Incompleteness: Donald Trump, Populism and Citizenship

by Francis B. Nyamnjoh

This is a study of how Donald J. Trump, his populist credentials notwithstanding, borrows without acknowledgment and stubbornly refuses to come to terms with his indebtedness. Taken together with mobility and conviviality, the principle of incompleteness enables us to distinguish between inclusionary and exclusionary forms of populism, and when it is fuelled by ambitions of superiority and zero-sum games of conquest.

Nyamnjoh challenges the reader to reflect on how stifling frameworks of citizenship and belonging predicated upon hierarchies of humanity and mobility, and driven by a burning but elusive quest for completeness, can be constructively transcended by humility and conviviality inspired by taking incompleteness seriously. Nyamnjoh argues that the logic and practice of incompleteness is a healthy antidote to name-calling and scapegoating others as undesirable outsiders, depending on the brand of populism at play.

Recognising incompleteness also helps to question sterile and problematic binaries such as those between elites and the impoverished masses among whom populists go to fish for political visibility, prominence and success.

526 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 10, 2022

About the author

Francis B. Nyamnjoh is Professor of anthropology at the University of Cape Town in South Africa and a prolific writer.
He won the Eko Prize for Literature, an Anglophone Cameroon prize in 2014 for "his lifetime contributions to creative writing and arts in Cameroon and beyond'.