A wildly popular form of mass media and live entertainment, professional wrestling makes a spectacle of violent acts. With its long history of working contemporary events into storylines and commenting upon cultural and military conflicts, professional wrestling is also intrinsically political. Its performance-theatricalities, machinations and conditions of production, figurations, and audiences-arises from and engages with the world around. This edited volume asks how professional wrestling is implicated in the current resurgence of populist politics, whether right-wing and Trump-inflected, or leftist and socialist.
