THE NEW VICTORIANISM (original) (raw)
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Introduction: What is Global Neo-Victorianism?
2015
This special issue aims to strengthen and further expand the range of inquiry in neo-Victorian studies by looking at neo-Victorianism's global reach and relevance beyond the Anglosphere. By looking at neo-Victorianism as both a globally consumed and globally produced commodity, it seeks to open up the debate on the role of neo-Victorianism as a global, adaptive and adaptational phenomenon-one that exists in a digital era of quickly re-mediated generic forms, responding to the demands and liberties of convergence culture, and where the global language of exchange is English. Such an approach, we argue, necessitates a closer interdisciplinary involvement not only with postcolonial and adaptation studies, but also with translation studies and world literature. This perspective will inevitably lead to the re-examination of some critical perspectives and to a revisiting of theoretical debates, especially the one regarding the applicability of the term 'neo-Victorian' outside ...
Careful What You Wish For: Thinking Through the Neoliberal Nation
The destructive power of neoliberal globalization has prompted renewed interest in nationalism on the left. But the legacies of empire and the political nature of the neoliberal project itself suggest that enthusiasm for English nationalism needs to be tempered with a sober analysis of its unintended political consequences.
A new form of colonialism- Neoliberalism
Answer-In order to understand what neoliberalism is and how it is conceptually and historically distinctive, we shall first define what neoliberalism is. I DEFINING NEOLIBERALISM " Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade " (Harvey, 2005:2). David Harvey argues that the role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices. The state has to certify, for example, the quality and integrity of money. The state must also set up those military, defence, police, and legal structure and functions required to protect private property rights and to guarantee by force if need be, the proper functioning of markets. However, if markets do not exist in few areas such as education, environment etc., then they must be created necessarily by state functions action if necessary. Harvey however argues that beyond these tasks accentuated by the state, the state should not venture further. States interventions is needed to be kept bare minimum because according to the theory, the state cannot possess enough information to predict market signals (prices) and because powerful interest groups will inevitably alter and bias state interventions (particularly in democracies) for their own benefit. Deregulation, privatization and withdrawal of the state from many areas have become a common phenomenon. Harvey argues that the neoliberalisation has affected not only institutional frameworks but also social relations, welfare provisions, technological mixes, way of life and thought, reproductive activities attachments to the land and division of labor. The market becomes then, as 'an ethic in itself, according to the process of neoliberalisation. Neoliberalism has become in a way as a hegemonic mode of discourse. II
Politics, 2023
This essay approaches the neoliberal tradition of thought through the lens of liberal imperialism. Seeking to bring scholarship on the history of neoliberal ideas together with research on liberal defenses of empire, I show that the neoliberal tradition of thought contains a number of formal, explicit, and systematic defenses of (European) colonialism. In the first section of the essay I contextualize neoliberal imperialism by showing that many prominent early neoliberals had close ties to the British Colonial Office. I then offer a close reading of two highly influential instances of the neoliberal defense of empire. The first was articulated between the 1930s and 40s by Herbert Frankel, who saw colonization as a form of civilizational improvement that places a heavy ethical and political burden on the colonizer. The second was articulated by Lewis Gann and Peter Duignan between the 1960s and 70s. In contrast to Frankel's civilizational justification of colonialism, Gann and Duignan articulated a more dispassionate cost-benefit argument, claiming that colonialism's advantages outweighed its disadvantages. The article concludes by reflecting on the implications of this shift from a civilizational to a consequentialist frame both for the neoliberal tradition and for liberal imperialist discourse at large.
What is new about neoliberalism? Such a question immediately implies that certain objects and processes can be defined as ‘neoliberal’ and, importantly, that the contents of the ‘neo’ can be explained by reference to a larger phenomenon called liberalism. A veritable galaxy of things are now attached to the term neoliberalism, if not as some primary identifying marker then at least as one descriptive property among others. This chapter seeks to offer a window through which to problematise and analyze this core if recalcitrant question. In keeping with other debates in the social sciences, it proposes that the frame of neoliberalism tries to capture something about developments in capitalism since the 1970s, with commodification, financialisation, and general moves towards ‘market-based’ modes of regulation or governmentality being major debates in the literature (Harvey 2005; Brenner, Peck, and Theodore, 2010; Peck, Theodore, and Brenner 2012; Springer 2010). While accepting this temporal frame as a starting point, the chapter seeks to contextualise the history of neoliberalism in two ways. First, the chapter sheds a sharper light on the relationship between capitalism and its mechanisms of legitimation, particularly at the level of everyday experience. Second, within the inevitable space constraints, the argument traces certain threads of meaning that connect the history of the liberal tradition to the present, specifically the themes of individualism, universalism, and meliorism. Thus, the chapter aims to reveal how justifications for neoliberal capitalist practices are the product of a long history of social struggles that are, moreover, often confusing, multifarious, and even contradictory. Ironically, once this perspective is recognised, the task of deciphering contemporary neoliberalism arguably becomes harder, particularly concerning efforts to understand where certain ideas and values tied to neoliberalism acquire their commonsensical power. If neoliberalism is a moving concept then scholarship needs to be equally adept at moving with it.
Neoliberalism and cultural nationalism: A danse macabre
Neoliberal hegemony: A global critique, 2006
Neoliberalism was always more than a set of economic theories and they were far less successfully or consistently applied. Building on my earlier work on the Thatcherite think-tanks which attempted to place them in their wider political context, this paper explores one aspect further - the close political relations within the new right between neoliberalism and a host of socially and culturally authoritarian tendencies, here dubbed cultural nationalism.
The State, Empire and Imperialism
This article aims to develop a Marxist account to explain the more informal practices of imperialism today. In this respect the article agrees with those Marxists who argue that capitalists and politicians have sought to impose the hegemonic economic project of financial neoliberalism across the globe. However, unlike some Marxist accounts which tend to explore imperialism primarily through socioeconomic relations, this article argues that financial neoliberal hegemony is achieved through social, political and ideological mechanisms as well. This is to see and understand capitalism as a complex, interconnected whole in which the way that capital accrues profits is through the exploitation, governance and regulation of living labour, which itself requires social, political and ideological mechanisms in place to do so. The article argues that in contemporary imperialism these ‘non-economic’ forms of regulation have often been embedded in seemingly non-imperialist and more informal types of governance that some have identified as ‘Empire’. The article suggests that these governance mechanisms have extended imperialist financial domination of the US state through the political projects of neoliberalism and workfarism.
The Political Project of Postcolonial Neoliberal Nationalism
Indian Politics & Policy (IPP), 2019
The starting point of this article is the recognition of globally proliferating right-wing electoral successes of a specific kind that rely upon a weaving together of seemingly contradictory aspects of neoliberalism and nationalism. An important dimension of these globally occurring changes is that they reflect something more than simply the empirical instantiation of a right-wing success in any one specific context. They require us to unravel and understand the transmutations in the nature of the political and the economic in the contemporary postcolonial world. Here, I focus on the relevance of uncovering the powerful weave of nationalism, neoliberalism, and postcolonialism that lies behind such configurations of power; a governmentality I refer to as PNN (postcolonial neoliberal nationalism). An understanding of PNN requires us to challenge the a priori availability of analysis of either neoliberalism or nationalism in isolation; neoliberalism and nationalism are not only not contradictory to each other, but as projects of re-forming imaginaries, they co-constitute the ideas of “market/economy” and “nation/culture.” Furthermore, PNN makes visible the ambivalent status of “the West,” since it is imbued with the historical legacy of colonial memory re-called into the present as a revanchist pride, and combined with the conflicting aspirational/actual consumption desires to emulate the capitalist imperial metropolitan fantasies. I use the example of India to illustrate how PNN has been enacted as a technique of governmentality by the Modi-led BJP government through the reformulation of Swadeshi and the Make in India project. Keywords: Nationalism, Neoliberalism, India, Postcolonial, Modi, Swadeshi, Governmentality, Hindutva, Economy, Culture
Introduction: Neoliberal Culture / the Cultures of Neoliberalism
Sites: a journal of social anthropology and cultural studies, 2015
This introductory essay situates the contributors' articles in relation to the over-arching questions for this special issue: how has neoliberalism impacted on culture, and how is neoliberalism thought from cultural perspectives; or, what happens to the idea of culture under neoliberalism? We acknowledge extensive disagreement among commentators as to what neoliberalism is, its coherence as a concept, and its duration. We trace the different values attributed to neoliberalism, from social democratic inflections that decry growing disparities in wealth distribution, to those perspectives that emphasise its promise of self-determination and the individual, social and ethical potentials of self-determination and consumer choice in market relations. Noting that neoliberalism is a term used to explain wide range of contemporary cultural phenomena, we argue that it maintains enough coherence as a project to act as an influential force on material life, even if it operates in some spheres more as a 'structure of feeling' than an explicit platform. We trace its reorientation of the key principles of classical liberalism, and its relationship to, and ascendancy over, postmodernity and globalisation as terms that have been used to designate the current cultural conjuncture. Neoliberalism emerges out of the same moment and conditions, but more directly names a particular mode of political economy and governance that is inextricable from cultural life, from intra-subjective through to collective levels.