Race and the Cultural Spaces of Neoliberalism: Introduction (original) (raw)
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Edges of Identity: The Production of Neoliberal Subjectivities
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The chapter explores how competing forms of self and society are repressed or exploit opportunities within the liminal space at the edges of neoliberalism. In each case how agency is expressed or is repressed is the point of fascination. Both space and place, in this sense, are multidimensional and sustained by discursive practices. This speaks to how we might understand the enormity of international relations and social structures through to the everyday intimacy of relations in the private sphere. The normalisation and the reproduction of particular social practices are linked to the expansion and penetration of a neoliberal hegemony that rationalises, atomises and homogenises the world around us. This volume critically explores how a range of subjectivities is formed, constrained, reshaped or resisted when confronted by the expansionary logic of neoliberalism. Many critics (see Harvey, 2006) have argued that neoliberalism has failed to achieve the growth rates of the golden age of Keynesianism in the 1960s. This failure to succeed on its own merits raises serious questions about how neoliberalism has maintained legitimacy in the face of its own failed raison d’être – which is to ensure wealth for all through market efficiency. In light of sustained criticism of the neoliberal project it seems only reasonable to seek both tools and ‘how-to’ guides in order to untangle a limiting and reductive ideology from our lives and our social structures. We hope that the critical analysis and theoretical reflection embodied in this book goes some way to providing both tools and guides for readers.
Neoliberal Culture / the Cultures of Neoliberalism
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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 ...
Putting neoliberalism in its time and place: a response to the debate
The debate in this journal on neoliberalism neatly illustrates Nietzsche’s proposition that ‘all concepts in which an entire process is semiotically concentrated defy definition; only something which has no history can be defined’ (Nietzsche 1994 [1887]: 53). This claim is implicit in Daniel Goldstein’s remarks about the ‘surprisingly thin’ trope of ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ and, more pointedly, about how many anthropologists invoke neoliberalism ‘as a sort of explanatory catholicon’ (2012: 304). Even authors who accept that neoliberalism is a valid analytical object still differ over the entry points they adopt to establish its essential qualities – referring variously to a particular genealogy, a particular time period, a particular case or set of cases or a particular policy field. Others deny that neoliberalism has a quintessential form, insisting on its diverse origins, continuous reinvention, diverse local instantiations or variegated nature, without, however, asking what this polymorphic, even polymorphous, ‘it’ might comprise. The result is that neoliberalism tends to become a ‘chaotic concept’. In this context, it is interesting to note that this term is more often used by outsiders and critics of neoliberalism than it is by the advocates and supporters of the ideas, institutions, strategies and policies that this slippery concept is said to denote. For these reasons, as some contributions to this debate also indicate, neoliberalism may serve more as a socially constructed term of struggle (Kampfbegriff) that frames criticism and resistance than as a rigorously defined concept that can guide research in anthropology and other social sciences.
THE CIVIC HUMANITIES AND THE CRISIS OF NEOLIBERALISM High Noon for Neoliberalism
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High Noon for Neoliberalism he results of the Presidential election of 2016 struck the academic thoughtworld like a devastating hurricane that few expected to make landfall. In the run-up to the election, and in discussions that followed, one term kept coming up that had been used increasingly over the previous two decades, but more specifically in relationship to the global financial crisis of 2008. It was "neoliberalism." The topic has become inescapable within our current discourse, but has been rarely discussed in any serious way. It has been constantly named, yet hardly ever diagnosed. Injected into public conversation originally as a very specific, qualifying term to make sense of what at the time were new and unprecedented trends in global politics and economics, it became a bald term of disparagement for everything that seems to be wrong, especially if one is speaking from some minimally "progressive" perspective, with the world in general. At the same time the term during the same period has accumulated to itself a corpus of significant, as well as insightful, academic literature that provides both heft and precision for any kind of evolving analysis, even if the meaning of the expression itself remains rather opaque. Until recently, because of the work of the Marxist-leaning British economist and historian David Harvey, "neoliberalism" was intimately associated at its core with the post-Communist collapse of command economies and the unbounded flow of financial capitalism across borders. 1 Francis Fukuyama's paen in 1992 to "free-markets" as a hypothesized driver of liberal democracies in his best-selling book The End of History and the Last Man 2 was for almost two decades regarded as the grand neoliberal manifesto of that era. With the financial crash of 2008, however, it was not only the ideological euphoria, but the very nuances of the term "neoliberalism" that began to morph in an unanticipated manner. In recent years the expression has come to acquire strong social, cultural, and political overtones, especially in light of wage stagnation and galloping global income inequality. The recent surge of impassioned populist movements on both the right and the left, not just in the United States but throughout the Western