Race and the logic of radicalisation under neoliberalism

Abstract

I argue in this article that race – reconceptualised against the post-racial logic of racial neoliberalism as a material relationship rather than simply an identity – functions within the logic of radicalisation in Australian anti-terrorism to produce the conditions necessary for the reproduction of neoliberal capitalism. Taking theoretical cues from the arguments of David Theo Goldberg and Stuart Hall, I argue that the logic of radicalisation within this process mobilises the raced spectral figure of the essentially violent, extremist Muslim ‘other’ to two key ends: first, the invisibilisation of the political motivations and grievances underpinning the actions of those who commit terrorist violence; second, the reproduction of neoliberal capitalism through the fashioning of neoliberal subjectivities, the salving of collective anxieties at the effects of neoliberal restructuring via ‘authoritarian populism’, and the innovation of new – and augmentation of existing – opportunities for profit and accumulation.