World Literature, Neoliberalism, and the Culture of Discontent ed. by Sharae Deckard and Stephen Shapiro

Abstract

Reviewed by: World Literature, Neoliberalism, and the Culture of Discontent ed. by Sharae Deckard and Stephen Shapiro Shahab Nadimi Deckard, Sharae, and Stephen Shapiro, eds. World Literature, Neoliberalism, and the Culture of Discontent. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Pp. 269. CDN$166.24 hardcover. As the term neoliberalism, with its lack of unequivocal definition, is applied across diverse contexts, it has become more and more contested over the last few decades. However, financialization, deregulation of markets, privatization of public services, and wealth accumulation through dispossession remain some of the features associated with this concept. Within this context, World Literature, Neoliberalism, and the Culture of Discontent asks two important questions: are the cultural and ideological implications of neoliberalism experienced only in the US and Europe? How does neoliberalism function in a globalized setting? As editors Sharae Deckard and Stephen Shapiro note, the major goal of this collection is to forge a term that best characterizes the distinctive features of the last few decades that also include contexts beyond the Euro-American capitalist model of neoliberalism. The editors ask the reader to think through a broader framework of the capitalist world system within which neoliberalism is situated. The essays in this collection seek to reexamine the historical formulation of the term, periodize different phases of neoliberalism up to the present, and restore capitalism as the major object of critique to fully understand the shifting temporalities within these phases (4). Eleven chapters explore how neoliberalism is practiced in the core zones, semiperipheries, and peripheries. In their introductory essay, the editors address the difficulties and complexities of defining the term in diverse contexts while trying to provide a full-fledged approach that links different accounts of neoliberalism. They use a comparative framework to discuss these global zones and integrate three methodologies: a world-historical perspective; a world-ecological dimension; and a world-literary/cultural conception. Using the first methodology, the editors begin with “rehistoricizing” the development of neoliberalism within a “long spiral” of world-system perspectives. This method provides a comprehensive historical approach and focuses on the role of regions beyond Europe and North America. More than just undertaking a genealogical method, Deckard and Shapiro succeed in differentiating various phases of neoliberalism within capitalism’s longue durée. Following Duménil and Lévy’s The Crisis of Neoliberalism, the editors further divide the approximately 90-year neoliberal period into two major cycles of 40–50 years with an overlapping minor period in between. The neoliberal period is characterized by “a cluster of different, sequential conjunctural moments, a longer generational shift, and a longer duration of more expansive economic changes and processes” (40). Nested in the late nineteenth century, the first phase of neoliberalism runs from the 1930s through the mid-1960s as a reaction to the economic crisis [End Page 440] of the Great Depression along with the emergence of right-wing politics (Kennedy and Shapiro). Before entering the second major phase, this period saw an overlapping and transitional decade from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s as a key condition for neoliberalism to attack the working class and become a dominant force. In this period, social welfare protection began to be cut within the capitalist cores (Deckard and Shapiro 41). The second phase, from the late 1970s to 2008–11, began to hollow out the middle classes by forcing them into personal debts. A cluster of mini-cycles runs through this longer period that marks the growth of neoliberal strategies (42). The current phase, also called “late” neoliberalism, may indicate the movement of neoliberalism toward the supremacy of East and South Asia (6). Within their second methodology, the editors examine neoliberalism from a world-ecology perspective. As such, the process of neoliberalization is seen as a dynamic process/phenomenon “that registers the changing global composition of class relations governing the exploitation of peoples and the appropriation of natural resources” (25). Kerstin Oloff’s essay “From ‘Section 936’ to ‘Junk’: Neoliberalism, Ecology, and Puerto Rican Literature” explores the work of novelists such as Rafael Sánchez, Mayra Santos-Febres, Josué Montijo, and Rafael Acevedo from the 1970s onward, offering sharp-witted ways to lay bare “shifting socio-ecological realities...