Neoliberal Empire Research Articles

The Ruse of Repair: US Neoliberal Empire and the Turn from Critique

The Ruse of Repair: US Neoliberal Empire and the Turn from Critique

Liberalism and Critique

AbstractThe three books under discussion here evince the dialectic of liberalism and critique, and the imperative of joining critique and self-critique. Rachel Greenwald Smith’s On Compromise: Art, Politics, and the Fate of an American Ideal (2021) is a trenchant meditation on the cultural logics of liberalism in the moment of its putative triumph and global generalization. Patricia Stuelke’s The Ruse of Repair: US Neoliberal Empire and the Turn from Critique (2021) clarifies the origins and political consequence of reparative thinking and feeling—a cultural and intellectual tendency that has, Stuelke submits, permitted or encouraged artists, activists, and scholars to reconcile themselves to recent iterations of “US neoliberal empire” and the longer histories of racial capitalism and settler-colonial dispossession. The affinity that Stuelke reveals, between the language of imperial power and the language of its imagined transcendence, is anatomized by Erica Edwards, in The Other Side of Terror: Black Women and the Culture of US Empire (2021)—a cogent examination of the reciprocal relationship between the making of race and the making of war, and the complex positionality of Black women within the contemporary US imperium.The co-belonging of liberalism and critique often appears, to the critic or cultural producer, like complicity. There is an unsettling affinity . . . between the language we use to critique capital and the state, and the ideological lexicon of the forces that rule us.

Colonialingualism: colonial legacies, imperial mindsets, and inequitable practices in English language education

ABSTRACT Translanguaging and plurilingual approaches in English Language Education (ELE) have been important for envisaging more equitable language education. However, the languages implemented in translanguaging or plurilingual classrooms predominantly reflect the knowledge and belief systems of dominant, nation-state, “official”, and/or colonial languages as opposed to those of endangered and Indigenous languages. This paper contends that privileging dominant colonial knowledges, languages, and neoliberal valorizations of diversity is Colonialingualism. Colonialingualism, covertly or overtly, upholds colonial legacies, imperial mindsets, and inequitable practices. Colonial languages carry colonial legacies and can perpetuate an imperialistic and neoliberal worldview. Languages can be disembodied from place and commodified as mere “resources”, important only for economic “value” rather than cultural importance, in a “modern” global, neoliberal empire. Colonialingualism resides in the “epistemological error” in dominant western thought, characterized by linguistic imperialism and cognitive imperialism; the view that humans are superior to nature; and white (epistemological) supremacy. This “epistemological error” dominates the current mainstream western worldview, institutions, pedagogies, mindsets, and ways of languaging. Colonialingualism is subtractive and detrimental to multilingual, multicultural learners’ identities and heritages; endangered, Indigenous languages and knowledges; minoritized communities; and our environment. This paper argues that: (1) colonialingualism illustrates the “transformative limits” of translanguaging and plurilingualism; and (2) an epistemic “unlearning” of the western “epistemological error” is required to enable equitable use of all languages, languaging processes, and knowledge systems, including those Indigenous and minoritized, in ELE. The example of heritage language pedagogy in the Canadian context will demonstrate how epistemic “unlearning” while languaging can take place.

The Bourgeois Cinema of Boba Liberalism

If what characterizes Asian American radical politics in 2020 is an articulation of the difference between, and interrelatedness of, the Asian diasporic elite and the migrant poor, the 2018 Asian American films Crazy Rich Asians and Searching achieved mainstream success by celebrating the emergence of the former. The media paratexts of Crazy Rich Asians used race-consciousness as putative resistance, engendering “messianic visibility”—an over-investment in cinematic identification as possessing transformative, even curative, political and personal potential for liberal cisheteronormativity. Meanwhile, Searching's marketing as a film not about race was a significant talking point in the U.S. press. Its colormuteness functioned to normalize the entanglement of Asian diasporic elites in the ranks of Silicon Valley's digital empire. The films’ lack of friction in relation to surveillance capitalism and neoliberal empire ultimately highlights the contradictions of race and/as resistance in the present moment.

Decolonisation, Identity, Neo-Colonialism and Power

This paper explores the implications of “decolonisation,” first by focusing on the work of African thinker, Frantz Fanon’s work in this regard, particularly his insistence that decolonisation entails the creation of “new” people, before moving on to the related question of “identity.” Here the emphasis is on the work of Manuel Castells, specifically his examination of three kinds of identity-construction, the third of which he regards as being the most important category for understanding this process in the 21st century, namely “resistance identity.” It is argued that this casts the decolonisation debate in South Africa in an intelligible light. An interpretation of E.M. Forster’s paradigmatically “decolonising” novel, A Passage to India, is offered to unpack the meaning of the concept further, before switching the terrain to the question of the urgent need for a different kind of decolonisation, today, pertaining to the economic neo-colonisation of the world by neoliberal capitalism. The work of Hardt and Negri on the emerging world order under what they call “Empire” is indispensable in this regard, and their characterisation of the subject under neoliberal Empire in terms of the figures of the indebted, securitised, mediatised and represented, stresses the need for global decolonisation in the name of democracy. This part of the paper is concluded with a consideration of what decolonisation is really “all about,” namely power.

For Ella May Wiggins/Fuck NAFTA, and: My Goody Powder Drowns the Hideous Storm

“For Ella May Wiggins/Fuck NAFTA”: An elegy for North Carolina labor organizer/balladeer Ella May Wiggins

The monstrosity of the multitude: unredeeming radical theology

AbstractIf its power comes from the very value held so dear by neoliberalism—that of productivity—can the “multitude” as conceived by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri ever fully resist the neoliberal Empire? Engaging the Autonomous Marxism of Franco “Bifo” Berardi, I argue that continued philosophical and theological emphases on productivity resonate with a soteriological narrative embedded in neoliberalism’s promise that work is redemptive. As both counter and supplement to such emphases, this essay offers an alternate reading of Hardt and Negri’s multitude through the lens of crip (disability) theory. In Sex and Disability crip theorists Anna Mollow and Robert McRuer argue that counter to Joseph Conrad’s assertion that “ ‘A man is a worker. If he is not then he is nothing,’ ” a crip politics says, “fuck employability: I’m too sick to work” (25). To embrace the stigma of sickness is to question the demands of productive labour on offer by society. A similar crip politics, one that tells the Empire it is too sick to work and too slow to be efficient, might loose the multitude from its redeployment in the very technologies of power Hardt and Negri hope to counter. Looking to figures of monstrosity, I argue that productivist tendencies within radical theology betray the field’s crip potential. Ultimately, this essay seeks to recover the multitude’s monstrosity from within Hardt and Negri’s corpus. A return to its monstrosity returns the multitude to its unproductive potency, that which wanders away from demands of social cohesion, and thus resists redemptive wholeness. This article is published as part of a collection dedicated to radical theologies.

Imagine the Future! A Critical Transreligious Bio-Theology of ‘the 99 Percent’

As reaction to the failures of the globalization process, which is based on a commodification of the whole life new resistance mobilizations occurred. The Occupy Wall Street Movement has underlined that the social consequences of the neoliberal empire call for new resistances, new visions of solidarity, and new ways of representation. It has become clear, that capitalism’s influence on democracy has made that concept insufficient. The sovereign biopower is regulating life and survival via granting access or exclusion from resources. It not only disciplines and normalizes sexualities, bodies and gender but regulates health, security, etc. of everybody. Therefore responsible theology needs to expand Feminist, Gender and Queer critique and my approach is to offer a reaction by developing a critical Bio-Theology using Foucault’s critique of biopower and Castoriadis’ (1994) concept of the radical social imaginary. This paper uses inter- and transdisciplinary methodology bringing together (feminist) ‘beyond liberation theology’ approaches with queer, postcolonial, epistemological intersectionality critique and post-secular debates.

Where We Stand: US Empire at Street Level and in the Archive

"Where We Stand" takes the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease's Cultures of United States Imperialism as an occasion to survey the last forty years in both the lived experience of and the growing scholarship on US Empire. Capping a generation of critique and inquiry sparked by the Vietnam War, Cultures of US Imperialism is a poignant benchmark in the interdisciplinary study of US Empire, and also in the recognition that empire must be central to the study of the United States even in its "domestic" dimensions. In the twenty years since its publication, however, even as this turn in the scholarship has matured, the US Empire itself has not sat still. New paradigms are called for to conjoin the state-centered history of empire that Kaplan and Pease represent, on the one hand, with the geoeconomic contours of the corporatecentered neoliberal empire that have become increasingly apparent in recent decades, on the other. The address concludes with reflections on the relationship between the current forms of empire and the challenges to higher education in a neoliberal age.

Living With War: Sport, Citizenship, and the Cultural Politics of Post-9/11 Canadian Identity

If sport scholars are going to contribute to a critical (inter)national dialogue that challenges “official versions” of a post-9/11 geo-political reality, there is a need to continue to move beyond the borders of the US, and examine how nationalistic sporting spectacles work to promote local military initiatives that are aligned with the imperatives of neoliberal empire. In this article we provide a critical reading of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s nationally-televised broadcast of a National Hockey League game, colloquially known as Tickets for Troops. We reveal how interest groups emphasized three interrelated narratives that worked to: 1) personalize the Canadian Forces and understandings of neoliberal citizenship, 2) articulate warfare/military training with men’s ice hockey in relation to various promotional mandates, and 3) optimistically promote the war in Afghanistan and the Conservative Party of Canada via storied national traditions and mythologies.

Law of Geography and the Geography of Law: A Post-colonial Mapping

This article examines the relationship between law and geography through the prisms of colonialism and neoliberal Empire. Using two novels set in the India of 19th and 21st century, respectively, it evaluates the so-called first law of geography that posits decisive impact of spatial distance upon relations between things. This paper argues that the formative and enduring relationship between global systems of domination and modern law has created a geo-legal space that has a global dimension. This geo-legal space procreates norms and subjectivities that are intimately related to spatially distant forces and projects. Emergence and consolidation of capitalism created a global geo-economic space where law and geography were brought together creating an intimate relationship between the global and the local. Accumulation by dispossession, an enduring feature of capitalism, renders this global relationship one of domination and exploitation. While colonial and post-colonial phases of global capitalism deployed different regimes of political and economic governance, they function within the same grammar of modern law that facilitates domination and exploitation in the service of capital accumulation by dispossession.

Postcolonial disorientations: colonial ethnography and the vectors of the Philippine nation in the imperial frontier

This essay argues that American colonial governmentality in the early twentieth century was constituted by an ethnographic discourse that was inflected by an imperial frontier orientation. The frontier governmentality interdicts and disciplines Filipino society and culture for colonial formation, thus planting American frontier dreams in the state's education and land policies. But it was driven by the contradictions between two types of interdiction I call the “home” and “base” vectors, which have directed the disorientation of Philippine postcoloniality, trapping it between American dreams Filipinized to the hegemony of elite nationalism. As the mestizo elites came to embody Philippine nationalism in the later years of colonialism under the framework of imperial democracy, the Filipinization of the frontier ethnographic discourse entailed an elite autoethnography of racial blending, which produced a nation with an orientation seeping into the American Southeast Asian frontier. The Philippines is thus not simply an American client state, a cacique democracy or a deferred postcolony, but the vehicle of American imperial frontierism in Southeast Asia during the Cold War. The implication is that we are seeing the accentuation of the home/base contradictions in the frontier discourse in the fragmentation of the Philippine nation today, with Filipinos running through the enlarged frontiers of America's neoliberal empire as itinerant laborers.

The unrequited love of power: biopolitical investment and the refusal of care

Despite its increasing prominence in critical political and IR theory, the significance of the Foucauldian problematic of biopolitics remains underestimated. The frequent conflation of paradigmatically distinct sovereign and biopolitical forms of power, inspired by influential readings of Agamben and Hardt and Negri, results in increasingly incoherent applications of the concept of biopolitics. This is particularly evident in the attempts to theorise resistance to bio-power, which remains cast in conventional 'emancipatory' terms of resisting transcendent and exterior power. Critically engaging with Hardt and NegriÕs attempt to theorise resistance to biopolitics in terms of the liberation of the domain of biopolitical production, this article offers an alternative pathway of resistance that consists of the refusal of biopolitical 'care of the living' and the creation of autonomous forms of life outside the terrain of biopolitical governmentality. The example of such resistance is offered by the social practices of the late-Soviet period, whereby the alienation from and subversion of the socialist biopolitics and the concomitant experimentation with alternative forms of life in the 'shadow society' reduced Soviet power to its pure form of sovereignty. The article concludes with outlining the implications of this mode of resistance in the contemporary context of the global neoliberal Empire.

A DIMENSÃO DO CAMPO DA RECREAÇÃO NA CONSTRUÇÃO DA NAÇÃO ARGENTINA. EDUCAÇÃO POPULAR DESDE O POVO E SEU CONCEITO DE CIMENTAÇÃO DAS CULTURAS ORIGINÁRIAS

This present article intends to readdress the determinations that implied in the construction of the field of Recreation from the social issues derived from the construction of the Nation, from external and internal immigrations, from welfare and populist policies, as well as the destruction of actions from the countryside during the military dictatorship and since the establishment of the neoliberal empire. This article presents the reader with the actions which, nowadays, lead to the recovery of the countryside and its insertion in the awareness process towards transformation. KEY WORDS: recreation – popular education – making of nationality – demobilization – awareness.

Neoliberal Empire

If neoliberal globalization was a regime of American economic unilateralism, has this been succeeded by or combined with political and military unilateralism? This discussion probes the emerging features of a hybrid formation of neoliberal empire; a mélange of political-military and economic unilateralism, an attempt to merge geopolitics with the aims and techniques of neoliberalism. This is examined in relation to government, privatization, trade, aid, marketing and the occupation of Iraq. A further question is what kind of wider strategy is taking shape amid the turmoil of the new wars.