Neoliberal Politics Research Articles

Contesting spaces and civil resistance movements: A case study on India’s #FeeMustFall movement

The paper intends to conduct a spatial reading of civil resistance movements taking Jawaharlal Nehru University’s (JNU) #FeeMustFall in India as the case study. Amidst the penetration of neoliberal politics in public goods like health and education, the pay-per-user principle is not limited to the argument of efficiency of allocation of resources. It can be comprehended as the larger strategy of the ruling dispensation to deplatform dissent and homogenise state space on an ideological singularity catering to majoritarian and hegemonic nationalism. The paper shall focus on the spatial reading of civil resistance movements using Lefebvre’s characterisation of state space and Gramsci’s understanding of hegemony and nationalism in the context of JNU’s #FeeMustFall movement.

About the Contributors

Other| April 01 2023 About the Contributors GLQ (2023) 29 (2): 301–303. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-10308661 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation About the Contributors. GLQ 1 April 2023; 29 (2): 301–303. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-10308661 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsGLQ Search Advanced Search Amalia L. Cabezas is associate professor of media and cultural studies at the University of California, Riverside. Her publications include Economies of Desire: Sex and Tourism in Cuba and the Dominican Republic (2009), multiple peer-reviewed journal articles, and two coedited books: Una ventana a Cuba y los estudios cubanos (2010) and The Wages of Empire: Neoliberal Politics, Repression, and Women's Poverty (2007). She is completing a book on the sex worker movement in Latin America and the Caribbean.Ann Cvetkovich is professor in the Feminist Institute of Social Transformation at Carleton University. She was previously Ellen Clayton Garwood Centennial Professor of English, professor of women's and gender studies, and founding director of LGBTQ Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (1992); An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (2003); and Depression: A Public... You do not currently have access to this content.

How Far Does the Diverse Economies Approach Take Us?

How Far Does the Diverse Economies Approach Take Us?

Geochemical characterization and assessment of contamination in mud depocenters from the southern Brazilian shelf

Continental shelves hold ecological, environmental and economic importance. Mud depocenters found on continent shelves are able to adsorb and incorporate organic and inorganic pollutants into the surface of their grains, creating an effective record of anthropogenic influence and environmental changes in a region. The aim of this study is to perform a chemical characterization of mud depocenters on the southern Brazilian shelf, providing an inventory of elements and evaluation of their distribution and potential contamination or enrichment. The sediments from seven short cores were analyzed by Inductively Coupled Plasma-Optical Emission Spectrometry (ICP-OES) and X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF). The high correlation of metals such as Fe, K, Ti and V with PC 1 of PCA indicated the predominance of a terrigenous signal in the region. This signal was more evident in the cores collected further south and closer to the continent, because they were better related to PC 1 in the scatter plot of PCA. Furthermore, they presented the highest concentration of terrigenous elements, Fe/Ca and Fe/K ratios. The results corroborate the importance of Rio de la Plata discharge and local inputs, such as Patos Lagoon, to the southern Brazilian shelf. A period of decreased terrigenous input, identified by low element ratios from one of the cores, correlated with a drought that occurred in Rio Grande do Sul in 1943. The results of the pollution indices with almost all enrichment factors (EF) below 2, modified degree of contamination index (mCd) below 1.2, sediment quality guideline quotient (SQG-Q) around 0.1, and the elements with concentrations below those established by Brazilian regulation as safe, demonstrated the absence of potential risks to the biota and contamination levels by Cr, Cu, Ni, Pb and Zn. Nonetheless, increases in some EF vertical profiles after 1928 and 1988, which may be associated with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in Brazil and the establishment of Neoliberal politics in Brazil and Latin America, respectively, and the differentiated results for As, suggest that the influence of anthropogenic activities in the sediments of the region must not be neglected.

Messianic Failure: Angolan Literature, Magical Realism, and the Form of Critique

This article reads the turn toward the fantastic and the supernatural in postindependence Angolan literature as a critical registration of the trajectory of neoliberal politics in the country. After positing a homology between the corruption of "ideal-type" realism in 1960s Latin America and similar experiments in post-independence Angola, I argue that the fiction of Ndalu de Almeida (Ondjaki) should be understood as a continuation of the social commitment of earlier Angolan writers, as it deploys a set of non-realist aesthetic devices in order to challenge the entrenchment of political orthodoxies in the post-socialist Angolan state. To this end, I offer a reading of Ondjaki's 2012 novel Os Transparentes, which marks a rupture in the author's own intellectual development while also dovetailing with the recent wave of anti-governmental protests in Angola. Although the central fantastical motif of the novel—a man who is in the process of becoming transparent—has been read by critics as a critique of social inequality and kleptocratic governance, I suggest that it should rather be understood as an ambivalent registration of the encroaching feelings of disillusionment precipitated by the onset of Angola's neoliberal era. With reference to Jacques Lacan's concept of "the act," I read this ambivalence as a specifically ethical dilemma and draw attention to problems of communication and narrative in radical political movements.

The significance of plus-development through sport: the practices and neoliberal politics of attracting participants to corporate sport-for-development

Abstract Despite significant growth in the sport-for-development (SFD) sector, there has been little research to date examining the ways that SFD organizations attract communities, and/or the reasons that SFD organizations are able to attract and retain community members in their programmes. The purpose of this study was to explore how and why Maple Leafs Sports and Entertainment (MLSE) Launchpad, an SFD facility in downtown Toronto, attracted participants into its programmes, and to understand how and why community members took up the offer to engage in its programmes. Using ethnographic observations and semi-structured interviews with Launchpad staff, we found that ‘development’ activities, with little or no sport component to them at all, were, in many instances, the main attraction to participants at MLSE Launchpad, a phenomenon that we term ‘plus-development.’ In these cases, what attracted participants to MLSE Launchpad were programmes that, in practice, filled gaps in basic social and community service provisions. We use these findings to advance some critical insights about the broader neoliberal structures under which programmes like MLSE Launchpad operate, and the significance of SFD for and within urban communities.

Contemporary European Welfare State Transformations and the Risk of Erosion of Social Rights: A Normative Analysis of the Social Investment Approach

Over the last decades, there has been a huge debate on the transformations of the European Welfare State. The issue of its financial sustainability together with the emergence of new social risks has put under pressure the traditional model of social protection and created the conditions for a change in the gist of the welfare state provisions. In this context, the social investment approach has become an emerging reference paradigm to tackle new social risks and meet the need to recalibrate the European welfare state and ensure its economic sustainability. However, despite this success, social investment still seems to be a rather ambiguous concept, too vague to result in precise and univocal policy prescriptions and open to the risk of a stretch of its interpretation by neoliberal politics, to erode social rights. In this paper we propose a theoretical framework to better clarify the normative ground, the moral foundation and political justification of the social investment approach and to understand whether it can avoid the risk of the erosion of social rights.

“The great chain of being sure about things”: blockchain, truth, and a trustless network

ABSTRACT Often associated with the volatile cryptocurrency Bitcoin, a blockchain is a distributed ledger, an additive record of digitally networked transactions. On the assumption that technologies are cultural practices as much as they are instrumental, this essay contributes to the special issue on big data in communication by examining texts that constitute blockchain in a shared political imaginary and, in so doing, participate in blockchain's future. The essay analyzes how materials produced by IBM orient blockchain within contemporary ideals such as transparent access, immutability, and a single source of truth. Drawing on Sean Phelan's study of neoliberal politics and global media, including the naturalization of ideological values, the essay proposes that public discourses about blockchain evidence fundamental human desires to access truth and establish an infrastructure immune to corruption. The study finds that blockchain's decentralized infrastructure comports with a historical moment in which sociality itself is under intense pressure, and wherein the idea and practice of interconnected yet distrustful nodes make sense in the absence of functional governance. The essay concludes that in the routinized social practices of the blockchain's executive protocols, political potential is undercut by the absence of prospective and fundamental change.

Diagnosis of the situation of children and teenegers and their capture by a neoliberal politics

Resumo: O artigo apresenta a situação das crianças e dos adolescentes da classe trabalhadora brasileira no contexto do capitalismo neoliberal e do Estatuto da Criança e do Adolescente (ECA). Para tal, analisa os dados de diferentes institutos de pesquisas sobre temas como trabalho, violência e educação. Constata o agravamento da vida do segmento, mesmo com o avanço das garantias jurídicas, e que o ECA se configura como a modernização do status jurídico necessário à restruturação do capital.

АНАЛИЗ ПОСЛЕДСТВИЙ ИМПОРТА НЕОЛИБЕРАЛИЗМА ДЛЯ ЦИВИЛИЗАЦИОННОЙ БЕЗОПАСНОСТИ РОССИИ

Topic. The civilizational security of Russia in the context of an increasing threat from imported ideas, institutions and scientific and practical patterns of neoliberal political economy. Target. To characterize the negative consequences of neoliberal forms for the modern domestic society and its economy, as well as to identify the mechanism and forms of influence of monetary and market political economic simulacra on the civilizational security of our country. Methods. Qualitative analysis was used to concretize interpretations of the essence and characteristics of key concepts, as well as an interdisciplinary and structural-contour approach to identifying the socio-cultural and socio-economic consequences of implanting neoliberal forms on the Russian political economic “ground”. The creative potential of cause-and-effect relationships and relationships is applied in the process of studying the mechanism of influence of political economic simulacra on civilizational security. Results. The essence of civilizational security, as well as other key concepts related to its provision, is determined. The failures of neoliberalism as a source of political economic and socio-cultural simulacra are revealed, while justifying the need for dialectical “removal” rather than mechanical denial of its provisions. The general mechanism of the influence of imported neoliberal political economic simulacra on civilizational security is shown. A model of contour analysis of socio-cultural and political economic consequences of neoliberalism for our country is proposed. The necessity of import substitution of neoliberal political economic simulacra for the domestic concept of the same name, relevant to the requirements of ensuring civilizational security, is proved. Conclusions. To ensure the civilizational security of Russia, it is necessary to develop a political economic model based on domestic socio-cultural and socio-economic traditions, as well as using acceptable forms of the current neoliberal and other concepts of economic development. The criterion for the effectiveness of such political economic import substitution is the successful integration of our country into the new world economic order while ensuring a decent life for households.

Thinking as a form of political life, or “How can one think politically in a post-political world”?

What makes the paper relevant is modern strategies of neoliberal politics, according to which the political life of citizens is replaced by everyday politics of individuals. It has been established that the modern concepts of everyday politics of homo sacer and homo sucker contain the limit of ideas about the political life of citizens. The paper considers an ontological model of the political life of citizens built on the basis of thinking as form-of-life (Agamben). The return to the ontological level of research can be explained by the fact that in modern conditions, the survival of a person depends directly on the person’s ability to think. Thinking as the form-of-life of a community is seen as a force that allows citizens to resist not only the inertia of social existence, but also the life watched carefully by the authorities. The paper presents two interpretations of political life based on the following statements: ‘I think, therefore I resist’ (Badiou) and ‘I resist, therefore I think’ (Arendt).

Демоны неолиберализма: о политической теологии позднего капитализма

This is an abridged translation of the chapter from Adam Kotsko’s Demons of Neoliberalism: On the Political Theology of Late Capital. The author examines the politicaltheological characteristics of neoliberalism, in which the free market appears at first glance to be devoid of any external interference, but in fact turns out to be the result of a political strategy of governance, enriching elites, humiliating racial and gender minorities, and creating poor marginalized populations. Neoliberalism, according to Kotsko, is both a social order (the structure of family and sexuality, as well as the racial hierarchy) and a political order involving law and punishment, wars and international relations. Above all, however, neoliberalism is a coherent moral system that rests on a logic of constrained subjectivity (demonization), competition (in which there must be both winners and losers), and conformity at all levels, from the individual to the global. Kotsko identifies the core principles of neoliberal politics, such as demonization, criminalization, competition, and conformism, and locates their origins in the concepts of Western theology, describing neoliberalism as a holistic self-reinforcing system of political theology. All these principles are directly related to the notions of providence and free will: while granting people political freedom, the neoliberal state restricts it in every possible way, so that poverty, illness, and other failures become not just the personal, but the ideologically declared responsibility of an individual or an entire group. Neoliberalism, according to Kotsko, becomes a trap from which it is difficult to escape, because its active forces are disguised behind a selfgoverning system of universal justice, equality, and freedom of choice.

Wellbeing for Whom Neoliberalism against the Environment in Climate Fiction

The socio-economic environment in which climate fiction novels are produced and read influences their content. The three US novels discussed in this article (Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (2011), Richard Powers’ The Overstory (2018), and T.C. Boyle’s A Friend of The Earth (2000)) reflect the neoliberal political and economic agenda, which does not focus on human or planetary wellbeing. Current socioeconomic priorities contradict the possibility of a sustainable future, which is increasingly affecting the daily lives of everyone on the planet, and environmental destruction is at the core of capitalist production. The emergence of cli-fi and neocli-fi parallels the rise of neoliberal ideology, and I explore the influence of that ideology on US and other western societies. As I demonstrate, this extends to novels, the narratives of which either attempt to satirize capitalism or subscribe to the idea that there is no alternative to the system. The ensuing aura of complacency is antithetical to action. However, analysing contemporary climate fiction novels written in the US may provide a framework for understanding the popular attitudes when it comes to the social, economic, and political reality and the potential to address the environmental disaster.

Affective Architecture: Encountering Care in Built Environments

Between sprawling urban spheres and a return to the rural, between technological advancements and historical preservation, built environments become a productive sphere to explore imaginations of a shared future on a changing planet. At the same time, contemporary architectural writing appears to increasingly extend further than considering environmental care – particularly in relation to spaces and places frequently criticized for their ‘uncaring’ neoliberal politics. This article will argue that architecture is increasingly infused and saturated with affective connotations of care. Approaching global examples critically allows for a further exploration of the interdependency between spaces, places and communities that care. In this understanding, care becomes, quite literally, structural.

From the Welfare State to the Carceral State: Whither Social Reproduction?

Historical, feminist scholarship demonstrates that the welfare state underwrote the work of social reproduction, enabling procreation, socialization, sexuality, nurturance, and family maintenance. Carried out by families and other public and private social institutions, social reproduction includes making food, clothing, and shelter available for immediate consumption; ensuring the health and productivity of the current and future labor force; providing for people too old, too young, or too sick to care for themselves; and socializing family members. Historically, social reproduction includes both women's unpaid labor in the home and low-paid labor in the market and converts the wages of paid workers into the means of subsistence for the entire household. The economic crisis of the mid-1970s marked the end of the “golden age” of capitalism, and yielded neoliberal politics that sought to undo the redistributive elements of the New Deal and the Great Society. It called for a smaller state, greater reliance on market forces, and reduced expenditure on family maintenance. This article, a reprint of a 2017 book chapter, explores the crisis in social reproduction in the United States that surfaced with the rise of neoliberalism and the “carceral state.”

Hybrid ethnicities, fashionable bodies and unruly transgressors: Fetishizing Arab ‘first ladies’ in western media1

Until the Arab uprisings occurred, many Arab first ladies and queens feted by US media received exceptionally favourable coverage that celebrated their physical appearance and western sense of fashion. Grounded in the context of neo-liberal politics which considers them objects of cultural identification, this article studies western media’s representations of Suzanne Mubarak, Queen Rania of Jordan and Asma al-Assad who are framed as virtuous house wives, western by ethnicity, birth place or education, and sophisticated upper-middle class ladies with panic-trigger for both Arab elites and western observers: Egypt’s veiled Naglaa Mahmoud and the architype of a working-class seductress with lust for power, Tunisia’s Leila Trabelsi. Using qualitative textual and visual analysis of narratives and images from media coverage, reports and fashion magazines, the article presents a comparative content analysis of their representations through a set of three dichotomies: the first one pays careful attention to the intersection of neo-liberal politics and the deployment of ethnic hybridity as an ideological apparatus that sets up a binary between Arab and Caucasian or half-White women who emerge as the new ‘saviour’ of Muslim women; the second is a close pairing between the sexualization of the westernized and fashionable first lady and the de-sexualization of her veiled ‘backwards’ counterpart sister; the third entails a juxtaposition of the good and desired seductress with the promiscuous and bad one. Findings show how media discourses of modernity impose neo-liberal and neo-Orientalist demarcations to define Arab Muslim women’s agency, femininity, bodies and status according to western standards.

Neo-Liberal Politics: Dichotomy of Political Self-determination and Economic Dispossession of Individual

In the neoliberal democratic order, society is governed by dual constitutions. The constitutional laws ensure the rights and liberty of an individual. However, the economic laws of the market nurture competition for economic self-sufficiency of an individual as a homo-economicus. The neo-liberal market laws are complimented by the constitutional laws that help the liberal elites to perpetuate dominance and decry the call for social justice demanded by the masses. The study humbly attempts to brief upon the dichotomy between the free market and the interests of individuals in the neoliberal order. The study thus explores the evolution and status of neo-liberalism to trace out the dynamics of the dichotomy between market and individual.

Institutional form (blueprints) and institutional function (process): Theoretical reflections on property rights and land

This paper is concerned with the question how we should understand cases on property rights in general, and on land economics in particular, in which a remarkable level of growth (or other measures of institutional performance) is combined with so-called ‘perverse’ institutions. That is to say institutions that are not proposed by the neoliberal politics, in which the insights of mainstream economics (orthodoxy) and especially the economics of property rights and related market policies based on formal competition and corporate laws, figure prominently. This approach works out of the idea that societal objectives can be realized by following the blueprint of establishing the ‘right’ institutions, so the behavior of the actors in society is incentivized in the right direction and the societal objectives such as efficiency, innovation, and economic growth are realized. In this approach economic policy is about creating the right institutional form of the economy according to the “blueprint” of neo-liberal politics, which is based on mainstream economics, also known as neoclassical economics (NCE), or orthodoxy. This paper will review various theoretical positions that might substantiate or provide credence to an alternative view based on the function of institutions.

Literature and Economy in Portuguese-speaking Southern Africa

In “Literature and Economy in Portuguese-speaking Southern Africa”, Thomas Waller offers a comparative reading of literary responses to neoliberalization in Portuguese-speaking southern Africa. Reading the proliferation of spectral effects in the Mozambican literature of the late 1980s alongside dystopian depictions of societal collapse in contemporary Angolan fiction, he suggests that writers in the two states have used distinctive aesthetic idioms to register the reintegration of southern Africa into the neoliberal world-system. In the fiction of Mozambican writers Aldino Muianga and Aníbal Aleluia, he shows how the legacy of colonial underdevelopment and its role in the transition to neoliberalism in Mozambique is figured at the level of form through spectral and broadly gothic aesthetic strategies that intimate the rise in class tensions attendant on the establishment of a new national bourgeoisie. In Angola, similarly, he reads speculative novels by Pepetela and José Eduardo Agualusa as literary responses to the ecological fallout of the heightening of capitalist extractivism that has accompanied the transition from Afro-Marxism to free market capitalism in post-independence Angola. In this way, Waller shows the extent to which literary production in Mozambique and Angola has been used in an attempt to register and critique the trajectory of neoliberal politics in southern Africa and its systemic relation with the restructuring of political economic parameters across the globe.

Malay, in the shadows

Abstract Wayang Kulit performance, the art of shadow puppetry, has long embodied and conveyed political and secular voice throughout South and Southeast Asia, significant for the maintenance of cultural heritage. Throughout Malaysia’s modern history, Wayang as a dominant medium of education has mediated shifts in language ideologies and socialization, to the extent where changes to the Wayang correlate highly with changes to the Malay language. In the 1980s, the Malaysian government sought to attack and hence curtail Wayang performance, and to obscure its lineage, claiming that the Wayang defiles Islam and Malaysia as an Islamic state. The government sought to discontinue the Wayang, or at least to alter it significantly, and to persecute its adherents. With its attempts to mobilize the economy through neoliberal politics and the adoption of new non-poetic language registers, the Malaysian government altered Malaysian vernacular, cultural practices, and ideologies. Yet, little scholarly work, particularly through an Anthropological lens, has discussed the correlations and influences to these shifts. This paper addresses the significance of Wayang Kulit to the Malay language, that is, its contiguity with standardized language and vernacular, its semiotic complexities during performance and in larger society, and its junctures with Malaysian politics. The study unearths changes in the Wayang, its stylizations, symbolisms and performativities, in the latter 20th century, where these changes have aligned with cultural and language shifts, yet which the government has legitimated as pro Islamic and neoliberal. The data set includes a multi year ethnography of the Wayang, and a corpus of discussions, documentations, and scripts of Wayang performances and narratives.