Neoliberal Culture

Neoliberal Culture presents a critical analysis of the impact of the global free-market - the hegemony of which has been described elsewhere by the author as 'a short counter-revolution' - on the arts, media and everyday life since the 1970s.

Departing from the conventional understanding of neoliberalism as a set of economic and political policies favoring free markets, Neoliberal Culture presents a framework for analyzing neoliberalism in the United States as a culture-or structure of feeling- which shapes American everyday life. The book proposes five 'components' as the keys to any study of American neoliberal culture: biopower, corporatocracy, globalization, the erosion of welfare-state society, and hyperlegality, these five components enabling rich analyses of key artifacts of the neoliberal era, including the Iraq War, Las Vegas, welfare reform, Walmart, and Oprah's Book Club. Carefully organized according to its central themes and adopting a case study approach in order to allow for thorough, illustrated analyses, this book is an important tool for scholars and students of contemporary cultural studies, popular culture, American Studies, and sociology.

Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture is essential reading for anyone invested in the ever-changing state of literary culture.

The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are commonly characterised as an age of ‘neoliberalism’ in which individualism, competition, free markets and privatisation came to dominate Britain’s politics, economy and society. This historical framing has proven highly controversial, within both academia and contemporary political and public debate. Standard accounts of neoliberalism generally focus on the influence of political ideas in reshaping British politics; according to this narrative, neoliberalism was a right-wing ideology, peddled by political economists, think-tanks and politicians from the 1930s onwards, which finally triumphed in the 1970s and 1980s. The Neoliberal Age? suggests this narrative is too simplistic. Where the standard story sees neoliberalism as right-wing, this book points to some left-wing origins, too; where the standard story emphasises the agency of think-tanks and politicians, this book shows that other actors from the business world were also highly significant. Where the standard story can suggest that neoliberalism transformed subjectivities and social lives, this book illuminates other forces which helped make Britain more individualistic in the late twentieth century. The analysis thus takes neoliberalism seriously but also shows that it cannot be the only explanatory framework for understanding contemporary Britain. The book showcases cutting-edge research, making it useful to researchers and students, as well as to those interested in understanding the forces that have shaped our recent past.

What kind of thing is 'neoliberalism'? This collection of essays explores a range of possible answers to this question, arguing that neoliberalism is a complex, but specifiable and analysable phenomenon: a discursive formation, an ideology, a governmental programme, a hegemonic project, an assemblage of ideas, techniques and technologies, and what Deleuze and Guattari call an 'abstract machine'. Following an introductory essay by Jeremy Gilbert which contextualises the meaning and significance of neoliberalism, the collection considers the genesis, persistence and polyvalency of the concept across a range of cultural sites and discursive genres from political philosophy to pornography, from economics to photographic technology. Chapters examine the intersection of neoliberal ideology and political practice with experiences of race, gender, sexuality and class; with grand politics, technical innovation and hard economics. This book is essential reading for anyone interesting in the contemporary cultural climate, and the impact of the pervasive concept of neoliberalism on society in the present.

This book explains neoliberalism as a phenomenon of the capitalist world-system. Many writers focus on the cultural or ideological symptoms of neoliberalism only when they are experienced in Europe and America. This collection seeks to restore globalized capitalism as the primary object of critique and to distinguish between neoliberal ideology and processes of neoliberalization. It explores the ways in which cultural studies can teach us about aspects of neoliberalism that economics and political journalism cannot or have not: the particular affects, subjectivities, bodily dispositions, socio-ecological relations, genres, forms of understanding, and modes of political resistance that register neoliberalism. Using a world-systems perspective for cultural studies, the essays in this collection examine cultural productions from across the neoliberal world-system, bringing together works that might have in the past been separated into postcolonial studies and Anglo-American Studies.

DIVA special issue of PUBLIC CULTURE, this collection of essays forms an empirically grounded, conceptual discussion that posits global millennial capitalism as a historical formation./div

Thanks to the rise of neoliberalism over the past several decades, we live in an era of rampant anxiety, insecurity, and inequality. While neoliberalism has become somewhat of an academic buzzword in recent years, this book offers a rich and multilayered introduction to what is arguably the most pressing issue of our times. Engaging with prominent scholarship in media and cultural studies, as well as geography, sociology, economic history, and political theory, author Julie Wilson pushes against easy understandings of neoliberalism as market fundamentalism, rampant consumerism, and/or hyper-individualism. Instead, Wilson invites readers to interrogate neoliberalism in true cultural studies fashion, at once as history, theory, practice, policy, culture, identity, politics, and lived experience. Indeed, the book’s primary aim is to introduce neoliberalism in all of its social complexity, so that readers can see how neoliberalism shapes their own lives, as well as our political horizons, and thereby start to imagine and build alternative worlds.