This episode features four stellar scholars talking about one of the academy’s most commonly heard, and most often misunderstood, terms: Neoliberalism. These four authors engage neoliberalism and its discontents in literary manifestations, in domestic American political movements, and in global spaces, particularly Colombia and Nigeria.
Mitchum Huehls, of UCLA’s English Department, addresses the theory underneath neoliberalism, its resistance to critique, and the way in which the figure of the child soldier reveals profound difficulties in neoliberal human rights language.
His new book, hot off the presses, is After Critique: Twenty-First-Century Fiction in a Neoliberal Age, and it’s available from Oxford University Press.
Finis Dunaway, Professor of American History at Trent University, discusses the ways that popular media and media images, in particular, shaped the modern environmental movement from the late 1970s to the present, emphasizing the way the environmental message of personal responsibility — buy a Prius! be a good recycler! — dovetails with the neoliberal shift.
His most recent book on the matter, Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of Environmental Images, is available now from the University of Chicago Press.
Lesley Gill, head of Vanderbilt University’s Anthropology department, draws attention to neoliberalism’s effects in the Middle Magdalena region of Colombia. To the previous guests, she adds an emphasis of the role of violence in establishing the kind of free-market reforms that the neoliberal order prizes.
Her recent book focuses on precisely this articulation of neoliberal violence, as its title suggests: A Century of Violence in a Red City: Popular Struggle, Counterinsurgency, and Human Rights in Colombia will be released by Duke University Press at the end of February.
Omolade Adunbi is a political anthropologist in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan, and, like Dr. Gill, studies the global impacts of neoliberal reforms. For Dr. Adunbi, the focus is on the oil enclaves of the Niger delta and the often intertwined roles of multinational corporations, the Nigerian state, local insurgency groups, and transnational NGOs.
His book, Oil Wealth and Insurgency in Nigeria, is available now from Indiana University Press.