Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism

Jean Comaroff

Description

The essays in Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism pose a series of related questions: How are we to understand capitalism at the millennium? Is it a singular or polythetic creature? What are we to make of the culture of neoliberalism that appears to accompany it, taking on simultaneously local and translocal forms? To what extent does it make sense to describe the present juncture in world history as an "age of revolution," one not unlike 1789-1848 in its transformative potential?In exploring the material and cultural dimensions of the Age of Millennial Capitalism, the contributors interrogate the so-called crisis of the nation-state, how the triumph of the free market obscures rising tides of violence and cultures of exclusion, and the growth of new forms of identity politics. The collection also investigates the tendency of neoliberal capitalism to produce a world of increasing differences in wealth, environmental catastrophes, heightened flows of people and value across space and time, moral panics and social impossibilities, bitter generational antagonisms and gender conflicts, invisible class distinction, and "pariah" forms of economic activity. In the process, the volume opens up an empirically grounded, conceptual discussion about the world-at-large at a particularly momentous historical time-when the social sciences and humanities are in danger of ceding intellectual initiative to the masters of the market and the media.In addition to its crossdisciplinary essays, Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism-originally the third installment of the journal Public Culture's "Millennial Quartet"-features several photographic essays. The book will interest anthropologists, political geographers, economists, sociologists, and political theorists.Contributors. Scott Bradwell, Jean Comaroff, John L. Comaroff, Fernando Coronil, Peter Geschiere, David Harvey, Luiz Paulo Lima, Caitrin Lynch, Rosalind C. Morris, David G. Nicholls, Francis Nyamnjoh, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Paul Ryer, Allan Sekula, Irene Stengs, Michael Storper, Seamus Walsh, Robert P. Weller, Hylton White, Melissa W. Wright, Jeffrey A. Zimmerman

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Cultural studies
• Political economy
• Anthropology

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 05 juillet 2001
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822380184
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism

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                     ,

edited by Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar

             ,edited by Arjun Appadurai

                         

                     ,edited

by Jean Comaroff & John L. Comaroff

               ,edited by

Carol A. Breckenridge, Sheldon Pollock,

Homi K. Bhabha, & Dipesh Chakrabarty

                

Millennial Capitalism and

the Culture of Neoliberalism

Edited by Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff

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©  Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper  Typeset in Adobe Minion by Tseng Information Systems Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. The text of this book was originally published, without the essay by Melissa W. Wright or the index, as vol. , no.  () ofPublic Culture. Melissa W. Wright’s essay originally appeared in vol. , no.  () ofPublic Culture,pages –.

Contents

Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff First Thoughts on a Second Coming

Millennial Capitalism: 

Irene Stengs, Hylton White, Caitrin Lynch, and Jeffrey A. ZimmermannMillennial Transitions 

Fernando CoronilToward a Critique of Globalcentrism: Speculations on Capitalism’s Nature 

Michael StorperLived Effects of the Contemporary Economy: Globalization, Inequality, and Consumer Society 

Melissa W. WrightThe Dialectics of Still Life: Murder, Women, and Maquiladoras 

Allan Sekula

Freeway to China (Version , for Liverpool)

Peter Geschiere and Francis NyamnjohCapitalism and Autochthony: The Seesaw of Mobility and Belonging 

Luiz Paulo Lima, Scott Bradwell, and Seamus Walsh Millennial Coal Face 



Rosalind C. MorrisModernity’s Media and the End of Mediumship? On the Aesthetic Economy of Transparency in Thailand 

Robert P. WellerLiving at the Edge: Religion, Capitalism, and the End of the Nation-State in Taiwan 

Paul Ryer

Millenniums Past, Cuba’s Future?



Elizabeth A. PovinelliConsumingGeist:Popontology and the Spirit of Capital in Indigenous Australia 

David HarveyCosmopolitanism and the Banality of Geographical Evils 

Contributors

Index

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vi *        

Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism

Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff

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We live in difficult times, in times of monstrous chimeras and evil dreams and criminal follies.—Joseph Conrad,Under Western Eyes

The global triumph of capitalism at the millennium, its Second Coming, raises a number of conundrums for our understanding of his- tory at the end of the century. Some of its corollaries—‘‘plagues of the ‘new world order,’ ’’ Jacques Derrida (: ) calls them, unable to re- sist apocalyptic imagery—have been the subject of clamorous debate. Others receive less mention. Thus, for example, populist polemics have dwelt on the planetary conjuncture, for good or ill, of ‘‘homogenization and difference’’ (e.g., Barber ); on the simultaneous, synergistic spi- raling of wealth and poverty; on the rise of a ‘‘new feudalism,’’ a phoe- nix disfigured, of worldwide proportions (cf. Connelly and Kennedy 1 ). For its part, scholarly debate has focused on the confounding effects of rampant liberalization: on whether it engenders truly global flows of capital or concentrates circulation to a few major sites (Hirst and Thompson ); on whether it undermines, sustains, or reinvents the sovereignty of nation-states (Sassen ); on whether it frees up, curbs, or compartmentalizes the movement of labor (see the Geschiere and Nyamnjoh essay in this volume); on whether the current fixation with democracy, its resurrection in so many places, implies a measure of mass empowerment or an ‘‘emptying out of [its] meaning,’’ its reduc- 2 tion ‘‘to paper’’ (Negri : ; Comaroff and Comaroff ). Equally in question is why the present infatuation with civil society has been accompanied by alarming increases in civic strife, by an escalation of civil war, and by reports of the dramatic growth in many countries of domestic violence, rape, child abuse, prison populations, and most dra-