Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism

Front Cover
Jean Comaroff, John L. Comaroff
Duke University Press, Jul 5, 2001 - Business & Economics - 324 pages
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

 

Contents

First Thoughts on a Second Coming
1
Millennial Transitions
57
Speculations on Capitalisms Nature
63
Globalization Inequality and Consumer Society
88
Murder Women and Maquiladoras
125
Freeway to China Version 2 for Liverpool
147
The Seesaw of Mobility and Belonging
159
Millennial Coal Face
191
Modernitys Media and the End of Mediumship? On the Aesthetic Economy of Transparency in Thailand
192
Religion Capitalism and the End of the NationState in Taiwan
215
Millenniums Past Cubas Future?
240
Popontology and the Spirit of Capital in Indigenous Australia
241
Cosmopolitanism and the Banality of Geographical Evils David Harvey
271
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2001)

Jean Comaroff is Bernard E. and Ellen C. Sunny Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago.John L. Comaroff is Harold H. Swift Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Anthropology, also at the University of Chicago.

Bibliographic information