This chapter continues the discussion of the advocacy agenda of the LGBTQ rights movement by examining the development of the institution-based civil rights advocacy that came to define the movement during the Obama and Biden administrations. During this period, the LGBTQ rights movement secured a rapid expansion of LGBTQ rights through a combined campaign of impact litigation and congressional and administrative lobbying that was bolstered by public advocacy campaigns, corporate outreach, media buy-in, and public education. Although effective in the moment, this approach is highly dependent on functioning democratic institutions and ultimately produced gains that have been revealed to be all too temporal. This chapter critiques the constraints of civil rights advocacy in the age of neoliberalism and explains how institutional-based lobbying fundamentally narrowed the horizon of LGBTQ resistance from a potentially expansive and creative democratic project into to a competitive, rights-bound universe. It concludes that the queer and trans movements must embrace the work of democratic creation and transformation as part of a broader pro-democracy or democratic resistance movement.

Chapter 4 investigates the return of mass unemployment in post-neoliberal Britain. Through close readings of post-Thatcher unemployment novels, the chapter considers the emotional implications of increasing precarity for the genre of unemployment.

The political failure of community is the background against which a range of post-Marxist European philosophers have sought to rethink what community could be. This chapter focuses in particular on Jean-Luc Nancy, Roberto Esposito, and Giorgio Agamben, who have made substantial contributions to what we might call a new philosophy of community. Nancy, Esposito, and Agamben ask how community, not least because of its promise of solidarity, can continue to serve a political purpose, despite the violence of the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft, which appears to be the logical endpoint of any conception of community. But Nancy, Esposito, and Agamben also respond to the failure of community’s presumed revolutionary potential to become a site of resistance against both capitalism and the modern state. Should community be conceived in the plural (Nancy), as a gift economy (Esposito), or as a coming community of stateless refugees (Agamben)? Such attempts to save community come at a considerable cost, both philosophically and politically, since they make community irrelevant for a normative theory of democracy.

Martin Amis twice used the title ‘State of England’. This chapter considers his fiction as a series of reports on this subject. Despite a few intriguing and exceptional ventures into pastoral territory, most of Amis’s work is set in and around London, especially West London. From The Rachel Papers’s world of youth, the urban vision darkens into a dirty and dangerous city in which ‘the yobs are winning’. This social change is explored through Success, Money, London Fields, and Lionel Asbo. From Money on, Amis depicts an England influenced by the United States, yet which also retains its seemingly imperishable culture of pub and tabloid. Amis’s treatment of England is grim and biting, but Lionel Asbo allows a last hint of optimism.

Appeals to “community” and to “the common” have become increasingly frequent in political thought. In this chapter, I focus on some of the reasons for the appearance of such appeals in the landscape of contemporary political thought. This chapter also highlights some of the uncanny intellectual links across the entire political spectrum, from European post-Marxist and American communitarian philosophers to the public intellectuals of the neofascist “New Right.” These links emerge and play out in a broader intellectual field that is shaped both by the political economy of Western Europe and North America after 1945 and by the failure to address the obvious shortcomings and negative effects of this political economy. Against this broader background, current appeals to community in political thought can be seen as a response to the lived experience of neoliberal capitalism, which has led to a legitimation crisis of liberal constitutional democracy. But I am also going to suggest that appeals to community invariably tend to drift into an antidemocratic direction.

A renewed focus on “the common” in contemporary political theory, as it gained momentum in the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, is a direct response to the failure of community in political theory. I argue that Hardt and Negri develop what we can understand as an “insurgent democracy of the common.” On the one hand, such an insurgent democracy of the common seeks to preserve the revolutionary potential of democracy. On the other hand, this democracy of the common also tends toward political romanticism: the legitimacy of “the common” depends on a political subjectivity tied to a paradoxical nostalgia for failed revolutions. As such, the democracy of the common entails an escape from the realities of the political world that undercuts its emancipatory potential. This becomes particularly obvious in the hope that Hardt and Negri place in social movements of resistance, but also in their critique of neoliberal capitalism.

This chapter identifies in George Saunders’s earlier critiques of neoliberalism in his short stories and his critique of a conservative American version of Christian hell in his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, a common project with a spiritual alternative in the Buddhist order of compassion. I offer a brief history of the Christian theology of hell and American neoliberalism to show how they share a common idea of a punitive, individualistic sense of natural order, one with a common origin point in the theology of Augustine on the divine will. First tracing the public spiritual commitments expressed by Saunders across a wide range of his interviews, I then show how his sense of the potential of literature to empower a spirituality of compassion informs Lincoln in the Bardo’s rejection of the Christian hell and the novel’s alternative vision of a world where compassion is the order of the universe.

Americans have struggled to reconcile capitalism and war. Over three centuries of history, they have grappled with fundamental tensions between capitalism and security. The combination of war and capitalism often created disruptions and deep inequities that ordinary Americans and their leaders decided must be moderated for the sake of a more successful and politically sustainable war effort. For much of the nation’s history, capitalism was understood to be an insufficient provider of security; the U.S. military economy was semi-socialized, in both peacetime and wartime. But as the record of recent decades has highlighted, Americans have not experienced an ever-higher ratcheting of regulation and socialism, with each new war, over the long run. Rather, the historical record suggests that many postwar demobilizations served to reinforce capitalism. For the nation’s entire history, struggles over the economics of war and national security have been important parts of U.S. political development. This will continue to be the case in the current century, as Americans battle over economic policy and fight new wars, domestically and abroad.

This book has uncovered the role of multinational enterprises in the making of the Single European market by uncovering both firm strategies in the new business environment of an internal market as well as firm mobilization against to various dimensions of market governance. Together, the business cases covered in this book add a new, granular perspective to European political economy, not focused on the theoretical framework of capitalism, but on business strategy that constitutes its praxis. They also demonstrated the very different ways multinationals approached market integration and the Commission’s efforts to establish market regulations for the benefit of consumers and workers, with automakers most enthusiastic about the industrial focus of the market’s design, banks more interested in the new opportunities of market enlargement and its regulation than in deeper market integration, and commerce mobilizing against the threats of producer consolidation and the social dimensions of the Single Market.

In this chapter, Guy Zimmerman identifies innovative situated theater as a defining feature of LA drama, rebutting misperceived clichés about LA as a “placeless” city. Offering both a social history of 1980s and 1990s LA theater and extended readings of work by Reza Abdoh and John Steppling (alongside engagement with Luis Alfaro and Anna Deavere Smith), Zimmerman places LA theater within the broader context of the city’s unique cultural geography. He articulates how exemptions from union pay scales via the “Equity Waiver” partially liberated LA’s vibrant independent theater scene from market forces at a time when the rise of neoliberalism seemed to render such escape impossible, while also acknowledging how more recent years have applied yet greater economic and political pressures on artists attempting theatrical innovation in Los Angeles.

This chapter focuses the fractures in urban space created by racialized capitalism in the final decades of the twentieth century. Shoop distils discourses of neoliberal-era Los Angeles by drawing into dialogue the contrasting readings of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel proffered by Fredric Jameson and Mike Davis. Shoop explores Joan Didion’s expression of White paranoia over demographic changes as expressed in The White Album, setting Didion’s racial anxieties alongside the forms of Chicano resistance and historical memory articulated in Luis Valdez’s play Zoot Suit (1979). Shoop then examines how Carolyn See’s Golden Days (1986) and Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle (1996) satirically criticize racial liberalism and suburban whiteness. The chapter concludes by discussing the fractured, global Los Angeles as it emerges in the wake of the 1992 LA Uprising, in Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1993) and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange (1997).

This chapter draws on recent work in transnational feminist studies and critical beauty and fashion studies to examine South Asian American chick lit. It attends to how the transnationalization of Indian fashion and beauty industries produce new definitions of cosmopolitanism through economic citizenship, or the “right to work” in a global economy. The chapter focuses on Kavita Daswani’s chick lit novel Salaam, Paris (2006) and the Indian Muslim protagonist Tanaya Shah’s entry into the world of fashion modeling. It argues that Tanaya’s Muslimness contributes to the construction of fashion as a failed moral economy, in addition to operating as a racialized identity that facilitates the multicultural brand expansion of a global clothing retailer in a post-9/11 world. The chapter reads the sexual management of Tanaya's identities as a post-9/11 Muslim subject and an Indian model as allowing the fashion industry to produce convivial relations between Muslim identities, fashionability, and cosmopolitanism.

This chapter examines representations of wedding attire in a popular, though now defunct, feminist wedding blog, A Practical Wedding. The analysis compares two genres: posts sponsored by apparel brands and posts contributed by people about their own weddings. I argue that the two genres underline two forms of feminist personhood. On one hand, we find the rhetoric of neoliberal individuation, whereby the role of clothing is to help wearers present their best selves, wholly unfettered by others and their expectations. On the contrary, wedding accounts authored by readers-turned-contributors outline a model of clothing that is networked and connects the wearer to others alive and dead. I argue that the cleavage between these two models of dressed selfhood maps on to divergent impulses – toward individualism and being-in-relation – in contemporary feminism. Ultimately, the model of “haunting” by others that is implied by first-person accounts of dressing for the wedding provides a model for thinking about the ghosting of neoliberal feminism by relational ethics.

This chapter examines the mounting unease regarding the project of public education. By the mid-1960s, technocratic, Afrocentric, and Marxist critiques articulated a growing sense of worldwide educational crisis. These critiques presented differently in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, but in both countries popular frustrations were palpable. In response, both states attempted to reform public schooling: by introducing manual training in Ghanaian middle schools and television sets in Ivorian primary schools. Both reforms failed spectacularly, ultimately confirming the state’s abdication of its promise that education would lead to a better future for all. Public education systems crumbled along with public faith in the state, creating space for the privatization of education. The erosion of the anticolonial development ideology helped pave the way for neoliberalism to take root.

The Introduction defines the paradigm of anticolonial development, acquaints the reader with the scope of the book, and situates its main contributions in the literatures on education, decolonization, race, and development in Africa. It argues that a Black Atlantic perspective changes how we see decolonization and development in West Africa, by revealing schooling’s essential role in aspirations of African emancipation. The second part of the Introduction details the book’s unique methodological approach of comparison in global perspective. Such comparison allows for dialogue across two different colonial and postcolonial histories (Ghana/British empire and Côte d’Ivoire/French empire), in the process offering a regional history of the global spread of public schooling during the twentieth century.