Remembering The Neoliberal Turn

This book discusses how societies, groups and individuals remember and make sense of global neoliberal change in Eastern Europe. Such an investigation is all the more timely as the 1990s are increasingly looked to for answers explaining the populist and nationalist turn across the globe. The volume shows how the key processes that impacted many lives across the social spectrum in Eastern Europe, such as deindustrialization, privatization, restitution and abrupt social reorganization, are collectively remembered across society today and how memory narratives of the 1990s contribute to current identities and political climate. This volume establishes the memory of economic transformation as a research focus in its own right. It investigates different levels of memory, from the national through the local to the cultural, analysing key myths of the transformation, giving special recognition to the social space and vernacular memories of the transformation period and reflecting on how the changes of the 1990s are mediated in cultural representations. Given the book’s interdisciplinary scope that covers several fields, it will prove to be of interest to those working in memory studies, contemporary history, sociology, East European area studies and literary and film studies. It will also serve as a significant point of reference for those researching the interdisciplinary and rapidly expanding field of transformation studies and thus is an invaluable source across different fields.

"David Harvey, author of The Condition of Postmodernity and The New Imperialism, here tells the political-economic story of where neoliberalization came from and how it proliferated on the world stage. While Thatcher and Reagan are often cited as primary authors of this neoliberal turn, Harvey shows how a complex of forces, from Chile to China and from New York City to Mexico City, have also played their part. In addition he explores the continuities and contrasts between neoliberalism of the Clinton sort and the recent turn towards neoconservative imperialism of George W. Bush. Finally, through critical engagement with this history, Harvey constructs a framework not only for analyzing the political and economic dangers that now surround us, but also for assessing the prospects for the more socially just alternatives being advocated by many oppositional movements."--BOOK JACKET.

Economic inequality has at last taken center stage in political discourse, but little is said to explain or to offer solutions to it. Written by an award-winning academic and policy maker, The Inequality Crisis provides a comprehensive, evenhanded survey of all the available evidence. Fully up to date with the latest developments, from Brexit to Donald Trump's election, this accessible, jargon-free introduction is international in scope and packed with eye-opening facts. In his closing chapters, Roger Brown evaluates whether current UK government policies will actually help reduce inequality and offers practical suggestions relevant the world over, including raising taxes on higher earners, implementing tougher action against tax dodgers, helping people on lower incomes to save, and reducing inequalities in education.

This volume offers critical perspectives on memories of political and socioeconomic ‘transitions’ that took place between the 1970s and 1990s across the globe and that inaugurated the end of the Cold War. The essays respond to a wealth of recent works of literature, film, theatre, and other media in different languages that rethink the transformations of those decades in light of present-day crises. The authors scrutinize the enduring silences produced by established frameworks of memory and time and explore the mnemonic practices that challenge these frameworks by positing radical ambivalence or by articulating new perspectives and subjectivities. As a whole, the volume contributes to current debates and theory-making in critical memory studies by reflecting on how the changing recollection of transitions constitutes a response to the crisis of memory and time regimes, and how remembering these times as crises renders visible continuities between this past and the present. It is a valuable resource for academics, students, practitioners, and general readers interested in exploring the dynamics of memory in post-authoritarian societies.

This edited volume is about the rekindled investment in the figure of the first president Julius K. Nyerere in contemporary Tanzania. It explores how Nyerere is remembered by Tanzanians from different levels of society, in what ways and for what purposes. Looking into what Nyerere means and stands for today, it provides insight into the media, the political arena, poetry, the education sector, or street-corner talks. The main argument of this book is that Nyerere has become a widely shared political metaphor used to debate and contest conceptions of the Tanzanian nation and Tanzanian-ness. The state-citizens relationship, the moral standards for the exercise of power, and the contours of national sentiment are under scrutiny when the figure of Nyerere is mobilized today. The contributions gathered here come from a generation of budding or renowned scholars in varied disciplines - history, anthropology and political science. Drawing upon materials collected through extensive fieldwork and archival research, they all critically engage the existing literature about Tanzania and prevailing political narratives to explore how nationhood is (re)imagined in Tanzania today through assent and contest.

This book presents a re-engagement with oral histories as a way of documenting, understanding, and discussing experiences of work and economic life in Africa under neoliberal capitalism. It draws on seven case studies in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Uganda, and South Sudan, from the late 1980s to the present, to offer a critical analysis of neoliberal transformations and realities at the incisive level of peoples’ biographies. The last few decades have witnessed unprecedented changes in the working lives of people across the African continent. Oral historical accounts of working lives can offer unique and productive insights into these changes by allowing analyses of neoliberalism that focuses on personal experiences over the longue durée. Yet, there has been a surprising dearth of oral histories of work since the emergence of neoliberalism in the 1980s. Compared to scholarship published more than half a century ago, there has been a decline in the use of oral histories to explore experiences of living and working under capitalism. By grounding analysis in biographical details, histories, and dynamics, the chapters in this book seek better understandings of the wider life contexts, challenges, and circumstances in which people’s ‘agency’ emerges, unfolds, gains traction, and gets (re)shaped; and a better grasp of the multiple, entangled layers and temporalities of life and work in capitalist Africa. This book will be indispensable to students and researchers interested in political economy, development studies, anthropology, sociology, history and African Studies. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Third World Thematics and are accompanied by a new Foreword and Afterword.

This account of the “laboratory of radical democracy” in the months before East Germany’s absorption in the West challenges memories of Germany’s reunification. For many, 1989 is an iconic date, one we associate with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. The year prompts some to rue the defeat of socialism in the East, while others celebrate a victory for democracy and capitalism in the reunified Germany. Remembering 1989 focuses on a largely forgotten interregnum: the months between the outbreak of protests in the German Democratic Republic in 1989 and its absorption by the West in 1990. Anke Pinkert, who herself participated in those protests, recalls these months as a volatile but joyous “laboratory of radical democracy,” and tells the story of how and why this “time out of joint” has been erased from Germany’s national memory. Remembering 1989 argues that in order to truly understand Germany’s historic transformation, we must revisit protesters’ actions across a wide range of minor, vernacular, and often transient sources. Drawing on rich archives including videotapes of untelevised protests, illegally printed petitions by Church leaders, audio recordings of dissident meetings, and interview footage with military troops, Pinkert opens the discarded history of East European social uprisings to new interpretations and imagines alternatives to Germany’s neoliberal status quo. The result is a vivid, unexpected contribution to memory studies and European history.

This book discusses the active relationship among the mechanics of memory, visual practices, and historical narratives. Reflection on memory and its ties with historical narratives cannot be separated from reflection on the visual and the image as its points of reference which function in time. This volume addresses precisely that temporal aspect of the image, without reducing it to a neutral trace of the past, a mnemotechnical support of memory. As a commemorative device, the image fixes, structures, and crystalizes memory, turning the view of the past into myth. It may, however, also stimulate, transform, and update memory, functioning as a matrix of interpretation and understanding the past. The book questions whether the functioning of the visual matrices of memory can be related to a particular historical and geographical scope, that is, to Central and Eastern Europe, and whether it is possible to find their origin and decide if they are just local and regional or perhaps also Western European and universal. It focuses on the artistic reflection on time and history, in the reconstructions of memory due to change of frontiers and political regimes, as well as endeavours to impose some specific political structure on territories which were complex and mixed in terms of national identity, religion and social composition. The volume is ideal for students and scholars of memory studies, history and visual studies.

The field of memory studies has typically focused on everyday memory and commemoration practices through which we construct meaning and identities. The Right to Memory looks beyond these everyday practices, focusing instead on how memory relates to human rights and socio-legal constructs in order to legitimize and protect groups and individuals. With case studies including Polish Holocaust Law, the Indian origins of Amartya Sen’s capability theory approach, and the right to memory through digital technologies in Brazilian and British museums, this collected volume seeks to establish the right to memory as a foundational topic in memory studies.