Neoliberal manifestations: Cultural, political, and spatial transformation in the late twentieth century United States

This dissertation focuses on the intersection of political change and cultural production in the United States from 1965 to 2005. It explores the rise of neoliberalism in the United States, in the wake of a crisis of legitimacy of the governing coalition and ideologies of the New Deal and Great Society. Focusing on a variety of moments, texts, and arenas from the late 1960s to the early 2000s, including postmodernist fiction, political speeches, popular films, technology industry television commercials, and urban redevelopment patterns, this project proposes neoliberalism as an alternative framework to postmodernism for understanding the cultural dominant (Jameson) of the current conjuncture. Analyzing how complex issues of national identity and civic belonging are staged within and against representations of race, gender, class, and space in contemporary fiction, journalism, political discourse, television commercials, feature films, and urban redevelopment patterns, the dissertation aims to provide a sense of the degree to which neoliberalism has permeated U.S. culture and become a hegemonic discourse. As a hegemony, neoliberalism has attained the power to shape political debate and cultural contestation, forming a foundation upon which—or against which—a broad range of political, commercial and cultural forms of address are constructed. A revival of classical, Enlightenment liberalism in the context of an advanced, highly differentiated consumer society, neoliberalism replaces social equality with economic growth as the ethos and blueprint for national endeavor, representing and narrating the politics and practices of capital accumulation as if they were the politics and practices of social justice. This project works to identify, thematize and critique specific ideological and aesthetic components to neoliberalism that operate through cultural texts, public discourse, state formations, spatial arrangements, consumption practices, and apparatuses of entertainment to socially reproduce neoliberal ideas and institutions