[Linganth] Neoliberal Styles – Peculiar, Familiar, and Otherwise

[Falina Enriquez]

CALL FOR PAPERS:

Neoliberal Styles – Peculiar, Familiar, and Otherwise
Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, November 18-22, 2015

Co-Organizers:
Falina Enriquez (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Owen Kohl (University of Chicago)
Claudia Gastrow (University of the Witwatersrand) 

Keywords: Neoliberalism; Semiotics; Architecture/Built Environment; Aesthetics; Development;Music; Style. 
 
Recent ethnographies have demonstrated that despite the pervasiveness of entrepreneurialism, privatization, and a global “culture of neoliberalism,” neoliberalism is neither homogeneous nor totalizing (Canclini 2001; Comaroff and Comaroff 2000, 2009; Dávila 2012; Dent 2012; Greenhouse et al. 2010; Harvey 2005; Mains 2012; Yúdice 2008). In keeping with this insight, we will examine how individuals, groups, and institutions are configuring neoliberal ideologies to extant social and other political-economic frameworks and, in turn, redefining what this political theory entails. 

In particular, we are concerned with exploring various styles of neoliberalism where 'style,' broadly construed, gives us analytic access into the ensemble of semiotic, material, political, and social outcomes of neoliberal processes (Shankar and Cavanaugh 2012; cf. Auer et al. 2007; Coupland 2007; Hebdige 1979; Mendoza-Denton 2001, 2008). We are therefore concerned with how the aesthetic and performative connotations of style help us understand how distinct neoliberal approaches are emerging. Moreover, to what degree are economic reforms often glossed as ‘adjustments’ influencing local aesthetic production, circulation, and content? 

Drawing on examples from a wide array of sites, we will explore the myriad ways in which people are rendering neoliberalism, a seemingly intractable, cohesive political and economic project, into a set of differentiated, heterogeneous processes that are comparatively familiar and/or strange. These phenomena become noticeable in artistic, quotidian, and practical realms, such as music, architecture and social interaction. For example, what kinds of professional and aesthetic strategies are Brazilian musicians employing to thrive within a field where previously reliable forms of state sponsorship are eroding? Meanwhile, how are these musicians negotiating an expanded set of competitors who are recording, distributing, and selling music via their personal computers? How are Angolans' aesthetic preferences regarding houses shaped by (inter)national discourses of development? How do artists in the late 20th century social formation known as the domestic hip hop scene simultaneously embrace, debate, and critique neoliberal shifts in former Yugoslav spaces? How do the sounds, images, and buildings of multiple state projects – supranational European and socialist; ‘dictatorial’ and ‘liberal’; domestic and cosmopolitan – affect and inform ostensibly neoliberal styles? This panel seeks to consider neoliberalism as an everyday experience, one that may be initiated by major political-economic shifts, but is only registered and understood through concrete practices.

Please send your 250 word paper abstracts to Falina Enriquez (fenriquez2 at wisc.edu), Owen Kohl (owenkohl at uchicago.edu), and Claudia Gastrow (claudia.gastrow at wits.ac.za) by March 23, 2015.