HOC UGA Sep 2011

I tried to select readings that speak to the importance of place in shaping the ways that ideas associated with economic liberalization have been packaged, sold, legitimated, implemented, appropriated, etc. As terms like neoliberalism and globalization--or the ways that they have been deployed--tend to inscribe an aura of inevitability on the processes they denote, I'm hoping that these selections will help us to think about the contingent paths by which different countries and regions arrived at neoliberalism and the different forms that modern capitalism has taken in these places.

Readings:

1) Nancy MacLean, "Southern Dominance in Borrowed Language: The Regional Origins of American Neoliberalism" (Ch. 2 in Jane Collins, Micaela di Leonardo, and Brett Williams, eds. New Landscapes of Inequality: Neoliberalism and the Erosion of Democracy in America, 2008)

2) James Ferguson, "De-moralizing Economies: African Socialism, Scientific Capitalism, and the Moral Politics of Structural Adjustment" (Ch. 3 from Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order, 2006)

3) Yves Dezalay and Bryant G. Garth, "The Paradox of Symbolic Imperialism: The Southern Cone as an Explosive Laboratory of Modernity" (Ch. 7 from The Internationalization of Palace Wars: Lawyers, Economists, and the Contest to Transform Latin American States, 2002)