Novel Shocks: Urban Renewal and the Origins of Neoliberalism by Myka Tucker-Abramson

Author:Myka Tucker-Abramson
Format: pdf
Tags: Novel Shocks: Urban Renewal and the Origins of Neoliberalism traces the political and cultural origins of neoliberalism to the large-scale suburbanization and urban renewal programs of the 1950s and early 1960s, and places the Cold War novel at the center of this story. Throughout the 1950s, a coalition of developers, politicians and planners, bulldozed vast areas of land deemed “slums” or “blighted” to make way for freeways to the new suburban developments, public and private housing projects, medical centers, skyscrapers, and even the new United Nations headquarters. While the program was national, New York was ground zero, and like Haussman’s creative destruction of Paris a century before, the demolition and monumental reconstruction of New York created a distinctive, and soon to be global, urban sensorium, one rooted in the new segregated landscapes of prosperous white private space and poor black public space. Novel Shocks argues that these landscapes are at the centre of the work of novelists such as James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Patricia Highsmith, Ayn Rand, William Burroughs, Sylvia Plath, and Warren Miller, all of whom depicted and responded to these new urban spaces as forms of traumatic “shock” that required new aesthetic forms and political structures. These novels rejected older shock-based modernisms such as Surrealism and naturalism and, like the urbanization projects they depicted, forged a new kind of modernism, one that transformed shock from a traumatic and disruptive effect of urban modernity into a therapeutic force that helps strengthen and shape a more flexible, self-reliant, and resilient subject that would nourish the roots of neoliberalism. In offering an urban and cultural prehistory of neoliberalism, Novel Shocks both resituates the Cold War novel as a key archive for understanding neoliberalism, while also offering a more materialist and historically-grounded account of the affective, subjective, and ideological structures of neoliberalism., Publisher:Fordham University Press, Published:2018, Related ISBN:9780823282708, Language:English, OCLC:1059450753


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