October 16 - 18, 2007 

Remembering Trauma, Imagining Transformation: Neoliberalism’s Affective Economies and the Radical Imagination of Dissent

Tamara Lea Spira

History of Consciousness Department &

Feminist Studies Department

University of California, Santa Cruz

In this essay, I juxtapose Gayl Jones’s 1975 novel Corrigadora against Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina (1993). Created during the neoliberal turn, both texts engage historical traumas conventionally consigned to the past, and territorialized within the boundaries of the US nation-state.  While Corregidora’s protagonist is the (great)granddaughter of slaves and first in her family not borne of  intergenerational slave rape,  Bastard is about a young girl of “white trash” origins and her harrowing survival of incest and dire poverty in rural Appalachia.

Written in a moment when the (neo)slave prison-binge is proliferating globally, and neoliberal capital’s processes of (re)colonization are intensifying, it is significant that both novels labor to “remember” the interlinking traumas of slavery and colonization and sexual violence. As I argue, the neoliberal turn is as much about political-economic transformations, as it demands transformations in structures of subjectivity, affect and memory.  This is embodied everywhere from strategies of low-intensity warfare centralizing the strategic importance of “hearts and minds” for (neo)imperial (re)assertion, to Margaret Thatcher’s blunt decree that “economics are the method, but (neoliberalism’s) object is to change the soul.” Hence, rather than declaring obvious warfare on all sectors of dissidence, the neoliberal order functions through the encryption of violence into structures of feeling. Through an ever-perfected  “market technology of violence” that labors to imbue the desires of capital into our very souls, neoliberalism operates through logics of amnesia and forgetting, seeking to thwart dissent and forestall indefinitely the resolution of injustice.

Interestingly, then, these works were produced during an explosion of minoritarian “memory boom literatures” on a (variegated) global stage. While many black feminist texts were compelled to “remember” slavery, lesbian and radical feminist movements became increasingly concerned with “remembering” sexual violence. And, in post/neo-dictatorship Latin America, memories of state violence became an incredibly fraught arena of public debate.

In this essay, I suggest that we read these works as serving as commentary and problematizing the affective structures being (re)calibrated (and, as I stress resisted, reworked, evaded, subverted) in this move towards neoliberal (re)colonization. In their stories of collective trauma and multiple subjectivities, these texts represent the atrocities of incest, slavery and colonialism in ways that are anything but efficient, privatized, or manageable. Nor do they cede to a rationalization of violence in a moment when the rationalization of violence itself is becoming the modality par excellence of hegemony’s (re)assertion.

Secondly, these stories bear the traces of alternative modalities of feeling and being that clash with dominant constructions of neoliberal selfhood. I turn to the pivotal roles of music, fantasy and desire within the novels.  These highly imaginative texts both represent and exemplify multiple realities and feelings that exceed capital’s value-codings in a time of “globalization.”  As such, they evidence modalities of struggle that resist capitalist subsumption, hence embodying hope in a pivotal historical juncture commonly characterized as one of uncontested imperial domination, loss and despair.

Lastly, I reflect upon the implication of this reading within our contemporary political moment of imperial violence and global war. I ask: If twenty-five years of neoliberal policies and accompanying militarized forms have temporarily foreclosed the left’s ability to seriously engage a radical praxis, what can a re-working through these texts offer that has been locked away in the annals of the radical imagination?

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