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University of California Press

About the Book

How two seemingly separate forces—white power and neoliberalism—intersect and polarize the United States today.
 
White Power and American Neoliberal Culture speaks to the urgency of the present moment by uncovering and examining the ideologies that led us here. Working through sources such as white terrorist manifestos, white power utopian fiction, neoliberal think tank reports, and neoconservative policy statements, Patricia Ventura and Edward K. Chan analyze the conjunction of current forms of white supremacy and racial capitalism.
 
Short and accessible, this timely book argues that white extremist worldviews—and the violence they provoke—have converged with a radical economic and social agenda to shape daily life in the United States, especially by enshrining the male-dominated white family as the ideal of national identity. Through insightful observation and critical dissection, Ventura and Chan paint a striking portrait of how these forces enable each other, perpetuating social injustice and inequity.

About the Author

Patricia Ventura is Associate Professor of English at Spelman College in Atlanta. Her previous work includes Neoliberal Culture: Living with American NeoliberalismEdward K. Chan is Professor of American Studies at Waseda University in Tokyo. His previous work includes The Racial Horizon of Utopia: Unthinking the Future of Race in Late Twentieth-Century American Utopian Novels. Together the two coedited Race and Utopian Desire in American Literature and Society.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Disaster Whiteness
1 • Starting Points: White Power Neoliberalism / Neoliberal White Power
2 • Immiseration Culture, or How the Family Became a Trope and a Truncheon
3 • Far White Family Values: Strategies for Neoliberal Takeover
4 • The "Family" at the Core of White Power Utopia
Conclusions in Strange Times, or Life within the Conjuncture of Neoliberalism and White Power

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Reviews

"White Power and American Neoliberal Culture [illuminates] how the domestic sphere functions as a reproductive mechanism for raced and classed inequality and vehemence."
Ethnic and Racial Studies
"I hope that White Power and American Neoliberal Culture becomes a crossover book, read not only by scholars but by citizens (here and abroad) looking for a concise account of what’s going on in America today."
Utopian Studies
"White Power and American Neoliberal Culture is certainly a valuable resource."
Christian Century
"Ventura and Chan provide a necessary vista on racial capitalism’s everyday turmoil"
Ethnic and Racial Studies
"A great idea consummately well explored. Bringing white power and neoliberalism into the same analytic frame allows the authors to avoid suggesting that one explains the other. The result is an examination of our present danger that is able to apportion blame to both liberals and white nationalists and to explain why the two so enduringly coexist."—David Roediger, author of The Wages of Whiteness and The Sinking Middle Class  

"Patricia Ventura and Edward Chan expertly trace the alignment of white power and neoliberalism through both ideologies' deployment of the figure of the white heteropatriarchal family as a bulwark against an increasingly multiracial, globally connected nation and as a substitute for state power. Ventura and Chan illustrate not simply why we have seen a resurgence of the white power movement, but through attention to neoliberal culture, how the foundations of white power ideology underlie US culture today and provide fertile ground for future radicalization."—Lee Bebout, author of Whiteness on the Border: Mapping the US Racial Imagination in Brown and White  

"This book could not have been timelier. As pundits and politicians blame an aberrant Donald Trump for the flowering of white nationalism, Ventura and Chan find its roots in neoliberalism. Just as the liberalism of colonizing nations birthed 1930s fascism, the neoliberalism of American empire is the source of fascism's latest iteration. The authors take us into the dystopian imagination of white nationalist culture, where straight white men rule, white women are baby-making machines, and the rest of us are disappeared—imprisoned, deported, starved, or murdered by the state. For the latter, this is no dream; it is lived reality and heritage. For the struggling white working class, white power is only a dream."—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination  

"Donald Trump as emperor may have no clothes, but he does have baggage. To unpack all that he carries and signifies, White Power and American Neoliberal Culture tracks the catastrophe of white nationalism through the long genealogies of white supremacist and racial capitalist formations. With detail from white power novels and manifestos, Ventura and Chan cut to the heart of white nationalists' neoliberal promise of freedom—the heterosexist patriarchal family—and demonstrate how their rage is directed not simply at the social service state but at society itself. It's a gripping, vital study."—Shana L. Redmond, 2022–2023 President of the American Studies Association and author of Anthem and Everything Man

"An urgent work of striking originality. This book puts whiteness, neoliberalism, and culture into dialogue in a manner that illuminates the discourse of white power and recent resurgence of far-right extremism on the one hand and the persistence of everyday racism and ongoing advance of social conservatism on the other. With theoretical sophistication and analytic care, the authors demonstrate the dynamic interplay and chilling convergence of white power and neoliberalism around the family that have significant implications for our understanding of cultural politics and democratic action."—C. Richard King, coauthor of Beyond Hate: White Power and Popular Culture