Novel Shocks : Urban Renewal and the Origins of Neoliberalism

__Novel Shocks__ argues that the political and cultural origins of neoliberalism lie in the battles over suburban and urban space in the 1950s and early 1960s. At the end of World War II, Harry Truman’s administration launched a national program of urban renewal that sought to create a new and distinctly American modernity, which would underpin US global hegemony. The program’s effects in Manhattan were particularly notable: throughout the 1950s and 1960s, New York bulldozed vast areas of land deemed “slums” or “blighted” to make way for freeways, public and private housing projects, medical centers, skyscrapers, and even the new United Nations headquarters. Taken together, these processes dramatically transformed New York’s metropolitan region, creating the segregated landscape of prosperous white suburbs and poor black cities, and with it new cultural forms and subjectivities. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, novelists such as Ralph Ellison, Patricia Highsmith, Ayn Rand, William Burroughs, Sylvia Plath, and Warren Miller all 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. Throughout the 1950s, a coalition of developers, politicians, and planners bulldozed vast areas of land deemed “slums” or “blighted” to make way for freeways, public and private housing projects, cultural centers, and skyscrapers. While the program was national, New York was ground zero, and the demolition and monumental reconstruction of the city created a distinctive urban sensorium, rooted in the new segregated landscapes of prosperous white private space and poor black public space. Novel Shocks situates these landscapes at the center of the midcentury novel, arguing that James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Patricia Highsmith, Ayn Rand, William Burroughs, Sylvia Plath, and Warren Miller all registered these new urban spaces as traumatic “shocks” that required new aesthetic forms. Rejecting older shock-based modernisms, these novelists forged a new modernism, which reimagined shock as a therapeutic force that would create a more flexible, self-reliant, and resilient subject that would nourish neoliberalism’s roots. In offering a cultural prehistory of neoliberalism, Novel Shocks resituates the Cold War novel as a key archive for understanding neoliberalism’s emergence and offers a more materialist and historically grounded account of neoliberalism’s subjective, affective, and ideological structures. Reveals how the segregated urban landscapes of prosperous white private space and poor black public space were at the center of novels by James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Patricia Highsmith, Ayn Rand, William S. Burroughs, Sylvia Plath, and Warren Miller. "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" -- Provided by publisher