Writing Neoliberal Values: Rhetorical Connectivities and Globalized Capitalism

This book examines human-interest stories that circulate narratives about how markets, in alliance with nation-states, promote freedom and bring stability to previously marginalized people. It unpacks text samples which suggest racialized and gendered distribution of abandonment, violence, and death inherent to neoliberalism. Building on these brief moments, it examines whether it is possible to track rhetorical violence within human-interest stories, linking to wider political, economic, cultural, and discursive formations, and to write hints of people, events, labour, to suggest other political imaginaries. Within a violent archive and based on cutting edge research, this text searches for ghostly figures of the living dead  - those who are abandoned to decay, neglect, and death  - and considers whether rhetorical moments when they briefly appear can be used to conjure futures not yet imagined.