Presidential Session: Zombie Noliberalism? Survivals and Emergences in Political Economy 20 Years after Lisa Duggan's Twilight of Equality?

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

More than twenty years after the publication of Lisa Duggan's Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism and Cultural Politics and the Attack on Democracy (2003), change in the U.. political economy has been rapid and confusing. While Twilight examined the high tide of neoliberalim in the U.S during the 1990s, we may currently have arrived at the end of this era, though nothing is clear. This roundtable is designed to take a global perspective, and to consider the U.S. within the context of empire and settler colonialism (as the book did not), and to respond to a series of questions: Are at the end of the era of neoliberalism? Is it now in its zombie phase, dead yet still walking the early? Or are we at the beginning of another era of authoritarian capitalism, U.S. imperial decline? Techno feudalism? or some other newly emerging configuration? Taking Twilight's example, how is the decllining and/or emerging political economic order refiguring social formations like race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, indigeneity, along with the primary means of productions and the forms of labor? How are social movements responding? In other words, what the hell is going on now, and what can we do about it?

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Eng-Beng Lim, Dartmouth College

Panelists

• Elisabeth R Anker, George Washington University

• Lisa Duggan, New York University

• Daniel HoSang, Yale University

• Miranda Joseph, University of Minnesota

• Tavia Nyong'o, Yale University

Biographical Information

Eng-Beng Lim (Chair) is Associate Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and author of Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias (NYU, 2014). The book was recognized with two national awards, one by CLAGS (Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, CUNY Grad Center), and the other AAAS (Association of Asian American Studies). His fields of study are performance and cultural studies, Asian/American studies, postcolonial/diaspora studies and queer/transnational studies. He is currently working on a book project about megastructure and performance, and another on the visual cultures of "ethnocuties." He is part of the Social Text editorial collective, MLA division for Drama and Performance, the International Standing Review Board of Hong Kong's Research Grant Council, among other professional appointments. At Dartmouth, he is part of the Steering Committees of GRID (Gender Research Institute at Dartmouth) and the Women's and Gender Studies Program.

Lisa Duggan (roundtable introduction) a journalist, activist and Professor of Social & Cultural Analysis at New York University, where she teaches in the American Studies and Gender & Sexuality Studies Programs. She is the author of Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence and American Modernity; The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism and Cultural Politics, and Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed. She is co-author with Nan Hunter of Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture and co-editor with Lauren Berlant of Our Monica Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and National Interest. She is also co-editor with Curtis Marez of a book series at University of California Press, American Studies Now: Critical Studies of the Present. She is currently at work on a book on the political architecture of the far right in the United Stsred in global context— as analyzed through the career of Steve Bannon. Her next book project is a study of character AI technology platforms.

Libby Anker (roundtable participant) is Professor of American Studies and Political Science at George Washington University. Her research interests are at the intersection of political theory and cultural criticism, with a focus on expressions of freedom, violence, and power in US politics and culture. She is author of Ugly Freedoms (Duke, 2022), which won honorable mention for the John Hope Franklin Prize for the Best Book in American Studies, and Orgies of Feeling: Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom (Duke, 2014), a Choice Outstanding Academic Title, which won honorable mention for the Lora Romero Prize for the Best First Book in American Studies. Anker is co-editor of the interdisciplinary journal Theory & Event. Her current book projects include "Make Sovereignty Great Again" which examines new forms of white supremacy and misogyny, and "We Go Low" a book about fighting for democracy.

Miranda Joseph (roundtable participant)is Professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota. She currently serves as Chair of American Studies.Joseph is the author of Debt to Society: Accounting for Life under Capitalism (2014), Against the Romance of Community (2002), and numerous articles and book chapters about the relationship between culture and capitalism. Her recent works contribute to critical university studies and feminist studies of finance. Joseph teaches feminist and queer studies, cultural studies, and American studies.

Daniel Martinez HoSang (roundtable participant) is Professor of American Studies at Yale. He is a scholar of racial formation in politics, culture, and law. HoSang’s current research projects include a volume of essays co-edited with Joe Lowndes, The Politics of the Multiracial Right, (NYU Press in 2025). He is also author of A Wider Type of Freedom: How Struggles for Racial Justice Liberate Everyone (University of California Press, 2021) and co-author with Joseph Lowndes of Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity (University of Minnesota Press, 2019). His first book, Racial Propositions: Ballot Initiatives and the Making of Postwar California (University of California Press, 2010) was awarded the 2011 James A Rawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians

Tavia Nyong’o (roundtable participant)is Chair and William Lampson Professor of Performance Studies; American Studies; African-American Studies; and Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Yale. His books include The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (University of Minnesota Press, 2009) Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (New York University Press, 2018) and Black Apocalypse (University of California Press, 2025). His current research interests include: the performative turn in museum curation; the racial reckoning in theater, dance, and performance; racial and sexual dissidence in art and culture; and the cultural history of the metaverse. Editor-at-large for the journal Social Text, Nyong’o is also on the editorial boards of TDR: A Journal of Performance Studies, Theatre, and Contemporary Theatre Review. He co-edits the Sexual Cultures book series at NYU Press with Ann Pellegrini and Joshua Chambers-Letson. Since 2021, Nyong’o has also curated public programs at the Park Avenue Armory.