The New Religious Political Right in Neo-Apartheid South Africa

This article argues that, in similar ways that scholars such as Kaye (1987) and Apple (1990) have respectively demonstrated how post 1970s America and Britain fused the neo-liberal discourse of free markets with the neo-conservative Christian discourse of moral rightness to found a New Right, we can apply this analytical model in post-apartheid/neo-apartheid South Africa. The aim of this analytical comparison is to support the broad claim that the article makes about the rise of the New Right in contemporary South Africa as directly related to the fusion of neo-Pentecostal Christianity with neoliberal economics in very salient ways. Using discourse analysis, the article demonstrates how the New Right in South Africa also draws from the language of crisis to justify a response that brings together the interlocking of race, religion, and neoliberalism. The paper’s main argument is that, a different type of New Right is emerging in current day South Africa, one that is not simply the purview of whitenationalism, but has main appeal also within the black middle-class.

From Economizing to Ecologizing: Emerging an Integrated Perspective

The complex wickedness of many of today’s social and ecological problems calls for more integral thinking to bring better alignment between human activities, particularly economic and business activities, and ecological realities. This paper integrates emerging knowledge about the differences between right (holistic) and left (analytic) brain thinking, Indigenous wisdom, and the physics, biology, complexity, and chaos sciences into ideas for a new economic orthodoxy. Doing so offers the potential to shift away from today’s predominantly economizing mindsets towards integrated ecologizing mindsets that more holistically and realistically represent the world. Drawing on recent work that articulates six core values for a life-affirming economic orthodoxy, this paper explores that shift away from business as usual with today’s dominant neoliberal economics towards an integrated ecologizing socio-ecology. The need is to translate economizing mindsets associated with neoliberal economics into ecologizing ones through ideas that prioritize stewardship, collective value, cosmopolitan localism, regenerativity, relationality, and equitable markets.

(Neo)liberalizing the state – Privatization of core government competencies

For a few decades now and most prominently promoted by the US, neoliberal economics have been on the rise, epitomized in recent austerity policies with regard to countries that have met financial trouble. In particular the drive for privatization of core public services relating to basic human needs, such as water, social services or pensions, has been increasingly criticized because of a perceived incompatibility between the profit motive and social solidarity. This article uses a corpus-based analysis of the discourse on privatization in the US of proponents supporting, respectively opposing it, with an overall corpus size of about 230,000 tokens. It examines how the two groups conceptualize privatization differently and which strategies are applied to fore- or background particular aspects of it.

The ambivalent presence of economics in the work of Stuart Cunningham

In this short paper, I want to consider the ways in which Stuart Cunningham's focus on work that was policy-relevant and could speak to industry led him to an ambivalent relationship with the discipline of economics. Rejecting the binary opposition between alleged ‘neoliberal’ economics and the cultural sphere as a site of unbridled moral good, Cunningham sought to both engage with and critique the dominant paradigms of economics, and their influence in Australian public policy. In doing so, his work is strongly influenced by Ian Hunter's argument that scholarly work motivated by civically minded engagements with matters of public concern needed to go beyond moral grandstanding and engage critically with the institutional complexities of social and cultural governance.

Gender and economic security in southeast Asia

Economic security in southeast Asia is often connected to the survival and security of states. This macro definition can be contrasted with a more people-centred approach to economic security. This article focuses on this aspect. Of particular concern is how men and women are affected differently in unstable times. We witness this now in this global pandemic. The current economic insecurities of women are not a reflection of historical gender norms but more a creation of contemporary neoliberal economics as practised in the region. While southeast Asia does well as a global economic hub, women do not have a fair share in its gains. By examining issues of power, liberating policies and women's rights and the right to decent work, the article ultimately posits greater intervention in narrowing economic inequalities. This will be a vital step in rebuilding national economies in southeast Asia, post-pandemic and in the years to come.

The coming-of-age of tourism: embracing new economic models

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to re-examine the economic models and assumptions that have given rise to current day tourism. It suggests alternate models based on new values to help tourism emerge from the current COVID crisis and “come-of-age.” Design/methodology/approach The paper delineates the assumptions of neoliberal economics upon which much of tourism has been based. It then summarizes the work of progressive economists in developing new models that value capital other than financial. Six of these models are briefly described and applied to tourism. Findings Some assumptions underlying the neoliberal economic model that need re-examining are the ideas that: self-interest drives ideal economic behavior; success comes from competition, not cooperation; encouraging consumption for its own sake; giving owners priority over other stakeholders; and more income translates into more happiness. Redesign of economic systems requires consideration of social capital, natural capital, intellectual capital, compassion capital, trust capital and spiritual capital to name a few. Examples of alternate systems using these capitals are the collaborative economy, the circular economy, the creative economy, the gift economy, the sacred economy and the regenerative economy. Originality/value The paper’s approach is to interlace modern economic thought with the future maturation of tourism and to suggest that tourism policymakers and leaders learn from these thinkers to create a new model for the future of tourism.

Deconstructing the British Empire

The aim of this chapter is to explain why the British Empire survived so long in conditions of massive change. The empire was remarkably heterogeneous as a system of political economy and, even more importantly, as a system of ruling ideologies. For generations, these several systems and ideologies were, however, mutually reinforcing. The decline or atrophy of one “element of empire” merely set the scene for the emergence of another way of projecting power and legitimacy. As for the legacy of the British Empire in the modern world, the chapter emphasizes ideology, without wanting to detract from the significance of empire’s political and economic consequences. The leading social and economic ideologies in the modern world, from neoliberal economics through Third World nationalism, to Islamic, Hindu, and Buddhist revivalism, have all been deeply affected by the heritage of the British Empire, its ideologies and structures of power.

Art as Critique under Neoliberalism: Negativity Undoing Economic Naturalism

This essay considers the possibilities of contemporary art as a viable medium of socio-political critique within a cultural terrain dominated by naturalised neoliberal economics. It begins by considering the centrality of negativity to the historical project of critical theory most forcefully pursued by Adorno as ‘negative dialectics.’ Subsequent varieties of postmodern critique fairly dispensed with dialectics variously favouring complexity and an overriding emphasis on textuality. With the birth of neoliberalism and its burgeoning emphasis on ‘the contemporary’, economic values begin to penetrate every aspect of contemporary life and experience, including art and culture. Contemporary capitalism dematerialised as financialisation now comprises a naturalised ambience that is both everywhere and nowhere. Capitalist ambience is echoed in contemporary art that suggests criticality and yet seems to side with the imagery, values and logics of the prevailing financial order. The naturalisation of the neoliberal order is further internalised by artists online. Exacerbated contemporary emphasis on the ‘self as entrepreneur’ coincides with the biopolitical transformation of the contemporary artist into an individual ‘enterprise unit’. This is particularly observable online on social media where an artist’s whole life is simultaneously the subject and object of art. Criticality in art does not disappear but becomes ‘self-annulling’: it acts as a conduit questioning the commodity-identity of art while pointing to phenomena and affects outside the art world. With the recent appearance of the COVID-19 virus, added to the unignorable impact of global climate change, ‘real nature’ assumes a critical role, undermining neoliberalism’s ideological naturalisation while laying-bare the extent of its structural contradictions. Art criticality is revivified by divesting from art contexts saturated with neoliberal imperatives. Criticality is negatively practiced as an ‘un-’ or ‘not-doing’, defining modes of exodus while, crucially, not abandoning art’s institutional definition altogether.

Covid Conversations 1: Peter Sellars

In this profoundly dialogical exchange, Peter Sellars, theatre director, researcher, and teacher, and Maria Shevtsova open out a whole array of questions on the integral relation between politics and the theatre in its multiple manifestations. These questions not only concern the damages inflicted by the present Covid-19 pandemic but also those developed by the neoliberal economics and politics of the past forty years and more. In Sellars’s view, neoliberalism has been the hotbed of social injustices, inequities, market and other forms of current enslavement, migrations, refugee and related precarities, and the havoc of the world climate in which the plight of humanity and that of the planet are indelibly interconnected. His and Shevtsova’s discussion links such vital concerns with his theatre practice, which ranges from his engagement with local communities and indigenous peoples – he details some of his work with the collective, community organization of two Los Angeles Festivals of the early 1990s – to the various forms of his music theatre in which he collaborates, in institutional structures, with highly proficient musicians, singers and dancers. The focus chosen here from his music theatre is The Indian Queen (2013), which Sellars dramaturgically invents using pieces by Henry Purcell combined with prose fragments by Nicaraguan novelist Rosario Aguilar. Peter Sellars is an internationally renowned theatre director among whose more recent productions is Mozart’s Idomeneo, premiered at the Salzburg Festival in 2019. Maria Shevtsova, Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London, is editor of New Theatre Quarterly. This conversation took place on 16 August 2020, was transcribed from the recording by Kunsang Kelden, and was edited by Maria Shevtsova.