Post-Civil Rights In the Hold: Neoliberalism, Race and the Politics of Historical Memory in the Deep South

Foster, Theodore Roosevelt

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-5zxn-3y72

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Post-Civil Rights In the Hold: Neoliberalism, Race and the Politics of Historical Memory in the Deep South

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My dissertation is entitled “Post-civil Rights in the Hold: Neoliberalism, Race and the Politics of Historical Memory in the Deep South.” Post-civil rights discourse as a specific object of investigation has been under theorized, it has primarily been understood as a fundamental marker of racial progress in the United States rather than, a condition of belated inclusion and compartamentalization of Black politics, Black history and Blackness. Thus the research question I pose in the dissertation is how do we conceptualize the political, historical and ontological significance of Blackness and neoliberalism to the proliferation of a post-civil rights discourse and mythology that obscures ongoing forms of racial dominance rooted in racial slavery and settler colonialism? It argues that this discourse positions the U.S. South as a paradoxical space or site of transition and thus important to the production of racial and temporal difference. The neoliberal economy of civil rights history serves as a conceptual framework for revealing and unsettling the production of historical narratives of Black freedom that whitewash and quarantine how and why systems of racial dominance persist despite triumphalist narratives to the contrary. To demonstrate the critical purchase of this conceptual framework, the dissertation takes an interdisciplinary Black studies approach to examining the problem of post-civil rights discourse to the making of Black politics and racial politics more generally within three case studies; the 1979 election of Birmingham, Alabama’s first Black mayor, the creation of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute in 1992, and the 2011 emergence of a new immigrant justice movement in Alabama. Given the saturation of triumphalist historical narratives of civil rights and Black freedom in Birmingham and throughout the U.S. South, this site represents an important and under researched context relevant for understanding the global making of race in the wake of neoliberal reform. The dissertation finds that a fugitive orientation to Blackness and Black politics does not escape the logics of neoliberal adjustment but reveals ruptural moments of transformative possibility and historical contingency akin to what Cedric Robinson has theorized as the Black Radical Tradition.

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