Globalization, Neoliberalism, and the Global Rise of Right-Wing Politics
Date Published: 2/09/2025
With Trump’s second term and the rise of right-wing leaders globally, the 2016 election appears less like an anomaly and more like part of a broader rightward shift. This reading list explores how to make sense of this shift by examining its historical context and significance. As these questions arise in many discussions, we offer a collection of books, journal issues, and articles to help readers navigate this political moment.
The introduction to each book is free, and books may be purchased at dukeupress.edu.
BOOK
The Personality of Power: A Theory of Fascism for Anti-Fascist Life
Brian Massumi
2025
JOURNAL ARTICLE
Social Democratic Hauntings: On Swedish Dissociation and Melancholia
Viola Bao
South Atlantic Quarterly 124:1, 2025
JOURNAL ISSUE
Crisis Theory
Eugene Brennan, editor
South Atlantic Quarterly 123:2, 2024
JOURNAL ARTICLE
Ending Neoliberalism
Neil Vallelly
Critical Times 7:2, 2024
BOOK
The Inner Life of Race: Souls, Bodies, and the History of Racial Power
Leerom Medovoi
2024
BOOK
Rio as Method: Collective Resistance for a New Generation
Paul Amar, Editor
2024
JOURNAL ISSUE
Crisis to Catastrophe: Lineages of the Global New Right
Leah Feldman and Aamir R. Mufti, editors
boundary 2 50:1, 2023
JOURNAL ARTICLE
From Financialization to Derivative Fascisms: Some Cultural Politics of Far-Right Authoritarianism in an Era of Unmanageable Risk
Max Haiven
Social Text 155, 2023
BOOK
Planetary Longings
Mary Louise Pratt
2022
JOURNAL ARTICLE
Collective Disorientation and Catastrophic Precarity in the Hypermodern Era
Alexander J. Means and Graham B. Slater
Cultural Politics 18:2, 2022
JOURNAL ARTICLE
Modes of Regression: The Case of Ressentimen
Douglas Kellner
Critical Times 5:3, 2022
JOURNAL ARTICLE
Endangered Scholarship, Academic Freedom, and the Life of Critique
Judith Butler
Critical Times 5:2, 2022
JOURNAL ARTICLE
Brazilian Universities under Attack: From the Biopolitical Pact to the Necropopulist Moment
Pedro Fiori Arantes
Critical Times 5:1, 2022
BOOK
The Impasse of the Latin American Left
Franck Gaudichaud, Massimo Modonesi, and Jeffery R. Webber
2022
JOURNAL ARTICLE
Apparatuses of Denunciation, Neoliberal Governmental Rationality, and the Potential for a Fascist Turn: The Case of Turkey in the 2010s
Biriz Berksoy
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 42:1, 2022
BOOK
Paradoxes of Nostalgia: Cold War Triumphalism and Global Disorder since 1989
Penny M. Von Eschen
2022
JOURNAL ARTICLE
American Conservatism Unmoored: The Dissident Right's Adoption of Leftist Agitational Strategies
Ethan Stoneman and Joseph Packer
Cultural Politics 18:3, 2022
JOURNAL ARTICLE
Decolonizing Trans/Gender Studies?: Teaching Gender, Race, and Sexuality in Times of the Rise of the Global Right
Alyosha Tudor
TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 8:2, 2021
JOURNAL ARTICLE
An Old Right in New Bottles: State without Nation in South Korean New Right Historiography
Sungik Yang
The Journal of Asian Studies 80:4, 2021
JOURNAL SECTION
Explicit Exclusions; or, The Ethnicization of Democracy
Rahul Rao
Critical Times 4:3, 2021
JOURNAL ARTICLE
Trump, Authoritarian Populism, and COVID-19 from a US Perspective
Douglas Kellner
Cultural Politics 17:1, 2021
JOURNAL ARTICLE
Exploratory Notes on the Origins of New Fascisms
Zeynep Gambetti
Critical Times 3:1, 2020
JOURNAL ARTICLE
Ownership's Shadow: Neoauthoritarianism as Defense of Phantom Possession
Eva von Redecker
Critical Times 3:1, 2020
JOURNAL ARTICLE
What’s the Matter with Labor History?
Max Fraser
Labor 17:4, 2020
JOURNAL ARTICLE
Anti-’68ers and the Racist-Libertarian Alliance: How a Schism among Austrian School Neoliberals Helped Spawn the Alt Right
Quinn Slobodian
Cultural Politics 15:3, 2019
JOURNAL ISSUE
Neoliberalism's Authoritarian (Re)Turns
Nik Theodore and Jamie Peck, editors
South Atlantic Quarterly 118:2, 2019
JOURNAL ARTICLE
Sacrificing Citizenship: On Muslims and Assimilation in a Neoliberal Frame
Zahid R. Chaudhary
Social Text 140, 2019
JOURNAL ARTICLE
Neoliberalism's Frankenstein: Authoritarian Freedom in Twenty-First Century "Democracies"
Wendy Brown
Critical Times 1:1, 2018
JOURNAL ARTICLE
“Trump”—What Does the Name Signify? or, Protofascism and the Alt-Right: Three Contradictions of the Present Conjuncture
Matthew Flisfeder
Cultural Politics 14:1, 2018
JOURNAL ARTICLE
Rethinking Radical Anti-Racist Feminist Politics in a Global Neoliberal Context
Ochy Curiel, Manuela Borzone, and Alexander Ponomareff
Meridians 14:2, 2016
JOURNAL ARTICLE
The Cultural Logics of Neoliberalism: Baudrillard’s Account
Mike Gane
Cultural Politics 11:1, 2015
JOURNAL ISSUE
Genealogies of Neoliberalism
Jason Stahl and Mark Soderstrom, editors
Radical History Review 112, 2012
