Winter in America: A Cultural History of the Rise of Neoliberalism, 1960s-1980s

"Winter in America" explores the interactions between culture and economics related to the rise of neoliberalism in the United States between the 1960s and 1980s, and within the context of the processes of modernity (formed through the nexus of colonialism/imperialism, capitalism, slavery, and nationalism). Using the prism of the longue durée, this dissertation highlights the intersectional antagonisms characterizing the 1960s culture wars and their manifestation across popular culture and media. In particular, if focuses on the ways in which new, reconfigured formations of blackness and whiteness appeared within the changing American political economy that emerged in the late 1970s as neoliberalism. "Winter in America" weaves the longue durée challenges of the Civil Rights and Women's Liberation movement to white masculinity into the fabric of the corporate multinational and finance counterrevolution against the Welfare state that took place in the 1970s. Rather than viewing the late 1960s and 1970s white masculine backlash as a simple reaction against 1960s social movements, "Winter in America" ties these structures of feeling to deeper core elements of cultural-economic forms anchored to the evolving processes of modernity as it entered the neoliberal stage of global capitalism.;Forming an interdisciplinary framework to view the post-Civil Rights, post-Welfare state United States, "Winter in America" draws together the historiographies of Civil Rights and Black Power, the New Right, Second Wave Feminism, Business History, Film and Media studies, and Critical Race Theory. Indeed, much of the rhetorical fabric supporting the corporate counterrevolution in the 1970s aimed toward reconstructing and reorienting the American political economy in a way that incorporated the moderate reforms of the Civil Rights-Black Power movement and Second Wave Feminism—colorblindness and gender-neutrality—while not fully relinquishing the processes of modernity related to anti-blackness and misogyny. Centered on various case studies of popular culture (film, music, television, and news magazines) that either explicitly or implicitly commented on the intersections of economics and culture, "Winter in America" helps provide a framework for better understanding the cultural logic of the rise of neoliberalism within the larger project of modernity.