The Politics and Policies of Postcolonial Neoliberal Nationalism

Globally proliferating right-wing electoral successes of a specific kind are ubiquitous -- they rely upon a weaving together of seemingly contradictory aspects of neoliberalism and nationalism. An important dimension of these contemporary changes is that they reflect something more than simply the empirical instantiation of a right-wing success in any one specific context. They require us to unravel and understand the transmutations in the nature of the political and the economic in the contemporary postcolonial world. I analyse this in terms of what I have previously called 'Postcolonial Neoliberal Nationalism' (PNN) (2019) -- a powerful weave of nationalism, neoliberalism, and postcolonialism that lies behind such configurations of power. PNN requires us to challenge the a priori availability of either neoliberalism or nationalism in isolation; neoliberalism and nationalism are not only not contradictory to each other, but as projects of re-forming imaginaries, they co-constitute the ideas of “market/economy” and “nation/culture.” Furthermore, PNN makes visible the ambivalent status of “the West,” since it is imbued with the historical legacy of colonial memory re-called into the present as a revanchist pride, and combined with the conflicting aspirational/actual consumption desires to emulate the capitalist imperial metropolitan fantasies. I illustrate PNN at work with empirical examples, and further analyse how such projects function across various policy arenas in multiple countries by deploying misogyny as political strategy.