Literature of Resistance for a Neoliberal Era

In her 1999 book No Logo, Canadian activist and critic Naomi Klein argued that corporate branding had co-opted cultural spaces for rebellion. Declaring "no space, no choice, no jobs, no logo," Klein painted a bleak picture of global capitalism's totalizing hold, which left cultural resisters with "little more than a vaguely sarcastic way to eat Pizza Pops."¹ Nearly two decades later, Mitchum Huehls reminds us that neoliberal co-optation has only intensified. His 2016 work After Critique: Twenty-First-Century Fiction in a Neoliberal Age considers how neoliberalism's pernicious effects extend into the conceptual space of scholarly critique.

After Critique is challenging and worthwhile, demanding much of the reader and offering provocative insights in return. At the center of the book is a conceptualization of neoliberalism that integrates late Foucauldian thought with Eva Cherniavsky's vision of a post-normative neoliberalism and Latourian anti-critique. Neoliberalism, in this view, is a negative political and economic system, "our very own zombie plague" (ix), whose power derives less from the ideological control of individuals than from the production of many post-normative identities, all of which contribute, willingly or unwillingly, to capital accumulation. In the face of such ubiquitous, co-optive power, Huehls argues, critique is inadequate as a strategy of resistance. Following Latour, he describes critique as an oppositional mode of thought that vacillates between conceptual binaries instead of upsetting them. Neoliberalism's insidious power comes from its ability to infiltrate both sides of the binary, trapping the critic in a "neoliberal circle" (12). For example, "Neoliberalism speaks the language of the greater communal good as a cover for its systematic exploitation of individual-objects," Huehls writes, "and it speaks the anti-exploitative language of social justice as a cover for its championing of entrepreneurial individual-subjects" (12–13). Dissatisfied with critique's capacity for resistance, Huehls advocates for an ontological engagement with questions of politics and value, turning to an emergent archive of post-critical literature that "identif[ies] alternative, non-representational forms—different ways to produce the value and significance of the world—that reject the representational logic of critique in an attempt to challenge neo-liberalism's dominance in new and potentially more effective ways" (15).

In chapter 1, Huehls asserts the limits of critique and the virtues of post-critical literature through a comparative study of Uzodinma Iweala's Beasts of No Nation and Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone, two texts that take up the neoliberal discourse on human rights. Huehls argues that human rights discourse attempts to grant agency—a subject position—to objectified or victimized people. However, because neoliberal corporations often fund the NGOs that promote international human rights, this new subjecthood simply grants entry into the commodified neoliberal world. It doesn't challenge the neoliberal order. According to Huehls, Beah's memoir of being a child soldier in Sierra Leone becomes trapped in the neoliberal circle of human rights discourse by defining people as either objects or subjects. As a child soldier, Beah is construed as an object who cannot be held accountable for his acts of violence; as an adult in the first world, he is a subject with rights who remains blameless for the crimes he committed as an "object." By contrast, Huehls applauds Iweala's fictional child soldier narrative because it acknowledges that people simultaneously hold subject and object positions. Frequently employing the present tense, Iweala insists that the narrator is still both the child soldier who kills and the adult who deplores the killing. This is the model of post-critical literature in which Huehls finds promise: though it does not hold out "a version of humanity that can counter and dismantle neoliberalism. … it's also not particularly appropriable by neoliberalism" (58).

Chapter 2 offers a second illustration of the post-critical orientation Huehls endorses, examining Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange and Helena Maria Viramontes's Their Dogs Came with Them. Against the...