Does neoliberalism create neoliberal subjects, or did neoliberal subjects create neoliberalism? In the most usual version of this story, the new economic reality of unrestrained free market capitalism creates a new subjectivity in a process that begins in the 1970s and ends somewhere in our present (are we still neoliberal subjects? How would we know?). In their recent introduction to Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture, for instance, Mitchum Huehls and Rachel Greenwald Smith describe neoliberalism as moving from an economic phenomenon beginning in 1971 with the undoing of Bretton Woods, to a political ideology under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, to a sociocultural norm after the end of the Cold War, before finally becoming internalized, sometime in the new millennium, as an ontology, “a mode of existence defined by individual self-responsibility, entrepreneurial action, and the maximization of human capital.”1 While debate remains fervent about whatneoliberalism is, and perhaps even whether it is (see, for instance, Bruce Robbins’ recent review of Huels and Smith’s collection), the question of when it is remains relatively uncontroversial.2

Into this charged if sometimes sludgy set of debates steps Myka Tucker-Abramson’s Novel Shocks: Urban Renewal and the Origins of Neoliberalism, a short, sharp book that radically resituates the emergence of the proto-neoliberal subject much earlier in the twentieth century. Taking as its object of analysis the relationship between the long, highly contested process of urban renewal in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s and the mid-century American novel, Tucker-Abramson tells a very different story, one in which neoliberalism is an emergent force even in the heyday of Keynesian economics. Urban renewal, the process by which state funds and forces were used to open up urban space as newly accessible to capital, becomes visible in Novel Shocks as an early microcosm of what would later be known as neoliberalism. At the same time, Tucker-Abramson’s focus on the mid-century New York novel allows her to analyze the lived experience of urban renewal as producing the constellation of affects and ideologies that would later become known as “the neoliberal subject.” In so doing, Tucker-Abramson restores a much needed dialectical analysis to the story of neoliberalism, in which it is the contradictions of Keynesian economics that produce a proto-neoliberal economic reality in urban space, which in turn produces a lived experience within which the later, fuller emergence of neoliberalism in all its aspects will appear natural, like common sense.

Novel Shocksmoves productively between urban studies, political economy, and literary studies to analyze how urban space became the locus for the emergence of a proto-neoliberal subject formation in the mid-twentieth century. In Tucker-Abramson’s analysis, mid-century urban renewal produced a particular set of landscapes (“prosperous, private, white suburbs” and “poor, public, black cities”) and subjectivities (entrepreneurial, capitalized, atomized) which would, in Tucker-Abramson’s pleasingly bucolic metaphor, “nourish the roots of neoliberalism.”3 In an elegant double turn, Tucker-Abramson shifts our attention away from the ideas and ideologies of proto-neoliberal thinkers to offer a prehistory of neoliberalism that is at once more materialist and more attuned to what Raymond Williams would call the “structure of feeling” that made neoliberalism’s rise to hegemony possible.4 Tucker-Abramson convincingly locates neoliberalism’s emergence in the mid-century urban renewal movement and the ways that it made both cities and subjects newly available as frontiers for capital, while at the same adding a global perspective by showing the continuities between capital’s expansion into American cities and its expansion into extra-territorial spaces across the globe. While histories of neoliberalism often point to the takeover of New York by capital in the 1970s as a key point of emergence for a new economic mode, Tucker-Abramson shows that the idea of the city as “an important space for renewed capital accumulation” began much earlier, as fantasies of a de-slummed, un-blighted downtown core that would make money for private enterprise motivated the catastrophic destruction of urban life that marched under the banner of “urban renewal.”5

At the same time as it disrupts the received historical narrative of neoliberalism, Novel Shocks also troubles one of the founding distinctions of urban studies: the opposition between urban and suburban space. While classic histories of white flight have shown that suburbs were imagined as the “crabgrass frontier” for people and capital, Tucker-Abramson shows that this was only one half of a more dialectical relationship between city and suburb: as capital fled to the crabgrass frontier, the city, imagined now as a blighted, empty wilderness, itself became available as a frontier that required taming by the mixture of financialization and racialized policing that would come to define neoliberalism.6 Indeed, one of the most welcome contributions of Novel Shocks is the way that it reconceptualizes the relationship between urban and suburban space: where urban studies tends to see two distinct spaces in a relation of binary opposition, Tucker-Abramson sees a metropolitan region composed of city and suburb in which both are necessary to produce the ideal conditions for the new American subject—and especially the new American woman. Compelling readings of Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar show how the ability to move within and across this space is what allows the working-class woman (even the queer working-class woman) to shake off her limiting class, ethnic, and sexual markers, while access to the city-as-frontier allows the white suburban woman to exist beyond the Cold War housewife paradigm while still maintaining the privileges of her class and race.

Urban renewal’s transformation of urban space into frontier chronotope thus catalyzes, in Tucker-Abramson’s account, the transformation of the older frontier character type into the new entrepreneurial subject. In perhaps the strongest chapter in the book, Tucker-Abramson reads Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged not as the key to all neoliberal mythologies (as accounts of its centrality to the minds of Alan Greenspan and Paul Ryan tend to do) but rather as an urban novel that lays out “in the most naked and clear-eyed manner…the cynical ways that a small group of elites can systematically hollow out and destroy urban infrastructure in order to take it over for capital.”7 On this reading, Atlas Shrugged is a drama of identification that takes place within urban space, in which the reader who feels trapped by their classed and raced subject position becomes identified with the crumbling city as “jungle”, the welfare state, and the apocalyptic destruction of all kinds of freedom, while only the reader who can identify with capital is granted freedom, futurity, and access to the city as frontier. The entrepreneurial subject of neoliberalism is not, then, an abstract form shaped only by its orientation towards self-improvement, but rather a subjectivity shaped by the material processes of urban renewal and especially by the racial structures that urban renewal encodes. If the old, naturalist city is both disempowered and racialized, then the new, capitalist frontier city requires a subject who identifies fully with what Cheryl Harris has called “whiteness as property.”8 The irony is, of course, that identifying with whiteness becomes identical with identifying with capital, and identifying with capital works actively against people’s class interests; as Tucker-Abramson points out, there is no actual class mobility in the book. Capital and its eight or nine avatars win; everybody else loses. But for the readers who come to identify closely with the book, this loss feels like a victory: capital has won, and so I have too.

The process by which this transformation of the subject takes place in Atlas Shrugged, as in the other novels that Tucker-Abramson analyzes, is one of shock. The novel shock in Novel Shocks is another of the book’s major contributions, accounting for the shift in social meaning from the proto-revolutionary experience of shock in Frankfurt School modernism to the profitable shocks of creative destruction in late capitalism. Each of the novels examined by the book has shock at its center, from the literal electric shock treatments in The Bell Jar, Atlas Shrugged,and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, to the drug-induced consciousness shocks of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, to the more traditional modernist shock of the encounter with the city in The Price of Salt. As Tucker-Abramson shows, however, the city of urban renewal is not the shock-producing metropolis of Benjamin or Adorno, in which the reified world is unmade leaving room for the emergence of a revolutionary perception of how things are. In the city of urban renewal, the moment of shock—the accident, the disaster, the encounter with history—is precisely the moment where capital finds entry. And as with the city, so with the subject: in the postwar era, shock both urban and mental “was refigured from a traumatic event to a therapeutic treatment that, while painful, would bring the city, the subject, and the nation through their frontiers and out the other side.”9 Whereas the modernist subject was destabilized by the experience of shock as trauma, the mid-century proto-neoliberal subject was entrained (by, among other things, the mid-century novel) to experience shock as therapy, producing a newly stable and rational subject who is themselves a frontier and a tool for capital.

As my description thus far suggests, the concept of the frontier is central to Tucker-Abramson’s analysis. The frontier is everywhere: it’s how urban planners and suburban subjects understood their respective spaces; it’s a genre through which people understood their lives within urban renewal, as we see in the constant resurgence of the Western as hauntology in the mid-century novel; and it’s a trope by which certain spaces are marked by writers as appropriate for the renewal of the enervated subject, as when the clinic that successfully treats Esther in The Bell Jar “is connected to Native American history—such that, when she arrives, a ‘handsome white-haired doctor’ explains to her ‘about the Pilgrims and the Indians and who had the land after them, and what rivers ran nearby.’”10 Within a book that is so dedicated to historicizing a particular set of property relations, however, it is striking that the frontier as a historical property relation that still determines the present remains relatively absent from the text. We learn much about the historical function of the frontier as an open space for capital and as a “West cure” for the exhausted subject of modernity, and much about the genre history of the Western as a cultural mechanism for imagining escape and renewal. Yet the term “settler colonialism” does not appear in the text, and you would not know from reading Novel Shocksthat the urban and suburban regions of the Northeast on which the book focuses are colonized land: that they are literally, as well as figuratively, frontier spaces of colonial extraction.

One of the great strengths of Novel Shocks is its interdisciplinarity. Tucker-Abramson is as masterful when talking about Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs in the mode of urban studies as she is when discussing the limits of the containment culture model for thinking about Cold War literature or performing razor-sharp close readings of mid-century novels, and her clear-eyed understanding of political economy works across her multidisciplinary approach to provide a unified framework within which her materialist analyses of urban and suburban space are clearly articulated with her literary analyses of form, genre, and subjectivity. The book also offers a sustained racial analysis of whiteness as a function of value, which is itself a valuable contribution to an often “race-blind” discourse around neoliberalism and its origins, as well as provocatively connecting the opening of domestic urban space to capital with America’s neocolonial adventures abroad. Yet I cannot help but wonder what might have become visible in this project if it had also taken seriously the actuality of the United States as a settler-colonial nation state, and the impacts of that actuality on the historical development of neoliberalism across the twentieth century. The neoliberal subject is marked by whiteness, as Tucker-Abramson makes clear. But that subjectivity is also a settler-colonial one, and neoliberalism itself is a new(ish) development of an ongoing economy of conquest in what is now and for now the United States. My question here is, perhaps, more one about the nature and range of the field than it is solely about Tucker-Abramson’s valuable contribution to it. What might urban studies look like if we took both seriously and literally what William Jamal Richardson calls “the city as a settler colonial structure”: the genocidal conquest that cleared the land of America’s cities for settlement, and the ongoing dispossession that maintains them?11 As Tucker-Abramson writes in her closing consideration of Black urban resistance movements and theorists, “the city was the other space in which the United States was fighting its imperial wars.”12 These wars, however, include the Indian Wars, still ongoing, and still incomplete. Accounting for the spaces and subjectivities of the city within this ongoing process of colonial dispossession must be the next great reorientation of urban studies if it hopes adequately to describe anything to do with land and economy in the United States.

If I find myself contemplating what Novel Shocks does not do, however, it is only because the book does so much that it leaves me wanting more. Tucker-Abramson’s book does an extraordinary amount of work in its 183 pages and showcases the best elements of literary criticism as an active participant in interdisciplinary conversations, using incisive analyses of literary forms to reveal the cultural and economic dynamics at work far beyond literary texts. Novel Shocks is an indispensable intervention into the narrative of neoliberalism, the impact of urban renewal on the emergence of neoliberalism, the racialized nature of neoliberal subjectivity, the relationship between urban renewal at home and America’s neocolonial actions abroad, and the Cold War novel; I expect that readers of Mediations will, as I did, gain a great deal from this deeply-researched and intellectually provocative book.

1. Mitchum Huehls and Rachel Greenwald Smith, eds. Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017) 9.
2. Bruce Robbins, “Everything Is Not Neoliberalism.” American Literary History 31.4 (2019).
3. Myka Tucker-Abramson, Novel Shocks: Urban Renewal and the Origins of Neoliberalism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019) 3.
4. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).
5. Tucker-Abramson, Novel Shocks 16.
6. Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).
7. Novel Shocks 102.
8. Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review, 106:8 (1993): 1707-91.
9. Novel Shocks 20.
10. Novel Shocks 119.
11. William Jamal Richardson, “Understanding the City as a Settler Colonial Structure,” (27 June 2017).
    www.willjrichardson.com/2017/06/27/understanding-the-city-as-a-settler-colonial-structure/
12. Novel Shocks 137.