The struggle against neoliberal order has gained momentum over the last five decades---to the point that economic elites have not only adapted to the Left's critiques but incorporated them for capitalist expansion. Venture funds expose their ties to slavery and pledge to invest in racial equity. Banks pitch microloans as a path to indigenous self-determination. Fair-trade brands narrate consumption as an act of feminist solidarity with women artisans in the global South. In Capitalist Humanitarianism Lucia Hulsether examines these projects and the contexts of their emergence. Blending historical and ethnographic styles, and traversing intimate and global scales, Hulsether tracks how neoliberal self-critique creates new institutional hegemonies that, in turn, reproduce racial and neocolonial dispossession. From the archives of Christian fair traders to luxury social entrepreneurship conferences, from US finance offices to Guatemalan towns flooded with their loan products, from service economy desperation to the internal contradictions of social movements, Hulsether argues that capitalist humanitarian projects are fueled as much by a profit motive as by a hope that racial capitalism can redeem the losses that accumulate in its wake.

About the Author
Lucia Hulsether is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Skidmore College.


Reviews
"Hulsether combines reportage, ethnographic research, personal narrative, and social theory to look at the ways in which the 21st-century global economic system has absorbed the very movements that seek to resist it. . . . [A] stance of constant resistance to an unjust system, even in the seeming absence of alternatives, is what Hulsether-who is a union activist as well as a teacher and scholar-calls us to take on. . . . Hulsether's book models this approach beautifully, urging us to "write a history of the impossible" in which 'survival is not the end.'" -- Jeannine Marie Pitas * Christian Century *



Book Information
ISBN 9781478019206
Author Lucia Hulsether
Format Paperback
Page Count 264
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 386g