Autonomous choices and patriotic professionalism: On governmentality in late-socialist China

A museum, the city, and a nation

“…79 Through such a combination we come to understand the emphasis on class as a melding of strategies of government (such as patriotism, active guidance of citizen-subjects, nationalist rhetoric) with selective neoliberal elements (such as the mythos of merit, autonomy, and choice) that seeks to manage the direction of broader cultural and political experiences of the wax and wane of nationalist-capitalist accumulation and democratic authoritarianism in contemporary Malaysia.…”

“…They are ideal(ized) patriotic professionals. 69 This interracial group of people that might have remained fragmented outside The City, are brought together in it. In this sense, the actual emergence of Bangsa Malaysia aspired to in Vision 2020 is preceded by this model of The City and the imperatives directed to museum visitors to embrace technologically advanced, urban sophistication.…”

“…17 This attempt by the state to actively guide a shift in Malaysian identity from biocultural notions of race to economic-nationalist notions of class can be usefully understood in terms of what Hoffman calls 'patriotic professionalism'. 18 Patriotic professionalism describes the formation of self-enterprising citizen-subjects employed as marketized labour in skilled professions who are simultaneously 'concerned with, and (have) affinity for, the nation'. 19 This process involves a form of governmentality characterized by a combination of state-centric action and forms of neoliberalism through notions of choice and autonomy to achieve a co-construction of personhood and nationhood.…”

Redefining Need, Reconfiguring Expectations: The Rise of State-Run Youth Voluntarism Programs in Russia

“…As Douglas Rogers (2010) argues, 20 years on, the category "postsocialism" is still salient insofar as it pushes us to continue to (re)assess and consider local histories. Recent scholarship points to moments of resonance, fit, or convergence between socialist and liberal formations, confounding exclusionary models and challenging the notion of liberalism and socialism as mutually exclusive and incommensurate (Boyer and Yurchak 2010;Hoffman 2006Hoffman , 2010Song 2009;Yurchak 2002). 6 These studies suggest that we can view neoliberalism and socialism as utopian projects that, despite political-ideological assumptions of their opposition, have substantial points of commonality and overlap (Buck-Morss 2002, Bockman and Eyal 2002, Verdery and Chari 2009 These insights are important; they prevent us both from reifying neoliberalism and from skating over the complexities of the postsocialist present as well (Kipnis 2008, Rogers 2010.…”

“…3 Such studies have shown that although neoliberal economic policy has global reach, specific local histories and conditions influence the extent of neoliberal restructuring and the way it plays out in particular places (Collier, Hoffman, and DeHart 2006;Ong 2006;Tsing 2004). 4 In sites where neoliberal economic policy is the exception, rather than the norm, neoliberal economic logic may coexist with other rationalities, with unpredictable results (Dunn 2004;Hoffman 2006Hoffman , 2009Collier and Ong 2005;Song 2009). The postsocialist case has proven to be an extremely fertile site from which to interrogate neoliberalism, and make sense of the complex social and cultural forms that characterize contemporary life both in the former East bloc and in China.…”