ALYOSHA GOLDSTEIN
Assistant Professor of American Studies.

Goldstein’s research interests include the study of contemporary globalization, neoliberalism, and social movements; (post)colonial theory; civil society and critical policy studies; formations of urban space and place; comparative histories of colonialism, imperialism, and nationalism; and political and social theory.

Worlds Within: Democracy, Poverty, and the Politics of Belonging, Goldstein’s book manuscript, examines poverty as a political consideration during the thirty years following World War II. This study demonstrates how the forms of knowledge and techniques of power animating U.S. domestic policy operated in conjunction with the global projection of modernization and political and economic development. The particular exigencies of U.S. Cold War policy and the twilight of European colonial rule focused legislative and public attention on poverty and advanced local community action as a liberal democratic imperative. This study thus focuses on community-based initiatives aimed at mobilizing participation of the poor in the planning and administration of programs on their behalf and highlights the protracted tension between “self-help” and “self-determination” that animated competing agendas for participation. An earlier draft of this manuscript was awarded the American Studies Association’s Ralph Henry Gabriel Dissertation Prize in 2005.

Goldstein’s current research examines the social ideologies of contemporary neoliberal governance. Focusing on the political, economic, and cultural transformations that emerged during the 1970s, this project explores the accelerated polarization of the U.S. state as either purely coercive—manifest in regimes of penal and military intervention—or as devolved into the self-management of individuals mediated through local “community” and civil society. Neoliberal governance today, both in its tacit continuities with and calculated disavowal of postwar liberalism, continues to tout community—and civil society more broadly—as an alternative to government, while simultaneously enhancing the state’s recourse to “legitimate” violence. This research explores what reading a history of the present convergence of penal and mental health institutions through the 1970s conjuncture might suggest about the neoliberal refashioning of self and state, and its consequences for racialized and “deviant” subjects. This project asks what the move away from state-administered “rehabilitation” towards intensified forms of retribution and “personal responsibility” during the past thirty years can tell us about present-day formations of the U.S. state.

Publications

Worlds Within: Democracy, Poverty, and the Politics of Belonging (under advance contract with Duke University Press)

“The ‘Attributes of Political Sovereignty’: The Cold War, Colonialism, and Community Education in Puerto Rico,” in Imagining Our Americas: Nation, Empire, and Region, Heidi Tinsman and Sandhya Shukla, eds. (Duke University Press, 2007)

"Formations of United States Empire,” in Theories of the Americas: A Reader in Inter-American Studies, George Yúdice, ed. (Blackwell Publishers, forthcoming)

“On the Internal Border: Colonial Difference, the Cold War, and the Locations of ‘Underdevelopment,’” Comparative Studies in Society and History (under review)

Courses

AMST 180 Introduction to American Studies
AMST 285 American Life and Thought
AMST 309 Globalization and Social Movements
AMST 310/510 Policing, Prisons and American Culture
AMST 510 The Cultural Politics of Neoliberalism
AMST 518 (Post)Colonial Theory and American Studies

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