(December 2nd, 2019)
I am very pleased to announce that my academic monograph with Routledge | Taylor & Francis Group has now been published: Keren Wang, Legal and Rhetorical Foundations of Economic Globalization: An Atlas of Ritual Sacrifice in Late-Capitalism. It is available in both hardback and digital formats.
This book was developed from my doctoral dissertation, “Three Studies of Ritual Sacrifice in Late Capitalism.” I would like to extend my special thanks to Stephen H. Browne, my dissertation supervisor, and to members of my dissertation advising committee: Larry Catá Backer, Kirt H. Wilson, and Jeremy David Engels. This project would not have been possible without their guidance and mentorship. I would also like to express my gratitude to members of the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences at Penn State University for their generous, ongoing support of my Ph.D. study and related postdoctoral research.
This book examines the subtle ways in which rhetorics of sacrifice have been re-appropriated into the workings of the global political economy in the twenty-first century. It presents an in-depth analysis of how ritual practices are deployed, under a diverse set of political and legal contexts, as legitimation devices that render exploitative structures of the prevailing political-economic system inescapable, or even palatable. To this end, the work explores the deeper rhetorical and legal basis of late-capitalist governmentality by critically interrogating its mythical and ritual dimensions. The analysis gives due consideration to contemporary incarnations of ritual sacrifice in transnational neoliberal discourse: from exploitative yet inescapable contractual obligations to calendrical multi-billion-dollar “offerings” to the insatiable needs of “too-big-to-fail” corporations.
The first part of the book provides a working interpretive framework for understanding the politics of ritual sacrifice, one that not only accommodates multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary knowledge of ritual practices but can also be employed in the integrated analysis of sacrificial rituals as political rhetoric under divergent historical and societal contexts. The second part conducts a series of case studies that cut across the wide variability of ritual public takings in late capitalism. The book concludes by highlighting several common doctrines of public ritual sacrifice observed across these cases. These doctrines reflect the rhetorical and legal foundations for public takings under hegemonic market-driven governance; they define “appropriate and proper” occasions for suspending pre-existing legal protections to regularize otherwise transgressive transfers of rights and possessions for the “greater good” of the economic order.