Fitt, Robert Alexander (2023). Neolympics: race, nation, and neoliberal culture at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.
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Abstract
The 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games were a hugely consequential moment in the history of the 1980s United States and the development of the neoliberal world. In ways which historians have not fully comprehended, these Olympic Games – the first ever to be funded by the private sector instead of the state — were a powerful transmitter of neoliberal ideas and a vehicle for neoliberal practices. They are a case study of how and why Americans learned to think about the role of the state, society, and themselves in ways which buttressed neoliberal change. The Games shaped the meaning of neoliberalism on an “everyday” level, establishing ideas like global individualism, privatisation, and marketisation as “common sense” solutions to local problems of unemployment, crime, and the continuance of a racialised political economy. Underpinning the apparent desirability of neoliberal ideas was the idea that these Games could build a fairer, meritocratic, post-racial society.
This history of LA’84 is a story of how Americans saw within neoliberal ideas the promise of egalitarian change at the local level. Olympic preparations in Los Angeles provoked residents to ask larger social, political, and economic questions. Olympic organisers needed to tread carefully through the local contexts of LA in the late 1970s and early 1980s, moulding their plans around notions of race, national identity, and economic conduct. In doing so, the Olympic preparations for 1984 reveal the ways in which mass consent to the neoliberal project took shape. Rather than a coherent inculcation from the top down, Angelenos, businessmen, street vendors, athletes, artists, police, and the interests of real estate contested and shaped consent at the neighbourhood level. Using the lens of racial capitalism, this thesis analyses the archives of LA’s Olympic Committee, City Hall, the LAPD, and the press, demonstrating that new invocations of “multiculturalism”, race, nation, and identity were not the products of neoliberal changes in the city. Rather, they were the forums in which Olympic organisers sought to manufacture the social conditions in which an individualised, privatised, and marketized America took root.
| Type of Work: | Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.) | |||||||||||||||
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| Award Type: | Doctorates > Ph.D. | |||||||||||||||
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| Licence: | All rights reserved | |||||||||||||||
| College/Faculty: | Colleges (2008 onwards) > College of Arts & Law | |||||||||||||||
| School or Department: | School of History and Cultures, Department of History | |||||||||||||||
| Funders: | Arts and Humanities Research Council | |||||||||||||||
| Subjects: | E History America > E11 America (General) E History America > E151 United States (General) F History United States, Canada, Latin America > F001 United States local history H Social Sciences > HC Economic History and Conditions H Social Sciences > HT Communities. Classes. Races |
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| URI: | http://etheses.bham.ac.uk/id/eprint/13925 |
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