A Comparative Study of Karen Ho’s Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (2009) and Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (2007).

Abstract

This paper is a study of the much-vaunted idea of Neoliberal order in the US. I examine it in light of two masterpieces, Karen Ho’s Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (2009) and Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (2007). As ethnographer and geographer, Ho and Gilmore have engaged in their respective books in an ethnographic study of two sites of production of the neoliberal order. While Ho targeted to unveil the evil side of Wall Street, Gilmore provides a detailed account of the massive prison building project in California between 1982 and 2000. Both places are perfect examples of how neoliberalism and its terrible effects on the populations operate through people and institutions incarnating it.

Both authors have a personal engagement with their topics. Ho was hired as an “internal management consultant” analyst by Bankers Trust New York Corporation, a Wall Street investment bank and Gilmore was requested, as a researcher, to engage with a grassroots activist group of mostly African-American mothers to help them in their anti-prison movement.

Keywords

• USA
• Neoliberal order
• Wall Street
• California
• Ethnography