Patricia Ventura is associate professor of English at Spelman College, Atlanta GA. Her research and teaching center on American cultural studies and media studies. Her most recent monograph White Power and American Neoliberal Culture (University of California Press, 2023), co-written with Edward K. Chan, draws on sources such as terrorist manifestos, white power utopian fiction, and neoliberal think tank reports, to analyze the violent intersections between white power and neoliberal racial capitalism to show that extremist worldviews and the violence they provoke have converged with a radical economic agenda to perpetuate social injustice in daily US life, especially by enshrining the male-dominated white family.
She also co-edited with Chan two collections on race and utopia: one a book from Palgrave Macmillan entitled Race and Utopian Desire in American Literature and Society and the other a special issue entitled “Race and Utopia” for the journal Utopian Studies; both were published in 2019. These edited collections aim to fill a gap in two fields—literary studies, which has largely ignored the racialized character of utopia, and utopian studies, which has said too little about race. Ventura’s first book, Neoliberal Culture (Routledge 2012, 2016), articulates the implications of neoliberalism as a cultural logic that can be analyzed through key “artifacts” of US life from 1990-2008 including Walmart, the Oprah Winfrey Show, the architecture of Las Vegas, and the politics of the Iraq War. This text creates a framework for understanding American neoliberal culture by analyzing it using key components especially biopolitics, corporatocracy, and hyperlegality.
A selection of her book chapters and articles includes “America and/as White Supremacy” (co-written with Chan) to appear in 2024 in the Cambridge Companion to American Utopian Literature and Culture, 1945-present. “Scandal: A Melodrama of Social Death” in Gladiators in Suits: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Representation in Scandal (U of Syracuse Press 2019) and “Dystopian Eating, Queer Liberalism, and the Roots of Donald Trump in HBO’s Angels in America” in the Journal of Popular Culture, 2018.
