CFP: Finance Capital and the Ghosts of Empire

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Special Issue CFP: ‘Finance Capital and the Ghosts of Empire’

Deadline for abstracts: Friday July 19 2019

We invite interested parties to submit an abstract to be included in a
Special Issue proposal that gathers cutting-edge interdisciplinary thinking
about the intersections of finance and colonialism, empire and race. In
addition to the typical 9,000 word (including citations) peer-reviewed
article, there are also opportunities for book reviews, review articles and
shorter interventions.


The Special Issue will be targeted towards Journal of Cultural Economy, Finance
& Society or ephemera. This proposal follows on from a 2017 gathering at
Goldsmiths (“Colonial Debts, Imperial Insolvencies, Extractive Nostalgias
<http://www.perc.org.uk/project_posts/colonial-debts-extractive-nostalgias-imperial-insolvencies-reimagining-financialization/>”),
a 2018 special focus section of Discover Society
<https://discoversociety.org/2018/09/04/focus-colonial-debts-imperial-insolvencies-extractive-nostalgias/>
, and a recent 2019 gathering at Sussex (“Finance Capital and the Ghosts of
Empire <http://rival.lakeheadu.ca/ghostsofempire/>”), and we explicitly
invite submissions from those who did not or were unable to participate in
either of these events.

To propose a 200-word abstract for consideration, please use the following
form: https://forms.gle/A44W8MamdknbFmLF9

For more information, please contact: [email protected] or
[email protected]
Abstracts are due July 15, 2019. We will endeavour to have responses to
applicants by mid-July and seek drafts by October 15, 2019, towards the
goal of publication in 2020. We welcome contributions from a wide diversity
of disciplines across the social sciences and also from the humanities as
well.Editors

●  Dr Clea Bourne
<https://www.gold.ac.uk/media-communications/staff/bourne/> (Senior
Lecturer in Promotional Media, Goldsmiths, University of London)

●  Dr Paul Gilbert <http://www.sussex.ac.uk/profiles/275733> (Lecturer in
International Development, University of Sussex)

●  Dr Max Haiven <https://maxhaiven.com/> (Canada Research Chair in
Culture, Media and Social Justice, Lakehead University)

●  Dr Johnna Montgomerie
<https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/person.aspx?id=01626bb5-f2af-4060-80bc-b7b0ba96730a>
(Reader in International Political Economy, King’s College, London)
Additionally

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   BOOK PROJECT: The editors are, simultaneously, working on an edited
   collection of short, accessible essays oriented around images (historical
   or contemporary, documentary or artistic) to be published in a book that
   guides newcomers to an understanding of the interconnections of debt,
   empire, colonialism, finance and race. For more information, and to
   contribute a proposal, please visit:
   https://docs.google.com/document/d/1apT_PNvEnHRiZmJgFWko2T3RePnqh0Axps-8IeBp7dc/edit?usp=sharing
   -

   PODCAST: The editors are pleased to present a podcast and downloadable
   audio version of the proceedings of April’s “Finance Capital and the Ghosts
   of Empire” symposium:
   https://reimaginevalue.podbean.com/category/finance-capital-and-the-ghosts-of-empire-symposium/

Background

Has the emerging interdisciplinary field of critical study of finance, debt
and financialization sufficiently accounted for the histories, legacies and
ongoing realities of empire, colonialism and global racial ordering? What
is being missed when these themes are marginalized? What accounts for this
marginalization? What can be gained when they come into focus? And how
might prioritizing them open not only different scholarly horizons, but
also different interdisciplinary linkages and pathways towards policy,
practice and action?

While scholars in the humanities have grappled with the long intertwined
histories of slavery, empire and finance (Baucom 2005), social scientific
engagements with finance have largely neglected questions of race and
empire in their analyses of contemporary financial arrangements (Bourne et
al. 2018). The vitality of the overlapping fields known as cultural
economy, critical finance studies and the social studies of finance means
that “the practices and processes of financial markets are now subjected to
scrutiny from the disciplines of social anthropology, science studies, arts
and humanities, and cultural geography amongst others” (Bennett, McFall and
Pryke 2008, p. 3). Indeed, as the editors of one recent collection put it,
“finance should be studied by all the social sciences” (Chambost, Lenglet &
Tadjeddine 2018a, 2018b). And yet the “absence of studies on the roles of
race and ethnicity in financial cultures” appears just as profound and
surprising now as it was a decade ago, not least because “two major
economic phenomena, colonialism and underdevelopment, are intimately
connected with race and ethnic relations” (Sioh 2010, p. 118; see Appel
2018).

Responding to this charge, economic historians, economic geographers, and
political economists might well point towards a well-established literature
on the role of the City of London as the world’s great middleman,
facilitating imperial expansion and leaving as its post-imperial legacy the
network of offshore jurisdictions increasingly termed ‘Britain’s Second
Empire’ (Cain & Hopkins 2016; Haberly & Wojcik 2015; Palan 2015). But our
aim is not merely to deploy empire, race or colonialism as a means of
explaining away finance as ‘socially constructed’. After all, is there not
a risk that refracting analyses through time-lagged representations of
colonial repression takes us further away from understanding the
relationship between race, empire and finance in the present (O’Riley 2007)?

As such, we seek submissions that build on existing work in cultural
economy by placing the “nature, character and operation” of finance’s
relationship with race, empire and colonialism into question (cf. Bennett
et al. 2008, p. 1). Such work has already begun to emerge outside the
cultural economy/finance studies space, among historians concerned with the
way that enduring legal concepts and insurance “techniques” were developed
and adapted in the context of debates around the humanity of slaves
trafficked across the Atlantic (Kish and Leroy 2015; Rupprecht 2016).

By inviting submissions that take an explicit concern with the
entanglements of race, empire, colonialism and finance we acknowledge a
debt to, and seek to go beyond, existing cultural studies work that have
sought to “read the subprime crisis through a dual lens of race and empire”
(Chakravartty and da Silva 2012, p. 364). Understanding the imbrication of
race, racism and economy requires attention to diverse, situated processes
of racialization - whether understood in terms of an “unfolding story of
historical capitalism” or a “civilizational encounter between the West and
the Rest” - as much as it does a careful anatomizing of financial
arrangements (Virdee 2019, p. 22; Bhattacharyya 2018; Tilley and Shilliam
2017).

Equally, we encourage contributions from authors who leave behind the
conventional geographies of finance studies. With few exceptions (e.g.
Çalişkan 2010; Maurer 2013; Rudnyckyj 2019), work in cultural economy and
the social studies of finance has tended to concern itself with the City of
London, London’s Mayfair district, Chicago, New York, Paris, Tokyo, Zurich,
or emerging global financial centres in China and the Gulf. (See variously
Beunza and Stark 2008; Castelle et al. 2016; Clark and Monk 2010; Hardie
and MacKenzie 2007; Lai 2012; Leins 2018; Miyzaki 2013; Ortiz 2014;
Pardo-Guerra 2011; Zaloom 2006). Taking a lead from recent work that has
examined the relationship between Wall Street and the Caribbean (Hudson
2017), we encourage submissions that trace outwards from global financial
centres to reveal the imperial ambition and racist discourses which enabled
such centres to experiment, ‘innovate’, and expand.  Equally, we are
interested in counter-histories that tell the stories of other relations of
financing, speculation and economic integration beyond the centre-periphery
narrative.

Just as we seek to destabilize the conventional geographical preoccupations
of finance studies, we also invite submissions that explore the nature,
character and operation of finance in the context of shifting North-South
relations, changing geographies of development, and new forms of
imperialism and ‘sub-imperialism’ (Bond 2016). The emergence of ‘BRICS’ and
the remaking of the former ‘Third World’ or ‘Global South’ as a set of
‘frontier’ and ‘emerging’ markets conjures a set of indices, metrics and
speculative imaginaries that rest upon the erasure of faded anti-colonial
projects, whilst also posing a challenge to certainties about the ‘West’
(Bourne 2015; Gilbert 2019; Kaur 2018; Tilley 2018). As much as past
colonial encounters leave traces in contemporary financial organization,
emergent financial certainties feed back into desires and strategies that
re-shape the contemporary post-colony.

Finally, we seek contributions that examine the haunting of economic tools
and methodologies by imperial ambition and colonial anxieties. If Keynesian
economics was both informed by and tested through violent colonial
encounters (Biltoft 2018; Goswami 2018; Patnaik 2017), how should this be
accounted for in analyses of economic measurement (Mitchell 2010) and
central banking (Holmes 2009) which make their entry into economic
processes via Keynes and his concepts?

Towards these ends, we invite abstracts for academic articles directed
towards themes that include but are not limited to:

● The ‘haunting’ of contemporary financial orders and practices by colonial
legacies;

● Colonial genealogies of contemporary finance and their significance;

● The relationship between historical colonialism and contemporary forms of
colonialism (‘data’ colonialism, ‘green’ colonialism);

● Methodological tensions or convergence between de/postcolonial studies &
cultural economies/social studies of finance;

● Intersections of gender, race/racialization, sexuality and contemporary
forms of exclusion and exploitation with orders of debt, credit, extraction
and neo-colonialism;

● Visions of the decolonization of the economy and the social relations in
which it is embedded, including questions of reparations, repatriation of
lands and artefacts and radical movements for collective liberation.
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Baucom, I. (2005) Specters of the Atlantic: Finance capital, slavery, and
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Bennett, T., McFall, L. and Pryke, M. (2008) Culture/Economy/Social. Journal
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