CFP: Call for Proposals from Radical History Review, "The Fictions of Finance"

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Subject: Call for Proposals from Radical History Review, "The Fictions of Finance"

Please find below a Call for Proposals from the
Radical History Review for a special issue on "The Fictions of Finance."
Would you please distribute this to your list? The deadline for submissions
is March 15, 2012.

Very best,

Aaron Carico

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The Fictions of Finance (Radical History Review, Number 118)

Call for Proposals, due March 15, 2012

Across the humanities and social sciences, a new conversation has begun
about the enigmas of capital, and of finance capital, in particular.  This
special issue of the Radical History Review on ³The Fictions of Finance²
aims to intervene in that conversation and to help to shape it.  From
geography, history, and literary studies to anthropology, sociology, and
labor studies, there has been an efflorescence of work on finance and
commercial capital, flourishing amid the current capital crisis and chronic
³recession.² As a historical primer on the planetary intersections of the
rhetorical and the operational dimensions of ³The Fictions of Finance,² this
issue is designed to knit together the disparate strands of these renewed
conversations. In naming that theme, we mean to recover the old notion that
finance capital is itself a kind of fabrication, an illusion‹the realm of
Marx¹s ³fictitious capital.² History provides a long record of cultural
figurations of this fictionality, of the fraudulent productivity and magical
profit of credit and speculation‹from the ³wind wheat² of Illinois to the
³devil² of Colombia. But new modes of thought have continually helped to
marginalize those responses and to naturalize the mechanisms of finance
capital. In other words, to paraphrase cultural historian Ann Fabian,
economic innovation and epistemological innovation have gone hand in hand.


With ³The Fictions of Finance,² then, we mean to decipher a vast array of
moral panics, conceptual revolutions, legal constructions, and discursive
forms implicated and imbricated within the world histories of capital.  This
theme may point in many directions: genealogies of economic thought; the
performativity of economic theory; finance capital¹s institutional
architectures, such as corporations and state bureaucracies; territorial
sovereignties, geographical imaginaries or spatial materialities secured by
finance capital; techniques of racial capitalism; and modes of imperialism
and accumulation.  We want this theme to mark out the space for an
interdisciplinary conversation, rather than a strictly historical one, about
the political economy of finance capitalism.  We seek a cultural history,
writ large, writ global, of the forms, concepts, subjects, and networks that
finance capital elaborates. In other words, we¹d like to emphasize critiques
of capitalism and to foreground its logic, and, practically speaking, to
emphasize provocative juxtapositions of topics.

Some possible topics this issue might explore include, but are not limited
to, the following:

·     Slave insurance, slave mortgages, and the corporealization of finance
capital

·     Speculation and risk as imperatives of capitalist citizenship

·     ³Time is money,² and other tropes of the transactionalism of everyday
life

·     Microfinance, credit-baiting, and primitive accumulation in the Global
South

·     Pin money and the domestication of finance

·     FIRE economies and the rise of global cities

·     ³Ball pork²: the circulation of finance capital through built and
natural environments

·     Territorial and national sovereignties imagined by finance capital

·     Shysters, Welfare Queens and other discourses of parasitism

·     Radical critiques of finance capital, among theorists and activists
around the world

·     The grammar of finance, e.g., the categories of credit and debt
(whether personal or national)

·     The instruments of finance, e.g., double-entry bookkeeping and
collateralized debt obligations

·     Money as a narrative strategy, from the realist novel to conceptual
art

·     The personification of the market that speaks, sleeps, and stumbles

·     Global cycles of finance capital and the temporality of history

·     Finance capital and the scapes of modernity: HSBC as ³The World¹s
Local Bank²

·     The boundary between clean and dirty money

·     The emergence of the concept of finance capital

·     Homo Economicus: the productions of affect, desire, and subjectivity

·     The legal ³personhood² of business corporations


The RHR seeks scholarly, monographic research articles, but we also
encourage such non-traditional contributions as photo essays, film and book
review essays, interviews, brief interventions, ³conversations² between
scholars and/or activists, and teaching notes and annotated course syllabi
for our Teaching Radical History section.

Procedures for submission of articles: At this time we are requesting
abstracts that are no longer than 400 words; these are due by March 15, 2012
and should be submitted electronically as an attachment to
[email protected]
<https://exchange.cornell.edu/owa/redir.aspx?C=b697da7bb50148c1a355d8d0444c5
156&URL=mailto%3acontactrhr%40gmail.com>  with ³Issue 118 submission² in the
subject line. By April 15, 2012, authors will be notified whether they
should submit a full version of their article to undergo the peer review
process. The due date for completed drafts of articles is October 1, 2012.
An invitation to submit a full article does not guarantee publication.

Please send any images as low-resolution digital files embedded in a Word
document along with the text. If chosen for publication, you will need to
send high-resolution image files (jpg or tif files at a minimum of 300 dpi),
and secure written permission to reprint all images. Those articles selected
for publication after the peer review process will be included in issue 118
of Radical History Review, scheduled to appear in Winter 2014.

For preliminary e-mail inquiries, please include ³Issue 118² in the subject
line.

Abstract Deadline: March 15, 2012

Radical History Review

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New York University

70 Washington Square South

New York, NY 10012

Email: [email protected]
<https://exchange.cornell.edu/owa/redir.aspx?C=b697da7bb50148c1a355d8d0444c5
156&URL=mailto%3acontactrhr%40gmail.com>
Visit the website at http://chnm.gmu.edu/rhr/rhr.htm