How does financialization shift our relationship to the future? And what new insights emerge when we decenter northern approaches in our analysis?

Since the end of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, financial markets have been used to mediate and control national economies and international markets. Facilitated by new financial instruments such as the derivative, financialization transformed the relationship between former colonies and the old imperial centers. It is a decentralizing process, assigning monetary value to non-monetary commodities and relations, creating pervasive cultural effects. Mark Fisher described this “capitalist realism” as “the sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it” (3).

Capitalist realism not only defines how we see: it shapes the apparatus of perception as the “economy” imposes itself on social relations, politics, and nature. Contemporary critics  have turned to historical ad humanistic analysis, from Yanis Varoufakis’ conception of technofeudalism to Timothy Mitchell’s insight that capitalism consumes the future. These works reveal economic theory as itself a literary formulation: telling stories of rationality and shared growth; inventing characters like homo economicus; equivocation fallacies linking human development with economic growth, or value with price, transforming the meaning of words and disguising alternative possibilities. 

In this seminar, we seek to re-theorize economic systems from beyond neoliberal presumptions. We are especially interested in how theorizing from the Global South might shift our understandings of financialization and its impacts, and what new insights cultural analysis specifically offers. We ask:

• What looks different when we theorize economics from outside of neoliberal framings?
• What may be learned from approaching postcolonial literary studies through frameworks that go beyond “neoliberalism” to take into account the influence of economic instruments on cultural production?
• How can we understand the histories of structural adjustment, development schemes, debt, and privatization from the Global South?
• How can creativity offer ways out of the dehumanizing operations of finance?
• How do artists and writers reimagine their relation to economic processes under conditions of precarity or cycles of debt?
• What new insights into economic production and relation does literary analysis offer? 

We welcome papers relating, broadly, to the relationship between financialization and our responsibility to the future; development schemes; industrial financialization; credit and debt; investment and consumption; property and/or privatization; labor and extraction. Topics may relate to genres, technologies, prizes, infrastructures, institutions, or individual works.

For questions, please contact Susanna Sacks ([email protected]) and/or Kyle Wanberg ([email protected]).