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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 “The Fictions of Finance”
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
“recession.” As a historical primer on the planetary intersections of the
rhetorical and the operational dimensions of “The Fictions of Finance,”
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 Marx’s “fictitious capital.” History provides a long
record of cultural figurations of this fictionality, of the fraudulent
productivity and magical profit of credit and speculation—from the “wind
wheat” of Illinois to the “devil” 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 “The Fictions of Finance,” 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 capital’s 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, we’d 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

· “Time is money,” 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

· “Ball pork”: 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 “The World’s
Local Bank”

· 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 “personhood” 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, “conversations” 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
[log in to unmask] with “Issue 118 submission” 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 “Issue 118” in the subject
line.

Abstract Deadline: March 15, 2012

Radical History Review
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New York, NY 10012

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