Annie McClanahan: Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First-Century Culture (2016)
Filed under book | Tags: · affect, art criticism, capitalism, debt, economics, finance, financial crisis, horror, literary criticism, mediation, mortgage, photography, property
“Dead Pledges is the first book to explore the ways that U.S. culture—from novels and poems to photojournalism and horror movies—has responded to the collapse of the financialized consumer credit economy in 2008. Connecting debt theory to questions of cultural form, this book argues that artists, filmmakers, and writers have re-imagined what it means to owe and to own in a period when debt is what makes our economic lives possible. Encompassing both popular entertainment and avant-garde art, the post-crisis productions examined here help to map the landscape of contemporary debt: from foreclosure to credit scoring, student debt to securitized risk, microeconomic theory to anti-eviction activism. A searing critique of the ideology of debt, Dead Pledges dismantles the discourse of moral obligation so often invoked to make us repay. Debt is no longer a source of economic credibility, it contends, but a system of dispossession that threatens the basic fabric of social life.”
Publisher Stanford University Press, 2016
Post ’45 series
ISBN 9780804799058, 0804799059
ix+235 pages
Reviews: Brian Whitener (The New Inquiry, 2017), Sofia Cutler (LA Review of Books, 2017), Julian Murphet (Affirmations, 2017), Davis Smith-Brecheisen (Mediations, 2017), Arne De Boever (boundary2, 2017), Laura Finch (Journal of Cultural Economy, 2018).
Comment (0)Janet Roitman: Anti-Crisis (2013)
Filed under book | Tags: · anthropology, capitalism, critique, financial crisis, history, knowledge, narrative, risk, value
“Crisis is everywhere: in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and the Congo; in housing markets, money markets, financial systems, state budgets, and sovereign currencies. In Anti-Crisis, Janet Roitman steps back from the cycle of crisis production to ask not just why we declare so many crises but also what sort of analytical work the concept of crisis enables. What, she asks, are the stakes of crisis? Taking responses to the so-called subprime mortgage crisis of 2007–2008 as her case in point, Roitman engages with the work of thinkers ranging from Reinhart Koselleck to Michael Lewis, and from Thomas Hobbes to Robert Shiller. In the process, she questions the bases for claims to crisis and shows how crisis functions as a narrative device, or how the invocation of crisis in contemporary accounts of the financial meltdown enables particular narratives, raising certain questions while foreclosing others.”
Publisher Duke University Press, 2013
ISBN 9780822355120
176 pages
Reviews: Fokwang (Anthropology Southern Africa, 2014), McDonagh (LSE Review of Books, 2014), Engel (New Political Science, 2014).
PDF (updated on 2019-10-11)
Comment (0)Tatiana Bazzichelli, Geoff Cox (eds.): Disrupting Business: Art & Activism in Times of Financial Crisis (2013)
Filed under book | Tags: · activism, art, financial crisis, media activism
“Disrupting Business explores some of the interconnections between art, activism and the business concept of disruptive innovation. With a backdrop of the crisis in financial capitalism and austerity cuts in the cultural sphere, the idea is to focus on potential art strategies in relation to a broken economy. In a perverse way, we ask whether this presents new opportunities for cultural producers to achieve more autonomy over their production process. If it is indeed possible, or desirable, what alternative business models emerge? This book is concerned broadly with business as material for reinvention, including critical writing and examples of art/activist projects.”
Contributors include Saul Albert, Christian Ulrik Andersen, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Heath Bunting, Paolo Cirio, Baruch Gottlieb, Brian Holmes, Geert Lovink, Dmytri Kleiner, Georgios Papadopolous, Søren Bro Pold, Oliver Ressler, Kate Rich, René Ridgway, Guido Segni, Stevphen Shukaitis, Nathaniel Tkacz, and Marina Vishmidt.
Publisher Autonomedia, New York, October 2013
Data Browser series, 5
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 Unported License
ISBN 9781570272646
232 pages