We are seeing the ascendancy of international systems of monopoly-finance capitalism across the globe. Abstract systems of finance consolidate power and value in the hands of a very few, comfortably ensconced in enclaves of wealth, while continuing to extract resources from the old imperial tributary system. The instruments of financial gain have simply allowed imperialism to go ‘underground,’ making these extractive processes less visible. Contesting globalization, austerity, privatization, and the concomitant militarization of civil society present us with new and constantly-changing targets for critique.

This panel brings together scholars and students who work in different areas of the economic humanities, challenging the broad rubric of economic “rationality.” We are interested in expanding the scholarly conversation around literary and economic thought, including as regards the deployment of debts, structural adjustment, the reformulation of labor relations. Building on earlier efforts of New Economic Criticism in the 1990’s and grounded in more recent scholarship in the Economic Humanities since the 2008 crisis, our panel seeks to underscore the role of empire in organizing developments of international finance culture. Therefore, our conversation aims to target diverse geographical regions to compare and interrogate the impact of specific events in modern financial imperialism.

While we are aware of historical perspectives on the long durée of finance, we are especially focused on developments from around the 1870s, when new financial methods for capitalization led to new forms of extraction on a grand scale (e.g. the rise of “fictitious capital”). Our panel aims to articulate some specific connections between empire and finance. Overall, we are seeking to begin a conversation around the use and limits of financial accounting and calculability, aided by the lens of literary, cinematic, and theoretical texts. Our panel discussion aims to investigate the authority of systems of economic value and imagine ways of contesting this authority by undoing its attachment to false claims of knowledge and predictability.

Kyle Wanberg, Associate Professor in Global Liberal Studies at NYU and the presider of the panel discussion, will open the discussion with a few brief remarks about the Economic Humanities and the forms of reason disseminated in the field of Economics that our panel discussion is concerned with. He will give a very short opening presentation, “Bamako and the cinema of financial imperialism” considering the history of modern finance in relation to contemporary forms of accumulation by dispossession, using Abderrahmane Sissako’s film Bamako as a fulcrum for thinking about the historical role that the World Bank and the IMF have had in Mali and Africa more generally.

Next, Manasvini Rajan, will present her paper, “Risk Fictions,” exploring the Green Revolution in India, following the drought crisis and attendant food scarcity in 1960s India. Her paper considers the role of development models that deploy particular structures of risk assessment and reduction strategies in constructing a veneer of macroeconomic rationality. Her approach is critical of the role of the state and networks of finance capital in creating structures of domination that marginalize farmers and imagine them as mere instruments of economic policies within larger matrices of power.

Tess Renker, a Ph.D candidate in Hispanic Studies at Brown, will present her paper “Cyborgs, Migration, and Anti-Imperialism in Yuri Herrera’s Señales que precederán al fin del mundo.” Focusing on the figure of the transnational migrant, Renker explores how she may challenge empire from within. Renker argues that Herrera’s novel points towards new possibilities for anti-imperialist thought and activism, through the critique and disruption of neoliberal technologies of exploitation, economic rationality, and neoliberalism’s use and abuse of migrant bodies.

Josue Chavez, our final presenter, is a graduate student in the Hispanic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His paper, “Disavowal in Transit,” asks how two contemporary works of art theorize Panama’s transformation from Canal Zone to tax haven. In the wake of a mid-20^th century US congressional amendment to the Bank Holding Act, which permitted U.S. banks to operate abroad, canal shipping activities dwindled as the main engine for accumulation. This “real” economic driver was rapidly replaced by transnational financial services, intensifying processes of urbanization. Chavez sees the so-called “economic rationality,” explored in the previous papers, as a coercive form of irrationality among the Panamanian elite.