Finance capitalism transforms the way value is seen, promising more precise ways of calculating or predicting its presence. Tools like the Black-Scholes formula allow derivatives to be priced according to volatility, facilitating speculation in abstract but value-bearing assets. Meanwhile, calculating sites and subjects of “compromised” value makes it possible to generate profit even under neoliberal austerity. The 2007-2008 financial crisis disclosed how banks prey on borrowers with poor credit scores by turning punishing interest rates into investor revenue–a practice of predatory lending with roots in longer histories of land dispossession, debt peonage, and debt imperialism, as theorists of colonial racial capitalism (Cheryl Harris, Joanne Barker, Jodi Byrd) have shown. Financial assessment, we are told, gets the world to run–otherwise, risk would be incalculable, banks would offer no security, goods and services could not be exchanged. But at whose expense?

This panel nominates reading value as an urgent corrective to calculating it. That value is read–not simply measured, recorded, or realized–is an argument literary and cultural critics are uniquely positioned to make, especially as finance capitalism’s ostensibly bloodless proceduralism continues to intensify mass indebtedness and restructure domestic and foreign economies. Whereas option pricing or credit scoring admit only to gauging value where it is or will be, work by Randy Martin, Fred Moten, Annie McClanahan and others bring history, aesthetics, affect, and politics to bear on the violence masked by sanitized theories of economic value. Our panelists draw from this work to underscore the positions and methods through which value is interpreted. Which scenes count when establishing who or what bears value? What heuristics shape our encounters with economic systems? What logics of social devaluation structure the capitalist everyday? In conversation with MLA’s presidential theme “visibility,” we seek to disrupt regimes of value appraisal to make visible the life whose enclosure serves as finance capitalism’s condition of possibility.

Our panel features papers from scholars at different ranks and institutions who explore intersections of art, culture, and political economy.

The session opens with Angel Garduño’s paper, which close-reads images of dilapidated houses for sale by the Detroit Land Bank Authority and an episode of HGTV’s Detroit-based renovation show Bargain Block (2021-present). Garduño identifies these sites as ‘collapsed domestic scenes’ and examines how they encode what we see – the detritus of “abandoned” houses – according to interpretive norms that invite audiences to read for value-extraction. Analyzing these scenes not only illuminates the traces of disavowed violence that have produced them, but also disinters life beneath the belongings of the dispossessed with an archival and speculative reading practice called ‘slow reading.’ Garduño uncovers a productive tension through which to understand how “speculative risk” – especially as it is staged as an honest entrepreneurial venture – works to obfuscate the constitutive violences of ongoing racialized capitalist dispossession in a US context.

Next, we ask: what reading practices make financial meltdown an opportunity to undo, not reinforce, existing arbitrations of value? Revisiting the unfinished aftermath of the 2007-2008 crisis, Shirl Yang traces the public refrain that $700B of federal relief earmarked for troubled banks should have gone to victims of foreclosure and bad mortgages. Discredited by policymakers for its unruly style of juxtaposing borrowers and financial institutions, this collective complaint circulated in protests, social media, and novels such as Zia Haider Rahman’s In Light of What We Know (2014), making visible kinds of financial intuition deliberately excluded from serious economic consideration. Yang draws on Lauren Berlant and Sara Ahmed’s accounts of complaint (articulations of forms of injury that escape official accounting) to show how financial complaint spotlights bankruptcy’s political contradictions and calls into question how the state, as lender of last resort, decides who should be made whole.

We conclude by turning to another scene of restructure to read value as a form of coloniality: in 2016, the US federal government restructured Puerto Rico’s debt to ensure repayment to creditors at the expense of health care, pensions, and education. Gerónimo Sarmiento Cruz reads two poetry collections from Puerto Rico—Esteban Valdéz’s Fuera de Trabajo (1977) and Raquel Salas Rivera’s Lo Terciario/The Tertiary (2018)—as auditing this debt. Understanding financial debts as historical debts, per Rocío Zambrana, he analyzes these texts as interrogating the colonial conditions of debt to reassess its strictures. Valdéz’s concrete poetry estranges the page’s accessibility as a critique of (the legibility of) value. In turn, Salas Rivera questions debt’s temporal organization. By translating Marx’s Capital onto a Puerto Rican reality, Salas Rivera summons an alternative history of communal debt over financial debt.