TY - JOUR
AU - Finch,, Laura
AB - Abstract This essay is a response to the pieces collected for the special issue of American Literary History on economics and literature, with a particular focus on those dealing with the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It makes two related arguments: first, that studies of the North American economy must center analyses of racial capitalism and settler colonialism as an inherent part of their work and not as an optional add-on. Secondly, I argue that the field of economics and literature loses much of its anti-capitalist potential when it allows the parameters of the debate to be set by the economy; that is, taking the terms of analysis, the texts for analysis, the methods of analysis, and suppositions about who can be read as an economic actor and what is an economic action from how they are defined by the economy precludes a disruption of these premises. I conclude by arguing for the importance of the aesthetic for reimaging the terms of the debate and offering a brief biography of writing on racial capitalism and settler colonialism that is already doing this work. “It’s the economy, stupid”: Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign mantra makes clear that, at least since the early 1990s, the economy has been available as “our collective environment” that, according to Michelle Murphy, “anyone might intuitively feel . . . as a determining yet diffuse presence” (1, 18). The reminder also implies a brisk common sense about identifying the economic in any given situation: we know it when we see it, and we see it everywhere. The everywhere-yet-nowhere atmospherics of the economy makes the act of disciplinary-field definition a tough one, because, really, what is not economic criticism? Economic criticism can rely on neither geographic nor temporal boundedness, unlike, for example, Global Anglophone or Modernism, which have some anchoring in time and space even if these anchors are sites of deep contention. Nor does economic criticism have a methodological or object-based coherence; it is a theoretical orientation rather than a set of cultural objects that are somehow ontologically economic. Nor does it have the specific limitations of institutional entanglement in the way that some fields do: there are no job hires in economic criticism.1 Perhaps unsurprisingly then, the snapshot of the field that this issue gives us is broad, covering the eighteenth century to the present day with a geographic focus on the territorial US, its formal empire, and a more expansive idea of US-backed global capitalism. A range of economic forms are also considered—slavery, the national debt, the economics of empire, microeconomics, circulation, and personal finance all make an appearance—while genre is also broadly conceived, including realism, the sublime, the epistolary, personal finance guides, speculative fictions, visual art, and music videos. The history of Economics and Literature is also made up of gaps and discontinuities as much as it is a shared genealogy. In recent descriptions of the field, including the excellent one by Paul Crosthwaite, Peter Knight, and Nicky Marsh, three key sites of intellectual inquiry are often noted: first, the Marxist tradition, a noncoherent but somewhat continuous line with particular visibility in the Frankfurt School of the 1930s, the cultural studies of the 1970s, and most recently inflected by the “long guiding shadow” of Fredric Jameson (Chihara and Seybold 5). Secondly, the New Economic Criticism (NEC) of the 1990s, with roots in the post-structuralist work on money and language that began in the 1970s. This field was accompanied (and inspired by) a rapprochement from the other side: the work of rhetorical economics (or Humanomics) that Deirdre McCloskey spearheaded in the mid-1980s, which sought to interrogate neoclassical economics’ radically asocial imaginary by “us[ing] literary and rhetorical methods to unveil [economics’] buried metaphors and fictions” (Woodmansee and Osteen 3).2 While NEC did not exclude Marxist analysis, as Nicky Marsh writes, “[f]or those invested in the material histories of money, NEC’s assumption of the parallel between money and language, that implied a shift from a materially reali[z]ed and socially meaningful exchange of gold or goods to the dematerial and socially alienating exchange of an abstract money form, was problematic” (317). Thirdly, Critical Finance Studies, a subfield of economic criticism arising in response to the 2007–08 credit crisis. While work on finance has dominated the field recently, it is not a term with enough centripetal force to hold economic criticism together as a field, nor does it describe all recent work on economics and literature.3 This is not a straightforward history given the large temporal gaps and dispositional variances between Marxism, NEC, and current work on finance. More importantly, it is also a somewhat geographically unmoored history, in which European Marxism, Anglo-American NEC, and finance studies (largely Anglo-American but with interest in finance’s relationship to globalization) can act as signposts for surveying the shape of the field. The lack of geographic specificity in this history of the field is particularly felt in relation to this special issue, which is after all a collection of essays for the journal of American Literary History; the economy under discussion here is the North American economy, that is, a capitalist economy based on the foundational violences of native genocide and the transatlantic slave trade.4 These histories are not parallel to the history of US capitalism; rather, “settler colonialism and racial violence [are] determinate conditions of and immanent to US capitalism” (Byrd et al. 6). A history of the field of Economics and Literature within the US might look a little different if we were to not only invite in but center economic criticism that focuses on racial settler capitalism. I use the metaphor of centering rather than addition advisedly: as Denise Ferreira da Silva writes in her important work on the construction of global racial otherness: “We need to abandon constructions of the racial as an add-on… . Instead, it [must be] recentered as a theoretical device necessary for any analysis of multiracial societies” (xxxvi, xxv).5 In my conclusion, I offer an alternative set of theoretical texts that we might wish to center in the field of American Economics and Literature. On the way to this conclusion, I focus also on the other term in the coupling of economics and literature, making an argument for the central importance of the aesthetic in this field; and, in fact, the two are interconnected: when dealing with the quantifying drive of the economic, the aesthetic offers a reminder that what appears as common sense is indeed an effect of hegemonic discourse, at base shaped by the needs of capital. In this way, the aesthetic as a form of knowledge resists “the stupidity of common sense” that privileges the visible, factual, and knowable, and allows access to knowledge discounted by the epistemic regime of capital (Adorno 86). Sociologist Avery Gordon, who cites the novels of Toni Morrison and Luisa Valenzuela as her “greatest inspiration,” articulates this form of inquiry well: radical scholars and intellectuals knew a great deal about the world capitalist system and repressive states and yet insisted on distinctions . . . between fact and fiction, between presence and absence . . . between knowing and not-knowing—whose tenuousness and manipulation seemed precisely to me in need of comprehension and articulation, being themselves modalities of the exercise of unwanted power. (xvii) One version of bringing the aesthetic to bear on the economic is offered by Paul Crosthwaite, Peter Knight, and Nicky Marsh.6 Their article is in some ways an inheritor of the ameliorative energies of NEC, bringing the techniques of “interpretative and analytical tools drawn from the humanities” to critique the “frighteningly narrow” (683) discipline of economics. The essay convincingly reads closely a range of twentieth-century texts offering personal financial advice to show the gendered assumptions embedded within the discourse. Renaming the field “Economic Humanities,” Crosthwaite, Knight, and Marsh hope “to bring together literary studies scholars and historians . . . as well as economic sociologists and economic anthropologists, to provide an analysis of the material culture, representational practices, and ideological assumptions of economics and finance” (664). To this end, the authors call for interdisciplinary collaboration, for “[t]o be taken seriously by those within economics, finance, and business studies, the Economic Humanities will need to become intimately familiar with research in those disciplines” (664). While treating close reading as a transferable skill that can be applied to economic texts certainly serves to “defamiliarize and denaturalize” (682) the unexamined assumptions of the economy, this move also gives up a certain amount of critical possibility by taking its lead from the preexisting shape of the economy. To make a methodological centerpiece the desire “to be taken seriously by those within economics” rules out several bandwidths of critical possibility, circumscribing the horizon of desire of the field to concepts that are ideologically compatible with (or at least recognizable to) capital. It is this imaginative otherness that the aesthetic allows for, and if, as they aver, “we also need to understand the politics of resistance and ultimately the possibilities of an alternative form of economics” (683), then trying to do this without literature is, if not impossible, certainly a harder task.7 1. The Economics of Addition Two other essays in this special issue—Dan Sinykin, Richard So, and Jessica Young’s “Economics, Race, and the Postwar US Novel: A Quantitative Literary History” and Jarvis C. McInnis’s “Black Women’s Geographies and the Afterlives of the Sugar Plantation”—are useful for clarifying what exactly the aesthetic can bring to the study of the US economy. In particular, these essays pair interestingly as both explicitly seek to center black female experiences of the economy. I turn first to “Economics, Race, and the Postwar US Novel,” which uses computational criticism to study economic language as it appears in US novels between 1950 and 2000. Using the Oxford Dictionary of Economics (ODE) as the source for their economic terms, the authors “built a model to determine the ‘economicness’ of each novel in [their] corpus,” a figure they reached by “count[ing] how often the terms from the ODE appear” (781).8 The results, unsurprisingly, reflect that novels written by white men are the most “economic.” They then wrestle with the difficulty of trying to adapt a hegemonic model of the economy to account for alternative experiences of the economic.9 In order to supplement the OED, Sinykin, So, and Young add a close reading of Gayl Jones’s novel Corregidora (1975) to course-correct the whiteness of their results, leading them to ask: “what would ‘economicness’ in the US literary field look like if we took black women’s writing as the basis of our model instead of the Oxford Dictionary of Economics?” (797). This question is usefully clarifying, as “how does the economy look from x subject position” (where x=non-male, non-white in this instance) sounds similar to my desire to provide an account of the economy that centers the articulated complexities of racial settler capitalism. Yet as similar as these questions sound, they are not the same. The addition of a minoritized subject position to a mode of analysis does not alter the model’s center of gravity. It springs from a critical method that relies on making “arguments based on the number of times x word or gram appears” (606), as Nan Z. Da writes in her incisive critique of Computational Literary Studies.10 This method of computational analysis is one that works by addition. One economic word = one economic point scored for that novel. The analysis is built on the premise that the economic resides in single words, and these words are easily identifiable. If they are not, if “for example, bond could be that which connects to people or things, in which case it would not be economic; but it could also be a debt security, in which case it would be economic,” then the authors carried out “rigorous computational and analytical work, coding each polysemous term so that we only counted terms in their economic senses as specified by the ODE” (782).11 Thus, even the economic words that their close reading generates (slave, slavery, and plantation [797]) are abstracted into quantifiable units, a move that has ramifications for the kinds of analysis that is sanctioned, the kind of politics that are allowed, and the kind of futures that can be thought.12 The richness of the close reading of Jones’s Corregidora gets folded back into the machinery of computational criticism. Computational criticism’s methodology of quantitative addition succumbs to the problem of liberal inclusivity that leaves the initial corpus of economic texts by white male authors as it is. Whiteness remains a transparent nonracialized subject position, while the writing of minoritized subject positions is forced into an auto-ethnographic speech. As Theodore Martin writes, we should not succumb to the “pseudosociological imperative that literature reflect its author’s ‘own experience’” (723) and must instead “refus[e] to allow fiction to be mistaken for the ethnographic reporting of direct experience” (716). Jodi Melamed’s work on liberal inclusivity is instructive here: “liberal antiracisms have not theorized literature or reading. Instead, they have simply presumed that the antiracist values ascribed to literature are immanent in literary texts themselves” (16). One of the hardest things about theorizing racial settler capitalism is how to “articulate,” to use Stuart Hall’s term, the overlapping oppressions that are generated.13 A methodology of transparency and quantitative addition can only get us so far here. Black feminist geographer Katherine McKittrick’s work is exemplary in its engagement with race and numbers; McInnis also finds her thinking crucial in his work to “rematerialize the black female body against its relative ‘absence,’ silence, and ‘historical spatial [and economic] unrepresentability’” (746). The first half of McInnis’s essay, “Plantation Pasts,” does this work of rematerialization through readings of work by Attica Locke and Kara Walker. The second half, “Plantation Futures” (a phrase he takes from McKittrick) foregrounds the aesthetic as an essential part of conceiving of exactly those “possibilities of an alternative” that Crosthwaite, Marsh, and Knight call for. While “Plantation Pasts” highlight “the violent legacies of sugar and the plantation [that] persist in the present” (759), McInnis asks, “is it possible to imbue these sites of violence with an ethic that does not perpetuate racial capitalism but that honors the lives that perished there instead?” (760). To this end, McInnis’s texts “rematerializ[e] the disappeared black female body and lived experience to the history of the sugar plantation in the Americas, and especially in the US South” (770).14 This rematerialization of a specifically embodied black female history—the hyperbolically sized “monstrosity of Walker’s sphinx” (765), Serena Williams’s “performance of pleasure and sexual agency” “[b]y twerking in the big house” (764)—is very different from reinserting black women numerically into history. As McInnis explains: [E]ven as I incorporate historical and economic data to quantify enslaved people’s contributions to the nineteenth-century US economy, I acknowledge the limits of such quantification and the inability of statistics to fully capture the dynamism and intricacies of individual human experiences. So I mine literature, visual art, and performance as counter-archives that rematerialize those who have been evacuated from the landscape and factory floor and rendered as mere commodities in the plantation ledger. (746) Economics and literary studies can learn from other fields that have spent a long time theorizing the racial and colonial nature of the US economy and working with archives where the economic does not always (or even often) arrive as an easily identifiable textual unit. A very incomplete list of recent thinking that could be central to economics and literary studies might include work on: the racialized abstractions of capital (Simone Browne, Iyko Day, Saidiya Hartman, Chandan Reddy, Christina Sharpe); bodies and land as property (Jodi Byrd, Glen Sean Coulthard, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Saidiya Hartman, Tiffany Lethabo King, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang); finance and debt (Fred Moten); and globalization and empire (Brenna Bhandar, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Lisa Lowe, Michelle Murphy, Anna Tsing, the Warwick Research Collective).15 However incomplete, I hope this list is useful in moving economics and literature toward methodologies and traditions that “[b]ecause they have long understood inclusion in the liberal capitalist state as an unmaking of collective social being . . . may help us to think alternatives that are both transformative and realizable and, in fact, already manifest and discernible” (Byrd et al.).16 Common sense, rigor, intelligibility, and other brisk synonyms can be deployed all too easily to discount social forms that are not profitable to the juggernaut of accumulation that is racial settler capitalism. Allowing economics to set the terms means that we hand over the power to decide not only how we count and what we count, but also the power to decide who counts. Allowing economics to set the terms means that we hand over the power to decide not only how we count and what we count, but also the power to decide who counts. Footnotes 1 The boundlessness of the field has struck other commentators. As Leigh Claire La Berge and Alison Shonkwiler write in Reading Capitalist Realism (2014), “all realism is already capitalist” (1). More broadly, the editors’ introduction to a 2014 special issue of Radical History Review on “The Fictions of Finance” (vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 3–13) by Aaron Carico and Dara Orenstein asks, “[h]ow, then, should the history of capitalism be narrated? … for what does that history not include?” (9). 2 A brief history of neoclassical economics: economics and literature were once intertwined through political economy’s interest in and use of literary ideas and the novel form’s entanglement with the rise of the bourgeoisie and print capitalism. This co-dependency was rudely severed by the Marginal Revolution of the late nineteenth century, inaugurated by the political economist William Stanley Jevons, who claimed in The Theory of Political Economy (1871) that, for the new economics, “there is never, in a single instance, an attempt made to compare the amount of feeling in one mind with that in another… . Every mind is thus inscrutable to every other mind, and no common denominator of feeling is possible” (21). We can see this sentiment repackaged in Margaret Thatcher’s infamous statement that “there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families,” an epistemic claim that she set about ontologizing (interview with Douglas Keay, Woman's Own, 23 Sep. 1987, Margaret Thatcher Foundation Archive. Web.). The deeply social writing of early political economists turned a humanities-oriented discipline from a social to an asocial and then antisocial science, myopically contracting to become the quantitative arena it is today. 3 See, for example, the number of special issues (Journal of American Studies, vol. 49, no. 4, 2015; CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 19, no. 1, 2019; Representations, vol. 126, no. 1, 2014; Radical History Review, vol. 14, no. 1, 2014) on this topic since 2008. There are also financial working groups at Dartmouth, the University of Arizona, the University of Warwick, and UC Irvine. 4 Many thanks to Jess Hurley and Myka Tucker-Abramson for their invaluable help in formulating this idea in particular and the piece in general. 5 Thanks to my colleague Ben Mangrum for his comments, including pushing me to interrogate my use of the metaphor of centering. 6 Thanks to my colleague Marah Gubar for her suggestions on structuring this section. 7 For more on this, see Annie McClanahan’s recent work on the problems of theorizing the neoliberal subject using the terms bequeathed to us by the market, “Serious Crises: Rethinking the Neoliberal Subject,” boundary 2, vol. 46, no. 1, 2019, p. 123. 8 Of their choice of the ODE (despite its British provenance), the authors write, “the transnationalism of US economics as a discipline obviates the risk that national variation would skew our results” (780). This move takes as a premise the falsely transnational self-representation of the North American economy as the global economy, rather than looking for ways to disrupt this imperial claim. 9 While the authors’ aims are aligned with my own—to unseat white male authors and experiences from the economic canon—I found myself disagreeing with aspects of their methodology. The similarity in aims yet difference in methods made this article useful to think both with and against, and I offer the following comments in this spirit of collegiality. 10 The authors extend this logic in a footnote where they suggest that “[o]ther manipulations of our model, which would be generative but exceed the scope of this essay, might include adding vocabularies specific to migrant worker, refugee, and Indigenous discourses” (802). In a description of their final sample of economic novels, the identities of the authors are broken down as “95% white, 3% black, 1.6% Asian American, Latinx, and Indigenous” (779). This statistical clumping evinces what Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang call the “asterisk-ing [of] Indigenous peoples” (4), a practice by which “Indigenous peoples are included only as asterisks, as footnotes into dominant paradigms” (22). One doesn’t have to reject wholesale, quantitative methods in the humanities to see that some populations are always only included as statistical adjunct, such that quantitative methods will be disproportionately effacing because there will never be “enough” data. See also Ben Mangrum’s “Aggregation, Public Criticism, and the History of Reading Big Data,” PMLA, vol. 133, no. 5, 2018, pp. 1207–24, which argues that “[t]he idea of accessing literary history through massive text corpora is a child of [a specific] intellectual and technological history. Consequently, this vein of the digital humanities is freighted with that history’s assumptions and limitations” (1216). 11 Referencing the more complex identification of economic themes through formal analysis that can be found in Marxist literary criticism, the authors “do not equate a novel’s use of economic language with its adequacy at representing economic conditions” (787). They argue that this methodological one-dimensionality results from “the modesty of our project, in which we track the movement of language between discursive spheres with awareness that lexical uptake is not necessarily the best measure for understanding a novel’s representation of the economic conditions from which it emerges” (787). This rhetorical one-two (coupling a language of rigor with a claim to modesty) is prevalent in computational literary studies and has been critiqued by Da, who argues that “this kind of strategic incrementalism has made some of the most vocal critics of [Computational Literary Studies] temper their argument—after all, who would not want to appear reasonable, forward-looking, open-minded?” (602–3). 12 For an argument about the ways that postcritique and distant reading may similarly elide traditions of critical race, indigenous, gender, and queer critique, see Mark C. Jerng’s “Race in the Crucible of Literary Debate,” American Literary History, vol. 31, no. 2, 2019, pp. 260–71, especially pp. 265–66. 13 See Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano. “Race, Real Estate, and Real Abstraction,” Radical Philosophy, vol. 194, 2015, pp. 11–13. 14 The economy, for McInnis, is deeply geographically specific. For example, he reads the location of Kara Walker’s 2014 exhibit, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, installed in the Domino Sugar Refinery in Brooklyn, New York as a “northern plantation tour, a respatialization that shifts the locus of slavery from the plantation to the factory, thus exposing the genealogical and economic ties between them” (752). At the same time, the subtitle of the exhibit—an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant—“situates the geopolitical economy of the US sugar industry within a broader hemispheric context” (753–54). Similarly, Locke’s novel “explores corporate farming and agribusiness as another afterlife of the plantation, effectively linking the history of slavery with the contemporary condition of Latinx migrant laborers, and thus the US South to the Global South” (749). 15 I list some of these texts here both as a way to reconsider the field of economics and literature but also from an interest in the politics of citational practice, focusing on “work that has been too quickly (in my view) cast aside or left behind, work that lays out other paths, paths we can call desire lines… . Citation is how we acknowledge our debt to those who came before” (Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life [2017], p. 15). See also: Eve Tuck, K. Wayne Yang, and Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández’s “Citation Practices Challenge,” Critical Ethnic Studies, Apr. 2015. Web; Carrie Mott and Daniel Cockayne, “Citation Matters: Mobilizing the Politics of Citation Toward a Practice of ‘Conscientious Engagement,’” Gender, Place and Culture, vol. 24, no. 7, 2017, pp. 954–73. 16 This quotation is from Byrd, Goldstein, Melamed, and Reddy’s blisteringly good article “Predatory Value: Economies of Dispossession and Disturbed Relationalities.” Here she and her co-authors are speaking explicitly of “Black radical philosophy read alongside Indigenous critical theory” (12), traditions central to the list I offer above. Works Cited Adorno Theodor W. Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life . Translated by Redmond Dennis , Prism Key P, 2011 . Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Bhandar Brenna. Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership . Duke UP , 2018 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Browne Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness . Duke UP , 2015 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Byrd Jodi A. , Goldstein Alyosha , Melamed Jodi , Reddy Chandan . “Predatory Value: Economies of Dispossession and Disturbed Relationalities.” Social Text , vol. 36 , no. 2 , 2018 , pp. 1 – 18 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat Byrd Jodi A. The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism . U of Minnesota P , 2011 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Chihara Michelle , Seybold Matt . “Introduction.” The Routledge Companion to Literature and Economics , edited by Chihara and Seybold . Routledge , 2019 , pp. 1 – 12 . Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Coulthard Glen Sean. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition . U of Minnesota P , 2014 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Crosthwaite Paul , Knight Peter , Marsh Nicky . “The Economic Humanities and the History of Financial Advice.” American Literary History , vol. 31 , no. 4 , 2019 , pp. 661–686. WorldCat da Silva Denise Ferreira. Toward a Global Idea of Race . U of Minnesota P , 2007 . Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Da Nan Z. “The Computational Case against Computational Literary Studies.” Critical Inquiry , vol. 45 , no. 3 , 2019 , pp. 601 – 39 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat Day Iyko. Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism . Duke UP , 2016 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Gilmore Ruth Wilson. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California . U of California P , 2007 . Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Gordon Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination . U of Minnesota P , 2008 . Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Hall Stuart. “Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance.” Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism , edited by UNESCO. UNESCO , 1980 , pp. 305 – 45 . Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Hartman Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America . Oxford UP , 1997 . Google Preview WorldCat COPAC King Tiffany Lethabo. “The Labor of (Re)reading Plantation Landscapes Fungible(ly).” Antipode , vol. 48 , no. 4 , 2016 , pp. 1022 – 39 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat Lowe Lisa. The Intimacies of Four Continents . Duke UP , 2015 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Marsh Nicky. “Reproduction.” Routledge Companion to Literature and Economics , edited by Chihara Michelle , Seybold Matt . Routledge , 2019 , pp. 315 – 23 . Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Martin Theodore. “Crime Fiction and Black Criminality.” American Literary History , vol. 30 , no. 4 , 2018 , pp. 703 – 29 . WorldCat McInnis Jarvis C. “Black Women’s Geographies and the Afterlives of the Sugar Plantation.” American Literary History , vol. 31 , no. 4 , 2019 , pp. 741–774. WorldCat Melamed Jodi. Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism . U of Minnesota P , 2011 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Moten Fred. “The Subprime and the Beautiful.” African Identities , vol. 11 , no. 2 , 2013 , pp. 237 – 45 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat Murphy Michelle. The Economization of Life . Duke UP , 2017 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Reddy Chandan. Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State . Duke UP , 2011 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Sharpe Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being . Duke UP , 2016 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Sinykin Dan , So Richard Jean , Young Jessica . “Economics, Race, and the Postwar US Novel: A Quantitative Literary History.” American Literary History , vol. 31 , no. 4 , 2019 , pp. 775–804. WorldCat Tsing Anna Lowenhaupt. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection . Princeton UP , 2005 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Tsing Anna Lowenhaupt. . The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins . Princeton UP , 2015 . Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Tuck Eve , Yang K. Wayne . “ Decolonization is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society , vol. 1 , no. 1 , 2012 , pp. 1 – 40 . WorldCat Warwick Research Collective . Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature . Liverpool UP , 2015 . WorldCat COPAC Woodmansee Martha , Osteen Mark . “Taking Account of the New Economic Criticism: An Historical Introduction.” The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics , edited by Woodmansee and Osteen . Routledge , 1999 , pp. 3 – 50 . Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Author notes Laura Finch is currently at the University of Michigan as a member of the Society of Fellows and an Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature. After this fellowship she will be joining MIT as a member of the Literature Section. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Commentary: It’s the economy, stupid: On the Costs of Marginalizing the Aesthetic
JO - American Literary History
DO - 10.1093/alh/ajz045
DA - 2019-11-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/commentary-it-s-the-economy-stupid-on-the-costs-of-marginalizing-the-kFTzo0plFV
SP - 818
VL - 31
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -