Call for Interventions 

Blog posts of between 1,500-3,000 words

Scholarly articles of up to 8,000 words

For submissions and inquiries, please use the following form

The Political Economy Research Centre (PERC) at Goldsmiths, University of London and Lakehead University’s ReImagining Value Action Lab invite submissions for a new series of scholarly, artistic or activist blog posts on the themes of colonial debts, extractive nostalgias, and imperial insolvencies, described below. Additionally, we are soliciting proposals for full-length scholarly essays from a diversity of disciplinary perspectives on these questions. In general, we aim to support a more robust and imaginative conversation about the entanglements of financialization, colonialism, empire, race and power, with an interdisciplinary eye on the past, present and future.  

In the case of both blog posts and academic essays, we encourage submissions from a wide range of disciplinary and transdisciplinary perspectives that address these themes: whether historical, contemporary and/or prospective. Contributions from authors from backgrounds typically  marginalized from academic institutions because of racism, sexism or other systemic factors are especially encouraged.

Colonial Debts

Contemporary discussions of debt, financialization and neoliberal capitalism have often elided the ideological, technical, political and cultural roots of these phenomena in the colonial world order. How can we better understand present-day wealth and power by tracing the entanglements of high finance, the insurance industry and real-estate speculation in the violent flows of empire? How does a robust theorization of race and racism enhance our understanding of financialization, debt and punitive economic power; and, vice-versa: in what ways is the landscape of race and racism changing amidst the set of trends known as financialization?

Extractive Nostalgias

While certain aspects of financialization and ballooning personal and government indebtedness must be acknowledged as emergent  tendencies, how and when is the assumption of their “nowness” dependent on the production of a fictitious “before”? By “extractive nostalgia” we aim to name the political and economic mobilization of problematic anachronisms when it comes to narrating the neoliberal present, and therefore in imagining better potential futures. How is this nostalgia for a time “before” debt and austerity haunted by the spectres of slavery, colonialism, empire and racism? From whence, or from whom, did “our” now-vanished wealth spring? What kind of extractive relations – past, present and future – are obscured by attempts to rescue the “real” economy from the vagaries of financialization and speculation?

Imperial Insolvencies

Today, we are told that the political spectrum is monopolized by the struggle between neoliberal globalists and neo-nationalist populism. But what does this often false binary hide about the roots of today’s crisis in the histories and legacies of empire? What can we learn from debates about past and present struggles for reparations, for the repatriation of stolen lands, or for the return of looted cultural treasures? How can an effort to measure the odious or exploitative debts that burden the oppressed with the moral or historical debts owed by the oppressors open new horizons for thinking beyond “the crisis”?

Submissions will be accepted on an ongoing basis. Please supply both inquiries and submissions to the following-link: https://goo.gl/forms/6n4wPSF397MsCJkJ2

Series Editors

Dr. Clea Bourne, Senior Lecturer in Promotional Media, Goldsmiths, University of London

Dr. Paul Gilbert, Lecturer in International Development, University of Sussex

Dr. Max Haiven, Canada Research Chair in Culture, Media and Social Justice, Lakehead University

Dr. Johnna Montgomerie, Senior Lecturer in Economics, Goldsmiths, University of London