R E S E A R C H

MAPPING ABSTRACTIONS: RACE, SPACE, AND ECONOMICS IN THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL

“Mapping Abstractions: Race, Space, and Economics in the Contemporary Novel” takes a genealogical and comparative approach to theorising the post-1970s global economy in order to contest the claim that the aesthetic can no longer represent economic forms. Focusing on urban development as a key method of value creation in the contemporary U.S., my project turns away from the skyscraper to focus on the broader metropolitan areas of New York, Atlanta, and Oakland in order to show how wealth is created through the differential valuation of land based on the racialisation of the population. The project then turns to readings of authors from China, Pakistan, and South Africa, where I show how these racialised modes of value creation get played out - and resisted - differently in a variety of global cities.

The first half of the project focuses on the history of the racialisation of Black and Indigenous populations in the U.S., and the ways that these racialising schemas allowed and continue to allow for value to be extracted from land. An archive of novels by Black and Indigenous authors (Toni Cade Bambara, Colson Whitehead, and Tommy Orange [Cheyenne and Arapaho]) provides this alternate genealogy for the current economic moment. Importantly, these novel also imagine alternate models for depicting the economy that are vital and ongoing - such as the re-mapping of Atlanta offered by author and activist Toni Cade Bambara in response to the weaponised use of “urban renewal” against the Black population of the city.

While the first half of the book theorises how racialisation is leveraged to differentially devalue and over-value space in U.S. cities, the second half of the project considers how the-U.S. backed spread of global capitalism creates hierarchies of value when it does not directly control the land. In these non-settler imperial contexts, I contend that value is created through the territorialisation of the body. For example, in Lauren Beukes’s novels set in a future South Africa, nanotechnology is seen as a new frontier; just as the American West promised “free” land to settlers (through genocidal colonisation), nanotechnology promises to open up unchartered territory within the human body for profit. While signalling the global influence of American-created forms of value extraction (through entities such as micro-loans, NGOs and the IMF), my project also de-centres the U.S. as the singular model for the contemporary economy by showing how forms of valuation are constituted, re-constituted, and resisted as they materialise in different locations. For example, the smooth territorialisation of the body by nanotechnology in Lauren Beukes’s work is brought up short when it collides with post-apartheid racial schemas that value bodies and spaces along different vectors than the American model; while in Mohsin Hamid’s novels, the global economy’s demand for subaltern subjects to be infinitely flexible and entrepreneurial runs up against the hard limits of environmental resources in the Global South, where climate crisis and decades of extractive pillaging force wealth creation to a halt.

GIRLISH: EMPIRE, CAPITAL, AND IMPOSSIBLE SUBJECTS

My second project “Girlish: Empire, Capital, and Impossible Subjects” theorises the rise of “the Girl” as a new frontier of global investment. The 1992 annual meeting of the World Bank placed investment in global girls front and centre, marking her shift from over-shadowed object to economic subject in the neo-Imperial gaze of Western economies. My project reads this discourse of the girl of the global south as a safe investment vehicle alongside the narrative of white Western girlhood as product and producer of an irrational and violent social disorder. Theorising girlhood beyond the arid outlines of entrepreneur or victim prescribed for her by global finance, I triangulate these divergent narratives with girls of colour, trans-girls, and girls residing under conditions of settler colonialism who are written off as sunk costs within the domestic U.S. economy.