Authors: &
Abstract
This article takes up recent calls to further problematize race in international political economy by focusing on money at the frontier of global finance. Alami and Guermond draw upon the Black radical tradition’s theoretical formulations of racial capitalism, which they bring into dialogue with conceptualizations of money and finance as developed within the critique of political economy. Money is the most supreme and abstract incarnation of wealth and class power, yet it is also suffused with racial and colonial logics of differentiation. To explore this tension, the authors offer a relational-comparison of two sites of frontier finance, namely cross-border investment and digital financial inclusion in developing countries. Alami and Guermond trace the mechanisms through which race affects the operations of money and finance across these two sites. They argue that racialized difference is mobilized and reproduced at three key moments in the construction of investibility at the financial frontier: (1) the re/making of a development ‘problem’; (2) the construction of racialized ideal-typical financial subjects; and (3) processes of risk valuation and the legitimation of surveillance, discipline, and extraction. This allows them to characterize the color of money at the financial frontier as a particularly potent and violent combination of the abstractive powers of race and money.
(2023) The color of money at the financial frontier, Review of International Political Economy, 30:3, 1073-1097, available here