Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times - Softcover

Bahng, Aimee

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822363798 ISBN 13: 9780822363798

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2018

Synopsis

In Migrant Futures Aimee Bahng traces the cultural production of futurity by juxtaposing the practices of speculative finance against those of speculative fiction. While financial speculation creates a future based on predicting and mitigating risk for wealthy elites, the wide range of speculative novels, comics, films, and narratives Bahng examines imagines alternative futures that envision the multiple possibilities that exist beyond capital’s reach. Whether presenting new spatial futures of the US-Mexico borderlands or inventing forms of kinship in Singapore in order to survive in an economy designed for the few, the varied texts Bahng analyzes illuminate how the futurity of speculative finance is experienced by those who find themselves mired in it. At the same time these displaced, undocumented, unbanked, and disavowed characters imagine alternative visions of the future that offer ways to bring forth new political economies, social structures, and subjectivities that exceed the framework of capitalism.

About this title

About the Author

Aimee Bahng is Assistant Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at Pomona College.

Review

"Compelling and unique . . . Aimee Bahng's skillfully made point: that the emerging field of critical finance studies, paired with feminist science studies, can help to reconfigure not only literary criticism but also Americanist, anti-/decolonial scholarship, queer theory, and science fiction studies. Migrant Futures truly sits at the edges of disciplines and casts its illuminating light over all of them." (Sean Guynes ASAP/Journal 2019-02-21)

"In her readings of various Asian and Asian American texts and experiences, Aimee Bahng makes a significant intervention into Asian futurism. Instead of struggling to identify a specific Asianness in futurity, Bahng’s work attempts to connect Asian futurism with other neocolonial, postcolonial, and imperial experiences." (Eunice Sang Eun Lee Situations 2019-03-01)

"The ideas in Migrant Futures are big, novel, and fantastic. But more than that, the structure itself is an act of academic decolonization and speculation." (Joshua Earle Catalyst 2019-04-01)

"Illuminating. . . . Aimee Bahng’s ambitious book contributes to the nascent but growing field of critical finance studies, as well as to the more established tradition of scholarship on racial capitalism." (Gabriella Friedman American Quarterly 2019-03-01)

Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0822363798
• ISBN 13: 9780822363798
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 248