Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Goldstein, "Finance and Foreclosure in the Colonial Present"

Alyosha Goldstein (University of New Mexico) has posted "Finance and Foreclosure in the Colonial Present." The essay appears in the Winter 2014 volume of the Radical History Review. Here's the abstract:
The Claims Resolution Act (CRA) of 2010, which brought together and financed a series of historic US civil rights and Native American class-action lawsuit settlements, serves as the lens through which this essay examines debates over accountability, debt, and reconciliation and provides a means to consider how present-day efforts to foreclose the genealogies of historical injustice have been shaped in response to the contemporary crisis of global capitalism and financialization. Focusing on the salience of racialization and settler colonialism, this essay studies how and why the CRA's juridical assemblage brings into proximity discrepant histories of dispossession and racism so as to situate these within an overarching teleology of progress and improvement in the face of contemporary economic volatility and social instability.
Read on here. (Hat tip: Turtle Talk)