Book contents
- The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Economics
- The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Economics
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I Histories and Critical Traditions
- Chapter 1 Medieval Literature’s Economic Imagination
- Chapter 2 Early Modern Literature and Monetary Debate
- Chapter 3 Literary and Economic Exchanges in the Long Eighteenth Century
- Chapter 4 Economic Literature and Economic Thought in the Nineteenth Century
- Chapter 5 Women, Money, and Modernism
- Chapter 6 Economic Logics and Postmodern Forms
- Chapter 7 Writing Postcolonial Capitalism
- Part II Contemporary Critical Perspectives
- Part III Interdisciplinary Exchanges
- Further Reading
- Index
- Cambridge Companions To …
Chapter 6 - Economic Logics and Postmodern Forms
from Part I - Histories and Critical Traditions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2022
- The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Economics
- The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Economics
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I Histories and Critical Traditions
- Chapter 1 Medieval Literature’s Economic Imagination
- Chapter 2 Early Modern Literature and Monetary Debate
- Chapter 3 Literary and Economic Exchanges in the Long Eighteenth Century
- Chapter 4 Economic Literature and Economic Thought in the Nineteenth Century
- Chapter 5 Women, Money, and Modernism
- Chapter 6 Economic Logics and Postmodern Forms
- Chapter 7 Writing Postcolonial Capitalism
- Part II Contemporary Critical Perspectives
- Part III Interdisciplinary Exchanges
- Further Reading
- Index
- Cambridge Companions To …
Summary
This chapter outlines the relationship between finance and postmodernism in the post-1970s United States. After laying out this shared narrative of finance and postmodernism, particularly in regard to the work of Fredric Jameson and in a reading of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991), the chapter then argues that the presumed whiteness of both finance capital and postmodern aesthetics in Jameson and Ellis is decentered by Toni Cade Bambara’s Those Bones Are Not My Child (1999). Bambara’s novel is set in Atlanta in 1979-1981, years during which the city was at once rapidly becoming a global financial capital and was simultaneously also the site of the abduction and murder of anywhere between thirty to one hundred Black children and youths. Bambara’s novel demands that this racialized violence be read as a part of any analysis of Atlanta as a financialized city, and shows us that there is no way of understanding finance and postmodernism without reckoning with the constitutive anti-Blackness of the US economy.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Economics , pp. 98 - 113Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022