The Color of Creditworthiness: Debt, Race, and Democracy in the 21st Century

Debt;Credit;Morality;Race;Racism;Capitalism;Neoliberalism;Democracy;Governmentality;Nietzsche;Foucault;Political Science

Forster-Smith, Christopher AldenKhan, Ali ;

Johns Hopkins University

关键词: Debt;    Credit;    Morality;    Race;    Racism;    Capitalism;    Neoliberalism;    Democracy;    Governmentality;    Nietzsche;    Foucault;    Political Science;   

Others  :  https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/bitstream/handle/1774.2/60992/FORSTER-SMITH-DISSERTATION-2018.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: JOHNS HOPKINS DSpace Repository

【 摘 要 】

The Color of Creditworthiness: Debt, Race, and Democracy in the 21st Century addresses the historical and contemporary politics of debt and race. It addresses the practices of debt and race together by demonstrating how debt has served as a central rhetorical and material nexus for producing asymmetrical power relationships between subjects figured as creditors or debtors through techniques for evaluating creditworthiness in varying combinations of moral, racial, economic, and political terms. The project proposes to view the creditor-debtor relation as the primary power relation underpinning capitalist society and liberal democracy, challenging a foundational assumption in liberal political theory and neoclassical economics that views exchange between contracting citizens or free-market actors as axiomatic. By contrast, the dissertation argues that capitalism and liberal democracy are based on asymmetrical power relations between creditor subjects who enjoy the political privilege of citizenship, the racial privilege of whiteness, and the economic privilege of creditworthiness, and debtor subjects figured as non-citizens, non-whites, and without credit. The dissertation first puts Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Weber into conversation to illustrate how religiously derived notions of indebtedness and creditworthiness contributed to producing the model of the rational economic subject during the rise of early capitalism. Second, it engages the work of Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Saidiya Hartman to show how race and debt functioned together as crucial political technologies that shaped the liberal capitalist regime, serving to discipline and dispossess free blacks in the Reconstruction-era American South. Third, it performs a close reading of recent theoretical works on debt by Maurizio Lazzarato and Annie McClanahan to argue that the neoliberal debt economy, and credit scoring in particular, constitute techno-political infrastructures of control maintaining a ;;colorblind” form of racial capitalism in the United States today. Finally, the dissertation draws on work in democratic theory from Wendy Brown, William Connolly, W. E. B. Du Bois and Joel Olson to make a case for the abolition of the contemporary regime of racialized indebtedness, which poses a severe threat to the unfinished project of democracy in America by undermining democratic citizenship, institutions and forms of popular struggle.