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Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First-Century Culture (Post*45)
Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First-Century Culture (Post*45)

Dead Pledges is the first book to explore the ways that U.S. culture—from novels and poems to photojournalism and horror movies—has responded to the collapse of the financialized consumer credit economy in 2008. Connecting debt theory to questions of cultural form, this book argues that artists, filmmakers, and writers have re-imagined what it means to owe and to own in a period when debt is what makes our economic lives possible. Encompassing both popular entertainment and avant-garde art, the post-crisis productions examined here help to map the landscape of contemporary debt: from foreclosure to credit scoring, student debt to securitized risk, microeconomic theory to anti-eviction activism. A searing critique of the ideology of debt, Dead Pledges dismantles the discourse of moral obligation so often invoked to make us repay. Debt is no longer a source of economic credibility, it contends, but is a system of dispossession that threatens the basic fabric of social life.

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Freedom’s Debt: The Royal African Company and the Politics of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1672-1752 (Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia)
Freedom’s Debt: The Royal African Company and the Politics of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1672-1752 (Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia)

In the years following the Glorious Revolution, independent slave traders challenged the charter of the Royal African Company by asserting their natural rights as Britons to trade freely in enslaved Africans. In this comprehensive history of the rise and fall of the RAC, William A. Pettigrew grounds the transatlantic slave trade in politics, not economic forces, analyzing the ideological arguments of the RAC and its opponents in Parliament and in public debate. Ultimately, Pettigrew powerfully reasons that freedom became the rallying cry for those who wished to participate in the slave trade and therefore bolstered the expansion of the largest intercontinental forced migration in history.
Unlike previous histories of the RAC, Pettigrew’s study pursues the Company’s story beyond the trade’s complete deregulation in 1712 to its demise in 1752. Opening the trade led to its escalation, which provided a reliable supply of enslaved Africans to the mainland American colonies, thus playing a critical part in entrenching African slavery as the colonies’ preferred solution to the American problem of labor supply.

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The Logic of Slavery: Debt, Technology, and Pain in American Literature (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)
The Logic of Slavery: Debt, Technology, and Pain in American Literature (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

Winner of the 2013 C. Hugh Holman Award

Product Features

  • Used Book in Good Condition
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