ABSTRACT
Historically, economists have tended to eschew consideration of the relationship between systems of economic exchange and other dynamics -historical, cultural, social, and political. And, in particular, they have remained largely impervious to the expanding field of postcolonial studies, which offers significant challenges to the narrow conceptual frames within which economists work. Those economists who have been almost exclusively preoccupied with exchange value have tended to repress the historical, cultural, social, and political predicates of valuing and exchanging. Yet much of the disturbance in the global arena can be tied to the differential cultural and political forces that articulate with and inflect the consequences of capital flows. As nations enter modernity at different paces and with different costs to their populations, the powerful neo-imperial effects of capitalism become ever more apparent. As the theorist of visual culture, Jonathan Crary has noted, contemporary “modernization,” is a “process by which capitalism uproots and makes mobile what is grounded, clears away that which impedes circulation, and makes exchangeable what is singular” (1991: 10).
