ABSTRACT
This chapter traces three phases of the relationship between literature, politics, and debt: first, in the nineteenth century’s late-industrial culture, literature served as a pedagogical tool for creating belief in financial objects whose value referenced something that was not there; second, postcolonial literature criticized its own universal translatability as participating in a growing culture of world financialization where development is divorced from local democracy and sovereignty; third, subjectivity, affect, and communication become the targets of profit extraction under “real subsumption” in neoliberal societies of control. Arguing that, in each of these phases, debt mortgages the future and reduces its possibilities, the chapter concludes by calling for debt cancellation.
