Colonial Debts, imperial insolvencies, extractive nostalgias

This special section of Discover Society emerges from a two-day gathering of scholars, activists and artists dedicated to the theme at Goldsmiths, University of London, in September of 2017. Its inspiration comes from a certain frustration with the emergent interdisciplinary field of critical finance studies, which, regrettably (and with some noble exceptions), has not yet elected to enter into a vibrant dialogue with fields such as post-colonial criticism, critical race studies and settler-colonial studies. We believe such an avoidance is tragic, given not only the vibrancy of all of these fields but also the reality that many of the phenomena associated with finance, finance capital and financialization cannot be fully understood without reference to imperial, colonial and racialized realities, past and present.