[ecrea] CFP: Speculative Finance / Speculative Fiction

CFP: Speculative Finance/Speculative Fiction (Edited Collection)

David M. Higgins and Hugh Charles O’Connell

The 2008 global economic crash awakened many to the inherent 
precariousness of the global capitalist world-system, and it has 
provoked renewed demands for financial regulation as well as 
revolutionary speculations concerning the end of capitalism 
itself.Phenomena such as the critical success of films like /The Big 
Short/ and the unexpected resonance of Bernie Sanders’ presidential 
primary campaign have drawn attention to (and fostered discontent 
around) the dangers of speculative finance, yet for many, speculative 
finance is a problem akin to global warming: It seems to occur beyond 
the size and scale of everyday experience, and it seems nearly 
unapproachable in terms of critical praxis. Thus, at a nearly universal 
level, the distance between everyday life and the systemic structures of 
late capitalism now seem incommensurable and irreal. In the face of such 
irreality, speculative genres offer unique and extraordinary critical 
perspectives concerning our contemporary financialized existence.

This edited collection seeks essays that examine a broad range of 
imaginative productions that bridge the relationships between finance 
speculation and speculative fiction.The volume’s organizing principle is 
that speculative fiction, as a particularly modern form, has often (if 
not always) been attuned to the speculative and fantastical nature of 
capitalist economics.

Contributions may thus include articles that examine utopias and 
dystopias, literary speculative fiction, science fiction, fantasy, New 
Weird fiction, and other non-mimetic literary imaginings. We also 
welcome contributions that move beyond the literary, including all forms 
of digital and graphic media, film, and performance. Likewise, we 
encourage contributions that focus on work from any and all global, 
national, extranational, or regional positions.

In terms of the analysis of speculative finance, we recognize that 
neither finance nor speculation are originary conditions of the 
twenty-first century, even as they have combined to form a dominant 
center in the global 21st century economy. Therefore, we seek a broad 
historical approach that limns the origins, development, and rise to 
global hegemony of speculative finance, and we welcome contributions 
that examine the beginnings of speculative finance in early speculative 
fiction and within imperial systems of extraction, finance, and market 
formation/consolidation. We also encourage investigations of the 
contemporary relationships between speculative fiction and speculative 
finance, and, given the universal ramifications of financialization, we 
welcome essays from a diverse set of critical positions.

Questions to consider may include (but are not limited to) the following:

·What can science fictional economies tell us about fictive capital (and 
vice versa)?

·How does literary speculation illuminate, fortify, and/or challenge the 
models of futurity embodied within finance capital and its associated 
speculative instruments and practices?

·Is the (lack of) futurity in dystopian sf relatable to the ontology of 
debt?

·How can the tools of sf studies such as cognitive estrangement or the 
novum help us to understand the invention of financial instruments — 
e.g. the credit default swap — and the new financial worlds they built 
around them?

·What might the operations of speculative finance reveal about the 
futures, the otherworlds, and the alternate histories produced by our 
speculative narrative forms?

·Is bitcoin a science fictional currency?

·Are the disjunctive temporalities of (New) Weird fiction mappable to 
the waves of commodity production and financialization?

·Is the “speculative” of speculative fiction the same as that of 
speculative finance?

·How does the imbrication of the futures industry, futures trading, and 
sf/f futurism relate to speculative finance and the universalization of 
indebted life?

·What can utopianism as an economic subset of sf tell us about the 
development of speculative finance?

·Do feminist utopias as alternate social configurations provide 
critiques of the phallocentric drives of finance capitalism?

·How is sf franchising related to the logics of financialization, 
commodification, and debt?

·How might the application of feminist epistemology to technoscientific 
sf help to reveal sf’s complicity with the ideology of financialization?

·How might the disjunctive temporalities of time travel, multiple worlds 
and/or alternate history critique the disjunctive aspects of finance 
capital and its predation on the future?

·What can sf/f world-building reveal about the operation of global 
capitalist world-systems theory (and vice versa)?

·What does the ludic aspect of speculative narrative – including the 
prominence of gaming and simulation – tell us about the universalization 
of individualized risk and/or futures trading as key aspects of the 
global shadow economy?

·How does the imbrication of fictive economies with real economies in 
contemporary video games relate to the conditions of speculative finance?

Prospective contributors should submit a 300-500 word abstract, contact 
information, and a brief bio or CV to both David M. Higgins 
((dmhiggin /at/ gmail.com) <mailto:(dmhiggin /at/ gmail.com)>) and Hugh Charles 
O’Connell ((Hugh.OConnell /at/ umb.edu) <mailto:(Hugh.OConnell /at/ umb.edu)>).

Abstracts are due November 1, 2016.Completed essays will be due in May 
2017 with the goal of a late 2017 or early 2018 publication date.

Sincerely,

David M. Higgins, Inver Hills College ((dmhiggin /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(dmhiggin /at/ gmail.com)>)

Hugh Charles O’Connell, University of Massachusetts Boston 
((Hugh.OConnell /at/ umb.edu) <mailto:(Hugh.OConnell /at/ umb.edu)>)



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