Christopher Forster-Smith

The Color of Creditworthiness: Debt, Race, and Democracy in the 21st Century addresses the historical and contemporary politics of debt and race. It addresses the practices of debt and race together by demonstrating how debt has served as a central rhetorical and material nexus for producing asymmetrical power relationships between subjects figured as creditors or debtors through techniques for evaluating creditworthiness in varying combinations of moral, racial, economic, and political terms. The project proposes to view the creditor-debtor relation as the primary power relation underpinning capitalist society and liberal democracy, challenging a foundational assumption in liberal political theory and neoclassical economics that views exchange between contracting citizens or free-market actors as axiomatic. By contrast, the dissertation argues that capitalism and liberal democracy are based on asymmetrical power relations between creditor subjects who enjoy the political privilege ...