This volume approaches the issue of the 2008 global financial crisis from a perspective that situates the crisis within the broader history of ＂the colonial and racial matrix of capitalist
accumulation of land (conquest and settlement), exploitation of labor (slavery, indentured labor, forced migration), appropriation of resources, and ultimately the very meaning of debt in what
Walter Mignolo called the ’modern/colonial world system.’＂ The first four essays presented by editors Chakravarty (communication, U. of Massachusetts, US) and da Silva (ethics, U. of London,
England) explore connections between the 2008 crisis and previous moments of debt, austerity, and resistance to US-led neoliberal transformations domestically and globally. The next three
essays explore symbolic discourses of the ＂subprime＂ crisis and the ways in which the racial subaltern was presented as unfit for participation in the modern capitalist configurations built by
Europeans and their descendants. The final four contributions explore the contemporary situation for economically dispossessed Blacks and Latinos in the urban United States, ＂in which
postracial discourse and neoliberal practices combine to exact even more profit from the very penury resulting from the expropriation unleashed in previous moments and modalities of racial and
colonial subjugation.＂ Annotation ©2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
