Geoff Mann

Why does country music sound white? Race and the voice of nostalgia

Abstract Since American country music has historical ties to musics of many different regions and racial groups, the answer to the question ‘Why does country music sound white?’ is by no means obvious. This article asks how country became white, and how it stays white. To inquire into why country music sounds white is to wonder what whiteness sounds like, and how it is heard. This article considers the meaning of the sounds of country in the making of a pose of historically ‘innocent’ and ‘besieged’ American whiteness. Focusing on the cultural politics of nostalgia, I argue that in the construction of an idealized past-ness, or ‘used to’, country music not only ‘talks white’, but it is whites who hear it, and whose whiteness is produced and reproduced by what they hear.

Hobbes’ redoubt? Toward a geography of monetary policy

This paper undertakes three tasks: (1) to consider monetary policy’s role in contemporary capitalism and state governance; (2) to introduce the fundamentals of contemporary monetary policy; and (3) to outline some of the material and ideological stakes in the social, political, and economic geographies of monetary policy and central banking as practised in advanced capitalist nation states. I focus on subnational and class effects, arguing that the precarious relation between central banks and national democratic processes has become increasingly tenuous. Empirical examples are drawn from Canada and the USA.

Value after Lehman

This article considers the status and meaning of the category of value in the wake of the financial crisis that began in 2007. I argue that value is best understood as a form of social wealth constituted by a spatially and temporally generalising social relation of equivalence and substitutability under, and specific to, capitalism ‐ and that a categorial focus shows that despite massive ‘devaluations’, the value-relation is not itself in crisis. On the contrary, it is running at near full capacity, erasing the difference between ‘financial’ and ‘real’ capitals, values, and assets. Consequently, attempts to understand the crisis that rely on material distinctions between ‘real’ and ‘fictitious’ values and capitals overstate the extent and depth of the crisis for capital, and underestimate the virtually uninterrupted consolidation of the rule of the value, i.e. the territorial and historical imperative of equivalence and substitutability.

The monetary exception: Labour, distribution and money in capitalism

Contemporary monetary institutions posit money as an ‘exceptional’ domain, outside of democratic sovereign authority in modern capitalist states, on the basis of the claim that without it, liberal democracy would fall apart. Labour’s distributional critique of capitalism and the state must wrestle with the possibility that money in modern capitalism is anti-democratic by definition, and that as such, any social-democratic project of radical redistribution, implicit in labour’s critique of capitalist distribution, will require not merely a different allocation of existing money, but a radically different monetary relation.

Climate Change and the Adaptation of the Political

In the face of climate change, along what path might we attempt transformation that could create a just and livable planet? Recently we proposed a framework for anticipating the possible political–economic forms that might emerge as the worlds climate changes. Our framework outlines four possible paths; two of those paths are defined by what is called “Leviathan,” the emergence of a form of planetary sovereignty. In this article we elaborate by examining the adaptive character of emergent planetary sovereignty. To grasp this, we need a theory that can see through our ostensibly “postpolitical” moment to grasp not the disintegration but the adaptation of the political. What does it mean to say the political adapts? Reduced to its essence, it is to say that if the character of political life prevents a radical response to crisis, then it is the political that must change. A materialist attempt to elaborate on this question must begin by reflecting on the manifest inequalities of power in the current mode of global political-economic regulation. After doing so, we conclude by arguing for a return to the concept of natural history.

A General Theory for Our Times: On Piketty

Thomas Piketty has offered, and many have desperately snatched at, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money of our epoch. Piketty’s affinity with John Maynard Keynes and his groundbreaking 1936 landmark is largely unreflexive. But the ties that bind him to Keynes are powerful, and manifest themselves at many levels in Capital in the Twenty-First Century. The epistemology, the political stance, the methodological commitments, and the politics resonate in imperfect but remarkable harmony. This is no accident, because the world in which Piketty’s book appeared is saturated with the specifically capitalist form of anxiety that Keynes sought to diagnose, and fix, the last time it made the richest economies in the world tremble.

It’s just not true

Simon Springer’s argument for anarchist geography is both an unsubstantiated dismissal of the Marxian tradition and an uncritical celebration of the anarchism he endorses. There may be good reasons to be wary of the influence of Marxism and Marxists in ‘radical’ geography, but his politically ungenerous and analytically wrong representation of Marxism and Marxism geography is not the place to begin.

Keynes resurrected? Saving civilization, again and again

The resurrection of Keynes and Keynesianism in the wake of the recent financial crisis is widely assumed to index the similarities between the present conjuncture and the Great Depression. But Keynesian reason—an analytical approach to the contradictions at the core of liberal capitalist civil society—is much older and has animated ‘progressive’ liberal and Left thought since Hegel reflected on the consequences of the French Revolution. What drives this persistent knee-jerk Keynesianism, and why has it become so central to progressive and Left politics in capitalist societies? This article argues that the key to understanding both Keynes and the persistent appeal of Keynesianism lies in a widely shared, and increasingly unshakeable, fear of disorder, populist reaction, and distrust of mass politics, sentiments shared by both liberals and ‘progressives’. In these conditions, what appears to be at risk is not so much the current order as order itself, and the capacity to imagine a political trajectory outside the bounds of existing structures is so constrained as to make those very structures seem like the only means of escape. The constant renewal of Keynesianism, by radicals and liberals, is today built in to both liberal and Left thinking, a product of two centuries of political thought in the face of existential threats to the very notion of ‘civilization’.

Money and Finance After the Crisis: Critical Thinking for Uncertain Times

Here we are, a full ten years past the global financial crisis, a time in which postcrisis seems simultaneously a timeless and an aspirational state. The lived consequences of ongoing reconfigurations of financial power and wealth keep the notion of crisis politically salient, almost an organizing concept for our political cultures. In this volume, eight essays and a robust introduction center around essential questions born from the crisis: What happened? And, why does it matter? Specifically, this volume asks what the effects of the crisis have been on finance and to what extent the concepts geographers use to understand finance help us make sense of them. The essays explore crisis geographies—the “dynamic and sometimes volatile post-crisis financial and monetary worlds we inhabit” (p. 1). The critical in the book’s title is reflected in the diversity of approaches to grappling with time, space, scale, and place (not to mention capitalism, which reappears as a concept sporadically); the essays are a heterogenous collection both theoretically and empirically. The editors’ framing essay explores three threads: crisis itself as challenging notions of how the world works (including potentially upending the power of economic orthodoxy); the uneven and compromised performance of state/regulation that followed; and the evolution of the financial system(s) itself—such as approaches to risk transfer and risk mitigation, and the creation of risk-bearing subjects. These latter maneuvers are best understood, the editors argue, through three phenomena (which then form the essay groupings): financialization, financial practices, and financial imaginaries. Financial imaginaries (Part I) constitute the notions we adhere to, even if they are perhaps less salient than we think (e.g., the nation), the way our descriptive language of finance reflects our ideas about what finance is, and the importance of instability to a proper geographic understanding of finance. One chapter explores how we describe finance: both academics and the media invoke metaphors from physics or geography to explain financial systems, to render them legible, to imagine them as earthly phenomena. These imaginaries are also provocative: we experienced instability, so we invoke a spatial concept that feels unstable. The metaphors also hint at the kind of intervention needed to manage them: hydraulics, toxicity, underwater, seized up. What do these ways of imagining finance and its behavior accomplish, politically and theoretically? They support further narratives of bailing out or injecting or opening up or inoculating. Another essay argues that the most central narrative—of instability and uncertainty— has been insufficiently explored by geographers. And there is perhaps no more powerful cultural and political imaginary than the nation. Two essays (one in Part III) explore the limits of the nation as an economic concept, even as it is potentially defined dozens of ways through a financial lens: the national economy, national debt, foreign investment, national monetary systems, and national regulatory action in global financial spaces. It may be true, as one author argues, that balance of payments is a relic, ill suited for the postcrisis time, but it is also true that we have ample examples in recent years of the “ideological reassertion of state 204 BO O K R EV EW

Haute finance in the not-so-quiet revolution: and the bombing of la Bourse de Montréal

ABSTRACT This paper examines a situation in which finance is perceived as imperialist – as immanent to, and serving the interests of, a single ‘culture’ in the colloquial sense. The analysis centres on the long-forgotten 1969 bombing of the trading floor of la Bourse de Montréal (the Montréal Stock Exchange), a moment in an intense phase of the Québécois movement for independence from Canada. Because of the way in which the bombers framed the attack, and its political-economic and discursive contexts, the bombing presents an opportunity to think about key features of the relation between finance and cultural domination or imperialism. These features relate to finance’s specific articulation to the future, uncertainty, and, in the words of the séparatistes of the time, cultural ‘destiny’. The paper has three parts. The first describes the bombing of la Bourse and the public, media, and state responses, linking it to Québécois cultural-political geographies at several scales. Part two places the bombing in the longer-run cultural-politicization of finance in the francophone independence movement, to outline a specifically Québecois critique of finance capital. The third part considers finance’s perceived and real connection to, and thus capacity to shape or constrain, the cultural-political construction of collective possibility.