Globalizing Finance: Nostalgia, Desire, and the Market in Contemporary

Laura Finch

Comparative Literature Studies, Volume 55, Number 1, 2018, pp. 1-22 (Article)

Published by Penn State University Press

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/687402

Access provided at 11 Feb 2020 16:59 GMT from MIT Libraries 2016 a. owen aldridge prize winner

globalizing finance: nostalgia, desire, and the market in contemporary shanghai

Laura Finch abstract This paper reads Tash Aw’s Shanghai-set Five Star Billionaire (2014) as a novel that provides an alternative theory of global finance than the standard model that takes Wall Street as its blueprint. Rather than the abstract tech- no-futurity typically associated with finance in Anglo-American literature, Aw’s novel shows that contemporary finance in Shanghai is a form of capital created and experienced through nostalgia. keywords: finance, Shanghai, nostalgia, contemporary, global

‘It’s cyber-capital that makes the future. What is the measurement called a nanosecond?’ ‘Ten to the minus nth power.’ ‘This is what.’ ‘One billionth of a second,’ he said. ‘I understand none of this. But it tells me how rigorous we have to be in order to take adequate measure of the world around us.’ —Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis

This conversation from DeLillo’s 2003 novel Cosmopolis presents a snapshot of one of the difficulties of theorizing capital in the era of financialization. Finance capital acts at inhuman speeds and moves “too rapidly for our mental picture of [it] to remain true to life”1 as Michael Lewis writes in his comparative literature studies, vol. 55, no. 1, 2018. Copyright © 2018. The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

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history of high-tech trading. The perceived acceleration of capital creates a problem of cognitive mapping: I understand none of this. A counterpoint to the future draw of finance capital is the way that it obscures the past. Cosmopolis’s New York is littered with historical forms of capital that appear out of joint: the word skyscrapers “belonged to the olden soul of awe,”2 the acronym ATM is “aged and burdened by its own historical memory,”3 and cash registers should be “confined to display cases in a museum.”4 In oppo- sition to these objects embedded in history, finance capital appears in the novel as time itself: it is “the future . . . impatient[, p]ressing upon us.”5 The regimenting and standardizing abilities of measured time that once allowed for the spread of capital in modernity (Taylorism, the synchronizing of railroad schedules) have become reversed in DeLillo’s present, where time is both created and owned by finance. History recedes in the taillights of the present, hyperbolically distant in our rearview mirrors: “the past,” says Eric Packer, DeLillo’s protagonist, “is disappearing. We used to know the past but not the future. This is changing. We need a new theory of time.”6 Fredric Jameson’s work on finance has sought to supply this new theory of time. We are familiar with his theory of the enfeeblement of historical consciousness in works such as Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991): the past, encountered only through pastiche, becomes empty nostalgia that stands in as a compensatory symptom for the evacuation of access to true historical consciousness. For Jameson, these historical claims also hold for finance capital, which as he writes in “Culture and Finance Capital” (1997) is the economic correlate for postmodernism just as banking and credit were voiced through modernism: “today, what is called postmo- dernity articulates the symptomatology of yet another stage of abstraction, qualitatively and structurally distinct from the previous one, which I have drawn on [Giovanni] Arrighi to characterize as our own moment of finance capitalism.”7 In line with Jameson’s other work on postmodernism, the era of finance capital is one of bad historicism and abstract dematerialization: time is mere “image fragments”8 accompanied by “the vanishing away of affect.”9 For both Jameson and DeLillo, this epoch of accelerated finance is a global one. Jameson writes of it as “specters of value . . . in a vast, worldwide, disembodied phantasmagoria,”10 while the title of DeLillo’s novel names New York as the capital city of the world and a key event occurs when the protagonist’s trading against the yen brings the global economy into freefall. This model of globalization through financial contagion posits Wall Street as the epicenter of postmodern capital, which then spreads globally until the whole planet is blanched out in an ahistorical nightmare ruled by fictional capital. This model seems plausible for what is finance if not global; and cer- tainly, the World Bank and the IMF seek to spread it in its North American Globalizing Finance 3 incarnation the world over. However, it is the centrality of this model that this article seeks to disrupt. The U.S. model of finance as future-oriented and beyond the scale of human understanding can be dislocated by the ­simple inclusion of representations of finance from outside the United States. By thinking beyond “our uncritical habit of conflating epistemological and chronological primacy”11 these alternative experiences of finance become not just copies of the North American version but their own models. Moving beyond the North American canon to consider finance’s global forms demands that I ask a question as yet unvoiced in critical work on finance: why is an inherently transnational economic form theorized through its expression in the United States? Why would the experience of Wall Street be an adequate metonym for global financial experiences? Such a narrative, of course, relies on the hegemonic power of the United States to raise itself to the position of abstract universal, a move similar to the default unmarked position of straight white male or the universalizing position of the West that works such as Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe, Andre Gunder Frank’s ReOrient, and Martin W. Lewis’s The Myth of Continents seek to decenter. These universals—white, male, straight, American, democratic— are not merely formally similar but collaborate to create an ur-narrative of American finance that is then considered to be corrupted and weakened in its spread to people of color, women (through microfinance), and the “undemocratic” (China). This article presents an opposing picture of finance capital, locating the ways that globalized finance is not merely a derivative of the American model and in so doing disrupts the American universalism of current theories of finance. The centrality given to North American experience when theorizing global finance is in part also due to the influential framework provided by Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth-Century (1994), the tacit backdrop to almost all Marxist-inflected work in recent finance studies including Jameson’s 1997 essay. Following world system theorists Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein, Arrighi offers a neat expression of the cycles of capitalist accumulation arguing that the dominant economic powers of capitalism—identified as Venice (1450–1650), the United Provinces (1650–1800), the United Kingdom (1800–1920), and the United States (1920 to present day)—exhibit a similar model of growth and decline throughout the course of their imperial reign. He maps this pattern onto Marx’s general formula of capital, M-C-M’: “the first stage, M-C, is the material expan- sion of capital accumulation where money sets commodities in motion and spatial expansion is undertaken to benefit capital accumulation, first within the nation and then externally in imperial endeavors. When the limits of expansion have been reached capital is returned to its money form (C-M’) 4 Comparative Literature Studies

and profits return to the financialized center in the creation of wealth without capital, M-M’.” To adequately theorize finance at the turn of the nineteenth century, then, one would need to read simultaneously the novels of British decline (such as Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now) as well as those depicting nascent American wealth (such as Theodore Dreiser’s The Financier).12 This is borne out in the heat map of economic criticism: work done on fictions of finance shows a strong grouping of interest in British realism at the end of the nineteenth century13 and in American naturalism and modernism at the start of the twentieth.14 However, in the current moment of transition work on finance remains within the U.S. archive. This is perhaps due to Arrighi’s uncertainty over the next imperial power in line, although he speculates that it will be China. In a 2015 essay, Jameson attempts to respond to the exemplary globality of the current financial market with a reworking of “Culture and Finance Capital.” In “The Aesthetics of Singularity” Jameson returns to finance, rearticulating his earlier argument while also adding a new dimension to it. Referring to his earlier essay, Jameson writes that:

after my initial work on what I would now call postmodernity, a new word began to appear, and I realized that this new term was what had been missing from my original description. The word, along with its new reality, was globalization; and I began to realize that it was globalization that formed, as it were, the substructure of postmodernity, and constituted the economic base of which, in the largest sense, postmodernity was the superstructure.15

Moving to identify the cultural form that is appropriate to the current global financial moment Jameson proposes the postmodern artistic event. Taking the derivative (a contract between two or more parties that wagers on the risk associated with an underlying financial instrument) as the “par- adigmatic”16 financial form, Jameson evolves a theory of the artistic event out of the temporality of this financial instrument. The time of the deriv- ative is of particular importance to Jameson: “there can never be another derivative quite like [the previous] one in its structure and requirements. Indeed, it is more like a unique event than a contract” thus, he concludes, “the postmodern artistic singularity-effect . . . is of the same unique type as that unique one-time financial instrument called the derivative.”17 The three artistic events that Jameson cites are the Chinese artist XuBing’s Tian Shu (1987–1991), an installation of four hundred handmade books and scrolls exhibiting four thousand Chinese characters none of which Globalizing Finance 5 are “real”; Damien Hirst’s “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” (1991) (i.e., that-one-with-the-shark); and Tom McCarthy’s novel Remainder (2005), a ­postmodern romp through mem- ory fragments and simulacra. We have a globally selected range of artists. However, can they be so easily used to exemplify the globality of finance? The choice of the derivative as the financial equivalent to these art works renders Bing’s inclusion problematic: the derivative is an Anglo-American financial instrument, and has been central to theorizations of Western finance as bottomless abstraction. However, in China the futures market was not launched until 2010 and derivatives only came into their own in the spring of 2015. To include this piece as an example of a globalized theory of finance is to read it through an Americanized financial lens. Works by Jameson and DeLillo and also Max Haiven, Edward LiPuma, and Benjamin Lee read the spread of finance as a seamless global process. In so doing, their analysis is inevitably one that encounters finance as an abstraction. However, there has been a recent move in the humanities to theorize the quotidian effects and affects of finance capital.18 Randy Martin has termed this encroachment of finance into life as “the financialization of daily life,” described by Jason Read as “a generalization of the idea of the ‘entrepreneur,’ ‘investment’ and ‘risk’ beyond the realm of finance capital to every quotidian relation.”19 The intimacy that my account of finance seeks to elucidate is its affective dimension as a personalization of the global economy. It could not be described as inclusive exactly, for there is no group into which it brings people. It is rather a decoupling of the economy from wealth so that one can inhabit a financial subjectivity while still being excluded from the economy. This affective attachment makes a financialized narrative of the economy a little different to the exclusion from wage labor: when you are laid off by the subcontractor to Amazon that has employed you for seasonal work, your distance from economic inclusion is pretty clear. Financialization offers a narrative of personalized economic agency that does not necessarily rest on capital. In particular, the arena of personal financial products provides a suture between an excluded economic subject and a financial existence. Although “financial self-help [provides] a vehicle by which economic concepts, language, and techniques reach mass audiences unlikely to have direct contact with more legitimate forms of economic expertise,”20 wealth is in fact secondary to work on the self if we are to believe Robert Kiyosaki, author of the top-selling series of personal financial books,Rich Dad, Poor Dad. The genre of personal finance is a descendent of the Benjamin Franklin style success manual and its subsequent uptake in the Horatio Alger series. 6 Comparative Literature Studies

In its modern form, it grew out of the American depression of the 1920s, colliding fortuitously with the nascent self-help industry (Olen). This North American genre has become a global phenomenon. Financial therapy has been going strong in burgeoning financial economies beyond the United States and Western Europe since the early 1990s, both home-grown and in translation. Buoyantly titled American books such as The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Don’t Eat the Marshmallow Yet, and Who Moved My Cheese? are popular across South Asia: in South Korea in the 1990s the most popular section of the bookstore was the self-improvement section21, Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People was a bestseller throughout this decade, the Franklin Diary, a daily planner named after Franklin, became a popular business accoutrement; and Who Moved My Cheese? translated into Mandarin in 1999, sold over three million copies by 2013 with another six million pirated copies estimated to be on the market. In the same year, six of the top ten best-selling foreign books in China were books of personal finance, selling well in English and in translation. While the radical individualism of Franklin’s advice remains, the rise of finance capital shifts the focus from industriousness—“sloth makes all things difficult, but industry all easy,”22 writes Franklin—to the labor-free gain promised by finance capital. While both Franklin and Koyasaki’s aim is to create free time, Franklin suggests that you need to outrun time by laboring vigorously in order to earn your freedom; the startling advice of the current self-help genre is its disdain for labor as a concept; it in fact “completely discards employability as a worthy goal,”23 and in fact “the difference between one’s material conditions and one’s chances of mobility is a defining feature of [contemporary] financial self-help.”24

Beyond Wall Street

While work on finance has been slow to theorize finance globally, literature itself has not. From within the Anglophone novel tradition, the last decade has brought fictions of finance from Nigeria (Okey Ndibe’sForeign Gods, Inc., 2014), South Africa (Lauren Beukes’s Moxyland, 2008 and Zoo City, 2010, and Zinaid Meeran’s Tanuki Ichiban, 2012), Pakistan (Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, 2013), India (Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, 2008 and Anuvab Pal’s 1800 Dial India, 2011). It has also enticed Anglo-American authors to set their work outside of the United States: China (Tash Aw’s Five Star Billionaire, 2014), Thailand (Paolo Bacigalupi’s Globalizing Finance 7

The Windup Girl, 2009), and outer space (David Louis Edelman’s Infoquake, 2006). There are also those transnational fictions that cover multiple sites: Joseph O’Neill’s The Dog (2014) and Dave Egger’s A Hologram for the King (2013) straddle New York and Dubai; Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know (2014) covers New York, London, Afghanistan; Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (2014) depicts a hybrid world of China and North America; and DeLillo’s Zero K (2016) skips between New York and subter- ranean cryogenic catacombs under southeast Kazakhstan. The proliferation of styles and genres that make up this financial archive should make us question the ease with which “global finance” is currently theorized through the novels of straight white men on Wall Street such as Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, and DeLillo’s Cosmopolis. Some, such as The White Tiger, displace Wall Street from the center of the financial world: this epistolary novel is addressed from an entrepreneurial protagonist in Bangalore to the Chinese Premier, creating an Indian-Chinese transnationalism that excludes the United States in its belief that “the future of the world lies with the yellow man and the brown man.”25 Others such as On Such a Full Sea posit a future where China has colonized North America after an ecological catastrophe, disrupting the assumption that the United States will remain a key player in future global circuits. This article takes as a specific caseFive Star Billionaire (2014) by Malaysian-British author Tash Aw. Aw’s novel of Malaysian immigrants making their way through Shanghai explicitly represents the form of finance in a global city. Unlike The White Tiger, which simply bypasses the United States altogether, Aw’s novel takes on North America; however, unlike the transnational fictions that loop the United States into larger global circuits, Aw’s novel does not interrogate North American financial hegemony at the level of content, but at the level of form. While Five Star Billionaire barely mentions the United States, the novel is modeled on a historically North American genre: that uniquely neoliberal blend of entrepreneurial calculation and self-help known as the book of financial self-help.Five Star Billionaire mimics the book of personal finance with chapter titles such as “Move to Where the Money is,” “Reinvent Yourself,” “Cultivate an Urbane, Humorous Personality,” “Choose the Right Moment to Launch Yourself,” and “Know When to Cut Your Losses.” Within the novel, the genre is duplicated: while the novel as a whole mimics personal financial books, we are also introduced to a book within the book: financier Walter Chao is the author of a finan- cial self-help book called “Five Star Billionaire,” a doubling that is itself indicative of the transportability of the form of the financial self-help book. 8 Comparative Literature Studies

By using the form of a “how-to” book on personal finance and filling it with a content specific to characters in Shanghai, Aw’s novel disrupts the narrative that finance can be exported unchanged. Just as Aw’s novel, certain formal elements of finance may be exported from the United States, but the content of finance is filled by the location that it is in. Rather than dismissing finance as nonhuman, Aw explores the ways that people connect to the life narrative offered by finance.Five Star Billionaire follows several characters as they move to Shanghai and make their way through the city: Phoebe Chen Aiping, a young Malaysian immigrant looking for work; Yinghui Leong, a financier in her 30s who abandons her bohemian youth for business; Gary Gao, a young man who transforms himself into a pop star before crashing out of the limelight; Walter Chao, the shady financier and author of book within a book, Five“ Star Billionaire”; and Justin Lim, a young businessman adopted into a wealthy family who falls into despair and withdraws from finance as his family’s fortune collapses. Taking as a premise of its narrative the real subsumption of the personal to the financial, which has engulfed deeply private areas of human life, Aw’s characters exhibit a spectrum of contingent selfhoods in response to finance. Following two of these characters—Phoebe, a young woman obsessed with financial self-help books and the financier Justin —my reading of Aw’s novel puts pressure on the idea of a twenty-first century epoch of global finance as inevitably centered on that thicket of big swinging dicks that we know as Wall Street.

Engendering Desire

The only affect that is tied to global finance when theorized through the lens of North America is one of melancholy at the long withdrawing roar of the U.S. Empire as its assets are financialized. The affect that finance brings is not attached to finance but is the scum left behind as capital disappears to a new location, a feeling of being left high and dry often described as a “a sign of autumn” following the language of Braudel. The melancholy of a fading season is accompanied by nostalgia for the misremembered solidity of pro- duction and industry. Nathan Hensley identifies this desire for solidity based in the past as the financialized late style of empire, where “the once-secure ontological and political order [is] now dying, falling, cooling.”26 A similar lament can be heard in Jameson’s “Culture and Finance Capital,” where the solidity of the past is abandoned by capital, which “like the butterfly stirring Globalizing Finance 9 within the chrysalis, [s]eparates itself from that concrete breeding ground and prepares to take flight”27 leaving the United States awash with the affective residue of financialization: melancholy nostalgia. These interpretations have been taken up broadly, a language of autumnal abandonment that currently infuses all work that theorizes finance as a structure of feeling. Phoebe’s affective tie to finance is not melancholy but exhilaration meanwhile the financier Justin is not master of the universe—he is in fact a melancholy character. However, his melancholy is the affect through which finance exerts itself in Justin’s Shanghai, rather than the feeling of its absence. In both cases, finance is not a homogenous will to speed but deeply personal. Five Star Billionaire goes some way toward showing us what this version of finance might look like: not capitalism with Chinese character- istics (as it is commonly referred to) but Chinese capitalism, which should inform our understanding of finance as uchm as the Anglo-American model currently does. Phoebe sees excerpts from Chao’s “Five Star Billionaire” on television and recites quotes from it as her mantra. Characters also school and scold themselves with an internalized narrative of entrepreneurial subjectivity, so that this language of self-investment appears on the cover of the book, as chapter titles, as quotes from Chao’s “Five Star Billionaire,” and also rever- berates through the inner thoughts and speech of the novel. This movement across scales is indicative of the transportability of the narrative of personal finance, and the variety of ways it plays out across the book reveals its mutability and adaptability to on-the-ground realities. The seriousness with which Aw’s novel uses this form to think through the intertwinement of personal and financial in contemporary Shanghai makesFive Star Billionaire a unique theorization of finance. I classify Aw’s interest in Phoebe asseri- ous to differentiate it from the way that female finance is marketed in the United States. The titles of feminized self-help books are indicative of the gender politics at play: The Frugalista Files; Shoo, Jimmy Choo: the Modern Girl’s Guide to Spending Less and Saving More!; Bitches on a Budget: Sage Advice for Surviving Tough Times in Style; A Purse of Your Own: An Easy Guide to Financial Security (all published in 2010). Treating the reader as an infantilized spendthrift, these books offer fluffy financial basics packaged in a rom-com style. They also advocate for a conservative saving of wealth rather than the more dynamic schemes of male-marketed books that offer ways to increase your wealth. Five Star Billionaire shows its female characters, especially Phoebe, interested in historically feminized spheres such as fashion and dating. These arenas are not belittled but are staged as a vital site of self-creation and a 10 Comparative Literature Studies

powerful narrative engine for the novel itself. That they are one’s only access to economic achievement also leads to a total linking of self and success. And as Robert Kiyosaki writes, “we have the choice to be rich, poor or middle class. That decision is up to you, regardless of which class you are in today.”28 The desperate precarity of an indefatigable desire can be heard in Phoebe’s mantra: “Phoebe Chen Aiping, every second of the day offers a beautiful opportunity to achieve success. Therefore you have 86,400 chances to change your life every day.”29 The financialized self becomes like the MM′ of Marx’s formula where money creates money without the visible presence of labor, an “automatic fetish, self-expanding.”30 And yet, like Marx’s formula, the labor of capital is still there. While finance capital, Marx writes, “no longer bears the birthmarks of its origin”31 and thus appears as the creation of wealth without labor, as Joshua Clover reminds us the labor is always merely deferred and “the financialized formula M-M′ is in fact always the formula M-M′[C]. The labor commodity is not truly routed around.”32 For Phoebe, the creation of infinite yet effortless desire is an act that is paid for—and in full—by the labor of embodiment. Our first glimpse of Phoebe is as an observer in a cafe in Shanghai:

Phoebe had noticed [the wealthy man] as soon as he walked through the door, his walk so confident, soft yet bouncy. He must have grown up walking on carpet. He ordered two lattes and a green-tea muffin and paid with a silver ICBC card that slipped out of a wallet . . . It was strange how Phoebe noticed such things nowadays, as swift and easy as breathing. She wondered when she had picked up that habit. She had not always been like this.33

It may not look like the hidden labor of finance but of course it is: her per- ception is altered, becoming sensitive to the shaping power of finance both in others and herself, attuned to the habitus of wealth that creates the easy bounce of a cushioned walk and the frictionless sliding of bank cards from wallets. After this moment, Phoebe literally takes on a new persona, stealing the identity card of the wealthy man’s girlfriend. This card is essential for Phoebe to find employment: in China in 2013, of a mainland population of 1,360.72 million, the number living away from their household registration was 289 million, of which 245 million were members of the floating popu- lation (liudong renkou, those who have not transferred their hukou [a record in the system of household registration required by law] when they moved), existing in the paradox of being illegal aliens in their own country. Phoebe’s flexibility to arrive in a new city and take on a new name gives her the ability Globalizing Finance 11 to discard her rural Malaysian identity and earn a living: “New China was amazing, she could see for herself. No one asks too many questions; no one cares where you are from. All that counts is your ability. If you can do a job, you’re hired.”34 Under finance, the successful person doesn’t become a brand but becomes an opportunity for finance to flow through. Fans of the Rich Dad, Poor Dad board game are aware of this fact: “part of the game is creating a habit you don’t currently have”35 and realizing that “the biggest thing you have to learn from that game is that you are your worst enemy.”36 This flexibility of personhood is gendered inFive Star Billionaire, where the female characters are better at adapting than the male. The financier Justin Lim is told “the thing about you is that you have no fantasy. You can’t imagine being anything other than yourself.”37 Phoebe, however, has no fixed self. While the male characters in Five Star Billionaire hold on to the idea of the individual and tediously search for “a chance to do the most exciting thing of all: to reveal [their] true identity”38 whenever they can, the female characters use the gendered resources of an adaptive style to survive. Phoebe realizes that “she couldn’t turn back now. The fake Phoebe had become too much a part of the real one; their histories were the same now, there was no difference between them,”39 while Yinghui Leong, a successful businesswoman, “named her spa [Apsara] for those celestial nymphs whose name evoked grace and beauty, but she had, in fact been thinking of their other attribute —their shape-shifting power, their ability to constantly evolve at will.”40 The formation of young women in China through their capacity to desire has been theorized by Lisa Rofel, who writes of the saturation of the social by desire:

Where in the 1980s [in China], people spoke to me about how they sought to grapple with the effects of state policies in their lives, a decade later people excitedly showed me their home furnishings, talked to me about gay cruising or extramarital sexual affairs, shared their schemes for making money, and fantasized about travel and their desire to get to America. At times, it seemed to me that the kinds of yearnings, passions, or hopes need not be specified, so long as someone could assert she or he had the capability of embodying the figure of a ‘desiring subject.’41

Rofel convincingly links this desiring self to a renunciation of the austerity of the socialist past; Aw’s book shows that desire works both to turn away from socialist renunciation and to create a selfhood capable of surviving the flexibility demanded by a financializing economy. 12 Comparative Literature Studies

The ability of young women to offer the flexible skills necessary to join the financializing of Asia is different from other entrances of women into the economy. The necessity of thinking the traditionally male-oriented sphere of production alongside the female-gendered reproduction of capitalism (what Nancy Fraser, citing Marx, calls the “hidden abode of production”42) takes another step here. The adaptive and reactive sensorium that Phoebe exhibits is not akin to the hidden support for the male sphere of production; nor is it central to the flow of female workers into industries that demand affective labor as part of their role (such as teaching, nursing, or sex work). Neither is it the targeting of women for microfinancial initiatives through organizations such as the World Bank and the IMF, which demand a clear identity and a promise of stability from the recipient. (The legitimation of a global economic subject through recognition and inclusion is central to the work of the World Bank. James Wolfensohn, former World Bank President, reminisces of a trip to a favela in Rio where he met women who “came up to me displaying receipts for a few reals a month,” which he interprets as “the first time in their lives that their existence has been officially recognized. This is the first time that they have been included in society.”43) Finance in contemporary Shanghai does not work through this kind of recognition. Social belonging is not part of the deal: you do not have to be a national citizen, nor does anyone have to know your real name (as we see with Phoebe) in order to succeed as a financial self. While the narrative of finance takes Phoebe from rural Malaysia to Shanghai, its collaboration with and through already existing inequalities puts the brakes on any truly liberatory impulse. At the conclusion of the book, Phoebe throws her own journal of personal finance away, synecdochically also discarding Aw’s novel:

She had wanted to throw [her ‘Journal of My Secret Self ’] ceremo- niously into the Huangpu River, as she had always planned to do. In her dreams, she would be rich and successful when she cast adrift the journal that contained her darkest fears and ambitions. But now that she was leaving – now that she was a failure – it seemed meaningless and empty to perform such a grand ritual. She took it from her bag and dropped it into a rubbish bin.44

This disjuncture of revolutionary scale—the ability to imagine a theoretically different future through discarding the book but the difficulty of linking this to the lived experience of the most vulnerable characters in the novel—is a problem for the critical theorization of finance. However, Aw’s novel Globalizing Finance 13 at least acknowledges the ways that these two scales work with, through, and against each other, rather than merely reiterating a depiction of finance as in opposition to the human.

Back to the Future

Where yesterday meets tomorrow in Shanghai today. —Shanghai Project

As well as showing the lure of a financialized narrative of the self for those with unlimited economic opportunities Aw’s novel also presents a more tra- ditional financial character who interacts with high finance. While Phoebe and other female characters show how to interact with finance without a formal link to the economy, Five Star Billionaire also shows large-scale finance. In this desire to straddle scales,Five Star Billionaire is rare among contemporary literature of the economy. It is perhaps a failing of the novel that those scales are united only through sexual relationships (Yinghui Leong has relations with Justin Lim, and Yinghui and Phoebe both have relations of sorts with Walter Chao). If it is a failing, it is as in any attempt to represent the unfolding present of the contemporary, an interesting one and tells us something about the difficulty of thinking of high finance and personal finance together. While Justin and Phoebe do not interact, their relationship with finance across scalar differences does contain affective similarities, for just as Phoebe had to open herself to becoming a self that desires, Justin had to create a self that remembers. Adopted at a young age by the Lim family, Justin is the unwilling heir to LKH holdings, a billion-dollar insurance and property company. Expected to present a brisk business face to the world, Justin is introspective and melancholy. The family business is involved in construction in Shanghai, a city that has literally built itself into a global financial center over the course of a decade. Beyond the usual connection of finance with futurity, in the world’s cultural imagination, Shanghai is often metonymic of the future; and in fact, in the 1990s, the building boom in Shanghai was such that a new version of the city map was printed on average every three months. However, Justin’s lens on urban development is a sepia one creating a nostalgic version of Shanghai from the 1930s instead of the Shanghai of the present. His attachment to this slice of Shanghai’s past is indicated within pages of our first sighting of the character: Shanghai“ Tatler magazine photographed 14 Comparative Literature Studies

him at a black-tie charity event a few weeks after he arrived, his hair slickly swept back in a nod to the 1930, a small white flower in his buttonhole, and a young Western woman in qipao at his side.”45 Beyond the explicit invocation of the 1930s, the outfit of his companion gives greater weight to this historical touchstone. The qipao, a gown with roots in Manchu culture, was modified by Han Chinese and Western influences (the thigh-split, for example, became popular in order to show off Western high heels and stockings) and is a specifically indexical garment. In the 1920s, it experienced a return to fashion, “signif[ying] the emergence of the ‘modern’ woman in China with its relatively looser cut than traditional Han garments.”46 The 1930s saw the cut change to a more formfitting version as the Nationalist Party (1928–1949) demanded a return to gender norms, where “redefining the boundary between male and female was part of the process of sorting out the chaos into which Chinese society had descended.”47 This hyper-femininity withered under the androgynous fashions of Maoism; however, following the contemporary relaxing of attitudes toward Western influences, theqipao has returned—primarily in the service industry as the uniform of hostesses and also at Shanghai black-tie parties.48 This garment that both traces political shifts and also helps to enact them speaks to “a certain nostalgia for the 1930s and of a vague sense of the connection that qipao supplies with a generalized past”49 while skirting over the turbulence of its material history. The introduction of a financier in relation to this evocative piece of politicized fashion is not coincidental. Two elements of this scene are nota- ble. First, that the nostalgia is signified through an item of fashion recalls the relationship between finance and self-fashioning—in particular through gendered desire—that the novel explores. Second, the recall to the 1930s is not a haphazard choice but one deeply redolent of finance’s complicated past in China. A complex history is embedded in the qipao, a history that Justin’s Western companion (or the novel’s reader) may not be aware of, just as the disjointed narrative of globalization that it indexes is often lost in the story of the seamless inclusion of China into the twenty-first century global economy. Rather than a teleology of progression, a split temporality characterizes China’s relationship to global finance; in order to be included in the metonymic chain of modernity/capitalism/finance/globalization there must be a severance from the recent socialist past. While Marxism provided a narrative of revolutionary teleology from feudalism to capitalism to socialism, China’s recent history has reversed the final two stages, effec- tively entering “global modernity” by moving backward through orthodox chronology. In order to combat this paradox of moving forward by stepping backward, global capitalism is rhetorically coupled with progress and futurity. Globalizing Finance 15

While there is nothing new in this coupling of capitalism with progress in China it is accompanied by a simultaneous repudiation of Maoism. As a historical precedent for the arrival of capitalism is required, time is looped back to the 1920s and 30s when Shanghai sailed on the West’s horizon as the “Paris of the East.” This glittering image demands a simultaneous forgetting of the cost of globalization. Shanghai’s inclusion into global circuits was inevitably a violent one, it being among the first of the Chinese cities forced into foreign trade under the Treaty of Nanking (1842).50 This treaty, a result of the Opium War between Great Britain and imperial China (1839–1842), demanded a huge payment from China to Britain (21 million silver dollars), opened five ports to trade (including Shanghai), imposed a tariff on custom duties 5% higher than before, guaranteed foreigners extraterritorial rights exempting them from Chinese law, and granted the British the right to occupy Hong Kong. Ensuing treaties led to the presence of American, French, and Japanese citizens in Shanghai, “a roughly century-long treaty-port period, lasting from the early 1840s through the 1940s, during which time Shanghai underwent an intensive form of forced internationalization.”51 In this treaty-port era, Shanghai hosted up to fifty nationalities52 creating what Ackbar Abbas has termed a foreign “cosmopolitanism of extraterritoriality”53 in the city. The idea that the socialist city was “pickled and preserved . . . [in] ­suspended animation”54 “possessed [of ] an almost museum like quality, where building facades remained unchanged since the 1930s”55 is a recurring theme in depictions of Shanghai. Nostalgia for the “old Shanghai” began in roughly the 1990s at the very moment of intense financial construction. Before this time, the rush to modernize showed little interest in preserving the historic. Abbas suggests that this sudden interest in preservation

is something more complex than just a question of the past remem- bered: in Shanghai, the past allows the present to pursue the future; hence ‘memory’ itself is select and fissured, sometimes indistinguish- able from amnesia. This paradox of the past as the future’s future also throws a particular light on Shanghai’s urban development, which, like preservation, takes on a special quality: Shanghai today is not just a city on the make with the new and brash everywhere – as might be said more aptly of Shenzhen, for example.56

History and preservation go hand-in-hand with capitalist futurity in Shanghai, where “the listed [European-style] buildings on and the chaos of skyscrapers in [the financial] [district] do not so much 16 Comparative Literature Studies

comfort as complement each other on either side of the Huangpu River.”57 The use of history as midwife to the future is almost diametrically opposed to the creation of the central business district in New York that systematically cleared out the thriving mixed-use port area at the southern tip of Manhattan and replaced it with a verticality that offered no concessions to history. Within North America, there is an assumption of a homogenous financial time, radiating from Wall Street outward. However, in China, as Ann Anagnost describes, “the paradoxical unity of the ‘nation’ in time and space has been fragmented by the accretion of layered temporalities within social memory”58 following the abrupt shift into and then out of Maoism. The precision with which economic epochs can be dated in China has also infused financial terms with temporality, where words such as “‘market’ do more than linguistically capture modes of economic coordination. In contemporary China, they also evoke distinctly temporal categories.”59 Of course, within the United States context, economic terms also bear more weight than the purely objective markers that the marginal revolution tried to forge: one need only think of the racialized connotations attached to subprime lending or the moral valence of credit.60 However, they do not signal a temporal epoch beyond that of a broadly defined economic modernity. By contrast, in the context of a postsocialist country entering a global capitalist economy, these terms take on the weight of historical signposts. The opportunism of finance’s narrative to link itself to the 1930s fashion is a parallel construction to its exploitation of the female workforce. By aligning itself with preexisting social and historical narratives, the nascent discourse of finance embeds itself swiftly into preexisting affec- tive pathways. This piggybacking is a consequence of finance’s inability to actually generate more capital; it is not a form of creative destruction but a parasitic dependence that manipulates the abundant resources of the corporeal and emotional. One particular scene involving Justin’s attempt to develop some land in Shanghai demonstrates the symbiotic relationship between the financial and the felt. At the event where we first encounter Justin, he wins a guided tour of the city. Justin and the reader are walked through the longtang of Shanghai (a community centered on interconnected lanes): “these were the famous longtang of Shanghai, [the guide] explained, the ones foreigners fell in love with.”61 Just as the qipao in the previous scene, the longtang operates as an indicator and creator of a financialized Shanghai. Seeing these traditional Shanghai structures, Justin is seized with a desire to develop and modernize them while retaining their historical facade. This ambition is not entirely fictional: in 1998, Hong Kong developer Vincent Lo Globalizing Finance 17 partnered with American architect Ben Wood to create the Xintiandi project in downtown Shanghai, a $200 million development spread over two blocks to house restaurants, clubs, and shops. The project aimed to transform the traditional style housing (two- or three-story brick buildings built by French developers in the early twentieth century) built in the longtang style. While officially described as a renovation project, the plan demolished over 70% of the original buildings and displaced 25,000 households and 800 work units (which included a further 3,800 households and 156 workplaces) in 43 days. The evacuation of the inhabitants is made up for, we are told, by its attraction as a tourist site that draws 50,000 people a day—more visitors than Disneyworld.62 In fact, this project was so successful that developers now use the verb “to Xintiandi” when asking for “aspirational China-lite designs.”63 The removal of current inhabitants for future capital is a move familiar to settler colonialism and gentrification alike, a pre-rehearsed script of obliteration that Justin easily ventrilo- quizes as he enters one of the houses uninvited: “there was a stillness that settled heavily on the house, as if its inhabitants had recently abandoned it, as if the present was already giving way to the past.”64 The tagline of the Xintiandi website—“Where yesterday meets tomorrow in Shanghai today”—neatly sums up the convoluted time involved in the financialization of Shanghai’s landscape in the last twenty years. The invocation of “meet” as the relationship between past and present euphemistically glosses over the swift clearance of populations from the longtang to allow the Shanghai of tomorrow to arrive.65 In order to supply the houses with a past that is appropriate for devel- opment rather than the actual past of its inhabitants, Justin flavors his desire to develop with a historical sweetener: nostalgia. This nostalgia is not an attachment to the dream of a prefinancial history of capitalist production and full employment, which is the nostalgia thought to accompany finance in the United States. Let us walk with Justin through his nostalgia: while he contemplates how he can turn the longtang into a development, he sutures the form of his personal history onto the houses, noting that “th[ey] reminded him of the slums not far from where he grew up [in Malaysia].”66 An elderly woman he sees strikes him with a particular resonance:

There was something about her thin hair, dyed jet-black and set in tight curls, that reminded him of his grandmother . . . He was sur- prised by the glassy clarity of these memories, the way they settled insistently on his waking days like a thin, sticky film that he could not shake off. He had never even been close to his grandmother.67 18 Comparative Literature Studies

Not only does financial nostalgia allow Justin to vacate the inhabited ­properties, it in fact creates memories that did not exist before. The depth and reach of finance as a strategy of self-narration heighten the attachment to the self, but as with Phoebe, this could be any self. Here, a false nostalgic kinship between Justin and his grandmother has a more tenacious grip on Justin’s mind than the present. Returning to the longtang after several months spent planning their redevelopment, he finds them already demolished by another developer. As he looks for the old woman/his grandmother, the narrative descends into an unusually bathetic mode:

an old man cycled past, his face creased and leathery; in the basket between his handlebars was a small poodle wearing a pink quilted coat. It looked at Justin as it went past, its mouth drawn wide as if in a smile, but there were streaks running down from its eyes, like black tears. Justin stood in the brilliant winter sunshine looking at the patch of earth [where the house had been].68

The heavy adjectival load of this paragraph brings an uncharacteristic affective gravitas to Aw’s prose, which is typically measured and consistent in its tone. Justin stands in the cold light where he previously experienced nostalgia for both redevelopment and a personal history. The bathetic image of the swaddled, weeping poodle is unsettling and marks the start of Justin’s descent into deep depression as he abandons his family’s company, which in turn spirals into bankruptcy. The excitement of the amped-up nostalgia that financing a development allowed Justin becomes a surreally cathected location and his inflated emotions swing into depression: “he had lost even more weight. He splashed his face with water and looked into the mirror. His eyes were sunken and dark, his eyes glassy and staring, like a fish at the market, his lips chapped and sore; a verisimilitude of life.”69 The form that finance takes in contemporary Shanghai—a nostalgic return as a launch pad to the future—collides with Justin’s own sense of the past informed by his childhood in rural Malaysia before his adoption by the Lim family. The nostalgic history of finance does not obliterate Justin’s own nostalgic past, but rather connects to and amplifies it. Here, financial attachments work through increased feeling rather than a techno-futuristic affectless speed, the experience akin to the Proust-y madeleine stretching its sugary fingers back in time to claim the past for Justin. Creating nostalgia where it had not previously existed, finance plays fast and loose with Justin’s past, becoming deeply embedded in his emotional register. Globalizing Finance 19

The theorization of U.S. finance à la Jameson, DeLillo, or Ellis’s American Psycho (surely the apogee of the representation of the inhumanity of Wall Street) reads the present experience of twenty-first century financial life as empty and affectless. In contrast, Aw’s Shanghai finance does not mourn the past but seizes it, using the affective power of nostalgia to exhume the capitalist era of the 1930s. The pushing of Shanghai into the futurity of finance cannot occur without nostalgia in order to create a coherent temporal narrative. This is not quite the critical nostalgia of Svetlana Boym’s work. But, it is also not quiescent. While this nostalgia short-circuits history, effacing the cosmopolitanism of international socialism that linked China to Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the former Soviet bloc in the mid-twentieth century, it also weakens the link between finance and the future, allowing a space in which it is conceivable to think of a future without finance. Within the novel’s diegetic space, finance is here to stay; however, bringing the theory of finance it presents out of the novel—one that is entangled in complex temporalities, affects, and corporealities—offers a fulcrum around which to pry finance and futurity apart. This at least to me seems useful: if finance is always placed in front of and separate from the human it becomes further mystified. Careful tracing of its outlines as it changes both historically and spatially bring it back down from the ether to the earth. An attentiveness to this appears as a side note in Arrighi’s Long Twentieth Century, one that has been overlooked in favor of a focus on his pleasingly neat argument for the return of identical cycles. In this small moment, Arrighi writes that the “fundamental reorganization of the system occurs precisely when the ‘same’ (in the form of recurrent financial expansions) appears to return.”70 This reorganization is not revolutionary but it is a movement away from the paralysis of the imagination, that cog- nitive deficit in the face of the monolithic representation of U.S. finance. We should remember that American Psycho is bookended by two lines, both displayed in red capital letters on the walls of New York: “abandon all hope ye who enter here,”71 and “this is not an exit.”72 The blood on the walls is a message of containment. However, if finance is not identical with the future, if it can be shown to use currently existing situations of inequity and tap into quotidian feelings, then it need not be thought of as an incomprehensible phantasmagoria but as subject to social and material analysis as any other stage of capitalist accumulation. laura finch is currently at the University of Michigan as a member of the Society of Fellows and an assistant professor in the Department of English Language and Literature. After this fellowship, she will be joining MIT as 20 Comparative Literature Studies a member of the English Department. She received her PhD in 2016 from the University of Pennsylvania in the program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory. She is currently completing her book manuscript entitled Intimate Economies: Financial Citizenship and Literary Form in the Contemporary Novel and is starting work on her second project Girlish: Empire, Capital, and Impossible Subjects.

Notes

1. Michael Lewis, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2014), 30. 2. Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis: A Novel (New York: Scribner, 2003), 79. 3. Ibid., 54. 4. Ibid., 71. 5. Ibid., 54. 6. Ibid., 86. 7. Fredric Jameson, “Culture and Finance Capital,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 1 (1997): 246–65, 252. 8. Ibid., 265. 9. Ibid., 264. 10. Ibid., 251. 11. Sharae Deckard, Nicholas Lawrence, Neil Lazarus, Graeme Macdonald, Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, Benita Parry, and Stephen Shapiro, Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), 15. 12. For an example of this comparative work see Annette Van, “Ambivalent Speculations: America as England’s Future in The Way We Live Now,” Novel 39, no. 1 (2005): 75–96 and Nathan K. Hensley, “Allegories of the Contemporary,” Novel 45, no. 2 ( June 20, 2012): 276–300. 13. See Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Kathleen Blake, The Pleasures of Benthamism: Victorian Literature, Utility, Political Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Eleanor Courtemanche, The ‘Invisible Hand’ and British Fiction, 1818–1860: Adam Smith, Political Economy, and the Genre of Realism (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Regenia Gagnier, The Insatiability of Human Wants (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: the Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) and The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Mary Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Deidre Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen, eds., The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics (London and New York: Routledge, 1999). 14. See Lawrence Birken, Consuming Desire: Sexual Science and the Emergence of a Culture of Abundance 1871–1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989); Simon J. James, Unsettled Accounts: Money and Narrative in the Novels of George Gissing (London: Anthem Press, 2003); Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Alison Shonkwiler, “Towards a Late View of Capitalism: Dehistoricized Finance in The Financier.” Studies in the Novel, 41, no. 1 (Spring 2009); Michael Tratner, Deficits and Desires: Economics and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). 15. Fredric Jameson, “The Aesthetics of Singularity,” New Left Review (2015): 101–32, 104. Globalizing Finance 21

16. Ibid., 117. 17. Ibid., 123. 18. See Rob Aitken R, Performing Capital. Toward a Cultural Economy of Popular and Global Finance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Johnna Montgomerie, “The Financialization of the American Credit Card Industry,” Competition & Change 10 (2006): 301–19; Gerald F. Davis, Managed by the Markets: How Finance Re-Shaped America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Timothy J. Sinclair, The New Masters of Capital: American Bond Rating Agencies and the Politics of Creditworthiness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008). 19. Jason Read, “Genealogy of Homo-Economicus: Neoliberalism and the Production of Subjectivity,” Foucault Studies (2009): 25–36, 32. 20. Daniel Fridman, Freedom from Work: Embracing Financial Self-Help in the United States and Argentina (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016), 12 21. Jesook Song, “Positioning Asia in a Global FutureŒ An Example through Rethinking Finance,” Positions: Asia Critique 20, no. 1 (2012): 173–82, 89. 22. Benjamin Franklin, The Way to Wealth (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2016), 11. 23. Fridman, Freedom from Work, 35. 24. Ibid., 96. 25. Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger: A Novel (New York: Free Press, 2008), 3–4. 26. Henlsey, “Allegories of the Contemporary,” 295. 27. Jameson, “Culture and Finance Capital,” 251. 28. Richard Kiyosaki, “Rich Dad’s Cashflow Quadrant: Guide to Financial Freedom (Scottsdale, AZ: Plata Publishing, 2011), 6. 29. Ibid., 178. 30. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 3 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1972), 400. 31. Ibid., 518. 32. Joshua Clover, “Autumn of the System: Poetry and Financial Capital,” Journal of Narrative Theory 41, no. 1 (2011): 34–52, 44–45. 33. Ibid., 3. 34. Ibid., 8. 35. Fridman, Freedom from Work, 109. 36. Ibid., 105. 37. Ibid., 131 (italics in original). 38. Ibid., 195. 39. Ibid., 280. 40. Ibid., 306. 41. Lisa Rofel, Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture (Durham: Duke UP, 2007), 405. 42. Nancy Fraser, “Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode,” New Left Review 86 (2014): 55–72, 57. 43. Cited in Suzanne Bergeron, “Challenging the World Bank’s Narrative,” in World Bank Literature, ed. Amitava Kumar (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 159. 44. Ibid., 371. 45. Ibid., 21. 46. Hazel Clark, The Cheongsam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 168–69. 47. Antonia Finnane, “What Should Chinese Women WearŒ: A National Problem,” Modern China 22, no. 2 (1996): 99–131, 117. 48. Adam Geczy, Fashion and Orientalism: Dress, Textiles and Culture from the 17th to the 21st Century (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 189. 49. Finnane, “What Should Chinese Women WearŒ” 170. 50. Rey Chow, Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films: Attachment in the Age of Global Visibility (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 30. 51. Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, “Is Global Shanghai Good to ThinkŒ Thoughts on Comparative History and Post-Socialist Cities,” Journal of World History 18, no. 2 (2007): 199–234, 204. 22 Comparative Literature Studies

52. Ibid. 210–11. 53. Ackbar Abbas, “Cosmopolitan De-scriptions: Shanghai and Hong Kong,” Public Culture 12, no. 3 (2000): 769–86, 774. 54. Anna Greenspan, Shanghai Future: Modernity Remade (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), xxiii. 55. Nancy N. Chen, China Urban: Ethnographies of Contemporary Culture, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 7. 56. Abbas, 780. 57. Ibid., 782. 58. Ann Anagnost, National Past-times: Narrative, Representation, and Power in Modern China (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 2. 59. Lida Junghans, “Railway Workers Between Plan and Market,” China Urban: Ethnographies of Contemporary Culture, ed. Nancy N. Chen. (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 185. 60. See Paula Chakravartty and Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Accumulation, Dispossession, and Debt: The Racial Logic of Global Capitalism—An Introduction,” American Quarterly 64, no. 3 (2012): 361–85 and Annie McClanahan, “Bad Credit: The Character of Credit Scoring,” Representations 126, no. 1 (2014): 31–57. 61. Ibid., 22. 62. Greenspan, Shanghai Future, 113. 63. Ben Wood, “Our Man in Shanghai: Ben Wood Takes on History,” New York Times, 13/08/2013, n.p. 64. Ibid., 22. 65. Greenspan, Shanghai Future, 113. 66. Ibid., 23. 67. Ibid., 24. 68. Ibid., 27. 69. Ibid., 30–31. 70. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (London: Verso, 1994), 375. 71. Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho: a Novel (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 1. 72. Ibid., 399.