Debt, Vulnerability, and Forms of Care

The question of debt, in particular, has defined the fate of many countries from the Global South. In addition to debts accrued by states through lending agreements with other states and international monetary institutions, there are individual debts which have had a direct effect on governance policy: punishing and criminalizing debtors as well as fostering notions of individual irresponsibility that deflect both from debt-based forms of subjection and modes of resistance to them. The withdrawal of state funding for social services in neoliberal governance has produced forms of vulnerability and the rise of debt that facilitates social control. How this happens, and what interventions are possible both locally and internationally, will form key questions for participants in these workshops. Another question will concern the efforts and struggles against the contemporary politics of financial debt and indebtedness. Finally, these workshops will also examine how the colonial and imperial histories of debt and bankruptcy have helped to form the circumstances of the present world, and seek to understand experimental efforts to present and overcome this legacy.

Materials

Debt and indebtedness – sovereign, private and personal – mark the histories and the present conditions of life in the global south. The operations of debt are implicated in nature’s plundering, colonial relations, geopolitics, racism, property, gendered relations, immigration, and lasting occupations. Colonial and public debts have for centuries devastated and impoverished populations as well as their territories. The wreaking of local institutions, through the withdrawal of state funding for community investments and social services during decades of neoliberalism, has produced distinct forms of vulnerability, while facilitating new avenues of control. Debt’s history is even longer. Financial capitalism and its contemporary forms of occupation and colonization build upon the complex legacies of plantation economies, dispossession, and slavery. Bodies and territories can be read as material inscriptions of these historical itineraries.

Confronted with all forms of colonial debts that devastate conditions of life, as well as with individual debt-based forms of subjection, communities in the global south have continued to invent and cultivate practices that foster care, solidarity, connectedness, forms of resistance and struggle. In different sites of the global south, we observe old and new practices of care-as-solidarity that offset and enable persistence in the midst of destitution and wreckage. These practices are not necessarily perceived as economic or financial activities, nor do they operate wholly outside subjugating structures of debt, but they offer a window onto persistent or alternative forms of life. Similarly, we are in the midst of creating new ways of experiencing and relating to nature that refuse capital’s extractive operations as they continue to be fueled by new forms of debt.

Marked by the history and present of colonial debt, Puerto Rico—its people, territories and struggles—offer us a trans-territorial and nature-nestled historical perspective. By convening activists, artists, and scholars from Puerto Rico as well as from the global south, we hope to critically unpack the operations of debt, and to articulate old and emergent practices of care-as-solidarity.