Positioning Asia in a Global Future? An Example through Rethinking Finance

As a response to positions' twentieth-anniversary workshop that solicited suggestions on the future direction of the journal, this article raises questions on how to study Asia without falling into traps of reproducing capitalist discourse that reduces the significance of Asia to its economic value. By contextualizing ways in which Asia is commodified as a promise to the global future at the same time it is chastised as yet to be civilized for the market economy, the article urges the investigation of the history of financialization in Asia as a window of rethinking “global” history of capitalism for challenging oversimplified imagination of the trajectory of finance capital and “global financial crisis.”

Capital (architecture · Capitalism · China · Commodification · East Asia · Economic history · Economics · Economy · Financial crisis · Financialization · Keynesian economics · Neoclassical economics · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Value (mathematics · History · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Law · Finance