Migrant remittances and the frontiers of finance
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4848859 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Christine Okoth (0000-0002-4571-0773, King’s College London, London, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Pages | 1-20 |
| Publication date | 2025-09-18 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Interventions (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1369-801X • E-ISSN: 1469-929X |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/1369801x.2025.2555845 |
| OpenAlex | W4414336540 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 25 |
This essay excavates the material foundations of financialization through a reading of two texts in which migrant remittances are centrally positioned as a financial product that reveals financialization’s own indebtedness to the economic structures of colonial export economies. Both Ousmane Sembène’s post-independence, pre-structural adjustment novella Le mandat or The Money-Order (1965) and Nigerian-American author Okey Ndibe’s post-globalization satire Foreign Gods, Inc. (2014) relate the remittance to the circulation of commodities including rice and African artefacts. They do so as a means of highlighting the frontiers of financialization during the era of decolonization and the subsequent limits of financial personhood in the contemporary period. The two texts that this essay engages also confront the close relationship between remittance economies and colonial trade relations from two different ends, namely the recipient of the money-order and its sender. In conversation with scholarship that identifies finance as a crucial component in the making of fiction, this essay proposes that the particular character of the migrant remittance elicits new understandings of finance’s relationship to those processes of abstraction taking place in the sphere of representation
Boom · Colonialism · Conversation · Financialization · Neocolonialism · Remittance · Scholarship · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity · Migration and Labor Dynamics · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy
Genres of the Credit Economy
Modernity at large
Capital Fictions
African Cinema
The Global City
Statement at Ouagadougou (1979)
Global Matters
Literary and Cinematic Scenes of Reading in the Works of Ousmane Sembène
Amandina Lihamba's Gendered Adaptation of Sembene Ousmane's The Money-Order
Consumption and Dependency in Mandabi
The Rules of Abstraction
Literature For The People
Bad Credit
"What If He Did Not Have a Sister [Who Lived in the United States]" Jamaica Kincaid's My Brother as Remittance Text
A Literary Remittance
Accumulation, Dispossession, and Debt
Finance as Capital's Imagination
Basket Cases and Breadbaskets
Culture and Finance Capital
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |