A major factor leading to the U.S. financial crisis was predatory lending by large banks to underprivileged and often nonwhite borrowers.

Predatory lending of subprime mortgages targeting the most economically vulnerable minority communities helped trigger the current global financial crisis. This special issue of the journal American Quarterly explores the ways in which “subprime” becomes a racial signifier in the current debate about the causes and fixes for a capitalism itself in crisis. It signifies both the accumulated dispossession of racial exclusion in the twenty-first century gilded age in the United States and Global North more broadly, as well as the imperial ambitions of three decades of U.S.–led neoliberal rule over the Global South. Essays are divided into sections: debt, discipline, and empire; the pathologies of debt; and security, space, and resistance in the post-racial urban setting. Focusing on race and empire, that is, on racial and global subjugation, the contributors expose the ethical-political underpinnings of the current global financial crisis.

Contributors include:
Radhika Balakrishnan
Jordan T. Camp
Paula Chakravartty
Ofelia Ortiz Cuevas
Sophie Ellen Fung
Daniel J. Hammel
James Heintz
Bosco Ho
Zachary Liebowitz
Tayyab Mahmud
John D. Márquez
Pierson Nettling
C. S. Ponder
Sarita Echavez See
Shawn Shimpach
Denise Ferreira da Silva
Catherine R. Squires
Michael J. Watts
Elvin Wyly

Paula Chakravartty is an associate professor of communications at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Denise Ferreira da Silva is a professor of ethics and director of the Centre for Ethics and Politics at the School of Business and Management at Queen Mary, University of London.