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Abstract

Through an ethnography of African migrants in the United States, this dissertation approaches economy, law and politics as performative contradictions of contemporary capitalism. Since currency replaced gold as the epicenter of international trade in the 1970s, finance has emerged as the dominant regime of capital accumulation, reconfiguring the rules and processes through which we engage with institutions and to a significant extent with each other. Central to this process of financialization is a strategy called “arbitrage”, buying and selling the same asset in different markets in order to profit from disparities in price. Arbitrage is contradictory: it performs the “law of one price” yet it is only possible by virtue of the failure of that model. Arbitrage also generates new disparities, counter-performatively undermining the premise of equilibrium on which it is based. I use this financial term broadly to capture how expectations are both conditions of and obstacles to outcomes. Like the efficient market, the rule of law and political membership are models that are performatively sustained and counter-performatively threatened by their own knowledge practices. In recent years, the counter-performativity of liberal modernity has ruptured everyday expectations even in wealthy countries. The day-to-day management of contingency calls for skepticism and speculation, what my informants call debrouillardise, or making do, and I call “knowing practice.” This dissertation explores this generalized predicament as it operated among francophone African migrants over six years of multi-sited fieldwork. Following the 2008 Recession, many of my informants were cut off from the livelihoods and living arrangements that they had come to expect as the pay-off for having risked emigration. They seemed to agree that Africa was rising, while America’s “promised land” brought economic hardship and a punitive immigration bureaucracy, not to mention racial profiling, police harassment and hostility towards foreigners. How did they understand their own actions as they confronted these challenges? I argue that my informants arbitraged space and time as a knowing practice that derives value from uncertainty. They might not be betting on stocks and bonds, yet their economic activities, legal encounters and social interdependencies reflected the systematic surrender of social wealth to financial markets. Each chapter addresses an experiential dimension in which past memories and future aspirations constitute an ambiguous present, simultaneously affirming and undermining the grounds of personhood. Finding their beliefs out of sync with the actuality of community formation, political activism, historical accounting, legal adjudications, and work, they practiced an ethics of ambivalence that expresses commitment without confidence in the moral or political significance of the outcome. Finance teaches us that market equilibrium is a myth; our accounts are never balanced. When the past and the future meet in the broken middle of day-to-day life, it is usually too late or too soon to do what’s right. And yet that is what we must do. We integrate our worlds by exception by occupying this liminal state of uncertainty, the ambivalent faith in doubt of a salto mortale. As collective practice, this is a politics that is indistinguishable from ethics.

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