Framing Finance: Rebellion, Dispossession, and the Geopolitics of Enclosure in Samuel Delany's Nevèrÿon Series

This essay provides a framework for the literary analysis of financialization during the period recently termed “the long 1970s” and contributes to recent historical scholarship on the rise of finance and economic crises by focusing on literary forms of popular resistance that also flourished during this period of acute crisis. The authors concentrate on two conditions undergirding financialization: the intensified dispossession of people of color in the United States and the acceleration of enclosures worldwide. They explore these transformations via Samuel Delany's Nevèrÿon series, a four-volume fantasy series published between 1979 and 1987. If financialization is conditioned on the interweaving of domestic and international dispossessions and enclosures, Nevèrÿon, they argue, crystallizes — and protests — this interweaving in literary form.