PUBLICATIONS
2024
REVISTA HISPÁNICA MODERNA
"El evangelio del papel moneda de Miguel Antonio Caro: dinero y poder en la Colombia decimonónica." Revista Hispánica Moderna. Vol. 77, no. 1, 97-114.
Miguel Antonio Caro is known as one of the most lucid conservative thinkers of nineteenth-century Latin America. His antiliberal thinking came to define what it meant to be a Catholic man of letters in Colombia and beyond. Today, he is mostly remembered for his work on linguistics, Latin translations, and the 1886 Colombian Constitution. However, Caro was also the most recalcitrant defender of paper money of his time. In press articles, he developed what can be described as a Hispanic Catholic theory of monetary signs. While he is often portrayed as an anti-modern ideologist, the financial dimensions of his writings reveal a very different picture. Vindicating a Spanish tradition of currency debasement that went back to Alfonso the Wise, the Colombian ultramontane conciliated his traditionalism with capitalism’s global accumulation drive by equating paper money with God’s infinite gift: the divine grace. He hence proposed a Catholic view of capitalist modernity that rejected the “evils” of utilitarianism but embraced Colombia’s agro-exporter economic model as part of God’s providential design. In his political-religious project, money is thus imagined as a key tool of the Christian oikonomia, that is, God’s government of earthly affairs.
2023
HISPANIC REVIEW
"Auditar la selva: finanzas, burocracia y desequilibrio en La vorágine (1924) de José Eustasio Rivera." Hispanic Review. Vol. 94, no. 4, 583-605.
This article argues that the aesthetic of disequilibrium that distinguishes José Eustasio Rivera’s La vorágine points to the impossibility of disciplining capital through writing. Throughout the 1800s, criollos imagined that money and letters, guided by the invisible hand, would be able to administer America’s rebel matter and turn it harmoniously into exchange values. In contrast to this dogma, the formal experiment of Rivera’s novel, published in the bullish decade of the 1920s, suggests that capitalism is not a balanced system like its apologists claim, but rather a turbulent vortex characterized by its volatility. Arturo Cova’s unstable diary parodies the futures promised by financial prospectuses and reminds us of the limits to capital by showing that, even when deployed most recklessly, it still encounters matters that stubbornly refuse to let themselves be reduced to an abstract unit of account.
2023
LETRAL
"José Maria Vergara y Vergara, el agiotista: la invención del cuerpo crediticio de la nacion en los cuadros de costumbres." no. 31, 51-77.
Based on a review of the work of the Colombian Conservative writer José María Vergara y Vergara (1831-1872) in light of mid-century financial anxieties, this article argues that sketches of manners are an aesthetics of accreditation. Although recent research has emphasized its biopolitical func-tion, these valuable contributions have overlooked how these “cuadros”invented the nation's body of credit. In them, criollos put into circulation “types”whose moral traits, inscribed on the body, functioned as an ethno-financial profile that appraised their supposed potential to create value. If on a geopolitical level, the criolloimagined his literature as an imitation of European genres that was negotiated “at a discount”, within the nation-state the criolloconceived of himself as the universal equivalent. This monetary logic allowed the criollo subject to self-fashion as a creditor of a less-valuable “people”whose work he could govern and exploit.
2020
REVISTA DE ESTUDIOS HISPÁNICOS
"Encountering the Master of the Book: Accounting, Confession, and Statecraft in Cervantes’s 'Rinconete y Cortadillo'." Vol. 54, no. 3, 823-843.
This article argues that Cervantes’s novella “Rinconete y Cortadillo” can be read as a fictional laboratory that reflects upon the relationship between accounting, writing, and statecraft in the wake of global capitalism. The novella is reinserted into the context of the commercial revolution of the second half of the sixteenth century, produced by the inflow of precious metals from America, to show how Cervantes problematizes the separation between fictional and commercial literacies. Focusing on Monipodio’s librillo de memoria, the article claims that the allusions to Catholic confession connects the character’s bookkeeping practices with broader questions of government. The conjuncture of commercial practices, bookkeeping, and a new art of government produced a space of intelligibility that allowed for the deployment of new techniques for conducting economic life. Through the figure of mock ruler, Cervantes thus invites readers to examine the connections between writing, power, and moral in early modern Spain.
2019
STATUS QUAESTIONIS
"El Dorado in the Stock Exchange: The Financial Boom of the 1820s in London and the Birth of Colombia." Special Issue. Narrating the Economy: Perspectives on the Intersection Between Literature and Economics, no. 16, 141-167.
This paper examines the link between representations of Colombia and the bonds and stocks that circulated during the speculative boom of the 1820s in London. During this period, an array of articles and books about the newly independent Spanish American countries, influenced by the promises of liberalism and the findings of Alexander von Humboldt, renewed the desire to discover ‘El Dorado.’ This myth of unlimited wealth helped to produce the illusion of a financial utopia that, upon the crash of 1826, turned into disenchantment. The article analyzes the issue of representation that emerged from the difficulty in accounting for the relation between financial instruments and their alleged referent in the riches of Spanish America. Explaining how these ‘financial signs’ worked as a center of gravity for other representations, it shows how the efforts to manipulate the value of bonds and stocks made by criollos and British capitalists defined the form of the Colombian nation in its early days.
WORKS IN PROGRESS
BOOK MANUSCRIPT
Minting Words: Money and the Aesthetics of Extractivism in 19th Century Colombia
EDITED VOLUME
Finance and Material Cultures in Nineteenth-Century Latin American (with
Richard Rosa).
JOURNAL ARTICLES
Pájaro negro del Cauca: las aves neotropicales como cantautoras de María (1867) de Jorge Isaacs
JOURNAL ARTICLE
A Derivative Fiction: The Financialization of Gender and Race in Machado de
Assis’s ‘Pecuniary Anecdote.’
JOURNAL ARTICLE
Satoshi’s Invisible Hand in El Salvador: Bitcoin, Sovereignty, and Economy.