Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism (Historical Materialism Book Series, 30)

__Monsters of the Market____Frankenstein____Monsters of the Market__ Contents Acknowledgements List of Figures Introduction Chapter One Dissecting the Labouring Body: Frankenstein, Political Anatomy and the Rise of Ca pitalism ‘Save my body from the surgeons’ The culture of dissection: anatomy, colonisation and social order Political anatomy, wage-labour and destruction of the English commons Anatomy and the corpse-economy Monsters of rebellion Jacobins, Irishmen and Luddites: rebel-monsters in the age of Frankenstein The rights of monsters: horror and the split society Chapter Two Marx’s Monsters: Vampire-Capital and the Nightmare-World of Late Capitalism Dialectics and the doubled life of the commodity The spectre of value and the fetishism of commodities ‘As if by love possessed’: vampire-capital and the labouring body Zombie-labour and the ‘monstrous outrages’ of capital Money: capitalism’s second nature ‘Self-birthing’ capital and the alchemy of money Wild money: the occult economies of late-capitalist globalisation Enron: case-study in the occult economy of late capitalism ‘Capital comes into the world dripping in blood from every pore’ Chapter Three African Vampires in the Age of Globalisation Kinship and accumulation: from the old witchcraft to the new Zombies, vampires, and spectres of capital: the new occult economies of globalising capitalism African fetishes and the fetishism of commodities The living dead: zombie-labourers in the age of globalisation Vampire-capitalism in Sub-Saharan Africa Bewitched accumulation, famished roads, and the endless toilers of the Earth Conclusion Ugly Beauty: Monstrous Dreams of Utopia References Index Winner of the 2012 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize. Monsters of the Market investigates the rise of capitalism through the prism of the body-panics it arouses. Drawing on folklore, literature and popular culture, the book links tales of monstrosity from early-modern England, including Mary Shelley's Frankenstein , to a spate of recent vampire- and zombie-fables from sub-Saharan Africa, and it connects these to Marx's persistent use of monster-metaphors in his descriptions of capitalism. Reading across these tales of the grotesque, Monsters of the Market offers a novel account of the cultural and corporeal economy of a global market-system. The book thus makes original contributions to political economy, cultural theory, commodification-studies and 'body-theory' "Monsters of the Market investigates the rise of capitalism through the prism of the body-panics it arouses. Drawing on folklore, literature and popular culture, the book links tales of monstrosity from early-modern England, including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, to a spate of recent vampire- and zombie-fables from sub-Saharan Africa, and it connects these to Marx’s persistent use of monster-metaphors in his descriptions of capitalism. Reading across these tales of the grotesque, Monsters of the Market offers a novel account of the cultural and corporeal economy of a global market-system. The book thus makes original contributions to political economy, cultural theory, commodification-studies and ‘body-theory’."--Publisher's website Monsters of the Market investigates modern capitalism through the prism of the body panics it arouses. Examining Frankenstein , Marxs Capital and zombie fables from sub-Saharan Africa, it offers a novel account of the cultural and corporeal economy of global capitalism.