Inflationary Modernities by Wayne Stables

Inflationary Modernities by Wayne Stables

Collecting ten essays from prominent and emerging scholars of diverse backgrounds, this book offers distinctive perspectives from both the Global North and South—a range appropriate to the multifaceted phenomenon it takes as its object of investigation. Collectively, these essays emphasize the importance of the book’s topic. As the consumer price index reaches historic highs across the world, the need to think about inflation in all its aspects has never been more urgent. If inflation frustrates the economists’ best efforts to theorize it coherently, the time has come to ask questions about where the boundaries of economics lie and to re-evaluate the assumption that inflation is primarily an economic phenomenon. Rather than offering a dogmatic analysis that would assert what inflation really is, this book theorizes its shifting forms, furnishing the reader with a multidimensional, non-totalizing understanding of its mechanisms. In doing so, the book opens up new possibilities for grappling with one of the most pressing problems of our time.

Wayne Stables is an associate professor of theory of literature at the University of South Africa. He is the author of many articles, ranging across literature, philosophy, and visual art.

Kieran Brown is a researcher and lecturer at Somerville College, University of Oxford. He has published works on modernism, critical theory, and economics.