Racialised Futures: On Risk, Race and Finance

This article explores the relationship between race and finance. By looking closer at risk, this article seeks to contribute to the literature in three ways: First, the concepts of risk and uncertainty need to be understood from a post-colonial perspective. Second, through a post-colonial reading of risk, we seek to develop a different concept of risk itself which emphasises its three qualities of de-humanisation, de-socialisation, and de-territorialisation. Last but not least, we propose to understand the post-colonial critique not only as a reconstruction of Europe’s past, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has named it, but locate it at the intersection of the present and the future: The post-colonial critique is enacted as soon as Europe’s future is imagined through risk.