Inflationary Modernities : Literature, Culture and Economy

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.

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.