ABSTRACT: U.S. and Europe-based banks and international financial institutions including the IMF have been central to critical accounts of Africa’s place in global capitalism. And yet since 2008 these institutions have been in retreat on the continent, partially replaced by Pan African Banks. Putting ethnographic work with Africa-based finance professionals into dialogue with heterodox economic thinking on banks and currency sovereignty, I argue that we must not only analyze the geographic shift in where banks are headquartered and who owns them, but also generate empirical and theoretical shifts in what a bank is, what it does, and to what effect, especially in terms of the relationship between currencies, social violence, and imperial and racial power.

BIO: Appel teaches Anthropology, Global Studies and International Development Studies at UCLA where she also serves as the Associate Director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy.

Appel is an economic anthropologist interested in transnational capitalism and finance; finance, debt and debtors’ unions; the African continent’s place in global capitalism; the economic imagination; anti-capitalist and abolitionist social movements. Her research and teaching interests are guided by the economic imagination. What does it mean to understand racial capitalism ethnographically, and to work actively to undo it? She is committed to ethnographic research as a vibrant method for asking new questions and formulating new answers about the world in which we live.