Currents and Currencies 2015

In the collective project of 2014-15, the Working Group on Globalization and Culture explored two words that course through our stories and maps of the contemporary world: currents and currencies.

In a not-unusual desire to be current, we began a conversation in the fall of 2014 about the currents and currencies of the planet, those socio-natural forces that circulate power and measure value. We explored the social life of money and finance, the climatic effects of ocean currents, even the battle between alternating and direct current. But we were also drawn to the temporal dimension of the “current,” its use in current events and current affairs, and to the metaphorical uses of currents and currency to think about migration and diaspora, rights and ideas: intellectual currents and current opinion. Together we tacked from Emily Rosenberg’s suggestion that the idea of “transnational currents” captured the dynamics of the early twentieth century’s “age of electricity,” to Alan Sekula’s bleak film of the current of container ships moving across the forgotten space of the ocean.

Though our papers have swirled in the same currents, they are offered here neither as a comprehensive account of the world’s currencies nor as a single current of opinion; as we move from the Rio Grande to Lake Cocibolca, from Crab Key to Robben Island, from the lecture circuit to the radio airwaves, from financial thrillers to household accounts, you may discern cross currents and undercurrents, even some against the current.

Currents and Currencies

The Working Group on Globalization and Culture is currently exploring the cultural meaning of two linked keywords of contemporary culture: currents and currencies. From the “hot money” of financial markets to the respective accounts of cultural flow given by Raymond Williams and Arjun Appadurai, currents and currencies have become central to our stories and maps of globalization. Currents signal both the flow of ideas, moods, media, courses of events, inclinations in public opinion, and prevailing atmospheres, while also marking the temporality of the present, the transactional aspects of everyday life, and financialization of the planet. But beneath these flows of time, media, discourses, feelings and finance lie the bodies and movements of liquids, air, and energy from which these other meanings borrow their metaphoric energy — oceans, air streams, and electric circuits. This year-long collective research project explores the socio-natural currents and currencies that circulate power and measure value globally, as well as their representation in visual images and narratives. Collectively we ask how we understand the flows and circuits, the pulse of globalization, from remittances to grey markets? How do we understand the cultural meanings of ocean currents as they shape steamship lines, container ships and the great canals? How might we think around ossifying “money talk” and jargon to better understand the complexities of monetary systems where currencies are undergoing monumental material, political, and social changes? We question what it means to be “current” or for ideologies and cultural movements to gain “currency.” Charting both a sustained and expansive historiography of “currents” across the sciences and humanities opens further dialogue for the ways that crossings, crosscurrents, countercurrents, and other literal, metaphorical, and spatial flows are a central concern for cultural studies.