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About
Money from Nothing explores the dynamics surrounding South Africa's national project of financial inclusion-dubbed "banking the unbanked"-which aimed to extend credit to black South Africans as a critical aspect of broad-based economic enfranchisement. Through rich and captivating accounts, Deborah James reveals the varied ways in which middle- and working-class South Africans' access to credit is intimately bound up with identity, status-making, and aspirations of upward mobility. She draws out the deeply precarious nature of both the aspirations and the economic relations of debt which sustain her subjects, revealing the shadowy side of indebtedness and its potential to produce new forms of oppression and disenfranchisement in place of older ones. Money from Nothing uniquely captures the lived experience of indebtedness for those many millions who attempt to improve their positions (or merely sustain existing livelihoods) in emerging economies.
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Reviews
"Money from Nothing offers the most comprehensive, multi-angled study that we have of new initiatives in credit and debt in a poor population. It will be a key source for all who concern themselves with the debt nexus, as lived."
Johns Hopkins University
"James is attentive not only to the class dynamics of post-apartheid indebtedness but also to the competitive dynamics of status and distinction . . . [The book] emphasises the complex logics of her informants as they seek to navigate the frustrations of contemporary South Africa . . . Scholarship on the post-apartheid state, and intersection with private capital and its discourses, will benefit c
Allegra Laboratory
"Credit, and its flip side, debt, emerges as a fundamental lens to understand the workings of both social mobility and economic disenfranchisement, precariously inter-twined in the New South Africa. James makes complex theory accessible, combining it with page-turning ethnography-utterly captivating!"
Senior Lecturer in Anthropology, University of Sussex and author of In Good Company: An An