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  • Introduction:Life and Debt
  • Rosalind Petchesky (bio) and Meena Alexander (bio)

Give back the life I gaveyou pay me my money downso there’s no questionI did it for love for anythingbut desireput a tarnished nickel in my dishso the guard will knowwhen he comeswith a bleeding chickentied to his wristwith a bitter promisethat we are not kinuncommitted forever.

Audre Lorde, “Generation III”

What, precisely, does it mean to say that our sense of morality and justice is reduced to the language of a business deal? What does it mean when we reduce moral obligations to debts? What changes when the one turns into the other? And how do we speak about them when our language has been so shaped by the market?. … A debt is the obligation to pay a certain sum of money. As a result, a debt, unlike any other form of obligation, can be precisely quantified. … One does not need to calculate the human effects; one need only calculate principal, balances, penalties, and rates of interest. …

Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years [End Page 13]

As editors, we share a personal debt—and a professional lifetime of giving and receiving—to the City University of New York, Hunter College, and the PhD programs in Political Science (Ros) and English (Meena) at the CUNY Graduate Center. These have been the academic homes whose students and colleagues have nurtured our thinking for so many years but also the incubator of some troubling thoughts about the meaning, in everyday life terms, of debt. The question of a whole generation of young people bound by student debt is something that we see close at hand. It forms part of a whole chain of injustices that affect them not only as students but also as recent immigrants (or children of immigrants), working-class people, and victims of racism and gender inequality—imminent castaways in a precarious job market, in addition perhaps to their being foot soldiers in the armies of the medically uninsured and credit-deficient.

So our decision to devote an issue of WSQ to the theme of “Debt” was initially driven by the outrage we shared with the Occupy Movement, the Occupy Student Debt Campaign, and their many allies across the globe at the ways in which higher education—our work world—has become “a profit engine for financiers, asset speculators, and real estate developers” (Occupy Student Debt Campaign 2013). As our CUNY colleague, sociologist Jack Hammond, has written concerning “the student debt bubble,” “At more than one trillion dollars, student loans have grown to exceed total credit card debt. Debt has become a standard part of the college experience. Students take it on because they expect it to pay off in better jobs and higher salaries. But many will be disappointed” (Hammond 2012). Monica Johnson’s marvelous graphic novel, The Adventures of Dorrit Little, one chapter of which is printed in this issue, illustrates the dire experience and limited choices of a typical student slaving away at a low-paying, food service job while contemplating the lifetime of debt that grad school is likely to entail. Moreover, as Dorrit’s wan expressions only hint at, new findings by medical researchers at Northwestern University show that the stresses of having to pay off massive loans are hitting young people with health as well as financial costs—in the form of higher blood pressure, hypertension, and depression (Von Hoffman 2013). Is student debt becoming an apparatus for training and disciplining bodies, an apprenticeship in debt enfranchisement? Has debt become the newly normal way of performing citizenship?

Debt is thus not only a bleak reality that corrodes our institutions, families, and communities; it also raises larger political, philosophical, and [End Page 14] historical questions that resonate globally. In contemplating an issue of WSQ that would capture this landscape, we asked, what does it mean to live in a world of debt—whether you are a college student in the United States, a struggling farmer in India, a homeowner, or a country? What does it mean to forgive a debt? How have these meanings shifted over time? Do ancestral...

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