Chapter 13 - Risk’s Instruments

Summary

This essay uses the concept of risk and its various instruments to organize some through-lines in the new modernist studies. The first of its three sections examines risk and futurity through the work of Sarah Cole, Enda Duffy, and Paul Saint-Amour. The second section focuses on economic risk through practices of speculation, ranging from Zora Neale Hurston’s efforts to speculate on folk culture to modernist literature’s imbrication in the welfare state and in speculative markets alike, as studied by Michael Szalay, Laura Meixner, and others. The final section moves to an emergent area in modernist scholarship: studies of speculative fiction – and within that field, futuristic science fiction by minority writers. It looks to George Schuyler’s controversial Black No More as a text that ties together the modes of risk-taking, future-projection, and speculative economics that this essay posits as avenues for continued scholarly engagement.