Hannah Appel

Hannah 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?

Her first book, The Licit Life of Capitalism, is both an account of a specific capitalist project—U.S. oil companies working off the shores of Equatorial Guinea—and a theorization of more general forms and processes that facilitate diverse capitalist projects around the world. She is at work on a second ethnographic project—Pan African Capital: Finance, Banking, and Economic Self-Fashioning—continuing her inquiry into the licit life of capitalism, and the displacement of how and from where we think about global capitalism and the imperial power of the U.S. dollar. Pan African Capital is a multi-sited project based on ethnographic work with transnational, African-owned banks and financial institutions on the continent.

Hannah is also a co-founder and organizer with the Debt Collective. The Debt Collective works to build debtors unions through an emancipatory activation of household debt under finance capitalism: What if mass indebtedness is not simply a liability, but also a potential collective asset or leverage point in the fight to enact the new and radical economic forms we need? Hannah brings her organizing and scholarly work together under the auspices of the Future of Finance at the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy.