A double take on debt

Abstract

The coercive circumstances of national debt in the postcolony include coercion that is visible, and coercion that is part of the background laws and institutions that cast their shadow on terms of debt negotiations. This chapter proposes that the doctrine of ‘odious debt’ provides a fruitful framework for Third World demands for restitution and debt severance. The history of Haitian indemnity and debt provides a lens into the larger regime of world economic order built by colonialism and slavery, including how debt travels as a silent virus of decolonisation and the histories of trade and aid that engendered debt and dependence. The concept of odious debt makes visible and less-visible dimensions of global governance legible in international law in ways that render debt severance ‘thinkable’. In analysing the work of different regimes of visibility I have found it useful to think with Abderrahmane Sissako’s 2006 film Bamako, and its illumination of what is foregrounded and what is backgrounded in law and global economic governance. Bamako unsettles the focus of the filmic gaze, shifting and reversing the camera work of viewing and being viewed so that the lens documenting the adjudication of the legal and economic framework of international debt, the act of seeing, becomes what we see. Visibility – both as a metaphor for what is explicit and an account of what is before our eyes – is central to the politics of reparations and debt.