This chapter outlines the relationship between finance and postmodernism in the post-1970s United States. After laying out this shared narrative of finance and postmodernism, particularly in regard to the work of Fredric Jameson and in a reading of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991), the chapter then argues that the presumed whiteness of both finance capital and postmodern aesthetics in Jameson and Ellis is decentered by Toni Cade Bambara’s Those Bones Are Not My Child (1999). Bambara’s novel is set in Atlanta in 1979-1981, years during which the city was at once rapidly becoming a global financial capital and was simultaneously also the site of the abduction and murder of anywhere between thirty to one hundred Black children and youths. Bambara’s novel demands that this racialized violence be read as a part of any analysis of Atlanta as a financialized city, and shows us that there is no way of understanding finance and postmodernism without reckoning with the constitutive anti-Blackness of the US economy.

McCaskill examines three different groundbreaking texts of the second half of the twentieth century: Toni Cade Bambara’s The Black Woman (1970), Lucille Clifton’s Generations (1976), and Patricia Bell-Scott et al.’s Double Stitch (1991). Working backwards and forwards from these three texts, McCaskill’s chapter analyzes ways that Black women turned the tables on previous representations of themselves by Black men and hegemonic others as subordinate citizens, matriarchs, and ciphers.