Sofia Butnaru

Americans increasingly rely on debt—like credit card or medical debt—to survive while calls for student loan debt cancellation and eviction moratoriums have become major political struggles. Black and brown individuals hold a major share of burdensome, high-cost debt. What is the relationship between debt and race? How are current debt regimes shaped by histories of slavery and racism? This project will explore the emergence of consumer debt by tracing its origins to post-Emancipation sharecropping. Using historically-embedded ethnographic methods, this study emphasizes the racial underpinnings of contemporary indebtedness. It offers a novel accounting for the development of consumer debt and pays close attention to the “life of a debt,” or the qualitative processes that shape the experience of indebtedness. Lastly, by focusing on sharecropping, this dissertation will look at the ways in which debt and environment are co-constitutive.