“Doing unpayable debt”

This response to Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Unpayable Debt (2022) takes seriously the author’s self-description as a scholar and artist, and so considers the study within a genealogy of contemporary experiments with the book form in the Americas. Unpayable Debt calls for a reader who will assemble its sequence of moments and texts into an accounting of the debt that Western epistemologies, disciplines, and habits of reading owe to the people and cultures subjected to the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and to the dispossession and genocide of indigenous peoples. Fiction, distinct from history and the other disciplines that use the written word, proves essential to calculate that liability, and Ferreira da Silva exercises its inventive power in her scholarly critique as much as in videos, performances, and social practice collaborations.