Contribution short abstract:

The material presence of gold seems to matter a lot, even in financial spaces thought of as concerned only with virtual ledgers and communicative practices. In this paper, I peruse how and why gold’s presence in central banks is staged as “really there" through reference to its physical qualities.

Contribution long abstract:

The material presence of gold seems to matter a lot, even in financial spaces that are conventionally thought of as concerned only with numbers, virtual ledgers, economic formulae, and cold hard data. Some of the most important of these institutions are banks that manage the reserves and direct the economies of nations. There is no longer a gold standard, and no currency is fully backed by gold. Yet as of July 2021, central banks held nearly one fifth of the world’s mined gold (about 18 percent) as a “reserve asset” (a financial asset held for possible use to balance payment). Even though most of what a central bank does in the 21st century has nothing to do with gold, it has become necessary over the past ten or fifteen years for banks to create credible performances of gold’s material presence. And there is a smaller puzzle within this larger one, for while central banks, especially in Europe and the United States, are charged with holding the country’s gold reserves, keeping them safe and generally hidden, in order to maintain public trust, they also have to show the gold at key moments, so that people will know it is “really there.” Its “really-there-ness” is staged in ways that foreground gold’s color, mass, luster, and other elemental properties, and links it to certain kinds of human bodies who are seen as responsible stewards—these are in general male, white and middle-aged, suggesting "staging gold" as undergirding a project of racial capitalism.