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About Change: Ali Smith’s Numismatic Modernism

2016; Oxford University Press; Volume: 10; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/cww/vpw014

1754-1484

Mary Horgan,

Travel Writing and Literature

In Ali Smith's Hotel World (2001), a diverse group of women comes together within a chain hotel. Here, they misuse and redirect money. They transform coins and notes into a liberatory language, capable of countering the commerciality of the contemporary moment and the lexicon that upholds it. This essay charts that numismatic narrative, taking the creative, interventional treatment of cash in Hotel World as a case study through which to think through Smith's model of contemporary modernism, a sustained political project that can be traced across her oeuvre. It proposes "numismatic modernism," and theorizes it as a mode that constructs a creative, critical response to capitalist modernity by closely engaging with its materials and contexts, carving out an alternative to the marketplace from within it.