Abstract: The past several years have seen a resurgence in the study of the intersection of race and capitalism. Building on Cedric Robinson’s foundational work on racial capitalism, this work has sought to further theorize and empirically study this intersection at the local, national and global level. Yet, more work is needed to study the intersection of race and capitalism explicitly in the context of this relatively new era of financialized capitalism. Central to financial capitalism is the concept of risk. The papers proposed for this panel address how risk is theoretically conceptualized and acted on by corporate and state actors to reproduce and reshape patterns of racial inequality, racial hierarchies, and mechanisms of expropriation and exploitation in the 21st century. Empirically papers for this panel interrogate the relationship between racial subordination and marginalization and the deployment of risk at the local level in the context of municipal fiscal crisis; at the national level by examining how capitalists have been able to profit off the risk taken by the less fortunate while “devolving risk” to ever more marginalized communities; and, at the global level how multinational corporations use racialized understandings of risk to justify massive levels of expropriation that reproduce and intensify a global racial order. Theoretically, the concept of race is shown to be a construct that has been stripped of a history of racial oppression and expropriation and is itself a key component that works to maintain racial economic injustice. Collectively, these papers contribute to the discussion of how to understand racial capitalism in the era of financial capitalism.

http://tinyurl.com/y56vr84w

This panel examines various forms of juridical and state mechanisms of protection, trusteeship, or superintendence as racialized economies of violence, domestication, possession, and intimate governance. Panelists likewise examine the collective forms of refusal and resistance that interrupt and dismantle the normative operations of law and state power. This collective inquiry centers racial regimes of property, the differential devaluation of racialized groups, and the construction and policing of categories of belonging as constitutive for capitalist accumulation. Law serves as a focus for this panel not because of the justice, protection, regulation, or resolution it claims to confer, but rather because it stages and registers political and social antagonisms - antagonisms that are in excess of its sphere of authority and jurisdiction. Together the panelists interrogate the administration of racial governance and economies of dispossession underwritten by the rule of law.

Chair: Charles R. Lawrence, III, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa

Presentations

Megan Ming Francis, University of Washington-Seattle, Risky Capital: Race, Speculation, and Convict Leasing in Texas

Alyosha Goldstein, The University of New Mexico, Holding in Trust: Fiduciary Economies and the Domestic Relation

Lee Ann S Wang, University of California-Los Angeles, Uninheritable Blood: Reproduction, Alien Land Law, and Violation

This roundtable addresses the racial and settler violences that install and reproduce capitalist modes of production, valuation, and politics in North America. Bringing together scholars working across the long durée of North American capitalism, our roundtable seeks to trouble key tenants in the study of racial capitalism. First, as our title indicates, we argue that work on racial capitalism still inadequately engages and leaves untheorized the settler colonial project of which chattel slavery was a part from the very start of the transatlantic trade, just as contemporary theorizations of resistance to racial capitalism often build upon conceptions of “land,” “labor,” and “race” that settler dispossession seeks to naturalize and universalize in our time. Second, by bringing together scholars working in eras of capitalism rarely thought together-such as the 17th century British transatlantic trade, 19th century American antebellum and postbellum plantation capitalism, and twenty-first century digital and financial capitalism-we are interested in thinking about the ongoing necessity of racial and settler violences across phases of capital that traditional and disciplinary forms of periodization obscure and miss. In this sense our roundtable rethinks Marx’s own arguments about so-called original or primitive accumulation by suggesting that racial and settler violences are so “original” to capital, it is not their “overcoming” that capital seeks but the conditions for their repeated assertion and expansion. Talking across periods, locations, and racial formations, and indigenous, diasporic, and racialized communities, the panel will take up a series of questions, topics, and themes that require new epistemes, ones that allow us to connect the archives of settler colonialism and the making of the African diaspora to Marx’s own accounts of capital’s origins, that narrate post-slavery emancipation as ushering forth not a “freedom” once again denied by antiblackness, but new logics of black people as surplus populations subject to containment or elimination in a settler colonial order, that impede the recursivity of dispossession through grounded relationalities, and that point towards forms of resistance and relations that contest the rights-based violences of today’s financialization of racial settler capital.

This day-long symposium brings together scholars, organizers, and political strategists for a discussion on questions such as: What would a multiracial class-based populism require? What historical and global lessons might we bring to bear on this question? And how does our specific context both enable and disable movement and electoral politics that centers an anti-racist, feminist and internationalist orientation?

This event is sponsored by the Race and Capitalism Project, 3CT, Working Families Party, and the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture.

For a schedule of the day’s events, click here. Please RSVP on Eventbrite if you plan to attend.

Session Description: We are at a critical moment in the history of race and capital in the United States. The country is emerging from one of the most devastating recessions in history at the same time that anti-immigration rhetoric is ratcheting up and unarmed blacks are being murdered in the streets. In order to understand the contemporary crisis, we must address the economic as well as the political and legal foundations of persisting inequality. As historians have convincingly shown over the past several years—race and capitalism are deeply connected from the time of the latter’s inception. Therefore, it is important from both scholarly and policy perspectives to deepen our scholarly understanding of the relationship between race and capitalism and connect that research to public debates on racial and economic inequality. Intellectually it is important to understand how the two are interrelated; how processes of race making and racialization fueled capitalism at its onset, the relationship between racial and capitalist social orders—their theoretical, historical and empirical linkages. At the same time, it is critical to understand how people at the margins of society have contested and fought back against these institutional structures. The panel brings together a wide-ranging group of scholars from different parts of the discipline to engage racial capitalism. Panelists will connect the study of racial capitalism to a larger discussion about new frontiers in race politics, economic inequality, social movements, and political theory.

http://tinyurl.com/y62p8aux