Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism explores early modern theories that underpinned eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British imperialism, liberalism, and capitalism. In a novel con...

This volume looks at how accumulation in postcolonial capitalism blurs the boundaries of space, institutions, forms, financial regimes, labour processes, and economic segments on one hand, and creates zones and corridors on the other. It draws our attention to the peculiar but structurally necessary coexistence of both primitive and virtual modes of accumulation in the postcolony. From these two major inquiries it develops a new understanding of postcolonial capitalism. The case studies from India and Sri Lanka discuss the (...) production of urban spaces of capital extraction, institutionalization of postcolonial finance capital, gendering of work forms, establishment of new forms of labour, formation of and changes in caste and racial identities and networks, and securitization-and thereby confirm that no study of contemporary capitalism is complete without thoroughly addressing the postcolonial condition. By challenging the established dualities between citizenship-based civil society and welfare-based political society, exploring critically the question of colonial and postcolonial difference, and foregrounding the material processes of accumulation against the culturalism of postcolonial studies, this volume redefines postcolonial studies in South Asia and beyond. It is invaluable reading for students and scholars of South Asian studies, sociology, cultural and critical anthropology, critical and praxis studies, and political science. (shrink)

A reconsideration of the crucial historical role of slavery in the consolidation of the global regime of capital accumulation provides a vital source of Marxian critique for our postcolonial present. The Atlantic slave trade literally transformed African men and women into human commodities. The reduction of human beings into human commodities, or ‘human capital’ – indeed, into labour and nothing but labour – which was the very essence of modern slavery, served as a necessary prerequisite for the consolidation and perfecting (...) of what Marx called ‘labour in the abstract’, and requires us to re-situate enslaved labour as the defining and constitutive limit for how we comprehend labour as such under capitalism. The production of labour in the abstract, or labour ‘in general’, depended nonetheless upon concrete productions of sociopolitical difference, particularly the branding of race. The term ‘Black’, which was devised to literally and figuratively brand the flesh of enslaved people, was also contrived to signify their particular sociopolitical condition of brutal degradation as the ultimate limit for the subjugation of labour. Blackness names that limit. Thus, Blackness is in fact necessary for apprehending labour as such under capitalism. Marx’s scathing critique of wage labour is always haunted by the long shadow of slavery as its limit figure. If we comprehend labour to be the antithesis of capital, then to the extent that Blackness names the ultimate condition of labour’s subordination and subjection to capital, we need to recognise the tendency for all labour under capital to be pressed toward a sociopolitical condition of Blackness (or approximating Blackness), where Blackness does not name any kind of essential identity but the racialised sociopolitical condition of that subordination/subjection. Consequently, the labour theory of value – which has always been in fact, more accurately, a value theory of labour – must be complemented with what we might posit to be a racial theory of labour. Such an ostensibly historical perspective on the foundational role of slavery in the genesis of capitalism is no mere scholastic exercise in the historiography of ‘primitive accumulation’, however, but rather must be re-purposed toward the ends of elaborating what has remained an as-yet underdeveloped Marxian theory of migrant labour. Extrapolating key insights from Marx’s corpus for the formulation of a racial theory of labour, this essay is ultimately concerned with the ways that slavery supplies capitalism with a defining horizon for all labour, and thus how this insight might instructively serve to comprehend the racialised subordination of migrant labour within our global/postcolonial sociopolitical order. (shrink)

Hegel's lord-bondsman dialectic has been of especially great interest to progressive and radical Hegelians—broadly speaking, politically left-leaning interpreters of Hegel who object to certain social hierarchies and demand their abolition. They read Hegel as giving an account of how ‘lordship’ over others is an inherently unstable and unsatisfying social formation, even for its supposed beneficiaries. Marxists, feminists and post-colonial theorists have all found inspiration in Hegel's analysis of the lord and bondsman by applying it to concrete relations of oppression, (...) such as capitalism, patriarchy, or racism. In contrast, recent scholarship on Hegel's views on race and colonialism has cast doubt on whether his systematic political philosophy and philosophy of history can be of similar use to progressives. Hegel was undeniably a Eurocentric thinker, but philosophers like Robert Bernasconi and Alison Stone have convincingly shown that he was also a racist and a defender of colonialism. Crucially, however, few of the scholars who write on Hegel's pro-colonialism have analysed this feature of Hegel's thought in connection with the lord-bondsman dialectic. In this article, I argue for two connected theses. First, I argue that contrary to the hopes of some progressive defenders of Hegel, we cannot easily separate the lord-bondsman dialectic from Hegel's pro-colonialism. This is because Hegel himself appealed to the lord-bondsman dialectic to argue that colonial slavery educated its victims, and could therefore be temporarily justified. Second, I argue that this pro-colonial reading of the dialectic, though largely ignored by contemporary interpreters, was in fact recognized and embraced by a group of Hegelians in North America known as the St Louis Hegelians. They used the lord-bondsman dialectic as a basis for a qualified defence of pre-Civil War American slavery. (shrink)

Feminist Geneaologies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures provides a feminist anaylsis of the questions of sexual and gender politics, economic and cultural marginality, and anti-racist and anti-colonial practices both in the "West" and in the "Third World." This collection, edited by Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, charts the underlying theoretical perspectives and organization practices of the different varieties of feminism that take on questions of colonialism, imperialism, and the repressive rule of colonial, post-colonial and advanced capitalist (...) nation-states. It provides a comparative, relational, historically grounded conception of feminist praxis that differs markedly from the liberal pluralist, multicultural understanding that sheapes some of the dominant version of Euro-American feminism. As a whole, the collection poses a unique challenge to the naturalization of gender based in the experiences, histories and practices of Euro-American women. (shrink)

: The coloniality of power is understood by Anibal Quijano as at the constituting crux of the global capitalist system of power. What is characteristic of global, Eurocentered, capitalist power is that it is organized around two axes that Quijano terms "the coloniality of power" and "modernity." The coloniality of power introduces the basic and universal social classification of the population of the planet in terms of the idea of race, a replacing of relations of superiority and inferiority established through (...) domination with naturalized understandings of inferiority and superiority. In this essay, Lugones introduces a systemic understanding of gender constituted by colonial/modernity in terms of multiple relations of power. This gender system has a light and a dark side that depict relations, and beings in relation as deeply different and thus as calling for very different patterns of violent abuse. Lugones argues that gender itself is a colonial introduction, a violent introduction consistently and contemporarily used to destroy peoples, cosmologies, and communities as the building ground of the "civilized" West. (shrink)

The coloniality of power is understood by Anibal Quijano as at the constituting crux of the global capitalist system of power. What is characteristic of global, Eurocentered, capitalist power is that it is organized around two axes that Quijano terms “the coloniality of power” and “modernity.” The coloniality of power introduces the basic and universal social classification of the population of the planet in terms of the idea of race, a replacing of relations of superiority and inferiority established through domination (...) with naturalized understandings of inferiority and superiority. In this essay, Lugones introduces a systemic understanding of gender constituted by colonial/modernity in terms of multiple relations of power. This gender system has a light and a dark side that depict relations, and beings in relation as deeply different and thus as calling for very different patterns of violent abuse. Lugones argues that gender itself is a colonial introduction, a violent introduction consistently and contemporarily used to destroy peoples, cosmologies, and communities as the building ground of the “civilized” West. (shrink)

This article offers a decolonial methodology that questions the universality tied to the concept of gender. While not questioning that the modern/colonial capitalist gender system is an oppressive, variable, systemic organization of power, it argues that it is not universal; that is, that not all peoples organize their relations in terms of and on the grounds of gender. Its aim is to offer a decolonial methodology to both study colonized people who live at the colonial difference, but also (...) to engage in decolonial coalition. To see the colonial difference is to see coloniality/modernity as the place the colonized inhabit and the situation of oppression from which the colonized create meanings that are not assimilated. (shrink)

Abstract:“Colonial Connections” explores historical connections and patterns between Iberian and British colonialism that have been ignored by conventional anti-Eurocentric and postcolonial narratives. At issue are the erasure of inter-imperial linkages and the omission of the Iberian empires of Spain and Portugal and the colonization Abya Yala/Latin America as well as the importance that Iberian colonialism and indigenous civilizations had in the shaping of the modern world such as capitalism, racism and the coloniality of gender. The article provides a (...) brief examination of anti-Eurocentric literature that rescues Asia, foremost China, from the dustbin of history while ignoring the importance of Iberian colonialism in the fall of China and the role that indigenous and African slave labor played in the development of capitalism and the triumph of the West. It also explores the artificial separation between Iberian and British colonialism that minimizes the role of religion in British colonialism and the commonalities that emerge once religion is accounted for. Finally, the article addresses the coloniality of democracy or the expulsion of the colony from the polity that emerges from conquest and the dehumanization of indigenous women and men of Abya Yala and notes the unevenness and divergences that surface when British and Iberian colonialisms are compared. (shrink)

This essay argues that the concept of ‘racial capitalism’ can help us understand the connections between seemingly disparate parts of Voltaire’s extensive corpus of work. It contends that even though the Enlightenment’s racial politics abounded with contradictions and ambivalences, Voltaire stood out from his contemporaries. While the connections between his polygenism – the theory that humans of different races were created separately – and material investments in colonial commerce have long been debated by radical historians, this essay suggests (...) that Voltaire’s views about race’s relationship to labour were transformed by France’s colonial losses during the Seven Years’ War. (shrink)

The coloniality of power is understood by Anibal Quijano as at the constituting crux of the global capitalist system of power. What is characteristic of global, Eurocentered, capitalist power is that it is organized around two axes that Quijano terms “the coloniality of power” and “modernity.” The coloniality of power introduces the basic and universal social classification of the population of the planet in terms of the idea of race, a replacing of relations of superiority and inferiority established through domination (...) with naturalized understandings of inferiority and superiority. In this essay, Lugones introduces a systemic understanding of gender constituted by colonial/modernity in terms of multiple relations of power. This gender system has a light and a dark side that depict relations, and beings in relation as deeply different and thus as calling for very different patterns of violent abuse. Lugones argues that gender itself is a colonial introduction, a violent introduction consistently and contemporarily used to destroy peoples, cosmologies, and communities as the building ground of the “civilized” West. (shrink)

____Feminist Geneaologies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic__ ____Futures__ provides a feminist anaylsis of the questions of sexual and gender politics, economic and cultural marginality, and anti-racist and anti-colonial practices both in the "West" and in the "Third World." This collection, edited by Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, charts the underlying theoretical perspectives and organization practices of the different varieties of feminism that take on questions of colonialism, imperialism, and the repressive rule of colonial, post-colonial and advanced capitalist (...) nation-states. It provides a comparative, relational, historically grounded conception of feminist praxis that differs markedly from the liberal pluralist, multicultural understanding that sheapes some of the dominant version of Euro-American feminism. As a whole, the collection poses a unique challenge to the naturalization of gender based in the experiences, histories and practices of Euro-American women. (shrink)

This book looks at facets in the history of capitalism from the Enlightenment period, through the emergence of the American Empire in the Pacific, and to the contemporary era of neoliberal globalization. This re-telling of history is done by drawing from the works of E. San Juan, Jr., considered arguably one of the great contemporary cultural and literary critics of our time. In this author's view, San Juan's lifetime of works offer a living documentation of, among others, the history (...) and thought of the modern world highlighted by the rise of capitalism through the contemporary era of neoliberal globalization, and shepherded to its hegemonic status by what stands today as the preeminent empire of the United States. The book underscores the symbiosis between contemporary capitalism as an economic system based on accumulation on the one hand, and the American imperial state on the other, just as it revisits the colonial project that was carried out in capitalism's wake, the violence and subjugation inflicted on its victims, and how this colonial project has morphed into a new form of colonialism maintained and enforced through the rules and institutional mechanisms of what is popularly known as neoliberal globalization that also provides the ideological and legal rationale for the commodification and the ultimate grab of the global commons reminiscent of the classical, albeit cruder, form of colonialism. (shrink)

This article responds to Samuel Knafo and Benno Teschke’s recent critique of Political Marxism and their proposal for an alternative, ‘radical agency-centred’ historicism. While sympathetic to the critiques raised by the authors, I am less convinced by the conclusions they reach. Rather than abandon Political Marxism altogether, I argue that there remains much of value in the tradition. Through an analysis of the differential path of capitalist development in settler-colonial Canada, I suggest that bringing the methodological insights of Uneven (...) and Combined Development to bear on the theoretical material of Political Marxism can alleviate the problems identified by the authors. (shrink)

In this paper, three racialized social work educators unsettle our settled colonial silences as acts of self-decolonization and as a way of responding to the call to action by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Hailing from the uneven manifestations of global capitalism and coloniality in Morocco, Vietnam, and Ethiopia, we draw on various critical theories to interrogate our unique entanglements with the imperial project of entwined settler colonialism and white supremacy. We narrate our embodied coloniality and (...) how the virulent materiality of global processes of displacement and dispossession plays out in each of our personal stories, everyday encounters, and practices as educators. With the aim of teaching for social justice by modeling, we share the processes of unsettling our colonial settlerhood and puncturing our racialized innocence. Each story addresses three themes: contact and colonial relations with Indigenous peoples of Canada, complicity in global coloniality, and responsibility in responding to the TRC call to action. The first story provides a broad outline of our struggles with the Indigenous/Settler binary created to perpetuate the various forms of displacement and dispossession in settler colonialism. The second story probes the complexities in the Settler category by engaging difference-making as a central technology of dispossession. The third story probes the complexities in the Indigenous category through interrogating the perils and promises of recognition and reconciliation in the context of global hierarchies of nation-states and global Indigenous resistance. We conclude bymoving beyond our divergent trajectories and offering shared critical remarks on the human rights framework, the nation-state framework, and the coloniality of social work. (shrink)

This article adds to critiques of discourses and practices of care that are enmeshed with coloniality. It does so via examining the prominent model of helping marginalized people through giving them the opportunity to care for themselves and their own by being recruited into paid (care) work, thus, becoming “useful” participants in society. This usefulness is read as a colonial project of subordinate inclusion into neoliberal racial capitalism. A perverse ideology of care is mobilized to extract surplus value (...) from marginalized workers “integrated” into the lower echelons of social reproduction. Using historic and contemporary examples, the argument is developed in three steps: First, I discuss how care workers are included via subordination. Second, I analyze how an inversion of care receiver and caregiver transforms marginalized care workers into recipients of integration measures, rendering their care work invisible. Third, I show how racial usefulness, the interpellation that racialized workers be/come “useful,” is undergirded by productivism within neoliberal racial capitalism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Capitalism as Religion and Religious Pluralism:An Approach from Liberation TheologyJung Mo Sungreligious pluralism and the struggle of the godsReligious pluralism as a social fact, namely, the coexistence of different religions within a social system, be it a country or an empire, is not anything new. The mere contact with other people and their various religions, for example, through commerce, still does not indicate religious pluralism. In this case, (...) each group of people has its religion and its gods, and recognizes that other groups of people exist with other religions and other gods. Religious pluralism occurs when, because of immigration or the conquest of one people over another, groups of people with different religions live together in the same social space.Whether by immigration or by conquest, the resulting religious pluralism does not occur in an egalitarian or harmonious manner. Immigrants are forced to live out their religion within their group as a marginal religion in society, or even in hiding when it is not accepted in the society where they went to seek a livelihood. In the case of conquest or expansion of empires, the conquering power imposes its cultural values and religion on the conquered peoples. The empire can try to extinguish the religions of conquered peoples and impose their own as if it is the only one acceptable, or tolerate them as long as these religions do not question the imperial order. This means that the coexistence of different religions within the empire takes place in a hierarchical relationship: The religion of the empire is the ultimate and the others are tolerated provided they accept their place as subordinate. The Roman Empire was an example of an empire that tolerated the religions of subject peoples as long as they didn’t question the absolute power of the empire, with its own empire religion and emperor worship.In this historical context, it is empirically impossible to live out a third way: recognizing the otherness of the other and respecting their religion as we respect our [End Page 155] own. That’s because the “encounter” between religions takes place in a situation of colonial conquest and domination. Expecting that there could be a relationship of respect and dialogue among equals would ignore the role of religion in premodern societies, especially in the processes of domination.In these societies, religion has the function of being the foundation of the world-view that legitimized the existing social order, as well as the process of external conquest. Religion fulfills the function of legitimizing and justifying the conquest and consequent exploitation and oppression of the conquered people. Therefore, religion performs a key task for systems of oppression, the reversal of evil into good: conquest as peace; exploitation as the path to salvation or integration into civilization. Furthermore, religion transcendentalizes the imperial system of oppression and presents it as eternal or as an expression of divine will. Therefore, how to classify religions and manage their coexistence is not just a problem for religious leaders, but also a matter of the state, a matter of interest for the king or emperor. The limits of religious tolerance are determined by the interests of the dominant social system, even when they are often discussed in religious or theological language.Of course, no religion, even those that perform the function of legitimizing an empire, is totally homogeneous. Within a religion, there is or can be a certain “theological pluralism.” The figure of Las Casas in the Spanish conquest of America is an example of the contradictions that are in all religions. But the defense of the Indians and their religion that was made by Las Casas had to be made in the court of the king of Spain. The means of evangelization and the ways of seeing the culture and religion of the Indians (i.e., the other) is a problem of the state, and not just the Church.Before thinking about the ideal of a religious pluralism that makes possible “a fraternal living together of religions as also a covenant of all those in favor of Peace and the Common Good of Humanity and the Planet,”1 we must also remember that the Bible... (shrink)

One of the most common critiques of Marx is that he mistook the birth pangs of capitalism for its death throes, on the basis of which he made the completely erroneous prediction of the increasing immiseration of the working class – a critique that rather superficially reduces immiseration to a simple matter of standard of living. The goal of this essay, however, is to expose the corporeal depths of Marx's notion of immiseration, and, in so doing, to show that (...) immiseration is by no means a long-since disappeared attribute of early capitalism. To do so, I reread the chapters on surplus-value in Capital by following the corporeal leitmotifs suggested in Franz Kafka's short story, 'In the Penal Colony'. Kafka's narration of the condemned learning the meaning of his fate through the corporeal experience of wounding evokes Marx's very graphic narration in Capital of workers experiencing exploitation and immiseration on their own bodies. Raising themes found later in Kafka's narrative, Marx tells of the arranging of the entire workplace 'under the command of capital', of the design and employment of technology both to secure that command and to extract surplus-value; and he shows how capital, like Kafka's torture machine, writes its messages on the body of labour in a script not immediately decipherable by observers. The history that Marx tells in Capital is less graphic in form than Kafka's, but it is in content at least as fantastic and horrific – perhaps even more so. Their common concern with machines painfully inscribing bodies helps to highlight the corporeal dimension of Marx's concept of immiseration. (shrink)

The high rate of inequality in South Africa is rooted in colonial dispossession and racial exploitation, and still runs primarily along the racial divide. Policy initiatives taken to redress past economic injustices through the black economic empowerment (BEE) have failed to bring economic transformation. Using the twin lenses of epistemic violence and racial capitalism, this study analyses how entangled interests aimed to co-opt the ruling party elite by the apartheid-era business elite led to the BEE impasse. The pervasiveness (...) of cultural alienation in BEE failure suggests that a shift to restorative justice is necessary to break from the impasse. (shrink)

The article aims to map the contemporary techno-social networks, together with delineation of the algorithmic governmentality, computational unconscious, the epistemic structure of the Eurocentric matrix of power haunted by its own repetition of the constant abyss of horrors, only to search for gestures of resistance. Gestures of resistance, contrary to the false conviction of capitalist realism, can be found everywhere, including in Jordan Peele's Nope (2022). Through a variety of motifs, themes, and cultural and cinematic references, Peele creates a resistance (...) image, i.e., an image that resists the historical trajectory of the violence of the digital colonial matrix of knowledge. In particular with Nope, in which the history of racial violence is disentangled by evoking the relation between the entanglement of capital and epistemic violence embodied in an all-devouring predator UFO. But Nope is also about visualizing silenced histories. Indeed, to strive to capture UFO with the camera is to break away from modernity as a totalizing onto-epistemology and in this register generating a false universal subject of a Man. (shrink)

This paper revisits the perennial crisis of African development. The authors, unoblivious of theories that have been put forward for ending this crisis, delimit their intervention to the political and economic aspects. They review the dominant approaches to African development, that is, capitalism and Marxism. Following this review and a critical reading of the reigning orthodoxies of economic mobilization and statecraft inherent in pre-colonial Africa, the authors propose a liberal-paternalistic theory of development rooted in the idea of African (...) socialism/communalism. They argue that this idea provides a veritable basis for Africa’s development. (shrink)

Dussel’s complex work calls into question the standard history of philosophy, reveals a counter-history at work beneath the official history that gives voice to the victims of capitalism and colonialism, and systematically develops a novel ‘material ethics’ grounded in an unqualified, universal affirmation of life as the foundation of liberatory values. The Ethics of Liberation brings together the major problems explored in Dussel’s prolific body of earlier work: the relationship between Western philosophy and the expansion of European society; the (...) relationship between centre and periphery in global political economy, considered as both a philosophical and an ethical problem; the ethical interpretation of Marxism; the politics of liberation in the colonial context; the defence of universal foundations of ethical norms; and the distinction between formal and critical ethics. (shrink)

This article aims at contributing to current debates on the ‘new imperialism’ by presenting the main results of a reading of Marx’sCapitalin light of his writings on colonialism, which were unknown in the early Marxist debate on imperialism. It aims to prove that, in his main work, Marx does not analyse a national economy or – correspondingly – an abstract model of capitalist society, but a world-polarising and ever-expanding system. This abstraction allows the identification of the laws of development of (...) capitalism and its antagonisms, and reflects the tendency of the capital of the dominant states, by making permanent recourse also to methods of so-called ‘primitive accumulation’, to expand and increase the exploitation of workers worldwide, and, at the same time, the cooperation between them. What, for Marx, was later defined as imperialism is the concrete form of the process of ‘globalisation’ of the capital of the dominant states. With the development of his analysis, Marx became increasingly aware of the economic and political consequences of imperialism. In his activity within the First International, with regard to the question of Irish independence, he affirmed the fundamental importance of building a real solidarity between class struggles in imperialist countries and anti-colonial resistance in colonised and dependent countries. His examination of imperialism and internationalist perspective were downplayed, denied, if not completely reversed in the interpretation and systematisation of his thought by reformist leaders within the Second International. In their attempt to react against this tendency and develop an analysis and a political strategy adequate to the new phase of generalised imperialist expansion, increased inter-imperialist rivalries and rising anti-colonial resistance, Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin reaffirmed the centrality of the critique of imperialism at the economic and at the political levels. Even if they were partially unaware of this, they thus developed and expanded on some aspects already present in Marx’s work. (shrink)

This essay explores how, for many minoritized peoples, cyborg ontology is experienced as dehumanizing rather than posthumanizing. Rereading Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto through a decolonial, transfeminist lens, it explores the implications of Haraway’s assertion that cyborg subjectivity is the “illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism” by examining the modern/colonial development and deployment of microprosthetic hormonal technologies – so often heralded as one of the technologies ushering in a queer, posthuman, post-gender future – as mechanisms of gendered and racialized (...) subjective control operative at the level of the biomolecular. (shrink)

This article highlights the impasses of anti-racist struggles that understand racism as an opinion or a prejudice and use education as their only means for addressing it. Racism should rather be understood as a socio-historical subjective structure rooted in the process of constitution of the division of labour on a global scale through colonialism, a process that was crucial to the institution of capitalism. This is why we will put forth the importance of rejecting the narrations that camouflage colonization (...) with the idea of civilization, and the necessity to produce decolonial counter-histories. We will thus claim that such an endeavor should start from the struggles of racialized peoples against the different forms of coloniality—that is, from the refusal by racialized peoples of the representations that are imposed on them, and from their repositioning on the basis of their alterity. Only the position of a powerful alterity can in fact make possible a real equality.Cet article met en évidence les impasses des luttes antiracistes qui conçoivent le racisme comme une opinion ou un préjugé et utilisent l’éducation comme le seul moyen d’y remédier. Le racisme devrait plutôt être compris comme une structure socio-historique subjective qui s’enracine dans le procès de constitution de la division mondiale du travail par le colonialisme, un procès qui a été décisif pour l’institution du capitalisme. C’est pourquoi nous mettrons en avant le caractère problématique des récits qui recouvrent la colonisation de l’idée de civilisation et la nécessité de produire des contre-histoires décoloniales. Il s’agira alors de montrer que, pour ce faire, il faut partir des luttes des racisés contre les différentes formes de colonialité—c’est-à-dire du refus par les racisés des représentations qui leur sont adressées et de leur repositionnement à partir de leur altérité. Seule la position d’une altérité puissante peut, en effet, rendre possible une égalité réelle. (shrink)

This essay reviews recent feminist scholarship, autobiographical narrative and fiction which explores nurses' engagement with empire in Africa and elsewhere in this century. Such literature suggests that while nursing work may have improved native health in colonized regions, it also contributed significantly to the establishment and stabilization of the racialized order of colonial rule. Of particular significance was colonial nursing's intervention into the reproductive practices of native women, resulting in the loss of local knowledges and autonomy, the disruption (...) of complex social links and indigenous health strategies, and the expansion of markets for western capitalism. (shrink)

The capitalism and slavery debate is among the most significant in world historiography. This essay suggests that its main perspectives still use nation-based approaches and employ analytical categories of classical and neoclassical economics that obscure the very notion of capital. As a result, the material relations of slavery are reduced to the problem of profitability within national or colonial contexts, an approach that depicts the nineteenth-century nexus between slavery and capitalism as a transhistorical one. Against this backdrop, (...) this essay proposes that the rise and fall of slavery can be better understood by examining the changing material composition of capital as well as its equally changing cluster of global circuits. Based on critical value theory, it argues that industrialization consistently reshaped spatial and material relations between town and country, capital and labor, and production and consumption, engendering world geographies of accumulation that both fueled and challenged the reproduction of slave labor in the Americas. (shrink)

Eric Williams's Capitalism and Slavery is a classic in the sense that it irreversyibly altered our most basic way of looking at an historical event. Writing the book in 1944, Williams broke with the century of histories portraying the British abolition of slavery as a humanist event, a moral victory. His account of slavery in the British colonies was innovative in introducing the notion that economic, rather than moral, factors were decisive in the motivation and success of the abolitionists. (...) The two farthest-reaching claims of Capitalism and Slavery are that British colonial slave production and the slave trade enabled the industrial revolution to take place in Britain, and that the abolition movement resulted solely from changes in the British imperial economy. Though few historians since Williams have agreed with him on the centrality of industrialization in the slave colonies and abolition, his work has resulted in the inclusion of economic factors in all recent accounts of slavery and its abolition. By writing a simplistic history with a global context, Williams made it impossible for subsequent historians to write about abolition as an isolated moral act of the British Empire. (shrink)

Impelled by the intertwined expansion of capitalist institutions and fossil-fueled industry, human activity has made devastating impacts on ecosystems and earth systems. The colonial, class, racial, and gender systems that coevolved with these historical processes have long been critiqued for engineering exploitation and inequality. Yet the technologies with which these systems interact are widely portrayed as neutral and nonpartisan. This paper interrogates the purported independence of technology on two fronts. First, it uses a political ecology lens to illuminate some (...) ways in which the generation and application of technology have been historically entangled with colonial, racial, and gender systems. Second, it considers how those entanglements have been variously obscured, acknowledged, depoliticized, and/or politicized in two realms of thought and practice: ecomodernism and degrowth. Conclusions call for bringing creative innovation of ecomodernism together with degrowth commitment to just social–ecological transformation. (shrink)

This article criticises the political-economic analysis of settler colonial studies, which it draws out through an immanent critique of its most famous practitioners. It then offers a critical genealogy of the wider theoretical trend that secures it: the post-Cold War vogue of asserting the ever-increasing centrality of primitive accumulation in global capitalism – what we might term a mode of predation. Finally, it teases out the tensions and confusions in the reliance of settler colonial studies upon Marx’s (...) concept of surplus populations, as well as problems abounding in Patrick Wolfe’s ‘logic of elimination’. Overall, it argues that the frequent claim that we inhabit a global settler modernity cannot be sustained through these notions, and that this claim is profoundly moral and academic, lacking political and analytical value. The insistence on the durability of settler colonialism amounts, in this literature, to a claim on behalf of settler colonial studies itself. (shrink)

Via a reading of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and a critical appraisal of Foucault’s break with historical materialism, W. Oliver Baker finds, at the limits of the new materialisms, space for a new post-humanist critical materialism that sees utopia not in post-human assemblages, but in the abolition of colonial and capitalist structures that condition those assemblages in the first place.

This essay brings together political theories of empire and racial capitalism to clarify the entanglements between socialist and imperial discourse at the turn of the twentieth century. I show that white labor activists and intellectuals in the United States and the British settler colonies borrowed from imperial scripts to mark non-white workers as a threat. This discourse was thus both imperial and popular, because it absorbed the white working class into settler projects and enlisted its support in defense of (...) imperial logics of labor control. While white workers’ demands of enfranchisement were part of a transnational imagination that was both imperial and narrowly emancipatory, this discourse reemerged as one of popular sovereignty and found channels and paths to institutionalization through national states. These institutional formations arose out of the encounter between capitalists interested in facilitating mobility of racialized laboring subjects around the globe, elite projects invested in sheltering settler spaces, and white workers concerned with protecting their own labor from competition by excluding exploitable non-white workers. White labor’s embrace of racial prejudice and the exclusion of workers of color created segregated labor spaces that fit neatly with both capitalist goals of labor control and the protection of the settler status of emerging polities. Bringing to the forefront the imperial genealogy of popular sovereignty and immigration control disrupts liberal political theory frameworks that condemn restrictions as well as those that find migration restrictions permissible. The analysis also illuminates contemporary immigration politics. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article elaborates a concept of localization through interpreting key arguments in Colombian philosopher Santiago Castro-Gómez’s early works grouped by the author under the name “genealogies of coloniality.” Following the role localization in his genealogies of coloniality reveals what Castro-Gómez calls “heterarchic articulations.” Heterarchic articulations delineate an analytic model of power that traces how multiple technologies and formations of power operating at different levels, from colonial geopolitics to individual “corpopolitics” of desire, converge and configure radically localized processes of (...) subjectivation. Localization understood in these terms, the author argues, allows Castro-Gómez to radicalize, transform, and combine Foucault’s genealogical approach and decolonial theory. The article concludes by showing that, besides radicalizing and combining genealogy and decoloniality, the localization at work in Castro-Gómez’s genealogies of coloniality serves to interpret theorizations and phenomena of contemporary violence by turning to Mexican transfeminist philosopher Sayak Valencia’s analysis of “gore capitalism.”. (shrink)

During the last few decades, the concept of primitive accumulation (ursprüngliche Akkumulation) introduced by Karl Marx and expanded by Rosa Luxemburg has been revived and improved. Accordingly, scholars have used this framework not to characterize a past moment in the history of capitalism, but to grasp the continuous process of coupling and uncoupling geographical and social spheres in the capital accumulation in different fields: financialization, the care economy, green grabbing, the sharing economy, real estate bubbles, data mining, etc. Despite (...) the quality and productivity of these debates, they are still focused on authors and phenomena observed in the Global North, ignoring a long tradition of similar discussions developed especially in Latin America. The article seeks to decentre these debates by taking seriously into account approaches which address primitive accumulation from the perspective of (post)colonial and (post)slave societies. It coins the concept entangled accumulation to emphasize the interdependencies between practices of exploitation and expropriation, wage and slave labour, state power and illegal violence, and capitalist and non-capitalist economies, which have shaped capital accumulation throughout history. (shrink)

The author argues that Quijano’s conceptualization of race within the theory of coloniality of power is limited and theoretically insufficient given its lack of elaboration regarding the role of anti-Blackness in Spanish colonization. This article contrasts the idea of coloniality of power with Cedric Robinson’s elaboration of racial capitalism to demonstrates how Robinson has a more complex and historically rich analysis of race that centers the expansion of racial capitalism with the invention of the Negro subject. The article (...) closes with an attempt to bridge the history of anti-Blackness and the idea of coloniality using Sylvia Wynter’s adaptation of the idea of coloniality, which is attentive to the Portuguese expeditions prior to Columbus and how coloniality disproportionally affected people of African descent in the Américas. (shrink)

Amartya Sen’s theory of enhancement of justice bears an insurmountable blind side that impairs and makes it incomplete, if not parochial. It dismisses coloniality as the veiled face of modernity without which any understanding of a theory of justice in a globalized world is impossible. Constructing a theory outside the complex frame of coloniality makes the theory vulnerable to severe hindrances. The duality produces a twofold but interdependent reality: for the western world it means the achievement of values such as (...) liberty and prosperity; for the non-western world, racism, extraction and exclusion. Since colonialism has been rearticulated into coloniality, these two categories cannot be isolated for they presuppose one another. Democracy remains a fallacy as long as real power depends on capitalism, which is the inextricable way of coloniality itself. Henceforth, free public discussion and free social choice remain chimerical, obtainable only when democracy as a true, unresolved conflict is a reality through the destruction of coloniality. Finally we propose a third principle of justice that would correct both Rawls’ and Sen’s conceptions of justice. Such corrections pinpoint the void in their approaches thus inverting the panoptic. (shrink)

There are two observations about the history of Marxism as a theory, and of the movements informed by that theory, which command wide assent. The first is an indisputable empirical observation: socialist movements proved more successful in the relatively �backward� parts of the world than in the heartlands of capitalism, where Marx expected his ideas to take root and his prophecies to be fulfilled. Marxist ideas and Marxist inspired movements once registered important successes in Eastern and Central Europe (distant (...) as that now seems!), but not in Western Europe and North America. They also -- what concerns us in this essay -- occasionally triumphed, and frequently achieved some measure of influence even where they did not triumph, in �Third World� countries. The second observation is that the phenomena of nationhood and of nationalism were never adequately theorized within Marxism; nor, in most cases, were they dealt with satisfactorily in �practical� terms. This theoretical shortcoming was frequently pointed out by non-Marxists. In more recent times Marxists have been at the forefront in pointing to this lacunae or limitation. Nicos Poulantzas urges an imputedly reluctant audience, �we have to recognize that there is no Marxist theory of the nation�. Similarly Tom Nairn adjudges, in portentious tones: �The theory of nationalism represents Marxism's great historical failure.� Both these observations are indisputably true, but a paradox becomes apparent when they are juxtaposed. It would appear that Marxism proved more influential and successful in the former colonial and semi-colonial countries of the �East� than in the bourgeois societies of Western Europe, despite the fact that in the former region the national question, one of Marxism's great theoretical failings, was an issue of pressing political importance. How can one explain this paradox? This essay argues that a major part of the answer lies in the manner in which Lenin developed and reformulated Marx's theory. It suggests that the seeds both of the successful extension of Marxism to the underdeveloped parts of the world, and of its failure to develop a theory of the nation, lay in the reformulation of Marx's thought undertaken with the theory of imperialism. In order fully to understand how Lenin developed Marx's thought, it is first necessary to consider Marx's writings on the non-Western world and what would later come to be known as the 'colonial question'. (shrink)

This paper examines the critique of capitalism provided by the New World Group. Emerging from the West Indian Society for the Study of Social Issues at The University of The West Indies, Mona, the Group was formed in 1963 specifically to address the reconfiguration of social and political forces in the wake of Caribbean territories gaining formal independence from European colonial powers. This reconfiguration went beyond matters of political economy, and included psychological and ideological reworkings, all items necessary (...) to evaluate the kinds of societies West Indians could strive for. Set within intra-Marxist debates on early capitalist development, this paper focuses on the collaboration and creative tensions between Norman Girvan, George Beckford, and Lloyd Best as they helped one another construct their respective political philosophy, social theory, and economic analysis of the logic of plantation societies, which while incomplete from our vantage point, did mostly capture the historical dynamics found in the Caribbean. (shrink)

This article provides a Latin American feminist critique of early decolonial theories focusing on the work of Aníbal Quijano and Enrique Dussel. Although decolonial theorists refer to Chicana feminist scholarship in their work, the work of Latin American feminists is ignored. However, the author argues that Chicana feminist theory cannot stand in for Latin American feminist theory because “lo latinoamericano” gets lost in translation. Latin American feminists must do their own theoretical work. Central to the critique of the use of (...) gender in decolonial theory is an analysis of the social pacts among white capitalists and white working-class men that not only exclude white women but make citizenship and democracy impossible for men and women of color in the metropolis as well as in the colony. By revealing the nexus between gender, race, and democracy, not only is the coloniality of gender apparent, but also the coloniality of democracy. (shrink)

This article examines colonialism, the regime of whiteness, and feminism; it sketches possible genealogies of theories and practices in order to design an aesthetic of radicality or a radical aesthetic that is insurgent and defiant, based on histories and knowledge. We know that aesthetics is a colonial formation that historically and currently privileges the white European bourgeois who could speculate on the beautiful and the good, while genocidal practices and slave trade were carried out from European soil in other (...) parts of the world. Similarly, the Shoah, the still unthinkable genocide that happened on European soil in the twentieth century and shaped the European present, is still, at its base, covered by rhetorically empty constructions of aesthetic perception, practices, and theories. A radical aesthetics must realign all these categories, not only with a cynical gesture of inversion but to situate them categorically and ethically elsewhere. (shrink)

The recent proliferation of settler colonial and Indigenous studies of Palestine have addressed the historical and present-day enclosure of Palestinian land, yet the question of ‘indigeneity’ is underexamined in this literature. Claims to indigeneity in Palestine straddle varied definitions: a racial category; as constructed through the colonial encounter or preceding colonialism; and as a local relation or an international juridico-political category. Using discourse analysis and ethnography of a specific Palestinian sustainable agriculture initiative, I show how for Palestinians, claiming (...) indigeneity brings into tension potential political economic gains, social relations of struggle, and discursive formations of collective subjectivity. A valorisation and commodification of indigeneity as a racial category narrows notions of indigeneity to the biological-cultural, offering challenges for Palestinian struggles for sovereignty. I conclude by asking what theorising from Palestine offers to Marxist theories of racial capitalism and settler colonialism, and whether indigeneity can exceed its commodification. (shrink)

Discussions of ‘cultural appropriation’ in popular culture suffer from an inherited politics of authenticity and ownership originating in a liberal legal–ethical framework. Here, I use Raymond Williams’s and Stuart Hall’s cultural theory to pinpoint the place at which cultural-appropriation discourse goes wrong – an essentialist and anti- historical notion of colonial encounters. We can overcome these limits through Marxist cultural and historical analysis. Outrage about colonial violence which most often roots appropriation discourse is better understood within the context (...) of an account of the transition to capitalism beginning with the Low Countries and their eastern colonies. Furthermore, the Marxist idea of the cosmopolitan cultures of both capital and labour offers a productive path for the history of culture rooted in the same colonial encounter. (shrink)