Colonial Racial Capitalism

The contributors to Colonial Racial Capitalism consider anti-Blackness, human commodification, and slave labor alongside the history of Indigenous dispossession and the uneven development of colonized lands across the globe. They demonstrate the co-constitution and entanglement of slavery and colonialism from the conquest of the New World through industrial capitalism to contemporary financial capitalism. Among other topics, the essays explore the historical suturing of Blackness and Black people to debt, the violence of uranium mining on Indigenous lands in Canada and the Belgian Congo, how municipal property assessment and waste management software encodes and produces racial difference, how Puerto Rican police crackdowns on protestors in 2010 and 2011 drew on decades of policing racially and economically marginalized people, and how historic sites in Los Angeles County narrate the Mexican-American War in ways that occlude the war's imperialist groundings. The volume's analytic of colonial racial capitalism opens new frameworks for understanding the persistence of violence, precarity, and inequality in modern society.

Contributors. Joanne Barker, Jodi A. Byrd, Lisa Marie Cacho, Michael Dawson, Iyko Day, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Alyosha Goldstein, Cheryl I. Harris, Kimberly Kay Hoang, Brian Jordan Jefferson, Susan Koshy, Marisol LeBrón, Jodi Melamed, Laura Pulido

ISBN-13: 9781478018742

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Duke University Press

Publication Date: 09-23-2022

Pages: 364

Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.75(d)

Susan Koshy is Associate Professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Lisa Marie Cacho is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Virginia. Jodi A. Byrd is Associate Professor of Literatures in English at Cornell University. Brian Jordan Jefferson is Associate Professor of Geography and Geographic Information Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

What People are Saying About This

Ananya Roy

“This is an extraordinary volume organized around the key modalities of racial capitalism but in anticipation of their unmaking and unraveling. The ‘colonial’ is no mere appendage; the intellectual feat of this book is to definitively demonstrate the centrality of colonial-imperial relations to dispossession. And it is through such a critique that these brilliant essays make possible a refusal of capitalist violence and a rehearsal of freedom.”

Toward a Global Idea of Race - Denise Ferreira da Silva

“By centering land as a site of deployment of and resistance to modern power, the pieces in Colonial Racial Capitalism formulate the question of the conditions of the existence of capital that requires an answer exceeding the geographical, philosophical, and racial limits of white Europe. Anyone interested in a serious examination of global capital and in alternatives that do not merely rehearse its constitutive colonial and racial violence must begin by reading this book.”

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  vii
Introduction / Susan Koshy, Lisa Marie Cacho, Jodi A. Byrd and Brian Jordan Jefferson  1
I. Accumulation: Development by Dispossession
1. The Corporation and the Tribe / Joanne Barker  33
2. “In the Constant Flux of Its Incessant Renewal”: The Social Reproduction of Racial Capitalism and Settler Colonial Entitlement / Alyosha Goldstein  60
3. The Racial Alchemy of Debt: Dispossession and Accumulation in Afterlives of Slavery / Cheryl I. Harris  88
II. Administration: The Open Secret of Colonial Racial Capitalist Violence
4. In Search of the Next El Dorado: Mining for Capital in a Frontier Market with Colonial Legacies / Kimberly Kay Hoang  131
5. “Don’t Arrest Me, Arrest the Police”: Policing as the Street Administration of Colonial Racial Capitalist Orders / Lisa Marie Cacho and Jodi Melamed  159
6. Policing Solidarity: Race, Violence, and the University of Puerto Rico / Marisol LeBrón  206
7. Programming Colonial Racial Capitalism: Encoding Human Value in Smart Cities / Brian Jordan Jefferson  232
III. Aesthetics: Reimagining the Sites of Cultural Memory
8. Nuclear Antipolitics and the Queer Art of Logistical Failure / Iyko Day  257
9. Erasing Empire: Remembering the Mexican-American War in Los Angeles / Laura Pulido  284
IV. Rehearsing for the Future
10. Racial Capitalism Now: A Conversation with Michael Dawson and Ruth Wilson Gilmore / Facilitated by Brian Jordan Jefferson and Jodi Melamed  311
Contributors  333
Index  337
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