Foreword

Abstract

Extract Beyond Racial Capitalism: Co-operatives in the African Diaspora, edited by Caroline Shenaz Hossein, Sharon D. Wright Austin, and Kevin Edmonds for Oxford University Press, brings together Black and racialized scholars who explore political theorist Cedric Robinson’s conceptualization of “racial capitalism” in order to bring it into studies of the Black social economy as lived and created throughout the African diaspora. Contributors place the “Black radical tradition”, simply described as “the refusal to accept life in captivity” and the force that wills us to create maroonage spaces in conversation, with writings by exemplary feminist political economists including Nina Banks, Caroline Shenaz Hossein, Jessica Gordon-Nembhard, and H. L. T. Quan to demonstrate that the Black social economy is essential to the Black radical tradition historically and conceptually. Contributors explain that fugitivity itself has relied on dimensions of Black co-operative economics. Co-operative thinking and practice enabled Black people to sabotage the coercive nature of slavery itself and to weaken the market economy that followed in its “afterlife” and “second” life (Tomich 2003; Hartman 2007). Such cooperative thinking prioritized affirming the self-determination and inherent humanity of those deemed natural and inherent slaves. In the economic order of the Black social economy, cooperation performed an alchemy of social reality: turning bondspeople into free people, turning plantations into sustainable small-scale food-independent communities, and turning predatory credit and lending markets into member-owned financial unions. White-led social, legal, juridical, electoral, educational, and economic institutions engaged in legally protected conspiracies to extract and accumulate wealth and to demand the tribute of relentless and agonizing forms of humiliation from generations of enslaved and colonized persons and their descendants.