Racial capital, racial capitalism and the paradox of migration: experience of northeast women in the spa industry in India

This intervention considers uneven development and social reproduction within racial capitalism. Social reproduction refers to the range of practices that form the conditions of possibility for the life of capital, as well as life and death within racial capitalism. This spans a range of institutions and networks within households, communities, states and across national borders as well as the labour practices, relations and organization that reproduce racial capitalism. Here, we examine the extraction of time, taking up theorizations across carceral geographies, postcolonial theory and Caribbean studies to demonstrate how coercive relations of social reproduction contribute to uneven development. In particular, we look at the role of the state in racial capital’s capture of reproductive activities across our work on electric utilities in Atlanta, Georgia and extralegal land tenure on Jamaica’s north coast. In bringing these distinct sites into conversation, we re-affirm the need to study uneven development by understanding how the circulation and accumulation of capital is imbricated with the production of hierarchies of all kinds of difference. We show how a conjunctural countertopography can reveal how state practices advance accumulation under conditions of widespread surplus lives, as capital wagers on captive life and premature death.

Tracing the development of Lehman Brothers from their roots as a dry goods store in Montgomery, Alabama, into a Fortune 500 global financial services company that collapsed in the 2007 financial crisis reveals the contours of US‐style racial capitalism. We highlight how race and capital are geographically rooted in the United States. At the heart of our argument is an understanding of the geographic imperative of capital which creates and exploits differences to wrench capital’s profits from the blood, sweat, and toil of racialised bodies. Perhaps most geographically significant, we advance a second, interrelated argument, the geographic case for reparations. By arguing the system itself is entirely and wholly wrapped in race in ways that extend and advance practices of exploitation, we understand reparations that do not fundamentally undermine, transform, destabilise or smash the system as doomed to be short‐term solutions to long‐term structural problems.

This chapter proposes an interrogation of how Black cultural producers in Portugal have gauged these while situating their experiences of systemic racism in Portugal into longer histories of coloniality and racial capitalism. In the process, these producers propose radical revisions of the interwoven matrices of Portuguese nationality-making and anti-Blackness while laboring toward and situating themselves within broader Black diasporic epistemologies and worldmaking. To this end, this chapter will put in conversation works from distinct cultural genres such as Telma Tvon’s novel, O preto mais português [The Most Portuguese Black Man] (2017) and rap artist Valete’s “Quando o sorriso morre” [“When the Smile Dies”] (2012). These works propose alternate and emerging counter-hegemonic historiographies of Portuguese colonialism and Eurocentric coloniality more broadly that contextualize postcolonial African migration to the metropolis into a longer history of the transatlantic slave trade and the Portuguese state’s dominant role in it, the trafficking of enslaved African people into the metropolis, and the long-durée mechanisms of colonial extraction.

This chapter assesses the racial turn in medieval studies from the mid-1990s to the early-2020s within the context of neoliberal order and its politics of recognition. It evaluates the methodological and theoretical differences among three medievalists’ approaches to matters of medieval race: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s Deleuzianism, Geraldine Heng’s Foucauldianism, and Cord Whitaker’s metaphoricism. Engaging in what Margo Hendricks terms ‘Premodern Critical Race Studies’ (PCRS), the chapter also examines Chaucer’s ‘Man of Law’s Tale’ through the lenses of White Fragility, logistics, and racial capitalism. As Robin DiAngelo theorises, White Fragility is a defensive response to perceived racial stress, and it seeks to preserve racial equilibrium and racial comfort. In Chaucer’s narrative, racial capital is a product of fragility and circulates in somatic, spiritual, affective, and social forms. Rather than conceiving of race as correlating with other medieval social hierarchies such as religion, sex, gender, and class, it is more productive to reconceive their relationality as one of interdigitation. Lastly, the chapter proposes ‘racialicity’ as a more capacious critical term to approach medieval race studies, for it recognises the historical reality of racialism and racism without the burden of a teleological modernity.

The ‘question of labour’ and its exploitation in the Third World has not been given ample consideration by contemporary international legal scholars in their historical examinations of the making of the international order. This article revisits the history of the interwar institutions of the League of Nations, particularly the International Labour Organization (ILO), to argue that international law reformulated imperialism through its re-articulation of labour relations, beginning with its quest to suppress slavery and ultimately regulate forced labour in Africa. International institutions contributed to the valorization of ‘free wage labour’ in Africa and the Third World through its international ‘native labour’ policies, the development of international labour standards, and especially the passing of the 1930 Forced Labour Convention. The article argues that international institutions safeguarded the processes of capitalist racial/colonial accumulation and labour exploitation by ideologically dis-embedding the violence of slavery and forced labour from ‘free wage labour’, veiling the structural unity and totality of the international legal order with racial capitalism. Drawing on the ‘Black radical/internationalist tradition’, I propose an expansive critique of the international order as a form of ‘enslavement’ to the structures of capitalism, so as to adequately expose international law’s structural embeddedness with labour exploitation, white supremacy, and racial capitalism.

How might we understand the current political formations that emerged from the election of Donald Trump in the United States and the parliamentary coup in Brazil? Despite the U.S. disavowal for human rights violations in foreign policies, the victory of explicitly anti-black, anti-female, anti-gay, anti-poor forces in both democracies seems to be part of the vociferous restructuring of global racial capitalism, apartheid enforced by law and police violence. The more conventional analysis is that the Brazilian coup and Trump's election represent a threat to electoral democracy. Within this perspective, the protests generated by the outcomes of electoral politics in the United States and Brazil aimed to counter the reproduction of white supremacy and racial capital. We propose an alternative reading: the political conflicts that emerged in the aftermath of both events illustrate democracy's strength and its fulfilling promise to maintain racial domination and the political grammar that authorizes its reproduction. If we consider the continuum of racial violence—from slavery to democracy—that permeated the human rights–oriented Obama and Rousseff administrations, why would we unquestionably accept that liberal democracy is the pathway to racial integration and to control anti-black violence and police terror in Brazil and the United States?

We interrogate the interrelations of race and gentrification in three Chicago neighborhoods of historical significance to Black, Mexican, and Puerto Rican residents. Our previous work indicates that historical legacies of structural racism mean that gentrification works differently in each area, although the extant literature has not directly addressed how race fuels local valuation regimes. For each neighborhood we provide GIS mapping of 30 years of property parcel data and Census block data on race, compared with a parcel level visual scan of material conditions in the built environment. Changes in value at the block level reveal value assigned to whiteness irrespective of material improvement and run counter to standard explanations of gentrification but closely align with a model of racial capitalism. We bridge the gap between qualitative and quantitative research by mapping the everyday life of racial change that is felt and known by residents of color in Chicago.

The history and nature of racial capitalism remain primary questions of our times. Its true significance and gravity threaten to reveal everything about our contemporary world, from our immediate social arrangements to the global system. Within this, corporate power and the hegemonic culture shape the world at the limits of our perceptions. We must simultaneously engage the contemporary politics of knowledge production around these issues, both within the academy and in popular culture.

: This article considers the contemporary sculptures of acclaimed Philippine artist Nikki Luna alongside the performance art of Argentine group Resquicio Colectivo, both of which are active theorizations of gendered violence’s imbrication in global racial capital. Luna’s works of lace in the shape of firearms respond to a specific Philippine context in which capitalist extraction has intensified gendered violence, while also joining a larger internationalist feminist program that has been led by activists in other national contexts also under the influence of dual Spanish colonialism and American imperialism, especially the International Women’s Strike as theorized by feminists in Argentina, including Rita Segato’s reflections of the Ciudad Juarez, which this article translates at length. By placing Luna’s sculptures alongside contemporary Argentine feminist performance art, this article tracks what it calls a “formalist solidarity” of shared form/content configurations indexing shared precarity and strategies of resistance. In turn, these works provide a vantage point from which to revisit canonical 1970s feminist performance art politicizing rape by Martha Rosler, Suzanne Lacy, and Leslie Liebowitz. At the same time, the materiality of waste in these works expands performance art’s theorization of the body under patriarchy within a larger framework of racial capitalism and ultimately theorizes the short-circuiting of capital’s reproduction through gendered sabotage.

This article examines the deportation proceedings of Nicolas Flores to interrogate larger issues of race, citizenship, and belonging in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. The case demonstrates how concepts of race based on culture and biology, and the fact that Flores lacked racial capital, helped cast doubt on his citizenship and even reinscribed him as an immigrant.

This focus explores queer Black and Brown feminist and utopian politics as imagined in modern-day alternative nightlife spaces. This is done through case studies of the QTPOC (Queer and Trans People of Colour) nightlife spaces of Queertopia by the Other Village People in Johannesburg, Misery Party and Pxssy Palace in London, and Papi Juice and BK Boihood in New York. These cities are particularly lifted up as spaces of Black and Brown resistance to white dominance and racial capital, even within LGBTQIA+ spaces that implicitly or explicitly do not cater to Black and Brown queers. Through these examinations, it is argued that queer feminists of colour are embodying queer utopia through parties that centre healing, mental health, ancestral faith practices, queer Black and Brown music and dance traditions, and spaces for activists and cultural workers to gather beyond mainstream bars and nightlife. By linking these practices to transnational resistance to racial capitalism and cisheterophobia, and by particularly catering to queer people of colour involved in social movement, resistance, and cultural organising work, these parties exist as experiments in Black and Brown transnational feminist practice. This article examines the bonds that organisers and attendees of these parties build with each other across borders, both in physical nightlife spaces as well as in digital spaces conducted during COVID-19 lockdowns that explicitly brought queer people of colour together to dance and dream transnationally. It ultimately argues that these nightlife spaces are practices of imagining the possibility of utopias where queer people of colour thrive beyond borders.

This article examines how the Black Manosphere develops through the ideology of misogynoir and the accumulation of racial capital via digital media, specifically podcasting. A critical analysis of three Black Manosphere podcasting channels on YouTube reveals the co-constitutive relationship between verbal and visual misogynoir in these spaces. The cumulative effect of linguistic choices, video titles, superchats, homepages, thumbnails, set interactions, and other intertextual media is the lucrative economy of the degradation of Black women. Ultimately, misogynoir emerges as a profitable strategy in the Black Manosphere in which content creators leverage platform affordances and affective currencies to exacerbate Black women’s marginalization.

To what extent is an American dream of economic mobility real, in particular for historically marginalized racial minorities? Asian Americans are a revealing group to study, in particular those with above-average levels of education and income. This chapter explains how they migrated to the United States and experience the white-collar workplace and small business entrepreneurship. It analyzes their hardships and successes within a context of racial capitalism. Rather than a story of either clear upward mobility or blocked opportunities, Asian Americans reveal how groups must navigate restrictions within racial capitalism. Asian Americans have economic achievements even as the American dream of promised economic mobility proves a false narrative. The point is not to deny that any achievement has taken place but to explain that mobility does not affirm an American dream and, instead, reveals how racial capitalism operates even for those who appear to have succeeded.

Intergenerational social mobility has been of interest to economists and sociologists in recent years. However, with the development of methodologies and applications, it has been found that studying income mobility and class mobility separately often led to some conflicting findings. The class mobility and income mobility of China, a major developing country, has attracted the widespread interest of economists and sociologists from around the world. In this article, we attempt to answer the following questions: Should these divergent findings of intergenerational income and class mobility be regarded as a result of the differing data problems faced by researchers seeking to investigate income and class mobility or as a result of their differing analytical approaches? Is there a significant difference between intergenerational class mobility and income mobility in China? Our own comparative analysis involves measuring the magnitudes and temporal trends of intergenerational class mobility and income mobility. By using China Health and Nutrition Survey data, this paper explicitly tests the differences in the intergenerational associations of the income table and the class table from the “local”, “global”, and “comprehensive” perspectives, and provides smooth estimates of trends of both social class mobility and income mobility. This empirical study demonstrates that there is strong evidence showing that China’s class mobility and income mobility are not consistent in both fluidity levels and trend changes using the same data and same analytical approaches. Furthermore, there is a stronger association between fathers’ class and children’s class than between fathers’ income and children’s income, and the temporal trend of class mobility is more volatile than that of income mobility. This leads us to suggest that, in China, class may in general be a better indicator of socioeconomic status than one-shot measures of current income.

It is often pointed out that conclusions about intergenerational (parent – child) mobility can differ depending on whether we base them on studies of class or income. We analyze empirically the degree of overlap in income and social mobility and we demonstrate mathematically the nature of their relationship.. Analyzing Swedish longitudinal register data on the incomes and occupations of over 300,000 parent-child pairs, we find that social mobility accounts for up to 49 per cent of the observed intergenerational income correlations. This figure is somewhat greater for a fine-graded micro-class classification than a five-class schema, and somewhat greater for women than men. Our empirical results verify that the overlap between income mobility and social mobility leaves ample room for the two indicators to move in different directions over time, or show diverse patterns across countries. We explain the circumstances under which income and social mobility will change together or co-vary positively, and the circumstances in which they will diverge.