Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism

This article tells a story about the unfolding “Chinese Century” in South Africa centered on China Malls, wholesale shopping centers for Chinese goods that have cropped up along Johannesburg's old mining belt since the early 2000s. Based in ethnographic and historical analysis, the essay takes a palimpsestic approach to imagine how Chinese capital enters into a terrain profoundly shaped by race, labor, and migration and is entangled with the afterlives of gold. Chinese migrant traders in South Africa draw on legacies of migrant mine labor and refashion processes that devalue Black labor. Whereas these histories are lost upon Chinese newcomers, African workers experience working for “the Chinese” through the memory of the mines. With the aim of theorizing emergent formations of race and capital in the Chinese Century, the essay threads this new epoch through the history of colonial and racial capitalism of the City of Gold.

Can we begin at the beginning? Or maybe we must enter midstream, in medias res? In any case, let us continue with our story —“When something big like that night happens,” says the narrator of Animal’s People (2007), “time divides into before and after, the before time breaks up into dreams, the dreams dissolve into darkness. That’s how it is here.”1 The tragedy to which Animal, the narrator of Indra Sinha’s novel, refers is the 1984 gas leak at the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal, India. It is the cause of his spina bifida and leaves him walking on all fours. Throughout the novel, Animal grapples not just with the physical and bodily effects of the disaster, but also with its temporal ramifications. The event is so decisive that it fractures time itself in two: there is time before the toxic gas leak and there is time after the leak. The people of Khaufpur gradually start to lose their sense of history; at first the “before time” turns blurry and intangible, and then becomes completely inaccessible, “dissolv[ing] into darkness.” Elsewhere in the text, we learn that Animal and his loved ones have been forced into a kind of stasis, stuck in time as a result of the ongoing bodily and environmental harms from the poisons of “that night,” and a slow-moving juridical process that gradually extinguishes all hopes of reparation. Part of Animal’s challenge, then, is to learn to inhabit time differently. He has to reorient his sense of himself as “animal” (a childhood slur about his disability) and dare to imagine an alternate, more ethical present and future.If time is a medium that carries our stories, then how do we change our place in it? What would it mean to reorient ourselves in time?“Whore!” “Whore! Whore! Whore!” These are the first words you hear in Anamika Haksar’s genre-defying film, Ghode ko Jalebi Khilane Le Ja Riya Hoon (Taking the Horse to Eat Jalebis, 2018; henceforth Ghode). The words are spoken by unseen women, in high-pitched voices that get more frantic and accusatory with each iteration. This aural track of abusive speech is overlaid on visuals of a choked drain in the back alleys of Delhi’s Old City. The camera follows the slow drip-drip of water from a leaky community tap as it flows into an uncovered drain and mingles with sewage and slime, the accumulated urban refuse of lives lived on the margins of a big city. As the opening sequence continues, the camera rises up from drain-level to present a sweeping aerial view of the sleeping bodies of male wage laborers, fast asleep on wooden handcarts and cement pavements. These are the places and implements of their informal everyday labor. In the next seconds, Haksar takes us from the distance of the aerial view and drops us inside the surreal dreamworlds of the exhausted sleepers. Through an irreverent mix of extreme documentary realism and fantastic animation, we experience the contradictory dreams of these tired humans as they move between visions of proletarian revolution and divine beneficence. One man is visited by the Goddess Lakshmi who showers him with wealth, while another sees a united front of workers heartily singing “The Internationale.” Two different utopian visions for the future collide here, rather uneasily. Our own disorientation, as viewers, is heightened when we remember the voices of the women who shout shrilly, “Whore!” For beneath the struggle for work and rest, behind the conflict between capital and labor, are unspoken stories of gendered violence and misogyny. The city resonates with a quiet buzz, a volley of words that spell “woman,” but sound like fear.****When we—that is, Pavitra and Debashree—sat down to articulate our understanding of a decolonial and feminist media studies, we knew that we were entering a conversation that had long been underway. Anticolonial movements of the twentieth century ousted powerful and globe-spanning modern empires. Postcolonial and decolonial theories helped us understand the epistemic violence that made the material extraction of colonialism possible. They cautioned us that colonialism looked different in different parts of the world, used different weapons, and had different avatars in the present.Moreover, the year was 2020 and we were writing from the United States of America. We were witnessing a popular movement of racial reckoning even as it unfolded in the middle of a devastating global pandemic.2 No doubt we were buoyed by the energy of mass protest, but were also alert to the many gendered forms of racialized and right-wing tyrannies that were gaining momentum under the cover of pandemic lockdowns across the globe. We wanted to take seriously the recurring calls to “Decolonize!” resonating across our multiple locations. This is what we said in our initial call for papers: “2020 has been a year of many reckonings. With this CFP we invite reflections on media that build on one of the most urgent calls currently resonating across the globe: the call to decolonize. Echoing loudly on our streets, our screens, and our classrooms, this is a call to dismantle structures of racial capitalism, carcerality, Brahminical patriarchy, ecological extraction, and the global division of gendered labor, all of which are interconnected systems that consolidate racial-capitalist power around the world.” Clearly, the enemies were powerful and the struggle would be long.As we send this issue to press, we do not offer any programmatic solutions or universal prescriptions. We prefer the provisional and the specific. Not a formula that will help achieve decolonization, once and for all, but anthems that can sustain us all in an ongoing collective struggle. As many of the authors in this issue observe, the work of decolonization does not end at a definite historical milestone, and calls to decolonize become defanged when they are appropriated by the very institutions we seek to challenge. The struggle against the colonization of our minds and bodies and lands is ongoing. That is, colonialism has not ended—not just because there remain many parts of the world ruled by “external” powers, but also because many of the epistemological, temporal, and indeed mediatic infrastructures that carry our bodies, desires, and nightmares, continue to be racist, casteist, sexist, Islamophobic, anti-poor, or otherwise extractive. The task of the feminist media scholar, then, is to enter the struggle midstream and try to make sense of the different currents that make up the turbulence.The two media artifacts we began with are appropriately slippery and challenging texts that do some of the anthemic work this issue seeks. Provisional and provocative, tragic but not elegiac, the novel and the film both embrace the power of storytelling and the practice of the imagination as the raw material from which to build just futures. Like Sinha’s novel, Haksar’s film homes in on the constant ontological, material, and epistemological struggles of those whose lives are marked by violence and oppression. The classic colonial encounter between white colonizer and racialized native is updated for the present as both novel and film grapple with the depredations wrought by local hierarchies (of gender, caste, religion, and nation, for example) and neoliberal economic imperatives, as they intersect with, and extend, colonial structures. Sinha’s protagonist-narrator Animal resists making himself legible and palatable to his Western readers, the greedy Eyes to whom he addresses his foul-mouthed, tape-recorded narrative, and to Elli Barber, the naive and altruistic American doctor, with whom he strikes up an unequal friendship.3 His solution is not unlike that of Patru in Ghode (played by Ravindra Sahu), who decides to appropriate the commercially lucrative urban form of the heritage “walking tour.” By exposing middle- and upper-class Indian tourists to the liminal lives and grotesque realities of urban spaces that are carefully veiled from mainstream view, Patru forces fellow Delhiites and experience-hungry foreign tourists to reckon equally with the poverty and pleasures of his daily life. Animal’s People and Ghode are both set many decades after the end of British colonial rule in India, but through this temporal distance they demonstrate the ongoing nature of capitalist, sexist, and state-sponsored extraction. In the face of these crushing structures, the subaltern protagonists find ever more imaginative ways to keep on keeping on.What might a decolonial “keeping on” look like, particularly for feminist scholars of media?For us, “decolonial” is a term to describe an active process, not the marker of a particular historical epoch that has passed but an active, evolving set of strategies. This process must be at once materially and conceptually transformative.4 We conceive of the decolonial as a strategic “orientation device,” to borrow a phrase from Sara Ahmed, one that shifts our ways of looking at, and living in, the world. Orientation, Ahmed explains, is a fundamentally relational concept: “Orientations shape not only how we inhabit space, but how we apprehend the world of shared inhabitance, as well as ‘who’ and ‘what’ we direct our energy and attention toward.”5 We are always oriented toward and around something other than ourselves; the challenge is to look anew at both that other and at the relations of power that define our orientation. How do we position ourselves within an existing field of thought, a discipline, vis-à-vis our “objects” of study, even as we think carefully about our relations with each other as feminists engaged in the historical study of media? Decolonial as disciplinary reorientation urges greater reflexivity, an accounting of privilege, a defamiliarizing and dismantling of our usual intellectual and disciplinary “habits.”6For film and media studies, some of these habits would include assumptions that theory is written from the unnamed West while case studies emerge from the rest of the world. Or that we can teach courses on Film Language, History of Documentary, or Media Theory without acknowledging the rich and varied scholarship on these topics that pertain to the postcolonial world or that are being produced in the Global South. Both these habits might partially stem from the same problem: an assumption that every medium has certain fixed aesthetic, industrial, and technological features that make the medium unique and make the principles of its study universal. A decolonial reorientation to a medium like cinema, for example, would insist on historical and geographical specificity, and it would shift the focus from the oft-repeated question “What is cinema?” to “What does cinema do?”7 Cinema is a relational form, located at the intersection of multiple vectors such as commerce, labor, affect, technological change, representational politics, screening conditions, and much more. If we think of cinema itself as a process, something that continually shifts in form and address, we will no longer be able to present histories of the medium as if there were only one narrative trajectory to pursue. In fact, we will have to acknowledge that instead of the history of cinema, the world has always accommodated many histories of cinema.Crucially, we do not mean to suggest that these multiple media histories are incommensurable or self-contained. To stay with the example of cinema: We know that as motion picture technologies started to proliferate across the globe in the late nineteenth century, cinema was invented and reinvented at various sites in conjunction with locally existing cultural forms, commercial exigencies, visual traditions, and the transnational circulation of mechanically reproduced images. Rather than argue for a culturally peculiar and untranslatable discrete object called “Indian cinema,” for instance, we call for a recognition of contextual specificity and colonial-capitalist economies of film trade. We reiterate what Aimé Césaire, Edward Said, and others have said before us: that the opulently violent encounter between colonizer and colonized created a historical bond that radically shaped and transformed all sides of the encounter. Hollywood cinema, born in a neo-imperialist settler colony, was as marked by coloniality as was Mexican cinema, or Filipino cinema, or Pakistani cinema. In fact, we might adapt an English saying from the days of the Orient Express to ask, “What do they know of cinema, who only Hollywood cinema know?”8These are not new concerns. These are issues that Indigenous and native scholars, critical race theorists, women-of-color and transnational feminists, and a host of others “theor[izing] from the margins” have been raising for decades.9 What the decolonial as a category does for us now is reinvigorate and reframe those debates for this historical moment. If we take seriously the challenges posed by feminist theorists of the decolonial (and its affiliated terms), then we must ask more “demanding” questions of our epistemological frameworks, our methodologies, our canons, the very limits of what we study when we study society, technology, and representation.10 Thus, the decolonial reorients us as theorists and practitioners of media, allowing us to approach longstanding scholarly debates as well as more recent struggles for social justice, in and outside the academy, from a different vantage point.Decolonial feminist media studies, as we imagine it, can accommodate artistic engagements with archives of slavery and indenture; media industry studies that acknowledges the gendered and racialized division of labor across local and global industrial networks; work on ecology and elemental media that critiques the colonial-modern separation of nature and culture; representational histories that offer a counter-canon of feminist praxis and antiracist solidarity; and decolonial approaches to archives and digitization.In all of this, a reorientation to the past, disciplinary and otherwise, is critical. Whether it inspires imaginative storytelling, embodied memory-making, feminist historiography, or some other mode of approaching the past, the decolonial as orientation device enjoins us to stay alert to the inequities of the past as well the imbalances of power within decolonial alliances. At the recent online conference on Dismantling Global Hindutva, which was viciously trolled by right-wing Hindu nationalists in the diaspora, Meena Kandaswamy, a feminist anti-caste activist and writer, quipped that “postcolonial theory has been stretched as jelly,” and indeed, as scholars from South Asia we want to underline this caution.11 Here, we find a salutary lesson in appropriations of the slogan “Decolonize this!” in the Indian context—appropriations that emphasize selective notions of indigeneity as the locus of nationalist essence. The recent episode of Walter Mignolo’s (inadvertent) endorsement of a book that furthers majoritarian and casteist theories of a pre-colonial “Hindu India” has led to a productive conversation about the dangers of stretching the meaning of decolonization “as jelly,” and we are reminded that nativism and cultural triumphalism are themselves implicated in the “coloniality of power.”12The theft of decolonial discourse toward a muscular and masculinist nationalism is even more troubling from a feminist perspective. If decolonization during the long twentieth century was largely driven by multiple forms of anticolonial nationalism, then we must acknowledge that the promise of the nation-state has failed its most vulnerable populations. Misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia continue to the most debates and the of right-wing As transnational feminist scholars have long we must the nation-state to imagine and in of We must imagine into being different of that are and are not and and are the who passed in decolonial is a and It is a of capitalist, as a lived of the social by and other feminist on forms of and a politics, we ask which bodies and have as in our histories of media, and how do we start to this We might begin with a to work that and epistemic in and this issue we are in the conversation on what can by recognition of the power and the of this in the We conceive of the decolonial not as a or so much as an to reckon with the ongoing epistemic and material harms wrought through the of racial capitalism, and the Our of into ongoing and movements that we not define our intellectual in to not define this in with, and oriented new more toward the and of we were by the to our call for The of and media in the initial our that our was not to be but to be more like who had urgent stories to both new and To the we offer this as a whose in the of different of the different visions of what a to the decolonial can look like in film, social media, and The authors think with multiple to to time and media forms, and the environmental postcolonial and studies to feminist film historiography, and critical the the that decolonial offer us in of media and and in the by us in a of for whom is a violent that can describe ongoing of artistic by women in as to and to with a history of and feminist have produced and that a is a and is a The that and to embodied and gendered of that artistic practice has long been in the and of the and of but violent forms of bodily such as For these are of embodied against the of and cultural The of bodily and rather than or forms of underline the nature of that is not by or institutions but the and of such as physical and cultural what feminist do with to ongoing and most the as sites that as both of violence and of anticolonial a and in the film, made by to Indigenous into our existing of The is with questions of time and the imagination of in a has colonized our with a of the future as and as this the of Indigenous to imagine and of and that can help us build new Hollywood and of imagine that seek to with an that the of the of with Indigenous we that the has been a daily for for The does not from on a in the but is the from which struggle is as a mode of a term by to describe a in Indigenous storytelling that time as and that like a This or rather understanding of is into the of the film which can be as of the past and the and its depredations are and but to only does refuse the view that and colonialism are structures, but it also to the modern from the The two in the film, a and an the of through such embodied as and As has the decolonial is not to in the the of and from the struggles of By making and parts of the everyday of a the in fact, into in of the and as of how to ethical as their orientation to the world, to all and in the world, and through this orientation new are materially us to the that decolonial praxis can and must be of of and of with the narrative of that struggles for on feminist anticolonial who to the of the the the of and neoliberal that the future of the and new into economic and cultural For feminists, the as they the between and the postcolonial as as the from which women their anticolonial in in we such as as a for and of feminist is a also in the that and and in the own of these the that from be it or or ecological as they to the of imagination in futures. Thus, in this of and become that the work of decolonial as an made from a place of Not such as and through this as that can be wrought through and with who praxis in on being and has continually reinvented from the through the with the of as a in As this a of feminist and struggles across Asia and into the also the ways in which we and teach histories of cinema, the of certain Cinema to as film or as At the same carefully us from a decolonial feminist that is on and us toward that would accommodate multiple across the of gender, and To from the and this decolonial us to not how can be in the of decolonization as the of but how of decolonization through women about for “The the and the and the of is a of women in media and work in the of the in the is as of and of well as a transnational was a decolonial in its as and the the industry hierarchies and gendered and were as and the strategic of these women who under structures of and Decolonial Media The and of Media critiques the of as a for all of that the to decolonize has been to a that white and with the violence of What is in this and discourse is any of the Indigenous who the of settler of that the as to themselves as Thus, like that any decolonial feminist its must the of various they women, white or colonial power structures. such the by and Indigenous The which has been used on the decades of by various Indigenous to mainstream and transnational to the It also and a of a that would a or with the of the or the the in this issue coloniality as within multiple media forms by offer for intellectual and artistic decolonial to to we multiple media histories in this a a set of by and offer for film and media “The a that has become in media scholars have made in this us, for example, that archives are not of or historical and that can be only because it is first this of work in its own epistemic violence through its in a that the white and of the to which and our attention decades on the work that an category such as does in feminist and it takes for what it and what it The is not to find a new to the but to dismantle the masculinist settler colonial by the ways in which we understand the and collective labor of those who are in their more those who are in started with the of we now to as decolonial A for our of toward the Film and Media the racial reckoning that has the in both the and the and what our will and work do we study or seek at work do we and and what kind of scholarship do we outside the of film and media What we those methodologies, and critical as limits and work to the epistemic of our How might that change the of our What debates would of view, and which ones would to the What media texts would become and As the questions so must the that there is no to and our this is not a call for for a of our work as feminist and the that the of colonial and in that the the the the the the the and the as humans and the relations between humans and are continually so are the that we are Our anthems of the future not as an the decolonial not as a but rather as an ongoing a revolution that is not past or failed or but the of the being in is get we have work to

This article employs the theoretical concept of racial capitalism as an intellectual framework with which to theorise and explain racialised inequality in South Africa. Historical evidence shows that the accumulation of Whiteness in South Africa has historically been inseparable from the accumulation of capital. This work illustrates that the African National Congress (ANC) used the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to launder and legitimise racial capitalism in post-apartheid South Africa. It identifies Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) as one of the ANC government’s economic laundering schemes that it employs to legitimise racial capitalism in post-apartheid South Africa. I use the insight of scholars such as Marzia Milazzo to conclude that, as a full-blown laundered discourse, racial capitalism allows a White middle class to continue to own and manage the means of production and intergenerational wealth, while a Black middle class continues to endure intergenerational poverty and dispossession.

Abstract: This introduction presents 'racial capitalism' as a timely and important avenue of study in contemporary French and Francophone Studies. Drawing inspiration from the belated French translation of Cedric Robinson's landmark Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition , it details early responses to Robinson's book on the francophone left, before engaging more broadly with the concept of racial capitalism in its more recent interpretations. Before detailing the issue's contributions, it argues that while work on race and racism in French and Francophone Studies is rich and expansive, work on racial capitalism remains to be developed.

Apartheid has become an increasingly important framework for understanding and challenging Israeli rule in Palestine. The Apartheid Convention states apartheid is a crime against humanity. We contend what is missing from this definition of apartheid is an economic and ontological link. Although the current legal definition focuses solely on the political regime, it does not provide a strong basis for critiquing the economic aspects of a settler colonial state embedded in apartheid. To address this concern, we propose a more comprehensive definition of apartheid which grew out of the struggle in South Africa during the 1970s that gained support among revolutionaries due to the limits of decolonisation in South Africa after 1994 — highlighting the reality(ies) that apartheid is intimately connected to capitalism. This conceptualisation was termed racial capitalism. This article argues that racial capitalism provides a more thorough understanding of the destructive dynamics of the Israeli settler colonial project, one that insists that the struggle against Israeli domination must confront both the apartheid state and the racial capitalist system if Palestinians ever hope to achieve liberation.

The paper discusses empirical evidence and theoretical perspectives on structurally and spatially ingrained racial capitalism, dispossession, and precarisation in what is identified as ‘neo-apartheid’ Sweden. Theoretically, the argument rests on a critical re-engagement of the notions of ‘racial capitalism’ and ‘neo-apartheid’ in contemporary critical research, inspired, historically, by rich research on racial capitalism in South Africa under apartheid. The argument is illustrated, empirically, by a scrutiny of processes of segregation, racial stigmatisation, and ‘the return of primitive accumulation’ reflected in predatory housing policies and super-exploitation of labour, conditioning livelihoods and opportunities of subaltern Others in disadvantaged urban neighbourhoods. Through a local case in the region of Järvafältet in metropolitan Stockholm, the paper addresses subaltern struggles contesting these realities of racial capitalism in a society that used to be an international showpiece of social equality and inclusive diversity policy.

ABSTRACTThis article examines white settler colonialism and racial capitalism as the primary mechanisms for the historical and ongoing land dispossession of Afrikan people in South Africa. It argues that by addressing land dispossession through land restitution, South Africa could begin to meaningfully address the ongoing impacts of settler colonial displacement of Afrikan people. It contends that land reparations are central not only to restorative physical and spatial justice but also to physical healing. The aim of this contribution is to historicize and herstoricize the South African land question; situate this within the context of racial capitalism and settler colonialism; provide a framing of the racialization and feminization of the land economy; and expound on the particularities of misogynoir and critical feminist theory in theorizing the acute land dispossession of Afrikan women. Situated within the Azanian School of thought, its essential contribution is the suggestion that land restoration is a necessary and meaningful reparative measure for South Africans.

This essay investigates the category of the refugee as an instantiation of racial capitalism. To illustrate this conjunction, it first examines international law that defines refugees and, then, looks to specific national jurisprudence that accords different recognition to them. The national contexts discussed are the United States, given that the racial discourse there serves as a ground for the most widely known theorization of racial capitalism via Cedric Robinson’s book Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, and South Africa, where racial capitalism was first coined. Robinson’s work is briefly elaborated in relation to subsequent scholarship that has engaged and extended the concept of racial capitalism, in relation to the particularities of South Africa racialization, and in relation to zama zamas (unregulated miners, often perceived as foreigners who threaten the Rainbow Nation’s stability in various ways). Given limitations of space, the essay uses the overview of juridical regimes and the excursus on Robinson to rethink the category of refugee. Zama zamas and the history of the South African mining sector as it informs understandings of race are posited as a fruitful direction for further research because these phenomena help to extend the entwinement of race and refugee and the implications of Robinson’s text for understanding refugees anew.

Social scientists have long debated whether racial inequality is an unfortunate consequence of political and economic exploitation or a core feature of capitalism. In 1983, Cedric Robinson synthesized these two opposing perspectives, calling the latter racial capitalism and demonstrating its theoretical viability. In recent years, scholars have increasingly employed Robinson’s conception of racial capitalism to explain a wide array of phenomena. Yet, urban sociology has not fully explored how racial capitalism changes and reshapes our core theoretical approaches. To begin to fill this gap, this special issue presents original papers that employ racial capitalism to extend, challenge, or refine theories of and methods for understanding cities and communities. In this introduction, we outline urban scholars’ historical explanations of racial inequality and provide an overview of the development and definition(s) of racial capitalism. We then summarize the papers included in this special issue and discuss a pathway forward for urban sociology.

This article explores left critiques of neoliberalism in light of the Black Lives Matter movement’s (BLM) recourse to the notion of ‘racial capitalism’ in their analyses of anti-Black oppression. Taking a cue from BLM, I argue for a critical theory of racial capitalism that historicizes neoliberalism within a longue duree framework, surfacing racialized continuities in capitalism’s violence. I begin by revealing how neo-Marxist and neo-Foucaultian approaches to neoliberalism, particularly that of David Harvey and Wendy Brown, respectively, partition race from the workings of contemporary capitalism. Such analyses obscure neoliberalism’s differential impact on non-white racialized populations, while simultaneously casting anti-racist struggles as divisive. In contrast, I then trace how the Movement for Black Lives policy platform invokes Cedric Robinson’s work on racial capitalism, investigating the utility of this framework for the movement’s demands. Building on BLM’s turn to the concept of racial capitalism, I finally offer an outline of a critical theory of racial capitalism to better theorize neoliberalism. By historicizing neoliberalism within racial capitalism’s historical arc, such a theory unravels the qualitatively different mechanisms through which racialized populations are pressed into circuits of capital accumulation. It also paves the way to move past the entrenched class-versus-identity debate on the American left.

International audience

The papers in this special issue engage Black radical intellectual ideas to highlight the related concepts of anti-Blackness and racial capitalism. As such, these works challenge white supremacy in scholarship and beyond by providing case studies, interviews, essays, and theoretical explorations that center Black liberational thought and radical Black knowledge-making. Underpinning these efforts, is a commitment to challenge anti-Blackness in management and organization studies. Anti-Blackness is an organized and stubborn form of racism that targets Black communities by removing or denying their full humanity. In our introduction, we discuss the relationship between anti-Blackness and racial capitalism, and suggest that these are critical concepts for scholars of management and organization to meaningfully engage with. Racial capitalism has rapidly emerged over the last 10 years as a significant analytic of race and its materiality as a socioeconomic formation. We write this introduction to offer deeper insights into this concept and how its foundational ideas can be applied to current debates in the organization of scholarship, public policy, and corporate activity. Specifically, the special issue highlights the role of context and positionality in the formation of capitalism and urges scholars and activists to pay greater attention to how our analysis of race and capitalism must retain a focus on specific mechanisms and arrangements that shape these relations.

African Americans' interest in world politics can be traced back to the American Revolutionary War, the Haitian Revolution, and the Abolition Movement in the pre-Civil War era. New World Africans' interest in influencing international affairs took on a new life when the USA established its overseas empire and Europe divided Africa into spheres of influence. At this critical juncture when much of the world came under the control of Europe or of descendants of Europe in the USA, African Americans developed a view of world affairs that drew connections between the discrimination they faced at home and the expansion of empire abroad. Black internationalism, as a worldview, was an ideology that stressed the role of race and racism in world affairs drawing attention to the linkages, interconnections, and interrelationships between racial capitalism and the color line in world affairs. For this reason, this belief in the existence of a color scheme or hierarchy in global affairs served as a guiding theoretical framework of black internationalism. As an upshot to that main principle, black internationalism believed that, as victims of racial capitalism and imperialism, the world's darker races, a term they employed to describe the non-European world, shared a common interest in overthrowing white supremacy and creating a new world order based on racial equality. This article will address Cedric J. Robinson's contribution to our understanding of the linkages between racial capitalism, black internationalism, resistance, and black liberation.

The COVID‐19 pandemic and state violence converged in the U.S. in 2020 highlighting the uneven distribution of illness and death. In this article, we mobilize three bodies of literature–political ecologies of health and the body, Black geographies and racial capitalism, and Black feminist work on care—to understand the disproportionate impacts of the COVID‐19 pandemic on Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Asian people, and to imagine different, more just futures. We argue that these literatures center relationships, enabling an analysis that incorporates viruses and cellular processes, histories of racism, power differences, and political economy. We conclude by taking inspiration from the uprisings and Black feminism to envision a more caring future that nurtures relationships.

Reviewed by: Reimagining Social Medicine from the South by Abigail H. Neely Kwaku Nti Neely, Abigail H. Reimagining Social Medicine from the South. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. Foregrounded in social medicine (a branch in the medical field that focuses on demographic determinants of health and the biology of disease, as well as community-oriented primary care [COPC] that influenced the World Health Organization [WHO]–led primary health care for all), this book upholds the Pholela Community Health Center (PCHC) "unbecoming role." Significantly, yet, the author derives her ideas from the experiences of the proximate community—that is "the homes, landscapes, and lives—the worlds of Pholela residents" (xv). Abigail Neely, essentially, reiterates that it is conceptually impracticable to fully comprehend the global story of social medicine without the lives of the residents of Pholela, their homesteads, health, and words, since these elements proffer the possibilities and limitations of this field, and equally pushes for a more-than-human understanding of social life in illness and wellness. Arguably, in the cast of Charles van Onselen, who did a social history of the industrialized gold mining sector of the economy of South Africa and shifted the glorious attention from the mine owners to the underground miners and others in that category, Neely de-emphasizes "laudatory narratives of white male doctors who practice medicine to fight for social justice" (4) and centers Pholela residents as the people who lived in the community and made different worlds amid the vagaries of illness and wellness. She, therefore, juxtaposes the sacrosanct scientific study of PCHC with the understandings and interventions borne out of the worlds in which the Pholela people lived. Neely avers, and justifiably so, that these local and cultural understandings and interventions forged "health outcomes in ways social medicine could not always understand and treat" because "for all its many successes, the PCHC was haunted by its own faith in [End Page 220] science, both biomedical and social, as well as by broader political and economic forces at work in South Africa" (4). Elaborating on the limitations of the PCHC program, Neely discusses its inability to consider the role of the people in the development of the practice, disregard of the sociality of nonhuman things that remain integral to it, and the lack of understanding of Pholela-specific social relationships giving a deep "vision of social life in which individual actors disappear and health and illness emerge as the product of entanglements" (5). Connected to the foregoing factor is the idea of "ontological coordination"; for the residents of Pholela, "ontologies are multiple, relational, and overlapping" (4), a kind of multiplicity that reveals yet another limitation to the social medicine practiced in the Pholela vicinity. Finally, the political ecology inflected by the scholarship on racial capitalism also illuminates some of the limits of social medicine practiced in Pholela. Although the health center could assist with modifications of the homesteads of the residents in addition to offering clinical care, it hardly could change the overarching structures of racial capitalism that heavily impacted livelihoods, illness, and wellness. Neely points out that to the extent that the political economy of South Africa was stratified by race, scholarship on racial capitalism is particularly valuable for a political-ecology analysis in Pholela. According to these scholars, capitalism, as well as capital accumulation, predicated a racial hierarchy that both government policy and industrial practices reinforced. The policies and practices culminated in Apartheid ensuring astronomical profit for whites at the expense of the well-being of African laborers. Reimagining Social Medicine from the South essentially consists of four chapters that are bookended by the introduction and conclusion. In chapter 1, Neely discusses her sources that mainly include archival documents, PCHC publications, and regional ethnographies of the Nguni people. While not discounting the biases and problems of these various sources, she affirms that in varying degrees, they are helpful for understanding the vision of social medicine that the PCHC practiced. She uses these sources to tell the story of the beginnings and operations of the PCHC and concludes that "seeing like a health center meant making certain aspects of health center practice visible to the outside world, all while recognizing how...