What does capital consume? Racial capitalism and the social reproduction of surplus people

There has been a large-scale migration of population from Northeastern states to India’s metropolitan cities and other regions in the past two decades under neo-economic policies, blurring the historical disjuncture between the perceived ‘mainland’ and the country’s Northeast. While this demonstrates social and economic mobility, recent literature has shown that such movements have also produced racial discrimination, labour exploitation, hostility and violence against perceived ‘others’ from the Northeast. Building on this literature, the paper explores how race, sexuality and labour intersect in soft skill industries, especially in spa centres, and examines how racial capital and racial capitalism work in complex and paradoxical forms while Northeasterners migrate internally in India. The paper brings forth the nuanced insight that even internal, domestic migration can entail the creation of racial capital, and migrants need not cross national borders for their raciality to be valued differently. By employing concepts of racial capital and racial capitalism side by side, it is shown that while the differentiation is animated through mobility, signifying the intra-Asian diversity, the neo-liberal economy simultaneously racialises the labour field where mobility is confronted by the experience of structured inequalities and everyday forms of violence and suffering.

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.

In 2011 milk banks became key components of the public health establishment in South Africa, when the country committed to promoting exclusive breastfeeding to fight infant morbidity and mortality. In this article I present a conjunctural analysis of how donor human milk banks are social reproductive infrastructures that facilitate the flow of milk at a space-time of racial capitalist infectious disease and neoliberal care crises. I ask: How do multiscalar governing logics, discourses, and technologies articulate to make this donor economy a conjunctural form of distributed social and biological reproduction? How have various interlocking economic, ecological, and reproductive crises underpinned the emergence of milk banking infrastructures? And, methodologically, how can conjunctural analysis fold in necessary attention to the embodied, biological, biomedical, and religious factors that shape social reproductive politics in a given space-time? I argue that this social reproductive infrastructure is molded through the articulation of numerous discourses and processual logics that dialectically entwine the global and local, including socioecological and embodied crisis, biomedicalization, networks of kin and care, and secularization. In so doing I build out a conjunctural analytic attentive to social reproduction under racial capitalism that privileges the body, ecologies, kinship, and religious-cultural norms.

The Digital Calculus of Racial Capitalism

This article attempts to think through the relationship between homocapitalism, racial capitalism, and caste capitalism. It conceptualizes homocapitalism as immanent within the assemblage of homonationalism but also as becoming partially disembedded from it as a result of the shift in conjuncture from the “war on terror” to the “global financial crisis.” Having made a case for the partial autonomy of homocapitalism from homonationalism, the article explores the relationship between homocapitalism, racial capitalism, and the emergent theoretical conceptualization of caste capitalism. The author demonstrates how the central analytical insight of racial and caste capitalism—namely, that capitalism mobilizes precapitalist social hierarchies as a means of furthering accumulation—throws open the field for a range of ideological approaches that seek emancipation from racial and caste oppression through varying relationships with capitalism. This allows the author to make a crucial distinction between analytics and ideologies, a distinction that has been unhelpfully blurred in discussions of homocapitalism. As ideology, homocapitalism intensifies and derives some of its purchase from its affinities with discourses of liberatory capitalism such as Black capitalism and Dalit capitalism. As analytic, homocapitalism illuminates the fractioning of queerness in terms of its potential (ability, willingness) to contribute to production and social reproduction. Central to the comparison around which this article is structured is the illumination of racialization as a technology for the extraction and attribution of value that operates across racial capitalism, caste capitalism, and homocapitalism.

This essay examines how the operation of background rules and institutions provided by law leads to the expulsion of individuals under racial capitalism based upon gender. Aligning itself with anti-capitalist work by critical theorists of social reproduction and intersectionality, it contributes to perspectives on racial capitalism that regard gender, in the way it creates subjects and differentiates between workers, as a co-constituting force with race under racial capitalism. Women and transgender persons, because of gender, are precariously situated on the edge of exile from the economic order. It makes this argument by weaving feminist insights – particularly those articulated in scholarship on social reproduction and intersectionality – with perspectives on racial capitalism.

This article explores humanitarian-development responses to displacement as postcolonial modes of security within actually existing racial capitalism. Focusing on Greece's “Emergency Support to Integration and Accommodation” program, it provides insight into “make-live” interventions that temporarily subsidize stranded migrants’ social reproduction at Europe's frontiers. The article argues that development-led refugee-hosting strategies, marketed as win–win solutions for both “hosted” and “hosting” communities, actually serve a twofold function: containing racially subordinate outsiders and compensating so-called transit countries for taking up the task of “keeping out by keeping alive.” By minimally supporting migrants’ social reproductive needs within designated territories, the racial biopolitics of the humanitarian-development nexus brings surplus populations into the fold of local capital accumulation while sustaining the global color line. Analyzing the refugee humanitarian-development nexus as a spatioracial fix that harnesses the vital capacities of surplus populations, the article seeks to: invite discussion on the social reproduction of populations violently cast out of the wage relation; theorize racial capitalism beyond metropolitan centers and their (post)colonial borderlands, highlighting the role of intermediary spaces as crucial nodes of georacial and capitalist stabilization; and demonstrate how the dialectic between humanitarianism and rentier economies embeds new racialized hierarchies between crisis-affected local “hosts” and surplused migrant “guests.”

How does the circulation of capital in the form of money and finance mobilize different constructions of “Blackness” across historical-geographical contexts, and how does this produce uneven development? This contribution offers theoretical and methodological provocations to think about this question, drawing on two cases of raced finance: race-based bank lending in the United States, and international investment to sub-Saharan countries. I argue that the impersonal character of social domination under capitalism, expressed in and by the movement of abstract categories (such as the commodity, value, money, the state) requires that we carefully mobilize the notion of abstraction in theorizing the co-production of racialized difference and uneven development. I develop this conceptual argument by way of a sympathetic yet critical engagement with recent scholarship on racial capitalism, and by bringing the critique of political economy into conversation with the Black radical tradition. The key question is not the extent to which cases of raced finance exhibit a paradigmatic “anti-Blackness.” Rather, it is about how the abstractive powers of race and the social forms of capital refract each other in violent configurations, and contribute to giving the capitalist production of space a raced imprint. The co-production of racialized and spatial difference thus enhances processes of capitalist discipline and extraction mediated by money, while the totalizing operations of money reproduce racialized power relations and uneven development. I then turn to the work of Bhandar and Toscano to reflect methodologically on how to mobilize various levels and modalities of abstraction in concrete research.

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.