scholarly journals Theorising ‘racial/colonial primitive accumulation’: settler colonialism, slavery and racial capitalism

Race & Class ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 030639682199627
Author(s):  
Siddhant Issar
Keyword(s):  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Primitive Accumulation ◽  
Racial Capitalism ◽  
The Core ◽  
Wage Labour ◽  
Labour Exploitation ◽  
American Capitalism ◽  
Racial Domination ◽  
Racial Slavery

This article reconceptualises the Marxist notion of ‘primitive accumulation’, examining how settler colonialism and anti-Black racial domination structure American capitalism. The analysis intervenes in theorisations of primitive accumulation in both critiques of neoliberalism and the growing literature on racial capitalism. It shows how particular appropriations of primitive accumulation in the context of neoliberalism not only treat the concept as, ultimately, external to the core logic of capitalism, but also ignore the ways racial domination and colonisation configure capital’s violence. Simultaneously, within racial capitalism scholarship, primitive accumulation is prone to conceptual stretching, often flattening disparate forms of land and labour expropriation. In contrast, through the analytic of ‘racial/colonial primitive accumulation’, the author elucidates how normative wage-labour exploitation is predicated on settler colonialism and racial slavery and its afterlives. This thus adds precision to received understandings of capitalist expropriation, while also pushing the literature on racial capitalism beyond a white/Black binary.

Twenty-Five Years after Sa-I-Gu: Multiracial Politics in Times of Crisis

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeff Chang ◽  
Daniel Martinez HoSang ◽  
Soya Jung ◽  
Chandan Reddy ◽  
Alex Tom
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
Critical Consciousness ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
The State ◽  
Racial Capitalism

We chose to frame this conversation in terms of crisis: not only the state of permanent crisis created by racial capitalism and settler colonialism but also specific flashpoints like Sa-I-Gu [the Korean term for the April 1992 uprising in Los Angeles after the acquittal of the police officers involved in the Rodney King beating]. We want to look at the conditions surrounding these flashpoints and the responses to them that then shaped race consciousness and politics subsequently. Today we have no shortage of crisis, no shortage of flashpoints. And yet there is hope. Perhaps more than at any other time in my lifetime, there are opportunities to shift mass culture, at the very least to popularize and normalize a slightly more critical consciousness. So now I want to turn to my friends here to talk about crisis and multiracial politics. We’ll start with Sa-I-Gu and work forward to this moment and also to future possibilities.

scholarly journals Environmental justice, settler colonialism, and more-than-humans in the occupied West Bank: An introduction

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-27
Author(s):  
Irus Braverman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
West Bank ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
The West ◽  
The Core ◽  
Waste Concrete

Our special issue provides a first-of-its kind attempt to examine environmental injustices in the occupied West Bank through interdisciplinary perspectives, pointing to the broader settler colonial and neoliberal contexts within which they occur and to their more-than-human implications. Specifically, we seek to understand what environmental justice—a movement originating from, and rooted in, the United States—means in the context of Palestine/Israel. Moving beyond the settler-native dialectic, we draw attention to the more-than-human flows that occur in the region—which include water, air, waste, cement, trees, donkeys, watermelons, and insects—to consider the dynamic, and often gradational, meanings of frontier, enclosure, and Indigeneity in the West Bank, challenging the all-too-binary assumptions at the core of settler colonialism. Against the backdrop of the settler colonial project of territorial dispossession and elimination, we illuminate the infrastructural connections and disruptions among lives and matter in the West Bank, interpreting these through the lens of environmental justice. We finally ask what forms of ecological decolonization might emerge from this landscape of accumulating waste, concrete, and ruin. Such alternative visions that move beyond the single axis of settler-native enable the emergence of more nuanced, and even hopeful, ecological imaginaries that focus on sumud, dignity, and recognition.

Jeremy Bentham: Pauperism, Colonialism, and Imperialism

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
BARBARA ARNEIL
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Jeremy Bentham ◽  
Theoretical Contribution ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Poor ◽  
First Contact

Using two recently published folios by Jeremy Bentham, I draw out a fundamental but little-analyzed connection between pauperism and both domestic and settler colonialism in opposition to imperialism in his thought. The core theoretical contribution of this article is to draw a distinction between a colonial, internal, and productive form of power that claims to improve people and land from within, which Bentham defends, and an imperial, external, and repressive form of power that dominates or rules over people from above and afar, that he rejects. Inherent in colonialism and the power unleashed by it are specific and profoundly negative implications in practice for the poor and disabled of Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries subject to domestic colonialism and indigenous peoples subject to settler colonialism from first contact until today. I conclude Bentham is best understood as a pro-colonialist and anti-imperialist thinker.

Vagrant Figures

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sal Nicolazzo
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Significant Contribution ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Law And Literature ◽  
Police Force ◽  
Police Legitimacy ◽  
Police Power ◽  
Racial Capitalism

This book, demonstrating the important role of eighteenth-century literary treatments of policing and vagrancy, offers a prehistory of police legitimacy in a period that predates the establishment of the modern police force. The book argues that narrative, textual, and rhetorical practices shaped not only police and legal activity of the period, but also public conceptions of police power. The author's research delves into law and literature on both sides of the Atlantic, tracking the centrality of vagrancy in establishing police power as a form of sovereignty crucial to settler colonialism, slavery, and racial capitalism. The first book in several generations to address policing and vagrancy in the eighteenth-century, and the first in the field to center race and empire in its account of literary vagrancy, this work is a significant contribution to the field of eighteenth-century literary and cultural studies.

Devalorization

2020 ◽  
pp. 77-99
Author(s):  
Thomas Nail
Keyword(s):  
Use Value ◽  
Primitive Accumulation ◽  
The Core ◽  
Exchange Value ◽  
Mode Of Presentation ◽  
Core Concepts ◽  
Theory Of Value

This chapter shows that the process of primitive accumulation or direct appropriation is and must be internal to Marx’s theory of value. This is the case for precisely the methodological reasons Marx describes in his postface to the second edition of Capital. The core concepts in the “mode of presentation” (use-value, exchange-value, and value) describe the strictly immanent conditions or core “logic of capitalism” but are also derived from the historical “mode of inquiry.” Since primitive accumulation is part of the historical mode of inquiry, there must be a conceptual place for primitive accumulation in the mode of presentation itself. If not, then the mode of presentation is strictly speaking inadequate to the mode of inquiry—something that any dialectician, and Marx himself, must reject.

scholarly journals Introduction

2019 ◽  
Vol 96 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Franco Barchiesi ◽  
Shona N. Jackson
Keyword(s):  
White Supremacy ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
The Political ◽  
Free Labor ◽  
Philosophical Foundations ◽  
The Core ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The Status ◽  
Racial Slavery

Labor historiography in the contexts of modern racial slavery and emancipation has long placed changes in the status of work at the core of the very meaning of captivity and freedom, their epochal watersheds, and institutionalized or unintended overlaps. Reviewing, in this journal's pages, recent scholarship on the relations between slavery and capitalism, James Oakes summarized that the “crucial differences between the political economy of slave and free labor … ultimately led to a catastrophic Civil War and one of the most violent emancipations in the hemisphere.” The literature Oakes critically discussed exemplifies the growing academic interest in the multifarious functionality of coerced production for the development of global capitalism. The resulting picture reaches much further than mere questions of economic causality, or whether chattel slavery did kick-start the profitability of capitalism, rather than the other way around. At stake are explanations of how racial captivity—which liberal economic, political, and moral discourse deems an anachronism—shapes the very productive, financial, social, institutional, and philosophical foundations of the global present. Historic and contemporary activist resistance to recurring and ubiquitous waves of antiblack violence, as well as the increasingly self-confident affirmation of white supremacy across Western states and civil societies has rendered such dilemmas in starker terms, asking whether persistent echoes of racial slavery are symptoms that the system is “built this way” rather than being just “broken.”

“The Finest Men We Have Ever Seen”: Jefferson, the Osages, and the Mirror of Nativism

2020 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 276-282
Author(s):  
Robert Warrior
Keyword(s):  
Native Americans ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Thomas Jefferson ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
Us History ◽  
Racial Capitalism ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
High Regard ◽  
Ideological Commitment ◽  
Media Event

Abstract Noting the entwined histories of settler colonialism and racial capitalism, Robert Warrior investigates the place of Native Americans in colonial hierarchies manifest across US history, from an 1804 encounter in Washington, DC, between the Osage people and Thomas Jefferson—in which Jefferson claims that the Osage were among “the finest men we have ever seen”—to the January 2019 media event surrounding Nathan Phillips and Nicholas Sandmann on the National Mall. Drawing from the work of Arica Coleman, he notes that Jefferson’s seeming high regard for the Osage people masks his ideological commitment to racial purity, and he casts these reflections alongside movements such as Standing Rock and Black Lives Matter.

scholarly journals Introduction: Public Health and the Promise of Palestine

2020 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 8-26
Author(s):  
Danya M. Qato
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Health Research ◽  
Research Agenda ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Public Health Research ◽  
The Public ◽  
Racial Capitalism ◽  
Special Collection ◽  
Public Health Discourse ◽  
Health Discourse

This introductory essay contextualizes the special collection of papers on the pandemic and seeks to map the terrain of extant public health research on Palestine and the Palestinians. In addition, it is a contribution in Palestine studies to a nascent yet propulsive conversation that has been accelerated by Covid-19 on the erasure of structures of violence, including those of settler colonialism and racial capitalism, within the discipline of epidemiology. Using public health as an analytic, this essay asks us to consider foundational questions that have long been sidelined in the public health discourse on Palestine, including the implications for health and health research of eliding ongoing settler colonialism. Rather than ignoring and reproducing their violence, this essay seeks to tackle these questions head-on in an attempt to imagine a future public health research agenda that centers health, and not simply survivability, for all Palestinians.

Infrastructure and the Form of Politics

2021 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Darin Barney
Keyword(s):  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Racial Capitalism ◽  
Discursive Politics ◽  
Critical Feminist ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Indigenous Thought

Background: This article surveys recent engagement with infrastructure across several fields, with particular attention to analyses of the relationship between infrastructure, extractive capitalism, and settler colonialism.  Analysis: The article treats infrastructure as a form of non-discursive politics and examines the critical status of the concept in light of the historical and contemporary implications of infrastructure in colonialism, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism.  Conclusions and implications: The article concludes that treatments of infrastructure in recent critical feminist, queer, and Indigenous thought open new possibilities for rethinking politics, communication, and media. Contexte : Cet article examine l’engagement récent en matières d’infrastructures dans plusieurs domaines, et accorde une attention particulière aux analyses des relations entre les infrastructures, le capitalisme extractif et le colonialisme-habitant. Analyse : L’article traite l’infrastructure comme une forme de politique non-discursive et examine le statut critique du concept en relation avec des implications historique et contemporaines de l’infrastructure dans le colonialisme, le colonialisme-habitant et le capitalisme racial.  Conclusions et implications : L’article conclut que le traitement de l’infrastructure dans la pensée critique, féministe, queer et indigène récente ouvre de nouvelles possibilités pour repenser la politique, la communication et les médias.

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