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Histories of (Racial) Capitalism

Helen Anne Gibson

Kommentar

How are raciality (race) and capitalism co-constituted? What is the decolonial significance of engaging histories of racial capitalism (Robinson 1983) in Europe and North America? This class will highlight the alchemy of redressing what Denise Ferreira da Silva terms “the erasure of the expropriation of the total value produced by slaved labor in accounts of capital accumulation” (Ferreira da Silva 2014, p. 83). Focusing on restitution of the total value of expropriated lands and labor, students in this seminar will grapple with legacies of expropriation beyond a global history of cotton (Beckert 2015). Methodologically speaking, “The historiography of ways in which racial capitalism was and is transcended (rendered cosmic/quantic) increasingly entails explicitly spiritual analysis that, like what Cedric Robinson terms the Black radical tradition, receives its analytical thrust from epistemologies that orient its adherents away from liberal property regimes, including those of the colonial era” (Gibson 2024, p. 215). Embracing this Black feminist theory and Indigenous studies-inspired epistemological orientation, students in the seminar will engage both material and immaterial legacies of histories of racial capitalism. Schließen