Round table in English with Manuela Bojadžijev, Robert Gooding-Williams, Tommie Shelby, and Inés Valdez, moderated by Robin Celikates
Topic
The term “racial capitalism” is increasingly used to insist that, as a matter of historical fact, industrial capitalism was built on the basis of colonialism and slavery, and that, as a matter of sociological fact, capitalist accumulation continues to operate through racial differentiation and hierarchization. In recent years, “racial capitalism” has attracted not only sustained theoretical attention, but it has also become an important reference point for radical social movements such as the Movement for Black Lives. It is not difficult to see why: race (just like gender) structures who can access jobs, wages, housing, credit, mobility across borders and other social goods; and being subjected to austerity, police violence, imprisonment, environmental hazards and health risks is in fundamental ways inflected by racism. Even if one recognizes the reality and indeed centrality of these phenomena to an adequate understanding of capitalism, however, it remains disputed whether, and if so how, the notion of racial capitalism can be systematically spelled out in ways that go beyond its often vague and undertheorized invocation.
In this summer school we will explore some of the central philosophical and socio-theoretical issues the turn to “racial capitalism” raises: Is the link between capitalism and racism historically contingent or necessary? If capitalism is necessarily racist, what makes it so? If race and gender are not accidental to, but constitutive of capitalism, how can the relation between class, race and gender be conceptualized in ways that also track their realignment in the current constellation? If, in the framework of racial capitalism, race is not primarily an identity but a structure of power, how does this impact our analysis both of capitalism and the movements that struggle against oppression and exploitation? And if the universal proletariat can no longer serve as the subject of revolutionary emancipation, what is the horizon for anti-capitalist struggles and transversal forms of solidarity today that can prevent emancipatory politics from splintering into a diversity of struggles that often remain at cross-purposes?
The public roundtable of this year’s International Critical Theory Summer School will provide an opportunity to discuss approaches to the economy in contemporary social theory.
Speakers
Manuela Bojadžijev is a professor at the Institute of European Ethnology and the Berlin Institute for Migration Research (BIM) at Humboldt University Berlin. Her research focuses on migration studies from a global perspective and on globalised and digital cultures. In addition to conceptual, methodological and epistemological questions of migration research, she is interested in the ‚debate on migration‘ in migration societies and how social change is narrated, lived and enacted in and through representations of migration and flight. In projects that are often collaborative in nature, she examines current transformations of mobility, migration and racism in interaction with changes in work and everyday life through digitalisation and logistics, especially in urban spaces and geopolitical constellations.
Robert Gooding-Williams took both his BA (1975) and his PhD (1982) from Yale, and he has recently returned to Yale as the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Philosophy (2024). He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2018 and in 2020 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2023, the Yale GSAS Alumni Association awarded Gooding-Williams the Wilbur Cross Medal. His most recent book, Democracy and Beauty: The Political Aesthetics of W.E.B. Du Bois, will be published by Columbia University Press in the spring of 2025.
Tommie Shelby is Lee Simpkins Family Professor of Arts and Sciences and the Caldwell Titcomb Professor in the Department of African and African American Studies and the Department of Philosophy at Harvard University. He is the author of much-discussed and prize-winning books that are waiting to be discovered by a broad public in Germany. His works combine fundamental philosophical questions about belonging, solidarity and the possibilities of overcoming racist conditions with a precise knowledge of the Black radical tradition. Tommie Shelby is the author of The Idea of Prison Abolition (Princeton University Press 2022), Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform (Harvard University Press 2016), and We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity (Harvard University Press 2005).
Inés Valdez is Professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University and works on the political theory of empire, capitalism, race, and migration. Dr. Valdez has published on the political thought of W. E. B. Du Bois and Immanuel Kant and is currently working on an intellectual history of the Latin American school of Marxist dependency theory. Her award-winning scholarship has been published in the American Political Science Review and Political Theory, among other outlets. Dr. Valdez’s most recent book, Democracy and Empire: Labor, Nature, and the Reproduction of Capitalism, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2023. She will spend the next academic year as a member of the School of Social Sciences at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study.