Colonial Racial Capitalism

by Susan Koshy (Editor), Lisa Marie Cacho (Editor), Jodi A. Byrd (Editor)

The contributors to Colonial Racial Capitalism consider anti-Blackness, human commodification, and slave labor alongside the history of Indigenous dispossession and the uneven development of colonized lands across the globe. They demonstrate the co-constitution and entanglement of slavery and colonialism from the conquest of the New World through industrial capitalism to contemporary financial capitalism. Among other topics, the essays explore the historical suturing of Blackness and Black people to debt, the violence of uranium mining on Indigenous lands in Canada and the Belgian Congo, how municipal property assessment and waste management software encodes and produces racial difference, how Puerto Rican police crackdowns on protestors in 2010 and 2011 drew on decades of policing racially and economically marginalized people, and how historic sites in Los Angeles County narrate the Mexican-American War in ways that occlude the war’s imperialist groundings. The volume’s analytic of colonial racial capitalism opens new frameworks for understanding the persistence of violence, precarity, and inequality in modern society.

Contributors. Joanne Barker, Jodi A. Byrd, Lisa Marie Cacho, Michael Dawson, Iyko Day, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Alyosha Goldstein, Cheryl I. Harris, Kimberly Kay Hoang, Brian Jordan Jefferson, Susan Koshy, Marisol LeBrón, Jodi Melamed, Laura Pulido

Genres: Race

368 pages, Hardcover

Published September 23, 2022

Reviews

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

Colonial means: one State controlling the lives and lands of people away.

Racial means: the State classifying the people in order to control them better.

Neither have anything to do with Capitalism: the private control of the means of production.

And the solution is, unsurprisingly, more State control.

And that comes from impartial people, working for the state, living off State handouts.

[Tavis M · Rating 5 out of 5]

The essays in this collection highlight the technological, ecological and social aspects of capitalism both domestically and internationally. Some of the great thinkers of our time are featured in it. Overall great read and eye-opening.