Description
Book SynopsisThis book brings together for the first time distinguished and rising scholars to consider the utility of the concept of racial capitalism across historical settings. By theorizing and testing racial capitalism in different circumstances, this book shows its analytical and political power for today’s scholars and activists.
Trade ReviewJenkins and Leroy have amassed an erudite and rigorous collection of essays that flesh out the meaning of racial capitalism in ways that are surprising and illuminating, and will extend a desperately needed debate. -- Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of
Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black HomeownershipBeginning with the ‘old history of capitalism’—the century-long discussion about empire and revolution in the Black radical tradition—this collection builds on that legacy. One by one, these learned and brilliant essays stretch and refine the meanings of racial capitalism, transforming and deepening our understanding of the histories they take up, and providing essential historical context and analytical clarity as we face the current crisis. -- Walter Johnson, author of
The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United StatesEschewing the notion of a universal capitalism under which racial capitalism is a variant,
Histories of Racial Capitalism is an edifying analysis of the racial and racializing character of capitalism and capital. Deft in its engagement with gender, bondage, debt, empire, and indigeneity, this volume is an urgent and brilliantly transformative revelation of racial capitalism’s conceptual possibilities for defying disciplinary enclosures and provoking new questions. -- Sarah Haley, author of
No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow ModernityHistories of Racial Capitalism is a stunning compilation of stellar original historical work that analyzes the co-constitutive dynamics of systems of global racial subordination and the capitalist social order. This volume will be required reading for a generation of scholars and activists. -- Michael Dawson, author of
Blacks In and Out of the Left[
Histories of Racial Capitalism] captures the elusive realities of racialism and anti-Blackness that permeate mechanisms of capital accumulation. * Monthly Review *
Scholarly rigorous and superbly written. * American Studies *
Table of ContentsForeword, by Angela P. Harris
Introduction: The Old History of Capitalism, by Destin Jenkins and Justin Leroy
1. Race, Innovation, and Financial Growth: The Example of Foreclosure, by K-Sue Park
2. Gendering Racial Capitalism and the Black Heretical Tradition, by Shauna J. Sweeney
3. The Indebted Among the “Free”: Producing Indian Labor through the Layers of Racial Capitalism, by Mishal Khan
4. Transpacific Migration, Racial Surplus, and Colonial Settlement, by Allan E. S. Lumba
5. The Counterrevolution of Property Along the 32nd Parallel, by Manu Karuka
6. Racial Capitalism and Black Philosophies of History, by Justin Leroy
7. Ghosts of the Past: Debt, the New South, and the Propaganda of History, by Destin Jenkins
8. Dead Labor: On Racial Capital and Fossil Capital, by Ryan Cecil Jobson
9. “They Speak Our Language . . . Business”: Latinx Businesspeople and the Pursuit of Wealth in New York City, by Pedro A. Regalado
Contributors
Acknowledgments
Index
