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
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction / Susan Koshy, Lisa Marie Cacho, Jodi A. Byrd and Brian Jordan Jefferson 1
I. Accumulation: Development by Dispossession
1. The Corporation and the Tribe / Joanne Barker 33
2. “In the Constant Flux of Its Incessant Renewal”: The Social Reproduction of Racial Capitalism and Settler Colonial Entitlement / Alyosha Goldstein 60
3. The Racial Alchemy of Debt: Dispossession and Accumulation in Afterlives of Slavery / Cheryl I. Harris 88
II. Administration: The Open Secret of Colonial Racial Capitalist Violence
4. In Search of the Next El Dorado: Mining for Capital in a Frontier Market with Colonial Legacies / Kimberly Kay Hoang 131
5. “Don’t Arrest Me, Arrest the Police”: Policing as the Street Administration of Colonial Racial Capitalist Orders / Lisa Marie Cacho and Jodi Melamed 159
6. Policing Solidarity: Race, Violence, and the University of Puerto Rico / Marisol LeBrÓn 206
7. Programming Colonial Racial Capitalism: Encoding Human Value in Smart Cities / Brian Jordan Jefferson 232
III. Aesthetics: Reimagining the Sites of Cultural Memory
8. Nuclear Antipolitics and the Queer Art of Logistical Failure / Iyko Day 257
9. Erasing Empire: Remembering the Mexican-American War in Los Angeles / Laura Pulido 284
IV. Rehearsing for the Future
10. Racial Capitalism Now: A Conversation with Michael Dawson and Ruth Wilson Gilmore / Facilitated by Brian Jordan Jefferson and Jodi Melamed 311
Contributors 333
Index 337
