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IHSS

Towards a Capital Theory of Race: A Reconstructed Marxist View

When: Thursday, October 10, 2024, 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Where: Arts Two 3.16,QMUL, 327 Mile End Road, London, E1 4NS

Centre on Labour, Sustainability and Global Production's Seminar with Onur Ulas Ince (SOAS)

This talk outlines the preliminary arguments of a chapter from an ongoing book project, entitled Before the Global Color Line: Empire, Capital, and Race in Asia, 1800-1850. The chapter develops the notion of “capitalist racialization,” an analytic concept that captures the role of capitalist social forms in shaping the semantic content and evaluative of racial hierarchies. Making a case for the co-constitution of capitalist and racial orderings of difference, I distinguish “capitalist racialization” from, on the one hand, civilizational critiques of racialism inspired by Cedric Robinson, and on the other, recent structural theorizations of race as an instrumentality of capital accumulation. Arguing with and beyond the latter, I propose to grasp race as a historically specific formation of embodied difference that is internal to the history of capitalism rather than an ontologically independent mode of domination.

Please note: a chapter of Ince’s book has been pre-circulated for anyone attending the seminar. If you are attending and would like to pre-read the chapter, please email clasp-info@qmul.ac.uk Kindly do not circulate the chapter further without permission or cite.

About the Speaker

Onur Ulas Ince is Senior Lecturer of Political Theory and Political Economy at SOAS University of London. He is the author of the award-winning book, Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism (Oxford UP, 2018), which received the 2020 David and Elaine Spitz Prize (ICSPT) and was finalist for the 2020 C. B. Macpherson Prize (CPSA).

For more details, visit the CLaSP blog.

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