When: Thursday, October 10, 2024, 4:00 PM - 6:00 PMWhere: Arts Two Room 3.16, in Mile End Campus, Queen Mary University of London., 327 Mile End Road London E1 4NS
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.
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.
In elaborating this argument, I draw on my previous work on “colonial capitalism” and on critical reappraisals of Marxist social theory that foreground the recoding of social difference, as opposed to its homogenization, as the modus operandi of capitalist expansion and reorganization. I mobilize the Marxist conceptual nomenclature of “formal/real subsumption” and “real abstraction” for sharpening “differentiation-in-commensurability” as the logic of capitalist racialization and the hinge connecting capitalist abstractions to racial abstractions.
A crucial upshot of this reconceptualization is the irreducible historicity of capitalist racialization. Any proper investigation of capitalist racialization, it is argued, necessarily involves the analysis of a concrete capitalist formation and of the specific languages that mediate the racial elaboration of social difference. I illustrate the latter point with reference to the book’s historical research on the construction of proto-racial categories under British colonial capitalism in Asia in the first half of the nineteenth century. Stadial theory of “civilization” and its capitalist codes, I contend, provided the semantic content and ordering principle of colonial striations that would sediment into overtly racial taxonomies in the last third of the nineteenth century.
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.
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).