Histories of Racial Capitalism

This colloquium takes as its starting point the insistence that the movement, settlement, and hierarchical arrangements of indigenous communities and people of African descent is inseparable from regimes of capital accumulation. It builds on the concept of "racial capitalism," which rejects treatments of race as external to a purely economic project and counters the idea that racism is an externality, cultural overflow, or aberration from the so-called real workings of capitalism. This course will cover topics such as chattel slavery, settler colonialism, black capitalism, the under-development of Africa, and the profitability of mass incarceration.