![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Taking as a generative starting point, Stuart Hall’s insight that “race is the modality in which class is lived” (1978), this essay considers the relevance of theoretical paradigms of “racial capitalism” for the intellectual and political work of communication and critical cultural studies. Rather than choosing between class- and race-based analyses, I sketch the outlines of a racial capitalism approach to communication, emphasizing how raced and gendered differences organize – and are organized by – capitalism, and highlighting how cultural histories of race and gender reflect the material uses that capital has long made of them.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. 2d ed. (London: Red Globe, 1978), 386.
2 Robert L. Ivie, “What Are We About?” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 1, no. 2 (2004): 125.
3 Ivie, “What Are We,” 126.
4 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks Quintin Hoare, ed. and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, trans. (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971), 276. See also Stuart Hall and Doreen Massey, “Interpreting the Crisis,” Soundings 44 (Spring 2010): 57–71.
5 Ronald Walter Greene, “Rhetorical Capital: Communicative Labor, Money/Speech, and Neo-Liberal Governance,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 4, no. 3 (2007): 328.
6 Armond R. Towns, “‘What Do We Wanna Be?’ Black Radical Imagination and the Ends of the World,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17, no. 1 (2020): 75–6.
7 Herman Gray, “Race, Media, and the Cultivation of Concern,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 10, nos. 2–3 (2013): 253.
8 Lisa A. Flores, “Towards an Insistent and Transformative Racial Rhetorical Criticism,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 4 (2018): 350.
9 Myra Washington, “Woke Skin, White Masks: Race and Communication Studies,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17, no. 2 (2020): 261. Emphasis in original.
10 Scarlett L. Hester and Catherine R. Squires, “Who Are We Working For? Recentering Black Feminism,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 4 (2018): 344.
11 Paula Chakravartty and Sarah J. Jackson, “The Disavowal of Race in Communication Theory,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17, no. 2 (2020): 210–11.
12 Michelle Colpean and Rebecca Dingo, “Beyond Drive-By Race Scholarship: The Importance of Engaging Geopolitical Contexts,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 4 (2018): 306.
13 Lisa A. Flores and Logan Rae Gomez, “Disciplinary Containment: Whiteness and the Academic Scarcity Narrative,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 17, no. 2 (2020): 236.
14 Roopali Mukherjee, The Racial Order of Things (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
15 Robert Mejia, Kay Beckermann, and Curtis Sullivan, “White Lies: A Racial History of the (Post)Truth,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 2 (2018): 120.
16 Vincent N. Pham, “Truth as White Property: Solidifying White Epistemology and Owning Racial Knowledge,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 20, no. 2 (2023): 289.
17 Hall, et al., Policing the Crisis, 386.
18 Nancy Fraser, “Expropriation and Exploitation in Racialized Capitalism: A Reply to Michael Dawson,” Critical Historical Studies 3, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 164–65.
19 Fraser, “Expropriation,” 166.
20 Ibid., 166. Emphasis in original.
21 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (London: Penguin, 1976), 914–26.
22 Alyosha Goldstein, “On the Reproduction of Race, Capitalism, and Settler Colonialism,” Symposium on Race and Capitalism: Global Territories, Transnational Histories (Institute on Inequality and Democracy, UCLA Luskin and Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, University of Chicago, 2017), 44.
23 Jodi Melamed, “Racial Capitalism,” Critical Ethnic Studies 1, no. 1 (2015): 77.
24 Fraser, “Expropriation,” 165. See also Michael Denning, The Cultural Front (New York: Verso, 1997).
25 Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 27–8.
26 Michael C. Dawson, “Hidden in Plain Sight: A Note on Legitimation Crises and the Racial Order,” Critical Historical Studies 3, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 151.
27 Dawson, “Hidden in Plain Sight,” 150.
28 Nancy Fraser, “Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode: For an Expanded Conception of Capitalism,” in Critical Theory in Critical Times, ed. Penelope Deutscher and Cristina Lafont (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 146.
29 Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 2.
30 Michael C. Dawson and Emily A. Katzenstein, “Articulated Darkness: White Supremacy, Patriarchy, and Capitalism in Shelby’s Dark Ghettos,” Journal of Political Philosophy 27, no. 2 (June 2019): 264–65.
31 Robinson, Black Marxism, 26. See also Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic, 2014); W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction (New York: Free, 1935); C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins (New York: Vintage, 1989); Walter Johnson, “To Remake the World: Slavery, Racial Capitalism, and Justice,” Boston Review (February 20, 2018). http://bostonreview.net/forum/walter-johnson-to-remake-the-world; Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).
32 Avery F. Gordon, “Preface,” in Cedric J. Robinson, An Anthropology of Marxism. 2d ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), xxvii. See also David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1999).
33 Gordon, “Preface,” xvii.
34 Robin D.G. Kelley, “What Did Cedric Robinson Mean by Racial Capitalism?” Boston Review (January 12, 2017). https://bostonreview.net/race/robin-d-g-kelley-what-did-cedric-robinson-mean-racial-capitalism.
35 Rosemary Hennessey, Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism (New York: Routledge, 2000). See also Silvia Federici, Beyond the Periphery of the Skin: Rethinking, Remaking, Reclaiming the Body in Contemporary Capitalism (Oakland: PM, 2020); Silvia Federici, Patriarchy of the Wage: Notes on Marx, Gender, and Feminism (Oakland: PM, 2021); J. K. Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996); Saidiya Hartman, “The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors,” Souls 18, no. 1 (2016): 166–73.
36 John D’Emilio, “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson (New York: NYU/Monthly Review, 1983), 100–13. See also John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Amy Gluckman and Betsey Reed, “The Gay Marketing Moment,” in HomoEconomics: Capitalism, Community, and Lesbian and Gay Life, ed. Amy Gluckman and Betsey Reed (London: Routledge, 1997), 3–10; Matthew Tinkcom, Working Like a Homosexual: Camp, Capital, Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002); Stephen Valocchi, “Capitalisms and Gay Identities: Towards a Capitalist Theory of Social Movements,” Social Problems 64 (2017): 315–31.
37 Gargi Bhattacharyya, Rethinking Racial Capitalism (Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018); Jodi A. Byrd, Alyosha Goldstein, Jodi Melamed, and Chandan Reddy, “Predatory Value: Economies of Dispossession and Disturbed Relationalities,” Social Text 135 36, no. 2 (2018): 1–18; Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007); Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease, Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993); Kaushik Sunder Rajan, Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Neferti X.M. Tadiar, “Life-Times of Becoming Human,” Occasion 3 (2012): 1–17.
38 Janet R. Jakobsen, “Can Homosexuals End Western Civilization as We Know It? Family Values in a Global Economy,” in Queer Globalizations: Citizenship in the Afterlife of Colonialism, ed. Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé and Martin F. Manalansan IV (New York: NYU Press, 2002), 57–8. See also Lisa Marie Cacho, Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected (New York: NYU Press, 2012); Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Thomas Holt, The Problem of Race in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002); Grace Kyungwon Hong, The Ruptures of American Capital: Women of Color Feminism and the Culture of Immigrant Labor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).
39 Melamed, “Racial Capitalism,” 77. Emphasis in original.
40 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
41 Laura Junka-Aikio and Catalina Cortes-Severino, “Cultural Studies of Extraction,” Cultural Studies 31, iss. 2–3 (2017): 175–84.
42 Paula Chakravartty and Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Accumulation, Dispossession, and Debt: The Racial Logic of Global Capitalism—An Introduction,” American Quarterly 64, no. 3 (September 2012): 367.
43 Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism (South Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2018), 125.
44 Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Libby Meintjes, trans. Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40.
45 Zenia Kish and Justin Leroy, “Bonded Life: Technologies of Racial Finance from Slave Insurance to Philanthrocapital,” Cultural Studies 29, nos. 5–6 (2015): 631–32.
46 Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 28.
47 Herman Gray, “Subject(ed) to Recognition,” American Quarterly 65, no. 4 (December 2013): 771–98. See also Nancy Leong, “Racial Capitalism,” Harvard Law Review 126, no. 8 (2013): 2151–226.
48 Roopali Mukherjee, The Blacking Factory: Branded Selves in Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, in press).