PHIL 206 - Racial Capitalism

0.5 unit(s)

(Same as AFRS 206, ANAS 206, and MEDS 206) First coined by Cedric Robinson in 1983, racial capitalism asserts that the potential for the accumulation and optimization of profit, which drives capitalism, would not be possible without the project of racial ordering and racialized exploitation. This course reconstructs the history of this concept, from Robinson, who was writing at the rise of neoliberalism, privatization, and deregulation in the Reagan era, through and after the War on Terror, the pandemic, until today. By close-reading main sources in this theoretical lineage, students are given critical skills to reflect on two implications universally shared by racial capitalist theorists: on the one hand, rather than homogenizing social relations as Karl Marx had wrongly assumed, capitalism differentiates populations by racializing them, first of all epidermically, and then geographically, culturally, and religiously; on the other hand, in contrast with prominent historical reconstructions of the rise of capitalism and modernity, including Max Weber’s, capitalism absorbs and reformulates racialized orderings that structured the feudal order that preceded it in medieval Europe. To exemplify the workings of racial capitalism on a material level, we devote considerable time to examining the case of London’s West India Dock, from its modern colonial reconstruction in 1802 until its transformation into an educational museum and a tourist attraction located in Canary Wharf. We show how the development of the West India Dock, from a key colonial hub of transport and exchange, including human bodies, to a Wunderkammer of postcolonial equivocations, encapsulates the feedback loop between the conditions of production organizing the plantation economy in the Caribbean and the workings of the imperial metropole, yesterday and today.

First six-week course.

Two 75-minute periods.

Not offered in 2026/27.

Course Format: CLS