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Geographers and others increasingly mobilize the hermeneutic of racial capitalism to describe the complex entanglements of race, governance and accumulation born alongside or that have accompanied capitalist social relations throughout their historical expansion and development. Important and influential currents within this literature attend to the racial logics that structure processes of so-called “primitive” accumulation and/or expropriation (Fraser, 2016; Singh, 2016; McClintock, 2018; Ramírez, 2020; Issar, 2021; Launius and Boyce, 2021); and interrogate the racializing violence that accompanies the production and governance of populations rendered surplus via neoliberal restructuring (Melamed, 2015; Battacharyya, 2018; Kudnani, 2021; Gilmore, 2022). Acknowledging the rich insights this work affords, there remain opportunities to expand conceptualization and analysis of racial capitalism to address other important moments and conditions necessary for the production and accumulation of surplus value.

One of the most promising of these trajectories of inquiry attends to the qualities and conditions of everyday and generational social reproduction. Indeed, some of the earliest work to introduce the qualifier “racial” to an analysis of capitalism did so precisely by attending to the governance of mobility, labor and social reproduction under the Apartheid regime in South Africa (Legassick and Hemson, 1976). Since then, a distinct tradition of feminist scholarship in geography has arisen that attends to how patterns and practices of social reproduction operate as a kind of sinew, connecting people and places across distance, while nevertheless remaining conditioned by heterogeneous patterns of social and spatial differentiation (Katz, 2001; Mitchell et al., 2003; Hopkins, 2015; Meehan and Strauss, 2015; Mezzadri, 2021).

For this paper session we invite empirical and theoretical contributions that advance a conversation between these trajectories of inquiry. The animating questions we aim to pursue include: How can social reproduction analysis advance existing theories and mobilizations of racial capitalism as a political and analytic framework? How can an understanding of capitalism as always already imbricated with regimes of racialization and racial governance open new horizons of inquiry related to the gendered and generational dimensions of social reproductive activity?

Informed by these questions, this session brings together scholarship that interrogates how the qualities and conditions of everyday and generational social reproduction become implicated in differentiating the value of people, land and labor-power; how such differentiation in turn shapes larger patterns of labor and capital accumulation; and, finally, patterns and practices of solidarity, resistance, autonomy and mutual aid that dialectically articulate with and/or challenge these broader conditions of social reproduction and racial governance.

Citations

Bhattacharyya, G., 2018. Rethinking racial capitalism: Questions of reproduction and survival. Rowman & Littlefield.

Fraser, N., 2016. Expropriation and exploitation in racialized capitalism: A reply to Michael Dawson. Critical Historical Studies, 3(1), pp.163-178.

Gilmore, R.W., 2022. Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation. Verso Books.

Hopkins, C.T., 2015, January. Introduction: Feminist geographies of social reproduction and race. In Women's Studies International Forum (Vol. 48, pp. 135-140). Pergamon.

Issar, S., 2021. Theorising ‘racial/colonial primitive accumulation’: settler colonialism, slavery and racial capitalism. Race & Class, 63(1), pp.23-50.

Katz, C., 2001. Vagabond capitalism and the necessity of social reproduction. Antipode, 33(4), pp.709-728.

Kundnani, A., 2021. The racial constitution of neoliberalism. Race & Class, 63(1), pp.51-69.

Launius, S. and Boyce, G.A., 2021. More than metaphor: Settler colonialism, frontier logic, and the continuities of racialized dispossession in a southwest US city. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 111(1), pp.157-174.

Legassick, M. and Hemson, D. 1976. Foreign Investment and the Reproduction of Racial Capitalism in South Africa. Foreign Investment in South Africa: A Discussion Series 2: 1-16.

McClintock, N., 2018. Urban agriculture, racial capitalism, and resistance in the settler‐colonial city. Geography Compass, 12(6), p.e12373.

Meehan, K. and Stauss, K. eds., 2015. Precarious worlds: Contested geographies of social reproduction. University of Georgia Press.

Melamed, J., 2015. Racial capitalism. Critical Ethnic Studies, 1(1), pp.76-85.

Mezzadri, A. 2021. A Value Theory of Inclusion: Informal Labour, the Homeworker, and the Social Reproduction of Value. Antipode 53(4): 1186-1205.

Mitchell, K., Marston, S.A. and Katz, C., 2003. Life’s work: An introduction, review and critique. Antipode, 35(3), pp.415-442.

Ramírez, M.M., 2020. City as borderland: Gentrification and the policing of Black and Latinx geographies in Oakland. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 38(1), pp.147-166.

Singh, N.P., 2016. On race, violence, and so-called primitive accumulation. Social Text, 34(3), pp.27-50.

Non-Presenting Participants