Siddhant Issar

This article reconceptualises the Marxist notion of ‘primitive accumulation’, examining how settler colonialism and anti-Black racial domination structure American capitalism. the analysis intervenes in theorisations of primitive accumulation in both critiques of neoliberalism and the growing literature on racial capitalism. It shows how particular appropriations of primitive accumulation in the context of neoliberalism not only treat the concept as, ultimately, external to the core logic of capitalism, but also ignore the ways racial domination and colonisation configure capital’s violence. Simultaneously, within racial capitalism scholarship, primitive accumulation is prone to conceptual stretching, often flattening disparate forms of land and labour expropriation. In contrast, through the analytic of ‘racial/ colonial primitive accumulation’, the author elucidates how normative wage- labour exploitation is predicated on settler colonialism and racial slavery and its afterlives. this thus adds precision to received understandings of capitalist expropriation, while also pushing the literature on racial capitalism beyond a white/Black binary.

Culminating much of his critical theoretical interventions of the last twenty years, Afropessimism chronicles Frank Wilderson III’s coming-of-age narrative and intellectual development. From his integrated Midwestern childhood, to his youthful journey across radical political movements and intimate relationships in the United States and South Africa, and extending through his theoretical work in the academy, Wilderson arrives at this iconoclastic premise: “Blackness is coterminous with Slaveness...[and] social death” (102). In this interview, Wilderson further draws out the allegorical, theoretical, and political implications of his afropessimist biography, connecting the longstanding pattern of anti-Blackness and social death to the contemporary context, encompassing uprisings under the banner of Black Lives Matter, all while the Covid-19 pandemic disproportionately ravages the Black American community.

This article explores left critiques of neoliberalism in light of the Black Lives Matter movement's (BLM) recourse to the notion of 'racial capitalism' in their analyses of anti-Black oppression. Taking a cue from BLM, I argue for a critical theory of racial capitalism that historicizes neoliberalism within a longue durée framework, surfacing racialized continuities in capitalism's violence. I begin by revealing how neo-Marxist and neo-Foucaultian approaches to neoliberalism, particularly that of David Harvey and Wendy Brown, respectively, partition race from the workings of contemporary capitalism. Such analyses obscure neoliberalism's differential impact on non-white racialized populations, while simultaneously casting anti-racist struggles as divisive. In contrast, I then trace how the Movement for Black Lives policy platform invokes Cedric Robinson's work on racial capitalism, investigating the utility of this framework for the movement's demands. Building on BLM's turn to the concept of racial capitalism, I finally offer an outline of a critical theory of racial capitalism to better theorize neoliberalism. By historicizing neoliberalism within racial capitalism's historical arc, such a theory unravels the qualitatively different mechanisms through which racialized populations are pressed into circuits of capital accumulation. It also paves the way to move past the entrenched class-versus-identity debate on the American left.

This course centers the struggles and insights of Black and Indigenous peoples to study the fraught entanglements between American democracy, racial domination, and empire. Through a historical and theoretical approach, some of the questions we will ask include: What is the relationship between settler colonialism and US democracy? How have foundational US ideals of "life, liberty, and property" been implicated in the perpetuation and reproduction of anti-Black racism? In what ways have Black and Indigenous movements, across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, connected domestic struggles against state violence with overseas imperialism? In what ways are race-making, war, capitalism, and policing entangled? How do the political-theoretical frameworks employed by anti-colonial, Indigenous, and Black freedom struggles enrich our understandings of US democracy, including its failures and promises?

This course examines the theoretical underpinnings of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. Through close engagement with primary documents such as the Movement for Black Lives's (M4BL) policy platform, we will trace how BLM builds on, reconfigures, and merges various traditions of radical critique to diagnose and dismantle contemporary structures of anti-Black violence. Since its emergence, BLM and the larger M4BL coalition have articulated an intersectional critique of anti-Black violence, pointing to the specific ways white supremacy, patriarchy, and racial capitalism (among other structures) affect Black populations in the United States and globally. By situating BLM's analyses in the context of Black radical theory and politics, ranging from Black queer and feminist thought to abolition to Black Marxism(s) and anti-capitalism, we will surface the rich historical terrain that BLM draws on and contributes to.

Our semester will begin with a historical, philosophical, and socio-political inquiry into the concepts of "race" and white supremacy. Subsequently, we will ask: How does BLM understand anti-Blackness and white supremacy? In what ways are the histories of Black enslavement and settler colonialism relevant to the present struggle for Black lives? Why are Black bodies disproportionately represented in the U.S. prison population? On what grounds does the M4BL policy platform suggest that "patriarchy, exploitative (global) capitalism, militarism, and white supremacy" are interlinked? What transnational solidarities and linkages has BLM forged? What universal vision of liberation does BLM seek to enact? By asking such questions, we will become familiar with the dynamic ways BLM and the M4BL coalition have theorized historical and ongoing forms of structural violence. We will also become conversant in the modes of resistance, including the formation of solidarities across national borders, that have emerged from BLM's on-the-ground struggles.

This course aims to unearth and analyze the theoretical underpinnings of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) policy platform. Since its emergence, BLM has articulated an intersectional critique of anti-black violence in the United States (and, to a certain extent, globally). BLM and the larger M4BL coalition provide an in-depth analysis of the specific ways structures of oppression such as white supremacy, patriarchy, and racial capitalism affect Black populations. By historically and theoretically situating BLM and the M4BL policy platform in the context of Black radical thought, including but not limited to abolitionist thought, intersectionality, and conceptualizations of racial capitalism, we will trace the ways BLM and M4BL adopt and build on various lineages of theoretical critique to diagnose contemporary structures of anti-black violence.