School of Social and Political Science

Description

This paper outlines the preliminary arguments of a chapter from an ongoing book project, entitled Before the Global Color Line: Empire, Capital, and Race in Asia, 1800-1850. The chapter develops the notion of “capitalist racialization,” an analytic concept that captures the role of capitalist social forms in shaping the semantic content and evaluative of racial hierarchies. Making a case for the co-constitution of capitalist and racial orderings of difference, I distinguish “capitalist racialization” from, on the one hand, civilizational critiques of racialism inspired by Cedric Robinson, and on the other, recent structural theorizations of race as an instrumentality of capital accumulation. Arguing with and beyond the latter, I propose to grasp race as a historically specific formation of embodied difference that is internal to the history of capitalism rather than an ontologically independent mode of domination. In elaborating this argument, I draw on my previous work on “colonial capitalism” and on critical reappraisals of Marxist social theory that foreground the recoding of social difference, as opposed to its homogenization, as the modus operandi of capitalist expansion and reorganization. I mobilize the conceptual nomenclature of “formal/real subsumption” and “real abstraction” for sharpening “differentiation-in-commensurability” as the logic of capitalist racialization and the hinge connecting capitalist abstractions to racial abstractions.