Call for Papers for Race and Capital Stream in the Historical Materialism London Conference
Historical Materialism Sixteenth Annual London Conference 2019
Claps of Thunder: Disaster Communism, Extinction Capitalism and How to Survive Tomorrow
Central London, 7-10 November 2019
https://conference.historicalmaterialism.org/index.php/hmlondon/annual16
Call for Papers, Deadline 15 May 2019
For all queries, email only please: historicalmaterialism@soas.ac.uk
The resurgence of visible racism through the organised right has brought forward a number of questions around identity, race, class, capital, empire, resistance and solidarity. Alongside largely unchanged institutional forms of racism and the mobilisation of traditional racist tropes and signifiers by the right, new forms of racialisation have been articulated through increasingly virulent official racism. This official racism has been deployed internationally – to legitimate and drive imperialist interventions and restructurings – and domestically – to channel social discontent away from the status quo and towards migrants and racial others.
All of this has not gone uncontested. Organised anti-racist politics throughout the world have made significant political interventions.
Indeed, many elements of the new right-wing movements’ platforms are the direct response to the growing significance of these anti-racist movements. A key component of analysing and challenging the resurgence of the right, therefore, is understanding the role that racism plays in their construction and maintenance.
This necessity has led to a series of heated political debates within the anti-racist movements concerning the relationship between racism and other oppressions; the relationship between capitalism, colonialism and racism, and the relationship between different racial oppressions on the domestic and international stage.
The Race and Capital stream seeks to provide a historical materialist position in these debates. Taking seriously the rich history of black and postcolonial Marxisms, we seek contributions mapping the contemporary and historical connections between capitalist accumulation and practices of racialisation and empire. We are driven by the conviction that understanding racism within social relations of exploitation can offer an explanation for its existence and persistence.
Understanding this in a broad sense to include issues of race, racism, indigeneity, colonialism, imperialism and migration, we would be especially interested in panels or papers concerning:
• Engagements with Afro-Pessimism and the relationship between anti-black and other racisms
• Engagement with, and contestation of, the concept of ‘racial capitalism’
• Marxist analyses of the relationship between racism, colonialism and indigeneity
• The relationship between Marxism and postcolonial theory
• Mappings of the relationship between racism and the right in both historical and contemporary contexts
• Historical accounts of the relationship between different forms of racism and different practices and regimes of accumulation
• Recovering anti-racist resources within the Marxist tradition
• Black and Third World feminisms
• Political Blackness and other historical accounts of anti-racist movements and their attempts to build solidarity with other oppressed groups
• Marxist engagement with intersectionality
• Histories of anti-colonial nationalism and its intersections with Marxism
Please Note: Although we welcome preconstituted panels, after extensive feedback from previous years we are tightening up on panels with just titles or incomplete names. Panels should provide title, abstract and full names, emails of each participant and abstract/note of contribution (where relevant). Incomplete panel proposals will be put on the reserve list and may ultimately be rejected. We also reserve the right to reject certain papers in a preconstituted panel and to reconstitute panels as we see fit.
