Racial Capitalism and its Discontents: Theory, History-Writing, and Periodization in Late-Stage Empire | American Studies Association (ASA)| November 20-23, 2025 | San Juan, Puerto Rico
From its origins in South African debates about the direction of the anti-apartheid movement, to its reinvention by Cedric Robinson as a theory of race and capital’s world-historical enmeshment, to its contemporary status as a master signifier for left-antiracist critique, racial capitalism is here to stay. Across fields and theories, archives and methods, it circulates as the authorizing ballast for any number of arguments: that capitalism differentiates rather than homogenizes; that anticapitalist politics must proceed from the existential grounding wire of alternative cosmologies; that race names the persistence of feudal social relations in the conceptual, libidinal, and political infrastructures of global modernity.