Racial Capitalism and the Middle Ages (MLA Sponsored Session)
Coined by Cedric J. Robinson in his magnum opus Black Marxism (1983), the term “racial capitalism” refers to the simultaneous and interdependent rise of global capitalism and racial classification and stratification. Robinson’s principal goal is to identify a tradition of radical thought and practice among Black intellectuals and activists in sites of colonial exploitation. He therefore decenters Marxist history by shifting our attention away from metropolitan Europe as a site of political radicalization. Black Marxism begins, however, in the European Middle Ages, which in Robinson’s view gave rise both to modern myths of whiteness and to the racialization of the proletariat.