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

deadline for submissions: 
February 7, 2025
full name / name of organization: 
Eric Cheuk / University of Notre Dame
contact email: 

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. At its furthest point of extension, racial capitalism becomes the frame into which all past efforts to apprehend and/or contest the nexus of race and class dominations are retrospectively conscripted – and all future efforts are anticipatorily drafted.  

Is racial capitalism’s conceptual drift just the fate met by all keywords before it? Is the proper response – disinter the historical and political contexts of its use, restore its original theoretical determinations – simple because already modeled in the familiarly dereferentializing trajectories of postmodernism and neoliberalism, queerness and intersectionality? Rather than adopt a defensive stance of (con)textual originalism with respect to racial capitalism, this panel invites presentations – historical case studies, general theoretical critique/schematization, personal reflections, and more – that reckon with its newfound ubiquity as a problem for thought. What historically specific play of forces has invested this theoretical and praxical rallying cry – all capitalism is racial capitalism! – with such widespread resonance? In what ways do the analytic procedures gathered under the heading of racial capitalism refract, condense, or otherwise express the dynamics of late-stage empire: economic stagnation, climate crisis, fascist resurgence? What libidinal attachments, desires, and fantasies are transacted in the contemporary circulation of a keyword that is at once theoretical framework, historical narrative, and political injunction?

This panel seeks to inhabit the field imaginary and political unconscious of racial capitalism studies for distinctly partisan ends. We thus ask if its master-concept is a reaction to late-imperial crisis that meets or fails the bar of strategy. To what extent does the contemporary theorization of racial capitalism yield intellectual resources for confronting the conditions that occasion it? Do its animating concerns reproduce old conceptual and/or political binds – and/or create new ones?  

Possible paper topics include (but aren’t limited to):

-       Racial capitalism then and now / racial capitalism as traveling theory

-       Racial capitalism and social movements

-       Racial capitalism and (early/pre)modernity

-       Racial capitalism studies in the university

-       Racial capitalism and/as/in/against “other” intellectual traditions: Afropessimism, Black Feminism, Marxism, Women of Color Feminism, etc.

-       Alternative articulations of the race/class relation

If you are interested, please send an abstract of 300 words, along with a brief bio, to Eric Cheuk at echeuk@nd.edu by February 5th.