05/01/2026
Fall 2026 grad seminar:
Course Description
“The term ‘racial capitalism’ requires its users to recognize that capitalism is racial capitalism,” explains Jodi Melamed. Building on Cedric Robinson’s analysis, Robin D.G. Kelley writes that “Race and gender are not incidental or accidental features of the global capitalist order, they are constitutive. Capitalism emerged as a racial and gendered regime… The secret to capitalism’s survival is racism, and the racial and patriarchal state.” Thus, to speak of racial capitalism is to acknowledge that, in Kelley’s words, “Capitalism developed and operates within a racial system or racial regime. Racism is fundamental for the production and reproduction of violence, and that violence is necessary for creating and maintaining capitalism.” This graduate seminar asks what is at stake in approaching the study of capitalism in this way. How might an analysis of colonialism and imperialism, disability, environmental justice, the bordering of nation-states, and global migration/displacement further inform or incorporate this analysis? Students are introduced to the theorization of racial capitalism as well as to scholarship critically engaged in rethinking and expanding the embodied, social, and geopolitical frames through which racial capitalism has been analyzed. In addition to writing by Melamed, Kelley, and Robinson, course readings include texts by Joanne Barker, Brenna Bhandar, Gargi Bhattacharyya, Lisa Marie Cacho, Andrew Curley, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Carmen Gonzalez, Saidiya Hartman, Jodi Kim, Manu Karuka, Justin Leroy, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Jennifer Morgan, Robert Nichols, Liliana Obregón, Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez, Harsha Walia, and Rocío Zambrana.
