Accumulation, dispossession, and debt: The racial logic of global capitalism - An introduction

American Quarterly

Volumn 64, Issue 3, 2012, Pages 361-385

  Chakravartty, Paula ^a   Da Silva, Denise Ferreira ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84867378917     PISSN: 00030678     EISSN: 10806490     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/aq.2012.0033     Document Type: Review

References (71)

1. For John Locke (Two Treatises on Government [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988]), for instance, the household remains the last domain of patriarchal rule, where the patriarch enjoys full freedom, where both as master and as husband, the citizen obeys but has the obligation to protect and punish his own, namely, wife, children, and servants (or slaves). Indeed, neither Locke's system of reward and punishment (the law) nor Thomas Hobbes's artificial body (the state) - the juridico-political figures manufactured by the social contractors - would intrude in the household in such a way.
2. According to a number of studies on racial and ethnic disparities in the aftermath of the subprime crisis, it is a relatively uncontested fact that while non-Hispanic whites made up the majority of at-risk borrowers, African Americans and Latina/o borrowers were much more likely to experience foreclosure (one study found this rate to be 76 percent and 71 percent, respectively, compared with non-Hispanic whites). for more detailed discussion of this point, see James Carr, Katrin B. Anakar, and Michelle L. Mulcahy, "The Foreclosure Crisis and Its Impact on Communities of Color: Research and Solutions," White Paper, National Community Reinvestment Coalition, 2011, www.ncrc.org/resources/reportsand-research/item/665-white-paper-the-foreclosure- crisis-and-its-impact-on-communities-of-coloras, well as Wyly et al., this issue.
3. These include, among other strategies, financial "innovations" like the infamous "no income no jobs no assets" (NINJA) loans targeting women and communities of color. Karen Ho's rich ethnographic study of Wall Street sheds light on the specifics of such practices and the ways in which investment bankers claimed that "their ingenuity was finally breaking down barriers of race and class, which the traditional 'redlining' commercial was unable to do with his simple, 'vanilla' toolkit of conventional loans that lacked the advantage of global securitization." See Karen Ho, Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009), 298-302.
4. Among other titles, see Roland Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (London: Sage, 1992);
5. Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992);
6. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Oxford: Polity, 1990);
7. and the collection edited by Mike Featherstone, Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization, and Modernity (London: Sage, 1990).
8. Edward Li Puma and Benjamin Lee, Financial Derivatives and the Globalization of Risk (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 5.
9. Paula Chakravartty and Dan Schiller write about the dominant media's framing of the bank's logic, which continues to demand the privatization of profit and the socialization of loss. See Paula Chakravartty and Dan Schiller, "Neo-Liberal Newspeak and Digital Capitalism," International Journal of Communication 4, http://ijoc.org/ojs/index.php/ijoc.
10. Dennis Kelleher, a financial reform activist, states that investment banks aggressively opposing regulatory intervention are quick to forget that they are "at the top... of the hierarchy of guilt" for the crisis (quoted in Annie Lowrey, "Facing Down the Bankers," New York Times, May 30, 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/05/31/business/kelleher-leads-anonprofit- better-markets-in-fight-for-stricter-banking-rules.html?pagewanted=all).
11. Janet Roitman, Fiscal Disobedience: An Anthropology of Economic Regulation in Central Africa (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005);
12. Eric Helleiner, "The Strange Story of the Bush Administration and the Argentine Debt Crisis," Third World Quarterly 26.6 (2005): 951-69.
13. Millennial or "messianic" capitalism as discussed in Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, "Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming," Public Culture 12.92 (2000): 301.
14. For more on the politics of debt revolts in response to microcredit lending schemes, see Ananya Roy, Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development (New York: Routledge, 2010), chap. 5;
15. Julie Elyachar, Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development, and the State in Cairo (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005).
16. See, for instance, Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996);
17. Vicente Rafael, White Love and Other Events in Filipino History (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000);
18. and the collections: Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd, The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997);
19. Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease, Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993).
20. As early as September 2007, Glen Beck on Fox was placing the blame on "illegal immigrant" home owners and pointing fingers at federal programs introduced in the Clinton administration promoting home ownership for minority communities, echoed across Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, the financial press, and across much of the online discussions. for more on dominant media discourse on the financial crisis, see Catherine Squires, "Bursting the Bubble: A Case Study of Counter-Framing in the Editorial Pages," Critical Studies in Media and Communications 28.1 (2011): 28-47.
21. Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000).
22. See David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
23. David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital (London: Profile Books, 2010), 1.
24. See Harvey, New Imperialism, 146.
25. Harvey, Enigma of Capital, 17.
26. David Graber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2011).
27. Robert Ezra Park, Race and Culture (New York: Free Press, 1950).
28. To be sure, old and recent accounts of the political also rehearse this view that, in the absence of moral ties, violence rules human relationships; this is the case in Carl Schmitt's definition of the political in terms of a distinction between friend and enemies, in Jacques Derrida's elaboration of hospitality as a choice in face of the arrival of the stranger, and even in Giorgio Agamben's description of "bare life" as one stripped of a moral claim (the one that can be killed but not sacrificed). See Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007);
29. Jacques Derrida and Ann Dufourmantelle, of Hospitality (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000);
30. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998).
31. For an elaboration of the view of how the racial transmutates the colonial, see Denise Ferreira da Silva, "Before Man: Sylvia Wynter's Rewriting of the Modern Episteme," in The Realization of Living: Sylvia Wynter and Being Human, ed. Katherine McKittrick (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, forthcoming).
32. For an elaboration of how the analytics of raciality produces the racial subaltern subject as an ontoepistemological figure defined by the logic of obliteration, how transcendentality (and its principles of universality and historicity) and self-determination are deployed to describe the post-Enlightenment European/white persons and places, see Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
33. Such an effect is also reproduced in what Barnor Hesse sees as modern philosophers' refusal to recognize the deep racial (because referents of the colonial) character of modernity's favored self-description ("Racialized Modernity: An Analytics of White Mythologies," Ethnic and Racial Studies 30.4 [2007]: 643-63).
34. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins (New York: Vintage Books, 1989);
35. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Penguin Classics, 2001);
36. Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (London: Zed Books, 1983).
37. Manu Gowswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). Relevant to our argument here, see the introduction and chapter 1.
38. Tsing is responding to Harvey's previous writings, but her point is no less relevant in terms of pointing out "the heterogeneity of capitalism at every moment of time." See Anna Lopenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 75-77.
39. Ibid. This brings to mind Arjun Appadurai's essay on the layers of history that shape the "spectral" quality of real estate speculation in ethno-linguistically and class-fractured globalized cities like Mumbai. Describing a more complex and contested process of no less violent a process of accumulation, Appadurai writes: "To speak of spectrality in Bombay's housing scene moves us beyond the empirics of inequality into the experience of shortage, speculation, crowding and public improvisation. It makes the space of speculation and specularities, empty scenes of dissolved industry, fantasies of urban planning, rumors of real estate transfers, consumption patterns that violate their spatial preconditions, and bodies that are their own housing ("Spectral Housing and Urban Cleansing: Notes on Millennial Mumbai," Public Culture 12.3 [2001]: 635).
40. Roy, Poverty Capital, 114-15.
41. Achille Mbembe, "Necropolitics," Public Culture 15.1 (2003): 11-40.
42. We recognize the explanatory advantages of concepts such as racism, race consciousness, and even coloniality of power. See Anibal Quijano, "Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America," Nepantla: Views from the South 1.3 (2000): 533-80. All of these concepts attempt to show how colonialism and (its attendant) slavery have performed a crucial work of power - in particular economic but also political - for a political (juridical, economic, and symbolic) configuration that defines itself by the opposite principles. What this framing of raciality does, however, is to show that exclusion and unfreedom have been more than necessary (for primitive or "spectacular" accumulation) or expedient aspects subcontracted to the others of Europe/whiteness. Raciality, as the naming of a productive assemblage enables the ethical demand that these "others of Europe" be done away with so that reason and freedom - embodied in the European/white being - can flourish in the stage of world history.
43. For an example of the effects of deployment of differential inclusion, see Yen Le Espiritu, Home Bound: Filipino American Lives across Culture, Communities, and Countries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
44. Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America (1960-2010) (New York: Crown Forum, 2012);
45. Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williams, The Te a Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
46. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York: Wiley Book, 1899), 96.
47. This argument is developed in Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race; and Denise Ferreira da Silva, "NoBodies: Law, Raciality, Violence," Griffth Law Review 18.2 (2009): 212-36.
48. Sylvia Wynter, "Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/ Freedom: Toward the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation - an Argument," CR: The New Centennial Review 3.3 (2003): 257-337.
49. Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World (New York: New Press, 2008), 210-14.
50. Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon, 2004);
51. Nicholas Rose and Peter Miller, Governing the Present: Administering Economic, Social, and Personal Life (New York: Polity, 2008).
52. Greg Gradin, Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (New York: Holt, 2010), 171-73.
53. Mitchell's term is useful in shedding light on the false distinction that was made even by critics of U.S. Empire in this period, that contrasted the globalizing power of capitalism with the "tribal particular- isms" that opposed the homogenizing force of capital. That "McWorld" and "Jihad" were actually co-constitutive of U.S. Empire in the Middle East is meant to show the "lack of contradiction between the logic of capitalism and other forces and ideas it encounters." See Timothy Mitchell, "McJihad: Islam in the US Global Order," Social Text, no. 73 (2002): 1-19.
54. This argument has been advanced by several recent works including Roy, "Poverty Capital"; and James Peck, Ideal Illusions: How the US Government Co-opted Human Rights (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2011).
55. for an especially sharp analysis of humanitarianism and U.S. Empire, see Mahmood Mamdani, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror (New York: Three Rivers, 2010).
56. For an elaboration of this point, see Paula Chakravartty and Yuezhi Zhao, Global Communications: Toward a Transcultural Political Economy (Boulder, Colo.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), 11-16.
57. www.salon.com/2012/06/07/probing-obamas-secrecy-games/singleton/.
58. Randy Martin, An Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), 9-12.
59. For example, Craig Calhoun and Georgi Derlugian have recently published a three-volume series titled Possible Futures on the history, governance regimes, and possible aftermath of the financial crisis that provides a useful comparative overview by prominent scholars of globalization: Craig Calhoun and Giorgi Delurgian, Business as Usual: The Roots of the Global Financial Meltdown (New York: New York University Press, 2011);
60. Calhoun and Delurgian, The Deepening of the Crisis: Governance Challenges after Neoliberalism (New York: New York University Press, 2011);
61. Calhoun and Delurgian, Aftermath: A New Global Economic Order? (New York: New York University Press, 2011).
62. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, "What Is to Be Done?" American Quarterly 63.2 (2011): 245-65.
63. David Lloyd, "Representation's Coup," Interventions (forthcoming): 2.
64. For an articulation of ethical oblivion as an effect of the workings of raciality, see Silva, "Before Man."
65. Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997);
66. Fred Moten, In the Break (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
67. Asaf Bayat, Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010).
68. Asaf Bayat, "A New Arab Street in Post-Islamist Times," Foreign Policy-Middle East Channel (2011), http://mideast.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/ 01/26/a-new-arab-street.
69. The following statement by Todd Gitlin, author of a new book titled Occupy Nation, is representative of this kind of commonsense argument: "I hadn't realized this until I checked off the movements of my recollection, that they had started as minority uprisings - at least expressions of dissidence - in comparison to the population as a whole. So the Civil Rights Movement, which obviously was popular with black people but not with Americans overall, certainly not in the South, when it broke out. The anti-Vietnam War movement represented a small minority, maybe a little more than 10%, when it erupted. The women's movement, it's hard to say - possible exception there. The gay movement was certainly not a popular movement over all. I see this more as the rule than the exception (www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2011/10/todd-gitlin-on-why- ows-is-different-from-all-other-social-movements.html).
70. Rinku Sen, "Race and Occupy Wall Street," Nation (2011): www.thenation.com/article/164212/ race-and-occupy-wall-street.
71. Jeff Juris, "Reflections of Occupy Everywhere: Social Media, Public Space, and Emerging Logics of Aggregation," American Ethnologist 39.2 (2012): 259-79.