An Introduction, Fall 2020
by Hossein Ayazi As students in AMST 202: "Intro to Racial Capitalism" in the American Studies Program at Williams College, you all have been co-authoring this digital glossary of keywords for racial capitalism, both as a concept with a specific history and as an "activist hermeneutic" (Melamed 2015). A year-long endeavor, this glossary joins you with those students who have come before and those who will come after, deconstructing and rebuilding individual and institutional memory toward liberatory ends. This glossary also catalogs your thinking and writing during a global pandemic, amidst the concerted disinvestment in--and relentless hyper-exploitation of--poor and working class communities within and beyond the U.S. nation-state. Together, this historical moment has enunciated specific dimensions of modern U.S. racial capitalism we have interrogated throughout the semester, from the nitty-gritty of policing and the protection of "critical infrastructure" for racial capitalist accumulation, to anti-blackness, settler colonialism, and counterrevolution as the legitimating architectures of modern U.S. racial capitalism. Through such critical engagements with finance and popular culture, class alliances and post-revolution Cuban exiles, and the metaphor and literalness of the 19th century "carving up of Africa," among others, you all have illustrated in profound ways the political economic, cultural, and embodied dimensions of racial capitalism, and thus the political economic, cultural, and embodied forms of intervention in its machinations. Here's to taking these lessons with us wherever we go. |