Join SWOP and ROAPE for a two-day workshop focused on interrogating different perspectives on racism and capitalism in relation to strategic questions drawn from contemporary political struggles. We welcome all those who are interested in these questions to join us for an intensive conversation centred on thinking through how oppressive structures have come to be bound together and have been collectively struggled against.
In 1980 Stuart Hall waded into South African race-class debates with the publication of his now classic essay, ‘Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance’. Over the course of the 1970s there had already emerged a powerful reformulation of political critiques of the South African racial order, both from within Marxist thought and with the dramatic entry of Black Consciousness onto the political stage, which found expression in Hall’s essay. In fact, by the end of the 1970s both Marxists and Black Consciousness theorists were increasingly coming to see struggles against racism and capitalism as inseparable.
Taking Hall’s essay and the political productivity of South African theorists in the 1970s as our orientating markers, over the last year a group of researchers, activists and students have gathered for a collective research project focused on interrogating different perspectives on racism and capitalism in relation to strategic questions drawn from contemporary political struggles.
On 17-18 September, this group (hosted by SWOP and ROAPE) will hold a two day workshop at the University of the Witwatersrand in which we will share and discuss some of the outcomes of this work and its potential political uses and implications. To this end we welcome all those who are interested in these questions to join us for an intensive two days of structured conversations centred on thinking through how different oppressive structures have come to be bound together and have been collectively struggled against.
As this will be a hybrid event, those unable to attend in person will be able to join the discussion online.
If you would like to attend the workshop online please register here
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Workshop Programme
Day One: Saturday, 17 September
Morning session [10am-12pm] Racial Capitalism and Social Reproduction
Hylton White – Racial Capitalism and Social Reproduction
Ulrike Kistner – Social (re-)inscriptions of the natal: Debating ‘Social Death’ and ‘Social Reproduction’ with Orlando Patterson and Claude Meillassoux
Bridget Kenny – Reproducing ‘racial capitalism’ through retailing in South Africa: White women, consumption and nation in the 1960s
LUNCH
Afternoon session [2pm-4pm] Race, Politics and Political Subjects
Asher Gamedze – ‘A new generation reborn in the battle for truth:’ The Communist Party of the Soviet Union and independent black student politics, 1957-1961
Hannah Dawson – Living, not just surviving: The politics of refusing low-wage jobs in urban South Africa
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Late afternoon/Evening Session [4:30pm -6:30pm]
Michael Hardt – The politics of articulation and strategic multiplicities
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Day Two: Sunday, 18 September
Morning session [10am -12pm] Concepts, Theory and the Critique of the Present
Tokelo Nhlapo – Benjamin and Memory
Ziyana Lategan – Historical and Dialectical Materialism Revisited
Listening session with Daniel Hutchinson
LUNCH
Afternoon session [2pm – 4pm] Race and political representation
Kelly Gillespie & Leigh-Anne Naidoo -“Shoot me I’m dead already!”: Critical notes on Afropessimism in South Africa
Tumi Mogorosi – The Racial Logic as a Structure of the Culture Industry: Black music and the political
Maya Bhardwaj – Articulations between Racialisation, Identity, and Politicisation for South Asian Diasporic and Indian South African Activists
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Late afternoon [4:30pm -6:30pm] Stuart Hall, Racial Capitalism and Politics of resistance
Ahmed Veriava and Prishani Naidoo – Reading Biko-with-Hall
Zachary Levenson and Marcel Paret – Resisting Racial Capitalism: Stuart Hall, Cedric Robinson, and the Question of Racialized Resistance
Efthimios Karayiannides – “Primitive Rebels” from Nairobi to Handsworth: the articulation of race, class and religion in British New Left thought
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