Fourteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

There is a contemporary tendency to view economics, and by extension political economy, as following essentially eternal law-like regularities, thereby discounting and overlooking its contingency and historical instantiation. One factor commonly ignored in the contemporary literature in political economy is race, its connection to colonialism, and imbrications with the capitalist economy. However, numerous works that are not ostensibly works of political economy have devoted at least part of their analyses to connections between race and capitalism, and to how this racialised economy has become an ineluctable aspect of the modern condition. One scholar whose varied work has connected race, politics, and economics is political theorist and philosopher Achille Mbembe, whose recent volume, Critique of Black Reason, offers a subtle yet incisive critique contemporary and historical capitalism through a novel conceptualisation of race and Blackness. Moreover, Mbembe’s book can be read as an invitation to scholars of political economy to further examine the interconnectedness of colonialism, race, and capitalism, taking his somewhat cursory exploration and extending it across disciplines to uncover the ways in which race structures economic order. As such, in this paper, I offer a reading of Mbembe’s analysis of capitalism and its racialised nature, connecting it to other theorists and thinkers of race and the colonial, as well as to the literature on the political economy of difference, in order to draw out the possible ways in which an analytic of race might, and indeed should be, taken up and recognised by scholars of political economy.