Anthropology 246E
This graduate course reads theories of capital and empire through the lens of colonial critique, feminist theory, and Black radical thought. It begins with some classic texts concerning debates on historical materialism and Marxist thought. It then turns to more recent events and theoretical trajectories, especially since the 1970s. The emphasis here is on the genealogy and the nature of a new (?) turn regarding iterations of capital and empire since the launch of the war on terror. Terms like “speculation,” “financialization,” “risk,” and “security,” to name a few, appear to crop up across war, finance, environmentalism, health, labor, and humanitarianism. One aim of the course is to understand these cross-overs, that is, why and how various conceptual nexuses have merged and what creates conjunctures between war-finance, finance-environment, security-health, war-labor, etc. Another aim is to think about what hasn’t changed – Victorian labor practices found in US outsourced manufacturing as well as Marx’s concept of “surplus populations”– people who are left dangling with each successive recession/boom & bust, mostly racialized bodies rendered as redundant surplus. But we will also seek to understand how people reinvent their circumstances in ways that do not quite fit within either of these scenarios, or in ways that exist alongside such scenarios. Students will take turns presenting on the material (usually in pairs). There will be weekly response papers and a final paper based upon topics relevant to each student’s dissertation objectives.