Book Forum on Ida Danewid's Resisting Racial Capitalism

Earlier this year, CRITIQUE, RACE.ED and GENDER.ED came together to host a book discussion of Ida Danewid's new book Resisting Racial Capitalism: An Antipolitical Theory of Refusal. In this book forum, Jared Holley and Hemangini Gupta engage the book's main arguments and Danewid offers a response in the final post. Read the next response here and Danewid's final response here.

Comment on Ida Danewid, Resisting Racial Capitalism: an antipolitical theory of refusal (CUP 2023) by Jared Holley

** These (undelivered) comments were prepared with the aim of contributing to and facilitating an in-person group dialogue. They have been slightly edited for clarity **

I approach Ida Danewid’s excellent and timely book as an historian of political thought. This means that I am a member of a subfield of a subfield that is often seen as being particularly interested in (or: obsessed with) questions about two things: Thomas Hobbes and method. While the first view is better founded than the second, I will nevertheless present my comments in relation to these two stereotypical concerns.

First, method. Of the many ‘refusals’ we encounter in Resisting Racial Capitalism, one of them might be seen as a sort of methodological one. One of the things that I appreciated most in this book is precisely the absence of any heavy-handed methodological statement. And yet I’d still like to like to invite Ida to say just a little bit more about her approach to – if not “political theory” – then, more prosaically, to thinking about politics. How does one best think about politics (i) first, with and alongside contemporary practices, in this case practices of “refusal”; while also, (ii) committing to placing these practices in a perspective that is both (a) global and (b) historical?

To say that there is a productive absence of method in the book is not to say that it fails to describe what it takes the idea of an “antipolitical theory” to be – this is put clearly enough. It’s just to say that we come to learn what such an antipolitical theory consists in by the force of example, by its being performed for us, on the page. Here at CRITIQUE, we’ve been thinking about the possibilities and limits of exemplarity as a mode of political theorizing. And Resisting Racial Capitalism is an exciting exemplary model for political theorists – but really for anyone thinking about politics today: whether what you want to do is to understand the phenomenon of global racial capitalism or, indeed, to resist – or think about how to resist – it.

This is a wonderfully written book. But what’s so exciting is that it is a beautiful book that is still full of difficult concepts, brilliantly elucidated. It blends rhetorical force with analytical rigor, and deploys this conceptual work to excavate an archive – or “an/archive” – by which it is, in turn, reciprocally supported. Which is to say that its approach is deeply attuned to its subject matter, in a way that reveals much of what is so interesting about it.

The archive it excavates is a contemporary one – of practices of resistance, the vibrant social movements that flourish today but that are, in various ways, occluded by our ordinary ways of thinking about global politics. It is also an historical archive – of the long global history of (a) these resistant practices and (b) the mechanisms of control and domination that emerge to contain some – and, thereby, give rise to yet others.

In methodological terms, this is a tour de force critique of methodological whiteness, methodological nationalism, statism, individualism – the list could go on. What links these targets is that they all are ways of seeing the world that prevent us from seeing the world as it, in many ways, “actually” is. In their place, Resisting Racial Capitalism demonstrates how thinking globally helps us to see relationally – that is, to see the reciprocal interrelations between concepts and practices that are customarily opposed. And how thinking historically – about these concepts, practices, and interrelations – helps us to see continuities and differences in them across time… and, thereby, reveals to us hidden sites for both thinking and acting for a world that is “otherwise”.

All of this is to say that Resisting Racial Capitalism, to me, makes a very strong case for the importance of thinking about politics globally and historically. But I’m curious to know how strong a case you, Ida, would want to make. Does thinking “antipolitically” about politics *require* us to think globally and historically. And does it require us to think globally and historically “otherwise”? There are many models of global and historical “political theory”. But it seems clear enough that many of our predominant (or: hegemonic) ways of thinking “politically” about politics are structured by conventional spatio-temporal oppositions (“local-global”, “past-present”). Does antipolitical theory refuse these oppositions, too?

My second question is related to Thomas Hobbes – at least tangentially. The clearest way of putting it might be to ask: to what do we turn – or, perhaps, return – when we “refuse” the state? What different answers to this question emerge among the different practices of “refusal” canvassed in the book?

This is related to Hobbes insofar as he is the most important critic of the idea that we are capable of sustaining durable social relations prior to or outside the state. What we turn to when we turn from the state is, for Hobbes and anyone else following him, our fundamental incapacity to get along with each other, about anything of real (human) significance, for any significant amount of time. Hobbes claimed to have founded modern political theory when he “refused” simply to assume that we have such a capacity and that it could undergird our social relations. This debate about “sociability” remains the key issue for modern (Western) political thought. In this sense, Resisting Racial Capitalism really is an “antipolitical” theory of refusal because it wants to refuse the Hobbesian refusal at the heart of modern “political” theory.

There are two types of refusal canvassed in the book’s conclusion. The first, thinking with Fred Moten – a frequent reference throughout – is presented as a flight “away from” politics, one that rejects projects of “reform and repair” in favour of the sociality of “existing social life” – in this case, especially, “black sociality”. The second mode of refusal, presented with reference to Bonnie Honig – is a “return to” politics – one that starts with an exit from and ends with a re-entry into the political world, understood as an “agonistic” ‘contest over the [very] meaning’ of politics. Ida suggests that we must not think of these refusals in binary terms, for such a framing constrains us into making a false choice. The choice and its falsity stem from our customary blindness to alternative modes of (anti)political agency that these binaries and our theories reinforce. What we need, instead, is a refusal that is “antipolitical” in the sense of neither (a) remaining bound to the state and its grammars of justice nor (b) simply hoping that the state goes away; but is, rather, a “creatively destructive project of building the world anew”.

This is an important lesson to be learned by anyone reared in the traditions of modern Western political theory and practice – whether reformist liberals who want a better state, self-styled radical Leninists who want to capture it, or anarchists who want simply to leave it behind. The theoretical basis of the lesson is principally Cedric Robinson, with important contributions from José Esteban Muñoz and (an anarcho-sympathetic reconstruction of) C.L.R. James. But in keeping with its exemplary mode, its real foundation is a set of fascinating case studies: police violence in Rio de Janeiro (Chapter 3); migration control in Europe (Chapter 4); extractivism on Turtle Island (Chapter 5); reproductive (un)freedom in the US (Chapter 6). While this separation of theory from practice is my own stylized one, it reflects the book’s organizing logic. And there is room, I think, to ask how far this theory is able to track (at least some of) these practices.

Take the politics of “refusal” in contemporary indigenous resurgence movements. Ida roots her analysis of the latter in the work of indigenous activist-intellectuals based in what is now called Canada. Their often-subtle differences notwithstanding, Taiaiake Alfred, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and Glen Coulthard all present resurgence as something other than a refusal-as-return – other than refusing to engage with the state (or any other dominant institution) on its own hegemonic terms but, ultimately, oriented to its reform. Resurgence is also other than a refusal-as-(mere)escape: it is a radical refusal and disengagement, which is oriented to reconstituting a form of life threatened with extermination. For Simpson, resurgence is a continuous refusal of the system and indigenous peoples’ presence within it – resurgent nations do not simply hope that the state goes away because they simply cannot; they have a deep historical memory and clear-eyed view of the state as an agent of occupation and erasure. But resurgence is also, crucially, a continuous expansion of and rooting in indigenous ways of life and intelligence systems – it is, on Simpson’s terms, a “generative refusal” to which Ida relates her refusal-as “generative project of moving towards” a world otherwise. 

But is it “antipolitics”? Robinson refuses politics and the state in order to turn to what he calls “a sacred universe of disorder”. For Simpson, on the other hand, resurgence refuses the state in order to return to what she, with Coulthard, calls grounded normativities: “modalities of Indigenous land-connected practices and longstanding experiential knowledge that inform and structure our ethical engagements with the world and our relationships with human and non-human others over time”. It seems important here that grounded normativities are presented not as a kind of disorder but, rather, a kind of living in alignment with “the implicate order”. Moreover, indigenous political systems (in Simpson’s case, Nishaabeg political systems) are presented as being grounded in individuals’ relationships to the implicate order. Resurgence is anti-Hobbesian because it returns to the implicate order and grounded normativity, an ethical framework on which politics can be built. But (on my reading at least) it is not so much anti-political as it is a politics of indigenous sovereignty and self-determination: not ‘not being governed’ (at all) but (real) ‘self-governance’. 

Perhaps I’m overreading (Ida’s reconstruction of) Robinson here and the distinction between his sacred universe of disorder and the “implicate order” doesn’t amount to a substantive difference. But if that’s the case, then does an antipolitical refusal refuse to be governed, or does it refuse to be governed this way so that we might be governed that way? 

Author Bio

Dr. Jared Holley is Co-Director of CRITIQUE and a Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of Edinburgh.