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. This is the second post of this book forum following Holley's piece and Danewid's final response is here.

Thinking from the South

Comment on Ida Danewid, Resisting Racial Capitalism: an antipolitical theory of refusal (CUP 2023) by Hemangini Gupta.

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I can think of no time more urgent than this one to discuss how entire populations are subjected to ethnic cleansing; how racialized groups are deemed excess and not worthy of life; how land is declared terra nullius and therefore available for settler colonialism, how the brutality of the state is repeatedly enforced through militarized borders, checkpoints and posts that make life unlivable. And no time more urgent than this to reimagine freedom outside of the persistent violence of the state.

So what is a theory of politics that does not repeatedly invest and reinvest in the foundational violence of the state? Ida Danewid reminds us that the state form can never simply be reimagined into a source of freedom and liberation. The fundamental categories through which it governs and distributes rights are built through racialized hierarchies of exclusion and extraction. These are not byproducts of the state or a result of faulty governance that needs to be improved: they are the basis of the state. Reading key political thinkers through recent work in Black Studies, racial geographies, decolonial theory, and queer and feminist theory, Resisting Racial Capitalism is an urgent call to imagine freedom otherwise: not through the governing violence of the state, but through a cacophonous and unruly archive of anticolonial anarchism. In the book’s conclusion she reminds us that and I quote, “rather than a project of detaching from the state or a quest for better forms of governance, antipolitical refusal should be thought of as a creatively destructive project of building the world anew...” I read this in resonance with Wendy Brown’s call to not center ressentiment in our political projects, thus anticolonial world making needs new tools and registers of care and collectivity.

Of course anticolonial thought may emerge from multiple genealogies. As Julietta Singh reminds us in “Unthinking Mastery,” across anticolonial discourse the mastery of the colonizer over the colonies was a practice that was explicitly disavowed, and yet, in their efforts to decolonize, anticolonial thinkers in turn often advocated practices of mastery—corporeal, linguistic, and intellectual—toward their own liberation. She says, In the anticolonial moment, mastery largely assumed a Hegelian form in which anticolonial actors were working through a desire or demand for recognition by another. The mastery at work in this project was one whose political resonance resided in national sovereignty and the legal principle of self-determination, one that approached the dismantling of mastery through an inverted binary that aimed to defeat colonial mastery through other masterful forms.” This is not the anticolonial archive that Danewid so carefully traces. 

Instead, in her pages, we meet anticolonial work in its perhaps more decolonial rather than postcolonial form: through the wayward and freedom loving young Black women of Saidiya Hartman’s experiments in critical fabulation for instance. We encounter the murkiness of a decolonial epistemology that joins its lifeworld in Macarena Gomez Barriss’ submerged perspectives. We examine the invisibilized and racialized labor that sustains our cities and economies in Francoise Verges’ Decolonial Feminism and together these and other authors serve to chart new and unknowable paths to a future of collective liberation.

One of the things this book does best is to show us how political thought is radically challenged when brought in conversation with literature on Empire and racial geography. In other words, whose power does the state seek to shore up and who is the other being defended against? The Leviathan, for instance, justifies the state as necessary by imagining the brutish state of nature that it protects us against. But who is the us who is being protected? Danewid shows how indigenous societies in the newly colonized Americas offered the imaginary of the noble savage that the White Man was to be protected from. Litigating violations without addressing their historical and structural source, notes Sylvia Tamale, does little to improve the vulnerability of those who suffer them. Or take the categories of migrant and refugee. Recent calls for a more humanitarian state appeal for benevolence and open borders yet, Danewid points out, they do not interrogate the historical production of the category of migrant itself. As Radhika Mongia writes, the migrant was produced as a category of racialized and indentured labor, strategically moved around the world in the service of Empire’s profits. Even recent calls for human rights regimes provoke the question of how the human itself is a racialized category, produced through, in Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s words, a plasticized Blackness that is experimented with as if it were infinitely malleable lexical and biological matter.

The state enacts its power through racial capitalism and in powerful chapters, Danewid tracks the sites of its violence. In a chapter focused on policing for instance, she draws on the example of extra judicial killings in Brazil to show how policing seeks to produce and eradicate populations through racial, colonial, gendered and ableist forms of disposability and extractability (p 69). As populations deemed unproductive and “surplus” are destroyed by the police, making way for the production of the global entrepreneurial city, urban regeneration projects are justified through racial logics that privilege middle class white bourgeoise life and landscape. I couldn’t help but wonder how the extreme forms of police violence built through racial capitalism that Danewid describes in Brazil might offer us a way to think police violence in India. Increasingly the Indian state has supported or directly inflicted violence on minoritized populations that it has dispossessed and disenfranchised. Its cleaving of the population into those deemed “anti-national” or not worthy of protection needs to be understood within the specific contours of a dominant Hindu majoritarianism and the production of citizenship through a virile Hindu masculinity that renders Muslims and Dalit others as disposable and threats to a nationalist project of a Hindu nation. How might racial capitalism offer us a way to think through these logics of disposability and might we need to situate it alongside a consideration of caste capitalism perhaps or a discussion of religious difference as key to the violence of the postcolonial state?

Second, I wonder how we might read the book if we played a bit with its central categories – take the state and the police for instance. Instead of imagining the police as a highly militarized force with the power to segregate and dispose particular populations what if we encountered it in some postcolonial forms as underfunded, underresourced, and at the mercy of the organizational power of local and national right-wing groups and NGOs? In other words, drawing on work by scholars of policing and the state like Beatrice Jauregui and Poulami Roychaudhury, we might find that the police are desperately trying to shore up their power with few resources in many Indian contexts. Furthermore, in the context of sexual violence, the state and para statal agencies emerge not as consolidations of governmental power but as collectives – often ragged and beleaguered – that women can mobilize and even threaten for access to benefits and recourse to justice from community and kin that have abandoned them. How do we think the violence of the state in the context of this unevenness: its possible decrepitude at times and its sheer brute force at others?

Third, if the state is not always what we imagine it to be, neither should we imagine as static what we think of as home or family. While postcolonial scholars like Michelle Murphy remind us that care is not always joyful and affirmative but also variegated and experienced unevenly, Danewid assembles a more hopeful archive from trans and queer studies to show us how forms of care and “homefulness” can be experienced outside the heterosexual family. Social reproduction then, can unfold through relations of care, friendship, and survival.

To think freedom and utopia in registers not overdetermined by the state is to embrace a radical uncertainty. An anticolonial politics must challenge the certain telos of the mastery narratives that accompany coloniality. To center indigeneous, decolonial visions in our utopic thinking in our visions of freedom might mean embracing the murky fish eye episteme that Macarena Gomez Barriss writes about in her work on epistemologies of submerged perspectives in the colonized Americas. It might mean thinking about abolition as Angela Davis does. In an interview with Dylan Roderiguez, on prison abolition, Davis suggests that calls for freedom otherwise do not necessarily advocate pragmatic or procedural “solutions” to the problems of racial capitalism but they invite a questioning of which lives are considered disposable and how we might envisage freedom outside of carceral structures of state rules. To embrace the unknown is to place our faith in the Ubuntu tradition of belief that “I am because we are” -- in other words, as Danewid shows us, we cannot know the future outside of our collective efforts to shape it. 

Author Bio

Dr. Hemangini Gupta is Associate Director of GENDER.ED and a Lecturer in Gender and Global Politics at the University of Edinburgh.