Accumulation under capitalism is necessarily the expropriation of labor, land, and resources. But it is also something else: we need a more apposite language to think about capital as a system of expropriating violence on collective life itself. To this end, one way to strengthen racial capitalism as an activist hermeneutic is to use it to name and analyze the production of social separateness—the disjoining or deactiving of relations between human beings (and humans and nature)—needed for capitalist expropriation to work. Considering racial capitalism as a technology of antirelationality reveals its weakness as much as its strength; for acts of racialized violence that would partition people from other senses and practices of social being (noncapitalist, nonstate) are as futile as they are constant.
Critical Ethnic Studies explores the guiding question of the Critical Ethnic Studies Association: how do the histories of colonialism and conquest, racial chattel slavery, and white supremacist patriarchies and heteronormativities affect, inspire, and unsettle scholarship and activism in the present? By decentering the nation-state as a unit of inquiry, focusing on scholarship that expands the identity rhetoric of ethnic studies, engaging in productive dialogue with indigenous studies, and making critical studies of gender and sexuality guiding intellectual forces, this journal appeals to scholars interested in the methodologies, philosophies, and discoveries of this new intellectual formation.
Founded in 1925, the University of Minnesota Press is best known as the publisher of groundbreaking work in social and cultural thought, critical theory, race and ethnic studies, urbanism, feminist criticism, and media studies. The Press is among the most active publishers of translations of significant works of European and Latin American thought and scholarship. Minnesota also publishes a diverse list of works on the cultural and natural heritage of the state and the upper Midwest region.
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