Reckoning with Racial Capitalism: Settler Colonialism, Anti-Blackness, and Left Critique Beyond Neoliberalism (New Directions in Critical Theory)

In recent years, activists and scholars have increasingly turned to the notion of racial capitalism to examine a range of topics, from the role of slavery in the development of the modern economy to the uneven effects of capitalism on nonwhite populations. Yet the meaning, scope, and political implications of this concept are deeply contested. Why has this idea provoked fierce debate? What can critical theory learn from engaging with the framework of racial capitalism and its use by social movements? How might reworking this framework push left politics and thinking to better understand our historical moment?

This book develops a critical theory of racial capitalism and argues that it is indispensable to understanding and contesting the neoliberal present. Challenging deracialized left critiques of neoliberalism, Siddhant Issar reconfigures the paradigm of racial capitalism to illuminate the relationships among anti-Black racism, settler colonialism, and capital accumulation. He historicizes the neoliberal era, examining American capitalism’s changing yet durable long-term entanglements with gendered logics of racial and colonial domination. Bringing together political theory, Black studies, Native and Indigenous studies, and critical political economy with the knowledge production of social movements, Reckoning with Racial Capitalism calls for a reorientation of left politics beyond zero-sum framings of antiracist, anticolonial, and anticapitalist struggles.

Siddhant Issar is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Louisville.