Britain's imperial history has engendered a growing field of study excavating the ways in which its contemporary racial order builds on the colonial past. This approach can be summarized in Patrick Wolfe's pithy claim that “race is colonialism speaking.” Yet though the signature racial differentiations intrinsic to capitalist social relations remain, they are remade not through linear development but in response to present crises in capitalism. Because the “past cannot serve as an alibi for the present” (Arun Kundnani), approaching racial capitalism today requires attending to Britain's changing economic and geopolitical status. Contrasting two zones in the pattern of racial capitalism in Britain—hotel housing for people seeking asylum and farms reliant on temporary migrant labor—this article seeks to understand why some spaces function as symbolically dense sites while others are culturally underdetermined. To contextualize this uneven distribution of social and cultural energy, rather than turn toward the colonial past, scholars must consider Britain's racial arrangements in dialogue with those that organize certain Asian polities, such as Singapore and the Gulf states. Doing so can allow researchers to observe emergent forms of group differentiation that maintain relations of domination and exploitation without employing a cultural machinery of denigration.
Sita Balani (Thu,) studied this question.