“The Seed of Opposition”: Racial Capitalism and Culture in Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism

Cedric Robinson is often invoked for his account of racial capitalism forwarded in his 1983 book Black Marxism . Yet much of what Robinson meant by the term has been lost in its posthumous revival in the wake of Black Lives Matter. What accounts for this belated reception, and what has that delay obscured? Like many thinkers associated with the cultural turn, Robinson theorized racial capitalism to critique economic reductionist accounts of race and culture. Unlike his contemporaries, however, Robinson understood culture as the expression of world-historical peoplehood. Rather than an account of historical difference or the contingency of meaning, Robinson theorized culture as emergent from civilizational struggle. This article argues that Robinson’s distinctive account of culture explains both the lack of attention he generated in his own moment and its sudden canonization today.