Toward a conjunctural critique of racial capitalism

This article contributes to contemporary debates about racial capitalism by turning to Stuart Hall, a Jamaican cultural theorist active in the British New Left and the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Hall made two moves to better diagnose the mediating role that “race” and racism played in the crises of post-war British capitalism. First, he adopted an imperial frame that situated Britain's industrialization in relation to its colonial sites of production. Second, Hall developed a “Marxism without final guarantees” that could explain how racialized difference becomes embedded within relations of production as a regulative norm. I argue his approach should be preferred to both formal and world-historical theories of racial capitalism, as the latter can fall back into an oversimplified economism. Hall's conjunctural analysis, by contrast, makes space for a more sustained consideration of both (a) the state and (b) a materialist account of popular culture.