Between the old and the new racial capitalism, the era of white supremacy and that of a formally antiracist liberal modernity, the trick of racialization has remained the same: racial procedures constitute human value and valuelessness differentially in accord with reigning geopolitics and economic orders. These procedures do this even as they appear “merely” to sort human beings into rationally inevitable categories of difference. Jodi Melamed (English and Africana Studies, Marquette University) will examine the post-World War II history of dominant antiracisms as generative forces for global capitalist development, focusing especially on our neoliberal era, whose hallmark is an aggressive recursivity between procedures of race and hyper-speculative capitalism, which speedily and flexibly fixes extreme differentials of value to forms of humanity in any given instance.
