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The concluding chapter expands on core ideas developed in the introductory chapter and integrated into the historical narrative, with an eye to reshaping the agendas of sociolegal scholars who research the politics of legal rights mobilization. One core theme is the need for greater attention to state legal violence. A second, and closely related theme involves the theoretical framework of “racial capitalism” in which the contemporary rule of law is embedded and whose hierarchical structures law works to perpetuate. The most original, provocative, and no doubt controversial aspect of this analysis is the development of ideas regarding the variegated traditions of liberal, repressive, and – especially in the post-World War II – hybrid legal forms that sustain racial capitalist hierarchies. Special attention will be given to racialized subjectivities of low wage workers and institutional practices of legal administration that repress them, including especially criminal justice, “crimmigration,” segregated housing policy, and workplace governance. The chapter concludes with the implications of the critical analysis for legal mobilization, as practical politics and intellectual research agendas, in the contemporary period.

The opening chapter summarizes the core themes and landmark events or developments in the historical narrative study from the initial colonial project of the US in the Philippines to the endemic “criminalization” of Filipino migrant workers in law and society, the second generation of worker’s aspirational political struggles, the murder of two reform leaders in 1981, and the devastating Wards Cove ruling in the late 1980s that rebuffed the workers’ claims and eviscerated civil rights law. After explaining the key terms in the book’s title – “by law” and “union” – the chapter outlines the core theoretical frameworks for the book, including legal mobilization theory, critical race theory, and racial capitalist analysis of the larger sociolegal context of workers’ rights struggles. Also discussed is the rationale for the historical research design, the constitutive approach to analysis of power, the role of Carlos Bulosan as literary chronicler and activist subject, and the unique, subtle epistemological and methodological standpoint of the book’s authors.

This chapter begins with an introduction to the paradox that the book examines: despite divergent trajectories of political change, South Africa and Palestine/Israel have experienced surprisingly similar social and economic changes over the last twenty years. What explains the simultaneous development of extreme inequality, racialized poverty, and advanced security strategies? Next, the chapter offers a brief overview of comparative scholarship on South Africa and Palestine/Israel and describes the key interventions of this study. The core of the chapter is a discussion of two fields of critical interdisciplinary scholarship: settler colonialism and racial capitalism. The book analyzes the relationship between the neoliberalization of racial capitalism and the (de)colonization of settler colonial regimes in South Africa and Palestine/Israel over the last twenty years. It argues that these processes have combined to generate new forms of neoliberal apartheid defined by marginalization and securitization. The chapter ends by presenting the research methods and an outline of the chapters.

This chapter traces sword and sorcery’s re-emergence as a popular genre in the 1960s and 1970s during the era of U.S. Civil Rights movements. It shows how strategies for reproducing racism despite changing political sensibilities are constructed through the genre of sword and sorcery. These strategies go hand in hand with soon-to-be dominant re-imaginations of free market economics by economists such as Milton Friedman and Gary Becker. The chapter analyzes the work on the economics of discrimination in relation to Samuel Delany’s use of sword and sorcery to reflect on how race gets used to imagine market processes. Delany’s Nevèrÿon series adds another dimension to understandings of racial capitalism by focusing on race as economic utility.

Centered on the work of contemporary experimental poet and critic Erica Hunt, this chapter argues that the author’s chapbook Piece Logic (2002) offers an implicit critique of postwar liberal antiracist ideals of racial progress understood primarily in terms of desegregated national inclusion within what Roland Marchand has called a “democracy of goods.” In this chapbook, Hunt explores how relations between subjects within and beyond the boundaries of the United States have been reshaped by an increasingly comprehensive system of differential economic valuation that redefines the meaning of racial difference, citizenship, family, and the material limits of formal equality. Hunt’s collection draws attention to how postwar processes of racial group formation are shaped by what Karl Marx calls “the fetishism of the commodity”, in which the life cycle of disposable objects mirrors the fate of racialized disposable or “surplus” populations. The devaluation and destruction of commodities, the chapter maintains, reflect a postwar racial order in which blackness comes to signify a limit case of relative expendability and the “broken” underside of postwar dreams of limitless consumer abundance.

Meditating on the continued racial speculation on black bodies in our contemporary moment, the epilogue brings the link between racial violence, capitalism, and evidentiary epistemology into sharper focus. Drawing on Harriet Jacobs’s insights into the role racial violence-as-spectacle plays in the construction of wealth, the epilogue considers what ex-slave narrators bring to contemporary debates around racial violence, such as the debate over whether or not police body cameras will resolve or lessen unremitting episodes of police brutality on people of color. While the book opens with an analysis of contemporary visual slave narratives at the end of the 20^th century, the epilogue ends with a consideration of the slave narrative form in the 21^st century, considering works that contribute to contemporary figurations of slavery but are not all strictly within the slave narrative tradition I have defined, including John Jones, Kerry James Marshall, and Kyle Baker.

The introduction argues that a tradition of liberal white race fiction has been a key component of American literary history. It surveys scholarship defining “racial liberalism” and “racial capitalism” and considers their application to literary analysis and concludes with summaries of the book’s chapters. Summarizing the common features of these novels, the introduction explains how they used a variety of literary devices, struggled to criticize racism, called for social and political change, and promoted liberal philosophies of freedom and equality. Empathy, sympathy, and an appeal to the emotions of readers are essential features of each book, moreover, for liberal race fiction imagines that changing how we feel about racial injustice will motivate us to do something about it.

This chapter examines Gil Scott-Heron as an exemplar of the socio-political manifestation of the contrarianism in funk aesthetics. Combining biographical information from Scott-Heron’s memoir and interviews, critical methods from literary scholarship, and insights from philosophy, the chapter highlights Scott-Heron’s understanding of the blues as a locus of black aesthetics and political philosophy. In doing so, the chapter illuminates Scott-Heron’s prescience, and examines many of his multiple talents, including poetry, songwriting, singing, and playing keyboards. Unlike most recording artists, however, Scott-Heron was influenced by writers, especially the Black Arts writers who generally believed that artists should create primarily for working-class African Americans. Consequently, he curtailed his budding career as a novelist and shifted his concentration to performing and recording songs and poems in the early 1970s. The chapter includes textual analyses of key recordings as well as discussions of Scott-Heron’s satire and social criticism. Additionally, Bolden highlights musical aspects of Scott-Heron’s appeal, especially the timbre of his voice but also the musicianship of the Midnight Band, which he co-led with longtime collaborator Brian Jackson.  

This chapter draws out the overall implications of the book. It begins with a discussion of apartheid and (de)colonization in Palestine/Israel and South Africa. While acknowledging the importance of the international legal definition of apartheid for efforts to hold the State of Israel accountable, the South African transition calls into question the value of legal instruments that focus exclusively on the state. Rather than defining apartheid as a political form of racial domination, the chapter proposes a political-economic definition that brings together an analysis of racial domination and racial capitalism. Building on this framework, the chapter argues that the transitions of the last twenty years have generated neoliberal apartheid regimes in both South Africa and Palestine/Israel. The chapter then outlines the core features of neoliberal apartheid: extreme inequality, racialized marginalization, advanced securitization, and constant crisis. It ends by suggesting that these features are present not only in South Africa and Palestine/Israel but throughout much of the world today.

Chapter Five clarifies theoretically the overlaps and distinctions between problematizing contemporary mass incarceration in terms of capitalist production, on the one hand, and in terms of social reproduction, on the other. Greater precision in this regard opens out the question rather than assumption of “racial” significance and signification today, specifically with reference to the “prison industrial complex” as a process of genocide—systematic extermination through arrested life and social incapacitation. Chapter Five concludes by examining the manipulation of prison mail in acts of retaliation and torture: wherein punishment does not operate primarily to discipline a labor force but to deaden those who refuse to be neutralized. Considering the letter as sign of living potential in this context, this chapter ultimately views the violence it magnetizes not as the negation but as the most apparent “evidence” of the letter’s social force.

In the Caribbean, the banking collapse and the economic crisis of the 1930s ignited a simmering anti-imperial antipathy and unleashed a current of nationalism targeting the United States and Wall Street. This chapter examines the struggles by Wall Street to consolidate its position in the Caribbean during these turbulent years and the growing local challenges to the punitive regimes of debt, the monopoly presence of foreign financial institutions, and the suffocation of national sovereignty and independence. The chapter argues that the crisis of finance capitalism in the United States was also a crisis of racial capitalism in the Caribbean as indictments of the prevailing racial order accompanied nationalist resistance to foreign banking and corporate monopoly. Calls for sovereignty and invocations of anti-imperialism often drew on figures of blackness to attack white colonialism. These evocations of blackness were ambivalent and often contradictory. While they were sometimes marked by an embrace of blackness, paradoxically, the critique of banking and empire also emerged as an attack on black bodies, especially on black migrant labor. The nationalism of the 1930s led to changes in banking regulation. It also forced the reordering of racial capitalism and its reconstitution within a new neo-colonial register.

This chapter introduces the concept of organisational violence to examine the consequences of gendered racism. It illuminates the ways organisations become inhospitable spaces for diversity. Specifically, the chapter demonstrates how diversity management has gradually supplanted social justice agendas through a capitalist logic. Despite the modest gains of diversity initiatives, recent backlashes against diversity highlight the significant hostility towards change in white patriarchal organisations and societies. Considering that much of what is written about diversity centres on the figure of a white male leader who extends inclusion to the Other, the chapter interrogates how dominant assumptions and practices of diversity can ultimately harm those who diversity initiatives are said to benefit.

This chapter traces the histories of settler colonialism and racial capitalism in South Africa and Palestine/Israel. Despite historical differences, South Africa and Israel governed similar social formations during the second half of the 20th century. The chapter then presents an overview of the political and economic transformations that have restructured social relations in South Africa and Palestine/Israel over the last twenty years. In the early 1990s, both states responded to political-economic crises by neoliberalizing their racial capitalist economies and entering into negotiations over decolonization. While South Africa has been partially decolonized, Israel remains a settler colonial state. In both cases, however, the combination of neoliberalization and (de)colonization has produced extreme inequality, racialized poverty, and advanced strategies of securitization. The chapter ends by introducing the sites of my ethnographic research: the Johannesburg and Jerusalem metropolitan regions. The difference between Israel’s ongoing colonial project and the post-colonial project of the South African state are perhaps nowhere more evident than in these urban regions. Yet the landscapes of Johannesburg and Jerusalem are increasingly defined by the combination of marginalization and securitization.

As corporations search for new frontiers of capitalist growth in the context of ongoing economic crises, they are making a business case for investing in poor, racialized girls and women in the Global South as a way to end poverty and promote economic growth and corporate profit. This chapter identifies this phenomenon as an instantiation of corporatized development and situates it within the context of the interrelated discourses of bottom-billion capitalism, philanthrocapitalism, gender equality, and third world difference. It introduces Nike Inc.’s investment in the Girl Effect through the Nike Foundation in the context of the corporation’s attempt to recover from transnational criticism of its well-documented abusive labor practices, and it situates the Girl Effect within the context of the racialization and feminization of global capitalism.

This chapter introduces Jonathan Daniels and explains his intentions for his 1937 automobile trip around the South. He wanted to explore the range of political and cultural possibilities in the region during the Great Depression and show a truer picture than either plantation romance or "white trash" caricatures showed. His views as a white southern liberal and what his observations reveal about the start of the nation's long civil rights era are put into historical and historiographical context. The book Daniels published, A Southerner Discovers the South (1938), is compared to photo-documentary works of the era such as You Have Seen Their Faces and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. The role of Jonathan Daniels's father, Josephus Daniels, in solidifying racial capitalism in North Carolina is introduced. The chapter concludes with a discussion of sources and methodology and a chapter outline.