Ben Pitcher

Race and capitalism redux

ABSTRACT Pitchers article deals with a revival of interest in the relationship between race and capitalism. The old reductionist arguments that once held that capitalism was ultimately to blame for racism have been subject to a peculiar inversion, and now capitalism is being conceived as having anti-racist outcomes. Engaging with arguments that suggest that anti-racism similarly serves as an agent of neoliberal capitalism, Pitcher suggests it is necessary to rethink the terms of the imputed relation between race and capital. He goes on to interrogate some of the pieties of contemporary race politics, and argues that common blind spots in left critique constitute an obstacle to understanding the articulation of capitalism and race.

“Are You Thinking What We're Thinking?” Immigration, Multiculturalism and the Disavowal of Racism in the Run-up to the 2005 British General Election

The overt expression of racist discourse in the public realm is today—even in the case of far-right organizations like the British National Party—avoided at all costs. Yet approaches by competing political parties to the “populist” issue of asylum/immigration in the months preceding the 2005 General Election were clearly informed by negative ideas of racial difference. This article sets out to describe the conceptual logic and rhetorical structures of political discourses of cultural pluralism underwritten by the spectre of racism. This “official multiculturalism” is in large part shared by mainstream political parties and national news media, and is predicated on the self-conscious disavowal of racism and racist intent, while simultaneously serving to attack or problematize the existence or behaviour of certain racialized groups, both within and without the nation. I argue that such interventions increasingly circulate around definitions of legitimate cultural citizenship; that is, on ideas of civil society predicated on normative models of belonging to multicultural Britain. I will consider how the electoral campaigns of both Labour and Conservative parties were carefully constructed with a view to their reporting in the news media, and the extent to which such discourses of (multi)cultural citizenship publicly disavow—yet remain strongly marked by—exclusionary concepts of racialized difference.

Policing the crisis, or, why we love The Wire

The Wire’s figuration of the complexity of the relations between the different social structures, institutions and agents that constitute contemporary urban life has been taken as evidence of its ‘sociological’ status. In this article we argue for a more reflexive consideration of the show’s appeal qua model social text. Rather than regarding The Wire as enhancing our understanding of the social, this article acknowledges, and offers a reading of, the show’s appeal to socially liberal audiences. Often cited as evidence of the show’s ‘realism’, we suggest that The Wire’s celebrated, stereotype-challenging representations of sex, race, class and gender can be indexed to its audience’s yearning for ‘progressive’ representation. The Wire, we go on to contend, offers a seductively intelligible vision of social and cultural complexity similarly in concordance with its audience’s desires. Thinking reflexively about why The Wire focuses these desires, we provide a reading of the show as an animation of our own relationship to the tradition of cultural studies. We suggest that the investigative ‘detail’ at the heart of the show – defined by its institutional marginality, interdisciplinarity, methodological innovation, pluralistic staff constituency, and vocational commitment to a complex understanding of the social – can be read as an idealized representation of collaborative knowledge production. We reflect on this analogy as an expression of nostalgia for an earlier moment in the history of cultural studies before the neoliberal onslaught on higher education.

Race, debt and the welfare state

In this article I explore how the figure of debt illuminates the racial politics of welfare in neoliberal Britain. I begin by giving a reading of the simultaneous unfolding of post-war race politics and the Beveridgean welfare state, and then turn to consider the interpellative appeal of neoliberal debt to minoritized subjects who have, in certain respects, been de facto excluded from prevailing models of welfare citizenship. In particular, this article considers the ways in which household debt might, even as it increases social inequality, simultaneously produce ideas about equality and futurity, as well as gesture towards the possibility of post-national forms of identity and belonging. If we are to challenge the lowest-common-denominator logics of ‘capitalist realism’ it is necessary to develop orientations to the economic that are as convincing as the popular stories that circulate about the operations of the neoliberal marketplace, and which are as meaningful as the social relations they play a part in constituting. Rather than reproduce the racialized model of welfare citizenship that is implicit to the ‘defence’ of the post-war welfare state, I suggest that there are elements of prevailing neoliberal market relations that might themselves serve as a more substantial basis for expressions of racial equality. There is, in other words, something that we can learn from neoliberal debt regimes in order to develop a more egalitarian future-oriented politics of social welfare and economic redistribution.

Obama and the politics of blackness: antiracism in the "post-black" conjuncture

This article sets out think about some of the challenges to U.S. antiracism heralded by Barack Obamas presidency. It begins by examining the relationship Obama negotiates with notions of blackness in his autobiographical writings, and it considers how this exemplifies what has been described as a “post-black” politics. It proceeds to discuss the insufficiency of critiques of “post-black” as having sold out a black political tradition, but it notes that these critiques reveal something of the changing significance of blackness as a form of antiracist practice. Considering how Obama represents a move in black politics from the margins to the mainstream, I argue that the Presidents symbolic centrality undermines a conception of critical oppositionality hitherto implicit to the antiracist imaginary. Exploring how this challenges longstanding ideas about who “owns” or controls the antiracist struggle, I suggest that antiracism will need to move beyond accusations of betrayal if it is to account for and understand the profound ways in which Obama has transformed the entire field of U.S. race discourse.

The Touch of Iconoclasm

This article reflects on some depicted intentional acts of iconoclasm undertaken by Isis in Northern Iraq and viewed as online videos. It attempts to consider what makes these moving images compelling to audiences who share an orientation to the protection and preservation of ancient artefacts. In doing so, it prompts a reflection on their circulation as part of stories that get told about cultural heritage, and particularly the simple civilizational oppositions that get set up between ‘Western’ and ‘Islamic’ culture. Centring on the significance of the sensation of touch to practices of cultural inscription, it suggests that the Northern Iraq videos animate forms of synaesthesic material engagement that are denied by the modernist technologies of museum culture.

Belonging to a Different Landscape: Repurposing Nationalist Affects

This is an article about the embodied, sensual experience of rural landscape as a site where racialized feelings of national belonging get produced. Largely impervious to criticism and reformation by ‘thin’ legal-political versions of multicultural or cosmopolitan citizenship, it is my suggestion that this racialized belonging is best confronted through the recognition and appreciation of precisely what makes it so compelling. Through an engagement with the theorization of affect in the work of Divya Praful Tolia-Kelly, I consider the resources immanent to the perception of landscapes of national belonging that might be repurposed to unravel that belonging from within. I suggest that forms of environmental consciousness can unpick the mutually reinforcing relationships between nature and nation, opening up opportunities for thinking identity and belonging in different ways, and allowing rural landscapes to become more hospitable places.