You are invited to join a two-day workshop co-hosted by SWOP and the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) on Articulation, Racial Capitalism and The Common.
Date: 17 - 18 Septemer 2022
Time: 10h00 - 18h30 on both days
Venue: Graduate Centre Seminar Room, South West Engineering Building, Wits University. To attend in-person please RSVP by the 14th of September to Dept-SWOP-Admin@wits.ac.za
Online: Please register at tinyurl.com/swop-workshop
Draft Programme
Call
In 1980 Stuart Hall waded into South African race-class debates with the publication of his now classic essay, ‘Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance’. Over the course of the 1970s there had already emerged a powerful reformulation of political critiques of the South African racial order, both from within Marxist thought and with the dramatic entry of Black Consciousness (BC) onto the political stage, and which found expression in Hall’s essay. In fact, by the end of the 1970s both Marxists and BC theorists were increasingly coming to see struggles against racism and capitalism as inseparable.
Taking Hall’s essay and the political productivity of South African theorists in the 1970s as our orientating markers, over the last year a group of us gathered for a collective research project focused on interrogating different perspectives on racism and capitalism in relation to strategic questions drawn from contemporary political struggles.
Over the weekend of the 17th and 18th of September, this group (hosted by SWOP) will hold a two day workshop at the University of the Witwatersrand in which we will share and discuss some of the outcomes of this work and its potential political uses. To this end we are inviting scholars working on similar questions to join us for an intensive 2 days of structured conversations centred on thinking through how different oppressive social forms have come to be bound together or have been collectively struggled against.
If you would like to participate in the workshop and present an intervention in the discussion, please send a short abstract to ahmed.veriava@wits.ac.za by the 1st of August 2022.
Traditional academic presentations are welcome, as well as interventions that take other forms. Submissions need not be directly linked to the terms of Hall’s essay, but should align with the broad questions we are thinking through. As this will be a hybrid event, those unable to attend in person will be able to join the discussion online.