Unpayable Debt
Classical liberalism leveraged and authorized racial distinctions as part of the Transatlantic commercial world that included the slave trade. Is the same true for neoliberal global markets?
How should we connect populist neo-racism—intensified Islamophobia, the “rebirth” of white supremacy, resurgent anti-Semitism—with the racial and ethnic stakes of neoliberalism?
What racial knowledges underpin contemporary neoliberalism, and how have they been produced as knowledges in the first place?
What myths about “race” and failures to specify “the human” underpin anxieties of nationalism that are manifest in contemporary neo-populist movements?
How has race been made to serve the aims of neoliberal capital, and in what ways might human rights discourses, including discourses of dehumanization and subjectivation, also be conscripted in service of capital’s ends? What is the “reason” of race? Is there a subject to be specified beyond or outside of extant discourses on race and the human? What forms of rationality underlie these questions?
We are joined this week by Denise Ferreira da Silva, author of numerous works including the field-clearing monograph Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007), on the careers of the post-Enlightenment subject she terms the “transparent I” and the role that race has played in modern scientific and historical thought. Ferreira da Silva has shown that raciality functions through logics of exclusion and obliteration that serve capital. Her forthcoming Unpayable Debt continues her longstanding interrogation of the relationships between race, colonialism, and global capital and the question of the “im/possibility of global/racial justice.” Our conversation will extend to topics including contemporary discourses of post-racialism and technoliberal futurity, and it will lay the groundwork for next month’s seminar on neoliberalism and Subjectivity.
Seminar Readings
Linked PDFs are password-protected.
Denise Ferreira da Silva
An academic and practicing artist, Dr. Denise Ferreira da Silva’s work addresses the ethico-political challenges of the global present. She is the author of Toward a Global Idea of Race (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), A Dívida Impagavel (Oficina da Imaginaçāo Política and Living Commons, 2019), Unpayable Debt (Sternberg/MIT Press, forthcoming) and co-editor (with Paula Chakravartty) of Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). Her several articles have been published in leading interdisciplinary journals, such as Social Text, Theory, Culture & Society, Social Identities, PhiloSOPHIA, Griffith Law Review, Theory & Event, The Black Scholar, to name a few. Her artistic works includes the films Serpent Rain (2016) and 4Waters-Deep Implicancy (2018), in collaboration with Arjuna Neuman; and the relational art practices Poethical Readings and Sensing Salon, in collaboration with Valentina Desideri. She has exhibited and lectured at major art venues, such as the Pompidou Center (Paris), Whitechapel Gallery (London, MASP (Sāo Paulo), Guggenheim (New York), and MoMa (New York). She has also written for publications for major art events (Liverpool Biennale, 2017; Sao Paulo Biennale, 2016, Venice Biennale, 2017, and Documenta 14) and published in art venues, such as Canadian Art, Texte Zur Kunst, and e-Flux.