Ishiguro’s fiction is pervasively concerned with questions of home and homelessness, and with the kinds of displacement, un-belonging, and cultural otherness that are characteristic of the immigrant condition and that can be traced to Ishiguro’s own experience of being relocated, at the age of five, from Nagasaki, Japan to England. There is an irony in how Ishiguro’s characters are often constantly on the move as their movement is juxtaposed against their internal stasis. Yet, the motif of travel helps reflect the ungrounded or displaced condition of the immigrant. This chapter focuses on two novels that directly and explicitly address the question of migration from one country (and one continent) to another – A Pale View of Hills concerns the trauma of moving from Japan to England; When We Were Orphans centres around an intercontinental move, from pre-communist Shanghai to pre-war Britain – in order to consider the importance of immigration and the condition of being nationally and ethnically ungrounded in Ishiguro’s work. The chapter will also consider Ishiguro’s latest novel, Klara and the Sun, to consider immigration alongside attendant issues of race and labour.

The production of coffee for export organized racial capitalism in Brazil and Colombia during the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century. The literary fiction from this period reveals an effort by the intellectuals of these countries to conceptualize their nations in the face of the organization of their national economies around deeply racialized modes of production. This chapter surveys a wide range of this fiction, including texts by José Bento Monteiro Lobato, Fernando González, Mário de Andrade, and José Restrepo Jaramillo. It also puts this fiction in dialogue with nonfictional texts such as essays by the Swiss-French writer Blaise Cendrars and the Colombian economist Alejandro López. The chapter shows that the imbrication of racialization and capitalism is particularly evident after the end of the coffee boom in 1929, when writers became more skeptical of the triumphalist narratives of the coffee industry.

This chapter examines the role that race and ethnicity play in the works of David Foster Wallace. More specifically, I am interested in what I identify as a key contradiction in the writer’s bibliography: how his hyper-attentiveness to the ways in which late capitalism inundates contemporary life fails to account for how that same late capitalist logic simultaneously acts to racialize and subjugate communities of color. Through readings that span the author’s career – from Signifying Rappers and “Authority and American Usage” to Infinite Jest and The Pale King – I explore how Wallace finds himself unable to openly navigate questions of race and discrimination and by so doing reproduces late capitalism’s project to buttress dominant ideology while outwardly projecting a self-conscious, anti-racist rhetoric. Ultimately, I deem Wallace’s inability to account for race in his critique of hyper-consumerism as symptomatic of a larger critical tendency to overlook racism’s inextricable connection to capitalism (what Cedric Robinson terms as racial capitalism).

While not as financially or critically successful as his previous novels, Charles Chesnutt’s 1905 novel The Colonel’s Dream is an important, though understudied, contribution to a vein of black anti-capitalist thought emergent in the post-Reconstruction era. The story of a former Confederate soldier’s failed endeavor to buy a dilapidated cotton mill and introduce economically and racially progressive labor practices, the novel explores how the post-slavery afterlife of the cotton commodity continued to contribute to Black subjugation in the south. In the end, The Colonel’s Dream asks us to consider whether the fallout of racial capitalism can be remedied by introducing more “humane” capitalist practices, or whether capitalism will always proceed on the same, ruinous route it has historically followed.

This chapter compares two generations of economic literary critics who, since the mid-1990s, have examined how literary texts intersect with racial capitalism. Like the authors they study, these scholars are less concerned with documenting the material consequences of racism than they are with interrogating the systemic logic of the sociocultural frameworks through which racialization is reproduced and racist policy is rationalized. The chapter specifically outlines the intersecting methodologies of these scholars and documents their efforts to show how literary texts often engage the language and logic of economic theory in ways that can destabilize racism’s ideological underpinnings. Beginning with the New Economic Criticism of the 1990s and ending with the emerging paradigm of the Economic Humanities, this chapter demonstrates that while the latter may better attend to the disciplinary specifics of economics than the former, it, like its predecessor, has yet to contend fully with the whiteness of the economic imaginary it takes as its subject.

A historical background of Saint Domingue within the wider context of the European colonization will be the focus of the second chapter, which frames the island originally known to the Taíno as Ayiti as a space of human commodification, death, and slave resistance since the first Africans arrived in 1503. Less than twenty years after arrival, enslaved Africans were constantly escaping, taking up residence with remaining Taíno in the mountains, and participating in organized revolts. These rebellions were reactions to the brutal treatment of Taíno and Africans in the encomienda labor system, the emergence of the slave plantation-based sugar economy and processes of racialization, and the exorbitant death rates of enslaved people. In examining the immediate social world of enslaved people, I look at their social lives and recreation, particularly cultural and spiritual creations, considering them as processes of enculturation that introduced new Africans to local idioms and modes of survival.

This chapter reveals that African inhabitants of the United Nations trust territories – pivotal sites for the emergence of international human rights law – used the newly implemented mechanism of petitioning the Trusteeship Council and the General Assembly to claim their socio-economic rights by challenging their administering authorities’ policies on the use, ownership and distribution of land. In the aftermath of the Second World War and the UN’s formation, inhabitants of African trust territories sought legal counsel to reclaim, before the UN, lands that they viewed as misappropriated. Using contextualised analyses specific to the locales of land claims examined, this chapter considers the social, economic and cultural meanings of land that African claimants had in mind as they and their advocates presented arguments for its return to the UN in the 1940s and 1950s.

A historical background of Saint Domingue within the wider context of the European colonization will be the focus of the second chapter, which frames the island originally known to the Taíno as Ayiti as a space of human commodification, death, and slave resistance since the first Africans arrived in 1503. Less than twenty years after arrival, enslaved Africans were constantly escaping, taking up residence with remaining Taíno in the mountains, and participating in organized revolts. These rebellions were reactions to the brutal treatment of Taíno and Africans in the encomienda labor system, the emergence of the slave plantation-based sugar economy and processes of racialization, and the exorbitant death rates of enslaved people. In examining the immediate social world of enslaved people, I look at their social lives and recreation, particularly cultural and spiritual creations, considering them as processes of enculturation that introduced new Africans to local idioms and modes of survival.

Scholars from across the humanities and sciences have deepened our understanding of the relationship between environmental and human health, revealing the centrality of race as a critical variable. Historians, sociologists, and anthropologists have revealed the centrality of race in disparities in access to healthy environments and medical care. Structural inequalities that stem from the legacies of slavery, colonialism, and imperial violence are embedded with racial ideologies that supported those systems. The growth of biomedicine and Western medical institutions in the context of slavery, colonialism, and empire produced medical ideologies of racial difference in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Similarly, environmental movements that emerged in the context of European and US empires emphasized conservation at the expense of indigenous land rights. The long-term impacts of slavery and colonial policies are apparent in studies of environmental damage and health disparities. In the late twentieth century, environmental activists in the Global South and southern USA challenged racism and postcolonial development, and advocated for environmental justice.

This chapter puts Marxist geography in dialogue with scholarship in critical ethnic studies in order to provide a critical basis for studying the urban geographies of racial capitalism. It focuses on work in black, Chicanx, and indigenous studies that has nuanced and extended the “spatial turn” introduced by scholars such as David Harvey, Neil Smith, Doreen Massey, and Cindi Katz. Discussions of gendered black geographies (Sylvia Wynter, Katherine McKittrick, and Rashad Shabazz), indigenous geographies (Laura Furlan), and Latinx geographies (Mary Pat Brady, Raúl Homero Villa) contextualize the stakes of urban literature by black, Chicanx, and indigenous authors such as Marita Bonner, Danez Smith, Helena María Viramontes, and Tommy Orange.

This chapter traces how historical analogies have enabled the use of the terms slavery and abolition in both the anti-trafficking and the anti-incarceration communities. By placing the often-contradictory approaches these two communities bring to the history of slavery, we trace how a belief in historical progress and an emotional investment in the power of innocence – both concepts embedded in our understanding of childhood – have helped to forge vexed and contradictory definitions of both slavery and freedom. Ultimately we argue that the complex work of historical analogy requires us to imagine history, and the solutions we create in response to history, outside of a developmental model that views the degradation of enslavement a stage we can outgrow or discard.

Stephen Knadler challenges the alignment of physical mobility with freedom by elaborating on the debt crisis and exclusion of the mobile freeman discursively constructed as a semi-citizen under mid-century racial capitalism. In doing so, he explores the limits to aligning African American autobiographical writing primarily with the slave narrative by making a case for the emergence of a new autobiographical genre that he calls the semi-citzenship narrative. Emerging in the decade before the Civil War and written predominantly, though not exclusively, by men, this genre complicates “understanding of the relation among antebellum citizenship making, Black freedom struggles and racial capitalism.” The semi-citizenship narrative, he argues, constitutes an ignored history of the “afterlife of free labor” that unsettles the racialization of Blackness as social and legal death and whiteness as free waged labor and citizenship. That unsettling is staged through a “quasi-citizenship” articulated in accounts of the freeman’s indebtedness and “excluding out” by writers such as William Grimes, Samuel Ringgold Ward, Thomas Smallwood, and Austin Steward. Knadler argues that these writers were using their narratives to account for the “unfolding and incomplete transition of the enslaved into a third term, a so-called free person who was not quite a citizen nor yet enslaved.”

Katherine Adams’s “‘This Is Especially Our Crop’: Blackness, Value, and the Reconstruction of Cotton” thinks deeply about that historical record’s ties to materiality, labor, and “worth.” Adams focuses on writing that promoted cotton as a site for Black economic self-determination – specifically on how writers negotiated the double bind of racial capitalism, simultaneously countering predictions that freedpeople could not become economic producers without white coercion and resisting the reduction of Black personhood to economic value. Analyzing texts from Martin Delany, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and diverse other authors for the Black periodical press, Adams shows how African American writers and thinkers complicated the putative opposition between capitalist and human value by laying claim to both, appropriating the logic of cotton capitalism in order to inscribe Black personhood within its aporia.

This chapter, the first of three case studies, illustrates how marketised global justice operates in the non-governmental organisation (NGO) sector. The viral video campaign Kony 2012 by the NGO Invisible Children is analysed. The extensive reliance on marketing – making Joseph Kony *famous* – is shown to distribute attention and capital to a narrow set of issues while simultaneously impoverishing the meaning of global justice. Specifically, the chapter highlights three features of marketised global justice: the close alliance between the anti-impunity movement and military intervention; the global justice sector’s alliance with racial capitalism; and the more general de-politicisation of global justice that is linked to viewing donors as consumers. The backlash against Kony 2012 is also studied. It is revealed that the backlash was lodged in marketing terms. This is contrasted with resistance – as a response that is conscious of histories of exploitation.