Logics of Capital: Witchcraft, Slavery, and Waged Work

This Geography and Environmental Systems graduate-level seminar examines the spatial logics of racial capitalism to analyze processes that create and sustain hierarchies of difference along lines that include but are not limited to race, gender, and class.  Throughout the course, we will explore these logics through topics such as racism, slavery, the sexual division of labor, patriarchy, witchcraft, unpaid work, the reproduction of labor power, labor deskilling, technology, waged work, and nature/society binaries. We will decenter the male proletariat in the historical development of capitalism to broaden the intersecting forms of accumulation by disposession with particular attention to the emergent and necessary spatial patterns of racial capitalism. Readings are selected to provide students with the tools to critically interrogate the political economy and to highlight the palimpsestic relationship between past and ongoing dispossessions and the relational nature of capitalism. We will look at multiple theoretical viewpoints of capitalism as well as specific forms of difference and the various strategies deployed to contest the logics of capitalism.