Race, Racism and Development by Kalpana Wilson

Author:Kalpana Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.
Published: 2013-07-25T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

Imperialism, accumulation and racialised embodiment

I still think today as yesterday that the color line is a great problem of this century. But today I see more clearly than yesterday that back of the problem of race and color, lies a greater problem which both obscures and implements it: and that is the fact that so many civilized persons are willing to live in comfort even if the price of this is poverty, ignorance and disease of the majority of their fellowmen; that to maintain this privilege men have waged war until today war tends to become universal and continuous, and the excuse for this war continues largely to be color and race.

W.E.B. Du Bois, preface to the 1953 edition

of The Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois 1962)

The early twenty-first-century conjuncture of aggressive neoliberal imperialism, in which development has been increasingly recast and revalorised as metropolitan security, has been the context for more focused theorising of the relationship between ‘development’ and notions of empire, variously conceived. However, as we will see, with some notable exceptions1 ‘race’ remains curiously elided from much of this work, which has taken place primarily within an international relations framework. This chapter engages with this approach and in particular its use of Foucauldian notions of biopower. It argues that while there are important insights to be gained from these analyses which focus on sustainable development as a ‘security technology’ of containment, they fail to acknowledge the extractive and accumulative aspects of global capitalist processes taking place within the framework of ‘development’. It suggests that this neglect of the material processes underpinning imperial intervention, and the related understanding of race as an exclusively discursive concept, may help to explain why ‘the racial … aspects of colonialism’ are assumed to have been superseded and to be ‘now routinely rejected’ (Duffield and Hewitt, 2009: 10) in these accounts. The chapter then goes on to discuss attempts to ‘research racial formations beyond ideology, through materiality, embodiment and spatiality’ (Chari, 2008: 1907), which have characterised some recent work in critical human geography. The third section focuses on the importance of addressing questions of racialised embodiment in the context of global processes of accumulation. It draws on feminist poststructuralist and postcolonial insight into the production of the embodied subject alongside Marxist theorising of the relationship between capital and embodiment, and historical materialist analyses of ‘race’ in the metropolis, to move towards an understanding of development, ‘race’ and racism which encompasses key questions of embodiment, labour, land, processes of accumulation and contemporary imperialism.

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