Christopher Chen and Sarika Chandra will present "Stuart Hall, Race, and the Antinomies of Social Formation Theory."
Abstract:
This talk examines Stuart Hall's influential essay "Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance" (1980) and his famous assertion that "race is the modality in which class is lived." While this formula has become widely cited, it is rarely read back through its sources in Althusserian theories of ideology on the one hand, and on the other 1970s mode of production/social formation theory (MPSF) debates over economic development in South Africa in particular, and the Global South more generally.
Hall appropriates Althusser's tripartite model of economic, political, and ideological "instances" to theorize race as an ideological structure that interpellates subjects within a racialized division of labor. This framework allows Hall to avoid both what he calls the “Scylla” of economic reductionism and the “Charybdis” of sociological pluralism.
However, the Althusserian theoretical framework's invariant categories produce a rigid antinomy between necessity and contingency that risks reducing the economics of racialization to a nationally delimited division of labor free of capitalist crisis tendencies. As Hall's account progressively develops a primarily ideological or discursive account of race, the question of the political economy of racialization recedes. The latter is arguably better conceived neither in terms of functional necessity nor sheer contingency but rather as a contested path-dependent process reproduced and reconfigured across both national boundaries and cycles of accumulation.
This talk returns to Hall's earlier essay, "Marx's Notes on Method: A 'Reading' of the 1857 Introduction to the Grundrisse," to recover a different point of departure for theorizing specifically capitalist forms of racialization.
Christopher Chen is Associate Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has published articles, poetry, and reviews in In boundary 2, Post45, Contemporaries, South Atlantic Quarterly, The Routledge Companion to Literature and Economics, Money and American Literature, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. He is the author of Literature and Race in the Democracy of Goods (2022), a comparative study of contemporary Black and Asian North American poetry.
Sarika Chandra is Associate Professor of English at Wayne State University. She researches and teaches in the areas of Globalization studies, American Studies, and Race and Ethnic Studies. Chandra is the author of Dislocalism: The Crisis of Globalization and the Remobilizing of Americanism. She is the co-editor of and co-contributor to Totality Inside Out. Her publications have appeared in various volumes and journals, including American Quarterly, Cultural Critique, and Modern Language Notes.