Of Carcerality, Race, and Colonizations: Infrastructuring the modern. Ann Laura Stoler

Thursday 25th of June at 12:00pm CET. Sala de Juntes (ground floor, Faculty of Geography and History, University of Barcelona)

This reflection argues for a relatively unexplored phenomenon on which capitalism as an ecological, racial, and imperial formation rests; unpaid, coerced, incarcerated, and non-wage labor. The premise I explore is that capitalism has never been based primarily and consistently on wage labor alone, nor even its surplus army of labor in wait. Capitalism is not only intrinsically shaped by the racisms on which is depends. It has been equally dependent on and productive of a displaced, unwaged, unpaid labor force bereft of the conditions or means to a sustainable life. The very “modernities” in which capitalism profits and insistently invests have been built with colonialisms on different degrees of unfreedom and forced labor. Carcerality, colonization, and forced mobilities are at the core of capitalism in its making and history of the present.