- It responds to a renewed interest in Marx’s mature work, and particularly his development of a theory of value within the three volumes of Capital. These include the work of the Neue Marx-Lektüre group, the writings of the Wertkritik school, and in the Anglophone world, the work of Marina Vishmidt and the Endnotes Collective;
- It responds to the republication of influential work in the integrated history of racialization and capitalism—such as Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition and Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery—which prompt a stretching of basic Marxist categories of analysis.
Our panel synthesizes these emergent dialogues by focalizing a key outgrowth of the turn to value: the capacity to think more rigorously about race as an ascriptive logic of value production and a means to variously “sculpt” laboring and non-laboring populations. We see this focus on race and value as opening up a conceptual frame in which new directions in Marxist inquiry can be brought into contact with work in Black Studies, Ethnic Studies, Indigeneity Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and other studies of comparative racialization. While these theoretical strands do not immediately appear as conversant with one another, this panel proposes that their framing on the terrain of the novel—a generic form that has historically alchemized questions of labor, race and population—evinces their imbrication.
Our first panelist, Rafael Lubner, historicizes the value-form’s constitutive relation to racialized forms of life in his “On Shipping Commodified Life.” In it, he reads Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake to give an account of the containment, transportation and subsequent “consumption” of racially-commodified life that indexes (1) a transnational set of economic and affective relationships that prompt a rethinking of value’s congealment into human form; and (2) an expansion of our geographical conception of value’s social and metaphoric production from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Lubner thus argues that the value-form is inescapably yoked to global histories of racialized extraction now embedded in contemporary modes of accumulation.
Christine Okoth’s “Factory Settings: Production and Value in the Postcolony,” evinces one modality of this embeddedness, reading literary renderings of the factory in the novels of Ayi Kwei Armah and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in order to draw attention to the disjunctive relation between the value-form and the postcolony. Okoth makes sense of the yoking of racialized difference to value by staging a conversation between visions of post-capitalist societies that hinge on the abolition of ‘value’ as an abstraction that organizes social life, and experiments in economic reorganization that took place across the Caribbean, West and East Africa. She shows how the factory acts both as an extension of the (neo)colonial state, and a location in which visions of resource sovereignty can be articulated, complicating the political programmatics of value-theoretical approaches.
Jane Hu’s “Value, Labor, and the Asian Anglophone Novel,” explores another intersection of race and value in Kazuo Ishiguro’s most recent novel, Klara and the Sun (2021). Situating it in the author’s broader oeuvre, Hu notes the novel’s divergence from Ishiguro’s prior work—as his only novel set in the future as well as in America—as marking the shift in waning empire from the site of the UK to USA in the postwar Cold War order. In particular, Hu examines Ishiguro’s turn from narratives about the British past to that of an explicitly American future as mediated through the specter of the “Japanese miracle.” Focusing on the eponymous character Klara—a robotic “Artificial Friend” whose sole purpose is to provide companionship to human children—Hu argues that the figure of abstract labor is, in fact, the material embodiment of racialized surplus labor.
In light of these “case studies,” Alya Ansari’s “Measures of the Global Anglophone” rethinks the state of the field of literary studies and the plasticity that the moniker “Global Anglophone” offers to such novel approaches to the intersection of racialization and valorization. Ansari suggests that the inauguration of the “Global Anglophone” as a heuristic of study in the twenty-first century does not necessarily threaten work that rigorously and insistently registers the disjunction between centers and peripheries, but that it might provide the matrix out of which more discerning genealogies of literary form might grow.
Each panelist will present their remarks—with associated provocations to the audience—for no more than 15 minutes, which will allow for 15 minutes of unstructured discussion with audience members.