Pedagogies of Racial Capitalism: Contesting Capitalist Subject Formation in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American Institutions

This roundtable seeks to excavate pedagogies of racial capitalism - and challenges to those pedagogies - that animated the creation of a variety of institutions and institutional innovations in the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries. While capitalism is often considered in the abstract as economic philosophy or political ideology, the historical process it describes was lived or embodied in the religious ontologies of its mediating institutions. Contributors examine African-American repatriation companies, Protestant churches, Fordist factories, business schools, vocational training programs, and agricultural curricula at land-grant universities to show how religious logics of colonial conquest and resource extraction persisted in the secular expressions of education, reform, and management. While centering on the North American context, this roundtable traces these institutions’ engagement with global networks of missionaries, scholars, and businesspeople through which racialized thought and exploitative practices were both produced and challenged.