Resisting Racial Capitalism: An Antipolitical Theory of Refusal

Join us for a joint lecture between IUR and the Department of Social Work at Malmö University! Room: A0306

Ida Danewid presents her book Resisting Racial Capitalism: An Antipolitical Theory of Refusal (2023) where she argues that state power is central to racial capitalism’s violent regimes of extraction and accumulation. Tracing the global histories of four technologies of state violence: policing, bordering, wastelanding, and reproductive control, she excavates an antipolitical archive of anarchism that stretches from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro to the borderlands of Europe, the poisoned landscape of Ogoniland, and the queer lifeworlds of Delhi. Thinking with a rich set of scholars, organisers, and otherworldy dreamers, Danewid theorises these modes of refusal as a utopian worldmaking project which seeks not just better ways of being governed, but an end to governance in its entirety. In a time where the state remains hegemonic across the Left–Right political spectrum, Resisting Racial Capitalism calls on us to dream bolder and better in order to (un)build the world anew.

Ida Danewid is a social and political theorist based in the Department of International Relations at the University of Sussex.