Browsing by Subject "Racial Capitalism"

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    Educational Migrations: A Critical Narrative Study of Educational Movement in a Rural Southeast Michigan Community.
    (2019-07) Joubert, Ezekiel
    This dissertation is on the formation of educational movement in a rural Southeast Michigan community. I examine black community strategies for engaging in educational processes that involve student movement, to better understand historical struggles for equal education and interrogate the educational structures that reproduce racial capitalist social relations. Drawing from critical educational scholarship, black intellectual thought in education, spatial-economic theories, critical narrative and African American and black studies, I document how twenty black rural residents, ages 21-96, engaged in and imagined school related migrations. I used interviews and locally sourced archival materials to trace the impact of schooling in a racial capitalist society (Robinson, 1983), at the intersections of the rural question, race/racism, social mobility and labor, in a region central to the national imagining of American progress and development. Shaped by the Great Migration and deindustrialization of Metropolitan Detroit, their critical narratives (Goodson & Gill, 2014) demonstrate how school district remapping, choice reforms, vocational training and tracking (ostensible solutions for marginalized communities) contribute to further segregation and structural inequality. I contend that their organizing, collaborations, and art/literary practices provide insights for developing and employing cooperative and collective educational responses to the ways schools participate in social stratification, racial-spatial discrimination, and the uneven redistribution of resources. This research offers pedagogical and curricular implications for transforming and complicating educational discourse and practice that simply associate the movement of predominantly poor and/or black children across neighborhood, district, and county borders with equality and upward mobility.
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    The Intimacies of Racial Capitalism: Chinese Capital and Migration In South Africa
    (2018-06) Huang, Mingwei
    In light of the People’s Republic of China’s reemergence on the African continent since 2000, my dissertation, The Intimacies of Racial Capitalism: Chinese Migration and Capital in South Africa, explores the social, cultural, political, and economic dimensions of contemporary Chinese migration and capital in South Africa from an interdisciplinary approach grounded in feminist and critical race studies. Based on the analysis of media and cultural texts, in-depth interviews, and extensive participant-observation fieldwork primarily sited at a “China Mall,” a wholesale shopping center for Chinese goods, and Chinatown in Johannesburg, my dissertation theorizes the “south-south” dynamics of the “Rise of China.” It argues that Chinese capital in South Africa is an emergent form of 21st century racial capitalism and empire that functions through neoliberal modes of flexibility, mobility, and risk-taking and the production of racial difference. My dissertation tells a novel story about aspiring Chinese entrepreneurs who chase economic ambitions unattainable to them in neoliberalizing China in the emerging markets for low-cost Chinese goods in South Africa and across Africa and Latin America, while reproducing the enduring social inequalities and power relations foundational to South Africa’s history of racial capitalism and colonialism. The dissertation chronicles not only transnational Chinese livelihoods in South Africa, but also the fraught intimate and non-intimate encounters between Chinese and Africans, and the experiences of precarious Southern Africans migrant workers at the mall. It emphasizes the multiplicity of economic forms, affective economies, socialities, and historical contingencies. A feminist ethnography of racial capitalism, it tracks practices of capital accumulation, transnational capital flows, and labor relations alongside the production of racial, gender, and sexual difference necessary for the maximization of profit. The Intimacies of Racial Capitalism theorizes contemporary processes of racialization and neoliberal global capitalism across seldom examined yet increasingly important south-south geographies, while engaging racial capitalism scholarship with often elided analysis of gender and sexuality.