"Open the Gates Mek We Repatriate": Caribbean slavery, constructivism, and hermeneutic tensions

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copy edit version of an article published in International Theory. The definitive publisher-authenticated version: Shilliam, Robbie. "“Open the Gates Mek We Repatriate”: Caribbean slavery, constructivism, and hermeneutic tensions." International Theory 6.02 (2014): 349-372 is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1752971914000165© 2015, Cambridge University Press

Colonial Architecture or Relatable Hinterlands? Locke, Nandy, Fanon and the Bandung Spirit

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Raced markets: an introduction

The central consensus among the scholars and activists who came together for the first Raced Markets Workshop in December 2015 was that ‘race’ may have begun as fiction, an invention of Europeans in the service of colonisation, however, the fiction of race became material over time, reproduced in relation to the manifold raced markets of the global political economy. Since that original workshop, and against a consolidated neoliberal capitalist context, the political rise of fascistic movements has intensified across the globe. Our collective provocation here is that this current conjuncture cannot be explained with reference to the exceptional intrusion of racism, nor the epiphenomenal status of race in relation to political economy. Instead we attend to how race functions in structural and agential ways, integrally reproducing raced markets and social conditions. Our Introduction opens this conversation for New Political Economy readers, positioning neoliberalism and the current conjuncture as the present political economic moment to be understood through a raced market frame of analysis. Our hope is that this special issue will be read as a timely intervention, referencing a long tradition of (often marginalised) thought which attends to race as productive and material, rather than confined to the ideological realm

Introduction: global challenges for sociology

With the 50th anniversary of the journal, this special issue takes stock of the progress that has been made within sociology to become a more globally oriented discipline and discusses the new challenges for the future that emerge as a consequence. From its inception, classical sociology was primarily concerned with the European origins of processes of modernity that were to become global. There was little discussion of how the global might be understood in terms of structures, processes and social movements not directly identified as European but nonetheless contributing to modernity. The challenge for sociology has been to take into account these other phenomena and to rethink its core categories and concepts in light of newly understood alternative formations of the global and the social movements that bring them about

Teaching Africa and international studies: Forum introduction

Africa has often been defined and represented by outsiders. In International Studies, the continent is frequently viewed as peripheral and uninteresting. This is clearly a problem, and an increasingly apparent one as the number of courses on Africa and IS grow, both in Africa and beyond. Many academics who run these courses are keen to challenge the continent’s traditional marginalisation and perceived dependency, but they are limited by the resources available to them, and the fact that many are establishing new courses from scratch. This article outlines some of the key debates around teaching Africa and IS, setting the scene for the articles that follow

Global social theory: building resources

There has been an intensification of student protests around the world addressing issues of racial exclusion and racialised hierarchy within the university, including its teaching and research practices. These movements point to urgent concerns about what and how we teach and research, and how the resources of universities might be used to support the amelioration of injustice rather than its reproduction. This short piece focuses on the curriculum and points to actions that we can take to build resources for a more dynamic and adequate curriculum within our universities. In particular, it discusses one collaborative initiative that all the authors have been involved in, the website Global Social Theory. This site provides resources for the diversification and expansion of the curriculum for those teaching and studying social theory

Domesticating the ‘troubled family’: Racialised sexuality and the postcolonial governance of family life in the UK

This article examines how the UK’s Troubled Families Programme (TFP) works as a strategy of domestication which produces and delimits certain forms of ‘family life’. Drawing upon critical geographies of home and empire, the article explores how the TFP works to manage the troubled family as part of a longer history of regulating unruly households in the name of national health and civilisation. Viewing the TFP as part of the production of heteronormative order, highlights how the policy remobilises and reconfigures older forms of colonial rule which work to demarcate between civility/savagery, the developable/undevelopable. In examining the postcolonial dimension of neoliberal social policy, the article stresses how the TFP relies on racializing and sexualised logics of socio-biological control borrowed from imperial eugenics. Reading the TFP in this way contributes to our understanding of neoliberal rule. That the troubled family can be either domesticated or destroyed (through benefit sanctions and eviction) equally reveals the extent to which domesticity works as a key site for the production of both ‘worthy’ and ‘surplus’ life

The lacuna of capital, the state and war? The lost global history and theory of Eastern agency

In this article I seek to constructively engage Alex Anievas’s seminal book that is deservedly the subject of this forum. For Anievas has become a key figure in the revival of Trotskyism in IR and his is one of the first book-length treatments of the New Trotskyist theory of the international. My critique is meant merely as a constructive effort to push his excellent scholarship further in terms of developing his non-Eurocentric approach. In the first section I argue that his book represents a giant leap forward for the New Trotskyist IR. However, in the following sections I argue that although undeniably a brave attempt nevertheless, in the last instance, Anievas falls a few steps short in realising a genuinely non-Eurocentric account of world politics. This is because while he certainly restores or brings in ‘the lost theory and history of IR’ that elevates class forces to a central role in shaping world politics, nevertheless he fails to bring in ‘the lost global theory and history of Eastern agency’ that constitutes, in my view, the key ingredient of a non-Eurocentric approach to world politics. I also argue that while his anti-reductionist ontological credentials are for the most part extremely impressive, nevertheless, I argue that these are compromised in his analysis of Hitler’s racism. Finally, in the conclusion I ask whether the theoretical architecture of the New Trotskyism in IR is capable of developing a non-Eurocentric approach before concluding in the affirmative with respect to its modern revisionist incarnation of which Anievas is in the vanguard