 global pandemic we live through today. On the one hand, our aim today is to point out a range of paradigmatic stages and events in the history of racial capitalism that throw in sharply the long beret of racial capitalism imperialist violence, especially when in the so-called crisis mode. On the other hand, we want to explore how the present pandemic in particular has continued to contribute to the virality and disposability of life being embedded as it is in racial capitalism through its integral features of capitalist development, white supremacy, exploitation of labor, and commodification of sexual and gender non-conformity. So we are indebted to the generations of transnational black radical critique from W.E.B. Du Bois to Winston Paterson from C.L.R. James to Richard Nathaniel Wright from Hazel Carby to Paul Gilroy and many, many others, as well as to the foremost articulations of racial capitalism and the works of Cedric Robinson, Celia Wenter, and Walter Rodney. But we wonder today and want to debate why it is that racial capitalism's theoretical contours seem to get muddied the more and more it gets taken up in the mainstream. Relatedly and in a wider context, with respect to Patricia Clough and Jasby Poir's 2012 observations, which some might even call prophetic in nature on viral capitalism, on Stoller's work on imperial legibilities, and as recently indicated in Vidya Kumar's talk at a SOAS event, we ask what exactly might be viral and durable about racial capitalism, especially when it comes to its continuous concern with productive sexual and gender ordering. Huge thank you to the SOAS Festival of Ideas, and in particular to our colleagues, Amna King and Stefanie Guirin, for inviting us to hold this panel and for working tirelessly towards making such an amazing and important series of virtual events possible. So my name is Ivania Hamzic. I'm a senior lecturer in legal history and legal anthropology here at SOAS, and I will be your host this morning, afternoon, evening, depending on where you are in the world right now. We have an amazing panel spanning at least three continents and time zones and an array of critical, theoretical, ethnographic, and activist engagements with racial capitalism, crisis, and temporality. Every panelist will be given up to 10 minutes for an initial intervention. The panel will be divided into two blocks. So in the present hour, we will first hear from Badura Lyra, Sameh Khatun, and me, and then I'll leave some 15 minutes for a discussion at the end of which we will have a bit of a break, some maybe 10 minutes or five minute break. In block two, we will hear from Naftar Prudeval, Basiba Omar, and Althea Maria Rivas, and then devote the rest of our time to any specific or general discussion. You will not be able to ask questions live, but by all means, please make use of the Q&A box rather than the chat box to send in your queries and comments and time permitting I will try as best I can to integrate a portion of your Q&A contributions into the two discussion blocks. So let me now quickly introduce the block one panelists. We will first hear from Dr. Badura Lyra, who joins us from across the pond where she is an assistant professor of political and social thought in the department of Africa and Africa diaspora studies at the University of Texas at Austin. The book manuscript she currently works on is titled The Interminable Catastrophe, A Fatal Liberalism, Splantation, Logics, and Black Political Life in the Wake of Disaster. Badura is interested in black political thought, especially Caribbean political thought, African anti-colonial thought, and black Marxism. And she's the co-editor of a volume on black political thought forthcoming from Hutopras and is currently working with Tony Boats on edited volume on Silvia Winter's unpublished essays. We will then hear from Dr. Samya Khattun who became a feminist historian because she once lost her way to a mathematics lecture at the University of Sydney. Since then, Samya has chased truths about the past in Sydney, Antigua, Calcutta, Istanbul, Berlin, New York, donating Melbourne, London, and DACA. And her book, I can tell you, Australian Nama, The South Asian Odyssey in Australia, is one of my favorite reads of all times. She researches the life worlds of people colonized by the British Empire and her documentaries have screened on ABC and SPS TV in Australia. And Samya is the new chair of the Center for Gender Studies and so on. And finally, my own work has a principle as well to shed new light on how gender and non-conforming individuals and communities have braved the turbulent times of racial capitalism, imperialism, slavery, and other forms of legally sanctioned oppression and how in turn they have developed and abided by multiple formations of insurrectionary knowledge. In 2010, I co-authored the book with Dr. Ziva Mikhassini titled Control and Sexuality, The Revival of Zinnabovs in Muslim Context. And back in 2016, I published the first edition of my monograph, Sexual and Gender Diversity in the Muslim World, History, Law, and Vernacular Knowledge. And for the past five or so years, I've been researching towards a book manuscript titled, Interruption, Rethinking Circum-Atlantic Gender Variance of the Enslaved in 18th Century West Africa and Colonial Louisiana. So good morning, good early morning, Badour, and welcome and the virtual floor is yours. Thank you, Vanya, and thank you to Stelas for inviting me from across the pond. So I'm going to get right into it. I find myself with the rather daunting and difficult task of first defining racial capitalism and I'll offer some scattered thoughts on this question of the endurance and gendering of racial capitalism, emphasis on the scattered part. So I'll start first by quoting Cedric Robinson directly, who in his tomes like Marxism offers the following meditation on the meaning and nature of this thing that is so contested as a term today, racial capitalism. He writes, quote, the development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions, so too did social ideology. As a material force then, it could be expected that racialism would inevitably permeate the social structures emerging from capitalism. I've used the term racial capitalism to refer to this development and to the subsequent structure as a historical agency, end quote. Fundamental to Robinson's intervention is his suggestion that feudalism was not overturned or destroyed by the historical and material rupture presented by capitalism, but rather it was really extended along new categories of difference, growing in, quote, fits and starts, to quote from Robin Kelly. There's also a tradition of theorizing racial capitalism that comes out of South Africa, which precedes Robinson's definition as Peter Hudson remarks in his piece, racial capitalism and the dark proletariat, which deals largely with Neville Alexander's one, Azania, published in 1979, four years before Robertson published Black Marxism. Hudson writes the following, that quote, while the South Africans particularize Robinson universalizes. For Alexander, racial capitalism allows for the apprehension of the unique indeed, the exceptional character of South Africa and shows how the political economy of white supremacy in South Africa differed from that of the rest of the continent and for that matter of the United States. For Robinson, the racial capitalism is a global phenomenon. It is not limited to a particular nation state and it emerges at the beginning of European expansion. There are also methodological differences between Robinson's use of racial capitalism and its appearance in the South African context, end quote. Now there's also a thread or a line of theorization that joins these two together, offered by South African scholar, Dennis Davis, who writes that quote, Robinson's canvas was broader than that of Alexander in that he examined the concept of racial capitalism from the vantage point of the global, but that having been said, his theoretical lens was similar, end quote. Indeed, Neville Alexander in his post 1994 writing, right, after Robinson published Black Marxism, wrote that quote, the continuation and intensification into the post-apartheid capitalist system of the levels of inequality and exploitation characterized the apartheid capitalist system in the context of an increasingly barbaric, neoliberal, global apartheid inevitably pit workers against one another in a dog eat dog competition over allegedly scarce resources, end quote. So in this way, Alexander's thesis of racial capitalism begins in South Africa and ends in South Africa and begins by theorizing the political economic workings of racial capitalism, but later adopts an additional feature that of the intensification of pre-apartheid exploitation into the post-apartheid era, which echoes Robinson's thesis, which fundamentally is not necessarily how race and class collide, but accounts for the durability of the system, the way that the system manages to extend itself and recreate itself over time. And so for my purpose today, I'll go with the more generalizable world systems approach offered by Robinson and then later co-signed by Neville Alexander himself in order to better address the endurance and movable features of racial capitalism on a global scale as such. Now, the question remains is, what exactly is enduring about racial capitalism? For this, I have a really short answer, right? What endures is the very mechanism in which racial capitalism emerged and congealed, its ability to wield old forms of dominance and seemingly new ways, its ability to both account for continuities with the past and the way these continuities are embedded in different ways in the presence? This is what endures about racial capitalism, but the feudal order remains with us in so far as slavery as a time that is not yet past remains with us as well. What remains durable is both the crushing weight of the exploitation of slavery growing out of this feudal context and being extended again and again over time as well as what Robinson again identified as this intensification along old and new axes of difference. What endures is the bind but non-described as the indistinguishability between the base and the superstructure in the colonial situation that, quote, you are white because you are rich, you are rich because you are white, end quote. Yet the call to gender the idea of racial capitalism produces an additional predicament, one wherein we do the important and necessary work of stretching concepts to Borofinan's verbiage, right? Stretching concepts and categories, but we also make the mistake of burdening one concept with the task of accounting for everything. The question remains as to how we go about gendering a concept which describes the manner in which old modes of domination are made durable, right? This is what racial capitalism is. What this means simply excavating black women thinkers that have argued similar things, which is always already a failed project because the more we excavate, the more we realize that we don't know, right? Does it mean gender intensifies historically in a way that is separate from race? This is what gives me some difficulty. Part of the reason why racial capitalism is so contested today is not because people have failed to adequately study its genealogies, but rather that we now expect racial capitalism as an idea and as a concept to be excessively capacious to explain all things at all times related to any and all intersections between race and class. Now racial capitalism is used to describe any and every collision between race and class or for every conversation concerning the inseparability of race and class. This is not only not what racial capitalism means, but it's an impossible task. And risks emptying the concept of its genealogical characteristics in a similar way that has happened to decolonization and even more recently the mainstreaming and defanging of abolition as a concept. We know that Robinson's text does not spotlight any black women thinkers. So to say it's a blind spot would be an understatement. However, what if we instead of wielding racial capitalism to explain forms of gendered exploitation, what if we stepped outside the frame? And in so doing actually clarify racial capitalism further by placing these ideas in relation. So rather than gender racial capitalism, I'd like to instead offer some concepts that have been developed by black women thinkers themselves in tandem with and in collision with the idea of racial capitalism, keeping in mind the philosophic methodology of racial capitalism, which I think is the most durable element and how older utterances of the master script are not broken with, but re-territorialized fundamentally. We can see this particularly for example, enjoy James description of the captive maternal. Now I'm taking this from a talk that she gave at Brown University, a talk that I attended where she offered a definition of the captive maternal. And she writes, quote, captive maternals are self-identified female, male, trans or ungendered persons, feminized and socialized into caretaking within the legacy of racism and US democracy. Captive maternals are designated for consumption in the tradition of child slavery. They stabilize with their labor, the very social and state structures which prey upon them. The captive maternal labor is to nurture the private realm of family and community that seek shelter from social and state aggression and stabilize the public realm of policing, presidential powers and policies that prey upon said family and community. An anti-black international womb steals or appropriates degenerative powers of captive maternals in order to stabilize the state and social order. Today, white nationalist, patriarchs, Uber capitalists continue the legacy of defining presidential powers as the overseers of captive maternals. The intended offspring of a union between US democracy and white supremacy was a servile captive maternal, end quote. So as we can see, the idea of the captive maternal can work in a contrapuntal manner, colliding with and moving away from racial capitalism in its manner of accounting for the historical intensification of modes of domination rather than rupture, but also via offering us a different space other than racial capitalism to theorize the predicament of the enslaved African woman termed captive maternal as it were. This language of Joy James' womb theory is also present in an article Sidya Hartman published in the same year, 2016, The Belly of the World, in which she takes up W. E. B. Du Bois' understanding of labor and the general strike against plantocracy and black reconstruction, which is one of the key texts Robinson engages in his text, Black Marxism. She does not discard of his conception of the general strike defined as enslaved persons leaving the plantation to join the Union army, but rather she complicates it. Sidya Hartman writes concerning the absence of enslaved women and domestic reproductive and productive labor from his schema of the general strike, the following, quote, in black reconstruction, women's sexual and reproductive labor is critical in accounting for the violence and degradation of slavery, yet this labor falls outside of the heroic account of the black worker and the general strike, end quote. She proceeds by asking, quote, where does the impossible domestic fit into the general strike? What is the text of her insurgency and the genre of her refusal? What visions of the future would encourage her to run or propel her flight? Strategies of endurance and subsistence do not yield easily to the grand narrative of revolution, nor has a space been cleared for the sexual welfare of mother and domestic labor in the annals of the black radical tradition. She then goes on to name racial capitalism explicitly in her follow-up to this provocation concerning the impossible domestic. The forms of care, intimacy, she writes the forms of care, intimacy and sustenance exploited by racial capitalism must most importantly are not reducible to or exhausted by end quote, right? I bring up this example from Hartman's to suggest that changing the question away from how do we gender racial capitalism to another question, like where does the impossible domestic fit into the general strike and extrapolate from there? Where does the absented presence of black women fit into the broader narratives of black insurgency and radical struggles on their own terms? We arrive at a different narration of events, so to speak. And the question of the impossible domestic is also something that we can use and think through via the work of Claudia Jones, who we know extends, right? This kind of Marxian concept of exploitation and gives us the concept of super exploitation which encompasses the gendered class racialized exploitation that black women face, particularly as it pertain to domestic work. So all categories made new again. And we can see how racial capitalism is made stronger as an analytic framework not by wielding it outside of its genealogical contents but rather by placing it inside of a broader constellation of concepts that might help illuminate the predicament facing us more clearly. We can take the methodological intervention of racial capitalism of focusing on intensifications of the past along new and old modes of difference and read it alongside the works of black women thinkers. Indeed, by stepping outside the frame of racial capitalism in this endeavor, we return to it with a new set of questions and new possibilities as well. Thank you. Thank you, Madhu, so much. This was such a fascinating opening. It gave us so much food for thought. Samia, the poor is yours. Hi, everybody. Thank you, Vanya. What an incredible set of thoughts to start off with. So what I want to talk about today quite briefly is actually a temporal story that is absolutely inextricable from racial capitalism and its durability. I wanted to start by discussing a report and then by discussing another report I want to start with is this disparities in the risk and outcome of COVID-19 which was a report that came out in summer by Public Health England when of course COVID hit. Now, this is of course about the racial disparities of how COVID is hitting communities and the analysis I'll just reading. Analysis of survival shows that people of Bangladeshi ethnicity had around four times the risk of death. People of black Caribbean and other black ethnicities had between 10 and 50% higher risk of death when compared to white British. So in the fine-grained details of the incredible racial disparities of deaths, Bangladeshi and black British, in particular black Caribbean people were hardest hit by COVID, at least by until August. Anyway, the report keeps getting updated and the statistics kind of keep changing. Now, because I'm quite a recent arrival to Britain, of course, trying to find my feet in the racial landscape of how it all fits together here and what was particularly obvious from this COVID moment for all of us was of course that these stark differentials in race have suddenly been made visible more so than ever before. And it was of course against the backdrop of this kind of racialized death that the murder of George Floyd in the US, in the UK also sparked a massive protest with the Black Lives Matter movement. Now, as many of you would be very well aware, the throwing of the Edward Colston statue into the river at Brixton was a keen moment in this sort of Black Lives Matter movement. Black Lives Matter movement. I'm just gonna share my screen so that I can use some images. Now, it's an incredibly key moment in which many, many, many communities came out onto the streets in support of Black Lives Matter, even communities that weren't necessarily identifying as blacks or lots of Asian communities came out as well and lots of various other people of political solidarity came out. I understood this moment as being a challenge to three different things. Firstly, the system of racial capitalism that's underpinned and the template was laid for by slavery. And secondly, a challenge to the historical narrative that buttresses a kind of historical consciousness that has as its pinnacle white civilization and the white subject. So this notion that history is a thing that is moving towards a refinement where white civilization is at the absolute pinnacle. Because I'm trained as a historian, the Colston statue and it's being thrown into the river for me could not be separated from a challenge to historical consciousness and a challenge to the kinds of histories we tell. And of course, the throwing of this statue into the river also recalls the earlier toppling of statues in the decolonizing knowledge or decolonizing the curriculum movements. Now, what I want to draw your attention to is if we interpret this moment as a challenge to the idea that the white subject is at the pinnacle of civilization, the white male subject is at the pinnacle of civilization as a hegemonic idea. I want to draw your attention to a story that actually underpins that crowning of the white subject as pinnacle. Just my next slide. This is a story that many of you would have come across in a variety of different forum theorists have been grappling with this racist story for centuries since it was invented really. And it's the relationship between racial hierarchy and the philosophy of progress. The story, of course, goes that peoples of African and indigenous descent or peoples of Africa and indigenous spaces are the first peoples and then comes the South Asians and the Middle Easterns and then comes white civilization. This hierarchy of race is in fact a temporal story if you look at it carefully in that you would have all encountered the idea in various spaces that African peoples are backwards or South Asian peoples are backwards from white civilization and African peoples and Asian peoples are themselves arranged in a temporal relationship to each other. Now, this system of thought is actually currently underpins modernity in the most profound way. One of the things we've been asked to think about in this panel is the durability of racial capitalism. Here is a story that emerged in tandem with systems of racial capitalism and buttressing systems of racial capitalism. Racial capitalism almost can't exist without this narrative. Now, why on earth is this story so durable? It's expressed in many, many, many different forms by many different theorists and the very concept of progress and its intimacy with this story of racialization is what is of, I think, central concern and problem for us from a feminist perspective, from a perspective of studying gender as how it relates to this story. The way that even when we go to try and articulate gender depression or even when we try to articulate how sexuality fits into this story of white civilization at the top, the way that gender and sexuality become status markers for where civilization is in this schema of progress, the way that it becomes incredibly difficult to actually get away from this story, even from a feminist perspective. This is a narrative basically that is one that across the political spectrum, across the right left political spectrum, it's very, very, very difficult to get away from and hence its durability, hence its virality in a sense of it, even the most cutting edge, profoundly challenging social justice movements find it difficult to get away from this philosophy of progress. Now, I wanted to just sort of end by having a think about where on earth this story actually comes from. As I've said, it's a tale of race and temporality that is entwined. This is a narrative that is invented in the pages of history books. If it's not invented in the pages of history books, it is definitely one of the spaces where it is established as hegemonic is the history book. One of the texts that cited as one of the earliest hegemonic articulations of that narrative is of course, Hegel's philosophy of history. And what is absolutely fascinating to see if you're a historian of the late 18th century, early 19th century, is you start to see how this narrative actually is implemented in the colonies, in African spaces, in the Caribbean, in South Asian spaces, in Asian spaces, in East Asian spaces, this story gets to be taken up by the elites of those, you know, the people called the global south today. So what is of interest to me is if it was in history classrooms, if it was in history books that this narrative was established, surely in history classrooms, in spaces such as history books, we can actually invent new narratives, which brings me to the final report that I wanted to draw your attention to. It's called the race, ethnicity, and equality in UK history. And this is a report that was released in October, 2018. So it's been two years now. And in essence, it showed that once you get to the university level, at faculty level in Britain, 93.7% of historians are white. Now, this is a staggering number. It gives you some sense of the kinds of reasons why a narrative, such as the one that I've showed you, doesn't have greater challenges to it. However, I hope that I've sort of gestured towards the fact that just adding elite browns and elite black scholars or elite thinkers who have internalized this narrative of racial progress and hierarchy, just adding people like that into the history classroom or into the historian's guild does not actually in the end transform that deeper narrative. So with that, I might end my talk today. I hope I've given you some thoughts, at least from my perspective as a historian, as a feminist historian of what underpins a deeper challenge to the subject, the white male subject as the hegemonic pinnacle of so-called civilization. Thank you. Thank you so much, Samia. It's incredible how in sync we seem to be because everything that you have just said leads me precisely to a very good moment from which to reflect upon as another historian, as another critical historian, as to the temporality of history and the way in which the narrative of racial progress and other types of so-called progress, have intersected to create precisely the type of racial capitalism that we have stuck with for so long. So my intervention today proceeds from an early draft of a book that has now been some five years in the making based on my critical historical anthropological research of 18th century West African communities and subjectivities whose gender non-conformity, sexuality and spiritual linguistic diversity greatly exceeded the early colonial, virulently violent regimes of selfhood. So for the most part of the 18th century, there existed in an astonishingly direct link between the ports across Senegambia, what was first French and then so-called Spanish Louisiana, the directness of which really often puzzles researchers as a rather unique phenomenon in the Atlantic history. Still the nature of 18th century circumatlantic exchange in general and the trade in enslaved humans and the patterns of imperial archiving in particular command that I pay attention to many other nodal points of the 18th century world including the entrepreneur, Sowida in present day Benin, Campinda in today's Angola, various outposts in the Caribbean and the Cape Verde, the islands, the colonial archives in France, Britain, Spain and Portugal as well as the surviving oral narratives throughout the relevant regions of West Africa which is why this project is taking so incredibly long and will still take quite a bit of time. So today I want to address the life worlds of those unwilling transatlantic so-called laborers in their homelands of greater Senegambia that is the territories of today's Senegal, Gambia, Western Mali and lower Mauritania as well as very briefly in the so-called new world of colonial Louisiana. And I'm primarily interested in the temporality of this horrific displacements in its violent, dispossessive modes that are such an abiding essential feature of racial capitalism. So just about none of now well-attrenched categories of personhoods such as those relating to ostensibly ethnic, religious, racial, sexual or indeed gender difference automatically applied or were relevant to describe the diversity of 18th century Senegalian communities. Instead as a foremost preoccupation of the early capitalist economy centered on trading enslaved and other predatory wealth extraction activities, these categories serve to construct complex histories of human worth soon to be fashioned into equally predacious historical and social sciences. So by this time, such hierarchies were already for some two centuries in the making. Cedric Robinson, C.L.R. James and Sylvia Winter amongst others pointed out to the crucial importance of Paisa of the India or Piazza of the India for the racial capitalist project of human fungibility. This unit of value meaning piece of India was invented and used by enslavers undergirding the Iberian colonial project in West Africa through the Cape Bad islands and into the Americas throughout the 16th to 18th century as winter rights and I quote, the Piazza was the name given by the Portuguese during the slave trade to the African who functioned as the standard measure. He was a man of 25 years approximately in good health, calculated to give a certain amount of physical labor. He served as the general equivalent of physical labor value against which all the others could be measured with, for example, three teenagers equaling one Piazza and older men and women thrown into a job lot as refuse and quote. So used to establish quotas and tariffs. The Piazza enabled an early capitalist mode of domination, slavery and colonialism that ushered in the mode of production based on a highly reductive and forceful concept of persecute or the enslaved one in which the sheer level of commodification threatened at all times to extinguish any remnant of the human and for that matter, the worker. This was a racial capitalist intervention part excellence, not least because his winter wrap warrants and I quote, the Piazza framework required the repositioning of the mode of production in relation to the mode of domination. The former becomes a subset of the latter end quote. And as you can see, this project was from the start explicitly gender binary. So the 18th century offers a unique insight into how such economic military legal and political tendencies gradually transformed into an ostensibly scientific gauge and how many of those studied in the quarters in the categories of personhood invented to subjugate and dehumanize them in the first place made but partial and always epistemically violent entry into the colonial archive and imperial scholarly journals. Gender or other sex was one such category emerging out of a procreation driven approach to human personhood and familial units. Whilst it was still not time to talk of nuclear family only male and female subject made sense to European slavers and their missionary academic administrative counterparts. And so these subjects were soon unilaterally vested with these and other categories of colonial difference throughout this highly turbulent period in greater Senegambia. There existed a welter of larger and smaller states divided along the political rather than necessarily linguistic and ethnic lines. None of these polities was mono-ethnic linguistically and religiously plural even when a particular language and religion were constitutive of their claim to sovereignty, Senegambia states harbored a generally fluid sense of ethnic belonging. One could under certain favorable circumstances cross into another community or maintain the inter-ethnic and even inter-religious lines relatively fuzzy. And yet there certainly existed communities who identified as fulvers and in commandinka wall of Seder, drachna trasda and so on and who spoke amongst others wall of Seder, fulfe, Hussani, Arabic and a variety of Monday languages. The point is rather that the notion of ethnicity much like those of culture and race fails to account for an extraordinary malleability of the concepts of belonging that were in existence in 18th century greatest Senegambia. In a similar manner, whilst the concepts of maleness and femaleness were certainly in circulation, they were not mutually exclusive, no rendered opposite to one another in addition to them and sometimes combining both. There existed numerous other practices of sexing and gendering, some of which specifically pertained to an endodoma specialist group, status group that was typically made of several ranked artisan subgroups. As their collective name in one of the languages suggests, Nyemakala, a members of artisanal groups were thought to possess extraordinary access to the foundational life force or Nyemma and the beings with their own special temporality access to history and bodily and gender varying properties. So the Nyemakala or in wall of Nenye or in fulfe and Nenyebe occupied a deeply ambiguous position in society and were contradictoryly described as feared, loathed, desired, necessary and respected, all at the same time. And they ordinarily made, they're living through the specialized services they provided to the rest of the population. Whilst I have no time to provide more detail on the Nyemakala complex cosmologies and gender identities and the roles those continue to play in resisting the racial capitalists gender binary, whether in greatest Senegambia, border and slavery ships amidst the horrors of the middle passage or in colonial Louisiana, suffice it to say at this point that this was but one of many non-conforming clusters of subjectivities caught in the maelstrom of a complex circumatlantic system of exploitation and human fungibility. On the other hand, enforcing the gender binary became part and parcel of the European powers early experimentations in an increasingly globalized racial capitalist land based and oceanic networks of trading enslaved humans, whether African or indigenous to the Americas. For example, a European entrepreneur in West Africa would already serve as a space of heightened and forceful gendering and racing of enslaved Africans in accordance with the more and more standardized forms of commercial categorization and value even before they were sent onto the perilous voyage through the middle passage. But on the other hand, such forms of violence could never fully succeed in the unmaking of an astonishingly complex and diverse forms of Western African gender non-binary existence, including wide ranging forms of resistance in transit to or when forcefully embedded into the economies of the so-called new world. What's more, a number of enslaved West Africans forcefully misgendered though they may have been encountered and formed alliances with indigenous and even some of the European lower class communities some of which were in their own ways trying to resist the colonial gender binary and the class and racial divisions from the mental to early forms of racial capitalism. So what I'm interested really in is the stubborn telltale remnants or remnants of such circumatlantic gender non-conformity as evidenced within and beyond the colonial archive. And one of the key questions I seek to explore in this context is what practices of not only gender but also temporal alienation or distemporalization and slave laborers will have to contend with and just how in turn they will continue to struggle against the systemic violence. So let me conclude by saying that this temporalization seems to me to be a useful concept for analyzing a number of other forms of the abiding racial capitalist violence we seek to critically interrogate in this panel, the very endurance of such violence and the racial capitalist project as a whole appears to me to be predicated on its ability to interrupt or ostensibly relegate outside of its dominant presence, a variety of forms of insurrectionary dentitary formations and their intrinsic resistive temporalities. Thank you. So I'll call you all now to please turn on your cameras and we'll have about 10 to 15 minutes to engage with the three of us. You are welcome to ask your questions in the Q&A box but before all that, perhaps just to get the sense of what other colleagues here, the three of us what do we think of each other's approach to this question? I'll go first just because the notes are in front of me. So a few things that have come up. I think what's so fascinating is on the question of virality itself, it becomes abundantly clear how important it is to engage with Sylvia Wynch's understanding of the biosentricity of our conception of the human and the Darwinianly selected ethnoclass white male and equally diselected. And what becomes more and more abundantly clear is the argument makes that our physical bodies do not precede the story that we tell about those physical bodies. And so what can that lend us for thinking about this virus? That the story we tell about this virus, this material thing does not actually precede or exceed the story that we tell about it. So the question becomes, what if we told a different story about what this problem is? And of course, the question of storytelling becomes equally important because S.C.D. Hartman reminds us, there is no such thing as repair. But the absolute closest thing we have to repair is the transmission of stories. So telling the story differently is so important. And that's where temporality becomes so important, especially in your work. And I see that as well even in Cedric Robinson's work, because his statement is that capitalism grew and fits and starts. So this tells us that capitalism itself is not an historical inevitability. It's just not. And that means something completely different now for opposing. It means we can intervene in it if it does not an historical inevitability as such. And thank you so much for bringing up Sylvie Winter's work because I'm also, I'm actually writing a chapter in my manuscript about the pieza as well and thinking through racial capitalism. And it's so interesting how we get two genealogical kind of interventions. One beginning on the shores of Africa, one beginning in Europe. One having the pieza repeat and reproduce itself over time, then into the enslaved African, then as native labor, and then, of course, we have this repetition in Robinson's estimation. So the question doesn't become which is the theory of racial capitalism, but why is it that from these multiple genealogies, whether you start in Europe or in Africa, what seems to be the defining feature of any intervention around racial capitalism is precisely the repetition. I want to inhabit that commonality. And I think much of the racial capitalism wars now comes from what does it mean, who said it first, which genealogy do we go with? And rather, we could actually say, what is common across these genealogical interventions is the repetition. And we should inhabit that methodological intervention and extend that rather than the actual definition itself. And I think that's something that was really clear in your work, both of you. So I'll stop there. Thank you so much, Padula. Sami? But turn on the mic. Yeah, I'm also struck by this possibility of reaching for the commonalities across moments in racial capitalism as well. However, it's, I guess, as a political project to attack or challenge this system of racial capitalism, it's also so incredibly important for us to be able to distinguish precisely which moment of racial capitalism we are talking about or talking from. And I guess I'm particularly mindful of, you can talk about how racial capitalism gets taken up in the South Asian context after the templates of the grammar of race are actually set in the case, in the Caribbean case, and then also in the enslavement of peoples. How those ideas are then taken over and then sort of implanted in a South Asian context and not just implanted in a South Asian context, but it's in the era of colonization in South Asia that the hegemonic story that I shared becomes something that historians across the imperial framework start to narrate. So they turn the universalization of a tale that goes with racial capitalism. Some of that really key work happens in the South Asian context because it's a slightly different moment to the moment of the peak of the slave trade and also Atlantic slavery itself. So I feel that it's the possibility of finding commonalities in this strange way also requires us to go very, very, very carefully in how we talk about what different moments of racial capitalism have actually generated, how they talk to each other, how we don't collapse them into each other and that as a means of kind of laying the groundwork for how we could do politics of solidarity. So those were my thoughts that emerged as I listened to both of you. I cannot but let's say that I'm in full agreement with both of you and I'm particularly, thankful for the methodological direction that this conversation has taken because that's exactly where I have struggled for years and years on in figuring out precisely how to then account for all of the ways in which we do our research on racial capitalism, whatever our supposed disciplines and how those disciplines themselves then discipline us back into the forms of racial patterns that sustain itself for such a long time. So to me that the concept of this temporalization with Dr. Sahar Fajr Muhammad that I have worked with for quite some time, we're rather struggled with for quite some time now, suggest that we really need to focus on what happens to time, what happens to time to the people who are then forcefully embedded into this paradigm and with that time, what is achieved? And I agree with what we're talking here about a particular set of technologies, technologies that repeat themselves and sustain themselves and that there are in fact, the ideology of racial capitalism, the subjugation that takes place in so many various ways so that the person could, as I tried to say earlier and is nearly extinguished in number of these forms of being in such world. So, implantations and the progressive time frame that replaces other forms of temporality are precisely there so that racial capitalism can sustain itself and then can extract whatever it needs to constantly extract and then to the modes of extraction that pertain to that particular moment in time. I'm going to ask you now, Samia, to maybe answer this question that came up in the Q&A from Lara Speronnik who asks if you could give a modern example of racial capitalism and before you do, is the very modernity that one could equal with racial capitalism itself? It is the modernity itself that sustains the possibility of racial capitalism, but let's go ahead. So here I've understood that question to mean, can you give a contemporary example of racial capitalism? Again, use of the modern is very important in telling you. And of course, the easiest one for me to reflect on and think about is government workers in Bangladesh and the particular configuration of the commodity chain between your British high street fashion brand and your person who is actually doing the production. The way that the movement of these clothes across this commodity chain is always tied up with this idea of movement towards civilization because the entire discourse through which the garment factory girl is held up as sort of the flag bearer of the nation in Bangladesh is he is an agent of development. She is moving both the country and herself towards this other form of subject hood, of empowered subject hood. And that is the narrative that actually allows for this system of racial capitalism to be justified and be somehow for the elites of both the global south and the global north to go, yes, this is OK for these people to be laboring under these conditions. And what was absolutely fascinating and disgusting and heartbreaking in the wake of COVID was when the factories just stopped, of course, these were people who were absolutely screwed over because their livelihoods were completely disturbed. But then at the same time, when the Bangladeshi government actually just brought them back in, it was like they were in between a rock and a hard place. In that scenario, there was almost nothing you could do that was the right intervention. And it just showed how this system of racial capitalism was just completely and utterly bound to it. And there was this particular moment that really stood out for me was when the head of the BGMEA, the garment exporters and manufacturer's head, who describes herself as a feminist, she justified the return of the workers to the factory by saying that, oh, workers have a particular special strength that actually makes them immune to COVID. And hence, this is why they should return to the factories. And it just, it really highlighted for me how you can't, you actually just can't add brown elites to the mix and expect the story to be dismantled. It's actually incredibly complicated. So I hope I've answered your question there, Lara, rambling away. I'll ask Badour to, for any final intervention in this block. And then I think we will await other questions as we progress. So originally we were thinking of having a five minute break and so on, but perhaps it's better if we then immediately soldier on and go into the block too. So Badour, and then we will start with block two. Yeah, just a few thoughts on the question of modern examples of racial capitalism. I think Vanya said it so well, that racial capitalism is the foundation upon which the inauguration of modernity rested and was made possible. And so then the question is, can we find an iteration that isn't explicitly modern? I don't necessarily think so. And thinking about the question of time and temporality, my favorite writer is Derek Walcott, and he calls himself Poet of the Twilight, this kind of idea of the archipelago time, that he is writing from a time that is always not quite. So knowing what we do about linear temporality and also knowing that the most of the world is on a different clock than the one given to us then, what can we then, he says that he's able to tell a different story, being a poet of the Twilight, being a poet of this archipelago time. So how do these clocks confront and come up against each other? And just on the question, it's fascinating that the head of the garments organization is a feminist, and it reminds me of Sylvia Wintour's critique of feminism and beyond liberal and Marxist-Leninist feminisms, where she says that I am not against feminism. I'm simply afraid of what it has become. And I think this is, and a lot of times those words are used and weaponized against other women, as if she is critiquing any woman doing anything. But she is afraid of what feminism has become, because feminism has now made its claim as an ethno-class marker in the same way that man's over-represented status has. And so we can see that, especially in your critique of the way these ground faces enter, these spaces and stabilize the conditions rather than interrupt them. So those are just some, I'll leave it there, yeah. Thank you so much. So it's been so fascinating so far, and we will move on and add some more complexity to the mix. So the three of our other speakers are here with us as well. And here before that is a reminder to please make use of the Q&A box and send in your queries and comments. So in this block of interventions, we will first hear from Natesh Puriwal, who is a professor of political sociology and development studies at SAAS. And she's interested in how technologies of political power penetrate and shape the social. Tehesh has recently published a co-authored book Beyond Religion in India and Pakistan, Gender and Cost, Borders and Boundaries, and is currently co-editing with Jennifer Ungla, a special issue of feminist review on coloniality. And we will then hear from Naseba Omar. Naseba is a PhD candidate at the Center for Gender Studies at SAAS, and her pronouns are she and her. Her thesis titled queer subjectivity and sexual governance examines queer rights activism in Pakistan. And Naseba's research engages with scattered and diverse realities of queer individuals in order to highlight the genealogical nature of queer phobia and violence. Research in the domain of queer theory of color, transnational feminism and postcolonial theory has been a central focus throughout her academic career and remains so presently in Naseba's doctoral project. And finally we will hear from Dr. Latia Maria Rivas, who is a lecturer in gender and global development at SAAS. She uses feminist and the colonial theories and innovative methodologies such as photo voice, story and oral histories to explore the racialized and gender nature of processes of violence, post-conflict reconstruction and social justice. Latia Maria moved to SAAS in 2019 after holding post at York University in Toronto and University of Bath. So good afternoon, Tej. Welcome and I very much look forward to your intervention. Thank you, Vanya, for that introduction and thank you everyone for other presenters here and people who are attending. I'm going to basically be presenting today in a kind of experimental way. I'm going to be actually taught as quite autobiographical in many ways and be talking about the town that I was raised in and it's not a place I've done actually research on. So we'll think about it as kind of ethnographic notes that are in the making. And I'm going to begin by, let me just show you, I'll show you a few slides so I don't have to keep going back and forth into. So I'm going to begin. I'm going to be talking about a place called Marion, Ohio in the Midwest of the United States. As Vanya mentioned, I've ordinarily done work on my research is primarily focused on South Asia, but this is a town that I grew up in. And my house actually is on the end of the street of one of these buildings that you can see here. On the left is the tomb of the 29th president of the United States. It was Warren G. Harding and he served during 1921 to 1923 and died while it was in office. And on the right, you can see his home where he fought the election of 1920, 100 years ago. So I thought this would be a moment in many ways. This is why I thought this is a good opportunity to share some of my thoughts to think about a hundred years on now in the current US election, even though I'm not going to specifically be talking about that. I'm going to begin by looking at some of the news stories that emerged about this place, Marion, Ohio, which is a small town of approximately 40,000, largely agricultural, but also with a number of companies that over time have opened, closed, Whirlpool, Marion Power Shovel. There's a Honda plant about an hour away where you can see the kind of changes and you can track the ways in which capitalism has worked its way through places like this, which are now being labeled the rust belt and simultaneously the corn belt. Are those kinds of places which are viewed, if you drive down the streets, you see many Trump signs in people's front yards as being the kind of populations which have been part of the kind of populist wave of white supremacy on the one hand, but also in terms of following Trump and being highly uncritical of the kind of anti-racist politics that we see emerging. There's also a prison in this town, which is one of the most high security prisons in the state, the Marion Correctional Institute. I'm gonna stop my photos here. Well, so actually, I can leave this one here. So, well, you probably don't, not that I want to necessarily show my face, but I'll do this instead, okay. So I'm going to begin my story in Marion, Ohio and I'm going to then take a step back. Many of us here are kind of thinking transnationally. I'm actually revisiting a place where I looked at the second article here where at the moment of COVID beginning to emerge in the United States and being recognized as something and being also denied as something that was finding its way through the population, that the tweet that I showed you said, how did Marion, Ohio get to the top of the list of confirmed COVID-19 cases per thousand people? And so from the end of March until the middle of April, this small town actually showed to have, in terms of cumulative confirmed cases, it was ranked higher than New York City. Now, what's less, I'm not the statistician, but there were a lot of kind of discussions around what the significance of that figure was. But I think what's most important here in thinking about thinking through the lens of racial capitalism is the ways in which the different kind of telling, the tellings of the story of this virus and the virality of the kinds of fictions that reflect the kind of ways in which racial capitalism have worked their ways through to such towns as this could be seen. And it was one, the international media came in. There were two Al Jazeera reports, which highlighted how 80% of the inmates in the local prison had become infected with COVID-19 early on in the pandemic. And so while the local media were quick to highlight it, but very quickly shut it down and that the local newspaper was owned by the President Harding that I mentioned before, who's been memorialized at the same time as also being vilified by the local population, which I will also kind of highlight in a moment. And so what we can see here is an example of, and I want to highlight, what a town like this represents by in a book by James Lowen called The Sundown Towns. It very much fits in within that model of The Sundown Town. So we've been talking about temporality and time, and I didn't plan this, but I think when we think about the kinds of the quotes that circulated so popularly around the celebrations of the empire, the British empire, other European empires, around the empire in which the sun never sets in terms of accentuating the fact that the expansion, extraction, accumulation of these European empires would never, would always see daylight. The Sundown Towns highlight time and daylight in terms of the night and daytime. And what Lowen talks about is, looks at the ways in which Sundown Towns are not an aberration or an exception. These towns were, and in 1920 during the election, Warren G. Harding stood on the balcony of his front porch and fought the election from there and did not travel. And he was proposing anti-lynching legislation at that point, but along that came with him were many housekeepers, house help who were Black. And this became the talking point of the entire election. And you know, you can kind of, there's been quite a bit kind of written up around the local press around his story, in that there were allegations that were made by local, very influential business owners, people who were involved in the legal profession as well, who used the so-called one-drop rule that any Black blood at all would make someone Black. And there were allegations, and in fact, some people have even said that Warren G. Harding was the first Black president before Obama. Became the kind of ways in which this town has understood its policing of race within this town. So the sundown town of Marion has become, is a prototype and not an aberration. So while we might do the Trump signs on the front lawns as being kind of as extremism or populism or an expression of the alienation of the underclasses who have been left behind, I think what Lowen's book on sundown town highlights is in fact, they are a prototype of the norm. They are ubiquitous rather than being the extreme. And so some of the fictions of racial capitalism in how they sustain the racial, racialized and gendered dimensions of racial capitalism are continuously evolving. And it's a logic which shifts and changes in order to sustain itself in working through inequalities. And so a place like Marion, Ohio, which had to justify, and I didn't mention that what happened on social media around the local newspaper reporting that the town had cumulative cases per thousand higher than New York City was the immediate explanation of the prison I showed you of one of the children of an inmate which said that these people are not in the community. And I think that kind of highlights one of the ways in which racial capitalism and the fictions often circulate and sorry, hold on, I've got another slide here I wanted to show if I can find it. No, okay, sorry. And so the ways in which the fictions circulate. So as Jodi Melamed talks about that the prison, the example of the child protesting out there with a handful of protesters showing up with very, with quite sizable protests against the lockdown. As Melamed argues, the state finance racial violence nexus names the inseparable confluence of political economic governance with racial violence. And therefore we might say ending the quote here is that the continual policing of racial mixing and this is a place that had not only the sundown rulings where there were signs that have obviously been taken down long time ago, but many were up until the 1960s that no black person should be seen in this town after sunset. That what we see is that there's an enabling of the state finance racial violence through ongoing accumulation through dispossession by calling forth the specter of race as threat. And a small town such as this has a, there's a slightly more potent dimension to the ways in which the fictions around the disposability of the communities who are affected who are obviously in terms of the ways in which the, and some of them were high school teachers who were commenting which was most interesting about who belongs in the community who counts within the population and who does not. So what I want to propose here and very briefly is the idea of the racial contract being very significant within such small towns. And I think they can be juxtaposed to the larger picture of nationalism or other kinds of units of analysis is the underlying assumption of the racial contract which we see that is a requirement for racial capitalism to work its way through inequalities of white innocence and black guilt. And I think within that I'd like to posit the complicity of other racialized groups who have a performative function and who oftentimes take up the role of enabling racial capitalism to do its work. And so I might I would outline my positionality as being someone who you know clearly wasn't from I wasn't a local person but I went to a school there which was called Indian Mound which was just sort of not too far from the memorial built on a bureau native bureau ground which about 10 years ago the school and a number of other schools were renamed after US presidents. And so the fiction of the of the sundown town is not only about the disciplining of white society in terms of the one drop of blood rule and in terms of black communities to understand their place within a place that it has a geographical outline of the town has literally has a railroad track which serves as a spatial marker around racialized difference but we can also see what the underlying dimension here is how places like this in Ohio have been shaped by the native question and of course been shaped by removal erasure and violent dispossession that took place as a settler society. Now what I think is really important for stories like this town is the importance of retelling of the transmission of the narrative of the histories of these places. So if we look at the historical society for this town and others nearby we see the genealogy goes back to around 1920 and may go to the early settlement of the town whereas these stories are missing entirely from the narrative and of course what we know is a very rich history of native indigenous resistance to set the settlement of this region which is now seen as the Midwest but it was clearly Wyandotte, Shawnee tribe land and interestingly what we're saying about examples of racial capitalism this town is also now known as the popcorn capital of the world and it's named and the company that heads that is called Wyandotte named after the indigenous community that has been that there was genocide so I think the recognition of and I think this is what racial capitalism does is it simultaneously it removes erases dispossesses it assigns differential value on human life but it also asserts a kind of normality around coloniality and I think in places like of the so-called new world which are settler societies we can see the ways in which coloniality is in many ways unrecognizable to the kind of popular or public discourse so the idea of the burial ground on which a school was built isn't as though it was ignorant so the racial contract there doesn't speak because the population who would be able to answer are either under the ground or have been genocide or have been cleared and so we see of course the Indian removals that took place during the 19th century saw a complete clearance so I think the removal and the erasure are very telling about the stories of these types of towns which I think in many ways are the story of what is happening in terms of the contemporary politics of many parts of the world and I'm very reluctant to talk about them in terms of being aberrations or exceptions or the rise of the right wing but we see as the very foundations of racial capitalism in places like this town that I've been speaking about and very anecdotally are the ways in which erasure is kind of left without the kind of recognition of what was there before or what happened in the process of the erasure the removal takes place as though it was justified and of course there are many narratives then and the stories and the rumors that go viral which allow for the kind of shaming and that's what this person who became the 929 president of the United States what happened to him in his career was by trying to legislate against lynching at that point of the 1920s you know he lived during the Jim Crow era was also vilified within the local community and there are theses written on this and actually in the local newspaper which talk about how significant the rumor was to discredit him in terms of having any kind of genealogy in terms of having any black blood and I think what that says so much about is that if we want to look at the sundown town as a prototype we might look at it as a microcosm perhaps or there may be other ways in which we can say that the sundown town actually is reflecting the kind of white supremacist politics that we see emerging that it's something that's ongoing and it never went away so I think this is where the work of the understanding coloniality and racial capitalism is something that understands that abolition didn't happen and that abolition even as an idea is continually being resisted even within the kind of stories that circulate about the ways in which communities are organized or who's entitled to the space or even the ways in which we recognize how inequalities are understood so I'm going to leave it there thank you so much that that was fascinating and it brings us to a whole new set of epistemological and ontological and political and social concerns which we hope to now you know open up to the debate but before that there is Naseba and Naseba and the floor is yours hello everyone, I really enjoyed hearing everyone's perspective it's been such an interesting and rich conversation so I hope to add to the topic of racial capitalism by interlinking purple color labor to commodification of Hwaja Sera culture under corporate strategies in Pakistan before I get into that I first have to expound upon what I mean by purple color labor and also Hwaja Sera culture Hwaja Sera is a term which is used for gender variant people in South Asia explaining Hwaja Sera culture is a bit of a difficult task because it's so diverse but in the given time I will attempt to highlight distinguished aspects of it so the term purple color labor by David Emanuel it provides a theoretical framework to understand how employment of trans people as trans subjects creates conditions for new workplace inequalities it's a critique of neoliberal approaches that incorporate trans-specific roles into corporate structures and label it diversity so while they also cash in on minority status corporate strategies define what trans productivity should mean they distinguish between proper trans subjects deserving of opportunities and how transgender is folded into corporate culture creates control over how to be trans purple color labor instead of protecting trans rights creates precarious work environment and a form of capital exploitation which has especially become discernible during this time I will interlink purple color labor with the deliberate modification of Hwaja Sera culture by transgender support programs under NGOs in Pakistan the support programs categorize Hwaja Sera culture as economically disempowered creating trans-specific roles which blatantly disregard communal structures created by Hwaja Sera networks so the main distinction that has been highlighted between trans and Hwaja Sera by Hwaja Sera community members that I've interviewed in my own field work is that Hwaja Sera is not just an identity but an inherited and shared culture it has been passed on since pre-colonial Mughal dynasty and under the criminal trials act of 1871 British colonial rule criminalized Hwaja Sera's triggering a process of ostracization which has continued in post-colonial South Asia as they depart from heteropatriarchal expectations Hwaja Sera's have faced legal and institutional exclusion and in order to survive the network has created their own socio-economic structure there's a socialization process to which individuals follow communal policies in order to be integrated into the network the main source of earning for Hwaja Sera has been begging and sex work whether out of choice or economic necessity it has been fundamental to their survival and then there are traditional Hwaja Sera dance performances known as with Hai which either celebrate the birth of a child or they celebrate weddings so Hwaja Sera had been previously the term had been previously looked down upon because of association with performing and sex work it has now regained currency because of advocacy by community members in order to protest against the law of three terms while various terms are used within the community there is growing emphasis on how Hwaja Sera is the official public term because of international rights-based discourse in Pakistan over the past 10 years Hwaja Sera culture has sort of become a subcategory within the larger framework of global trans rights this is partly due to the development sector NGOs they are tasked with trans nationally funded initiatives to integrate Hwaja Sera into mainstream society and in these initiatives sometimes for the sake of being intelligible the term transgender was used to characterize all gender variant people legal protection of Hwaja Sera is also predominantly under the category of trans rights after a series of Supreme Court rulings Hwaja Sera were institutionalized as a third gender in 2009 and the most recent act was passed in 2018 the trans gender persons protection of rights act so when I talk about when I distinguish trans and Hwaja Sera the problem I'm highlighting isn't that with the terms and how they can't be used interchangeably I've met individuals who have identified as both trans and Hwaja Sera and who don't have a problem with using the terms interchangeably and there are some Hwaja Sera who do not want to be identified as trans the problem that I'm however highlighting over here is how corporations in Pakistan when they celebrate themselves as diverse for advertising trans specific roles they require applicants to distance themselves from aspects of Hwaja Sera culture in order to be successful so as I pointed out Hwaja Sera culture is very diverse it's regional and it's very hard to define but the distinguished aspects of Hwaja Sera culture is femininity and performance and in the corporate sector in Pakistan which is also very conservative which value codes trans labor such aspects are considered uncivilized the framework of purple collar labor it highlights how under a neuro-lible economy identities become brandable branding of identities dependent on visibility and representation and it solidifies a distinction between acceptable and unacceptable identity Hwaja Sera is largely considered and Hwaja Sera culture is largely considered unacceptable but the identity is made brandable through positive image building by this I mean national NGOs they will team up with international organizations and what has become very popular is that they create skills based programs which aim to restore dignity of Hwaja Sera through economic and social restoration the claim to restore Hwaja Sera dignity is not a critique of oppressive social structures but it's an obsession with how Hwaja Sera bodies occupy public spaces Hwaja Sera culture is associated with sex work and dancing it's deemed immoral therefore dignity needs to be restored through respectable integration into society so these national skill based programs will provide courses such as cooking, stitching and beauty courses for Hwaja Sera and skills that Hwaja Sera are expected to learn demonstrate how productivity is value coded according to gender and class expectations positive image building tactics also require Hwaja Sera to publicly reject dancing and performing and claim that these professions only existed exclusively as consequence of former economic disempowerment on completion of skill based programs some Hwaja Sera are referred to different organizations where they are sometimes able to find minimum wage employment they're really provided security employment contracts and predominantly when they enter this workforce they're forced to quit because of facing transphobia so this form of Hwaja Sera positive branding and skill based value coding is further amplified through the first transgender trope the first transgender trope is media investment in the success story of a trans or Hwaja Sera individual who breaks into a position which was previously only held by cis employees these stories they receive a lot of media traction for instance Mabria Malik is a trans person in Pakistan who gained international attention for being the first trans-Pakistani anchor and recently Aisha Mughal was hailed as the first trans person to represent Pakistan at a UN delegation this narrative is popular I think because it solidifies Hwaja Sera value on basis of productivity it takes away attention from oppressive structures of power and puts the pressure on individual to produce themselves as were these citizens according to national expectations so it is the responsibility of Hwaja Sera's to integrate according to neoliberal expectations of gender and sexuality there's limited media interest in how trans and Hwaja Sera individuals are treated post-employment or if their initial success is sustainable however it is even more problematic that in order to uphold these narratives there's a need to write off social and economic protection which is provided within Hwaja Sera culture and it is especially become apparent during COVID-19 which has impacted ways of earning but has also I think amplified structural discrimination the Hwaja Sera community has been largely ignored during this time by the state there are no alternatives which have been offered however it is networks within Hwaja Sera community and culture that have continued to organize to rethink economic sustainability during the pandemic which has the methods that they're turned to is protest and visibility to media and then distribution of ration which is distribution of basic necessities that their community needs so that's it for me. Thank you so much Naseba and thank you for working on Hwaja Sera issues in your absolutely groundbreaking PhD research project which I'm so delighted to be part of when it comes to the supervisory team what you have done what you have achieved is such a trailblazing effort and in particular when it comes to the ways in which you know the Hwaja Sera community gets increasingly commodified including with respect to this current crisis and I hope that we can you know later on reflect in particular on the COVID-19 related issues and Hwaja Sera communities but for now Althea Maria the floor is yours. Okay thank you Vanya can you hear me okay? Yeah okay good so full disclosure I had some computer problems today so the talk is a little bit different that I had kind of envisioned it to be but I think it's still on point so today my talk is going to explore how the racialized and gendered legacies of colonialism take new forms in the international aid architecture through an exploration of the everyday experiences of aid workers right so a lot of my research is built around the storytelling so today I'm going to tell you three different stories. So within development policy practice and sometimes academic circles as well there's kind of loud silences about the entanglements of race, gender, racism and development. Indeed in a lot of places there's kind of a passionate denial of the ways in which racial discrimination colonial violence were fundamental to the emergence of the development project but also the ways in which they continue to manifest today in the contemporary development industry and these silences have really obstructed our understanding of the prominence of racialized discourses and development and in particular and what I'm going to focus on today is the embodied experience of race and racialization and racism for those who operate within the international development architecture right so therefore we kind of miss out on understanding the multiple experiences of people of different racial backgrounds and different groups of people who work within the structures of power of aid. We don't get to gain a better understanding of how power moves through this particular architecture and how identity shifts within spaces where developments in humanitarian interventions take place. So in the colonial imaginary the territory is kind of encountered during exploratory journeys were prime opportunities for exploitation, for accumulation, for violence and for settlement. The non-European societies in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean that provided the basis for European developments and capitalist expansion both through slavery, genocide and colonial attraction were kind of constructed in opposition to Europe right and the first group of panelists spoke about this. So upon encountering the you know the natives Europeans also created categories of people that would justify their actions. Cedric Robinson kind of alluded to this when he said that the tendency of the European civilization to differentiate and categorize people led to or supported racialized categories that foster and justified exploitation, expropriation and exploitation. So race and racism are the foundation upon which colonialism and capitalist expansion were built and the racialized categories that were developed were used to legitimize conquest and capitalist exploitation and generated forms of social relations based on hierarchies and superiority. Now the colonial history and legacy upon which development, the international development discourse and practice is built continues to reproduce those same racialized spaces and to reinforce asymmetrical power relations in new and complex ways through everyday encounters. So indeed the racialized and gendered hierarchies that are maintained and mediated today through development imaginaries and the everyday theater of aid. So I'm now I'm going to try and illustrate how this takes place through the exploration of four stories of women of color who currently work in or have worked in development and or and or the humanitarian aid industry. So the first story is Lisa, well it's two, it's Lisa and Gail in racialized social spaces. So racialized and sexualized stereotypes often played out in social spaces according to the women that I spoke to. So Lisa who is from the Caribbean originally explains, the social activities and events that I attend are highly segregated. So if you belong to a group that has enough numbers sometimes you can organize side events but most of the time you end up being in places that are expat dominated and even local places where you go are often kind of local expat places. Now these events are usually dominated by white American and European men and if you're working in a conflict area this is even more so the case. As a woman you have to be careful in these environments and as a woman of color even more so having a romantic relationship or even a close friendship with the local woman sometimes is taboo and actually in some places that I've worked certain institutions will evacuate you for such a crime but as an expat woman of color you are strangely simultaneous sometimes simultaneously familiar and civilized yet enough yet somewhat still exotic so you're the unknown in a cleaner package. Gail said that she was often actually also perceived as a kind of quasi-white and therefore she gained access to certain conversations and spaces some of which she didn't want to have access to where discussions about the local other often took place. So Gail recounted having lunch with a group of aid workers and diplomats while working in Sudan so I noticed some of the men looking curiously at the waitress who said who was serving us lunch. After the waitress left their gaze shifted to me and then to the floor and then back to me after a few minutes one of them said God I feel so sorry for these people they have no history no culture and then turning to Gail he said you know you're not like them the women here are so rough and dark they're really unattractive but even though you're black you're much more refined why is that exactly do you think? Gail said she was shocked not only by the question but more so by the fact that the others at the table seemed to not in agreement and just wait for her to answer an answer which never came. So all of the women that I spoke to agreed that this intersection of race and gender made relationships whether romantic or friendships or even professional relationships and understanding their own positionality difficult in development spaces. Story two Teresa and the double speak of development so common sentiment among the women that I spoke to was that it's hard to address issues of race or racism within work environments because their colleagues refused to even consider the possibility that their behavior reflected racist attitudes so the response was often how could I how could it be possible that I'm here working every day with poor black or Asian people and and still be racist but this was a common attitude however but even in the face of sometimes overt and physical attacks on staff and local community members so disturbing accounts was given by Teresa about her first month working in Pakistan where she had witnessed a white British logistics officer drag an elderly member of local staff from the car. Teresa said she was shocked by the incident as she would have been by witnessing any type of violence wherever she was but what was more disconcerting was that no one said or did anything right it was just allowed to happen and was problematic so the break between the official kind of development discourse and practice and what happened revealed she thought a double speak which often permeates in development organizations the incident made her feel unsafe but also made her wonder where she fits within the racialized social order and global hierarchy that characterized the project that she was part of so she explained there's something strange that happens when people with people when you work with them overseas during development I don't know what else to say but it's strange and ironic because in principle all of these people belong to organizations that are supposedly aimed at helping people globally or at least respecting their rights so you would think that the people who work for these places have certain principles but sometimes it's the opposite they come to these places and give into all of their racist and sexist ideas all at once and for some reason think it's okay in this space as if being here gives them impunity but actually to be honest a lot of the time it does but there's something about the industry and these organizations something about these structures that empowers actually this type of behavior there's a constant double speak which I cannot quite reconcile and the last story is of Maria Maria and the global hierarchies of Green Village so one evening I had dinner with two friends at Green Village Green Village is a large securitized housing and office complex near the Kabul airport and McLean apartments in Afghanistan the advertising brochure describes Green Village as a safe secure and protected oasis of cool green in Kabul containing gardens relaxing arenas and restaurants my friends lived in a one bedroom apartment located at the back of the extensive 1800 room compound the complex housed EU police advisors UN staff international advisors private sector employees and contractors some organizations had taken over a whole accommodation blocks and allocated to their staff only the EU police advisors for example lived in a separate area that was fenced off in the compound to get to Green Village you had to travel down a long busy paved streets called Jalalabad road which leads to another UN compound and then out of the city to the eastern region of the country the turnoff to Green Village takes you down a wide dirt road a rock and then a rock road that is peppered with a few local shops and the highest and high stone barriers that alternate positions down the middle of the road that the Toyota Corolla that I was traveling in at the time had to weave through as we got closer to the compound armed guards began to appear along the road upon arrival to the entrance my car went through a vehicle checkpoint outside the compound and that was asked to drive to the entrance from the road nothing inside the compound is visible the only thing one can see is a large perimeter wall since I did not live in the compound I had to leave my car at the last gate and continue on foot on the other side of the entrance gate hascos and barriers were encountered and then I went through another checkpoint after exiting the checkpoint booth I entered an enclosed parking lot similar to the size of a small shopping center parking area after walking across the lot manned by guard tower I arrived at another checkpoint upon clearing the third checkpoint booth I stepped up into the distant edge of the green oasis where my friends met me it would be another seven minute walk to their accommodations that night while getting dessert I struck up a conversation with one of the staff members in the cafeteria named Maria so Maria had been working at Green Village for two months but before that she was working at one of the logistics camps in Kabul which provides supplies for the military bases and few other locations she'd been recruited by a private company from her home in the Philippines to come to Afghanistan she said she knew it would be dangerous but the money was good and the company provided insurance and accommodations and care for her children back home she also made friends during her time in Afghanistan Maria went home and to work and only left the compound to go shopping once a week she'd also gone carpet shopping once but didn't feel safe so came back quickly there was a lot of work to do and every day and organizing transportation outside of the compound walls was difficult but more so she was scared to leave the compound she said it's inside it's okay but every time I go out it's scary you never know what will happen with these people it's crazy for months Maria's only interaction however with with afghans was limited to the local staff that worked in the compound and at the supermarket where she shops Jalalabad road itself is heavily traveled on the side of freaking explosions which could often be heard inside of Green Village but spending her everyday nestled deep inside Green Village she felt safe but also increasingly fearful of the world around her and the people outside of that securitized compound so the interveners aid workers and contractors that lived in Green Village rarely mixed with compound staff like Maria so neither of my friends had ever spoken to her or even noticed her okay but they did occasionally speak to the guards but like Maria most of the staff are from the global south they earned low wages and had less secure contracts and benefits than other international staff or UN staff essentially Maria and her friends were an imported labor force a third imported labor force employing international compound staff meant was meant as a signal to the residents that Green Village had a higher level of service it was safer than uh other compounds that might have local afghan staff so the contracts of Green Village staff however were also viewed by the residents as slightly different slightly lower than other international workers so the distance of Green Village from the main road the obstacles along the way and the dozens of armed security staff were also meant to act as a deterrent to the tax my friends and Maria felt being inside that compound gave them refuge from not just the conflict but from the locals right within the compound however people also distanced themselves from each other so Green Village was a microcosm of social ordering global hierarchies mutualization the compound exemplified the complex and multifaceted way in which these hierarchies are manifested in developments in intervention not only between in this case afghan people and interveners but also amongst the interveners themselves so just in conclusion I think scholars and historians have traced the colonial origins of development thought and dependency hopping the racist racist and gender tendencies and racialized anxieties of these projects into the post-colonial world but not enough has been done to explore the deeply embedded racialized and gendered hierarchies and violence of aid and the everyday effects this has for people living with these processes and how they might be resisted because ultimately I think it's not easy to name racism and gendered violence and their intersections and to understand the very complex ways in which they manifest in an attractive aid economy and an industry in which race itself is fundamentally constantly denied thank you so much of them Maria for bringing us towards then a particular type of presence I suppose and the everyday effects and then the economics of the everyday effects of racial capitalism that that are both historical and present and in their own ways right question the temporality of this project all together now if you have any any three of you if you have any immediate response to each other presentation that would be great if you could you know make those responses possible now and then we'll have only about some 12 to 13 minutes to try to answer some of the questions that have been posted to the Q&A box so Tej, Naseba, Altem Maria, you can also turn on your cameras now all of us can I think because this is our final discussion please I have a question or just like a comment I think Tej you mentioned in your in your presentation you talked about the complicity of other races and kind of the project of racial capitalism in these sundown towns and I wonder if you could expand a little bit on that because you then talked about kind of the indigenous and Native American populations and erasure and the histories of slavery there's a lot of different complex angles and I think with my talk I mean that's also what I was getting at that we need to think about how these things function amongst groups in a much more complicated way moving away from this binary and I wonder so I thought that was an interesting aspect of your talk if you wanted to speak a little bit more about that yeah I mean I think one way of answering it is to kind of use you know what Patrick Wolf calls he looks at invasion I mean obviously I'm setting this up to talk about a settler society as well it's a small town settler society but thinking about it as invasion not as an event but as a structure and so I think that may be what I should have started off with but saying is that this is the structure of this society and in fact those monuments the memorialization of the tomb of a president who was seen as liberal in the 1920s a year after the clearance of the entire black population the only two people that were remaining in the town in 1920 were the seem to be president but presidents barber and unmade okay so so the structure the event can tends to be seen as the clearance the 1919 event and of course you know that that gets memorialized and other parts of the US as well in terms of other places where the that that racialized violence took place but the complicity that I was mentioning was in some ways kind of saying yes so how do other communities who enter into this space into this structure how do we engage with this how do we insomnia was mentioned how do we think about developing kind of solidarities when we are part of this system so I mean it might come back to what you were talking about as well thinking about engaging even in development as a structure that has its own eugeniology you know where do we begin to kind of try and dismantle the structure itself or how do we make those interventions when we you know if it's not about if it's about business as usual and and driving down that street and knowing that that monument is there and it will be there forever and we might have different understanding but we're not what's still dismantling it we're not allowing it to stay there right so I don't know I find I think the complicity is around not challenging the structures and there's a lot of that complicity within settler societies that's the logic of it it eliminates others it excludes others and then it selectively includes others the model I know I mean that's where the fictions are the model minorities you know certain communities are positioned that's how the hierarchies perpetuated so I don't know if that and trust is that if I can jump in precisely on that point so I think there's you left us with a very powerful you know a trope of the prototype and I wonder what you know that tell us about their again about temporality of racial captives and to what degree then the prototype and I can think you know in my own work of the European outposts of Saint-Louis and Ildegovay you know places that will then become the whole post of the other so-called you know French West Africa what kinds of temporalities and what kinds of structure abiding those would be quite an interesting you know question to ask and it to me you know it's in a way at least a question to ask because they are when it comes to this green village when it comes to the you know the obviously securitized compound that has its own not only you know space but indeed temporality as well. Shall we try to engage with some of the general questions perhaps before that Naseba I mean one of the I think issues that have not been so much raised in your other words excellent talk is the question of what happens with COVID-19 crisis in in Amman Zakhwajasera communities because you lived through it with them in Pakistan up till this very moment so and it would I suppose you know be related to our general questions on again the temporalities of racial captives and the question of crisis which we haven't really touched upon at all yet. Yes so yeah that's what I ended on and I didn't couldn't go into more detail because of also the time limitation but I was doing as you know ethnographic research in Pakistan when the pandemic hit and I was in touch with my my research had to do with interviewing Khajasera so it was the impact that it had on that community was really clear at that point because they spoke about it there are many individuals who did speak about how their crisis was completely overlooked and it was very separate from mainstream society because many of them did not have many cause of their individuals did not have employment official employment and they were relying upon dancing and also sex work and also begging and this with dancing and sex work and begging that's considered immoral in a conservative Pakistani society so they can't be too public about protesting that they're out of work because of this reason and then there's not a lot of alternative that's been offered so it's still even right now it was very unclear as to how they're going to move forward what's going to happen as is I mean everybody many communities but it was especially like I think with their with the lack of clarity with the Khajasera community was facing they were also facing lack of clarity of who to turn to besides their own community when it comes to aid and health so I hope to expand more on that as I'm writing up my own research and as I'm in communication with them so thank you so out of the box of the many queries let me ask you this well quite complex questions that Scott has tried to pose in the chat box and then that reflects you know the question that Esme has asked in the chat box itself and it's the question of what is so particular about the temporality of racial capitalism is it in any way different to other forms of imperial temporality and if so how and then Esme asked you know when when we look at China and she says particularly with their tech dominance and frontier scientific work I germinating the first seed on the moon being six months ahead of the west with 5g technology and so on does this change the landscape of racial capitalism it's these questions are to anyone who wishes to answer now so what's so special about the temporality of racial capitalism as opposed to other imperial temporalities yes but the staff at it so the the temporality of racial capitalism if we take what Robin Kelly says as you know the fits and starts right I think that's one feature of racial capitalism that again suggests that even this linear imperial clock that we're given is a fiction right it's just a manner of telling the story and that's not actually appropriate to the way that or the conditions under which people live so first recognizing that racial capitalism is on multiple clocks right because there is the authorized story of capitalism itself as linear then there is the bits and birds of how racial capitalism develops and then there is the manner in which people inside of the belly of the world so to speak narrate that position right which is also on a different clock so I wonder if we can change the question away from what does racial capitalism have in common with other imperial times but rather what meant what are the many forms of timekeeping that are required in order to maintain this thrust of racial capitalism because I think it takes many clocks to keep the story of racial capitalism going and so in that way I think the question is useful but the other thing that actually it came up in Tige's talk right on because Ohio is also a time place a timescape right that is indicative of the way racial capitalism develops you can't think of Ohio without thinking about Toni Morrison's work right and this idea of Ohio being this not quite space this place that was in another time right from that which was immediately to the left to the right to the south of it being Kentucky right so the idea is that racial capitalism doesn't have one clock we are told it has one clock but it doesn't actually right it contains many many clocks so when we talk about crisis and we frame the crisis as midnight on the clock then we have to ask okay toward what end right what is this midnight on which clock so to speak right and so it's less about you know competing hegemonic characteristics of time but rather recognizing the way all of those hegemonic notions of times are unfolded into racial capitalism in and against right these other forms of timekeeping that people like their walk hot have produced and sustained so a non-answer really anyone else the articulation of the crisis perhaps would be you know quite an important last point to make yeah sorry in terms of the what the specific almost definitive characteristic of imperial time is I'm going to treat that question as if you're asking what's the definitive characteristic of modern time because for me modernity colonial modernity is inseparable coloniality and modernity are inseparable and that you know one of the fascinating things for me is the way in which the violence of modern time and the way that it relegates things to the dead past it's almost a prophetic story where on encounter with other temporalities and here you know the one of the clearest examples you can use is Islam when the the secularity of modern time encounters islamic time it says it belongs to the dead past it belongs to death so it has no future in you know there is no way of continuing to live in that time in the future of modern time now what's absolutely fascinating and I mean I keep using the word fascinating but it's actually just disgusting and gross is when you look at this mode of thinking particularly in settler colonial contexts it becomes very obvious that it is an imagining of a future that is emptied of certain types of ontologies and peoples it's a prophetic time that actually kills like it sets up the structures to actually kill people who have ontologies and subjectivities tied in with other forms of temporality so one of the spaces from which I've been thinking about this question of different temporalities is actually Greenwich because I now live in East London and it's a 10 minute bike right that way to Greenwich and you go under the Thames through the Greenwich foot tunnel and you're at Greenwich and it's of course the Greenwich Observatory there which is where Universal Time Ground Zero is counted from and if you're looking from Greenwich you can see the Isle of Dogs you can see the Thames and right there is the West India Docks and right there is the East India Docks and you know anyone with any kind of historical imagination can see that from the very first ships where cotton is arriving from the very first ships where hand woven products made from this cotton is arriving to the East India Docks to the West India Docks also arriving with those ships are laborers from these various places and with them is arriving different temporalities so the way in which you know almost every single moment and place in time can be thought of as this conjecture of temporalities yet our institutions modern institutions are completely unable to step out from even seeing those temporalities it's it's very you know I'm I'm absolute I want to sort of follow up what Badour has said about the ways in which these other temporalities are harnessed and you know kind of put to the service of racial capitalism and again there if I think through the lens of Islam I can very much think of Islamic reformism and various different varieties of Islam which are harnessed for the purpose of actually fitting into that larger racial order but it's very to me it's always seemed that each of these temporalities that I've ever looked at in detail and I've looked at Aboriginal Australian Aboriginal thought in this line and also South Asian Islam in this thought each of these temporalities have inside them architectures of ways of encountering difference and I have to say the one that the colonial modern mode of encountering difference is the only one that relegates others to death but I might be that might be too broad a statement to make because you know that I'm basing that on South Asian Islam and Australian indigenous thought who you know I wouldn't want to say that no other temporalities relegate others to death. It's such an important observation and something that we are left with as one of the final images of everything that has been really talked about today and really you know built into it as such a possibility so Tej I'll give you one minute exactly if you want to add to this discussion then we will have to end with it you know start a bit late so Tej you do have the final word. Oh gosh that's a lot of big burden to me. Rather than maybe answering that question I think there are a couple of questions that have come up are in some ways kind of asking what work racial capitalism can do for us to understand the kind of the unfolding the evolving nature of capitalism and racialisation alongside that and I think one of the ways in which all of us I think are engaged coming at it from very different lenses is that it's important to engage with racial capitalism through a number of I think adjacent adjoining accompanying even conflicting tools that can help us to understand because temporality I mean the ways in which I think this has been a really exciting discussion so in terms of the decolonial turn for and development studies and you know the colonial the coloniality modernity complex you know is kind of throws the ways in which we kind of centre the west and you know European models of colonialism to thinking about one of the questions about China what do we do with you know the rise of China what does that what does that do does it unsettle the concept well we need to be thinking about how do we how can we can see how can we think critically about racial capitalism without yet again central western modernity within it and I think there are lots of ways in which we can and we can let that be kind of there are conversations happening across different disciplines in combining you know those those lenses thank you all thank you all really so much thank you to thank you everyone for such a wide ranging discussion so I hope that some of these conversations can continue beyond this panel including a number of other you know so as festival ideas events so one that follows immediately after our panel is starting right now is surely related to everything we've been discussing today and it is the hashtag Black Lives Matter part two hashtag Britain is not innocent panel which looks at the history of the Black Lives Matter movement in the United Kingdom and the United States everyone thank you and be well thank you so much