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SUMMARY:Lethal Necessities: Precarity\, Citizenship\, and the Paradigm of 
 Racial Violence (Subaltern &amp\; Decolonial Citizenships series) - Dr Fra
 nco Barchiesi
DTSTART:20210311T170000Z
DTEND:20210311T190000Z
UID:TALK157147@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Speaker to be confirmed
DESCRIPTION:In the wake of the past decade of global capitalist meltdown\,
  amplified by the current pandemic\, corporate and state management of cri
 sis has revealed the precarity of lives forced to depend on waged jobs tha
 t\, in the context of COVID-19\, have been wiped out by the tens of millio
 ns\, belying the normative values attached to employment status and policy
  fixations with “job creation”. Precarity verges indeed on the actual 
 lethality of jobs deemed “essential”\, whose allocation reflects long-
 standing patterns of racial domination. While stimulated by the ethical co
 llapse of job-centered social imagination\, which COVID-19 dramatically un
 derscores\, this presentation is not primarily focused on the eventfulness
  of specific crises as highlighting the precarity of employment\, or even 
 on growing scholarly perceptions of how precarity announces the twilight o
 f neoliberalism. Instead\, to write about the lethal entanglements of work
  and precarity in times like this demands attention to long-duration parad
 igms that structure contingency and event\, revealing the permanence of vi
 olence in excess of the framework of political economy. My core argument i
 s that the nexus of work\, death\, and mass disposability rests on the way
 s in which racial domination and colonial dispossession have informed the 
 conjunction of work and citizenship in the transition from post-slavery em
 ancipation to the globalization of the racial as a principle for the hiera
 rchical ordering of difference between the nineteenth and the twentieth ce
 nturies. Within that global context—which critical Black perspectives ha
 ve increasingly referred to as “the afterlife of slavery”—the notion
  of citizenship came to revolve around work and economic activity accordin
 g to modalities that critical theory has analyzed as hegemonic\, disciplin
 ary\, or biopolitical. None of these modalities\, however\, address the wa
 ys in which employment has been assumed to be the horizon and structural l
 imitation of Black emancipation as geared not to citizenship but to renewe
 d captivity and social death. Positioning the constitutive precarity of ca
 pitalist employment within reconfigured structures of post-slavery anti-Bl
 ack violence offers therefore stronger analytical insights into the non-co
 ntingent lethality of commodity-producing work as well as its persistent r
 acialization.
LOCATION:Online (Zoom)
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