"'Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism': Reflecting on Race, Profit, Labor and Life"

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

This roundtable brings together a group of scholars to engage with and reflect on Premilla Nadasen’s recently published book Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Drawing on theoretical insights from social reproduction and racial capitalism, Nadasen argues that care—the labor, services, and products that enable the maintenance and reproduction of human life—including health care, domestic work, the welfare state, and the nonprofit sector, has become indispensable for capitalist profit. If indeed this is a new stage of capitalism, to what degree does accumulation rooted in life-making rather than manufacturing signal the end of the American century and dominance of US capital, as the conference theme asks?

Marxist Feminists theorists have argued that an inherent contradiction between social reproduction and capitalism has led to the recent care crisis. They posit a renewed and robust care agenda as a way forward to address this crisis of capitalism. Building upon the robust body of scholarship on the history of slavery, gender, and reproduction, as well as the life stories of care workers and people on the margins of the care economy, Nadasen demonstrates how historically there were moments of alignment, not only tension, between social reproduction and capitalist profit. This history of racial capitalism as well as a methodological approach that foregrounds people who have been most harmed by extractive forms of care, can offer an alternate lens through which to view the contemporary care economy and and analyze the current capitalist crisis.

Drawing on their expertise about domestic and service workers and people on the margins, roundtable participants will address the following questions: How has the relationship between life and labor, and the unequal valuation of life, manifested in domestic and other forms of service work? How is the crisis of care a feature of the crisis of US economic dominance and the polycrisis of capitalism more broadly? What is the role of state in both the exploitation of labor as well as the extraction of profit from life? How are the biopolitical logics of care work and the care economy intertwined with the histories of racial capitalism, imperialism, and settler colonialism? What is and has been the relationship between care and forms of structural violence, including carcerality? In what ways might this moment of crisis create possibilities to reimagine and remake the relationship between care and capitalism, and perhaps capitalism itself?

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Sarah Haley, Columbia University

Panelist

• Premilla Nadasen, Barnard College

Comments

• Rachel H Brown, Washington University in St. Louis

• Preeti Sharma, California State University-Long Beach

• Neferti Tadiar, Barnard College

• Alissa D. Trotz, University of Toronto

Biographical Information

Premilla Nadasen is the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of History at Barnard College and past president of the National Women’s Studies Association. She has published extensively on the multiple meanings of feminism, alternative labor movements, and grass-roots community organizing and is most interested in visions of social change, and the ways in which poor and working-class women of color fought for economic justice. Her most recent book, Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (2023), examines profit extraction from the care economy as well as models of grassroots radical care that sit outside capitalism. She is also the author of two award-winning books, Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement and Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States. She is currently writing a biography of South African singer and anti-apartheid activist Miriam Makeba. Nadasen has a long history of community engagement, including collaborations with the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Damayan Migrant Workers Association, and the Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Initiative. In 2023 she was named a Marguerite Casey Foundation Freedom Scholar for her activism and scholarly contributions to social justice work.

Rachel Brown is Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research and teaching interests include feminist and queer theory, reproductive labor, settler colonial studies, labor migration, resistance to the war economy, and the politics of debt. Her recent book, Unsettled Labors: Migrant Care Work in Palestine/Israel, was published by Duke University Press in 2024. Her work has appeared in Feminist Theory, Political Theory, Race & Class, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Theory & Event, and Global Networks. Brown earned her doctorate from the CUNY Graduate Center in 2017.


Sarah Haley’s research areas include U.S. gender history, carceral history, Black feminist and queer theory, prison abolition, and feminist historical methods. She is the author of No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (2016), which earned honors in the fields of history, gender studies, American Studies, and African American Studies and was selected for the 2020 National Book Foundation’s Literature for Justice Reading List. Her writing has appeared in journals including Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, The Journal of African American History, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Souls, and Women & Performance and she is working on a book titled The Carceral Interior: A Black Feminist Study of American Punishment, 1966-2016. In 2022, Haley was named a Marguerite Casey Foundation Freedom Scholar. She is associate professor of gender studies and history at Columbia University and has been active in prison abolition, gender justice, and labor movements. She currently organizes with Scholars for Social Justice.

Preeti Sharma (she/her) is Assistant Professor of American Studies, California State University, Long Beach. She received her Ph.D. in Gender Studies from the University of California Los Angeles in 2019. Her scholarship on feminist theories of work, racial capitalism, care and service economies, women of color and Asian American feminisms, and alternative labor organizations has appeared in The Journal of Asian American Studies, The Labor Studies Journal, and Society & Space. She is also co-editor and co-author of The Auntie Sewing Squad Guide to Mask Making, Radical Care, and Racial Justice. Her book project, The Thread Between Them, examines how salon workers manage affective and intimate labor through aesthetics and temporality at the threading salon to create relations and community that are about, and also challenge, forms of devaluation in the Los Angeles beauty service industry.

Neferti X. M. Tadiar is a feminist scholar of Philippine cultures and global political economy and Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. Professor Tadiar writes on the role of cultural practice and social imagination in the production of wealth, power, marginality, and liberatory movements in the context of global relations of imperialism. She is the author of Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order (2004), which was awarded the Philippine National Book Award in Cultural Criticism in 2005; Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience and the Makings of Globalization (2009); and Life-Times of Becoming Human (2022), which was awarded the Philippine National Book Award in Philosophy in 2023. Her most recent book, Remaindered Life (2022), is an extended meditation on the disposability and surplus of life-making under contemporary conditions of global empire. It received the John Hope Franklin for Best Book in American Studies in 2023. She founded and currently directs the Alfredo F. Tadiar Library, an independent community library and cultural space in San Fernando, La Union, which holds artist-led creative workshops, art and community exhibitions, and cultural events, and publishes books that bring into view critical and creative perspectives on Philippine social and political life, culture, art, and history.

Alissa Trotz is a Professor of Caribbean Studies at New College and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto. She is affiliate faculty at the Dame Nita Barrow Institute of Gender and Development Studies at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados; and a member of the O’Neill-Lancet Commission on Racism, Structural Discrimination, and Global Health. She is editor of “In the Diaspora,” a weekly newspaper column in the Guyanese daily, Stabroek News; and of The Point is to Change the World: Selected Writings by Andaiye. London: Pluto Books, Black Critique Series, 2020. (translated 2022, O importante é transformar o mundo, Brazil: Editora Funilaria).