Marxism and Anti-Colonialism (Co-sponsored by Marxist Sociology Section)

Session Submission Type: Paper Session (90 minute)

Description

The Marxism and Anti-colonialism session invites papers that explore the historically dense, complex, and sometimes fraught engagement of Marxism with colonialism. The session suggests four broadly conceived avenues through which this relation between Marxism and anti-colonialism can be explored.
First, how did the various global traditions of Marxism—in both theory and political practice—historically encounter, conceptualize, and challenge colonialism. Reciprocally, how did the colonial past give contoured shape to Marxisms around the world?
Second, how did Marxisms’ encounter with the colonial question broaden the theoretical problematics of Marxism to engage with questions of slavery, racial capitalism, dispossession, gender, uneven development and other constitutive aspects of the colonial past and present.
Third, how has Marxist sociology contributed to thinking colonial relations both historically and contemporaneously. What conceptual and theoretical interventions have emerged from the synthesis of Marxism and sociology to make sense of and critique the colonial present?
Finally, in the context of repeated calls for decolonizing knowledge and the sociological canon, what resources does Marxism and Marxist sociology provide for a decolonial and global social theory?
We invite papers with varied methodologies and theoretical persuasions that seek to both historicize and situate the interaction between Marxism and colonialism, offer new readings of Marxist anti-colonial thought, and show how Marxist discourses and critiques of capitalism were deeply entangled in the colonial world system.

Sub Unit

• Theory Section / Marxism and Anti-Colonialism (Co-sponsored by Marxist Sociology Section)

Cosponsor

• Marxist Sociology Section

Presider

• Udeepta Chakravarty, New School For Social Research

Individual Presentations

• Anticolonialism and the Woman Question - Elisabeth Armstrong, Smith College

• Mapping the Late Marx: Gender, Race, Colonialism, Indigeneity, and Revolution - Kevin B. Anderson, University of California-Santa Barbara

• Marx, Lenin and the Theoretical Struggle in the Web of Life - Jason W. Moore, Binghamton University

• Political Blackness against Identity Politics: Race and Resistance in South Africa’s Black Consciousness Movement - Zachary Levenson, Florida International University; Marcel Paret, University of Utah

Session Organizer

• Udeepta Chakravarty, New School For Social Research