Sarika Chandra

In “Remapping the Race/Class Problematic,” Sarika Chandra and Chris Chen intervene in contemporary U.S. scholarly and activist debates over the theoretical relationship between race and capitalism—including debates over whether racism or “economic anxiety” drives twenty-first-century white nationalist politics or over the internally fractured class politics of contemporary anti-racist movements. Such debates often reproduce a reified opposition between race and class as identities or forms of identification intrinsically associated with competing or complementary political objectives. The authors argue that scholarship on these questions reveals a number of persistent theoretical impasses generated by the often-discrepant ways that critics define race, class, and capitalism. Building on the recent work of Michael Dawson, Nancy Fraser, and others, the essay moves beyond the concept of identity to retheorize race not as an intrinsic property of individuals and groups but as a politically contested signifier emerging from the historical interplay of racial domination and changing experiences of what Dawson calls “linked fate.” At the same time, the essay argues that politically heterogeneous and historically shifting experiences of racialized “linked fate” are embedded within a field of value relations and capitalist value as a medium of social cohesion on a global scale, systematically reproduced through co-constitutive, recursive, and specifically capitalist processes of exploitation, expropriation, and expulsion. Drawing on contemporary Marxist theory that insists on the historical specificity of how such core capitalist mechanisms of accumulation organize class relations, the authors argue that representations of class limited to empirical measures of income and wealth inequality, or to socioeconomic status identities defined by implicitly or explicitly racialized cultural signifiers, hinder theorists’ attempts to adequately map the material structure of racial group formation within developed capitalist economies.

In this essay, Sarika Chandra and Chris Chen intervene in contemporary US scholarly and activist debates regarding the theoretical relationship between capitalism and postwar racial group formation—including debates over whether racism or "economic anxiety" drive twenty-first-century white nationalist politics and over the internally fractured class politics of contemporary antiracist movements. Such debates often reproduce a reified opposition between race and class as forms of identification intrinsically associated with competing or complementary political objectives. The authors argue that the scholarship on these questions reveals a number of persistent theoretical impasses generated by the discrepant ways that critics define race, class, and capitalism. Building on recent scholarship, the essay moves beyond the concept of identity to retheorize race not as an intrinsic property of individuals and groups but as a politically contested signifier emerging from the historical interplay of racial domination and changing experiences of what Michael Dawson calls "linked fate." At the same time, the authors argue that the politically heterogeneous and historically shifting experiences of racialized "linked fate" are embedded within a field of capitalist value relations, as a medium of social cohesion on a global scale, reproduced through co-constitutive, recursive, and specifically capitalist processes of exploitation, expropriation, and expulsion.