Raced Markets: An Introduction

ABSTRACT

The central consensus among the scholars and activists who came together for the first Raced Markets Workshop in December 2015 was that ‘race’ may have begun as fiction, an invention of Europeans in the service of colonisation, however, the fiction of race became material over time, reproduced in relation to the manifold raced markets of the global political economy. Since that original workshop, and against a consolidated neoliberal capitalist context, the political rise of fascistic movements has intensified across the globe. Our collective provocation here is that this current conjuncture cannot be explained with reference to the exceptional intrusion of racism, nor the epiphenomenal status of race in relation to political economy. Instead we attend to how race functions in structural and agential ways, integrally reproducing raced markets and social conditions. Our Introduction opens this conversation for New Political Economy readers, positioning neoliberalism and the current conjuncture as the present political economic moment to be understood through a raced market frame of analysis. Our hope is that this special issue will be read as a timely intervention, referencing a long tradition of (often marginalised) thought which attends to race as productive and material, rather than confined to the ideological realm.

KEYWORDS:

• Race
• neoliberalism
• political economy
• raced markets
• Trump
• Brexit
• Grenfell

Acknowledgements

Warm thanks go to all of those who attended the first Raced Markets Workshop in December 2015 at the University of Warwick, as well as to the Department of Politics and International Studies at Warwick and the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London for co-sponsoring that event. We are deeply grateful to the anonymous referees of this special issue for their intellectual engagement with each of the research articles included. Gratitude is also extended to the Editor of New Political Economy for working with us to bring this to publication and to David Roediger for his generous Prefatory Note and general engagement with this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Lisa Tilley is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow on the project Race, Intimacy, and Extraction on an Internal Frontier and is based at the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London. She is also co-convenor of the Colonial, Postcolonial, Decolonial Working Group of the British International Studies Association (CPD-BISA).

Robbie Shilliam is Professor of International Relations at Queen Mary University of London. His latest book, Race and the Undeserving Poor: From Abolition to Brexit (Agenda Publishing) will be published in 2018.

ORCID

Lisa Tilley http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8805-2398

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Leverhulme Trust [grant number ECF-2017-683].