Online workshop, Thursday 25 April 2024, 5pm UK time / 6pm CET

On zoom, register here: https://bham-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMpceytqzwpGt0yHNN66DnsjsD2Enga4iDv

Sam Ashman is Associate Professor in the School of Economics at the University of Johannesburg. Her fields of research are Post-apartheid economic development in South Africa, financialization, industrial policy, combined and uneven development, and the state.

Discussants

Ilias Alami, Assistant Professor in the Political Economy of Development, Centre of Development Studies & Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge

Jörg Nowak, Professor of International Political Economy, Institute of International Relations, University of Brasilia

The article is available here: https://bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/view/journals/gpe/2/1/article-p37.xml#d3355727e961

Abstract

Surprisingly little uneven and combined development (UCD) work focuses on Africa. This article both widens the geographical scope of UCD literature and attempts to address a major blind spot in this literature: the importance of race and gender in understanding the UCD of world capitalism and global political economy. Helpful in this process, we argue, is an engagement with the work of Black Marxism and Marxist Feminism and the literature on Racial Capitalism. We draw on the work of Stuart Hall on race and class, and the importance of understanding their changing articulations, indeed of the need to look at multiple articulations – of the state and state power with forms of production; racialised ideologies; and systems of reproduction. We use a case study of South Africa to illustrate our argument. South Africa, previously on the periphery of the global system, was changed profoundly by the discovery of vast gold deposits and the construction of a forced labour system to secure its profitable extraction. South Africa’s specific form of racial capitalism challenges not only linear conceptions of development, but also binaries between free and forced labour, and Eurocentric conceptions of social reproduction.