This is a call for papers to participate in a conference in Alleppey, Kerala, co-organized by the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory (3CT), University of Chicago, in collaboration with the Forum on Contemporary Theory, Baroda, on the theme of “Global Capitalisms.” The conference will be held during March 13-16, 2024.
The theorization of capitalism has been fundamental to understanding the relationships between economy, society, and politics, at least since the eighteenth century. We aim to revisit and reinvigorate this theoretical project at a world-historical conjuncture that is marked by multiple crises of capitalism, the emergence of Southern economies such as India’s as major global players, and the challenges these present for contemporary politics.
Any adequate theorization of the contemporary requires an empirically attuned and theoretically sophisticated understanding of the dynamics, forms, and trajectories that global capitalism takes today. There have been a range of approaches adopted from across disciplinary perspectives, ranging from economics to philosophy, history, sociology, anthropology, literature, to do so. Many of the most pertinent critiques have emerged out of lineages of scholarship indebted to the works of Karl Marx.
In the twentieth century, these theorizations have increasingly come to be located within the framework of global relations of power and production, including those shaped by colonialism, then in the aftermath of decolonization, and more recently in the neoliberal turn and its attendant globalization. Yet capitalism is not singular, its forms and manifestations have changed across place and time, and the political challenges that come in its wake constantly demand its retheorization. This must take the form of revisiting philosophical understandings of the dynamics of capital, as well as elaborating new empirical manifestations in terms of regional impact, sectoral specificity, mutations in form, and sociological implications.
Specifically, we aim for a collective retheorization of Global Capitalisms at this world-historical conjuncture that is marked at once by:
The multiple crises of capitalism, witnessed in rising inequality, corporate hegemony and the consolidation of monopolies, rising authoritarianisms, impending climate catastrophe, the political effects of neoliberal austerity and deindustrialization, and the bubbles and bursts of speculative enterprises, which demand a longue durée attentiveness to the ways in which forces and relations of production have globalized with differential effects in different parts of the world.
The growth of emergent markets in the global South, which creates new axes of power and hierarchies of difference that reconfigure older colonial, metropolitan-periphery, lines of cleavage; and the challenges presented for politics in view of large-scale structural transformations in the operations of capital, which demands new forms of internationalist solidarity that respond to problems from the local to the planetary scale.
We invite papers and presentations that might address any of the following themes.
Corporatism and racialized monopoly capitalism
- Practices of global extractive enterprise
- Financialization and its global manifestations and implications
- Histories of mercantile culture and empire and their enduring postcolonial residues
- The reconstitution of class
- Relations between capitalism and kinship, including in relation to histories of migration and diaspora
- Relationships between capitalism and affect
- Old and new forms of international solidarity-making such as the rise and fall of leftist political movements.
- Any other relevant theme
The conference will include presentations by a number of scholars from the University of Chicago, including Chiara Cordelli, Daragh Grant, Sarah Johnson, Jonathan Levy, Josephine McDonagh, Kaushik Sunder Rajan, and Lisa Wedeen.
3CT (https://ccct.uchicago.edu/) is a space for the critical discussion and reimagination of social, political and cultural process in the world today. “Global Capitalisms” has emerged as a central topic of inquiry for 3CT and will be one of its focal interests over the coming two-year period. The Forum on Contemporary Theory (https://fctworld.org/) has been a key venue for critical theory conversations in India for over three decades, including through annual conferences that have brought together international scholars with scholars and students in India.
Abstracts of approximately 300 words may be sent to gita.viswanath@gmail.com with a copy each to ksunderr@gmail.com and thomaspathil@gmail.com
Note: Deadline for registration extended to Nov 15th, 2023
