Author Meets Critics: Inés Valdez’s "Democracy and Empire"

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

The panel is on Inés Valdez’s new book, Democracy and Empire: Labor, Nature, and the Reproduction of Capitalism, published by Cambridge University Press in 2023.

Democracy and Empire theorizes a popular sovereignty suffused with both an affective attachment to wealth and a collective agreement to dominate others abroad to secure that wealth. Imperial capitalist logics turn the notion of self-determination from a formal entitlement of peoples to self-govern toward an excessive entitlement to dominate others in the colonies and, later, the Global South. Valdez argues that this collective agreement is racial, in the sense that it welcomed white Europeans arriving in settler colonies to a polity that gave them access to land while excluding from this same compact nonwhite arrivals, who were instead conscripted into strenuous labor to sustain the white polity alongside other groups located in the colonies. This process was both “democratic” and imperial: it was grounded in political collectives that claimed a right to popular government, who were, however, grounded in stolen land and abided by logics of racial separation and capitalist extraction organized at the level of empires. The book tracks the interplay between imperial features and avowedly “democratic” institutions, including immigration control, racial regulation of local labor, and bilateral guest worker programs, as well as the division between an industrialized west, in which whiteness is identified with technology, and the rest of the world, identified with raw materials and strenuous labor. These arrangements conscripted the exploited labor of these subjects into the protection and nurturing of the relatively privileged white groups, i.e., their social reproduction, while threatening the destruction of family structures and bodily integrity of racialized subjects and facilitating a more intense and destructive exploitation of nature. In this scheme, ecological destruction and racial oppression go together. The book offers a bleak historical outlook of popular sovereignty as a praxis, but it also clarifies the mechanics of these claims to theorize and found a positively anti-imperial popular sovereignty, one that can track and operate against the articulated oppression of different racial groups, who, in coalition, can lead an anti-oligarchic critique of transnational structures of injustice. The conclusion leverages the points of commonality among differently-positioned subjects to craft a radical politics of solidarity.

The panel consists of Brittany Leach (Southern Illinois University; writing Reproductive Freedom Beyond Individualism), Hagar Kotef (SOAS; author of The Colonizing Self), Jeanne Morefield (Oxford; author of Unsettling the World), and Ray Rocco (UCLA; author of Transforming Citizenship). Inés Valdez (Johns Hopkins) will reply and Murad Idris (Michigan; author of War for Peace) will serve as Chair. The panel’s composition works to draw out the book’s arguments about empire, racial capitalism, hierarchies of violence at multiple scales, layers of disavowal and dispossession, and the global structure of social reproduction and exploitation. All of the commentators are theorists of empire, settler colonialism, and racialized dispossession who have challenged theorists to see—and think beyond—how liberalism and democracy can serve as perverse covers for colonial expansion and capitalist exploitation. In this panel, each brings their distinct regional and historical archive to the conversation, addressing Valdez’s new book from different perspectives, including pan-American anticolonialism, Israeli settler colonialism, Latino political thought, and Anglophone liberalism and liberal theory.

Sub Unit

• Division 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Chair

• Murad Idris University of Michigan

Presenters

• Hagar Kotef SOAS, University of London

• Brittany Leach Southern Illinois University, Carbondale

• Raymond Rocco University of California, Los Angeles

• Jeanne Morefield University of Oxford

• Inés Valdez Johns Hopkins University