This book offers a historically sweeping yet detailed view of world-systemic migration as a racialized process. Since the early expansion of the world-system, the movement of people has been its central process. Not only have managers of capital moved to direct profitable expansion; they have also forced, cajoled or encouraged workers to move in order to extract, grow, refi ne, manufacture and transport materials and commodities. The book offers historical cases that show that migration introduces and deepens racial dominance in all zones of the world-system. This often forces indigenous and imported slaves or bonded labor to extract, process and move raw materials. Yet it also often creates a contradiction between capital’s need to direct labor to where it enables profitability, and the desires of large sections of dominant populations to keep subordinate people of color marginalized and separate. Case studies reveal how core states are concurrently users and blockers of migrant labor. Key examples are Mexican migrants in the United States, both historically and in contemporary society. The United States even promotes of an image of a society that welcomes the immigrant—while policy realities often quite different. Nonetheless, the volume ends with a vision of a future whereby communities from below, both activists and people simply following their communal interests, can come together to create a society that overcomes racism. Its final chapter is a hopeful call by Immanuel Wallerstein for people to make small changes that, together, can bring real about real, revolutionary change.

As we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, the world faces extraordinary system-level challenges—from deep inequality and xenophobic nationalism to militarism and neofascism, from the refugee crisis and environmental degradation to upsurges of social unrest and escalating rivalries among powerful states. This book begins from the premise that world-systems analysis can be a powerful tool for the study of these problems, with the potential to overcome the methodological and theoretical limitations of other social science perspectives. The editors argue, moreover, that world-systems analysis can be strengthened by drawing on its holistic methodologies, returning to its Third World roots, and learning from other critical approaches. The authors in this volume not only make important contributions to comparative and historical social science, they also bring a new vigor to the world-systems perspective. Facing critical junctures in both the "state of knowledge" and the "state of the world," this book demonstrates the continued utility of, and future possibilities for, world-systems analysis.

Ethnographic research in Pakistan, the Middle East, and the United States helps to explain how transnational working classes from Pakistan are produced in the context of American empire and its War on Terror.

In Beyond the World's End T. J. Demos explores cultural practices that provide radical propositions for living in a world beset by environmental and political crises. Rethinking relationships between aesthetics and an expanded political ecology that foregrounds just futurity, Demos examines how contemporary artists are diversely addressing urgent themes, including John Akomfrah's cinematic entanglements of racial capitalism with current environmental threats, the visual politics of climate refugees in work by Forensic Architecture and Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman, and moving images of Afrofuturist climate justice in projects by Arthur Jafa and Martine Syms. Demos considers video and mixed-media art that responds to resource extraction in works by Angela Melitopoulos, Allora & Calzadilla, and Ursula Biemann, as well as the multispecies ecologies of Terike Haapoja and Public Studio. Throughout Demos contends that contemporary intersections of aesthetics and politics, as exemplified in the Standing Rock #NoDAPL campaign and the Zad's autonomous zone in France, are creating the imaginaries that will be crucial to building a socially just and flourishing future.

In The World Computer Jonathan Beller forcefully demonstrates that the history of commodification generates information itself. Out of the omnipresent calculus imposed by commodification, information emerges historically as a new money form. Investigating its subsequent financialization of daily life and colonization of semiotics, Beller situates the development of myriad systems for quantifying the value of people, objects, and affects as endemic to racial capitalism and computation. Built on oppression and genocide, capital and its technical result as computation manifest as racial formations, as do the machines and software of social mediation that feed racial capitalism and run on social difference. Algorithms, derived from for-profit management strategies, conscript all forms of expression—language, image, music, communication—into the calculus of capital such that even protest may turn a profit. Computational media function for the purpose of extraction rather than ameliorating global crises, and financialize every expressive act, converting each utterance into a wager. Repairing this ecology of exploitation, Beller contends, requires decolonizing information and money, and the scripting of futures wagered by the cultural legacies and claims of those in struggle.

This volume reviews the state of the field of world-systems analysis. World-systems analysts study the structure of the relationships among people, organisations, and states and how those relationships change over time.

This book examines 'eternal colonialism,' which describes policies designed by the Western world and United States to keep most of the world in a permanently subordinate political, economic, social, and military state. The authors argue that colonialism beginning in the fifteenth century never ended, but developed different forms over time.

Across the globe, states have long aimed to control the movement of people, identify their citizens, and restrict noncitizens' rights through official identification documents. Although states are now less likely to grant permanent legal status, they are increasingly issuing new temporary and provisional legal statuses to migrants. Meanwhile, the need for migrants to apply for frequent renewals subjects them to more intensive state surveillance. The contributors to Paper Trails examine how these new developments change migrants' relationship to state, local, and foreign bureaucracies. The contributors analyze, among other toics, immigration policies in the United Kingdom, the issuing of driver's licenses in Arizona and New Mexico, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, and community know-your-rights campaigns. By demonstrating how migrants are inscribed into official bureaucratic systems through the issuance of identification documents, the contributors open up new ways to understand how states exert their power and how migrants must navigate new systems of governance. Contributors. Bridget Anderson, Deborah A. Boehm, Susan Bibler Coutin, Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz, Sarah B. Horton, Josiah Heyman, Cecilia Menjívar, Juan Thomas Ordóñez, Doris Marie Provine, Nandita Sharma, Monica Varsanyi

This book traces 500 years of European-American colonization and racialized dominance, expanding our common assumptions about the ways racialization was used to build capitalism and the modern world-system. Professor Fenelon draws on personal experience and the agency of understudied Native (and African) resistance leaders, to weave a story too often hidden or distorted in the annals of the academy, that remains invisible at many universities and historical societies. The book identifies three epochs of racial constructions, colonialism, and capitalism that created the USA. Indigenous nations, the first to be racialized on a global scale, African peoples, enslaved and brought to the Americas, and European immigrants. It offers a sweeping analysis of the forces driving the invasion, occupation, and exploitation of Native America and the significance of labor in American history provided by Indigenous people, Africans, and immigrants, specifically the Irish. Indian, Black and Irish makes major contributions toward a deeper understanding of where Supremacy and Sovereignty originated from, and how our modern world has used these socio-political constructions, to build global hegemony that now threatens our very existence, through wars and climate change. It will be a vital resource to those studying history, colonialism, race and racism, labor history, and indigenous peoples.

This is a long overdue addition to a series of books and edited collections spawned initially from Immanuel Wallerstein's The Modern World-System. These 12 `theoretically informed case studies' from a 1987 conference add considerable insight to the heavy emphasis of the World-Systems approaches on macroeconomic determinism with the inclusion of ideological and cultural factors. Most cases address how capital uses social categories to cheapen industrial labor costs in Asia and the US. Two illuminating chapters analyze the `minoritization of immigrants' and variations in masculinity norms as aspects of this labor cheapening process. Choice A collection of papers presented at the Eleventh Annual Political Economy of the World-System Conference, this volume illustrates the degree to which fundamental processes of the world-system entail racist and sexist practices. The contributors have taken as their focus the attempt to both explain--in social, political, or historical terms--the pervasiveness of racism and sexism and trace the relationship between the two and the organization of the contemporary political economy. Taken together, their papers offer a more coherent treatment of the problem than has heretofore been available. By integrating an understanding of racial and sexual oppression with that of other processes that constitute the world-economy they offer new insights into the workings of the world-system and new hope for concerted efforts to eliminate racism and sexism. Many of the essays included here take the form of theoretically informed case studies. Detailed historical works explore such issues as labor force formation in the New York garment industry in the late 19th and early 20th century and competition in the world textile industry in the latter half of the 1880s. A critical analysis of the construction of census categories and an examination of the myths of differential ethnic success provide real-world examples of discrimination and its effects. A number of papers focus on the implications of our understanding of racial and sexual oppression for political struggle, while others assess the impact of women's exclusion from the workforce on power relationships in the home. Two major theoretical pieces address the issues in more general terms, emphasizing the circumstances under which racism and sexism are created and recreated in various contexts. Taken as a whole, the volume provides a necessary and enlightening re-examination of the role of race and gender in the world-economy.