Stratifying the Social: The Race/Class Dialectic and the Fetishization of Race in Our Neoliberal Contemporary

This dissertation utilizes the lens of Social Reproduction Theory to examine the consequences of viewing race and racism and other systems of oppression like Patriarchy as separate or additive autonomous ontologies. Intersectionality Theory posits oppressions as independent systems that “add” or “intersect” onto oppressed subjects in particular circumstances. On the other hand, responding to Intersectionality Theory, Social Reproduction Theory understands systems of oppression as mutually constitutive social relations. Social Reproduction Theory therefore allows for a more thorough understanding of the relationship between racism and other systems of oppression and their own relationship to capitalism. Rather than theorizing these social relations as disconnected, a more accurate and fruitful understanding of them is as co-constitutive, mutually immanent systems that function dialectically in order to reproduce the capitalist totality. The project focuses on this issue in the neoliberal contemporary moment in the United States. Here I define neoliberalism as the political expression of capitalism from the 1970s to today. Neoliberalism has been marked by deregulation and privatization, as well as the assimilation of people of color into the power structures of our status quo. In terms of race and racism, this has meant the contradiction of racialized subjects upholding systemic racism while remaining targets and victims of racism, as well as the conception of a “post-racial era.” I argue that the decoupling of systems of oppression is a feature of neoliberalism, and I look specifically at the ramifications of the disarticulation of race and racism from these other constitutive oppressions in the neoliberal social totality. As Himani Bannerji argues, to separate these systems is to fetishize them in that it distances them from their social determinations and limits our analysis of them because they come to be viewed as entirely independent from one another. Doing so allows the social totality to reproduce and undermines our attempts to resist the exploitative capitalist system. Hearkening back to Marx’s concept of the commodity fetish, Bannerji’s argument allows us to consider other ways to apply and think through fetishization and social determination and the alienation the fetish causes. I center the project around the question of fetishized race in three different literary genres and their relationship to major tenets of neoliberalism. Chapter 1 explores fetishization in its common usage as an obfuscation, arguing that in the context of the genre of street literature, in particular Sister Souljah’s two novels, The Coldest Winter Ever (1999) and its sequel, Life After Death (2021), to focus only on race and to disconnect it from its relation to class oppression is to occlude and hide class oppression. Class oppression in this context includes prisons and mass incarceration, and to obscure class in this context is to obscure mass incarceration. Chapter 2 focuses on satire through Paul Beatty’s The Sellout (2015) and Percival Everett’s Erasure (2001) and the ways in which fetishized race becomes subsumed into neoliberalism’s incessant need to monetize everything. I argue that fetishized race causes identity to become stamped with commodity logic. I also explore here the ways in which people of color advance to positions of power in ways that serve to uphold racism and contribute to its social reproduction. Through a reading of neo-slave narratives, in Chapter 3, I consider neoliberal temporality and its self-positioning as a perpetual present. My focus is on Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada (1976) and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016). This chapter shows how a turn to the past in these texts is related to neoliberalism’s lack of a future. Here I also address a potential link between neoliberalism and Afro-pessimism. Chapter 3 ends with a reading of Zora Neale Hurston’s interview with the last living survivor of the Middle Passage, Barracoon (2018). In juxtaposing these texts and through this turn to the past, I posit a potential alternate future. The dissertation concludes with a reflection on these consequences of fetishizing race and the effects of delinking systems of oppression for our attempts at resisting the capitalist social totality. I address these consequences through a consideration of the current political stakes of the argument with the looming 2024 United States presidential election.

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