W.E.B. Du Bois and the urban political economy tradition in geography

2021 ◽  
pp. 030913252098835
Author(s):  
Jason Hackworth
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Review Essay ◽  
Urban Geography ◽  
Theoretical Work ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Potential Value ◽  
Urban Political Economy

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois’s considerable contributions were actively diminished during his life and remain marginal in geography. This is unfortunate for urban geography, particularly its political economy wing, because his empirical and theoretical work offer an illuminating internal critique of modern debates in the field. This review essay attempts to initiate a wider dialogue about the potential value of Du Bois to the influential urban political economy paradigm in geography. Specifically, I adapt and apply Du Boisian definitions of racism to two literatures: the rise of neoliberalism and the significance of gentrification in Black spaces.

scholarly journals Against the Grain: Socially Just Social Science from the Standpoint of Roxana Ng (Review Essay)

2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 136-159
Author(s):  
Elaine Coburn
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Review Essay ◽  
The Political ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Relations Of Power ◽  
Varied Work

This contribution seeks to highlight the important scholarship of Roxana Ng, arguably one of Canadian sociology and political economy’s most underappreciated theorists. Like her activism, Ng’s academic work is both wide-ranging yet firmly focused on major, unjust inequalities. Her research particularly concerns the Canadian capitalist political economy but inevitably, given the embeddedness of these social relations within worldwide historical relations, stretches beyond national borders. In particular, Ng sought to unpack the everyday, intertwined – exploitative and unjust – relations of class, race, and gender, and the ways these unjust relations are articulated through migration and citizenship. This contribution situates the reception and uneven uptake of Ng’s varied work before critically analysing her contributions to understanding (1) immigrant women’s labour in Canada, (2) the complex racialized, gendered relations of power in the academy, and (3) the liberatory potential of embodied epistemologies, specifically Qi Gong meditation. In the conclusions, I consider the overall contributions and some contradictions of her work, in moving from the local to the global, and from the personal to the political.

Varieties in Comparative Capitalisms Research: A Critical Juncture

2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-156
Author(s):  
Daniel Šitera
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Review Essay ◽  
Holistic Approach ◽  
Theoretical Discussion ◽  
Critical Research ◽  
Critical Juncture ◽  
Prior Review ◽  
Comparative Capitalisms ◽  
Initial Survey ◽  
The Many

This article addresses Richard Westra, Ian Bruff and Matthias Ebenau's responses to my prior review essay on their edited volumes. In my initial survey, I concluded that both volumes reinvigorate the radical potential of contemporary Comparative Capitalisms (CC) literatures, but warned against the tendency in critical research to trace capitalism solely at its worst. I posited that this pessimism undermines the volumes’ pedagogical potential and threatens to bring us to intellectual cul-de-sacs. The authors respond in different ways to this critical engagement: Westra provides a guideline to trace such an intellectual pessimism in the (neo-)Marxist political economy and points to the so-called ‘Uno approach’ as an alternative direction that opens our intellectual horizons to social change in (post-)capitalism. In contrast, Bruff and Ebenau regard my review as less monochromatic than other discussions of their research project but nevertheless assertively retort to my critique. This reply seeks to engage the aforementioned scholars in a discussion, while reconsidering the alleged pessimism of critical CC research as informed optimism. Such informed optimism must be found in a critical research that (i) is based on a deeper reflexive theoretical discussion rather than a one-sided deconstruction of mainstream scholarship; and (ii) derives from a holistic approach broadened by a human-centred perspective, which also exposes us to actually existing alternatives within as well as to (post-)capitalism. Given that such approaches are currently only implicit, the many ongoing crises of contemporary capitalism represent a critical juncture not only for mainstream, but also for critical CC research.

The Political Economy of Niggerdom: W. E. B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King Jr. on the Racial and Economic Discrimination of Black Males in America

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 273-297 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adebayo Ogungbure
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Black Males ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Black Families ◽  
Wealth Creation ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Economic Discrimination ◽  
Racial Divide ◽  
Economic Injustice ◽  
Martin Luther King

In The Color of Money, Baradaran argues that the defining feature of America’s racial divide is the wealth gap which is where the seeds of historic anti-Black injustice and the present economic sufferings of African Americans were sown. While exploring the philosophical thoughts of W. E. B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King Jr., this essay grapples with such roots of anti-Black economic injustice by highlighting how the American capitalist economy was designed to, ultimately, destroy Black families through the exclusion of Black males from the system of wealth creation. I argue that insights from the structural, socio-political and economic critiques of W. E. B Du Bois and Martin Luther King Jr. reveal how America operated a “political economy of niggerdom”—a system that utilizes various modes of anti-Black misandry, and the stereotype of criminalization as the basis for racial and economic discrimination against Black males.

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