"Race," Labor, "Women's Proper Place," and the Birth of Nations: Notes on Historicizing the Coloniality of Power

SOME RECENT EXCHANGES WITHIN THE ANGLO- (NORTH) AMERICAN SOCIAL sciences on the concept of "race" vis-à-vis modernity have tended to highlight the problem of periodization. In its most extreme version, one finds perspectives such as those of Ann Laura Stoler arguing that "this disposition towards the past rests on a scholarly quest for origins, for the 'original' moment in which the dye of race was cast . . . histories of racism often appear as narratives of redemption" (Stoler 1997, 185).

I wanted to begin this piece by referencing that debate as an opportunity to think through some of the concepts proposed by Aníbal Quijano regarding world capitalism's institutionalities, patterns, or forms of power (namely, the nation-state, the bourgeois family, and the enterprise), which he sees as being mobilized in order to control the three sites or spaces of social existence (namely, relations of authority, of gender, and of labor). It's within this context that I intend to situate the historicity and structural significance of—and overlap between—the structures of "race," corpo-reality (i.e., "the body": physiological, social, political, semiotic), and in-corporation (affiliation, location-inclusion, and inscription: not just politico-economic, but sexual-somatic as well).

Historical Specificity and the Problem of Emergence

I find periodization to be important, but not because I understand historical capitalism as materializing during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries complete and pristine—like Minerva being born, fully formed, from the head of Jupiter. Rather, historical capitalism (i.e., colonial modernity) emerged as a complex threshold and interconnected accretion of forces or processes: both as a reterritorialized entrance into a new discontinuity-in-the-making (viz. the Atlantic System) and an uneven demarcation with respect to the previous articulation of social elements and operations (focusing on the Silk Road, the China Sea, the Indian Ocean, the Eastern Mediterranean, as well as Northwest and Eastern Africa). It was a pivotal moment in the "escape forward" ("huida hacia adelante") of Western Christendom during its fourteenth-century crisis: a desperate search for solutions to the bubonic plague, peasant uprisings, declining agricultural output, the Christian princes' lock on local-political power, and the mounting debts—and costly wars—with the Muslim monopolies operating within the internally imploding but still-prevailing world system (Wolf 1980; Abu-Lughod 1989).

Yet this colonial-modern, historical-capitalist threshold was also the uneven process whereby: (1) the (Christian) reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula as the westernmost zone/populations of the (Judeo-)Islamic-"Oriental"-Indies (i.e., the Maghreb/Sepharad, Asia-Minor, and Indian Ocean arc) transmuted into (2) the conquest of the (Atlantic) Indies and the direct, large-scale unlocking of the African continent to a new transoceanic trade (in no small part via the lockup of sizeable portions of this continent's population). This was how opposite Atlantic shores—the nucleus of the new (modern) world system—emerged as the initial site of the coloniality of power: new sources of bullion, new markets for Christendom's burgeoning manufactures (tendentially organized on the basis of wage labor), as well as sources of new commodities and raw materials, mostly outside of Mediterranean-Muslim control. Its immediate precursor was the shift and expansion of the incipient and beleaguered (Christian) sugar plantations of the Mediterranean islands into the Eastern Atlantic and West African coastal islands, and soon into their Caribbean and Pernambuco (Brazil) permutations. The latter process—together with the Ottoman capture of Constantinople and the sharp drop in Black Sea slaves for Western Mediterranean markets—coincided with the transformation of domestic-service oriented, child- and female-based pawnship and captivity (Balkan Slavic laborers, primarily) into production-oriented, adult and male-based, modern-chattel racial slavery (increasingly: Atlantic indigenous and/or African laborers [Williams 1944; Cox 1964...