The Postcolony and ‘Racy’ Histories of Accumulation

Abstract

In this chapter, the author looks at the recent spate of wilful violence against people from the north-east in Delhi, the national capital. As he points out, there is only one way of describing these assaults and the grass roots reaction they elicit: they are racist. It is crucial to note that capitalist development is not necessarily antithetical to cultural racism. The argument can be further extended to indicate that it is in the very nature of capitalist development to produce its well-demarcated racial categories before primitive accumulation can begin. With the emergence of global finance capital, the modes of reconstituting and redeploying races/ethnicities have morphed in significantly new ways. The author argues that racism in India is not an atavistic survival, but the pith and marrow of the contemporary economic exigencies. But, in what ways does global capital reconstitute and redeploy races/ethnicities? The chapter demonstrates this through a study of the Indian north-east where the emergence of the neoliberal market–state complex has given rise to autonomy movements. Most of these movements make political and economic claims in the name of race or ethnic identities. The very mark of their newly imagined minority identity or subject position is actively utilized to make claims for integration into the majoritarian logic, be it global economic or national statist. While the deployment of these ‘new’ race identities gives groups in the north-east extra teeth in terms of claims-making, it also opens up these groups to racist attacks elsewhere in the country through economic and cultural revisibilization.