Theatre, Labour, Race…

I spoke today at an excellent conference organised by PhD students at the University of Warwick. My paper offered an overview of research I’m doing at the moment on racialized work in the British theatre. It’s in two parts. The first part looks at work in the British theatre in the post-war period, arguing that there was a shift at the start of the 1990s of what Cedric Robinson terms the ‘racial regime’ governing cultural production. I argue that this can be seen most obviously in the move from de facto racial segregation to what I call, borrowing from Fred Moten, the ‘incorporative exclusion’ of racially minoritized people.

The second part of the talk turns to the question of how a racial regime is, as Robinson says it necessarily must be, ‘articulated with accruals of power’. I propose that one crucial means whereby this articulation is achieved is the organisation of work. To make this argument, I draw from Jason Read’s excellent development of Marx’s fleeting suggestion in Capital Vol. 3 that work is ‘the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social edifice and hence also the political form of the relationship of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the specific form of the state’. I take issue, however, with Read’s bracketing out of race from this process and suggest, instead, that both work and race are located at the heart of the relation between the political and the economic that establishes the specific form of a society because both proceed by a simultaneous double process of abstraction and concretion.

I have argued, then, that:

1. mainstream cultural production was subsumed to state capitalism in the post-war period under a racial regime characterised by a commitment to absolute cultural differences marked by race;

2. in this period, Black culture sought widely to sustain and legitimate itself by mapping its structures onto those of the mainstream;

3. this created the structural conditions for the incorporative exclusion of racially minoritised people under a new racial regime;

4. that racial regime was articulated with wider accruals of social power through the mechanism of capitalist labour relations.

The consequences of this proposal for the future of antiracist cultural production are, I suggest, that it can only proceed by divesting from the racial regime, which it can only do by divesting from capitalist labour relations. That will only be possible, however, if alternative infrastructures and relations of production can be built up as practices of simultaneous survival and resistance.

You can read the full paper here.