In Defense of Historical Specificity: Theorizing Racial Capitalism with Stuart Hall

Dr. Sara Bufkin (Assistant Professor in Political Theory, University of Birmingham)

Wednesday 11th February 2026, 3 to 4.30pm

Location: Rendall, Seminar Room 4

In this talk, I intervene in recent debates over how to theorize racial capitalism by returning to the work of Stuart Hall. Hall never used the concept of “racial capitalism” himself, but he spent a good deal of time working out a version of Marxism that could adequately account for the “colonial relation” and for the racisms operative in the UK as a declining imperial metropole. Hall adopted a conjunctural approach to the critique of racialized capitalisms — a method which descended from the abstract level of formal theories of capital to the concrete analysis of discrete capitalist formations, structured in racial dominance. Crucially, he claimed that these historical articulations between capital accumulation and racism were contingent constellations that had to be produced and then reproduced — and that they were more contradictory, ambivalent and one might say “lumpy” or “fractious’ relations than many abstractly functionalist accounts of racial capitalism would presume. I argue that Hall's approach makes space for a more sustained consideration of both (a) the state and (b) a materialist account of popular culture in shaping the terrain upon which racisms and racializations take shape.

As part of "Critical Theory, Critical Practice" Seminar Series of the Power, Space, and Cultural Change (PSCC) Research Cluster