Call for proposals for a symposium on ‘An Alchemy of the Intentional and the Unintended’: Theoretical and methodological possibilities of Cedric Robinson’s ‘racial regimes’
Cedric Robinson (1940-2016), photo credit: Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Posted with and on behalf of: Munotida Chinyanga, Alana Lentin, Mai Omer, and Rachel Vogler.
This interdisciplinary symposium, which is scheduled for July 3-4 2025, will be hosted by the London Arts and Humanities Partnership in collaboration with the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. It will explore Cedric Robinson’s concept of the ‘racial regime’ as a theoretical framework for analysing race in the contemporary world. We are seeking researchers at all career stages to participate in discursive, interdisciplinary panels with the aim of elaborating the potential of Robinson’s work for future race-critical interventions in scholarship and activism.
Cedric Robinson, who died in 2016, worked across an extraordinary range of disciplinary fields in his study of the Black radical tradition as a historical phenomenon and a resource for developing the theory and practice of liberation. He is now best known for his critiques of Marxist theory and wide-ranging analyses of the operation of racial capitalism. In this regard, Robinson has been critiqued, for example by Charles Post (2023), as advocating a conception of racism that operates ‘transhistorically’ and exhibits ‘a fundamental confusion between pre-capitalist and capitalist modes of differentiating human beings’. This symposium proposes that, in spite both of its late position in Robinson’s work and its relatively under-theorised status, the concept of a ‘racial regime’ – particularly when read back into Robinson’s earlier work – serves to resolve what we consider to be misreadings of the relationship between his conception of racial capitalism and historical materialism (his critiques of the Eurocentrism of Marxist thought notwithstanding).
We suggest that Robinson’s framing of each of the ‘constructed social systems in which race is proposed as a justification for the relations of power’ contains theoretical and methodological insights that could prove transformative across the disciplines of race critical studies. We also note that, with the exception of Joshua Myers’ elaboration of ‘racial regimes’ in relation to Black Studies (2022), and the use of ‘racial regimes’ in studies of political economy (Camp 2009), aesthetics (Lloyd 2018), and the law (Bhandar 2018), sustained theoretical attention has not yet been given to Robinson’s framing of every such regime as ‘an alchemy of the intentional and the unintended, of known and unimagined fractures of cultural forms, of relations of power and the power of social and cultural relations’ until Alana Lentin’s The New Racial Regime (2025). Lentin’s focus on the ‘recalibrations’ of race that both enable it to adapt successfully to changing configurations of power and expose its foundational weakness will be a central theme of our discussions.
In summary, the symposium asks race-critical scholars from across the humanities and social sciences and at all career stages to reflect on:
the significance of Robinson’s concept for their fields, and
how their own theoretical and methodological positioning can contribute to the project of deeper and finer elaboration of Robinson’s insights.
Rather than finished papers, we invite submissions for ideas that can start as stimuli for discussions towards the development of a network for elaborating on racial regimes as an analytic and methodology for theory and praxis against race, colonialism, and imperialism.
Questions could include, but are not limited to:
· How do racial regimes accompany racial capitalism, and how can they be traced in media representations, artistic productions, educational curricula, policy discourse etc?
· If racial regimes are integral to the ‘forgeries of memory and meaning,’ what is the role of truth for racial regimes, or how can we make sense of Robinson’s definition of racial regimes as ‘unstable truth systems’?
· If racial regimes ‘wear thin over time’ what practices from the worlds of art, activism, and scholarship can be shown as effective in attacking them? Or, conversely, what forms of anti-racist practice provide ‘new cloth’ for racial regimes?
· As Joshua Myers notes, ‘the racial regime is this nimble force that continuously recapitulates the idea that Africans have to be controlled, maintained, have to be disciplined through representation’. What risks are posed by expanding the analytic of the racial regime beyond the specificity of the Black radical tradition?
Submissions can be formulated as a traditional abstract or a set of questions (no longer than one page), and should be sent to a.lentin@westernsydney.edu.au and tom.six@cssd.ac.uk no later than 30 May 2025.
