Event overview
Department of Sociology Annual Lecture - David Roediger (University of Illinois) and Elizabeth Esch (Barnard College, Columbia University)
The persistence of racism in structuring life possibilities across the globe and in offering ideological explanations for those structures is a pressing concern of activists and intellectuals. Yet while broad agreement that “race matters” may exist there is little in the way of agreement about how and why race happens – why it came into being historically, how it continues, who benefits from it and how it should be challenged.
In their recent work The Production of Difference: Race and the Management of Labor in US History, David Roediger and Elizabeth Esch offer an examination of race as pursued and promoted through managerial practice and thought in multiple labor systems and industries. They show how the racial category “white” came to be linked to managerial supremacy in the contexts of colonial settlement, slavery and industrial production. The study builds on and enhances previous studies of race and work that have sought to take seriously the problem of working class racism. In considering the claim advanced by architects of transnational US capitalism that they possess a particularly acute ability to manage through race the authors offer a new entry point to examine the persistence of race in capitalism.
The authors will take up these themes in talks that draw on each of their specific work. David Roediger’s talk will consider the trajectory of the critical study of whiteness in relation to Marxist analyses of the emergence of wage labor. Elizabeth Esch will discuss the historical dilemma of treating Fordism as a universalizing system of capitalist management when the Ford Motor Company practiced racial segregation and racial exclusion in its workplaces globally and supported white supremacist political formations.
David Roediger teaches history at University of Illinois. He was born in southern Illinois and educated in public schools in that state, with a B.S. in Ed from Northern Illinois University and a PhD from Northwestern, where he studied under Sterling Stuckey and George Fredrickson. Roediger has taught working class and African American history at University of Missouri, and University of Minnesota. He has also worked as an editor of the Frederick Douglass Papers at Yale University. His books include The Wages of Whiteness, How Race Survived U.S. History, and Towards the Abolition of Whiteness and Working Toward Whiteness. His The Production of Difference (with Elizabeth Esch) won the International Labor History Association Book Prize. His edited books include the Modern Library edition of W.E.B. Du Bois’ John Brown as well as Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White.
Elizabeth Esch is Assistant Professor of History and American Studies at Barnard College-Columbia University. Her work focuses on US empire and the use and promotion of race-based social organization and ideology in industrial workplaces in Brazil, South Africa and the United States. She has published essays in Wages of Whiteness and Racist Symbolic Capitaledited by Wulf Hund and Company Towns in the Americas: Landscape, Power and Working-Class Communities edited by Angela Vergara and Oliver Dinius. Her book, The Color Line and the Assembly Line: the Ford Motor Company in Brazil, South Africa and the United States, 1924-1948 is forthcoming from The University of California Press.
The Lecture will be followed by a drinks reception.
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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11 Nov 2013 | 5:30pm - 7:30pm |
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