What is Capitalist Slavery?

This talk will consider Marx’s construction of the idea of capitalist slavery in Capital, as well as some of its implications for the black Jacobin tradition of revolutionary Caribbean thought.

Speaker bio: Nick Nesbitt is Professor in the Department of French and Italian at Princeton University. He received his PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures (French) with a Minor in Brazilian Portuguese from Harvard University. He has previously taught at the University of Aberdeen (Scotland) and at Miami University (Ohio), and in 2003-4 he was a Mellon Fellow at the Cornell University Society for the Humanities. He is the author of Caribbean Critique: Antillean Critical Theory from Toussaint to Glissant (Liverpool 2013); Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment (Virginia 2008); and Voicing Memory: History and Subjectivity in French Caribbean Literature (Virginia 2003). He is also the editor of The Concept in Crisis: Reading Capital Today (Duke 2017), Toussaint Louverture: The Haitian Revolution (Verso, 2008); co-editor of Revolutions for the Future: May '68 and the Prague Spring (Suture 2020); and co-editor (with Brian Hulse) of Sounding the Virtual: Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of Music (Ashgate 2010). His most recent book is entitled The Price of Slavery: Capitalism and Revolution in the Caribbean (Virginia, 2022).

This is a hybrid event. Register in advance for the Zoom meeting (click the register button, top right).

This event is supported by the JHI's Program for the Arts.