In Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism, Mingwei Huang traces the development of new forms of racial capitalism in the twenty-first century. Through fieldwork in one of the “China malls” that has emerged along Johannesburg’s former mining belt, Huang identifies everyday relations of power and difference between Chinese entrepreneurs and African migrant workers in these wholesale shops. These relations, Huang contends, replicate and perpetuate global structures of white supremacy, anti-Blackness, capitalism, and colonialism, even when whiteness is not present. Huang argues that this dynamic reflects the sedimented legacies and continued operation of white supremacy and colonialism, which have been transformed in the shift of capitalism’s center of gravity toward China and the global South. These new forms of racial capitalism and empire layer onto and extend histories of exploitation and racialization in South Africa. Taking a palimpsestic approach, Huang offers tools for understanding this shift and de-centering contemporary Western conceptions of race, empire, and racial capitalism in the Chinese Century.

An original vision for using technology to transform supply chains into value chains in order to revitalize American communities

When the COVID-19 pandemic led to a global economic “shutdown” in March 2020, our supply chains began to fail, and out-of-stocks and delivery delays became the new norm. Contrary to public perception, the pandemic strain did not break the current system of supply chains; it merely exposed weaknesses and fault lines that were decades in the making, and which were already acutely felt in deindustrialized cities and depopulated rural towns throughout the United States.

Reinventing the Supply Chain explores the historical role of supply chains in the global economy, outlines where the system went wrong and what needs to be done to fix it, and demonstrates how a retooled supply chain can lead to the revitalization of American communities. Jack Buffington proposes a transformation of the global supply chain system into a community-based value chain, led by the communities themselves and driven by digital platforms for raising capital and blockchain technology.

Buffington proposes new solutions to problems that have been decades in the making. With clear analysis and profound insight, Buffington provides a clear roadmap to a more durable and efficient system.

Working in four scholarly teams focused on different global regions—North America, the European Union, the Middle East, and China—the contributors to Religion, Secularism, and Political Belonging examine how new political worlds intersect with locally specific articulations of religion and secularism. The chapters address many topics, including the changing relationship between Islam and politics in Tunisia after the 2010 revolution, the influence of religion on the sharp turn to the political right in Western Europe, understandings of Confucianism as a form of secularism, and the alliance between evangelical Christians and neoliberal business elites in the United States since the 1970s. This volume also provides a methodological template for how humanities scholars around the world can collaboratively engage with sweeping issues of global significance.

Contributors. Markus Balkenhol, Elizabeth Bentley, Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, David N. Gibbs, Ori Goldberg, Marcia Klotz, Zeynep Kurtulus Korkman, Leerom Medovoi, Eva Midden, Mohanad Mustafa, Mu-chou Poo, Shaul Setter, John Vignaux Smith, Pooyan Tamimi Arab, Ernst van den Hemel, Albert Welter, Francis Ching-Wah Yip, Raef Zreik

In Remaindered Life Neferti X. M. Tadiar offers a new conceptual vocabulary and framework for rethinking the dynamics of a global capitalism maintained through permanent imperial war. Tracking how contemporary capitalist accumulation depends on producing life-times of disposability, Tadiar focuses on what she terms remaindered life—practices of living that exceed the distinction between life worth living and life worth expending. Through this heuristic, Tadiar reinterprets the global significance and genealogy of the surplus life-making practices of migrant domestic and service workers, refugees fleeing wars and environmental disasters, criminalized communities, urban slum dwellers, and dispossessed Indigenous people. She also examines artists and filmmakers in the Global South who render forms of various living in the midst of disposability. Retelling the story of globalization from the side of those who reach beyond dominant protocols of living, Tadiar demonstrates how attending to remaindered life can open up another horizon of possibility for a radical remaking of our present global mode of life.

Combining the intellectual history of the Enlightenment, Atlantic history, and the history of the French Revolution, Paul Cheney explores the political economy of globalization in eighteenth-century France.

The discovery of the New World and the rise of Europe's Atlantic economy brought unprecedented wealth. It also reordered the political balance among European states and threatened age-old social hierarchies within them. In this charged context, the French developed a "science of commerce" that aimed to benefit from this new wealth while containing its revolutionary effects. Montesquieu became a towering authority among reformist economic and political thinkers by developing a politics of fusion intended to reconcile France's aristocratic society and monarchical state with the needs and risks of international commerce. The Seven Years' War proved the weakness of this model, and after this watershed reforms that could guarantee shared prosperity at home and in the colonies remained elusive. Once the Revolution broke out in 1789, the contradictions that attended the growth of France's Atlantic economy helped to bring down the constitutional monarchy.

Drawing upon the writings of philosophes, diplomats, consuls of commerce, and merchants, Cheney rewrites the history of political economy in the Enlightenment era and provides a new interpretation of the relationship between capitalism and the French Revolution.

An examination of how the postwar United States twisted its ideal of “the free flow of information” into a one-sided export of values and a tool with global consequences.

When the dust settled after World War II, the United States stood as the world’s unquestionably pre-eminent military and economic power. In the decades that followed, the country exerted its dominant force in less visible but equally powerful ways, too, spreading its trade protocols, its media, and—perhaps most importantly—its alleged values. In A Righteous Smokescreen, Sam Lebovic homes in on one of the most prominent, yet ethereal, of those professed values: the free flow of information. This trope was seen as capturing what was most liberal about America’s self-declared leadership of the free world. But as Lebovic makes clear, even though diplomats and public figures trumpeted the importance of widespread cultural exchange, these transmissions flowed in only one direction: outward from the United States. Though other countries did try to promote their own cultural visions, Lebovic shows that the US moved to marginalize or block those visions outright, highlighting the shallowness of American commitments to multilateral institutions, the depth of its unstated devotion to cultural and economic supremacy, and its surprising hostility to importing foreign cultures. His book uncovers the unexpectedly profound global consequences buried in such ostensibly mundane matters as visa and passport policy, international educational funding, and land purchases for embassies. Even more crucially, A Righteous Smokescreen does nothing less than reveal that globalization was not the inevitable consequence of cultural convergence or the natural outcome of putatively free flows of information—it was always political to its core.

Rio as Method provides a new set of lenses for apprehending and transforming the world at critical junctures. Challenging trends that position global South scholars as research informants or objects, this Rio de Janeiro-based network of scholars, activists, attorneys, and political leaders center their Brazilian megacity as a globally-relevant source for transformational worldmaking insights. Presenting this volume as a handbook and manifesto for energizing public engagement and direct action, more than forty contributors reconceive method as a politics of knowledge production that animates new ways of being, seeing and doing politics. They draw on lessons from the city’s intersecting religious, feminist, queer, Black, Indigenous, and urbanist movements to examine issues ranging from state violence, urban marginalization, and moral panic to anticorruption efforts, paramilitary policing, sex work, and mutual aid. Rethinking theoretical and collaborative research methods, Rio as Method models theories of decolonial analysis and concepts of collective resistance that can be taken up by scholar-activists anywhere.

Contributors. Rosiane Rodrigues de Almeida, Tamires Maria Alves, Paul Amar, Marcelo Caetano Andreoli, Beatriz Bissio, Thaddeus Gregory Blanchette, Fernando Brancoli, Thayane Brêtas, Victoria Broadus, Fatima Cecchetto, Leonard Cortana, Marcos Coutinho, Monica Cunha, Luiz Henrique Eloy Amado, Marielle Franco, Cristiane Gomes Julião, Benjamin Lessing, Roberto Kant de Lima, Amanda De Lisio, Bryan McCann, Flávia Medeiros, Ana Paula Mendes de Miranda, Sean T. Mitchell, Rodrigo Monteiro, Vitória Moreira, Jacqueline de Oliveira Muniz, Laura Rebecca Murray, Cesar Pinheiro Teixeira, Osmundo Pinho, Paulo Pinto, María Victoria Pita, João Gabriel Rabello Sodré, Luciane Rocha, Marcos Alexandre dos Santos Albuquerque, Ana Paula da Silva, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Soraya Simões, Indianare Siqueira, José Claudio Souza Alves, Antonio Carlos de Souza Lima, Leonardo Vieira Silva

A historical account of ideology in the Global South as the postwar laboratory of socialism, its legacy following the Cold War, and the continuing influence of socialist ideas worldwide.

In the first decades after World War II, many newly independent Asian and African countries and established Latin American states pursued a socialist development model. Jeremy Friedman traces the socialist experiment over forty years through the experience of five countries: Indonesia, Chile, Tanzania, Angola, and Iran.

These states sought paths to socialism without formal adherence to the Soviet bloc or the programs that Soviets, East Germans, Cubans, Chinese, and other outsiders tried to promote. Instead, they attempted to forge new models of socialist development through their own trial and error, together with the help of existing socialist countries, demonstrating the flexibility and adaptability of socialism. All five countries would become Cold War battlegrounds and regional models, as new policies in one shaped evolving conceptions of development in another. Lessons from the collapse of democracy in Indonesia were later applied in Chile, just as the challenge of political Islam in Indonesia informed the policies of the left in Iran. Efforts to build agrarian economies in West Africa influenced Tanzania’s approach to socialism, which in turn influenced the trajectory of the Angolan model.

Ripe for Revolution shows socialism as more adaptable and pragmatic than often supposed. When we view it through the prism of a Stalinist orthodoxy, we miss its real effects and legacies, both good and bad. To understand how socialism succeeds and fails, and to grasp its evolution and potential horizons, we must do more than read manifestos. We must attend to history.

A riveting study of the booming rosewood trade between China and Madagascar uncovers an alternative approach to environmentalism that disrupts Western models.

Rosewood is the world’s most trafficked endangered species by value, accounting for larger outlays than ivory, rhino horn, and big cats put together. Nearly all rosewood logs are sent to China, fueling a $26 billion market for classically styled furniture. Vast expeditions across Asia and Africa search for the majestic timber, and legions of Chinese ships sail for Madagascar, where rosewood is purchased straight from the forest.

The international response has been to interdict the trade, but in this incisive account Annah Lake Zhu suggests that environmentalists have misunderstood both the intent and the effect of China’s appetite for rosewood, causing social and ecological damage in the process. For one thing, Chinese consumers are understandably seeking to reclaim their cultural heritage, restoring a centuries-old tradition of home furnishing that the Cultural Revolution had condemned. In addition, Chinese firms are investing in environmental preservation. Far from simply exploiting the tree, businesses are carefully managing valuable forests and experimenting with extensive new plantings. This sustainable-use paradigm differs dramatically from the conservation norms preferred by Western-dominated NGOs, whose trade bans have prompted speculation and high prices, even encouraging criminal activity. Meanwhile, attempts to arm conservation task forces—militias meant to guard the forests—have backfired.

Drawing on years of fieldwork in China and Madagascar, Rosewood upends the pieties of the global aid industry. Zhu offers a rigorous look at what environmentalism and biodiversity protection might look like in a world no longer dominated by the West.

This fourth Rural Sociological Society decennial volume provides advanced policy scholarship on rural North America during the 2010’s, closely reflecting upon the increasingly global nature of social, cultural, and economic forces and the impact of neoliberal ideology upon policy, politics, and power in rural areas.

The chapters in this volume represent the expertise of an influential group of scholars in rural sociology and related social sciences. Its five sections address the changing structure of North American agriculture, natural resources and the environment, demographics, diversity, and quality of life in rural communities.