This essay considers the role of the political right in managing the politics of the climate crises of U.S. capitalism. We confront in the U.S. a political situation in which no major party has even attempted to lay out a credible roadmap to address the scale of the climate crisis. Rather, they are pouring fuel on the fire, despite the fact that majorities want climate action and despite the cries of frontline communities, movements, and scientists around the world documenting the extreme, racialized, gendered, and class-based violence of both planetary warming and the fossil fueled economy that engenders it. To make sense of this moment, I take direction from Aimé Césaire’s trenchant analysis of the post-WWII transitionary period in which our present crises acquired their modernized form, and Laura Pulido et al.’s (2019) concept of “spectacular racism.”

This introduction lays out the program undertaken by the Climate Change, Decolonization, and Global Blackness project (CCDGB) at Duke University’s Franklin Humanities Institute. Underway since 2022, the project has invited key speakers to converse with the Duke University community on the contexts and impact of climate change, embedding its understanding within the long durée history of global development engineered and sustained through 500 years of ongoing colonial modernity and modernization as the principal pathways to progress and development. CCDGB’s three interrelated critical themes allow us to rethink our relation to the planet—its human and more than human inhabitants and ecologies through the optic of its entangled histories, going beyond methodological nationalisms that bedevil analyses and privilege conceptual orientations based on a fictitious sense of separated geographies, topographies, histories and populations. The sample of essays contained here, reflecting the lively presentations and conversations, gesture to the urgency of thinking through notions of nonlinear time and inseparable (re)existences. The offering here gathers only the initial interlocutors of our project, which in the past 3 years has grown into an increasingly expanding intellectual community, but it nonetheless highlights and summarizes the range of themes, topics, questions, and methodologies that continue to guide CCDGB’s varied activities.

The creation of the Lugar de la Memoria (LUM), dedicated to documenting the Peruvian internal armed conflict (1980–2000), is the result of complex negotiations among various political and social actors. The LUM not only serves as a symbolic gesture of recognition and reparation from the State but also represents the materialization of a longstanding demand from families and survivors. Considering the historical and political context, this article examines how human rights violations are presented in the exhibition, exploring how individual memories of the victims are incorporated into a collective narrative. Additionally, the paper reflects on the museum’s design and how its architecture and layout contribute (or not) to the understanding of the complex issues surrounding memory politics. The study raises key questions about the effectiveness of the LUM as a space for the reparation of past injustices, as well as the challenges of representing political violence within such an emotionally charged and historically disputed context. Through this analysis, the article seeks to explore how a memory museum can help bridge the gap between the past and the present, fostering critical reflection on Peru’s recent history.

The immense global surge in the anti-gender discourse, driven by right-wing populism and appealing to hegemonic masculinity, appears to be a calculated strategy aimed at consolidating conservative support during times of economic and political uncertainties. Conservative governments readily exhibit tendencies to implement this globally shared anti-gender rhetoric through various forms of public policy, such as legislative regulations that restrict abortion rights, limit access to medical services for sex reassignment procedures or by imposing bans on pride marches in public spaces. The worrisome assault undertaken by heteronormativity through the state apparatus may be considered a reflection of the crises surrounding the protective welfare state, the so-called efficient neoliberal economy and masculinity itself. In this article, however, I present an ethnographic perspective to argue otherwise; that the anti-gender backlash unleashed by the current neoliberal Islamic regime in Turkey emerges as a defensive response to Istanbul’s Occupy Movement commonly known as the Gezi events.

In this brief introduction, we highlight the critical contributions of the esteemed scholar, historical sociologist and theoretical historian, Dale Tomich, whose scholarly interventions have contributed to changing the field of plantation slavery, studies of capital and historical studies in general. We emphasize his key historical and methodological interventions, particularly the importance of studying locales at several intersecting scales, underscoring the world economy as ultimately the main unit of analysis as it operates differentially across the Atlantic and beyond. Moving among these interconnected and relational scales we argue has allowed for a more complex understanding of how even ‘small islands’ like those in the Caribbean facilitate ‘huge comparisons,’ influence and are shaped by deterritorialized forces emanating from the world economy. Tomich’s work we argue, theorizes and historizes from the top to the bottom and vice versa, a necessary labor for apprehending how subject-citizens navigate their worlds in their various locales.

This essay holds a conversation with Denise Ferreira da Silva’s book, Unpayable Debt. Ferreira da Silva describes Unpayable Debt as a Black feminist reading tool that stages the onto-epistemological conditions for the unrelenting persistence of the Colonial and the Racial—modalities of power and violence—in the present, in/as global capital. A major part of the work performed by Ferreira da Silva with this reading tool is the re/de/composition of a Marxian theory of value. This work is intended to show that Marx’s analysis conceals gendered and racialized violence in the way it renders the dynamic of capitalist accumulation. In concurring with the urgency of Ferreira da Silva’s question and ensuing interrogation, I offer a different way of reading Marx’s theory of value, as a theory that illuminates how capital comes to mediate gendered and racialized subjugation, sustaining it through its dissimulation.

How did visual techniques serve to facilitate slave regimes? How can an attention to the visual record enhance our understanding of slavery? In what ways does this record survive in our contemporary visual economy? This essay considers these questions through an analysis of Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery: A Visual History of the Plantation in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World by Dale Tomich et al. and of the contested practice of “plantation weddings” in an era dominated by the photographic image.

In Mexico microcredit has deviated from its original purpose of fighting poverty to oppress those whom it was supposed to help through high interest rates and over-indebtedness. There 42% of the population is poor, fighting poverty is paramount. Three decades ago, microcredit (which is different from microfinance), took root as a new, promising tool to help millions of people, who have historically been excluded from the traditional financial system, emerge from the grip of poverty. From the outset, microcredit usurped the place of microfinance in the fight against poverty, as it set aside the most effective financial tool: savings.