Colonial Domesticity and Social Reproduction

This lecture considers the centrality of forms of domesticity, such as family, kinship, and schooling, to the social reproduction of colonialism and racial capitalism in the United States. Colonial and capitalist social relations are materially reproduced through feminized care work, household, and biological labor. While homes and households are primary sites for the invisible and mostly unwaged labors of colonized, racialized, and immigrant women that reproduce human being, social reproduction takes place on plantations, in schools, factories, on assembly lines, in hospitals and prisons and in other institutions, at both intimate and global scales.