Maya Singhal | University of Chicago (original) (raw)
Maya Singhal is a Postdoctoral Researcher and Instructor in the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. Their current book project is an ethnographic and historical study of African American and Chinese American self- and community defense in New York City and the histories of extralegal neighborhood protection (e.g. gangs, neighborhood patrols and associations, etc.) that inform these present-day efforts towards safety.
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Papers by Maya Singhal
Neglected Social Theorists of Color: Deconstructing the Margins, 2022
Science & Society, 2022
Marx's assertion that religion “is the opium of the people” is his most famous invocation of opiu... more Marx's assertion that religion “is the opium of the people” is his most famous invocation of opium, but references to the drug appear throughout his work, providing a window into his theories of gender, the family, and the state. Responding to moral panics around a spike in rates of infanticide by opium among the working class in 19th-century England, Marx suggests that the spike was caused by women's increasing workforce participation. Marx uses trades of opium and cotton between England and China to exemplify problems with prevailing economic theories of money and exchange, but he also explains why opium and cotton were not comparable trades: the illicit opium trade in China undermined the Chinese government by promoting corruption. While many accounts of commodity trades in the 19th century treat opium as either a normal commodity or a moral disaster, Marx's invocations of opium and infanticide encompass a debate about working-class subsistence, changing bourgeois norms, and state power.
"Racial Capitalism", 2019
"Racial capitalism" has surfaced during the past few decades in projects that highlight the produ... more "Racial capitalism" has surfaced during the past few decades in projects that highlight the production of difference in tandem with the production of capital-usually through violence. Scholars in this tradition typically draw their inspiration-and framework-from Cedric Robinson's influential 1983 text, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. This article uses the work of Orlando Patterson to highlight some limits of "racial capitalism" as a theoretical project. First, the "racial capitalism" literature rarely clarifies what scholars mean by "race" or "capitalism." Second, some scholars using this conceptual language treat black subjectivity as a debilitated condition. An alleged byproduct of the Transatlantic slave trade, this debilitated form of black subjectivity derives from an African American exceptionalism that treats slavery as a form of abject status particular to capitalism without providing adequate theoretical justification or historical explanation. By contrast, we demonstrate how Patterson's insights about property, status, and capital offer an analysis of slavery more attentive to race, gender, sexuality, age, and ability. We close by using the "forensics of capital" to explore the notions of causality and protocols for determining who owes what to whom implicit in Patterson's concept of "social death."
Neglected Social Theorists of Color: Deconstructing the Margins, 2022
Science & Society, 2022
Marx's assertion that religion “is the opium of the people” is his most famous invocation of opiu... more Marx's assertion that religion “is the opium of the people” is his most famous invocation of opium, but references to the drug appear throughout his work, providing a window into his theories of gender, the family, and the state. Responding to moral panics around a spike in rates of infanticide by opium among the working class in 19th-century England, Marx suggests that the spike was caused by women's increasing workforce participation. Marx uses trades of opium and cotton between England and China to exemplify problems with prevailing economic theories of money and exchange, but he also explains why opium and cotton were not comparable trades: the illicit opium trade in China undermined the Chinese government by promoting corruption. While many accounts of commodity trades in the 19th century treat opium as either a normal commodity or a moral disaster, Marx's invocations of opium and infanticide encompass a debate about working-class subsistence, changing bourgeois norms, and state power.
"Racial Capitalism", 2019
"Racial capitalism" has surfaced during the past few decades in projects that highlight the produ... more "Racial capitalism" has surfaced during the past few decades in projects that highlight the production of difference in tandem with the production of capital-usually through violence. Scholars in this tradition typically draw their inspiration-and framework-from Cedric Robinson's influential 1983 text, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. This article uses the work of Orlando Patterson to highlight some limits of "racial capitalism" as a theoretical project. First, the "racial capitalism" literature rarely clarifies what scholars mean by "race" or "capitalism." Second, some scholars using this conceptual language treat black subjectivity as a debilitated condition. An alleged byproduct of the Transatlantic slave trade, this debilitated form of black subjectivity derives from an African American exceptionalism that treats slavery as a form of abject status particular to capitalism without providing adequate theoretical justification or historical explanation. By contrast, we demonstrate how Patterson's insights about property, status, and capital offer an analysis of slavery more attentive to race, gender, sexuality, age, and ability. We close by using the "forensics of capital" to explore the notions of causality and protocols for determining who owes what to whom implicit in Patterson's concept of "social death."