On Friday, Febrary 16, 2024, Professor Roopali Mukherjee gave an invited talk: "The Labour of Seeing and Being Seen: What’s Racial Capitalism Got to do with it?" at the Mediations of Racial Capitalism conference.
Her talk drew from her forthcoming book, The Blacking Factory, which proposes a retheorization of what scholars in media and cultural studies have termed the “precariat,” which has typically been understood as a relatively new and emerging class of workers, enlisted to new forms of media, cultural, and creative labor within the terms of a brutal “gig economy.” Professor Mukherjee centers theoretical paradigms of racial capitalism as key to understanding historical breaks as well as continuities shaping contemporary regimes of media and cultural labor. She interrogates how labor relations of the hustle mark and mediate the relations of digital labor, its work ethics of seeing and being seen, and its uneven allocations of precarity, vulnerability, and freedom.
Mediations of Racial Capitalism met online over three Fridays in February 2024 and took its cue from the Black radical intellectual Cedric Robinson and his status as a theorist of cinema and media. The conference addressed the multiple ways in which the analytic of racial capitalism must be brought to bear on media theory, media history, and media practice. Speakers and participants considered how an analysis of racial capitalism could open further avenues for making sense of the media landscape in the present conjuncture and for responding to exigencies and struggles of our times.