Conference Keynote: White Supremacy, the Colonial Commodification of the Land, and the Corporate Structure

Abstract

In this keynote address Steve Martinot will briefly examine the specific colonial relations in 17th century Virginia between the corporate structure, the seizure of indigenous land, and the forced labor imposed on indigenous American and African people as essential factors in the development of the modern concept of whiteness, race, and white supremacy, and consider how it then appears and expresses itself in the present. Today we find our socio-economic environment to be one of total commodification (a form of labor control), a general corporatization of our society (expressed as an absence of ethics), embedded in a concept of whiteness and a supremacist sense of white racialized identity as its organizing principle. The confluence of white supremacy and corporate control of socio-political processes signify an ongoing contemporary coloniality, in which all questions of "land" and social belonging are enmeshed. Our liberation from this coloniality will entail a decommodification of the land.