Reading the Mediterranean Border through Racial Capitalism
Reading the Mediterranean Border through Racial Capitalism
Research Factory
Mi, 15 January 2025, 11:00-13:00
Online lecture (Hybrid: AM 02)
With: Prof Dr Timothy Raeymaekers (Department of History and Cultures, University of Bologna / Department of Geography, University of Zurich)
[in English]
In this talk, Timothy Raeymaekers will present his monograph The Natural Border: Bounding Migrant Farmwork in the Black Mediterranean (Cornell 2024). Telling the recent history of Mediterranean agri-food capitalism from the perspective of marginalised Black African farm workers, the book argues that, in the context of global supply chains and repressive border regimes, agrarian production and reproduction are based on fundamental racial hierarchies. Taking the example of the tomato - a typical 'Made in Italy' commodity- the book furthermore interrogates how political boundaries are drawn around the land and the labour needed for its production, what technologies of exclusion and inclusion enable capitalist operations to take place, and which practices structure the allocation, use and commodification of land and labour across global commodity chains - thus offering a new conceptualization of territorial boundaries from a critical political ecology and environmental justice perspective.
SHORT BIOGRAPHY (100 words): Timothy Raeymaekers is Senior Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Cultures at the University of Bologna, and Affiliated Researcher in the Department of Geography at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. His research delves into the complex geographies of agri-food and mineral supply chains in Central Africa and the Mediterranean.
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