Name: Racial Capitalism and Environmental History: Metabolizing an Integrated Approach
Start: 2026-01-30T12:00:00+01:00
Location: Gołębia 16, 31-007 Kraków, Poland

Racial Capitalism and Environmental History: Metabolizing an Integrated Approach

Hybrid Seminar by Rob Gioielli
Faculty of Polish Studies, Jagiellonian University
ul. Gołębia 16, 31-007 Kraków
ROOM 42, 12.00 pm
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For much of the twentieth century, many historians of capitalism argued that that race was secondary to class when it came to understanding the hierarchies that shape labor relations and differential forms of value and exchange. A new generation of scholarship, building on traditions that go back to W.E.B. DuBois and Eric Williams, has developed models and frameworks that show how racism and processes of racialization work with class to shape different forms of dominance and exploitation, both historically and into the present day. This new set of tools to understand “racial capitalism” are from some perspectives revolutionary, but also quite evolutionary, validating work that has been done by scholars working in Black studies, post-colonial studies, and related fields. The rapid adoption of racial capitalism has not been without its critics. And although this is an obvious bridge to connect the development of racial hierarchies to environmental inequalities, there is also an opportunity to move beyond some of the more place specific approaches common in environmental justice studies.
One way to bring the environmental into histories of racial capitalism is through metabolism. Eco-Marxist scholars such as John Bellamy Foster and recently Kohei Saito have argued that Marx’s use of the concepts of metabolism provides an opportunity to see the real material and ecological rifts and flows of capitalism. But there is another step we can make to show how metabolism makes racial hierarchy and inequality under capitalist systems, as well as connect various places at different scales, across the globe. This seminar will propose an approach to racial capitalism and the environment through a case study of the raising, processing and consumption of pigs across the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. In particular it will examine Cincinnati, a global pioneer in industrial meat packing, as a key node that connected the emerging “hog belt” of the Ohio River Valley and the plantations of the American South. Pigs raised in Ohio created security, wealth and successful lives for White farmers, factory owners and (some) workers. But once they were processed into various pork products, they were also an important, if scarce, source of energy for enslaved laborers that produced sugar and especially cotton for global markets. This discussion will ask how did capitalist energetic systems, metabolic systems, make race? And how did race make those larger metabolic systems? Is metabolism a useful framework for integrating racial and environmental studies of capitalism?
Rob Gioielli is Associate Professor of Environmental Humanities and Director of the Environmental Humanities Laboratory at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology. An urban environmental historian, his research and teaching focus on the intersections race and sustainability, environmental justice and the complex forms of environmental activism and reform movements. He is the author of Environmental Activism and the Urban Crisis: Baltimore, St. Louis, Chicago (Temple UP 2014) and articles in journals such as the Radical History Review, the Journal of Urban History and Environmental History. He has received fellowships from the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society and the American Council of Learned Societies. Before moving to Sweden he taught for twelve years at the University of Cincinnati Blue Ash College, a two year teaching-oriented institution. This talk is based on research for his current book project Race, Sprawl and Sustainability: An Environmental History of the Second White Flight.
Artwork: Sue Coe, "We are Many. They are Few” (2020)