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This paper illuminates the mechanisms through which marketing practice and institutions produced, normalized and institutionalized systemic racism in support of imperialism, colonization and slavery to provide impetus for transformational change. Critical race research is drawn on to propose paths toward decolonial and anti-racist research agenda and practice.

The paper integrates multidisciplinary literature on race, racism, imperialism, colonialism and slavery, connecting these broad themes to the roles marketing practices and institutions played in creating and sustaining racism. Critical race theory, afro pessimism, postcolonial theories, anti-racism and decoloniality provide conceptual foundations for a proposed transformative research agenda.

Marketing practices and institutions played active and leading roles in producing, mass mobilizing and honing racist ideology and the imagery to support imperialism, colonial expansion and slavery. Racist inequalities in market systems were produced globally through active collusion by marketing actors and institutions in these historical forces creating White advantage and Black dispossession that persist; indicating an urgent need for transformative anti-racists and decolonial research agendas.

Covering these significant historical forces inevitably leaves much room for further inquiry. The paper by necessity “Mango picked” the most relevant research, but a full coverage of these topics was beyond the scope of this paper.

Marketing practitioners found themselves at the epicenter of a crisis during the Black Lives Matter protests. This paper aims to foster anti-racist ad decolonial research to guide practice.

This paper addresses systemic and institutional racism, and marketplace inequalities – urgent societal challenges.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the paper is the first in marketing to integrate multidisciplinary literature on historical forces of imperialism, colonization and slavery to illuminate marketing’s influential role in producing marketplace racism while advancing an anti-racist and de-colonial research agenda.

This chapter considers a narrative attuned to the tensions of bicultural performativity (blackness and whiteness) and how that performance relates to the politics of dislocation within the context of pursuing an advanced degree at a prestigious university. It does so by providing moments from my own narrative of self that focuses on an interrupted and hybridized racial project. In this chapter, I attempt to engage the reader by communicating the subjectivity of such moments in a provocative, fragmented, and emotionally charged self-reflexive manner. My own narrative, its performative element, and its racialized nature, are then considered in relation to larger sociological contexts and forces that present bicultural racial formations and their boundary transgression as a regulatory mechanism. Out of these narrative examples, I emphasize the growing centrality of performance studies as a frame of analysis.

In this chapter, I reflect on the place of hope in activist criminology. Offering reflections from my own activist scholarship, this chapter draws out the ways in which hope structures and sustains our work across temporal frames and distinct modes of academic practice. This chapter develops a hopeful analysis of lineage, memory and resistance, reflecting on my participatory research with the Tamil community in London, and reflects on the revival of utopian thought in criminological scholarship. Hopeful imaginaries of an abolitionist future inform my scholar-activism with Reclaim Holloway – an abolitionist collective formed to influence the redevelopment of the Holloway prison site. I describe this future-oriented work before considering hope as a practice in the present, focusing on ‘pedagogies of hope’ as activist criminology in the classroom.

As communities grappled with a slew of concurrent disasters in 2020, grassroots mutual aid regained prominence, providing lessons for a more equitable approach to emergency management. Within emergency management, “mutual aid” has come to mean the specific legal mechanisms by which governments, non-governmental organizations, and private sector entities share resources. However, the term “mutual aid” has a much longer history of functioning outside of government and emergency management circles. With a recorded history in Black and Creole communities dating back to the mid-1700s, it has been widely used within communities of color for centuries. To see grassroots mutual aid in practice, the authors present a case study of Imagine Water Works’ Mutual Aid Response Network (MARN) in New Orleans, which was developed in 2019 and responded to the COVID-19 pandemic and a record-breaking Gulf Coast hurricane season in 2020. Utilizing Facebook as a platform, the MARN’s “Imagine Mutual Aid (New Orleans)” group saw its membership grow by 5,000 members from March 2020 to March 2021. Within the first week of Hurricane Laura’s landfall, the group welcomed evacuated individuals from Southwest Louisiana and quickly facilitated thousands of requests for support, providing food, housing, clothing, medical devices, emotional support, emergency cash, laundry services, and personalized care for those in non-congregate shelters, as well as locally informed flood and hurricane preparedness information for subsequent storms. Grassroots mutual aid sheds light on root causes and existing gaps within emergency management and provides a model for autonomous community care.

This volume of Political Power and Social Theory highlights ongoing conversations concerning sociological approaches to the global and historical study of race and racism. In this introduction, we discuss the challenges and promises of studying race across space and time. We emphasize that attending to race on the global scale not only improves our understanding of how race operates in current times, but also helps us better recognize how social relations of power are organized. We underscore how scholars ought to conceive of racism as central to the making of the so-called modern world. The eight papers in this volume advance this intellectual project. We consider them in conversation with one another to highlight four foundations for the global historical study of race and racism. First, the authors emphasize on-the-ground race-making. Second, they explore continuity, change, and overlapping racial orders. Third, the authors document the tensions between local dynamics and global relations, drawing attention to sites where the two meet. Fourth, the authors interrogate the relationship of modernity to the construction of race around the world. The articles in this volume are important examples of work that pushes the study of race and racism forward.

Black death on a loop online through the click economy brings to bear the mimetic violence associated with Blackness. The idea of consuming Black death as a repeat event highlights the visceral economy of online consumption practices in which Black death is shared and passed on as viral content. The foreshadowing of the Black body and Black death is both banalized and commodified as content for instant gratification spread via algorithms, tagging, likes and newsfeeds. The distributive popular economy online and the offering of Black death through a click economy redrafts Blackness through its historic fungibility of slavery and White oppression, and equally ‘virtuality’ in which both its hyper-visibility and invisibility assemble it through new modalities of violence whilst invoking new spaces to commune, grieve and experience collective grief for these demised bodies. Blackness is made perceptible through its liminality and denial of its corporeality such that both social death and mortal death are ascribed to it. This chapter agitates against the futility of Black death by its quest to read Black humanism online as a moment of empowerment and emancipation to reclaim Blackness and to defy its formlessness in the digital economy as the new graveyard of its spiritual resurrection.