Anti-Capitalist Critique and the Fetish
Description
This panel is interested in the close historical association between the discourse of fetishism in anti-capitalist critique, and representations of Indigenous peoples. William Pietz argues that, prior to the adoption of the fetish as an object of anthropological inquiry in the 19th century, the discourse of fetishism emerged as an offshoot of the Christian theory of idolatry. Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism, in turn, “was a vivid way of suggesting to his readers that the truth of capital was to be grasped from a perspective alien to that of bourgeois understanding, which knows capital exclusively through its own categories” (Pietz). In doing so, Marx echoes some of the earliest critical representations of the indio by Europeans including Bartolome de las Casas, who evoked Indigenous figures in his polemics against the conquistadors’ idolatrous fixation on gold and its genocidal consequences. Michael Taussig extends the customary Marxist analysis of commodity fetishism by attending to the constitutive erasure that occurs in the creation of the fetish that effaces its scene of production. Among his elaborations of this theory is an analysis of what he calls ‘state fetishism.’ If fetishes involve a degree of deception, he argues, they are also magical objects closely aligned with the exercise of political power, which often have profound material effects. For example, Taussig describes how the image of the devil emerges in South American folklore as a fetishization of evil that mediates the transition between precapitalist and capitalist modes of production. In addition to such vernacular uses, contemporary artists and writers often deploy the fetish as a device uniquely suited to examine the entwinement of capitalism and colonialism.
This panel will work through the many aspects of the fetish – as commodity, as ethnographic object, as state power – as it is mobilized in comparative literature and art. In conversation with scholarship on Indigenous modernism, this panel foregrounds Indigenous epistemologies whose exploration of fetishism and totemism has been profoundly misrecognized within the academy as expressions of a primitive political order and aesthetic. We, instead, seek to explore the intersections between Indigenous expressions of sovereignty and anti-capitalist critiques of the fetish as a rich counter discourse on the complex interrelations of people and things.
We welcome papers on:
- Marxist analysis of commodity fetishism:
- The equation of people and things under capitalism
- Money
- Representations of indigeneity (Indigenismo, etc)
- Indigenous representations of the (commodity) fetish
- Anthropological/comparative theology origins of fetish:
- The fetish hiding/erasing traces of its production
- Agency falsely attributed to things
- Critiques of idolatry
- Totemism
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Torin McLachlan is a full-time regular instructor at Capilano University in North Vancouver, on the stolen lands of the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh, and Musqueam peoples. His research and teaching focuses on “exhaustion” in modernist and contemporary fiction and critical/comparative literary studies.
Speaker Bio
Jonah Gray is a Faculty Fellow at the NYU Program in Museum Studies. He completed his PhD at UC San Diego in Art History, Theory and Criticism. Specializing in contemporary art from Canada and the United States, his research examines the socio-economic and cultural demands faced by Indigenous and settler artists to perform difference in order to satisfy emerging markets for artistic explorations of identity.
Speaker Bio
Madeleine Reddon is an assistant professor of Indigenous literature in the Department of English at Loyola University of Chicago and a member of the Métis Nation of Alberta. She recently co-edited the creative writing anthology, Carving Space: The Indigenous Voices Awards, with Jordan Abel and Carleigh Baker.
Papers
Speaker Bio
I’ve a MA in Modern Philology from La Sapienza. Since September 2023, I’ve been a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Sorbonne Nouvelle. I’m the doctoral representative of my research laboratory and I co-directed the CERC doctoral students’ seminar for the year 2024/2025. I’m also on the editorial board of the comparative literature journal -TRANS, for which I'm currently directing our 34th issue "Miroirs".
Speaker Bio
Rusaba Alam is a PhD candidate in English and a sessional lecturer at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia. She writes about kinship, subjectivity, and the politics of knowledge in contemporary ecological thinking.
Speaker Bio
Sebastián López Vergara is Assistant Professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature at Stony Brook University.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Sheila Giffen is an instructor at Capilano University in Vancouver, Canada. Her research traces the turn to spiritual figures across a transnational archive of anti-colonial texts written in response to pandemic crisis and modern biopolitical subjection. Her writing appears in the Journal of Medical Humanities and the Journal of Intercultural Studies.
Speaker Bio
Deena Dinat (he/him/his) is a sessional lecturer at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. His research focuses on South African literature, postcolonial capitalism and nationalisms, and global film and adaptation studies.
Speaker Bio
Vibha Poriya is a PhD researcher in English Literature at Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda.
Her doctoral work, Aesthetics, Identity, and Resistance in Contemporary Indian Women’s Literature and Visual Arts, examines how underrepresented writers and artists use evolving forms to articulate memory, gender, and resistance.
Her interests include comparative literature, feminist theory, aesthetics, and subaltern studies.