SOAS Research Online

Abstract

The question of materialism – what it is, how it is studied and practised, and who takes it seriously enough – has long animated debates among Marxists and scholars of race and the colonial question. Today, our contemporary socioecological crises challenge established understandings of materialism and merit a return to these debates with the goal of collective liberation on a warming planet in mind. Taking up this task, this article builds an understanding of materialism as theory and practice working towards liberation – a theory and practice shaped variously by culture, ontology, and the experience of oppressive structural conditions. The contributions of scholarship focused on race and colonial projects and legacies particularly illuminate these multiple dimensions of materialism. Among a wealth of other insights, anticolonial Third Worldist thinkers left us with an astute diagnosis of value in the world system; Black radical scholars have revealed the ontological roots of material struggles; decolonial scholars have exposed the solidification of racial classification systems as structures; and Indigenous (Fourth World) ontologies continue to maintain a commitment to metabolic repair and reciprocity. While contemporary ecology-focused conceptual innovations – such as metabolic rift and material throughput – expand materialist analyses, approaches focused on race and the colonial question bring particular insight to the global structural elements of socioecological crises and generate a materialism oriented towards horizons of liberation for all.