The Parasitic Nature of Racial Capitalism

Join us for a reading and book party for Jackie Wang’s Carceral Capitalism, the newest volume in Semiotext(e)’s Interventions Series. This book of essays includes Wang’s influential critique of liberal anti-racist politics, “Against Innocence,” http://www.semiotextes.com/shop/against-innocence-jackie-wang besides essays on RoboCop, techno-policing, and the aesthetic problem of making invisible forms of power legible. Wang shows that the new racial capitalism begins with parasitic governance and predatory lending that extends credit only to dispossess later, and how new carceral modes emerging since the 1990s have blurred the distinction between the inside and the outside of prison.

Jackie Wang will be introduced by Brandon Brown, and joined by acclaimed essayist and prolific fiction writer Lily Hoang. Hoang, visiting from San Diego where she teaches in the MFA program at UCSD, is the author of five books of essays and fiction, most recently A Bestiary (Cleveland State University Press, 2016), selected by Wayne Koestenbaum for the inaugural Cleveland State University Poetry Center Nonfiction Contest. Koestenbaum notes: “Lily Hoang prompts us to rethink what literature today can aspire to.”

And Maggie Nelson adds: “Rarely have I come across tenderness, venom, and fire held so intimately, so exquisitely, as in Lily Hoang’s A Bestiary…. Lily Hoang writes like she has nothing to lose and everything at stake.”


“What do we make
of the flowering vine
that uses as its trellis
the walls of a prison?”