From Racial Capitalism to Peripheral Crisis: Oral Histories of Zambia and Zimbabwe in the Neoliberal Age

Yao Lu, Princeton University

Drawing on oral histories from Zambia and Zimbabwe, this paper examines how ordinary citizens narrate postcolonial crisis within the global capitalist system. Despite divergent colonial formations—settler racial capitalism in Zimbabwe and extractive mining dependency in Zambia—both states pursued redistributive nationalist projects before entering neoliberal restructuring under IMF conditionalities. Interviews reveal how crisis is remembered through the erosion of state provision, youth unemployment, informal survival, and new forms of foreign capital dominance. Rather than treating contemporary instability as governance failure, this paper situates Southern African crisis within long-term processes of racialized extraction, decolonial state-making, and peripheral incorporation into global capitalism. Oral histories illuminate how race, ethnicity, and class are rearticulated in everyday narratives of poverty and belonging in the neoliberal world-system.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 151. The Global Color Line