The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) has named its 2026 class of fellows, highlighting two philosophers whose work seeks to dismantle and reconstruct the historical narratives surrounding race and global capital. Corey Barnes of Northwestern University and Rocío Zambrana of the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras, represent a shift toward treating marginalized intellectual traditions with the analytical rigor typically reserved for the Western canon.
Barnes’s project, “Race’s Shadowy Subjects,” examines the foundational contributions of early Black intellectuals—including W.E.B. Du Bois, Anna Julia Cooper, and Alain Locke—to the ontology of race. By framing their work as formal philosophy, Barnes argues that race is not a static biological fact but a historically contingent concept shaped by political forces. This reconstruction serves as a corrective to Eurocentric intellectual histories that have long relegated Black thought to the periphery of philosophical inquiry.
Meanwhile, Zambrana’s “Metamorphosis of Value” turns its attention to the early modern Iberian world. While histories of capitalism often focus on British and Dutch political economies, Zambrana explores the philosophical underpinnings of the Spanish and Portuguese slave trades beginning in the 15th century. Her work investigates the “epistemic protocols of capital” forged through the trade of captives, suggesting that the very nature of value was transformed by these early colonial systems.
Together, these projects suggest that some of the most urgent philosophical work today lies in the archives. By re-examining the systems that built the modern world—from the conceptualization of identity to the birth of global markets—Barnes and Zambrana offer a clearer view of the structures that continue to govern contemporary life.
With reporting from Daily Nous.
Source · Daily Nous
