Jan 2, 2025 – Stephanie Sawah Raving Through the Tension of Racial Capitalism Sitting on a friend’s balcony, I watch as the edges of daylight are submerged by pinks, reds, and finally blues. The sun dutifully dips below the horizon, and the night stretches endlessly in front of us. Our goal is to make it to 4:00 a.m., the delicious, delirious hour when one borders on party haze, afterglow, and exhaustion. After deciding we are done pregaming, we hop in an Uber and arrive at a former industrial warehouse now turned rave cave in a Toronto inner suburb. While this specific neighbourhood was long known for its abattoirs as it was the nexus of the cattle and pork industry in the early twentieth century, throngs of partygoers now clamber out of taxis and Ubers into this small street where pigs were likely slaughtered decades prior. It was August 2024, and we were here to dance. My friends and I navigated the gravel walkway to the entrance. We entered the cavernous room and immediately felt the pulsing bass emanating from the sound system standing at least eight feet tall. We always ended up in front of these bass bins so I popped in my ear plugs. It is not cute to have tinnitus, I am told. I looked around and there were queer Black people and people of colour dancing to dancehall, Jersey club, jungle, drum and bass, UK garage, and techno. I crave hearing these varieties of genres and proceed to dance well into the night and early morning. The good feelings I experience at the rave are tempered by the material realities of throwing and attending parties. The cost to attend do-it-yourself (DIY) raves like the one I attended in August 2024 can range from as low as $20.00 for early bird tickets to as high as $80.00 for door tickets. I later learned the venue owner of this particular warehouse charges upwards of $15,000 a night to rent the space for parties. DIY parties cost exponentially more than hosting the party in a licensed venue with an existing bar and sound system. DIY parties that are hosted in “blank canvas” spaces like warehouses require party organizers to handle everything themselves including getting a temporary liquor license, bringing in and stocking the bar, renting the sound system and DJ equipment, organizing coat check, finding and paying door staff and security, paying for decor and lighting, not to mention the cost to pay the talent that graces the decks. Unless the party organizer has a major sponsor like a liquor brand or music label, these parties can easily cost tens of thousands of dollars. Given the astronomical costs to throw and attend parties, can raving be a haven in which we find a break from the crushing reality of racial capitalism when it is that very racial capitalism that allows for the existence of the party? This essay attempts to hold the tension that raving is a product of racial capitalism, yet honours a desire for raving to be a space of momentary reprieve from racial capitalism that queer people of colour so desperately seek. Racial capitalism, as defined by the late American scholar, Cedric Robinson in Black Marxism, is capital accumulation based on the exploitation of racial difference (2000, 46). Said another way, racial capitalism is the idea that racism and capitalism are linked. One cannot have capitalism without past and present histories of racism. Transatlantic slavery is the example par excellence of racial capitalism. Yet racial capitalism is not a relic of history. It persists today in Toronto. Think of the many South Asian food delivery app workers on their eBikes, rushing around the downtown core, delivering food to convenience-seeking people for a paltry wage. Think of the temporary foreign workers in Essex County, Ontario, who are by and large from Asia and the Caribbean. They pick your tomatoes, raspberries, blueberries, and other delicate fruit you ate today. They do not get paid adequately, are often living in crowded and unhygienic dorm-style housing, and are not protected under the Employment Standards Act. These workers are just a few contemporary examples of racial capitalism. However, the tentacles of racial capitalism extend far into the working poor of present-day Toronto. The highest percentage of the working poor in the city are members of racialized communities, with Black community members having the highest rate of working poverty (Stapleton, James, and Hope 2019, 36). Coupled with that, Toronto is currently experiencing a cost-of-living crisis brought on by the proliferation of speculative real estate investment that created a housing affordability crisis, and decades of low wages exacerbated by COVID-19 pandemic-driven inflation (“Toronto’s Housing Crisis” 2024). Toronto’s current cost-of-living crisis has its roots in former premier Mike Harris’s neoliberal Common Sense Revolution, the mid-1990s political mandate for the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario. Drastic cuts to provincial welfare programs, introduction of “workfare” through the legalization of a sixty hour work week via Bill 147, and the loosening of planning restrictions in pursuit of aggressive housing construction were all hallmarks of Harris’s Common Sense Revolution (Boudreau, Keil, and Young 2009, 59). The impacts of the Common Sense Revolution fuelled neoliberalism in the city that fractured racialized and Black communities such that they are now overrepresented in the data on the working poor (Stapleton, James, and Hope 2019, 36). One need not look far to see racism dripping from the Common Sense Revolution’s policy reforms. It created a racial Other in its rhetoric of the poor and so-called “illegal” immigrants who were a drain on the state and failed to assimilate to white, middle class culture (Pinto 2013, 8). Raving in Toronto inherits all these impacts of racial capitalism and neoliberalism. As partygoers and party organizers who read this zine know well, the amount of labour and capital to attend and throw parties is immense. The intended audience for many of the raves I go to are young, queer people of colour who inherit decades of austerity measures from Mike Harris’s neoliberal policies and later former Toronto mayor, John Tory, and his municipal fiscal conservatism. We have to work multiple jobs to simply afford life in Toronto. Even then, we find ourselves in mental and financial peril. How many Instagram stories do you see every week of a local community member who is underhoused and underemployed seeking mutual aid? How many of us are currently struggling with life in Toronto – a city that is experiencing infrequent transit service, unnavigable streets due to traffic jams, ballooning police budgets, exorbitant grocery prices, and expensive utility bills? With all this immiseration acutely felt by Black and racialized people across the city, it is tempting to believe the rave could be a safe “third space” – defined as a space distinct from home and work – that is free from racial capitalism. The linkage between the large amount of capital required to organize and attend DIY parties and the cost-of-living crisis in Toronto make raving as a haven free from racial capitalism a difficult possibility. I hold these tensions but do not necessarily look to resolve them. In trying to understand these tensions, I was initially eager to redeem raving away from the racial capitalism that allows the party to exist. I grasped at straws – why was I so eager to save the rave from the evils of racial capitalism? Could I redeem the rave away from the fact that people attend raves for all sorts of reasons not necessarily connected to seeking refuge from the onslaught of capitalist deprivation? In the end, I opted to not resolve these contradictions, and instead held them, as uncomfortable as that made me. For me, the uneasy tension in raving lies in the fact that racial capitalism allows for the existence of the party yet that same party allows me to eke out joy and pleasure. One may conceptualize the pleasure I find in dancing until 4:00 a.m as a defiant practice precisely because I am defying racial capitalism’s normative time. Good workers do not stay up until the early hours of the morning on illicit substances dancing wildly to jungle, dancehall, and drum and bass. Good workers must get up early to do endless amounts of gig work because gig work is only suitable for racialized people. But how defiant is it to while away my time on the dance floor, potentially risking my health, when my financial privilege afforded me the ticket? Yet the queer Black people, the queer people of colour, ravers, misfits, weirdos, junglists, nerds, miscreants, underemployed, jobless, poor, working class, lazy, underpaid service and gig workers, artists and DJs who dare show up to raves do so by taking a risk. The risk they take is to come to a party when the regime of racial capitalism wishes to exploit their labour power by exaggerating racial difference. Yet they still show up and party. Ravers may not think it is especially transgressive to bubble and whine at the party – and indeed it may not be politically subversive – but it is a public pedagogy on how to live with the contradiction in which racial capitalism produces. It is uncomfortable to recognize that racial capitalism allows for the very things we find lifegiving and world-making. However it does not change the social worth of the people who attend raves. Though I may never resolve the contradictions and tensions that exist at the rave, I will never disavow its existence. It is through raving in Toronto that I found my kin – fellow queer Black and racialized people – who wish to imagine a new world even though this existing one seeks to arrest our potential. I close this essay with a final anecdote. On the drive back to my apartment in the early morning after dancing in a rave cave for hours, I watched fellow nightcrawlers climb their way out of similar rave caves to return to wherever it is they call home. Observing them, I keep returning to a nagging question, “The world is tremendously difficult for us queer people of colour. So why do we keep raving?” I feel frustrated by this unresolved question and its associated tension. But the thing about tension is it must be released otherwise it becomes a state of constant crisis – much like capitalism. Raving can provide that release, but its current incarnation is always bound up in capital accumulation. Instead I offer the dawn chorus, the part of the morning when birdsong welcomes the transition from a sky of dark blues to reds, pinks, and finally yellows. The dawn chorus is the twilight moment of release from a long night spent in tension. If racial capitalism codifies all our night time dalliances, then the dawn chorus is the all-too-brief chance for conceptualizing new worlds. The dawn chorus is not freedom, to be sure, but something that outlines new possibilities. The dawn chorus is a brief hint, a notion, the start of a new realization. But just like that, the sun dutifully ascends and we are in the naked daylight again. Whatever possibility we may have begun to grasp in the dawn chorus is washed away in the humdrums of the workday. I seek that release that brings about the slight inkling of something new. So I will continue to stay up until 4:00 a.m. in the afterglow of the party, waiting for and listening to the dawn chorus. Bio: Stephanie Sawah (she/her) is a Master’s student in the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. She is interested in how Caribbean diasporic queer people use nightlife to imagine new worlds, new possibilities, and new paradigms. You can follow her on Instagram at @goodjobsteph. If you see her at the function, be sure to say hi! References Boudreau, Julie-Anne, Roger Keil, and Douglas Young. 2009. “Tory Toronto: Neoliberalism in the City.” In Changing Toronto: Governing Urban Neoliberalism, 53–67. University of Toronto Press. Pinto, Laura Elizabeth. 2013. “Race and Fear of the ‘Other’ in Common Sense Revolution Reforms.” Critical Education 4 (2): 1–27. Robinson, Cedric J. 2000. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. The University of North Carolina Press. Stapleton, John, Carl James, and Kofi Hope. 2019. “The Working Poor in the Toronto Region: A Closer Look at the Increasing Numbers.” The Metcalf Foundation. https://metcalffoundation.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Working-Poor-2019-NEW.pdf. “Toronto’s Housing Crisis.” 2024. The Green Line. March 2024. https://thegreenline.to/issue/toronto-housing-crisis/.
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