 Most critical theorists of race and ethnicity argue for an expansion beyond economic analyses. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam hold that “While political economy is absolutely essential to any substantive left critique, it is also important to articulate culture and economy together, to conceive of them as existing in and through each other” (2016, 421). In this vein, the cultural theorist Stuart Hall developed what he called a heterodox Marxist approach to race, emphasizing the role of culture in producing the hegemony required to maintain the racial organization of labor (Mills 2010, 186). Yet Hall rejected the idea that culture operates as a sufficient cause or is separable from material conditions (Hall 1980 [2002], 1997a, 1997; Morley and Chen 1996). Hall’s approach to the importance of culture in regard to racism was inspired by 20th century Marxist theorists such as Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser and those associated with the Frankfurt School, although these theorists avoided addressing race. Some did address anti-Semitism and the links between the rise of authoritarian societies and the forms of group hatred the Nazi’s promoted, but they wrote little about racism or colonialism (Allen 2016; Farr 2018). Hall suggests however that Gramsci’s origins in southern Italy informed his understanding of how regional ethnic identities could animate prejudice and play a formative role in the crafting of hegemony.  