The Worker as Revenant: Imagining Embodied Labor in Contemporary Visualizations of Migration

Connell, L.

This essay examines a series of visual representations of illegalized migration in order to consider how they respond to the presence of labor within global systems of economic exchange. Through an examination of the aesthetic qualities of these images it suggests that the worker’s body is repeatedly represented as a kind of specter or ghost. The essay considers how far this depiction is a product of the technical limitations on imaging migrants as they covertly pass across national borders and also how far it is a result of the bureaucratic restriction upon the attempts to record such images. It concludes that these images partly demonstrate the forms of power that are exercised in policing the border, but they also question some of the key assumptions that sit at the heart of neoliberal trading regimes. In particular, the essay indicates how the separation of labor and freight, which command quite different treatment in narratives of market freedom, is undermined by the visual blending of the worker’s body with cargo. In reading these images through the figure of the ghost, the essay argues that the commoditization of labor power is made explicit by the reappearance of embodied labor in the spaces for traded goods. In such a way, these images implicitly rearticulate the Marxist critique of the commodity’s fetish-like character by highlighting the invisibilities that this involves.

The Soul of Security: Christianity, Corporatism, and Control in Postwar Guatemala

O'Neill, K. L.

Amid unprecedented rates of deportation as well as an ever-growing gang problem, bilingual call centers have become viable spaces of control in postwar Guatemala. They provide deported ex–gang members with not only well-paying jobs but also a work environment structured by Protestant images and imperatives. Be humble. Be punctual. Be patient. These corporately Christian virtues minister to the deported at every turn, inviting them to assume and become subsumed by ascetic subjectivities. These are monkish dispositions that provide a vital lynchpin between the political, the economic, and the subjective. They also coordinate (at the level of conduct) projects of capitalist accumulation with efforts at regional security. This assemblage of industries and ethics, made in the name of control, is what this article understands as the soul of security.

Dogma-Line Racism: Islamophobia and the Second Axis of Race

Medovoi, L.

This article works backward from the targeting of Muslims in the war on terror to argue that religion and race have a historical relationship more intimate than typically thought. In particular, it argues that religion is not merely one more semiotic coordinate, alongside descent, phenotype, cultural identity, through which bodies have become racially ascribed as white or nonwhite. Rather, Islamophobia demonstrates that religion (and by extension, secular "ideology") has historically generated a supplemental racial dynamic irreducible to the assignation of color. This second axis of race distinguishes between those who compose a society worth defending from those whose interior lives or mentalities count as a threat. Like the color line, this second axis of race has a venerable history as a strategy of power. It finds its origins in religious distinctions between the Christian flock and its enemies as constituted by the regime of power that Michel Foucault once called the "pastorate" of premodern Europe. With the rise of the modern governmental state, this medieval politico-theological enemy was translated in secular terms as a figure for ideological threats to civil order, both at the global level of the expanding world-system’s borders and internally within the individual state. A supplement to racisms of the color line, dogma-line racism maps populations along the other side of Cartesian modernity’s mind/body split, in primary reference to mind rather than body, ideology rather than corporeality, according to theologies, creeds, beliefs, faiths, and ideas, rather than their color, face, hair, blood, and origin.

Sharing Time: C. L. R. James and Southern Agrarian Movements

Taylor, C.

Christopher Taylor considers C. L. R. James’s sojourn in the United States from the perspective of a series of articles that James wrote while assisting Missourian sharecroppers striking in 1941. While James’s work has been foundational to postnational Americanist scholarship, Taylor argues that the northern-centrism of both James’s scholarship and postnational American studies more broadly has elided flows of transnational interaction not mediated by the urban North. This elision is complicit with those modernization ideologies that organize both Marxist and non-Marxist understandings of agrarian politics, which suggest that sharecropping is a transitory phenomenon that will disappear with the full subsumption of rural economies into capital. Interrupting this narrative, Taylor adopts a transnational perspective oriented toward the southern United States and global South, emplotting James’s engagement with the Missourian sharecroppers within a deeper, circum-Caribbean history of agrarian revolt. Taylor argues that although rural subalterns might be fated to disappear from narratives of national capitalist development, James’s writings show how their scripts of resistance continue to circulate in a shared postnational time.

Real (Software) Abstractions: On the Rise of Facebook and the Fall of MySpace

Gehl, R. W.

This paper argues that the failure of MySpace and the rise of Facebook in the social networking site market is due in part to the degrees in which either site associates users, technology, and marketers into a successful "real software abstraction." Real software abstraction is a synthesis of the software engineering concept of abstraction and the Marxian concept of the real abstraction. This concept is used to examine MySpace and Facebook at the levels of aesthetics, code, culture, and appeal to marketers. I argue that instead of creating an architecture of abstraction in which users’ affect and content were easily reduced to marketer-friendly data sets, MySpace allowed users to create a cacophony of "pimped" profiles that undermined efforts to monetize user-generated content. In contrast, Facebook has proven to be extremely efficient at reducing users to commodifiable data sets within a muted, bland interface that does not detract from marketing efforts.

Birangonas (War Heroines), Rehabilitation Center, Dhaka, Bangladesh [photograph]

Spivak, G. C.

Reproductive Heteronormativity and Sexual Violence in the Bangladesh War of 1971: A Discussion with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Mookherjee, N.

In 1971, the formation of Bangladesh coincided with the death of a large number of civilians and the rape of many women. In stark contrast to the assumption of complete silence relating to war-time rape, the independent Bangladeshi government publicly designated that all women raped as a result of the war in 1971 were birangonas (war heroines). This effort remains internationally unprecedented and yet unknown to many apart from Bangladeshis. The government also set up various rehabilitation programs and centers to ensure the women were not socially ostracized. The history of rape of 1971 has remained in the Bangladeshi public memory through the last forty years. It has been a topic of literary and visual media (films, plays, photographs), thereby ensuring that the raped woman endured as an iconic figure. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who is primarily associated with deconstruction and a feminist-Marxist approach to postcolonialism, has been working with various organizations in Bangladesh for many years. Spivak first went to Bangladesh when she visited one of these rehabilitation centers while she was accompanying her mother, Sivani Chakravorty, and took photographs of the women and the rehabilitation program in Dhaka in January 1973. The following discussion highlights the personal, political, and intellectual context within which Spivak undertook this visit to Bangladesh along with a deconstructive reading of sexual violence during wars which she refers to as the "tacit globalization of reproductive heteronormativity."

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