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Paper short abstract:

By referring to the communities of contract labor migrants from Asia,South Pacific and Europe in Hawaiian sugar plantations, I will conceptually explore the link between labor position and racialization processes.

Paper long abstract:

Sugar beyond enslavement: race and labor in Hawaiian plantations

Hawaii joined the sugar economy much later than the Caribbean, Brazil or other societies that relied on the labor of enslaved Africans for sugar production and processing. Hawaiian plantations depended heavily on imported labor, provided by indentured/contract workers from China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Southern Pacific islands, Portugal, Spain, Germany, Norway, Sweden, etc., generating an idiosyncratic dynamic of racialization. In this paper I will address those racialization processes by using multiple sources: plantation records, collected oral history, early sociological studies on ethnicity in Hawaii, social literature on labor, and contemporary fieldwork. I will use these empirical references to explore conceptual work on the link between labor position and racialization processes.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper inquires into late nineteenth-century ruling elites' attitudes towards race and immigration and their strategic negotiation with colonial ideologies and practices in Hawai'i and Johore (Malaysia).

Paper long abstract:

In 1881, a discussion about the comparative merits and demerits of Asian and Western immigrants was held at the Istana Besar (Grand Palace) in Johor Bahru between Abu Bakar, Sultan of Johor, and David Kalākaua, the King of Hawai'i, following the latter's formal receptions in Japan, China and Siam. Taking this conversation as its starting point, this presentation inquires into the imbrication between plantations labour, race and attitudes towards immigration in two Asia-Pacific sites beyond direct imperial rule. By inquiring into indigenous elites' strategic negotiation with the pseudoscience of race in the backdrop of growing global asymmetries of cultural and economic power, this paper will examine local elite status aspiration in two sites typically marginalised in literature on colonialism, race and contract labour.

Indigenous leaders in Johor and Hawai'i produced unique instances of racial and assimilative-integrative discourse that have retained contemporary legacies in local nationalist discourses in both sites. A careful inquiry into the intersection between individual epistemologies of immigration and inter-regional networks of labour migration (the Chinese run credit-ticket system and the Western-administered contract labour system) permits a novel gaze into the complexities of state action and the globalization of racialised vocabularies and labour regimes in the late nineteenth century. I will thus contribute historical perspectives to current tensions between the explicitly multiculturalist successor governments that have emerged in both sites and activist indigenism that often posits an intimate link with late nineteenth-century kingly rule.

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Paper short abstract:

Plantation tourism diversifies commodities and influences the fabric of social relations, creating friction between modes of labour and spectacles of leisure in Mauritius. Examining these frictions uncovers implications of racism, race, class and ethnicity in the mobility of labour and leisure.

Paper long abstract:

Plantation tourism i.e. the diversification of plantation fields into tourist attractions is a growing phenomenon across Mauritius among travellers seeking 'exotic' sun, sand and sea paradise destinations. The influx and need to accommodate growing numbers of foreign tourists influences the geopolitical, socioeconomic and cultural demography of 'paradise islands'. Labour as leisure concerns modes of labour (formal/informal; plantation/domestic etc.) that exist as and reproduce forms of leisure for the tourist gaze. Often, these modes of labour exist within the intersection of race, class, gender and ethnicity. If the plantation system exists outside of agricultural production then we might presume that plantation tourism depends on and reproduces similar ideologies and representations of race, racism and class upon which forms of labour and leisure emerge.

By examining the forms of labour within the diversification of tea and sugar estates, in this paper I discuss how local/migrant workers experience and respond to the implications of racism, race (and racialization), class and ethnicity in the mobility of labour and leisure in Mauritius. In my current PhD project I seek to not only understand how plantation tourism transforms agricultural commodities (land, labour, tea, sugar etc.) into sites of luxury, but also how it influences the fabric of social relations thus creating friction between the lived realities of work/labour and the spectacle of leisure.

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Paper short abstract:

The paper will point out the characteristics of the recruitment, management and exploitation of the Mozambican migrant labour force in South Africa's gold mines focusing on western medicine's acted in the control of African workers, becoming increasingly racialized.

Paper long abstract:

After the military conquest in Mozambique - followed by the expropriation of sovereignty, land, cattle, military recruitment, taxes and forced labor - the accelerated capitalist expansion began to demand for an increasing and intensive incorporation of African workers in the agricultural properties, ports and urban commercial enterprises , but mainly as migrant labor for the mines. Since the last decade of the nineteenth century the economy of the colony of Mozambique has been tied to that of the neighboring Boer republic of the Transvaal where in the last quarter of the nineteenth century diamond, coal and gold were discovered. In order to escape the very poor conditions imposed by Portuguese colonialism in Mozambique, especially under compulsory or underpaid compulsory labor, military recruitment, hut tax (levied in gold from 1906), various forms of violence and other conditions imposed on the force thousands of workers sought to engage in contracts ranging from one to two years to the Transvaal gold mines. The poor conditions of recruitment, transportation, accommodation, food and work produced high rates of illness and death among workers, which required the employers and the State to create medical institutions that maximum economic profitability.

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Paper short abstract:

Presentation of an ongoing research and documentary project where focus is on Indigenous Forest Sámi reindeer herders - culture, tradition, human-nature-culture-animal relationships in the past and present - including the challenges/visions for the future, on the Swedish side of Sábme/Sápmi.

Paper long abstract:

This is a presentation of a research and documentary project where focus is on Indigenous Forest Sámi reindeer herders and culture bearers - culture, tradition, human-nature-culture-animal relationships in the past and present - including the challenges/visions for the future, on the Swedish side of the territory of the Indigenous Sámi in FennoScandinavia - Sábme.

Overall aim of the project, based in history of technology and science/ feminist technoscience/indigenous methodologies/environmental humanities in collaboration with filmmakers Petri Storlöpare and Tor L. Tuorda, as well as with Forest Sámi Reindeer herders /culture bearers Henrik Andersson, Anna-Karin Svensson and Eivor Auna, - is to analyze aspects of human security, safety and sustainability with a particular focus on livelihood of Indigenous peoples, while developing methodologies of how to make space for Sámi perspectives.

While one important issue is about making visible how the Swedish state - and its representatives - are through a continued violent industrial colonization pushing for the final destruction of Forest Sámi culture - another important part is to show how the reindeer herders and culture bearers make their way to not give in, how they continue their practices, maintain cultural traditions, and most of all, how they relate to nature, animals, humans. Such research work has so far never been made from Sámi perspectives, when studying Sámi, it is by outsiders, non-Sámi. This project is led by a Sámi scholar, Dr. Öhman and funded by SEEDBOX, an environmental collaboratory and FORMAS - future research leaders.

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Paper short abstract:

Discussing migrant textile and manufacturing laborers in New England factories during the late 18th-early 20th Century, this paper examines racialization processes through the labor rights movement and workers' insertion into US democracy through participation in cultural and economic associations.

Paper long abstract:

Late 18th and early 19th Century international flows brought southern, eastern European and Asian laborers to work in New England's textile and manufacturing mills. The migrant workers confronted their position in the labor system by negotiating with, rejecting, and integrating into the racialized discourses that sought to racialize laborers—part of US democratic political power process and legislation enforcement designed to maintain the migrants' place as a cheap, pliable labor force. This case study looks at migrant laborers from Portugal and Portuguese islands in various labor contexts in New England. examining how the laborers responded to their marginalization and racialization through their participation in the labor movement and through community wide economic, cultural, and civic associations.

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Paper short abstract:

Based upon class and race theories and ethnographic study of former and present day workers, this paper addresses the production of ethnoracial and class abstractions within the changing relations of exploitation and social closure in the Czech (post-)industrial context.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores Czech discourses on "migrants" and concentrates on ethnoracial and class categories, their production, circulation and articulation within the changing relations of exploitation and social closure in the Czech (post-)industrial context. Based upon ethnographic study of former and present industrial workers, this paper addresses the conditions of possibility of contemporary hierarchies of social worth, significance and recognition with particular attention paid to the transformations of social closure within the system of exploitation which today normalizes instability. My aim is to examine the ways in which racializations are used to counter the moral, social and economic instability.

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Paper short abstract:

Post-Soviet privatization and nation building have reshaped ethnically connoted Soviet hierarchies of industrial labor in Kazakhstan. Tensions linger between old-established working class Russians and newly "repatriated" diasporic Kazakhs sharing increasingly competitive industrial workplaces.

Paper long abstract:

This paper addresses of how class, nation building and capitalist restructuring concur in the reshaping of the hierarchy of ethnicity and labor in a former Soviet mono-industrial town in Kazakhstan. Initially part of a Gulag camp Temirtau became Central Asia's largest steel plant and a symbol of Soviet modernity in later Soviet years. After privatization to a global corporate company employment dropped and pressure on remaining jobs augmented. Kazakh contract workers replaced more skilled and paid regular Russian workers. Town and factory are still predominantly Russian, but many Russian speakers have left, while those who stayed feel threatened by "Kazakhization". Behind a facade of ethnic harmony tensions between cultural Russians and newly arrived ethnic Kazakhs trigger prejudice and hostility.

The paper, which is based on 11 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the steel plant, focuses on the vicissitudes of a rural Kazakh from Mongolia turning into a precarious contract worker and on his struggle to get by in an economically challenging and culturally hostile urban environment. Oralmans, diasporic Kazakhs that are beneficiaries of a state-funded repatriation program, enter the factory gates often taking up the lowest position in the hierarchy of labor. Being officially privileged, but marginal in practice, their social position is ambiguous. The state ideologically uses them for its nation building discourse, but under the ownership of a global corporate company the particular conditions and experiences of work and sociality transforms the Oralmans into an industrial underclass.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper will examine 1) current meanings of contribution discourses, 2) the place of suffering and adversity in the making ethnic moral capital, and 3) connections between these presumptions and moral access to different forms and conditions of labor.

Paper long abstract:

Morally worthwhile immigrants are presumed to be fleeing horrible home-country conditions. New arrivals have been expected to willing, humbly, and gratifully accept horrible living conditions in countries that call themselces hosts. Seen as members of racial groups, making ethinc cultures, it is further presumed that, for generations, these arrivals ought to suffer the worst jobs and worst living conditions in host countries. This now frozen constellation of presumptions—long operating as contribution discourse to justify social order as a moral hierarchy—informed US President Donald Trump's January 2018 questioning of why the United States was accepting immigrants from what he termed shit-hole countries instead of from countries, such Norway, from which the immigrants, he claimed, could be expected to contribute to growing the US economy, and, no less important, to happily assimilate to US culture. At the same time, the debate over passage of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), produces claims that because they have not suffered to contribute, these individuals are thieves of US patrimony. Taking the US as case in point, this paper will examine: 1) current meanings of contribution discourses, 2) the place of suffering and adversity in the making ethnic moral capital, and 3) connections between these presumptions and moral access to different forms and conditions of labor.