Globalizations
Volume 16, Issue 4, 2019, Pages 575-591

Subalterns ‘speak’: migrant bodies, and the performativity of the arts (Article)

Opondo S.O.* , Shapiro M.J.
  • a Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY, United States
  • b University of Hawai’i, Honolulu, HI, United States

Abstract

The contemporary globalizing world has unleashed new flows of migrant labour, among which are young women working in homes. As is well known, many find themselves in a situation of virtual slavery, having no juridical protections against both physical and emotional abuse, and against being held in servitude against their wills. While the situation of migrant domestic workers is increasingly well known, there has been little analysis of how their precarious lives look from their points of view and the complex set of affects and relations that make their lives meaningful. The following investigation treats the way their precarity can become political critique. It focuses on a critical locus of enunciation supplied by the conditions of migrant female domestic workers as it is articulated not in ethnographic work that solicits their actual voices, but through a focus on literary and cinematic texts in which the female protagonists compare domestic servitude to colonialism (in the case of Ousmane Sembene’s film Black Girl) and to war crimes (in the case of Zadie Smith’s story, The embassy of Cambodia). Mediated with some thoughts from Gayatri Spivak’s Can the subaltern speak and Mahasweta Devi’s short story The breast-giver, we also reflect on the ethical significance of aesthetic interruptions through other genres as illustrated by our reading of images from Ramiro Gomez’s Happy Hills painting and cardboard cutting series. In effect, the artistic texts we analyse raise an important ethico-political question regarding the effect of capitalist modernization on ethical life while provoking us to recognize the ethical weight of proximate and distant others. © 2018, © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Author Keywords

precarity migrancy aesthetics domestic work

Index Keywords

[No Keywords available]

Link
https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85048376101&doi=10.1080%2f14747731.2018.1473373&partnerID=40&md5=4b84e4c62e5d6c218a065b37d2b380aa

DOI: 10.1080/14747731.2018.1473373
ISSN: 14747731
Original Language: English