Unanticipated transformations of infrapolitics

ABSTRACT

Drawing on a decade of multi-country ethnographic fieldwork with Vietnamese migrant offshore fishermen contracted to work on Taiwanese vessels, this article presents a new account of infrapolitics that emphasizes the importance of its unanticipated transformations. To resist despotism onboard, Vietnamese fishermen planned their eventual escape, deserted ships, and absconded onto the shores of Trinidad and Tobago. Desertion helped increase immigration control and interior enforcement in Trinidad and propelled the Taiwanese and Vietnamese states to overhaul their migrant labor programs. Studying desertion turns attention toward the concept of ‘revolutionary agency’ and utility and contours of infrapolitics in transnational agrarian political economies.

KEYWORDS:

• Infrapolitics
• everyday resistance
• capture fisheries
• transnational agrarian political economy
• international migration
• Vietnam

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the Vietnamese fishermen who allowed me into their spaces and their histories. Juan Delgado, George Dutton, Matías Fernández, Joel Herrera, Hiroshi Motomura, Bill Roy, Casandra Salgado, Roger Waldinger, Edward Walker, and two anonymous reviewers offered insightful comments on previous drafts. Tuong Kim Le was a tremendous research assistant. I owe an enormous intellectual debt to James Scott. I am also indebted to those who attended the 2016 UCLA-Sciences Po-Humboldt University Graduate Student Conference. This research was supported by the University of California Santa Barbara’s Blum Center for Global Poverty Alleviation and Sustainable Development, UCLA’s International Institute Fieldwork Fellowship, UCLA’s Asia Pacific Center and Ministry of Education, Taiwan, represented by the Education Division, Taipei Economic and Cultural Office (TECO) in Los Angeles, and the Fulbright Program.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I use infrapolitics and everyday resistance interchangeably throughout the article.

2 Like other scholars (Edelman 2013; Firth 1946), I recognize the category of peasant to be heterogenous and include fishing persons.

3 Data concerning the rural and urban populations were accessed through the World Bank. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.RUR.TOTL.ZS

4 There is a chance that another Vietnamese group arose separately in Trinidad and Tobago.

5 Per the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nation’s report (FAO 2020), fish consumption per capita has reached record-high levels. Global fish consumption increased from 9.9 kg in the 1960s to 14.4 kg in the 1990s. More recently, global fish consumption increased to 19.7 kg in 2013, and is estimated to have exceeded 20 kg in 2015. Worldwide exports have grown significantly from $8 billion in 1976 to $148 billion in 2014.

6 Planning an escape and the act of desertion were two of many forms of symbolic and practical resistance that offshore fishermen resorted to. This included creating rumors about the Taiwanese captain’s sexuality and lack of sexual vitality, gossiping about the failed marriage and dire economic situation of the captain, hiding in nooks to take naps, intentionally losing or ruining fishing equipments, and hiding the fish to eventually cook.

7 Trinidad has a rich history with immigration of various ethnic groups. The result is a diverse population; per the 2011 census (Ministry of Planning 2011) approximately 37% of the population are Indo-Trinidadian, another 36% are Afro-Trinidadians, 24% are mixed, and the remaining population are either Chinese, Syrian, Lebanese, or other. Nonetheless, Trinidad has become a host to new migrants including Vietnamese deserters, recent Chinese migrants, and Venezuelans asylum seekers.

8 As discussed in interviews with knowledgeable government officials and journalists.

9 The percentage of ‘missing’ Vietnamese migrants had fallen from a high 10.2% in 2004 to 4.38% in 2018. Nonetheless, the figures remain much higher than for workers from Indonesia (2.88%), the Philippines (0.41%), and Thailand (0.5%) (Le 2019).

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Andrew Nova Le

Andrew Nova Le is a doctoral candidate in the Sociology Department at the University of California Los Angeles. His dissertation focuses on the triadic relationship between states, migrant brokers, and aspiring migrants in the context of Vietnamese labor outmigration. Andrew is broadly interested in international migration, environmental and political sociology, and race and ethnicity.