Sari suasion: migrant economies of care in Shailja Patel’s Migritude

Abstract

This essay examines Shailja Patel’s 2010 book, Migritude, and its framing of human value in feminist terms and from the vantage point of nonwestern migrants rather than Western human rights activists and investors. I argue that, through the material and affective legacy of the sari, Patel takes up neoliberal rhetorics of globalization and market-based forms of human value in order to reveal their violence, divest them of meaning and power, and imagine an alternative model of worth based in what she calls “care economies,” the work of repair and regeneration undertaken (often invisibly) by those most affected by violence and abuses of power.

Keywords:

• Migritude
• sari
• human rights
• transnational feminism
• Kenya
• empire

Notes

1. See, for example, the United Nations’ 2011 video, Kenya Maasai: The race to preserve the past at webtv.un.org.

2. See, for example, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide (New York: Knopf, 2009); the Nike Foundation’s “Girl Effect” campaign, a collaboration with the United Nations Foundation with the goal of “positively impact[ing] the lives” of girls and “influenc[ing] investment in them” (www.girleffect.org); and the 2013 documentary film, Girl Rising (dir. Richard Robbins, Docurama, 2014), among others.

3. For an examination of Maasai cultural rights and global development, see Dorothy Louise Hodgson, Once Intrepid Warriors: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Cultural Politics of Maasai Development (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001) and Becoming Maasai, Becoming Indigenous: Postcolonial Politics in a Neoliberal World (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2011). On the politics of gendered “rescue” and human rights, see Caroline S. Archambault, “Ethnographic Empathy and the Social Context of Rights: 'Rescuing' Maasai Girls from Early Marriage,” American Anthropologist 113.4 (Dec. 2011): 632–643.

4. Bilal Butt argues that, despite the promise that mobile technologies will “revolutionize” pastoral life in Kenya and elsewhere, in practice their effectiveness is more a matter of access to grazing lands than access to technology. See “Herding By Mobile Phone: Technology, Social Networks and the ‘Transformation’ of Pastoral Herding in East Africa,” Human Ecology 43.1 (2015): 1–14.

5. Kenyans for Peace with Truth and Justice (KPTJ) is a coalition of East African legal and human rights organizations formed in response to post-election violence in Kenya after the 2007 presidential and parliamentary elections and to campaign for a just response. The disputed December 27, 2007 election, which resulted in the reelection of President Mwai Kibaki, resulted in widespread protests and targeted ethnic violence, including the burning of over fifty Kibuke women and children in a church in Kiambaa Village on New Year’s Day. Scholars and human rights organizations have estimated that at least 1,200 Kenyans were killed and 600,000 displaced from their homes in the winter and spring of 2008 (undp.org; Kagwanja and Southall; Materu).

6. The ICC Witness Project is a collaboration of the work of Kenyan poets with the aim to give voice to some of the witnesses who went missing in advance of Kenya’s trial before the International Criminal Court in 2013. Patel describes the purpose this way: “Un-numbing by activating the ethical imagination was the heart of the ICC Witness project […]. And today, Kenya has just passed the Security Act, which makes that kind of witnessing a potential crime” (Iduma).

7. Most famously, Kristof is coauthor, with WuDunn, of Half the Sky as well as for a series of op-eds in The New York Times that highlight women’s human rights through a focus on their individual stories. For a typical example focusing on Kenya, see “Sewing Her Way Out of Poverty” (September 14, 2011), which tells the story of Jane Ngoiri, a single mother lifting herself out of poverty by sewing bridesmaids’ dresses.

8. See Kathryn Mathers, Travel, Humanitarianism, and Becoming American in Africa (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011) for a compelling argument about how humanitarian work in Africa constructs and regulates American identity. Mathers argues that demonstrating concern for Africans allows US subjects to resolve the tension between desire for a benevolent global America and the geopolitical realities of US empire.

9. Girl Up is a United Nations Foundation campaign with the goal of encouraging development in girls’ education, health, and safety in Ethiopia, Guatemala, Liberia, Malawi. and India, and in encouraging girls in the US to advocate on behalf of girls in other parts of the world. See girlup.org.

10. Amin forced all Ugandans of Indian and Pakistani descent--somewhere between 50,000 and 70,000 people--to leave Uganda in 1972 (Decker). The Asian population in East Africa was largely established through British coolie labor during the building of the Uganda Railway in the late nineteenth century, with subsequent generations of immigrants arriving to take advantage of the thriving merchant community established there. See Jagjit Singh Mangat, A History of the Asians in East Africa, 1886 to 1945 (Oxford: Clarendon P., 1969); and Robert G. Gregory, South Asians in East Africa: An Economic and Social History, 1890–1980 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993).

11. Amin’s predecessor, Milton Obote, threatened Israel’s military and financial interests in Sudan. Amin, who was groomed in the British military during the colonial period, was openly friendly with the British and its allies, the US and Israel (Bhagat; Decker).