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

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Precarity
• migrancy
• domestic work
• aesthetics

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Ida Danewid for bringing to our attention the intentionally ‘playful’ structure of Smith’s short story based on the structure of a badminton game.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sam Okoth Opondo

Sam Okoth Opondo is Assistant Professor in Political Science and Africana Studies at Vassar College N.Y. His research engages the diplomatic mediation of estrangement, aesthetics, and the ethics of encounter and co-habitation in colonial and postcolonial Africa and its diasporas.

Michael J. Shapiro

Michael J. Shapiro is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. His recent publications include War crimes, atrocity and justice, politics and time: Documenting the event (Polity, 2015 and 2016 respectively) and The political sublime (Duke University Press, 2018).