Stephanie Black’s important documentary Life and Debt contains a segment that focuses on a free trade zone established in Kingston, Jamaica in the 1980s. Black provides a compelling visual and narrative account of the processes of globalization leading up to the creation of this free zone and of the exploitive working conditions endured by the local Jamaicans within its military-style guarded walls. The Kingston free zone is represented as a site of transnational labour that exists outside the territorial and economic boundaries of Jamaica. Black shows how, inside this extra-territorial space, the bodies of the Jamaican workers become tools for capital accumulation by transnational corporations and how this exploitation is effected through the maintenance of a disciplined and subjected workforce. In these respects, Black’s representation of the Kingston free zone serves as a compelling example of the continuing operations of disciplinary power in current conditions of global capitalism.
However, in approaching an analysis of the Kingston free zone scene from this critical perspective, I am interested not only in what is signified about the power configurations of global capitalism but also in the kinds of stereotypes and tropes that are mobilized in Black’s representation of the group of Asian transnational labourers introduced into the Kingston free zone to displace the Jamaican workers. The issue that I wish to take up here has to do with the extent to which the film participates in an economy of representation that intentionally or unintentionally exports what has come to be an essential trope of global labour: the existence of a dispersed Asian labour community (and of a Asian female worker more specifically) that possesses certain “innate” characteristics suitable to labour in sites of transnational production. Building on Laura Kang’s analysis of the representations of Asian women as transnational labour, this paper will argue that Black’s representation of the Asian female transnational worker relies on two representational patterns that are frequently employed in various descriptive and critical accounts of labour exploitation in globalization. These tendencies, as identified by Kang, include a spatial-temporal distancing and a visual fixing of the Asian woman at transnational sites of labour, both of which contribute to the discursive production and circulation of the Asian woman as natural labour power for global capitalism (165-166). This paper will explore the extent to which these representational limits in Life and Debt affect the film’s overall critique of existing regimes of transnational capital, and will thus use the film to illustrate some of the challenges facing cultural criticism today.
Historical Background
It is useful to situate Black’s representation of the Kingston free zone within a broader historical context related to the creation of “export-oriented industrialization” (EOI) programs beginning in the 1960s. Swasti Mitter, in her book Common Fate, Common Bond: Women in the Global Economy, explains how the EOI model, encouraged by international agencies such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, was conceived of as a way to reduce the national debt of non-European countries—labeled as “Third World”—by having these countries sell their labour power and by having transnational companies from “First World” countries provide the necessary capital (7-8). A common arrangement under the EOI model would involve the provision of loans from the IMF or the World Bank to developing nations. These loans, sometimes referred to today as “tied-aid”—would be contingent upon conditions such as the “elimination of import tariffs that [would] protect domestic industry but hamper multinationals, tax breaks for foreign investors and the creation of free trade zones . . . control of wages, abolition of price controls and any subsidies for food and other necessities” (Fuentes and Ehrenreich 37-38). This international industrial restructuring had the effect of allowing transnational corporations (TNCs) to dictate to a large extent the work conditions of workers within a particular nation-state—exploitive conditions that were often enforced rather than contested by local military institutions (Mitter 9). This configuration was apparent in “export processing zones” or “free trade zones,” strategically chosen areas where a transnational corporation would relocate production in order to evade local economic controls and to employ a low-paid workforce.
As Mitter observes, “in free trade zones—the enclaves reserved for the export-led production of the subsidiaries and subcontractors of transnational corporations—nearly 80 per cent of the workers are women” (14). Mitter argues, however, that this disproportionate gender representation must be understood not in terms of any kind of biological suitability on the part of women, but in terms of an active recruitment strategy on the part of corporate management to compose its workforce of individuals already socially and economically marginalized, and who are thus more easily lured into accepting exploitative work conditions (13). The most common of these conditions include poor-pay, job insecurity, and the prohibition of assembly.
These material consequences of economic globalization policies are explored in Stephanie Black’s Life and Debt through the example of Jamaica, a country that has emerged from a history of colonialism to enter into what is shown to be in many ways a comparably dark period of globalization. While it is important to note that Jamaica entered into its first IMF agreement in 1977, and that it presently owes $4.5 Billion to the IMF and to other international lending agencies, a comprehensive summary of Black’s portrayal of the devastating impact of free trade, international lending, and structural adjustment policies on the everyday lives of Jamaicans is outside the scope of this paper. Rather, I wish to address more specifically Black’s treatment of the damaging effects of free zones on the people of Jamaica.
In the segment focused on the Kingston free zone, the viewer is introduced to the workers who sew five days a week to earn $1200 Jamaican dollars, which is equivalent to $30 U.S. per week. The heavily-secured free zone, for which the Jamaican government is still paying back loans, consists of garment factories owned by American corporations who “are not liable to local controls” (Life and Debt). These corporations are able to evade import tariffs on garment materials, which arrive by the shipload from the U.S., are assembled by the free zone workers, and are then put back on ships, “never in effect having touched the shores of Jamaica” (Life and Debt). Such impediments on local economic flows contradict the official rationale that the free zones provide an economic and social benefit to the nation-state of Jamaica. The inequities of free zones are also apparent in work conditions imposed on the Jamaican workers, who are forbidden from unionizing, and are frequently fired without cause. When the workers at the Kingston free zone eventually organize a work stoppage to protest their exploitive situation, a group of Asian labourers are brought into the free zone to finish the required work before the factory is closed down and relocated to another area.[1] In depicting the social and economic crisis incited by the shifting presence of transnational capital in Jamaica, Life and Debt attempts to capture a sense of the lived effects of globalization in general, and of free trade zones in particular, on the people who these social-historical formations purportedly benefit.
Disciplinary Power and Sites of Transnational Labour
Michel Foucault’s ideas about the operations of modern disciplinary power—and about the disciplinary ordering of space in particular—are useful to understanding Black’s representation of the Kingston free zone in Life and Debt. The first image of this free zone is an image of enclosure. The viewer sees a large number of Jamaican workers walking through the barred-metal gates of the zone structure, which is surrounded by concrete and barbed wire walls that extend beyond the perspective of the camera. An overhead shot of the free zone depicts a vast walled-in compound, complete with its own internal streets and composed of identical-looking factory buildings. As Foucault describes in Discipline and Punish, “discipline sometimes requires enclosure, the specification of a place heterogeneous to all others and closed in upon itself” (141). He goes on to argue that the “principle of enclosure” functions through “elementary location or partitioning. Each individual has his own place; and each place its individual” (143). Foucault’s understanding of the disciplinary ordering of space to enhance visibility and supervision is apparent not only in the architectural design of the free zone compound as a whole, but also in the interior spatial organization of each individual factory. The viewer sees the open interior of the factory as the camera pans across seemingly endless rows of women seated at garment workstations. Presumably, this arrangement is intended to maximize productivity by keeping workers within close enough proximity to invite self-monitoring but not close enough to invite communication.
Foucault’s concept of partitioning is illustrated by the anecdotal account given by one of the Jamaican workers. She describes her work conditions as the following: “You can’t talk to nobody. You can’t eat. You can’t get up to go to the bathroom. They’re watching you . . . It’s like you’re working under slavery” (Life and Debt). Like the “analytical space” of the enclosure, the factory space of the free zone factory corresponds “not only to the need to supervise, to break dangerous communications, but also to create a useful space” (Foucault 144). In the example of the Kingston free zone, we see that space is ordered to maximize the utility of disciplined bodies, which themselves become places for capital accumulation. To an extent, Black’s depiction here of a contemporary labour situation in which the intense regulation of physical bodies is more primary than the molding or disciplining of subjectivities suggests a return to an almost feudal system of wage-slavery. Thus, a strict application of Foucault’s concept of disciplinary society to an analysis of the situation Black represents would almost appear to be a mischaracterization. What Black conveys in this scene is the way in which subjectivities have been stripped down to bare labour within the space of free zones. In any case, Black’s overall representation of the Kingston free zone in Life and Debt lends itself to a Foucauldian explication of disciplinary power as operating through the ordering of space.
Other critics, however, have argued that such modes of representing the space of free zones can create a sense of spatial-temporal distancing that further estranges the workers within these zones. Laura Kang, for instance, discusses this representational tendency specifically in relation to the critical discourse surrounding the condition of Asian women within transnational factories. She argues that even in the discursive forms that seek to “uncover” or “report on” the hidden realities of this situation, “often these women workers are not only relegated to a distinct locale in a faraway place, but this geographical distance is mutually reinforced by figuring them as living in a belated moment of both global capitalist progress” (176). One example that she uses is the representation of transnational sites of labour that transcend territorial, social, and economic boundaries (177). While Kang acknowledges that many free trade zones and export-processing zones “have borne little correspondence to actual delineations of geographical contiguity or international borders,” the emphasis in critical discourse on representing these zones as extra-territorial spaces “has the effect of producing an estrangement” that detracts from the local and global corporate alliances responsible for the very real exploitation in these zones (178).
In Life and Debt, the impression of geographical remoteness is effected through the visual and narrative representation of the Kingston free zone as socially, spatially, and economically demarcated from the rest of Jamaica. The restricted accessibility of the Kingston free zone is illustrated by the security procedures that the workers are subjected to. We see that, once they pass through the metal gates of the compound, the workers must then proceed single file through another set of gates where they undergo a security check. The gateways in the Kingston free zone are guarded by “zone police” who verify the “special passes” of each person passing through the gates. The signs hanging on the concrete walls of the compound also work to symbolically demarcate the space of the free zone. One sign specifies that “all persons entering and leaving the Kingston free zone are subject to be searched”; another sign states that “no children under 17 are allowed on the free zone compound”; and finally one sign specifies that “no food or any other goods should be taken in the Kingston free zone for sale” (Life and Debt). These signs highlight the social fragmentation wrought by the free zone through the tight control of bodies and of the goods moving in and out of the zone.
The free zone’s spatial demarcation is conveyed not only through powerful overhead shots of the walled-in compound but also through the commentary preceding these images. One Jamaican worker describes the free zone as an “area . . . like a state within a country” (Life and Debt). Later in the scene, the viewer sees even more expansive overhead shots that depict the free zone’s geographical positioning on the coast of Jamaica. The following commentary is overlaid with the images of ships leaving and arriving at these coastal ports: “The free zone operates within the theoretical thing that is not even part of Jamaica. It is a separate entity. So the goods come in in a container and go through guarded gates. After it leaves the free zone it goes back onto the ship never in effect having touched the shores of Jamaica” (Life and Debt). As a “separate entity,” the free zone is exempt from the usual economic “laws or the systems that normally govern a country’s operations” (Life and Debt). While such visual and discursive accounts paint a picture of the political-economic autonomy of the Kingston free zone from the rest of Jamaica, they also imbue the free zone with an aura of alien remoteness that casts the exploitation of workers within these zones as removed from the motivated and material agents of power responsible for this exploitation. This mode of representation does more to circulate the image of the free zone as a broad symbol of globalization than it does to address or probe the question of what can be done to contest those corporate powers who are accountable.
This tendency in Black’s film to produce an estranging effect with respect to the Jamaican workers is also true with respect to the representation of the Asian transnational labourers who are brought into the free zone to displace the Jamaicans. While the documentary’s paralleling of the situation of Jamaican labourers and Asian labourers within the Kingston free zone effects a critique of globalization by suggesting the international scope of labour exploitation in present circumstances, this documentary construction also further illustrates the problem of spatial-temporal distancing within the film’s representational framework.
Referring to the Asian transnational labourers, one Jamaican worker describes: “these workers are brought in hundreds. And they live in what we consider to be a “camp situation”. They’re all housed in one place” (Life and Debt). Not only are the Asian workers brought to a place that is unmoored from the nation-state of Jamaica but they are relegated to a demarcated area within the free zone itself. The “camp situation” in which the Asian workers live functions as a kind of ethnic enclave that separates them from the local Jamaican workers. What is occluded in the documentary is a depiction or a discussion of the physical “camp situation” itself. Instead, the viewer primarily catches glimpses of female Asian workers in brief camera flashes showing them crowded into transport vehicles. The only explanation given for this representational impenetrability is one provided by a voice over from a Jamaican news broadcast: “We were not allowed into one of the main factories. But our camera caught a glimpse of the interior” (Life and Debt). Even more than the Jamaican workers, then, the Asian transnational workers are imbued with a sense of remoteness or mysterious other-worldliness that “privileges the mobile, disembodied agency of capitalist accumulation” (Kang 176). This tendency to “sight” the female Asian transnational labourer but to simultaneously refuse to go beyond a surface-level representation of her situation in global capitalism is a point I will return to shortly.
Disciplinary Power and Sighting Transnational Labourers
In addition to his theorizations about the disciplinary ordering of space, Foucault’s explication of the discursive construction of “docile bodies” is relevant to the understanding of the condition of workers within transnational sites of labour. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault describes how “discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience)” (138). A “docile body,” according to Foucault is one that “may be subjected, used, transformed and improved” (136). Many feminist theorists have taken up Foucault’s concept of docile bodies to explain the operations of modern patriarchal power in terms of the disciplinary regimes of femininity that work to inscribe an inferior status on the surface of women’s bodies.[2] The inscription of a specific biological status on the bodies of women employed in transnational factories is particularly evident in the corporate discourse that delineates various groups of women as naturally suited to the types of labour within these environments. In this context, disciplinary discourses work to justify the wage exploitation of the workers within the space of the free zone on the basis of a natural suitability on the part of the workers.
A clear example of this kind of justification is apparent in the wage exploitation of the Jamaican female labour force in Life and Debt. A Jamaican woman employed at the free zone encapsulates this exploitation in the following account: “a lot of pressure; they pressure you a lot; they tell you you have to go fast fast fast . . . We have to work five days a week to get 1200 Jamaican dollars, which [is] valued 30 US dollars” (Life and Debt). In addition to being economically exploited and physically over-worked, the Jamaican workers are forbidden from unionizing. The requirement of the Jamaican workers to perform repetitive and demanding physical labour under military style conditions, to accept unfair wages, and to be forbidden from assembling are strategically planned measures of control implemented on the part of management to maintain a docile and subjected workforce.
These overt disciplinary measures are conjoined with the discourses of global capitalism that work to discipline the subjectivities of the Jamaican workers. One of the male commentators explains why the free zones were initially established in Jamaica: “The free zones came into Jamaica in the 1980s. The US government decided on a Caribbean-based initiative with the idea of creating a lot of employment at the lower level bases” (Life and Debt; my emphasis). Implicit in this rationale is the attribution of inferior biological characteristics on the bodies of the Jamaica labourers. “Lower level” of course implies the level of un-skilled or semi-skilled labour—designations which are attached to the region and the Jamaican workers as a priori characteristics rather than as historically specific effects of global capitalism. The “low-level” Jamaican workforce, which is shown to be overwhelming female in proportion, becomes a naturalized attribute of the region rather than one that is discursively prescribed. This gender and racial encoding of bodies as means of justifying labour exploitation becomes even more apparent in Life and Debt when we see that not only are transnational corporations prepared to “move the production to areas that are cheaper for them” but they are also prepared to bring in “cheaper” workforces to production areas.
Before returning to a specific discussion of the film, I would like to situate Black’s representation of the Asian transnational workforce in Life and Debt in relation to other texts that have dealt with this topic. In her study of Malay women workers in transnational factories, Aihwa Ong identifies the often-paired traits of “nimble fingers” and “slow wit” that are assigned to Asian women workers in transnational factories. Ong quotes a Malaysian investment brochure to illustrate the management literature that is typical of this discourse: “Her hands are small and she works fast with extreme care. Who, therefore could be better qualified by nature and inheritance to contribute to the efficiency of a bench assembly production line than the oriental girl?” (qtd. in Ong 152). The infantilizing label of “oriental girl” implies passivity and docility, as if these traits were naturally inherent to the Asian female worker. Laura Kang notes that to the extent that such descriptions about the youth of Asian women workers are accurate, they seldom convey the fact that “the heavy concentration of young female workers is the effect of a consciously pursued recruitment, hiring, and promotion strategy on the part of the firms” (192). In addition to the emphasis on youth, the justificatory logic at work in the Malaysian investment brochure is based on ascribing the biological traits of dexterity and super-human levels of patience to the female Asian assembly-line worker. Semi-skilled labour somehow becomes something that the Asian women worker is naturally suited for, when in effect these are “feminine” traits that Malay peasant women are required to adopt in order to gain employment (Ong 152). These examples illustrate the way in which the bodies of Asian female workers are encoded with the inherent characteristics of passivity, docility, dexterity, and infinite patience to perform assembly-line labour.
To an extent, the appearance of Asian workers in Life and Debt mobilizes this stereotypical trope of the Asian female labourer. I have already discussed the representational problematics pertaining to the spatial and temporal distancing of the Asian transnational workers in the Kingston free zone. This emphasis on remoteness is combined with an equally problematic tendency to represent the female Asian transnational worker as a natural embodiment of labour power for global capitalism. In this respect, Black’s representation bears some similarity to the representational patterns employed in many texts that aim to expose and criticize the deployment of Asian women as transnational labour. Laura Kang makes this claim:
The unexamined identification of “Asian women” with its assured aura of both racial commonality and continental distinction could work to reinforce . . . naturalizing figurations. While these laboring subjects are granted a degree of socioeconomic agency, they are figured as enabling corporate exploitation by “accepting” or being “willing” to work under such terms and conditions. The inferior conditions under which their bodies and labour power are mobilized are rendered as inevitable even for those who would vociferously decry their exploitation.” (191)
Without denying the importance of exposing global inequities, Kang is concerned with unexamined assumptions about Asian women workers that get circulated in “the most well-intentioned representations” (165). She argues that in these texts there is often a visual or textual “fixation” on the Asian female working body that eclipses “a larger scene of transnational coordination” (164). Rather than interrogating the historical and material specificities of this figure, those texts that are avowedly the most critical of the exploitation of transnational workers in global capitalism often fail to go beyond a certain level of iconic fixity in their representation of the female Asian transnational worker.
It is through this kind of visual fixation that, I would argue, the Asian female working body is figured in Life and Debt. The first image that we see of the group of Asian transnational labourers brought into the Kingston free zone—rumored to be 800 in number—is a close-up of a young Asian women in the window a transport vehicle. She appears to be a teenager of no more than seventeen years of age. Her small hands are held beneath her chin, and she stares right at the camera with an almost expressionless gaze. The camera follows her moving image in the transport vehicle. She remains an anonymous figure in the documentary. If, as Laura Kang argues, the representation of a faceless Asian women bent over a tiny Ricoh watch part has become “one of the emblematic images of the global assembly line,” (164) then I would suggest that the representation of a young Asian girl being shuttled to an undisclosed work site has arguably become an emblematic image of transnational labour under global capitalism. While this image of the Asian girl in the window may be visually compelling, it conveys little about this subject’s historical materiality. From where exactly, and under what circumstances was she, and the other 800 Asian labourers, displaced? What kinds of conditions were these labourers forced to endure once inside the free zone? What network of global alliances were responsible for bringing them there? These important questions are elided in Black’s documentary composition of the Kingston free zone sequence. Admittedly, there are narrative limits to the film, and Life and Debt is clearly a film in the main about Jamaica and about the lived effects of globalization on Jamaicans; thus, a full account of the story of the Asian transnational labourers in Jamaica cannot realistically be expected from the film. This being said, however, I question how well the film treads that crucial line between including narrative emplotments that buttress the overall politics of the film and mobilizing stereotypical images and tropes that undermine its political objectives in the end.
One aspect of the film that suggests the latter of these two possibilities is the film’s uncritical portrayal of “racial commonality and continental distinction” among the Asian transnational workers (Kang 191). In Life and Debt, one female Jamaican worker comments, “they [the Asian workers in the free zone] don’t object to nothing because they are getting paid in US.” While such statements belie the Jamaican women’s internalization of the gender and racial stereotypes about Asian workers—stereotypes about obedience and willingness that have long been dessiminated by global capitalists as a way to attract foreign investment—I wonder whether Black’s representational patterns serve to dismantle or to reinscribe such essentialist stereotypes. Near the end of the free zone sequence, a male commentator who is presumably involved in the economic initiatives of the local government, states: “Obviously we’re trying to provide employment for Jamaicans, not Asians. They claim that they couldn’t get the people in Jamaica with the skill level they needed for that job” (Life and Debt; my emphasis). The film’s naming of the 800 transported labourers simply as “Asians” is highly problematic in that it ascribes one homogenous label to a population of over 3 billion people.
Furthermore, while this troubling claim that the Asian workers are more naturally suited to semi-skilled labour than the Jamaicans is clearly a motivated figuration disseminated by management, the discursive problematic in Life and Debt resides in the fact that this stereotypical claim is not clearly dispelled. What is shown instead is an image of a group of smiling Asian women in the back of a transport vehicle. The depiction of their smiling, giggling demeanor is reminiscent of the characterization of the “Oriental girl” in the Malaysian investment brochure. Also, the context of this shot suggests that the Asian workers are now being transported out of the free zone after its closure. The implication is that these workers are now happily moving off to the next transnational production site to be exploited all over again. The depiction of the smiles on the women’s faces mobilizes the stereotype of the Asian transnational worker as bearers of an innate indifference to hardship, particularly when it comes to matters of transnational relocation to work. Black’s representational pattern is symptomatic of the tendency in other discursive texts to uncritically circulate the image of the Asian worker, and the Asian woman worker in particular, as a naturalized embodiment of transnational labour.
Granted the film’s limitations in this respect, Black’s representation of the Asian transnational labourers fits in with the overall narrative of Life and Debt, which shows a relentless process of “accumulation through dispossession”[3] at every scale of Jamaican society: independent businesses, farmers, labourers. In examining the mechanisms of this process and in mapping Jamaica’s place within the broader circuits of power in global capitalism, Black depicts the Asian transnational workers as a part of this general process that will stop at nothing to further the ends of capital accumulation. In the Kingston free zone sequence, Black shows how labour power has become commodified to the point that even $30 a week in wages for the Jamaicans is too much for the system to accommodate. It has to bring in workers that it can exploit even more. The appearance of the Asian workers in this portrait of the contemporary labour situation highlights another aspect of Harvey’s notion of the process of accumulation through dispossession, which involves the “displacement of peasant populations and the formation of a landless proletariat” (145). The film shows how the Asian transnational workers have become a constitutive component of the global mass of “landless proletariat[s]”—workers whose mobility sadly places them at the bottom of the global system of transnational labour, and thus most vulnerable to its exploitive effects. Thus, while there are some significant limits in Life and Debt with respect to the representational strategies that I have already discussed, the film’s depiction of an indifferent exchange of labouring bodies in the Kingston free zone at the hands of an inhumane system of exploitation reinforces the film’s overall critique of globalization.
Conclusion
Unlike any other periodizing concept, the concept of globalization has dominated critical discussions in both academic and public discourse. In critical theory, the trend in analyzing the complex transformations that have taken place under globalization has tended to emphasize an emergent cultural dominant characterized by “new” forms of capitalism that have replaced the disciplinary orderings of the past.[4] Without denying the importance of such analytical approaches, this paper has attempted to trouble the notion that capitalist discipline has given way entirely to newer, more diffused forms of capitalist domination by examining textual and visual representations of sites of transnational labour and of transnational labourers. In particular, the analysis of the Kingston free zone sequence in Life and Debt highlights the continuing collusion of capitalism and disciplinary power under globalization.
Stephanie Black’s critically acclaimed documentary can be read not only as a discursive text that compellingly examines the lived effects of globalization and free trade zones on the citizens of Jamaica, but also as one that is itself partially disciplined by the discourses of global capitalism. I have argued that in its representational composition of the female Asian transnational worker, Life and Debt may inadvertently re-inscribe, rather than contest, certain ideological notions about the role of this figure in the economy of transnational labour. To a certain degree, then, Black’s documentary participates in a wider discursive field of sympathetic texts that, as Laura Kang identifies, implicitly privilege the logic of “transnational capital over and against the ‘natural’ Asian female working [body]” (187). Despite its representational limits, however, the film’s inclusion of the Asian transnational workers in the construction of the Kingston free zone sequence reinforces the film’s overall critique of existing regimes of transnational capital by showing how labouring bodies become exchanged and exploited within these regimes. The broader question that Life and Debt raises is the question of how to engage in cultural criticism that grapples with the discourse of neo-liberalism without affirming the inevitability of its goals. As critics and producers of public discourse, we must be attendant not only to the multiple forms of class and gender exploitation taking place in globalization, but also to the modes visualization, description, and critique that we use to convey present circumstances.
Notes
[1] It is telling that such displacements of Asian peoples under global capitalism bear an uncanny parallelism to the forced migrations of Asian indentured labourers to the Caribbean during the colonial period. See Walton Look Lai, Indentured Labour, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian Migrants to the British West Indies, 1838-1918 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993), 184-87, for a discussion of the history of Chinese indentured labour in Jamaica.
[2] See Sandra Bartky, "Foucault, Femininity and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power," in Feminism and Foucault: Paths of Resistance. Ed. Lee Quinby and Irene Diamond. (Boston: Northeastern UP, 1988), pp. 61-86.
[3] See David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford UP, 2005) for a full account of his notion of “accumulation by dispossession.”
[4] See Gilles Deleuze’s “Postscripts on the Society of Control” October 59 (1992): 3-7; Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Verso, 2006); James Paul Gee, Glynda Hull, and Colin Lankshear, The New Work Order: Behind the Language of New Capitalism (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996).
Works Cited
Bartky, Sandra Lee. "Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power.” Feminism and Foucault: Paths of Resistance. Ed. Lee Quinby and Irene Diamond. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1988.
Boltanski, Luc and Ève Chiapello. The New Spirit of Capitalism. Trans. Gregory Elliot.New York: Verson, 2006.
Deleuze, Gilles. "Postscript on the Societies of Control." October 59 (1992): 3-7.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans A. Sheridan. Oxford, England: Vintage, 1979.
Fuentes, Annette, and Barbara Ehrenreich. Women in the Global Factory. INC Pamphlet # 2. Boston: South End Press, 1983.
Harvey, David. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005.
Gee, James Paul, Glynda Hull, and Colin Lankshear. The New Work Order: Behind the Language of New Capitalism. Boulder: Westview Press, 1996.
Kang, Laura. Compositional Subjects: Enfiguring Asian/American Women. Duke UP, 2002.
Life and Debt. Dir. Stephanie Black. Narr. Jamaica Kincaid. Tuff Gong, 2001.
Look Lai, Walton. Indentured Labour, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian Migrants to the British West Indies, 1838-1918. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993.
Mitter, Swasti. Common Fate, Common Bond: Women in the Global Economy. London: Pluto Press, 1986.
Ong, Aihwa. Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987.
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