Suchergebnisse

I draw on the Tuba hunger strike of 2014, which took place in the shadow of the collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Dhaka, Bangladesh, the preceding year, to think through questions of collective action in relation to shifting figurations of labour in moments of crisis. I ask how state, capital and (I)NGO priorities shape or re-signify dominant narratives of labour insurgency under supply chain capitalism (Tsing, 2009). I trace conditions that enable the invocation of (highly contextualized) non-work tropes as a strategy for controlling or reframing labour struggles; I am particularly interested in the emergence of the figure of the anti-nationalist or outside agitator and the work of sedition narratives in constructing borders between legitimate and illegal forms of labour mobilization. I show how the highly contingent global assemblages that emerge bear directly on the prospects for organizing (what remains of) the 'formally' employed industrial workforce in the global garment sector, holding lessons for other spaces and places.

How do we understand the 15th amendment of the Bangladeshi Constitution that restored the principle of secularism and simultaneously (re)inscribed certain populations as outside the cultural nation? I approach this question through a close reading of the Constituent Assembly debates of 1972. The precarious state of minorities, I contend, is not a symptom of an incomplete or failed secularism but a feature of the violence inherent to the nation-state form. The Bangladeshi example suggests not only that minority is a profoundly unstable category but that some minorities are visibly critical to national self-fashioning while others must be invisibilized as national others. (Asian Aff/GIGA)

My argument revolves around two distinct but entangled lines of inquiry. The first considers the spectacle of Muslim female injury/vulnerability in relation to projects of global solidarity and sisterhood. In light of the entrenched, recursive nature of prevailing associations between Islam and spectacularized cultural violence, I ask what counts as a feminist injury and for whom. Under what conditions is the normative feminist gaze scandalized, and what does this imply for the politics of seeing and not seeing? I argue that in addition to the long-sedimented orientalist trope of Muslim women's bodies under threat, secular liberal sensibilities toward pain—visible, bodily, and attributable to religious backwardness—render certain kinds of injury always already scandalous. In contrast, less spectacular structural violence does not offend liberal sensibilities in quite the same manner. In the second part of the essay, I turn to the effects of maintaining a distinction between religiously inflicted illiberal pain and less visible secular forms of suffering. Moral outrage at scandalous forms of punishment precludes attending to systemic forms of subjugation that reside in the political rather than the cultural. I show how the resulting analytical blind spots allow questions of female desire and sexual agency to be perpetually elided. I draw on examples of fatwas in shalish (informal community hearings) and legal judgments on rape in Bangladesh to make my argument.

On the afternoon of August 2, 2014, I walked into Hossain Market, one of the many nondescript multistoried buildings lining the commercial thoroughfare in Uttor Badda, Dhaka. I had gone to show solidarity with hunger-striking garment workers of the Toba Group, three of whose units were housed in the building. Since July 28, several hundred workers had occupied the upper floors, demanding payment of three months back wages, overtime, and a festival bonus. The market entrance looked deserted, not exactly the hotbed of industrial action I'd expected. "Is this where the strike is?" I asked no one in particular. A couple of young women immediately escorted me up several flights of stairs – past the inevitable collapsible gates and oversized padlocks adorning each floor. On the seventh floor landing, young student volunteers were buzzing around a media and communications desk they had set up. Inside, I found half a dozen workers sprawled across cutting tables and makeshift beds, being administered saline by a medical team provided by a well-known health rights NGO. Hundreds of others, mostly women but also some men, milled across the room. Before I could speak to the workers, Shahidul Islam Shabuj, a labor organizer and sometime acquaintance, spied me from a distance and whisked me away to the top floor for an audience with Moshrefa Mishu, president of the Garment Workers Unity Forum and the prime mover behind the "fast unto death." For Shabuj, my presence was fortuitous—an opportunity to get the workers' formal message out.

AbstractThis essay explores the tensions and disjunctures between transnational principles of gender justice and the highly contextualized desires of women who seek the services of legal aid organizations in rural Bangladesh. More specifically, it looks at the shalish, or local village tribunal in the context of efforts to restructure the shalish to make it more "democratic and gender-friendly." On the basis of a close reading of several case studies, this essay shows how feminist conceptions of rights can sometimes founder in the face of women's actual desires and expectations. The paper argues for rethinking notions of agency that conceive of individuals as pre-cultural subjects in favor of a framework in which all selves are relational and agency is produced in relation to specific cultural, political and economic logics.

This article revisits the figure of the 'third world sweatshop worker', long iconic of the excesses of the global expansion of flexible accumulation in late twentieth-century capitalism. I am interested in how feminist activists concerned with the uneven impact of neo-liberal policies can engage in progressive political interventions without participating in the 'culture of global moralism' that continues to surround conventional representations of third world workers. I situate my analysis in the national space of Bangladesh, where the economy is heavily dependent on the labour of women factory workers in the garment industry and where local feminist understandings of the 'sweatshop economy' have not always converged with global feminist/left concerns about the exploitation inherent in the (now not so new) New International Division of Labor. The tensions or disjunctures between 'global' and 'local' feminist viewpoints animate the concerns of this article. I argue that de-contextualized critiques derived from abstract notions of individual rights, and corresponding calls for change from above — calls on the conscience of the feminist and the consumer, for instance — can entail troubling analytical simplifications. They highlight some relations of power while erasing others, thereby enacting a different kind of violence and at times undermining mobilizations on the ground. I draw attention to the multiple fields of power through which much of the activism across borders continues to be produced and reproduced discursively. This kind of framing fits all too easily into existing cultural scripts about gender and race elsewhere, and produces ethical obligations to 'save' women workers.