In analysing the role of the US in the global expansion of capitalist relations, most critical accounts see the US military’s invasion and conquest of various states as paving the way for the arrival ...of US businesses and capitalist relations. However, beyond this somewhat simplified image, and even in peacetime, the US military has been a major geoeconomic actor that has wielded its infrastructural power via its US Army Corps of Engineers’ overseas activities. The transformation of global economies in the 20th century has depended on the capitalisation of the newly independent states and the consolidation of liberal capitalist relations in the subsequent decades. The US Army Corps of Engineers has not only extended lucrative contracts to private firms (based not only in the US and host country, but also in geopolitically allied states), but also, and perhaps most important, has itself established a grammar of capitalist relations. It has done so by forging both physical infrastructures (roads, ports, utilities and telecommunications infrastructures) and virtual capitalist infrastructures through its practices of contracting, purchasing, design, accounting, regulatory processes and specific regimes of labour and private property ownership.
In what ways does humanitarianism uphold racial capitalism? The article draws on and expands Cedric Robinson’s arguments about the relationship between humanitarianism and racial capitalism in his ...Black Marxism. It does so by focusing on the Mission to Seafarers in the countries of the Persian/Arabian Gulf. The Mission has worked alongside state institutions and businesses, both before and after independence from Britain, to facilitate maritime trade through these Arabian ports. In the context of seafarer exploitation, these institutions – the extractive, the governing and the caring – need to ensure worker productivity to facilitate racial accumulation of capital. I argue that the Mission acts as part of the structure of political economic order to produce a racially striated, capitalist politics of care to individuated and atomised seafarers, acting to conciliate conflicts between seafarers and shipowners, maintain seafarer productivity and diminish the possibility of collective mobilisation.
In this article I will focus on particular forms of contemporary carcerality at sea. I reflect on what it means to hold people captive on the sea, and what sort of work such confinement at sea does ...for the accumulation of capital and for notions of security and sovereignty, and in both instances for the mutual effect of such captivity at sea on legal regimes and the reverse.
Many decades have passed since the Palestinian national movement began its political and military struggle. In that time, poignant memorials at massacre sites, a palimpsest of posters of young heroes ...and martyrs, sorrowful reminiscences about lost loved ones, and wistful images of young men and women who fought as guerrillas, have all flourished in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine tells the story of how dispossessed Palestinians have commemorated their past, and how through their dynamic everyday narrations, their nation has been made even without the institutional memory-making of a state. Bringing ethnography to political science, Khalili invites us to see Palestinian nationalism in its proper international context and traces its affinities with Third Worldist movements of its time, while tapping a rich and oft-ignored seam of Palestinian voices, histories, and memories.
Abstract In this Forum, six scholars reflect on Rahul Rao’s recent book Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality from other geographies, themes and radical possibilities. Part III explores ...the way Out of Time traces out its argument, focusing especially on Rao’s meaning-making, the care by which he makes distinctions and ambiguities, and the intimacy of his prose. In the first section, Laleh Khalili shows that generosity is key to the book’s method and style. Khalili takes Rao’s brief treatment of Freddie Mercury as emblematic of how Out of Time dwells in ambivalences and thematic echoes across its chapters. Chamon shows how disorientation remains a central question of the book, ‘but not only,’ since Rao also finds key ways to orient politics at the same time. In the second section, Chamon sensitively explores how Rao tries simultaneously to hold together multiple temporalities and permanences, mutations and grammars, and conviviality and oppositionality—all in order to understand how Rao’s lines of prose, first lines and last lines, exist in productive tension with the sovereign lines that make international politics possible.
Resumo Neste Fórum, seis acadêmicos refletem sobre o recente livro de Rahul Rao, Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality, a partir de outras geografias, temas e possibilidades radicais. A Parte III explora a maneira como Out of Time traça seu argumento, concentrando-se especialmente na criação de sentido de Rao, no cuidado com que ele faz distinções e ambiguidades e na intimidade de sua prosa. Na primeira seção, Laleh Khalili mostra que a generosidade é fundamental para o método e o estilo do livro. Khalili considera o breve tratamento dado por Rao a Freddie Mercury como emblemático de como Out of Time se detém em ambivalências e ecos temáticos em seus capítulos. Chamon mostra como a desorientação continua sendo uma questão central do livro, “mas não apenas”, já que Rao também encontra maneiras importantes de orientar a política ao mesmo tempo. Na segunda seção, Chamon explora com sensibilidade como Rao tenta, ao mesmo tempo, manter juntas múltiplas temporalidades e permanências, mutações e gramáticas, convívio e oposição - tudo para entender como as linhas de prosa de Rao, as primeiras e as últimas linhas, existem em tensão produtiva com as linhas soberanas que tornam possível a política internacional.
Can the pleasures of young Palestinian women from refugee camps in promenading on the Beirut seaside Corniche on a warm summer evening be political? Or days spent at women-only beaches? If so, how do ...we understand such pleasure as everyday practices, as a politics of the present moment, or conversely (or simultaneously) as mechanisms of being co-opted into a broader apparatus of consumerist ideology and capitalist complacency? Drawing on ethnographic research over 2 years I argue that these moments of pleasure are caesuras in the massive apparatus of power – welded from strands of work, neoliberal practice, nationalist certitudes and political exclusion – which binds these women. These acts of pleasure cannot easily be categorised as ‘resistance’ but I argue that they should not facilely be considered reinforcements of hegemonic control either. They are momentary and ephemeral recognitions of ordinary life lived in hard times, attempts at clawing back an instant of joy from the drudgery of the everyday, and a surrender to the enjoyment of conviviality in public and urban spaces. If they are at all political, they are so because such conviviality is ever harder to sustain in the calamity of hopelessness that characterises so much politics today.
Current US counterinsurgency doctrine is gendered diversely in the different geographic locations where it is formulated, put in practice, and experienced. Where Iraqi and Afghan populations are ...subjected to counterinsurgency and its attendant development policy, spaces are made legible in gendered ways, and people are targeted – for violence or ‘nation-building’ – on the basis of gender-categorisation. Second, this gendering takes its most incendiary form in the seam of encounter between counterinsurgent foot-soldiers and the locals, where sexuality is weaponised and gender is most starkly cross-hatched with class and race. Finally, in the Metropole, new masculinities and femininities are forged in the domain of counterinsurgency policymaking: While new soldier-scholars represent a softened masculinity, counterinsurgent women increasingly become visible in policy circles, with both using ostensibly feminist justifications for their involvement.
The embodied seafarer Khalili, Laleh
Etnografia e Ricerca Qualitativa,
gennaio-aprile 2024, Letnik:
17, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This essay is an abridged and revised version of the keynote lecture «The Corporeal Life of Commerce at Sea» given by Laleh Khalili at the 9th Ethnography and Qualitative Research International ...Conference at the University of Trento on 9 June 2023. Drawing on ethnography aboard container ships as well as literary and scholarly works, the essay reflects on the lives and bodies of modern seafarers in the Western Indian Ocean and considers the quotidian life of labour, tedium, longing and camaraderie aboard ships today. The essay shows that in order to think about commerce at sea, we have to locate the Arab world's economy in a global network of capital accumulation, and to seek in the macropolitical sweep of history the human-sized, the everyday, the embodied experience, and the affective lives of the people who make such commerce possible
PDF
