Cargo Culture: Literature in an Age of Mass Displacement

Abstract

The full implication of the identification of the rights of man with the rights of peoples in the European nation-state system came to light only when a growing number of people and peoples suddenly appeared whose elementary rights were not safeguarded by the ordinary functioning of the nation-state. —Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism Much of what is classified today as the literature of migration does not reflect the conditions of extreme duress of those who are trafficked from one part of the world to another. In many instances, postcolonial theories of hybridity and the literary forms in which such theories are instantiated were the product of elite forms of migration that have little connection to the experience of working-class migrants (Ahmad 2008). Even literary works that are more grounded in mass experience nonetheless reflect the tribulations of first- or second-generation diasporic populations who migrated to the developed nations of Western Europe and the United States legally. Such migration was largely a product of what were the now clearly anomalous conditions of labor shortage that obtained for the thirty or so years following World War II and the creation of the postwar social compact between capital, government, and the organized working class within developed nations. In the United States, for example, Congress established the bracero contract-labor program, which lasted from the early 1940s through the mid-1960s, in response to such labor shortages; similar guest worker programs were set up in Western European nations such as Germany, France, and Britain after the war (Bacon 2008). While residence was often initially tied to work, the communities who settled