Navigating race: intersectional boundary-making onboard transnational ships

Abstract

ABSTRACT Ocean-going merchant ships provide a unique context to examine race, place and migration: ships are globally mobile total institutions, a transnational setting with a multi-national migrant workforce but no single host country. The article focuses on boundary-making among seafarers themselves, drawing on interviews with sailors, crewing agents, and a multi-sited ethnography onboard three vessels with full and mixed-nationality Asian crews. Extending scholarship on boundary-making through an intersectional and spatial approach, the article shows how national differences, segmented and gendered through the global labour market, also become racialized and reproduced. In and through the ship’s spatial organization, the seafarers perform racialized forms of difference and belonging that heighten social boundaries, often hardening them through the essentializing of cultural distinctiveness. These performances interact with other forces of inequality and forms of boundary-making, demonstrating how racial formation is intimately tied with constructions of masculinity, occupation status, and national character in and through space.