Plantation Labour Research Articles

Re-encodation of GUMIL Hawaii Writers’ Association as a Diacritic Site for Ilocano Hawaiian Representation

The Filipino immigrants in Hawaii, particularly the Ilocanos, an ethnolinguistic group coming from the Northern part of the Philippines write not only narratives about their diasporic lives but work towards redefinition of themselves through GUMIL Hawaii writing. The study particularly recuperates and re-encodes GUMIL Hawaii (a collective writers’ association), as a diacritic site and discourse in the reterritorialization and contestation of space in multiethnic Hawaii and US as a monologic culture. Thus, the very contour that Ilocano-Hawaiian diasporic writing takes, through GUMIL Hawaii writers’ association is reactive and largely determined by their history as US’s colonial and neocolonial subjects, their history as sugar plantation labor, the pressures and specificities of Hawaii as a host culture and more broadly, America’s ideological imperatives and dehistoricizing logic.

Bound for Slavery? A Quaker Humanitarian Critique of Waged Labour at Koloa Plantation, Hawaii, 1836

The humanitarian testimonials of the concerned travellers, Quakers Daniel and Charles Wheeler, from Koloa Plantation on the Hawaiian Island of Kauai in June 1836, problematised the early years of the sugar plantation’s wage labour system. Although the newly introduced wage system was intended by the resident missionaries and the founding company to liberate the plantation labourers from existing feudal obligations, the Wheelers claimed a different form of slavery was being imposed on the indigenous Hawaiians employed within the new system. Produced in a climate of protectionist and abolitionist fervour in the mid-1830s age of reform, the Quaker humanitarian publications reflected wider contemporary concerns for indigenous populations and post-British emancipation labour conditions. Through examination of the Wheelers’ critique of Koloa in the formative years of Hawaii’s foreign-owned sugar plantation system, this article contributes a new perspective on the critical question of whether earning wages under the conditions at Kauai in 1836 excluded the Koloa Plantation labourer from slavery.

LITERACY PATTERN AND LEVEL OF DEVELOPMENT OF THE TEA GARDEN WORKERS OF DOOARS REGION, WEST BENGAL.

The tea industry is one of the oldest industries in India. It occupies a pivotal position in the country’s economy. The plantation labourers of Dooars of West Bengal were mostly from the weaker section of the society and were tortured and exploited by the local landlords. They have been kept or are forced to remain at the lowest rungs of the society due to lower rate of literacy level and unawareness. Education, being the major component of human resource development is one of the most important indicators of the socio-economic and political development of the tea workers. The depth of socio-cultural heritage of this group is judged from the percentage of literacy and educational advancement. It is a powerful instrument to change the values and attitude of the people and to create in them the urge of the necessary motivation to achieve social mobility and social ascendancy. The main objectives of the present are to study the literacy pattern and level of development of the tea garden workers of the Dooars region in West Bengal. Both primary and secondary data are used for the present study. For collecting the primary information from the workers of selected 30 tea gardens of Dooars region, the stratified random sampling technique is used for the present study. Statistical measures including Standard score, Composite Z scores are used to evaluate the literacy pattern and level of development of the workers and the results are presented in the form of relevant maps and diagrams by applying suitable cartographic techniques. The major finding of the present paper is that the vast numbers of people of the selected tea gardens of the Dooars region are illiterate. It can be also observed that the percentage of female literacy rate is decreasing compared to the male counterpart with the advancement of education in the hierarchical level. Considering the factors responsible for educational backwardness, prompt measures for its improvement are considered and highly necessary.

The World Bank, the Tata Conglomerate and Tea Workers in India

8 | International Union Rights | 24/1 FOCUS | WORLD BANK AND IMF The World Bank, the Tata Conglomerate and Tea Workers in India In September 2016, the Compliance Advisor Ombudsman (CAO) for the World Bank's private investment arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), issued a striking report on the Bank's investment in Indian tea plantations partowned by the massive Tata conglomerate and employing more than 30,000 workers. For a decade, the Bank had been involved with Tata in a project to spin the plantations off into a separate company. Smitten by Tata's reputation for social responsibility and plans for worker ownership, the Bank had ignored concerns about labour and living conditions. When problems arose, management denied them and the Bank provided cover. The CAO report lifted any remaining basis for that cover. As Wilfred Topno – one of those activists who initiated the CAO process – said of the report, it has validated concerns that workers have been raising for years. In carefully framed but unrelentingly critical language, the report vindicated complaints about poverty wages, dreadful living conditions, and harms from pesticide use. It savaged the Bank for relying on domestic regulation and third party certification. Even more significantly, the report exposed some of the thorniest and most vehemently denied violations of labour rights, union-management complicity and exploitation through a share-plan that was fundamental to the Bank's engagement in the first place. From Colonialism to CSR The tea sector in India began in the late nineteenth century as a public-private colonial project designed to break the dependence on China and provide for growing demand in Europe. Private companies were granted public land to create plantations, the most successful of which were established in Darjeeling and Assam. It is nearly a sin qua non of colonial mass labour projects that local populations, with established economic networks, are not easily drawn into wage labour. As a result, labour had to be recruited, transported, and, then, policed. In Assam, this involved massive displacement of primarily tribal populations, or Adivasis, from the areas that today form Jharkand and Odisha. Uprooted from their land, these populations became entirely dependent on the plantations for their survival, including healthcare, housing, and eventually education. Mobility was limited because of the isolation of the plantations and workers' dependence on 'benefits'. Cash wages were kept extraordinarily low, calculated on the basis of two working adults in each household and in-kind payments of food, housing and health care. It was nearly impossible for workers to build up savings and they had no right to acquire land or housing of their own on the plantation. There were criminal penalties for 'absconding' and collusion among planters insured that there was no variation on wages or conditions among the different plantations. While the criminal penalties are gone, much of the rest remains in place, including the fixed sectoral wage, the dependence on benefits and the extraordinary isolation. After independence, India adopted the Plantation Labour Act (PLA), a progressive law requiring plantations to provide adequate housing, sanitation, health care and education. But active enforcement of the PLA has been sorely lacking. According to Virginius Xaxa, a prominent Indian Sociologist and one of leading scholars in the field, there has been no serious effort to comply with the PLA by either companies or the state since the 1960s. These limitations might be less significant if there were active labour unions on the plantations. But government and planters have successfully colluded to allow the Assam Chah Mazdoor Sangha (ACMS, Assam Tea Workers Union) to maintain a near monopoly since before independence. For workers, it has rarely served as anything other than an arm of management. For most of the last century, these terrible conditions, the corrupt monopoly union in Assam and the failure of the government to enforce the PLA were well documented. But in Assam in particular, companies had little incentive either to improve conditions or deny them. The terms of the debate began to shift in the late 1990s, when Russia stopped buying large bulk quantities of Indian tea after the fall of the Soviet Union, leading to a massive drop in producer prices. More than a hundred plantations...

Asian Indentured Labor in the Age of African American Emancipation

AbstractThis article examines transnational connections between African American emancipation in the United States and Chinese and Indian indenture within the British Empire. In an era of social upheaval and capitalist crisis, planters and colonial officials envisioned coolies as a source of uninterrupted plantation labor. This vision was often bound to the conditions of African American emancipation. In British Honduras, colonial officials sought to bring emancipated African Americans to the colony as labor for sugar plantations. When this project failed, interest turned toward indentured Chinese labor managed by white planters from the U.S. South. In India’s North-Western Provinces, the outbreak of famine came to be seen as a “kindred distress” to the crisis in Lancashire’s textile industry. Unemployed English factory workers were seen as suffering from famine due to the scarcity of slave-produced cotton, just as colonial subjects suffered from scarcity of food. While some weavers in the North-Western Provinces were taken into the coolie trade, the emigration of unemployed Lancashire weavers was looked to as a possible alternative to indenture. Drawing upon archives in Australia, Belize, Britain, India, and the United States, this article explores connections between seemingly disparate histories. By focusing upon their interrelation, this article locates the formation of crisis not in raw materials, but rather within a transnational struggle over racialized labor exploitation, or what W.E.B. Du Bois called the “dark and vast sea of human labor.”

From King Cane to the Last Sugar Mill: Agricultural Technology and the Making of Hawai‘i’s Premier Crop by C Allan Jones and Robert V Osgood

Reviewed by: From King Cane to the Last Sugar Mill: Agricultural Technology and the Making of Hawai‘i’s Premier Crop by C Allan Jones and Robert V Osgood A Kaipo T. Matsumoto From King Cane to the Last Sugar Mill: Agricultural Technology and the Making of Hawai‘i’s Premier Crop, by C Allan Jones and Robert V Osgood. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015. isbn 978-0-8248-4000-6, xvi + 228 pages, notes, literature cited, index. Cloth, us$45.00. From King Cane to the Last Sugar Mill is a thorough interdisciplinary analysis of the agricultural technology used to cultivate sugarcane in the Hawaiian Islands, starting with the plant’s earliest cultivation by Polynesian settlers circa ad 500 and ending with the last remaining sugar company on the island of Maui in 2014. C Allan Jones and Robert V Osgood balance a detailed discussion of the technological advancements of the sugar industry with the broader social, political, and economic contexts that underpin the rise and fall of the industry in Hawai‘i. As agricultural scientists who worked for the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association, Jones and Osgood offer expert analysis of the industry’s technology and methods over time, discussing sugarcane varieties, irrigation infrastructure, plantation labor systems, fertilizers, and means of pest control. They argue that economic pressures forced the industry to reduce labor costs and implement technologies that increased production efficiency, resulting in the Hawaiian sugar industry’s rise as the most mechanized in the world. Further, they trace the decline of the industry over the past forty years, arguing that advanced technology, in the form of drip irrigation and new disease resistant varieties, allowed the last remaining sugar mill to survive into the twenty-first century. Jones and Osgood begin in chapter 1 by describing the indigenous agricultural infrastructure in conjunction with Hawaiian political organization prior to the arrival of Westerners in the eighteenth century. With the emergence of the first commercial sugar company in the late 1830s, the California gold rush, the US Civil War, and the decline of the whaling industry incentivized expansion of large-scale sugarcane cultivation. Due to the passing of the Reciprocity Treaty of 1876, the Hawaiian sugar industry boomed, increasing production twenty-fold between 1876 and 1896. During this time, sugar companies in Hawai‘i led the industry with ditch-irrigation technology, steam-powered machinery, and new fertilizers. Nearing the turn of the nineteenth century, powerful political interests, including prominent sugar industry leaders, staged a coup in 1893 to stabilize the sugar industry’s political and economic situation, overthrowing the Hawaiian monarchy and setting the stage for annexation later in 1898. As chapters 3 and 4 describe, the industry continued to grow rapidly during the period before the Great Depression and despite the Depression era’s low sugar prices due to improvements in irrigation infrastructure, hybrid varieties of sugarcane, and mechanized field and factory operations that reduced the need for labor. In light of major labor unrest and strikes by Japanese and Filipino workers, the industry continued to implement technology that increased production efficiencies, relying less [End Page 202] on field and factory hands. The same reliance on workforce-reducing technological advancements by the industry continued through the World War II era. The book ends by tracing the decline of the industry, starting in 1970, due to unstable domestic and international sugar prices. Unable to reduce production costs to meet the low market prices, and struggling to diversify crop productions, all but one commercial sugar company closed between 1970 and 2011. In 2014, the Hawaiian Commercial and Sugar Company (hc&s) faced legal challenges headed by water rights and environmental activists. A significant contribution to the interdisciplinary niche historicizing scientific progression in the agricultural industry in Hawai‘i, this book offers a highly detailed documentation and synthesis of technological history, both organizing and characterizing the progression of technology across multiple eras. Jones and Osgood demonstrate a masterful conversion of the archive of scientific company records into cohesive historical narrative. The primary strength and value of their work lies in the application of their scientific expertise to describe how agricultural technology evolved. Secondarily, Jones and Osgood historicize the role of...

Maya and Catholic Cultures in Crisis by John D. Early

Reviewed by: Maya and Catholic Cultures in Crisis by John D. Early Ruth J. Chojnacki Maya and Catholic Cultures in Crisis. By John D. Early. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida. 2012. Pp. xvi, 499. $74.95. ISBN 978-0-8130-4013-4.) This lengthy text concludes an ambitious study of Catholicism's encounter with highland Maya indigenous in Mexico and Guatemala beginning with the Conquest1 and, in this second volume, into the new millennium. Drawing on a lifetime of field experience and reading across several disciplines, John D. Early, professor emeritus of anthropology at Florida Atlantic University, insists on the indispensability of religion to cross-cultural understanding and focuses on its decisive significance for the Maya. The "crisis" of the title refers, in the Maya sphere, to disruption of the articulation between social-cultural tradition and peasant subsistence that explains the persistence of the Maya in the modern era. Early agrees with the scholarly consensus on the causes of this crisis. Scarce arable land was lost to ladinos, plantation labor opportunities evaporated, and population exploded, while national economic policies and global market forces accelerated Maya impoverishment in the last third of the last century. Deepening deprivation undermined belief in the saints who, according to Maya tradition, guaranteed well-being in return for ritual propitiation under what Early calls the Maya "covenant." In his account "crisis" also denotes the rupture within Catholicism ensuing from Vatican Council II's revision of Catholic orthodoxy as defined in early modern Europe by the Council of Trent ("Tridentine Catholicism" in Early's vocabulary). In the context of the Maya "subsistence crisis," the teachings of the Council (1962–65) challenged longstanding sacramentally and doctrinally oriented missionary practice. Early points further to the rise of biblically-inspired critical liberation praxis and the attempt to "inculturate" Catholic teaching and liturgy known as teología india (Indian theology). Of particular value, the study shows how these two crises figured in contentious undertakings by well-known Catholic missionaries (e.g., Father Stanley Rother) and bishops Juan Gerardi (Guatemala City) and Samuel Ruiz Garcia (San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas). Those interested in the theological permissibility of violence and Catholic entanglement in widely-reported political upheavals—civil [End Page 616] war in Guatemala and the Zapatista uprising and its effects in Chiapas—will find enlightening detail here, some from the author's personal experience. The book also relies substantially on the multiple case studies, political-economic analyses, and historical narratives produced by anthropologists, historians, journalists, and other observers drawn to the Maya in recent decades. Extended quotations from such sources invite readers to pursue these and other studies included in an ample bibliography. Evocative photographs and clear prose enhance the study. Perhaps inevitably, given its broad scope, the book repeatedly directs readers to consult earlier or later chapters to grasp the author's meaning. Many unfamiliar with the recent history of the Catholic Church and/or the highland Maya could find such referrals perplexing. Others might treat the book as a compendium to be consulted rather than read straight through. Expertly researched and richly informed, the book's value is nonetheless diminished by questionable theoretical moves. For one, it subsumes culture, social formations, and religion under the concept "worldview" deployed as an all-purpose heuristic. Doing so blurs distinctions essential to the meaning and analytic usefulness of these notions. It also neglects substantial contemporary advances in social thought. The text's coinage "Action Catholicism" collapses Catholic Action and liberation practice, though the difference between them remains quite consequential politically and theologically. Finally, the dubious proposition that the biblical idea of "covenant" entails cycles akin to Maya calendrical myth obscures the author's paramount point: the Bible's historical realism is precisely what moved Maya Catholics to reject ancestral myth and reassert their own historical agency. This book and its companion volume remain a significant achievement that will serve anthropologists, church historians, missiologists, and others who understand that theory risks sterility without local knowledge, amply displayed here. Ruth J. Chojnacki DePaul University and University of St. Mary of the Lake Footnotes 1. The first volume is The Maya and Catholicism: An Encounter of Worldviews (same publisher, 2006). Copyright © 2017 The...

Cultural Heritage and Identity in the Literature of Australian South Sea Islanders and Other Media

Australian South Sea Islanders represent a small community whose ancestors mainly came from Melanesian Islands to work as indentured labour in the sugar cane plantations of Queensland from the 1860’s to the beginning of the 20th century. Many still live near the old sugar towns, but apart from an official recognition of their existence and distinctiveness bythe Federal Government in 1994 and by the Queensland Government in 2000, South Sea Islanders’ culture, economic and political roles are still underrepresented or even ignored in Australia. In the 1970’s, writers belonging to that community, such as Faith Bandler, Mabel Edmund and Noel Fatnowna started to tell their own family history since the arrival of their first ancestors on the continent. These autobiographical accounts enabled them to reassert their identity as a culturally distinct group and to shed light on a part of Australia’s forgotten past. Other written testimonies followed at the beginning of the 21st century but the lack of young South Sea Islander writers induced us to look at their other means of expression to promote their culture and complete the missing parts of their personal and collective history.

Is oil palm agribusiness a sustainable development option for Indonesia? A review of issues and options

ABSTRACTThis article reviews proposals to improve the environmental and socioeconomic sustainability of Indonesia’s oil palm agribusiness. After considering the socioecological and economic systems in which the business is embedded, the study explores challenges to improving the governance and regulatory framework for smallholders, wage labourers in plantations and the biophysical environment. Specific initiatives regarding plantation labour and environment show the emergence of government and non-government regulatory frameworks, both voluntary and compulsory. However, the effectiveness of these forms of governance is constrained by the extent to which notions of sustainability are acceptable to a variety of civil society actors.

Remembering the Season of Suffering: Cloth and Memory

Narratives of cloth in oral history interviews may be read as rich autobiographical tales. This article explores the symbolic meaning of cloth in the life narratives of elderly Javanese plantation laborers on the Kayu Aro estate in Sumatra, Indonesia. Through stories of cloth, narrators communicated the hardship they experienced during the Japanese occupation and subsequent Indonesian national revolution, a time narrators referred to as “the season of suffering.” The narrative of Mbah Cilik, whose memories of the season of suffering are bound up in stories of cloth, is explored in detail to illustrate how stories ostensibly about cloth contain deeply personal recollections.

Humanism and the Ingenious Machine: Richard Ligon’s True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados

This essay argues that Ligon’s History represents Barbados as a space where the ontological blending of organisms and mechanisms is a fundamental aspect of the natural world, and it suggests that the recognition of this fact would lead to a more productive and ethical commonwealth. On the one hand, Ligon’s description of the sugar mills characterizes the plantation laborers as an extension of the mills, seemingly reducing their identities to a mere mechanical function and inscribing their status as objectified commodities. Yet, on the other hand, he writes about both enslaved Africans and Indians as fundamental to the island, not just due to their labor power but to their ingenium as well—the essential human capacity that enables them to rationally engage with the natural world and drives them to create both art and knowledge. Despite the seeming contradiction of those views, this essay demonstrates that these two readings are not incompatible when they are considered as a consequence of an early modern worldview that imagined society as the product of an intersection between nature and artifice.

Wage determination machinery of tea industry in India: a case of West Bengal State

Daily rate of wages for tea plantation workers in west Bengal is abysmally low in comparison to agricultural minimum wages. There are a few benefits offered by the employers apart from the statutory benefits enshrined in the Plantation Labour Act, 1951. Consequently, many tea workers in this state are suffering from starvation, malnutrition, debt, etc. In this backdrop, in my present study, a deliberate attempt has been made in order to highlight the actual picture of wage and its determination process in the tea industry located in West Bengal in India.

Reproducing the British Caribbean: Sex, Gender, and Population Politics after Slavery, by Juanita de Barros

Reproducing the British Caribbean: Sex, Gender, and Population Politics after Slavery, by Juanita de Barros. Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press, 2014. xii, 297 pp. $32.95 US (paper). This fascinating study opens with the powerful imagery of a homeless woman delivering a child in a mule pen in St. George parish, Barbados in 1893. As De Barros notes, this woman's story comes to us filtered through the lens of T. Law Gaskin, a physician who recorded his concern over the impact such incidents might have on the island's reputation and used it to push for the establishment of colonial maternity services. Gaskin was not alone. As De Barros convincingly demonstrates, women's reproductive labour was a subject of deep anxiety among local and metropolitan officials, doctors, ministers, and newspaper editors (among others) throughout the British Caribbean in the first century following emancipation. Some worried that high infant mortality rates and low population growth threatened the plantation labour supply, while others saw the provision of maternity services as a humanitarian imperative and/or an index of civilization. These concerns led to much debate across the region, while also prompting practical efforts to develop medical services and collect statistics (chapters one and two), regulate midwifery (chapter three), educate mothers on infant welfare (chapter four), and eliminate contagious diseases (chapter five). Along the way, these often limited and disjointed campaigns pulled in a broader range of actors--from social welfare workers to grannies--who left their own mark. While the book focuses on Barbados, Jamaica, and Guyana, many themes are relevant to the region as a whole and the British colonial project in general. The book also examines population in a broad sense, providing a wealth of new information on the development of public health infrastructure, the production of colonial knowledge, the impact of malaria, cholera, and venereal diseases, reforms of bastardy laws and poor relief systems, the growth of nursing and social welfare organizations, discourses surrounding Caribbean family formation, and the expansion of American philanthropy. It will thus appeal to a broad audience of scholars and students exploring not only Caribbean and British imperial history, but also the international history of public health, medicine, demography, sociology, and philanthropy. For those interested more specifically in the themes of sex and gender, there is much offered here. De Barros skillfully traces the development of the twin discourses of the so-called bad black working class mother/ midwife (whose perceived ignorance was often blamed for infant mortality) and the maternalist white nurse matron (charged most often with civilizing the former). These discourses drew on and reinforced the colonial race-class-gender hierarchy. But De Barros also moves past these narratives by highlighting stories of working class women who challenged these characterizations and pointed to the impact poverty and insecurity had on their ability to care for their children, a fact that was only occasionally recognized by officials. …

Reproducing the British Caribbean: Sex, Gender and Population Politics after Slavery. By Juanita de Barros (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2014) 279 pp. $32.95

<i>Reproducing the British Caribbean: Sex, Gender and Population Politics after Slavery.</i> By Juanita de Barros (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2014) 279 pp. $32.95

Islanders in the Empire: Filipino and Puerto Rican Laborers in Hawai‘i by Joanna Poblete (review)

Reviewed by: Islanders in the Empire: Filipino and Puerto Rican Laborers in Hawai‘i by Joanna Poblete Jordan Beltran Gonzales (bio) Islanders in the Empire: Filipino and Puerto Rican Laborers in Hawai‘i, by Joanna Poblete. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014. X + 227 pp. $55.00 cloth. ISBN 978-0-252-03829-7. Joanna Poblete’s Islanders in the Empire: Filipino and Puerto Rican Laborers in Hawai‘i is a well-organized and fascinating discussion of the intracolonial experiences of two ethnic groups whose histories are inextricably bound together by U.S. colonialism since the 1890s. This comparative history spans the U.S. colonies of Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and the Territory of Hawaii in terms of both state and sugar plantation labor policies and firsthand perspectives of Filipino and Puerto Rican laborers and community members. In the first two chapters, Poblete provides a comprehensive overview of how Puerto Rico eventually became supplanted by the Philippines in sending laborers to Hawaii’s sugar plantations between 1910 and the 1930s. Poblete’s case studies show that Puerto Ricans were long-term migrants whose home government had brokered their emigration to reduce Puerto Rico’s population, unemployment, and social unrest in 1900, but then did not enable their well-being in Hawaii or support their repatriation. By 1901, mislead and exploited Puerto Ricans made claims for repatriation from Hawaii to Puerto Rico, a futile effort that highlighted the duplicitous work of labor recruiters and plantation overseers in Hawaii, as well as the false idea that migratory workers could easily return home. Even in 1921, when several volatile years of labor organizing among Filipinos led the Hawaiian Sugar Planters Association (HSPA) to negotiate with the Puerto Rican government to resume labor recruitment, the lofty promises of increased wages, free medical care, and fair housing and work conditions again proved to be hollow for Puerto Rican laborers. From these community histories, Poblete synthesizes poignant observations, such as, “Puerto Rican and Filipino recruitment to Hawaii thrived only when it represented the free will of these groups and supported their personal needs and desires” (46). Poblete offers several analytical concepts rooted in the U.S. imperial complex—U.S. colonials, intracolonial migration, and open colonial mobility. These terms address the multilayered factors that facilitated the recruitment and exploitation of Filipinos and Puerto Ricans in “the second colonized space of Hawai‘i” (2). Poblete identifies the logics of colonialism and labor exploitation as the driving forces for the rise and eclipse of Puerto Rican labor migration (43), as well as the strategic turn to Filipino labor recruitment (59). More than three and a half centuries as a Spanish colony followed immediately by U.S. military occupation and colonial territory status severely underdeveloped the Philippines and created the circumstances for labor migration and concomitant remittances back home. Although U.S. exclusion acts against foreign nationals prohibited Chinese and Japanese immigrant laborers, Filipinos’ liminal status [End Page 222] as U.S. nationals, or colonials, meant that they were exempt from U.S. immigration restrictions and were capable of open colonial mobility, which led to their increased incentives to emigrate and to be recruited to the Territory of Hawaii. Poblete explains, “HSPA cooperation with Filipino Bureau of Labor policies fostered a supportive political environment to develop and sustain intra-colonial mobility to Hawaii” (54). Poblete further explores the intracolonial mobility of Filipinos as “impermanent male migrants” (61) through HSPA policies for return passage to the Philippines and paid transport of male relatives to Hawaii. In their legal status as “impermanent wards,” Puerto Ricans faced discrimination, mistreatment, and harassment because of a lack of dedicated officials in Hawaii. Their intracolonial grievances, moreover, were slowly processed in a “hierarchical,” “bureaucratic,” and “circuitous global complaint procedure” (76–77) that could require as long as seven and a half months for resolution. These circumstances for both Puerto Ricans and Filipinos necessitated labor mediators to advocate for colonial workers’ claims and help navigate bureaucracies. In chapter 4, Poblete outlines the careers of Cayetano Ligot, the U.S.-influenced and often proplantation, antiworker Philippine Resident Labor Commissioner in Hawaii, and Pablo Manlapit, the Filipino grassroots labor agitator who worked “outside the direct influence of the...

Christian Worship and the Question Concerning Technology

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsGerald C. LiuGerald C. Liu, an ordained United Methodist Elder, is a minister-in-residence at Church of the Village, New York City, and assistant professor of homiletics and worship arts, Drew Theological School, New Jersey.NotesMartin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 4.Heidegger distinguishes between “technology” and “modern technology,” as shown later in the current essay. For more detail regarding Heidegger’s genealogy of technology, see the development of his thought from “The Origin of the Work of Art” in Poetry, Language, and Thought (New York: Harper, 2013), The Bremen and Freiburg Lectures: Insight into That Which Is and Basic Principles of Thinking (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), and The Question Concerning Technology (New York: Harper, 1982). The argument in this essay depends upon Heidegger’s train of thought but shifts back-and-forth between technology and modern technology with perhaps more fluidity than he does.See Richard Wolin, “National Socialism, World Jewry, and the History of Being: Heidegger’s Black Notebooks,” Jewish Review of Books (Summer, 2014), http://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/993/national-socialism-world-jewry-and-the-history-of-being-heideggers-black-notebooks/.Heidegger, “The Thing,” in Poetry, Language, and Thought, 171.Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, 31: “To this end it is worth noting, that we observe how the ordering in advance infests all that is: nature and history, human and divine; then if today a poorly advised theology authorizes the achievements of nuclear physics, with the help of its divine evidence, then God will be placed in the domain of the orderable” (my translation).James P. Kraft, Stage to Studio: Musicians and the Sound Revolution, 1890–1950 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).Albert J. Raboteau, Canaan Land: A Religious History of African Americans (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).Theodor W. Adorno and Robert Hullot-Kentor, Current of Music: Elements of a Radio Theory (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2009); Theodor W. Adorno, Nachgelassene Schriften. Abteilung I, Fragment Gebliebene Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006), 13. Robert Hullot–Kentor quotes from Dickson Skinner, “Music Goes into Mass Production,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine (April 1939): 485.Adorno and Hullot-Kentor, Current of Music, 1–2.Terry Lindvall, Sanctuary Cinema: Origins of the Christian Film Industry (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 7.Ibid.Kraft, Stage to Studio, 2.Andrzej Bartzkowiak, director, Romeo Must Die, Warner Bros., 2000. See also Hoang Tan Nguyen, A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014) and Celine Shimizu, Straightjacket Sexualities: Unbinding Asian American Manhoods in the Movies (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012).Emerson W. Pugh, Building IBM: Shaping an Industry and Its Technology, History of Computing (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995).“NSA Utah Data Center,” http://nsa.gov1.info/utah-data-center/.“LEED, or Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design, is a green building certificate program” that recognizes buildings with positive impact upon the health of occupants and that promote renewable energy. Four certifications exist as listed in ascending order: (1) certified, (2) silver, (3) gold, (4) platinum; see http://www.usgbc.org/leed.David E. Sanger and Nicole Perlroth, “Internet Giants Erect Barriers to Spy Agencies,” New York Times (June 7, 2014), http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/07/technology/internet-giants-erect-barriers-to-spy-agencies.html?emc=edit_th_20140607&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=69006145&_r=0.For the universality of das Ge-Stell, see Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, 40. For the threat of complete forgetfulness of the truth of Being, see page 53.Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 42, and Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, 72. Italics in the quote are from the English translation.Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, 29.For Ai Weiwei, see Julie Makinen, “Ai Weiwei Pondering Freedoms in Alcatraz Show—from China,” Los Angeles Times (June 23, 2014), http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-ai-weiwei-alcatraz-20140623-story.html. For Liu Xiaobo, see http://www.pen.org/defending-writers/liu-xiaobo, and http://www.pen.org/press-clip/2010/10/08/words-cell-cant-hold.For Jacolby Satterwhite, see http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/2014Biennial/JacolbySatterwhite.For Kara Walker, see http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/27/arts/design/kara-walker-creates-a-confection-at-the-domino-refinery.html. Notably, Walker’s colossal sculpture also monumentalizes the historical exploitation of sugar plantation labor for other minority groups. For the history of United Methodist missionaries supplying Hawaiian sugarcane plantations with Korean immigrant labor in the early twentieth century, see David K. Yoo, Contentious Spirits: Religion in Korean American History, 1903–1945 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 4.Though not an example of liturgical practice influenced by contemporary art, see the Rev. Vicki Flippin’s theological reflection entitled “Taking My Baby to Kara Walker’s Sugar Baby,” Huffington Post (August 27, 2014), as an example of how contemporary art can shape pastoral thinking.Maxwell E. Johnson, “The Apostolic Tradition,” in The Oxford History of Christian Worship (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 32–76.Phillip Lyndon Reynolds, Marriage in the Western Church: The Christianization of Marriage During the Patristric and Medieval Period (Boston: Brill, 2001).Catherine L. Albanese, “Understanding Christian Diversity in America,” in American Christianities: A History of Dominance and Diversity, eds. Catherine A. Brekus and Clark Gilpin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 29–58.See Acts 5:1–11, 9:36, 12:13, 16:14, 17:34, and 18:26.Teresa Berger, Gender Differences and the Making of Liturgical History: Lifting a Veil on Liturgy’s Past (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011).http://www.noaa.gov/factsheets/new%20version/Earth_Observation_Satellites.pdf.

Recent Work in Caribbean Literature

Recent Work in Caribbean Literature Amanda Perry Davies, Carole Boyce. Caribbean Spaces: Escapes from Twilight Zones. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2013. Frydman, Jason. Sounding the Break: African American and Caribbean Routes of World Literature. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2014. Martinez-San Miguel, Yolanda. Coloniality of Diasporas: Rethinking Intra-colonial Migrations in a Pan-Caribbean Context. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Orlando, Valerie, and Sandra Cypress (eds.). Reimagining the Caribbean: Conversations among the Creole, English, French, and Spanish Caribbean. Lexington Books, 2014. Fifteen years ago, scholarship that addressed Caribbean literature in light of the region’s linguistic diversity was relatively limited. The issue was not necessarily a preference for national genealogies, as the region’s major works have long been studied in transnational contexts—variously divided into postcolonial, francophone, and Latin American frames of reference. Rather, the institutional divisions of language departments and the competencies of individual scholars made linguistic barriers more tenacious, such that Derek Walcott would be placed in conversation with Salman Rushdie or Wole Soyinka more often than fellow poet Nicolas Guillén. That tendency has shifted, however, and the four works reviewed here are symptomatic of those changes. Each of them brings together texts from the English, French, and Spanish-speaking Caribbean, stressing the broader interconnectedness of the region over and against what the editors of Reimagining the Caribbean call a “balkanizing” approach (xvii). Taken together, these works implicitly raise the question: what, precisely, [End Page 208] are the grounds for comparison? What are the mechanisms that make such comparison plausible, convincing, and effective? The historical processes that encourage treating the Caribbean as a coherent cultural space are by now well rehearsed. All territories have been subject to some form of radical external domination, at times by multiple colonial powers; most were deeply marked by slavery and plantation labour; intraregional migratory flows in the twentieth century continued the creolizing process; peoples from various parts of the Caribbean frequently live side by side in the diaspora. That said, there remain good reasons for treating literary traditions separately. While some writers like Jacques Stephen Alexis, Eric Walrond, Alejo Carpentier, and Maryse Condé demonstrate a robust sense of a pan-Caribbean literary and cultural formation, many others are monolingual and, given the comparative difficulties of regional travel, may not have first-hand experience of other parts of the region. In a context where translations are not always forthcoming, cross-linguistic intertextuality is frequently limited to a number of usual suspects, chief among them Aimé Césaire. It is thus telling that none of the studies here focus on documenting concrete intellectual exchanges between major authors, such as the Jacques Roumain, Nicolas Guillén, and Langston Hughes triad. Instead, they opt for thematic analyses that seek resonance between contexts that can be considered in some way parallel. In justifying this approach, Édouard Glissant and Antonio Benítez-Rojo emerge as clear theoretical favourites, as both push against nation-based frameworks to reach for more evocative imaginings of the region: for Glissant, it is an “archipelago” that enables non-hierarchical cultural exchange, while Benítez-Rojo famously uses the metaphor of the repeating island to capture the tension between fragmentation and resemblance. Of the texts reviewed here, Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel’s excellent Coloniality of Diasporas: Rethinking Intra-Colonial Migrations in a Pan-Caribbean Context is the most explicitly concerned with disrupting nation-based interpretive models. She continually turns to moments when nationalism falters, whether they be in nineteenth century novels that are too ambivalent to serve as foundational fictions or twentieth century narratives of women forced into exile because of their transgressive sexual practices. Though she also deals with writers from the Anglophone Caribbean, her most important examples are from Puerto Rico and Martinique, islands whose continued attachment to imperial powers denaturalizes the ideal of the sovereign nation state. Martínez-San Miguel is furthermore interested in the formative role of “intra-colonial migration” in the region, or migration within the bounds of a former or actual empire, emphasizing that such movement reveals the contradictory status of many Caribbean subjects, who may be legal citizens and...

Voices from the Canefields: Folksongs from Japanese Immigrant Workers in Hawai‘i by Franklin Odo (review)

Reviewed by: Voices from the Canefields: Folksongs from Japanese Immigrant Workers in Hawai‘i by Franklin Odo Christen Sasaki Voices from the Canefields: Folksongs from Japanese Immigrant Workers in Hawai‘i. By Franklin Odo. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. xxviii + 242 pp. Bibliography. Index. Lyrics. $55.00 cloth Franklin Odo’s study of the folk tradition, holehole bushi, provides a unique and in-depth look into the lives of issei, or first generation Japanese immigrants, in Hawai‘i. Through careful analysis of numerous folk songs, Odo successfully complicates the narrow image of the issei that is largely, “of a generation that suffered grievously, but with great patience and humility … in order to create better lives for their children …” (pp. x–xi), and offers an alternative narrative that is filled with fluidity, despair, love, lust, violence, and hope. This book is an important read for scholars of Japanese American history and historiography, ethnic studies, and labor history. It will also be especially useful to those engaged in comparative migration history, women’s history, Hawaiian history, and ethnomusicology. Adapted from traditional Japanese folk songs and poetry, holehole bushi were composed and sung by a generation of Japanese men and women who toiled in Hawai‘i’s sugar plantations from 1885–1924. Odo’s meticulous attention to this local folk tradition of Hawai‘i opens up the global and fluid world of the issei. The holehole bushi in chapter 1, “Japan to Hawai‘i,” creates a complicated picture of this first generation of immigrant laborers and the transnational world in which they lived. The issei are depicted as men and women straddling a home society in transition, while also inhabiting a contested space between two emerging empires and the independent kingdom of Hawai‘i. Chapters 2 to 5 are organized around themes found in the holehole bushi: work, despair and defiance, love and lust, and reflections. In chapter 2, “World of Work,” Odo tackles the harsh realities of plantation labor. Using holehole bushi lyrics, Odo adds to the scholarship on Hawai‘i’s sugar plantation labor by questioning the taken-for-granted gendered nature of work. He also successfully draws out the life choices that many issei faced when nearing the end of a three-year contract, and underscores the mobility of this generation within the islands and between nations. The holehole bushi analyzed in chapter 3, “Despair and Defiance,” breaks through “Hawai‘i’s plantation mythology” (p. 58) and offer a gritty depiction of issei life. Subjects such as gambling, gangs, rage, depression, prostitution, and alcoholism are among the topics covered. Chapter 4, “Love and Lust,” presents a unique glimpse into the intimate and sometimes scandalous world of plantation life. Here Odo shines as he reminds the reader through holehole bushi of the relative power some women wielded in a society where female companionship was scarce. In chapter [End Page 216] 5, titled “Reflections,” the holehole bushi reveal issei thoughts on their lived experiences, ranging from regret to gratitude. Chapters 6 and 7 focus on the process of recovering this particular folk tradition. Chapter 6, “A Last Hurrah,” examines the collective and constructed identity of the issei decades after their last days on the plantation. The holehole bushi examined in this chapter were submitted in response to a contest sponsored by a Japanese language newspaper in 1960. “Renaissance of Holehole Bushi,” chapter 7, charts the recuperation of this folk tradition by Harry Minoru Urata and traces its usage in popular media and academia. Odo writes in style that will entertain and engage a general audience. While there is some repetition in each of the chapters, they could easily be used as stand-alone pieces. Finally, having raised a number of issues for further study, including the mobility of the issei generation, “rurality,” and the fluidity of the plantation world, Odo leaves the reader with a collection of over 200 translated holehole bushi for their own reading and analysis. This project is clearly a labor of love for Odo, one that makes holehole bushi accessible to a new generation of Japanese Americans in Hawai‘i, as well as scholars and practitioners around the world. Christen Sasaki Assistant Professor, Department of Asian American...

Frontiers Turns Forty!

Frontiers Turns Forty! Christine Keating, Guisela Latorre, and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu This year marks a momentous anniversary for Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. Forty years ago, in 1975, the journal was founded at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Since its inception Frontiers has resided primarily in the US West. The journal moved to the University of New Mexico, to Washington State University, and to Arizona State University before relocating to the Midwest at Ohio State University in 2012. As our editorial team enters our third year of producing the journal, we honor the spirit of the founders of Frontiers. We publish cutting-edge interdisciplinary feminist scholarship and creative work that expand the frontiers of our collective knowledge. We also foreground scholarship, literature, and visual art that privileges intersectional analysis, women-of-color feminism, and transnational feminisms. After all, one society’s frontier can be reinterpreted as a borderland, a place where multiple peoples, cultures, and nations coexist. To help us honor the past, we begin this issue with a special feature, “Feminist Reflections.” Our first reflection features a roundtable of distinguished scholars on the life and career of historian Gerda Lerner (1920–2013). Born in Vienna to a Jewish family, Lerner crossed multiple borders in her personal, political, and intellectual life as she became a labor activist and leading scholar in US women’s and black women’s history. Renowned historians Nancy F. Cott, Linda Gordon, Linda K. Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, Joyce Antler, and Thavolia Glymph offer reflections on Lerner’s intellectual and activist careers. These comments were drawn from two events, a panel at the Organization of American Historians Annual Conference, held in San Francisco in April 2013, and the symposium “Why History Matters,” held at the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, in December 2013. Eileen Boris and Elizabeth Currans, authors of our “Feminist Currents” feature, offer concluding reflections to the roundtable. Their comments incorporate submissions sent in response to the question, “When Gerda Lerner passed, we lost a path-breaking feminist historian and fierce advocate for justice. How did her pioneering work shape your research and teaching?” [End Page vii] The articles by Basuli Deb and Karen Kuo continue the conversation between the past and present by foregrounding how historical literature provides new insights for theorizing transnational feminism. Deb analyzes Aphra Behn’s 1688 novella Oroonoko as a form of “protofeminist transnational politics between an imperial woman writer-narrator and the colonial subject in the seventeenth century.” Karen Kuo argues that Etsu I. Sugimoto’s 1926 work, A Daughter of a Samurai, constituted an important trans-Pacific feminist text in the early twentieth century. While Deb and Kuo examine race in relation to transnationalism, Kathleen B. Casey and Anh Hua analyze race in relation to sexuality and self-authorship. Casey’s work foregrounds the career of Eva Tanguay, a vaudeville performer in the early twentieth century. Tanguay, a white woman, performed “animalistic savagery,” presenting audiences with “a new ideal of racialized masculine femininity.” Hua analyzes Audre Lorde’s 1982 memoir, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, to illuminate how Lorde narrated eroticism and sexual trauma as practices of self-invention. The final two essays explore gender, race, and collective activism. La Donna L. Forsgren analyzes the art and activism of Barbara Ann Teer to illuminate how black women intellectuals contributed to the Black Arts Movement (1965–76). Marshall Jeffries examines the decolonial and feminist activism of the Occaneechi, a Native American nation in North Carolina. The artwork of Laura Kina and the creative essay by Catherine Jagoe are perfect complements to this issue’s themes of race, transnationalism, sexuality, and activism. Based in Chicago, Kina is a multiracial artist whose work examines the cultural influence of Bollywood (the movie industry in India); the historical significance of Loving vs. Virginia, the 1967 US Supreme Court case that deemed antimiscegenation laws (which prevented interracial marriage) unconstitutional; and the legacies of Japanese immigration and plantation labor in Hawaii. Kina explores these societal and historical issues through visual depictions of individuals and landscapes. Jagoe examines her past life, particularly her struggles with anorexia nervosa...

Discriminations Created by the Structural Violence (Case Study of the Tea Plantation Sector of Sri Lanka)

Structural violence is the invisible violence, created by various socio-political or legal structures which are being deeply rooted in the society. The study reveals the structural violence and its impact in the plantation sector, due to number of socio, economic and political factors. In one hand plantation labour community has been discriminated socially, politically, and economically. On the other hand historically, the plantation labours has been maintained through a well organized system of labour control with a chain of commands. This system of interdependence was organized and run on the basis of caste, class gender and ethnic differentiation. This rigid chain was of command across the labour regime was maintained by symbolic and physical means of separation and differentiation, a system which still continues albeit with some differences. All of these factors dominate the entire deep structure in the plantation sector, but invisibly or unconsciously. This major contradiction comes to the visible surface level as many issues from time to time. When finding solutions for these issues, attention always draws to the nearer factors of a particular issue other than addressing the root causes. Anyway this study suggests the changes in this violent structure so as to achieve a sustainable peace.