Temple University Press Journals
Not a member yet
549 research outputs found
Sort by
Essential Only as Labor: Coachella Valley Farmworkers during COVID-19
No full textIn this article, I attempt to come to terms with the Trump administration’s designation of farmers as “essential” to the economy, which allowed—or condemned—them to work while the majority of U.S. residents sheltered in place in the spring and early summer of 2020. I provide a snapshot of the Coachella Valley during the COVID-19 outbreak and relate farmworker pandemic conditions to a century-long exploitation of Mexican agricultural communities in the U.S. Southwest. I argue that a relational approach to race making and racialized life is key for understanding farmworkers’ present marginality: to see their disproportionate pandemic vulnerability, we must relate it to other racialized people’s historical oppression, especially within Indigenous and African American communities. But I also insist on pairing this approach with a transnational frame that centers the role of noncitizen labor in subsidizing U.S. consumption. Farmworker marginality, in other words, indicates more than a nimble and relational white supremacy. It also reflects the United States’ imperial relationship to the Global South and its citizenry’s reliance on noncitizen “essential labor.” Farmworker marginality suggests further that in a world marked by a growing refugee diaspora, a climate change crisis, and continued wealth inequalities, the United States’ citizen/noncitizen divide will continue to grow and shape its racialized hierarchies. To study farmworker pandemic conditions, in short, is to study the world to come
Susto, Sugar, and Song: ire’ne lara silva’s Chicana Diabetic Poetics
No full textThis article analytically traverses and closely reads a series of poems from Chicana feminist writer ire’ne lara silva’s 2016 collection Blood Sugar Canto, advancing the term “Chicana diabetic poetics” to describe a generic strain unifying lara silva’s poetic project. Shifting between Chicana feminist literary criticism, theories of decoloniality, and studies in the health humanities, this article argues that Blood Sugar Canto upends larger biomedical understandings of diabetes and its treatment by posing a call to treat susto (fear) and thereby elaborates ideas surrounding culturally competent and holistic healthcare practices. By imagining new healing modalities—fused by Chicana creative power and based on the tenets of curanderismo and the power of folk song—lara silva enacts a limpia (cleansing) by way of poetic song
To Care, to Belong: Art-Work in Community during the COVID-19 Pandemic
No full textSince the onslaught of the COVID-19 crisis began in early 2020, Tierra Narrative and Sustainable Little Tokyo—two community-based artist collectives working in the hard-hit urban centers of New York and Los Angeles, respectively—have taken up integral aspects of care with and in their communities. Using art as a vehicle to help secure access to basic necessities for vulnerable populations while creating opportunities for respite and healing, they have continued ongoing transnational and intergenerational efforts to (re)build community from the bottom up, modeling how cultural labor can sustain more livable presents and usher in more just futures. To this end, their art-work functions as both platform and mechanism to weave community members closer together (even while remaining physically apart), fostering networks of mutual care that holistically address both material and emotional needs that impact individual and collective well-being
The Knowledge of Justice in America
No full textIn Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote that the knowledge of justice in the United States belonged to those who “formed the sovereignty” in 1787. That thought captured a problem later perceived by James Baldwin and made stark by unrelenting attacks on the memory of Emmett Till from 2008 to 2018. Focusing attention precisely there is the purpose of this essay. Adopting a theory of popular sovereignty hewn to fix moral insight and political power together, the U.S. Constitution memorialized the people’s choice to deprive enslaved Black humanity not only of power but of moral authority in civic life. The essay reflects on the consequences of that founding choice while reimagining it, observing that the knowledge of justice lay with the enslaved
Songs That Never End: A Film by Yehuda Sharim
No full textSongs That Never End (2019) is a fascinating, compelling, and mesmerizing film. It focuses on seemingly small events inside small spaces to pose big questions about how people struggle with the hand that history has dealt them in a time of devastation, dispossession, and displacement. Filmed in cinema verité style, yet brilliantly shot, framed, and paced by director, camera operator, and interviewer Yehuda Sharim, Songs That Never End revolves around the everyday life experiences, events, injuries, and aspirations of an Iranian immigrant family living in a small apartment in Houston. Across nearly two hours of cinema, it sutures together a series of short scenes that convey chaos and unpredictability in the lives of these refugees who never find refuge, these exiles for whom exile never ends
Introduction: The Enduring Dangers of Essentializing Labor and Laborers
No full textThis special issue of Kalfou on “The Enduring Dangers of Essentializing Labor and Laborers” identifies and examines the diversity of ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic has given rise to two definitions of the word “essential.” On the one hand, service and production workers manufacturing and selling vital goods have been tagged with the title “essential workers” because their labor is needed to enable society to survive the pandemic. A grossly disproportionate percentage of these workers are immigrants and children of immigrants, African Americans, Latinx, and women. They are allowed—and in some cases required—to suspend social distancing and safety measures because the work they do is necessary. Yet in being declared essential, they have also been rendered disposable: susceptible to disease at their workplaces while deprived of proper protective equipment and adequate healthcare. As the articles in this issue demonstrate, these workers have become “essentialized” in another sense of the word—reduced to the essence of bare life and labor, treated as if underpaid service and physical sacrifice are their natural roles in life, defining their being. The authors gathered here explore how people deemed essential have been devalued as disposable, as well as how diverse people and social institutions have attempted to come to terms with the pandemic’s deadly toll by offering oppositional ideas about what—and who—is truly essential
Beyond Essential Workers, Toward Globalized Mortals in and beyond the Ethnic Studies Classroom during the Early Months of the COVID-19 Pandemic
No full textExamining the wisdom and knowledge acquired in the early months of the global pandemic from conversations with and projects by students of color who were also deemed essential labor, this essay argues for a relational ethnic studies that is holistic and centers itself on the idea of the human as not just a source of labor, be it in academia or in industry, but as mortal. Mortality then critiques the logics of essential labor, financial solvency, and risk management discourse and positions a move toward more horizontal and global meditations on the experiences of people who are rendered essentialized labor. 
Global Capitalism, Racism, and Social Triage during COVID-19
No full textThe theory of global capitalism offers useful tools for understanding the socio-structural determinations that result in enduring global health inequities. The theory’s conceptual framework highlights the role of transnational corporations, financialization, consumerism, transnational social classes, and the transnational state in affecting the production and distribution of economic resources, spread of cultural ideologies, and exercise of political power. To understand the health consequences and economic disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the theory of global capitalism offers a holistic approach for understanding the current geopolitical order as well as its inherently contested nature. However, the approach often elides questions of race and gender while privileging class analysis. To understand the intersectionality in the reproduction of capitalist globalization, the concept of social triage offers an organizational level of analysis to interrogate how bureaucratic decision-making leads to racial and gender health inequalities at the global and national levels. The examples of essential workers, immigration detention, and disparate access to medical technologies reveal the necropolitical reality of an anti-Black pandemic, contributing to current debates about racial capitalism