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How Far from Africa's Shore? A Response to Marcel van der Linden's Map for Global Labor History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 March 2013

Franco Barchiesi
Franco Barchiesi*
Affiliation:
Ohio State University
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Responses
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International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 82 , Fall 2012 , pp. 77 - 84
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2013

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References

Notes

1. Marcel van der Linden, “The Promise and Challenges of Global Labor History,” in this issue.

2. Ferguson, James, Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (Durham, NC, 2006), 48–49 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3. See de Waal, Alex, Famine Crimes: Politics and the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa (Oxford, 1997)Google Scholar and Southall, Roger, Imperialism or Solidarity? International Labour and South African Trade Unions (Cape Town, 1995)Google Scholar.

4. See Harrison, Graham, Neoliberal Africa: The Impact of Global Social Engineering (London, 2010)Google Scholar and Ndjio, Basile, “Millennial Democracy and Spectral Reality in Post-Colonial Africa,” African Journal of International Affairs 11 (2008): 115–56Google Scholar.

5. Cooper, Frederick, Decolonization and African Society: The Labour Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6. Van der Linden, “The Promise,” 10.

7. Especially Steinfeld, Robert J., The Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture (Chapel Hill, NC, 1991)Google Scholar. See also Montgomery, David, Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free Market During the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1995)Google Scholar and Eudell, Demetrius L., The Political Languages of Emancipation in the Caribbean and the U.S. South (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002)Google Scholar.

8. Van der Linden, “The Promise.”

9. Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth (New York, 2005 [1961])Google Scholar, especially chapter two (“Spontaneity: Its Strength and Weakness”) and Fanon, Frantz, Black Skins, White Masks (New York, 2008 [1952])Google Scholar.

10. See Mbembe, Achille, On the Postcolony (Berkeley, 2001)Google Scholar, Hartman, Saidiya V., Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1997)Google Scholar, and Spillers, Hortense J., Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago, 2003)Google Scholar.

11. Wilderson, Frank B. III, Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms (Durham, NC, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12. Van der Linden, “The Promise.”

13. Ibid .

14. Cooper, Decolonization.

15. Cooper, Frederick, On the African Waterfront: Urban Disorder and the Transformation of Work in Colonial Mombasa (New Haven, CT, 1987)Google Scholar.

16. See also, for a comprehensive overview, Freund, Bill, The African Worker (Cambridge, 1988)Google Scholar.

17. See for example Momoh, Abubakar, “Youth Culture and Area Boys in Lagos,” in Identity Transformation and Identity Politics Under Structural Adjustment in Nigeria, ed. Jega, Attahiru (Uppsala, 2000), 181–203 Google Scholar and Droz, Yvan, “Street Children and the Work Ethic. New Policy for an Old Moral, Nairobi (Kenya),” Childhood 13 (2006): 349–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18. A classic example, which problematizes the embrace of class consciousness by a constituency that can otherwise be presented as a “vanguard” in the commodification of labor in colonial Africa, Southern African mineworkers, is in Harries, Patrick, Work, Culture, and Identity: Migrant Laborers in Mozambique and South Africa, c.1860–1910 (Portsmouth, NH, 1994)Google Scholar.

19. Alverson, Hoyt, Mind in the Heart of Darkness: Value and Self-Identity Among the Tswana of Southern Africa (New Haven, CT, 1978)Google Scholar.

20. See Lindsay, Lisa, Working with Gender: Wage Labor and Social Change in Southwestern Nigeria (Portsmouth, NH, 2003)Google Scholar. For a discussion of relations of wage labor and masculinity under colonial capitalism see Brown, Carolyn, “We Were All Slaves”: African Miners, Culture and Resistance at the Enugu Government Colliery (Portsmouth, NH, 2003)Google Scholar.

21. Van der Linden, “The Promise.”

22. Lubeck, Paul, “Islamic Protest under Semi-Industrial Capitalism: ‘Yan Tatsine Explained,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 55 (1985): 369–89Google Scholar.

23. Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Rethinking Working Class History: Bengal 1890–1940 (Princeton, 1988)Google Scholar.

24. Spivak, Gayatri C., “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” in Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Guha, Ranajit and Spivak, Gayatri C. (Oxford, 1988), 16Google Scholar.

25. An excellent discussion of this point is in Mezzadra, Sandro, “How Many Histories of Labour? Towards a Theory of Postcolonial Capitalism,” Postcolonial Studies 14 (2011): 151–70Google Scholar.

26. Van der Linden, “The Promise.”