It is a sector that delivers $1.3bn annually to the New South Wales economy and supports up to 22,000 jobs, yet the average writer earns just $18,200 a year from their creative practice.

To counter this stark disparity, the NSW government is launching the state’s first ever writing and literature strategy, and has committed $3.2m to support and expand the sector.

The NSW arts minister, John Graham, said it was a response to urgent pressures, including low incomes, declining reading rates and the growing impact of digital media and artificial intelligence on publishing.

“This requires direct action, because there is too much to lose and so much to gain from a strong literary sector in NSW,” he said in a statement launching the Stories Matter strategy on Friday.

“We want our stories to be told, we want to be part of the global literary conversation and we rely on the social cohesion that comes from the nuance and empathy that books build.”

Stories Matter reflects similar programs operating in Canada, Germany, France and Scandinavian countries.

The NSW model will include $630,000 to support a public library membership campaign, including a pilot program to encourage women, girls and LGBTQ+ communities to take advantage of the free services and facilities offered by more than 360 public libraries across the state.

A $200,000 development fund for First Nations writers and publishing professionals was also announced as part of the strategy, along with the establishment of up to four temporary and 12 to 24-month affordable housing residencies for artists, writers, playwrights and illustrators.

The government will establish a $500,000 literary fellowships fund to support authors, playwrights and illustrators, and a further $225,000 will fund three co-funded Writing Australia collaborations – including a program to develop an international marketing arm to promote sales of Australian writing abroad and financially support writers who are touring internationally.

A further $100,000 will go to western Sydney literature organisations, including the delivery of a school-focused program and an emerging writers academy.

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The multi-award-winning writer Charlotte Wood was used as a case study by the NSW government’s advisory panel working on the strategy.

“I’m hopeful the strategy will recognise that Australian literature is not merely decorative, a nice thing somehow separate from the rest of life,” Wood said on Thursday.

“Literature is absolutely central to the intellectual life and psychology of any nation. Australian books and writers are a dynamic contributor to the cultural, economic and political thinking that shapes our society. And unless governments begin to take reading and literary contribution seriously, that flourishing intellectual life is doomed to evaporate.”

The novelist and critic James Bradley, whose work Deep Water was shortlisted for the 2025 Prime Minister’s Literary award for nonfiction, was on the advisory panel.

“The NSW government’s new literature strategy will make a material difference to the lives of the state’s writers by investing in creators, strengthening the literary ecosystem and fostering a range of new partnerships with universities, cultural institutions and other organisations,” he said.

“But it also helps ensure the benefits of reading and writing are available to everybody by investing in programs to improve literacy and promote reading in schools, supporting First Nations writers and publishing professionals and allowing readers of all ages to connect with writers through events in libraries and elsewhere.”

The initiative comes after the Australian Society of Authors launched its latest defence against the onslaught of AI, confirming that Australian writers and illustrators could be eligible for compensation under a landmark US$1.5bn class action settlement against AI company Anthropic in the US.

The lawsuit was brought by American writers who allege the company downloaded copyrighted books from the shadow library LibGen to train its chatbot.

The ASA chief executive, Lucy Hayward, said the association’s searchable list of works would enable Australian writers and illustrators to check whether their creations are among the 500,000 included in the class action. But Hayward said she feared some Australian authors could miss out, even though their books were included in the pirated books dataset, because of the narrow definition of the case.

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It is believed as many as 7m titles are in the LibGen library, without permission for use from authors or publishers.

“It’s clear that Australian authors cannot rely on expensive and lengthy overseas litigation to see redress for the harm done to them,” Hayward said.

“We need government intervention. The ASA is calling for the government to introduce a mandatory code of conduct that requires big tech to appropriately license the Australian copyright work they wish to use for AI training, as well as to pay ongoing fair compensation to Australian creators whose works have already been ingested – and from whom it is too late to seek consent – for as long as their work remains ingested in the models.”

The Anthropic case is one of dozens of lawsuits currently before US courts addressing the use of copyrighted books by AI companies.

As two neuroscientists filed a lawsuit last week in California against Apple, claiming the company used shadow libraries to illegally access thousands of pirated books to train its AI model, the Australian Productivity Commission was coming under fire in a parliamentary inquiry hearing for failing to consult anyone in the creative sector about AI’s impact on the arts – an oversight Wood described on Thursday as “an obscenity and a travesty”.

In 2023 the Booker prize winner Richard Flanagan discovered his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North was one of as many as 18,000 fiction and nonfiction titles with Australian ISBNs that had been pirated by the US-based Books3 dataset and used to train generative AI for corporations such as Meta and Bloomberg.

“I felt as if my soul had been strip-mined and I was powerless to stop it,” he said at the time.

“This is the biggest act of copyright theft in history.”

The head of policy at the Australian Publishers Association, Stuart Glover, said the Books3 case was ongoing.

“Tech needs to stop pretending this is ‘fair use’ of authors’ and publishers’ work,” he said.

“We hope future settlements at least meet the benchmarks set by the Anthropic case.”

What unites Jordan Peele’s Us, Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite, R. F. Kuang’s Yellowface, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (remade into a Hulu series), and the most recently viral Severance? We might call this a new genre: Labor-as-Horror, given rise, perhaps, by how much “labor” has been in the headlines. There are varying interpretations: It can be a horrible thing (i.e. migrant or child labor); it can be a necessary thing under horrible attack (i.e. Trump’s labor cuts; AI’s replacement of humans); or it can itself be “horror” (i.e. Severance as an indictment of American work culture). “Labor” forces us to ask: Who has power? “Horror” forces us to ask: Who is the monster? And the combination of the two, “Labor-as-Horror,” tells us to beware the uncomfortable fractures in our otherwise ordinary work.

What if, in fact, labor is a horror? Might the uncomfortable be a euphemism for the horrific? And might the fractures be bellwethers of actual collapse—of society, or safety, or everything we think we know? Or, perhaps, are we already living in that collapse?

In 2024, shortly before the US collapsed into its own panic of federal layoffs, job cuts, and halted funding—what CNN called a labor “bloodbath”—two novels were translated into English. Alia Trabucco Zerán’s Clean and Michele Mari’s Verdigris offer Chilean and Italian examples of Labor-as-Horror. And no wonder, set as they are in modern-day Santiago and 1969’s Nasca, respectively. More specifically, Clean and Verdigris are set in the states of Chile and Italy after the collapse of their fascist governments.

As their characters move through their everyday work, this history of fascism is simply fact, air, breath. Clean centers around the testimony of the housemaid Estela, assumed to be a murderer, while Verdigris is about the declining memory of the old groundskeeper “Felice: a true monster.” It is within the details of Estela and Felice’s work—as domestic workers—that the horror emerges: “Stiff, forced smile[s] which are really ‘grimace[s] of terror,’” a laundry of “shirts with bloodstains,” the “mass slaughter” of slugs in the garden, and lettuce heads with “voices chattering in French.”

The novels move toward revelations of death, destruction, and injustices obscured. In this way, the features of their work become structural and emotional fractures, and these fractures become horrific reflections of the persisting “social fissures” of the Pinochet and Mussolini regimes. For Estela and Felice—as for Chile and Italy—fascism is in the past. And yet its horrors endure.

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Clean is narrated by a housemaid, Estela; throughout the novel, she is being interrogated for the death of her employer’s daughter. It’s written in choppy, beguiling prose, akin to Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace and mirroring Scheherazade’s storytelling in Arabian Nights. Estela’s narration is filled with macabre reflections on life and death, imbued with visceral descriptions of bodily or emotional violation and, always, dread.

One gets the feeling that Estela’s life is on the line: She wants to tell a good story; she wants to say something meaningful about death, society, and the family that employed her; she wants to be listened to; and she keeps asking, “Can you hear me?” Estela states at the beginning of the novel, “I’m going to tell you a story, and when I get to the end, when I stop talking, you’re going to let me out of here.” But this promise, by the novel’s end, collapses. “Hello?” Estela asks after she has finished her story. “I’m in here. The door’s still locked.”

The entire project of Clean is, in fact, a rumination on collapse. The novel begins with an epigraph from Albert Camus’s The Fall, and Estela’s recounting ends with a rock being thrown into the air. She laments, “I didn’t hear it fall.”

For the entirety of the novel, readers are likewise waiting for the moment to “drop”—for the little girl, Julia, to die. Although written like a mystery, Clean holds no surprises, only the anxious and uncomfortable fractures that crop up in Estela’s daily, monotonous work: the hiding of a stray dog, who Estela is later forced to kill; Julia’s father’s strange confession one night, which Estela is forced to listen to; Julia’s mother, toasting “cheers” to her guests immediately after mistreating Estela. These events don’t serve a specific plot, as much as they build malaise and the terrifying realization that we are all trapped, alongside Estela, in the story, the interrogation room, and the social system of labor.

Indeed, if there is any surprise in Clean at all, it is that neither the “how” nor the “why” of Julia’s death—the entire reason for Estela’s confession—are ever fully revealed. “What did the cause matter?” Estela asks. The point is the collapse. (Of safety, the promise of freedom, and the previous conviction that we might “get used to life there.”) “The damage was already done,” Estela says, “It’s important you understand. Spilled blood can’t return to its source. Just as a lifeless body will eventually sink underwater. Just as the crack that opened up that day would be impossible to mend.”

This impossibility might have been top of mind for Trabucco Zerán, who belongs to “a generation of writers who were children during the Pinochet era but largely came of age after the democratic transition,” explains Caroline A. Miranda. “Even as they have tasted political freedom, the legacy of the dictatorship has followed them into adulthood: the missing who never returned, as well as an economic system and a constitution molded by the military regime that is still used to govern the country.” How, then, could one not connect Estela’s warning to Chile’s fascist past?

It is a distinctive and perhaps incriminating time, then, for Trabucco Zerán’s Clean to come to English-speaking audiences, and especially to the United States, where fascism is on the rise. There are obvious resonances between Pinochet and Trump: their carefully constructed legal immunity; their use of propaganda and conspiracy; their refusal to accept any election results not in their favor.

Most blatantly, Trump is now echoing Pinochet’s “disappearings”: the one-thousand-plus people who Pinochet’s dictatorship kidnapped and killed, leaving no record of their fate. Now, only two years after Chile began uncovering what it could of these disappeared people, the US government kidnapped and disappeared a green-card holder, pro-Palestinian organizer and Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil. Khalil’s case was the first out of a series of many attempts to deport, detain, and disappear not only pro-Palestinian activists but also migrants, dissenters, and people of color. The use of the word “disappear” as a verb with a passive object is vital: not just “Khalil disappeared” but “the Trump administration disappeared Khalil,” or “Khalil was disappeared (by the government).” Khalil is turned into the passive object that is disappeared, rather than the sentence’s subject. He is stripped of grammatical agency, just as he is stripped of his political agency and legal rights. The horror, of course, is that what happens merely grammatically is, then, what happens in real life.

This use of “disappear” is often credited to Pinochet and threatens not just death or detainment but the literal quashing of one’s existence, voice, and memory. It is consequential and oppressive: an act of terror. In Chile (and in Spanish) it identifies victims of the Pinochet regime, known as “Los Desaparecidos” (The Disappeared). And in Clean, it is the apparatus upon which the novel’s thriller/horror element depends. Estela is afraid of disappearing. “Can you hear me?” she asks in the second sentence of the novel. “Can you hear me?” she asks again in the second-to-last sentence.

Estela is constantly concerned with disappearance: She is haunted by the concept of being forgotten, erased, and, indeed, “disappeared” in the passive form. When she is ordered to wash a dress, Estela notes that it “was so soft that at any moment it seemed it might disappear, and I with it.” When asked to clean the fallen figs from the yard, Estela remarks, “I cleaned until every last trace of death had disappeared. The tree would never recover, it had found its cause. After a few months they cut it down.” When Estela muses about the child Julia’s death, she says, “Of course the girl wouldn’t remember me. But maybe, had she lived, she’d have remembered my hands.” And when she thinks of herself and her past, Estela confesses, “It’s a strange coincidence, because it’s like my childhood memories all mounted up until my seventh birthday and then, poof, disappeared.”

Estela’s fear of disappearance is the reason she is invested in her storytelling, the reason she is haunted by Julia’s death, and the reason she cannot forget her own mother. The mundanities of her work threaten violence. She notices bloodstains in her employers’ dental guards, laundered shirts, and chewed fingernails. She sees death in the trees, the box of rat poison, the dustbin. She shoots a dog between its eyes. How is it that something can suddenly, “poof, [be] disappeared,” even oneself?

Clean ends with three questions: “Hello? Can you hear me? Is anybody there?”

The following white space, marking the end of the novel, marks also Estela’s final disappearance. This move is foreshadowed in all the preceding chapters, themselves split up into small written chunks and divided by tense, white space. These breaks are themselves disappearances—time jumps, words unspoken, unvoiced grievances—over and over again. That is, until the very last one, in which Estela is vanished.

Such disappearances are “places like the hidden storage room behind the dismantled bed at the side of the hayloft, places like the rich earth that lay under the lawn,” explains Michele Mari in his gothic horror novel Verdigris. “In both cases,” he writes, “these places and memories housed bodies: was it possible that this was all the past granted us, dead people or ghosts? The executed or the disappeared?” Mari’s characters—much like Trabucco Zerán’s—live in the ruins of a collapse they have yet to recognize, or, perhaps, even remember. Indeed, disappearance in Verdigris is directly tied to memory, and in particular the deteriorating memory of Felice, the delirious groundskeeper of a northern Italian estate.

In the summer of 1969, Felice strikes an unlikely friendship with his employer’s grandson, the 13-year-old Michelino. Michelino is entranced by Felice’s Otherness: his “lumpy and spongelike nose,” his rural dialect (which itself “seems to present a break from reality,” as Brian Robert Moore writes in his translator’s note), and, most of all, the fact that Felice’s memories are “disappearing at a devastating rate, because for every erasure that he noticed there must have been many others that, by the very virtue of the memory having vanished, left no sign and inspired no suspicion.”

In both novels, labor is laden with horror precisely because its mundanities so easily mask inequality, structural oppression, and even the tyrannies of fascism.

Michelino and Felice’s friendship is precarious, and readers are unsure who might hurt the other. Felice is older, menacing, physically grotesque, with a mysterious history; but Michelino is smart and a member of the social elite, indeed the grandson of Felice’s employer. Their friendship is not only unlikely but laden itself with the unease of the horror genre. It is also reminiscent of Victor Frankenstein’s relationship to his monster. Throughout the novel, indeed, Michelino refers to Felice as his “monster,” and he extracts a frightening glee from this relationship. “While I felt disheartened by the impossibility of helping [Felice] to put his unsettled mind back in order,” Michelino confesses, “there now crept in the joy of being able to confirm that my monster truly was a monster.”

Michelino makes it his mission to recover the memory of “ugly,” “monstrous,” “poor” Felice. He quizzes his grandfather’s groundskeeper on facts, interviews him about his past, and devises a game of mnemonic devices (“fleece” for “Felice,” “NASCAR” for the town “Nasca,” et cetera). But what begins as an assumption of a biological disorder—“senile dementia,” Michelino suspects—has more sinister roots.

In fact, Felice is traumatized by his past, and in particular, the historical violences brought on by a fascist state. He was abandoned as a child and a witness to murder. He does not have a last name. The historical records do not account for his employment at the summer estate: “The local officials at the time made a clean sweep of the preexisting documentation.” And Felice’s memory, Verdigris insinuates, is overwritten by further trauma, such that he is constantly “in contact with something frightening and unhuman … with the dead, essentially.” In this way, the novel draws direct conclusions between oppressive political systems and the act of disappearing memories, histories, and people.

“And what about no one knowing who owned this house before the Fascist era? Do things like that happen too?” Michelino asks his grandfather.

“They can happen,” his grandfather responds.

“And a Fascist prefect randomly making up a new name for a municipality, that can happen too, and with not a single inhabitant remembering the previous name?”

“That’s life, tout passe…”

Michelino is horrified by his grandfather’s shrugging acceptance of historical revisionism: “The same old crap they teach you in school to get the better of you,” he exclaims. “Everything flows and nothing stays, you convinced yourself that things were a certain way when, upsy-daisy, they’ve changed.”

This collapse is the horror in Verdigris, just as it is in Clean. Michelino goes on to discover wine bottles filled with blood, hidden barrels of meat-eating slugs, and the skeletal remains of Nazi soldiers: all hidden in his grandparents’ otherwise beautiful estate. “Why did the people who knew keep quiet?” Michelino asks. And why did Felice continue to “liv[e] permanently among the house’s mysteries … sleep[ing] in his little room, work[ing] in our garden and orchard”?

The question is similar to the ones Estela poses:

By now you’re probably wondering why I stayed. … Why do you stay in your jobs? In your poky offices, in the factories, in the shops on the other side of this wall? I never stopped believing I would leave that house, but routine is treacherous; the repetition of the same rituals—open your eyes, close them, chew, swallow, brush your hair, brush your teeth—each one an attempt to gain mastery over time. A month, a week, the length and breadth of a life.

Both Clean and Verdigris ask us what we would do in the face of collapse. What we would do if we lived in “a place where we city dwellers … slowly yet meticulously progressed toward its own destruction”?

In both novels, labor is laden with horror precisely because its mundanities so easily mask inequality, structural oppression, and even the tyrannies of fascism. The ease with which we can continue in our respective daily tasks is one of the most obvious and horrendous ways we surrender our own freedom, agency, and remembrance.

What would we do in the face of an active disappearance—of people, memory, history? Would we keep quiet? Would we allow the mechanical repetition of labor, silence, or routine to pacify us? What would we do, if we were to be in that place?

As Anna Aslanyan writes, Verdigris can be read as a “a commentary on collective amnesia, a condition affecting not just contemporary Italy, where fascism is becoming a real threat again, but also societies all over the globe”—especially in the United States, which just welcomed the novel’s English translation. The same concern with amnesia, of course, can be found in Clean.

“From now on you can no longer say that you didn’t know,” Estela tells us, before she disappears forever. “That you didn’t hear or see. That you were oblivious to the truth, to reality.”

This is the double horror of both novels. We live in that place now. 

In his 1925 essay “The Negro Digs Up His Past,” Arturo Schomburg writes, “There is the definite desire and determination to have a history, well documented, widely known at least within race circles, and administered as a stimulating and inspiring tradition for the coming generations.” Award-winning historian and writer Blair LM Kelley is a shining example of Schomburg’s call to action for creating a historical legacy that future generations will invoke for years to come.

Kelley is the current Joel R. Williamson Distinguished Professor of Southern Studies and director of the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Her work focuses primarily on the Black American South and its activist legacies. For example, Kelley’s first book Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson (2010) chronicles the everyday resistance of Black women and men against segregated streetcars and trains in cities across the early Jim Crow South.

Kelley’s newest book, Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class (2023), uses her family history and archival research to expand our understanding of race, gender, and class in the South. Black Folk is a dazzling testament of research, storytelling, and analytical rigor that is accessible to both academic and nonacademic audiences alike. It is the recipient of multiple awards, including the 2024 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Book Award, the 2024 Phillip Taft Labor History Award, and the 2024 Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize in Nonfiction.

I sat down with Kelley ahead of the paperback release of Black Folk. We had a wide-ranging conversation about Black joy, her careful excavation of the interior lives of working-class Black people, quiet protest and resistance, and the influence of working-class Black women on Black activism.

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Regina N. Bradley (RNB): I have been rereading Black Folk and I want to start with the title, which you address in the introduction and pointedly say is not a reference to W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk. What made you feel like you had to distinguish between a Duboisian understanding of race and class, and the one that you present in the book?

 

Blair LM Kelley (BLMK): I called it Black Folk because I just wanted it to be us, and inhabit a Black point of view. Every reader is welcome, but I wanted it to be grounded in community, I wanted it to be home. Home folks who we know. And I wanted it to be discernible by us as a story of us, by us, for us.

 

RNB: For me, the book conjured up Zora. Do you see yourself in conversation with folks like Zora Neale Hurston and Albert Murray? If you were to put yourself in a genealogical conversation, which books do you feel would be with Black Folk?

 

BLMK: Absolutely, the work of Zora Neale Hurston is an inspiration. Particularly for my Athens chapter, the second chapter, “Sarah at Home, Working on Her Own Account,” which is the story of Sarah Hill, a Black washerwoman who lived and worked in Athens, Georgia, where I use historic, New Deal–era Works Progress Administration (WPA) interviews. Hurston worked as a WPA interviewer and drew on her profound understanding of the work of Black women. I talk about Hurston’s analysis and scholarship in that chapter and I explicate her story of a washerwoman, the short story called “Sweat,” which is so thoughtful and brilliant and careful.

In “Sweat,” the site of Black women’s work is all encompassing. The main character, Delia, was both fighting for her independence but then also tethered to her household and to a husband who was awful to her. In the end, her independent spirit and willingness to fight back really liberates her. So I love that story and I love the ways in which she is not only there as a storyteller but also as an oral historian, this ethnographer whose work is in the WPA, whose criticism of the work of others in the WPA undergirds my own analysis of the things we are missing in those interviews if we take them on the surface. Hurston’s work and just the brilliance that Sarah exhibits, the woman who is the washerwoman whose story I dig into, is so incredible and so she is really an inspiration for that work of digging deep, that care work that has to go into how we listen to this generation.

Of course, I’m always indebted to historians like Robin D. G. Kelley, Tera Hunter, whose work taught me how to even think in these ways, how to build the infrastructure behind the ways I want to storytell. I want it to read like a story, but I want it to sit in a structure that is historical, that is archival, that is grounded in oral histories and the things that we can know, ways of knowing about the past. And so I’m always indebted to them.

I’m also a huge fan of Toni Morrison and so I always want to invoke the ways in which she wrote about space and household and time and care with such beauty. And I really wanted to bring the beauty back to the ways in which we talked about regular Black people on an everyday basis and invoke that Morrisonian tone if I could.

 

RNB: Traditional historical narratives are so dry and impersonable and sometimes they dehumanize the subject in order to preserve academic integrity. I didn’t get that with this book. I know that this book is nonfiction. It is grounded in fact, but the storytelling is so absorbing. It reminded me of the oral tradition and how significant that is in understanding Southern Black history. You do that so beautifully with this book.

Can you talk a little bit about the significance of storytelling as an engine for history? Why is storytelling important for making the stories and the narratives that you are trying to highlight accessible to nonacademic audiences?

BLMK: What is so important is that people learn through story. We learn our past through the stories that we can tell. When I’m reading regular history, I’m always thinking about my folks and thinking, Well, how does that sound for their experiences? I’m always looking for the sound and the feel, even when I’m reading more traditional history.

I am frustrated with the ways in which people who are not formally trained as historians become the greatest leading historians in the country, because they can write for general audiences and people love history and they want readable history. So I also want trained historians to rise to the occasion of writing for a general audience, so that people can read our work. Folks should benefit from the things that scholars know, but it should be given to them in ways that they can be comfortable, that they can fall through the story on any level. You could read this book and not know any theory at all.

The other thing is that some of the beauty and the synchronicity of the story is bigger than me. It is ancestral. It is, there is no way in hell that I would have been able to find all these pieces that sit together so carefully, to find the stories that I found. Finding Sarah Hill, the washerwoman born in Elbert County, where my maternal ancestors are from, which I didn’t even—I never knew about Elbert County until I started working on my genealogy. Like Minnie Savage that I write about in the fifth chapter, who happened to be born in Accomack, the place where my grandfather was born, migrating probably within the same two- or three-year period as my grandfather to the city of Philadelphia. I have no idea if they knew each other or didn’t know each other, but her story, her oral history, fully narrates a story of migration from Accomack, Virginia, to Philadelphia that I can’t ask my grandfather about because he died before I was born. But just the happenstance of the way that finding Minnie rounds out the story I want to tell, that is just bigger than me. On top of all that, she was such a great storyteller! I mean, she snuck out of church to go run away to migrate, like who does that? And so, all of these things coming together at the same time, that is not just me. Me discovering in Accomack a whole labor organization started by Black workers that ends up in a racial massacre that I never read about in any history book. I’m writing a book about the working class, my grandfather is from this very, very tiny rural place; then, boom, I find a labor movement.

All those little pieces that snap together, they feel like the synchronicity that has been given to me, in order to tell this story. So, over and over and over again, it just felt like my path was laid.

 

RNB: It makes me think about how your book represents what Morrison calls “literary archeology.” You take bits and pieces of known fact and add sustenance and depth to it to make the story more rich and to humanize the subject. Your treatment of people in this book is not just as blips in history who are quickly covered over by whatever other significant and more well-established historical moments show up. For example, you brought up the Accomack protests, I remember saying to myself, “Wow. This is a lot even though the story sounds familiar.” I am familiar with the racial massacres and racial tension of the era but not familiar with Accomack as a place or the people. I am familiar with stories of Black people migrating from the “Deep South” but not the intimate particulars of why. You create an inside story, an interior narrative, that complicates larger historical events.

Black Folks gives an inside look into Black lives that would otherwise be frozen in time and unassuming in archival pictures, not knowing what their names were, what they did, or who they were.

Can you talk a little bit about how you created this interior understanding of not only Black working-class folk, but of the Black South?

 

BLMK: When I write, my goal is to sit on the shoulder of the folks I am writing about. What do they see when they wake up in the morning? What does that space look like? Who is family? Who is community? What is their neighborhood? Who is supporting them? Who is their enemy? Who is their friend?

So I just build out all those little things. I make maps and story charts for everybody that I write about. I use the technology that is available to me. I love a Google map. I will go back to an old neighborhood and if it still exists, I’m going to look at someone’s house. I am going to follow the pathway from the train to their house. What did they pass and what did the buildings really look like, and what did the train station look like?

My goal is to move through that neighborhood and make it feel as evocative and as cared for as an everyday experience as I possibly can. There are a lot of things that I do to research and build out a story that don’t even show up in a really direct way, but they help, they inform me, they enrich those small details.

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RNB: Black women are front and center in this book. For example, your research about washerwomen should win an award on its own. I’m going to read back to you a quote that I highlighted: “All Black women’s laundry work was born both in compliance with and defiance of white authority.” This made me think about my own great-grandmother, Mary Jones, who said, I will wash y’all’s clothes, I am not going to clean y’all’s house. She was very adamant about that. Your book made me think about how domestic workers connected to ideas of respectability and being ladylike, and how to maintain dignity and respect while pushing forward and taking care of their families.

Could you talk about how these women balanced the expectation to be neat and humble with the grind, the hustle, the I’m not going to just sit here and let y’all tell me what I can and can’t do.

 

BLMK: I love looking at the labor numbers around washerwomen and women who are maids inside households, cooks inside households. There was a trend toward women who had children, who had to care for family, who had obligations, wanting to do washer work. So, in fact they are the first stay-at-home generation who is working from home. They want to be there for their children, to raise their children, to be in proximate space, to build a household in ways that they were not allowed to as enslaved women. They set the terms of how the laundry will be taken in, when it will be done, when it will be bought back. They pushed back against all the stigmatization that happens about them.

They are a really formidable group of people, but they are behind so many of the protests against segregation that I studied in my first book, Right to Ride. They are riding streetcars to move that laundry around, so they don’t want to be insulted and degraded in those spaces. So they fight back. They don’t succeed in this first generation, but they are key to it.

When those women organize, they verbalize the need for protection from sexual assault that happens in white households. They verbalized that well before the turn of the 20th century. They are the very first people who I can see as the workers who are seeking out protection from being raped in those households, in labor organizing as early as the 1870s.

There is clarity of purpose that you can find among these brilliant washerwomen. And it just, it overwhelmed me, how powerful they really were.

RNB: This idea of thinking about the subtleties of Black activism, and how that made so many white folks uncomfortable, is one theme that kept coming up for me while reading your work. Especially in the Accomack chapter, where agricultural laborers organized for higher pay. Their resistance wasn’t loud. It seemed like many just said: I’m going to talk to you while we get something to eat, I’m going to talk to you while we working in the field. I’m going to talk to you after church. Usually when we think protest, we think loud and demanding. It really struck me how quiet much of the resistance was that you shared in the book.

Did you find that interesting in your research: Quiet resistance and how that pushes back against this popular narrative that you had to be loud and boisterous to invoke change? Because a lot of the change that you talk about in this book happened very quietly.

 

BLMK: I love that. A good Marxist would say that you can’t find this resistance among this population. It is a rural population; they haven’t developed consciousness enough to do this work; they have to move to an urban space; they have to be working in a factory; they would build their consciousness there.

But that just is not necessary. It wasn’t necessary, so much so because Black people in slavery developed those habits, those quiet habits that we can see in freedom, that is where they come from. You couldn’t do anything out loud as an enslaved person and live, at least not for long.

Black people developed the ability to speak in code, to talk in front of other folks and have them not understand exactly what was meant. They sang songs that sounded like one thing but in reality meant something completely different. They worshiped in secret and developed a brand of Black Christianity grounded in a different viewpoint, drawing on African cosmologies and a Black reading of the Bible. Black folks had been doing many things quietly all along, so they organized quietly too. They knew how to talk to one another without everybody hearing. And so of course as free people, they maintained those habits. They don’t appear to be organizing as a union until white people slowly start to recognize, well, wait a minute, no one is going to wash my clothes over the Christmas holiday, wait, none of y’all will wash my clothes over Christmas? That’s when they began to see that washerwomen had been talking, organizing. No one is going to pick these sweet potatoes because we wouldn’t let Black farmers join the all-white agricultural co-op, what? Huh? All the farmworkers in the county are going to ask for more money for their labor? How did that happen? Black workers used that church space, that grocery store, the field, the family gathering, the juke joint, communal wash pots in the backyards as a space to talk and think and theorize as workers. They were smart people.

I remember when I first went to graduate school, I got in some debate with somebody who said that people who did physical labor didn’t have time to think, and I thought, you’ve never worked with your hands before, have you? My first job was at a supermarket just scanning stuff and I had plenty of time to think. I was thinking the whole time.

So if you are in bondage or you are oppressed, while you are doing the work, you are thinking. You have plenty of time to share a quiet idea. You have time to develop a consciousness about the world and your place in it. They didn’t need labor organizers to tell them how to resist. No, the consciousness, the desire to organize was already there.

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RNB: Black Folk pushes back against the idea that integration is the dream. There is this notion that Black folks assimilate into society and everything will be all hunky-dory. But so many of the firsthand accounts that you included in this book said something like, I didn’t want to mess with no white folks.

What they are saying disrupts an indoctrinated narrative that we have been told about previous generations, that Jim Crow–era Black folks just wanted to be accepted by white people. I didn’t get that with this book, for which I thank you, by the way. Was that intentional? Did you consistently see that in the oral histories that you reviewed? How can you further break down that myth that Black people always have to be in proximity to white folks?

 

BLMK: The very first thing I did in graduate school was participate in a project called Behind the Veil at Duke University, which went out and interviewed Black Southerners about their experiences with Jim Crow. I was in two different Southern sites, my team did perhaps 50 interviews over that summer. And oh boy, people were just trying to get the safe buildings and good textbooks and equipment that white people had for their children, so that is why they wanted to integrate schools. It was not because they really liked white people or trusted them. After all, they knew white people just fine; their jobs had them working with white folks all the time. Especially people who worked in white households, they knew them, their children, their marriages, they probably knew more than the neighbors knew. White employers would forget that Black workers were there, they became invisible to them, so Black employees listened. They understood white people just fine, there was no magic sauce about white people, they were human like everyone else. Black agricultural workers knew that their knowledge of crops and science made white landholders wealthy. Black factory workers saw that the white supervisors sometime didn’t know as much about the work that they were doing. White supremacy meant that white workers didn’t have to know more to receive better jobs.

So Black people didn’t buy into the myths of white supremacy. They had to behave accordingly to live, but at no point are they thinking, Oh, white people, that is it. They got the nice stuff and we have the jacked-up stuff because they are better than us. No, they know it is because they took it. They took it. So they figured out that perhaps the best way for Black children to have better books and decent buildings that don’t fall down around them, would be to just integrate the schools. But the motivation was to get the better books and decent buildings. It wasn’t the idea that children needed to sit together because there is something magic that comes off of a white child that goes to the Black child and makes the Black child elevated. Black people knew that the Black child is just as good as the white child. They were never confused about that.

And so those interviews just hammered that home again and again. It was a strategy, it was an outcome of the planning of the NAACP, saying, I see you building this parallel world, it probably would be easier to get there if you just question segregation, go straight at the question. So that is an NAACP strategy, that is not Black thought.

Black thought really is more complex than that. Black people wanted what was due them. They did not think of their spaces and their institutions and their schools and their teachers and their ministers and their community as inherently less than just because they were Black. That is what white people thought.

 

RNB: That paranoia of quotidian everyday Black experiences angered me. I felt an irritation as I was reading that felt ancestral.

But joy is also a strong presence in this book. I want to hear your theorization of Black joy, especially as it relates to labor and the working class, because that is supposed to be oxymoronic. You are supposed to be working class and just toil day in and day out, and you don’t have any type of release. That is the expectation.

How calculated was it that you included these moments of happiness and community as joy? How do you theorize Black joy as a historian?

 

BLMK: Joy is a uniquely interesting Black experience. We talk about joy a lot, we sing about joy. The world didn’t give it, but the world can’t take it away. And that joy is transcendent; that is, despite the circumstances that are always going to be around, one can think, I have something inside me that isn’t dependent on you and how you treat me. I know who I am, I know the secret of whose I am, I got my folks, I got my ancestors, I got my God, and I’m all right, and I’m going to laugh with my folks. I am going to eat with my folks. We are going to drink, we are going to play, we are going to do fun things.

I never experienced being Black as an unjoyful thing. My grandparents, they could argue like crazy people, but then break into joy: like, what are we going to eat, and where are we going, and who is coming? And then it would just be in the yard, everybody talking and eating and laughing and playing games and jonesing on each other, my grandparents could tease the hot dickens out of anybody at any time, my grandfather was just hilarious, like he was just quick and mean and funny and just, always going back and forth with everything. So I experienced home as joyful and funny and full of music and laughter and dancing and celebrating.

They weren’t wealthy people, they weren’t ubersuccessful in any traditional American capitalistic accounting, but that didn’t make them unhappy. It probably made them a little bit happier than some other people just to have those spaces, where none of that was at play, where none of that was in effect. It was our space, they were hungry for those spaces: My grandfather and his brother sought out land in an all-Black enclave and they lived there and they were comfortable there, they built homes there, from their own hands because they knew that that turn within would help to keep them safe and would give them those spaces that were just free for their children, and grandchildren.

I write about my grandmother holding my hand so tightly when we were in public; on that land, my grandmother let my hand go because she knew she was at home.

RNB: Can we talk about home for a minute? I’m curious to hear your thoughts about an intentional pushback against South as a homeland to folks who aren’t white. When you think about the South as home, folks automatically go to the Confederacy, they go to the lost cause. And I say, Well, how does that include these other groups of people who don’t subscribe to that understanding of southernness?

I wonder how thinking about labor in the South speaks home? How can we tease out a stronger connection between home and labor and land, that is such a distinctively Black Southern thing. You have made it if you own land and if we get this land, you better not sell it.

 

BLMK: You got to keep it.

 

RNB: Yes. So, how do some of those markers indicate thinking about region as home, especially for Black folks?

 

BLMK: I think a lot about my grandmother’s garden. She was so tied to that land. She would wake up before dawn and be out in that field and paying attention to her vegetables and her fruit; she had a grape vine and strawberries and okra and string beans and greens and different lettuces and those big old cornstalks that would get so, so tall that they looked like towers to me as a little girl. She just knew everything about the soil, she would taste the soil a little bit to make sure it was right and did you need to amend it in any way? She would teach me about the green beans and when they were ready and when the strawberries were ripe and the right time of day to pick something. She would just put baskets out on the curb so that other people could take the fruits and vegetables that she had too much of. And she would take some to the church because somebody passed away, she was going to make that her thing on that line that were serving at the repast.

It was so powerful to me how that garden gave her space and peace and communion with her God. It gave her the ability to feed her family. It gave her a future through feeding her babies and grandbabies. It gave her the ability to be in community with other women and to mourn with those who mourn. It gave her preparation and a safety, those cans in that closet if things got bad, you just open a jar and then you have the basis of your dinner, even if things got tight financially. She would share those jars with different women who would come to the door.

That care was just so profound and that land gave that to her. So I can imagine what it was like for her when she first migrated and she couldn’t find an apartment where children were allowed, so her daughter, my mom, had to stay with someone who was not her blood relative. My grandmother lost the opportunity to mother her own child.

So, the migration was really a sacrifice for her. She lost a lot. She lost her relatives to tuberculosis, as they encountered disease environments that they weren’t prepared to live in, they started dying. Generations started dying in her family. So that land—that home she eventually built— represented safety, and allowed her to put her family and community back together.

All of those things told through her story tell you so much about what it means to be home, what it means to work and what it means to labor.

 

RNB: One of the things that I really appreciated was how you deromanticized the idea of the Great Migration.

 

BLMK: All my grandparents were migrants. And when they moved north, they were both stigmatized as country bumpkin Southerners but then they learned to embrace what the South gave them. My paternal grandfather had chickens in the alley in Philadelphia, he had a victory garden, he went to south Jersey to cultivate on land and from a man who was from his home county of Accomack. They must have had a little network and my grandparents met in Philadelphia, both from the Eastern Shore—like how the heck did that happen? They were talking. They are in community. Those communities had meaning over time. They were Southerners, they used the resources that they have in this new place to do new things, they don’t come empty handed.

RNB: Southern Black grandmothers are pillars in the community. I’m speaking as a grandmother’s girl, my grandmama was my world. Everything that I understand about the world I owe to her for giving me some kernel of insight and truth. Black grandmothers play such a pivotal role in your book too: What role do Black grandmothers play in how we understand southernness, class consciousness, and race consciousness?

 

BLMK: I’m in New Jersey, right, I’m not in the South, but I feel in part Southern because of her culture that she shared with me, that my grandfather shared with me. Their household, you could pick it up and put it in Georgia or South Carolina, and it would have made sense. Because of the way they ate, what they believed in, how they worshipped. It is so powerful to be raised by someone who was not ashamed of where she was from. It was a calling card, it was a connection. And for her to be like, baby, you are Geechee like me, because you love that rice. So I’m a preschool-aged girl wondering What is Geechee? because I’m more than 600 miles away from that space, but I am there because I’m in her kitchen, I’m eating her okra, corn, and tomatoes. I’m raised with an ethic passed down to her from her enslaved grandparents. She was born in the place where generations of her family had been held in bondage. And I carried that name. Blair is the last name of her ancestors, her mother’s maiden name, and the name of who held us in bondage, and the name of the plantation where they were held. She always wanted me to understand where she came from.

My nana, my paternal grandmother in Philadelphia, she was from the Eastern Shore. And so, even in the midst of Philadelphia, in a very urban space, she has these Southern habits and it is just so powerful to see: They are Southerners, they are not giving up, they are not ceding that as something that was wrong. They moved because they needed to, they had to support themselves and to find ways forward, to escape violence, but they aren’t saying, That is not who I am.

When I came to the academy a few decades ago, to say that you were a scholar of the South meant that you weren’t working on Black people. I’m trying to complicate that now in this moment, so many scholars have been in the process of complicating that and so I hope the Black Folk does the work of doing that too.

I’m really ready to write another book. This book is about my grandparents’ generation and now I want to write my parent’s generation. Just give me a contract to write it, dang it, and then I will be ready to go. 

Featured image: Blair LM Kelley. Courtesy of Blair LM Kelley

About the author

“Selda Altan brings a much needed and welcome perspective to China’s labor history by focusing on the international context of working-class formation during the late 19th and early 20th century. Studies of class formation (and fragmentation) in China have to date looked at the ‘roaring 1920s’ and the mid 1940s during the high points of the labor movement. Altan’s focus on labor in the construction of the Yunnan-Indochina railway is groundbreaking, expanding the spatial dimensions of China’s labor history to include transnational dimensions and broadening the temporal treatment by suggesting that workers’ subjectivity preceded the labor movement and Nationalist revolution of the 1920s by at least a decade.”

—Joshua H. Howard, University of Mississippi

“Selda Altan’s beautifully conceptualized and densely researched book analyzes the transformative labor relations formed during the building of the Yunnan-Indochina Railway in the early 20th century. Constructed in an area contested among French colonial, British imperialist, and Qing China’s imperial administrations, this railway helped embed the complex norms of modernization into China’s borderlands. These persisting norms include the enormous destruction of environment and habitat, the displacement and exploitation of large numbers of people, the violence of racialized labor regimes, the robustness of competing territorial and capitalist conquests, and more. Epic in scale and yet minute in detail, this book is simultaneously a materialist history; an intellectual history; and a history that intimately connects conflicting imperial projects at the dawn of a new century.”

—Rebecca E. Karl, New York University

“Chinese Workers of the World deepens our understanding of Chinese labor and politics during the late Qing, an era of ‘Imperial globalization.’ France’s construction of the Yunnan railroad on China’s periphery highlights the abuses of the notorious ‘coolie trade’ as well as Chinese workers’ resistance, which was informed by their own networks that were global, regional, and local.Altan offers a deft analysis of the formation of Chinese working class identity and its complex relation to anti-Qing nationalist movements. A must read for those interested in the politics of empire, labor, and the Chinese diaspora.”

—Mae Ngai, Columbia University

Public Books and the Asian Labour Review have partnered to exchange an ongoing series of essays and interviews about and for workers’ movements around the world. Today’s conversation, “5 Books on Labor and Ecology,” was originally published on July 12, 2023.

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Call it Anthropocene, call it Capitalocene, call it Plantationocene, our scorching planetary age results from the conjoined forces of colonial extractivism, fossil capitalism, and postcolonial developmentalism: ways of organizing nature and commodifying labor. Changing environments have already drastically altered labor conditions. Before 2050, some predict that one and a half billion people worldwide will be displaced as a result of climate change, with profound implications for our political economies and notions of citizenship.

However, to say labor agendas should prioritize climate seems incongruous, given the multiple political and social challenges faced by labor movements worldwide. Yet generations of historical and ethnographic research have shown the same ideologies that separate humans from nature underpin the exploitation of differences in class, gender, race, and environment. It is thus fruitful and necessary to think about labor and ecology alongside each other.

In the second installment of our “Five Books on Labor” series, Asian Labour Review’s contributing writer, Tom Guan, sits down with Michitake Aso, an associate professor of the history of the global environment at the University at Albany, State University of New York.  Defining “ecology” as the linkage among human relationships and nonhuman processes involved in the atmosphere, biosphere, and lithosphere, Aso’s award-winning first book, Rubber and the Making of Vietnam: An Ecological History, 1897–1975, exemplifies rigorous, innovative scholarship and provides pointers for activism.

In discussing five works of history and anthropology on Southeast Asia that continue to inspire his research, Aso enunciates why understanding humanity’s entanglement with ecology, with attentiveness to its historical trajectory as well as to gender and race, should be integral for contemporary movements oriented toward labor and environmental justice.

 

• • Pierre Brocheux and Daniel Hémery, Indochina: An Ambiguous Colonization, 1858–1954 (University of California Press, 2009).
  • Ann Laura Stoler, Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra’s Plantation Belt, 1870–1979, 2nd ed (The University of Michigan Press, 1995).
  • Michael Dove, The Banana Tree at the Gate: A History of Marginal Peoples and Global Markets in Borneo (Yale University Press, 2011).
  • Jonathan Padwe, Disturbed Forests, Fragmented Memories: Jarai and Other Lives in the Cambodian Highlands (University of Washington Press, 2020).
  • Sango Mahanty, Unsettled Frontiers: Market Formation in the Cambodia-Vietnam Borderlands (Cornell University Press, 2022).

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Asian Labor Review (ALR): Please tell us about yourself. How did you become a historian of Vietnam, and how does your work present an intersected histories of labor, the environment, and medicine?

 

Michitake Aso (MA): My first book is Rubber and the Making of Vietnam: An Ecological History, 1897–1975. The goal was to place rubber development and, in particular, the plantation form of rubber production in Vietnam, and neighboring Cambodia, into a long-term perspective that focuses on ecology, politics, labor, and medicine. It was an attempt to place a commodity, rubber, in the environments of southern Vietnam and eastern Cambodia to look at the changes over time in rubber production and its effects.

I came to this project due to both personal and intellectual influences. I majored in environmental engineering as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley and was frustrated by the lack of attention to societies, history, and politics in engineering. At some point, I took an environmental history class with Carolyn Merchant and found it an eye-opening experience. So, after finishing my degree in 1998, I went to Vietnam and taught English for two years. I spent much of my time in a city called Biên Hòa in southern Vietnam, about 30 kilometers north of Ho Chi Minh City. If you go a little way up into the foothills and then the Central Highlands, you could still see rubber plantations. I had never seen a plantation before; I found it fascinating, but I didn’t know what to do with this knowledge.

I decided to go to graduate school to understand what I had gone through, and I ended up in the History of Science department at the University of Wisconsin. There I studied under Gregg Mitman, Warwick Anderson, and Rick Keller, who all work at the intersections of science, medicine, and the environment. With their guidance, I sought to incorporate historical methodologies into thinking about Vietnam as a place. It struck me at the time that rubber was one of the most interesting things that I could examine.

My new book project is a history of environmental health in Vietnam during the Cold War. In this book, I analyze how Vietnamese medical doctors and scientists, both in the north and the south, sought to mitigate the worst effects of environmental warfare. The narrative arc of this story begins with the First Indochina War and an episode of alleged biological weapons use by the French, and it ends with Agent Orange. Starting from the 1960s, the US military and its South Vietnamese ally dumped millions of gallons of herbicides, which are inherently toxic and were made more so by the presence of dioxin, a chemical known to cause birth defects and genetic mutations.

These herbicides were used to destroy rice crops in Communist-held areas and deny them plant cover. They were an environmental weapon that had profound consequences on health and left a long-lasting legacy for the Vietnamese and US veterans exposed to them. Yet, little work has been done in English to study how the Vietnamese experts and institutions that dealt with such environmental warfare have contributed to global thinking about environmental health.

 

ALR: What is the ecological impact of the European style of plantations you study?

 

MA: Smallholder rubber production, which many Southeast Asian communities such as the Dayaks in Borneo practized in the nineteenth and especially 20th centuries, has been incorporated quite well into preexisting swidden, or slash-and-burn, agriculture. The hevea trees that were tapped for latex in South America were socially and ecologically integrated into existing forests in Southeast Asia. But European multinational companies created plantations by clearing out and permanently destroying these forests. There’s not much more you can do to destroy an ecology than to bulldoze it flat, burn it, and then replant it with rubber trees.

Once you grow rubber trees, there are different ways of managing a plantation. The ideology of colonial modernity meant that the scientific experts for these multinational companies emphasized the need to “clean weed” as a more advanced form of production, but that’s worse environmentally than letting other plants grow in between. There was quicker soil erosion, for example. Moreover, the chemicals used to process latex from plantations need to be dumped somewhere. Rubber trees, too, need lots of water, jeopardizing water availability in drier areas, and these plantations have not been suitable for wildlife. What were supposed to be the most modern ways of running a plantation were actually the most untenable ecologically.

ALR: Let’s delve into the first book you chose, Indochina: An Ambiguous Colonization, 1858–1954 by Brocheux and Hémery. Ostensibly it isn’t a work of environmental or labor history, but your book cites the two authors considerably. Why is this book important to you?

 

MA: Pierre Brocheux, who unfortunately passed away this past year, and Daniel Hémery are both part of a labor activist tradition in France. Brocheux was Vietnamese-French, and the two historians wrote many works together on Vietnamese nationalism during the colonial period. Indochina gives a good, accessible overview of the processes that occurred in French Indochina, tying together cultural, intellectual, social, political, economic, and to a degree, environmental change.

In other projects, Brocheux dealt extensively with the environment. He has a book on the Mekong Delta, one of the first to not only treat it as a social and economic space but also to look at the flow of the Mekong River itself, the sediments, and why the soils and the mangrove forests matter. This aspect of his writing isn’t recognized as much as I think it should be, but it’s quite groundbreaking.

Brocheux also wrote about rubber plantations. He has a 1975 article that views the rubber plantation as a microcosm of global society, a precursor to the concept of plantationocene. In this approach, which adopts a racial analytic lens, the plantation has a core area that belongs to the white European manager and a peripheral area for Vietnamese subordinates and unskilled laborers, the so-called “coolies.” But there’s another layer outside the plantations for ethnic people, such as the Bunong and Jarai, who lived in regions of southern Vietnam and Cambodia before they became sites of plantations. This analysis of the racial makeup of plantations makes it into the synthetic work of Indochina.

 

ALR: Let’s move to Ann Stoler’s book, Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra’s Plantation Belt, 1870–1979.

 

MA: In Stoler’s first major publication, originally published in 1985, she is on the ground looking at people from Java, Indonesia, who migrated to work on plantations in Sumatra, in particular the region called Deli, which is part of a broader plantation belt. Her book is interesting to me because it articulates a theoretical framework that lasted many years. People had been studying plantations for a long time, but Stoler’s book marks a moment where you can see a shift to a new way of looking at them.

Specifically, she combines attention to both production and reproduction. She examines how owners attempted to recreate artificial villages on plantation peripheries in order to have an excess workforce, mostly of Javanese workers who could be then called and used as laborers. Yet, these villages also seemed like spaces that resembled cultural comfort for the Javanese, a place where they might have felt some kind of home. So, she started to pull on this thread that sees the construction of race and gender not as given entities but as strategies of control, negotiation, and tension between managers, the state, and workers. Scholars, including Stoler herself, have taken this method up and run with it to all kinds of interesting places.

She talks a little bit about the environment, too: the kind of soils and the natural processes that the plantations replaced, though she doesn’t go in that direction. It’s only with the ecological urgency brought about by growing awareness of climate change that scholarship has taken an environmental turn.

 

ALR: Do you think the kind of villages profiled by Stoler shed light on migrant workers’ villages in many cities of the Global South today?

 

MA: It depends on where you’re looking and how much the state is involved. Stoler shows that these village creations were a colonial strategy of labor control. Her relevance to me is you see exactly the same thing in French Indochina with rubber plantations. French plantation owners and managers created these fake villages and promoted them, especially to people from northern and central Vietnam, building shrines and places of ancestral worship —the colonial imagination of what a Vietnamese village looked like.

On the other hand, anthropologist Erik Harms has looked at what he calls “Saigon’s Edge.” He analyzes a global phenomenon where you have workers drawn in from the countryside, creating squatter villages of temporary living that attempt to reproduce something of a livable space. But this is, for the most part, not a state or company-driven process. Global capital and the state may find these living spaces useful, but neither initiated it. Such spaces are allowed to exist until they’re no longer useful.

 

ALR: This segues well into the third book you chose, Michael Dove’s The Banana Tree at the Gate: A History of Marginal Peoples and Global Markets in Borneo, where the state does loom large, and the colonial state is shown to have altered the Dayak people’s relationship to global capitalism fundamentally.

 

MA: This collection of essays draws on Dove’s scholarly career working in the border region between Indonesia and Malaysia on Borneo. Despite its name, it is not only focused on bananas, and it does not adopt the techniques of a village study but rather looks to place the Dayak in a global context.

Dove’s point is that the Dayak have been engaged in world commodity markets for centuries. He describes how often people along the coast of Borneo have valued the Dayak’s role as intermediaries between ocean-going merchants, whether Chinese, South Asian, Arabian, or later European. The Dayak had a dual economy of cash crop production — rubber, resin, pepper — for trade combined with rice agriculture for subsistence. If you needed money for a marriage ceremony, for example, you could sell market-oriented commodities but didn’t rely on them. Dove shows that these two forms of production and labor were in concert with each other and made Dayak’s life ecologically and socially sustainable.

The boom in industrial rubber in the first half of the 20th century prompted the Dutch and British colonial states to disrupt this balance, favoring rubber production while relying on imported rice for subsistence. This state management of the Dayak’s way of life continued in New Order Indonesia and can still result in food shortages today.

Dove also provides a crucial insight into how to do environmental humanities. He takes the approach “in the tradition of [Julian] Steward, one of the founders of environmental anthropology, who always tried to tie the ecology of particular systems of production to particular systems of social organization.” That is an approach that I find very fruitful — to think about the ecological and the social together. We shouldn’t view these categories as given and non-changing, as they emerge out of the lived experience.

ALR: Jonathan Padwe’s book, Disturbed Forests, Fragmented Memories: Jarai and Other Lives in the Cambodian Highlands, brings out this tension between the ecological and the social.

 

MA: Padwe takes a close look at the Jarai of Cambodia, in particular villages where he spent time, and develops a vocabulary of the local language and culture. The Jarai have lived in the mid-and uplands frontier since before there was a formal border between Cambodia and Vietnam. But recently, they have had to deal with the encroachment of so-called lowland peoples, the Khmer and the Vietnamese, and productive and reproductive forms such as the plantation. 

Padwe pays particular attention to the environment and how the Jarai thinks about it. One of the things I appreciate is his emphasis on the connection between landscape and memory. Since villages move, they are defined by place and the lineages and memories that compose them. The Jarai told Padwe stories that were based on things that have gone on in the landscape, on things that existed or didn’t exist anymore.

In this vein, Padwe has a beautiful chapter on the recreation of swidden gardens and rice fields through seeds that were saved during the Khmer Rouge catastrophe between 1975 and 1979. Quite materially, people carried their memories with them in the form of seeds. We all have these ways of associating memories, peoples, and places, and the mobile Jarai have developed a sophisticated way of thinking about labor and ecology.

 

ALR: I was fascinated by this connection among labor, ecology, and culture in your book, too, in which you demonstrate how the rubber tree was seen as a colonizer by the Vietnamese, and its imagery is prevalent in anticolonial folk songs and poems.

 

MA: Dove also shows this very well: when people engage with rubber, either as smallholders or as “unskilled” workers, they express that relationship in various ways. Many of these Vietnamese poems or Dayak dream tales are stories about the rubber tree either eating rice in the Dayaks’ case or eating people in the Vietnamese case. Some of these are Communist Party propaganda. But many of them did emerge from the workers themselves, expressing their relationship to the land, to global capital, and European colonialism, and even to postcolonial forms of state rule that had placed them in an abusive relationship with the land. The landscape became a fraught place for workers, and they expressed that through these songs.

That’s also relevant for today because rapidly changing environments, say greater heat during the day and less predictable rains and drought, are very much labor concerns and expose workers to increased precarity. It’s important not to impose solutions to climate change, such as carbon tax schemes or going electric, without thinking about the labor involved, who will do the work, and how.

The plantation is a site of labor exploitation that has also been very ecologically destructive. decolonizing plantations depends on addressing these two issues together.

 

ALR: Do the cases of Vietnam and Cambodia bring out other potential frictions between labor and environmental activism?

 

MA: Yes: labor movements cannot ignore their environmental impact. In Vietnam, the midcentury revolutionary movements were progressive with respect to labor conditions but weren’t really attentive to environmental destruction. Socialism called for industrialization to improve working conditions for laborers. That’s a trade-off I don’t think can be made anymore.

In Padwe’s chapter on rubber in Cambodia, he details the Jarai response in 1960s Cambodia to Prince Sihanouk’s vision of development. The Jarai would say, we’re not against development, but if your development means taking and destroying our forests, that’s not development. That’s land appropriation.

 

ALR: Let’s discuss the fifth book, Sango Mahanty’s Unsettled Frontiers: Market Formation in the Cambodia-Vietnam Borderlands.

 

MA: Mahanty looks at places on either side of the Cambodia-Vietnam border, close to where Padwe spent time with the Jarai. The categorization of labor has been important to labor studies and is sometimes intellectually useful, but it also reifies the categories: you’re either a gig worker or you’re not. Mahanty moves away from such questions and looks at the market as a process in which everyone can be involved in different ways at different times. Sometimes people hire themselves out as laborers, sometimes, they withdraw their labor from the market, and they are the same person. Often, migration plays a part in these decisions. This is a very interesting perspective on the people who live along the Cambodian-Vietnam border.

Mahanty’s book starts with an insight from Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, namely that markets are always, to some degree, socially embedded, i.e. they arise out of social relationships and are not just abstract numerical spaces. Drawing on the ideas of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, she then qualifies this embeddedness as like a rhizome. In the context of the Vietnam-Cambodia border, markets are largely ungovernable and rupture-prone, which makes them volatile and risky for those seeking to sell their labor.

Mahanty adds an environmental aspect too. She highlights the fundamental point that market processes depend on ecological ones. She does this by looking at the different types of soils and investigating how and why border peoples choose among various agricultural products, such as cassava or rubber.

 

ALR: As a historian, why do you think history is essential to understanding the intersecting crises of labor and ecology today?

 

MA: History is a way of narrating the past that is quite powerful, and the choices you make in this narration — whether you include the environment or not — bring out different lessons from the past. For example, most Marxist histories of labor and capitalism have been less attentive to the role of landscapes and diseases. But when you look at the sources, workers were just as upset about malaria, heat, and environmental change.

In this way, reading history and excavating these laborers’ embodied experiences create possibilities for understanding the present that isn’t available elsewhere. They tell us that climate has left an imprint on workers for centuries, but it’s not the only issue at any given time. You cannot sacrifice labor movements, democracy, and concerns about livelihoods to try to solve climate change. Without looking at history, you get caught up in sterile arguments about priorities instead of how these different problems interact.

I really appreciate Padwe’s historical anthropology and its emphasis on the fragmented nature of memories of past landscapes. What he ends up doing is also powerful; stitching these memories together and narrating them in a way that can make sense of the fractured experience. Such narratives give something for people to think together with, to form a collective understanding of the past and the tensions within it.

 

ALR: One of your chapters is provocatively titled “Decolonizing Plantations.” At a discursive level, what does it mean to decolonize plantations?

 

MA: That’s a big question! One way to decolonize plantations, intellectually, is to tie the environment to labor. The plantation is a site of labor exploitation that has also been very ecologically destructive. Showing how these two issues became intertwined during colonial capitalism should make it clear that decolonizing plantations depends on addressing them together.

The other way, which I haven’t touched on as much as I should have here, is questioning gendered forms of labor. Plantations are still very gendered places. Sometimes plantations are actually largely female, such as the tea plantations in Darjeeling. As Piya Chatterjee and Sarah Besky have shown, the feminization of the labor force is used to sell tea globally.

However, appealing to consumers’ desire for a gentle, nurturing tea belies the harsh conditions that real women (and men) labor under. Studying how consumers and producers have understood changing relationships of labor to the environment through a gendered lens is really important if you want to start to decolonize anything.