The Global Arab and Arab American and the Global South Forums have jointly selected four papers for a collaborative session that offers a timely analysis of literary and cultural productions that attend to representations and conceptualizations of exploitative labor domestically and within migratory contexts, against the backdrop of imperialism and its globalizing reach within the Arab world/Global South. This panel not only offers a varied and innovative approach to the conditions of labor in the Arab world, the Global South and Global North but also responds to the call for a “praxis that leads to decolonizing knowledge and being” because “you can hardly decolonize something about which you do not know how it works” (Mignolo and Walsh 2018, 136). The four presentations bring novel and original insights to contemporary theorizing about labor in neocolonial spaces, the construction of and resistance to subalternity, and the representation of exploitation and its legacies.

In “Raduan Nassar and Arab Agriculture in Brazil,” Waïl Hassan demonstrates how attachment to the land and its cultivation, a practice associated with the original homeland in the novel Lavoura arcaica (1975), becomes a site of negotiating paradoxical allegiances for the younger generation. Hassan argues that the imported ethos of land and manual labor that the father attempts to implement to grant the family a sense of belonging discords with the next generation’s conflicting sense of cultural identity. The paper reflects on how glorification of manual agricultural labor, represented by the father’s attempt to perpetuate inherited land values of the original homeland, generates domestic conflict compounded by racism, the differential treatment of European immigrants and a rapidly modernizing, industrializing Brazil of the 1930s-40s.

In “The Managed of the Earth,” Nesrine Chahine examines the domestic land laborer, represented here by the fellah (peasant) in Egypt, who functions as a symbol for the nation’s incomplete modernization and its inability to effectively manage its productive power. While this figure had previously served as an iconic image of nationalism, emblematic of the close association of land cultivation and patriotism, debates on poverty by Egyptian intellectuals in the 1930s and 1940s projected the country’s ailing economy and political problems on the peasant laborer. Chahine argues that social and national reform debates, as played out in some of the country’s prominent literary and cultural magazines that deployed the figure of the peasant/pauper in relation to land productivity, replicated imperialist anxieties about poverty in the Global South. These intellectual views on peasantry labor reflect the power dynamic that motivates the dispossessed to control work patterns and practices and dictate the terms of social change.

In the third paper, “Screen Subalternity and the Laborers of Arab Gulf Cinema(s),” Anne Ciecko explores the practically and ethically conflictual economy that informs the kafala (labor sponsorship system) and its entanglements with film production and exhibition in Arab Gulf countries (GCC). While imported labor is critical for developing all sectors, these laborers, who are crucial for the burgeoning film industries in the Gulf countries, suffer from exclusionary practices from the GCC citizens. Focusing on analysis of narrative constructions and onscreen representations in several high-profile contemporary feature films of the Arab Gulf, Ciecko examines the polarized status of the migrant community in the representational spaces, created and cathected in this multiplex-scape, and their marginalization as well as active resistance and cultural interventions. This analysis uses the dialectics of “high culture” and “hard labor” to illuminate the exploitative economy that subtends the various branches of film and other symbolic representational forms and cultural institutions in the Global South in the GCC states that use/abuse the migrant workforce.

In “A Face, a Voice, and a Story: Migrant Testimonies and Transmission in Leïla Houari and Yamina Benguigui,” Azza Ben Youssef analyzes textual and screen memorialization in relation to labor exploitation of North African immigrant labor in France. Ben Youssef reflects on representations of Maghrebi immigrant workers and their descendants through a corpus that highlights the processes that shape and inform labor exploitation through multi-generational testimony in Leïla Houari and Joss Dray’s Femmes aux Milles Portes (1996) and Yamina Benguigui’s Mémoires d’immigrés. Héritages maghrébins (1997). The paper explores how converting these tests into visual documentaries that share embodied and concrete visual testimonies for the next generations of North African laborers in France and the dynamic of dominant/subaltern cultural practices has had a transformative impact with regard to reframing and the reception of the two texts and their modalities of representation and transmission.

Each panelist will have 10–12 minutes, leaving approximately 25 minutes for discussion.