In Smaran Dayal’s work, he draws out the deep-rooted connections between slavery/ indentured servitude, and labor exploitation under capitalism by analyzing African-American science fiction writer Samuel Delaney’s use of the speculative device of the “RAT” procedure in the novel Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984). The novel presents a speculative corporation on a fictional planet that offers proletarian inhabitants a way to secure their material existence through a neurological operation called “Radical Anxiety Termination,” through which workers relinquish their psychic autonomy and “unhappiness” for food and shelter—but also permanent servitude. This idea has been reimagined in Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You (2018) and the TV series Severance (2022-), however, Dayal claims that the psychic enslavement we encounter in Stars also enables an exploration of the dangers of a more totalizing form of enslavement, as well as the ever-present possibility of resistance to domination, even under a system of psychic control. The presentation underscores the deep-seated linkages between histories of oppression of the marginalized and labor in the North.
Leland Tabares’ paper addresses the anxieties surrounding the figure of the Asian American in the U.S. and worldwide. Tabares’ paper attends to the existing trends in Techno-Orientalism, formerly known to have portrayed Asia as a powerful threat to the global economy, that speculate on a disempowered, vanishing Asia through contemporary speculative narratives. His paper reads popular writings on the futures of work by Elon Musk and former presidential candidate Andrew Yang, before analyzing filmic portrayals of obsolete robots in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina and Kogonada’s After Yang where laboring Asiatic bodies fail to fulfill their programmed functions, rendering them obsolete. Such narratives, Tabares argues, unmake Asian economic citizenship under global capitalism by aligning Asianness with unproduction, rather than hyper-production (a hallmark of model minority stereotyping), to justify the dispossession and disposability of Asiatic labor in the future. Obsolescence revises the ideological relationship between Asianness and labor by portraying the Asian body not as the ideal capitalist producer but instead an unproductive subject unfit for capitalism’s future.
Sagnika Chanda’s presentation highlights the possibilities for cross border solidarity and resistance generated by Chicanafuturist science fiction works such as Sleep Dealer (2008) and the VR exhibit “Reaching the Shore: An Emblematic Group Virtual Reality Narrative” (2016). Her paper explores how drones and Virtual Reality trouble the relationship between human and machine. The Mexican farmer (bracero) is culturally brainwashed into believing that being in the South is living a wasted life, until he realizes that he is disposable labor in the digital economy of the North. This paper is set in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, where the Global North and South rub against each other, the proliferation of maquiladoras mark the operations of neocolonialism.It interrogates how Rosi Braidotti’s theory of “becoming machine” in Sleep Dealer can recycle the cybracero into a posthumanist existence. The kind of VR experience afforded by “Reaching the Shore” offers an opportunity to become aware of the precarity imbued in one’s own existence while simultaneously being aware that this existence is dependent on the laboring lives of those whom we can only experience through VR. This awareness and acknowledgement of one's own precarious vulnerability animates possibilities for solidarity.
The panel will have 18 minute presentations that interrogate the histories, futures and possibilities of resistance of the changing landscape of labor alongwith its long standing, complicated relationship with the marginalized, vulnerable precariat worldwide. There will be 15 minutes set aside for audience questions and discussion.