Thoughts on Presentation: Koy's
Koy did a great presentation. The map that he used to explain the flux of migration to the US and the racially diverse structure of labor in this country was very comprehensive and powerful. The US is the only country in the world that extracts labor from all three non-white territories of the globe: Asian, African and Latin America. This phenomenon is not incidental, it is carefully plotted throughout the history through many forms colonialism, slavery, and now free trade and globalization.
"I'm here because you were there." Koy, you said you were colonially Black. That was powerful.
I was reminded of the documentary Maquilapolis (you can watch it on Kanopy). It is about the industrial zone in Tijuana - the city on the border of Mexico and the US. The filmmaker gave several female factory workers cameras so they can make video diaries about their lives and works, about how foreign industries destroyed their homeland, their health, their economy and then disposed them all when there is cheaper labor across the ocean.
If they come to the US at all, they come to get back what they have lost.
The novel The Inheritance of Loss talks about two parallel lives: an Indian young man who works illegally in NYC and an Indian young woman who experiences adulthood in the post-colonial India.
Every restaurant in NYC is a little colony: white masters and workers of color slaving day by day in the kitchen. In India, there are great struggles between the new nationalism and the colonial mentality. Can a culture lost be regained? Did many people cross the ocean in search for what have been taken away from them after the fall of colonialism? Did it ever fall? Or colonialism has become mobile?
I just think these examples are relevant to the presentation.
Koy did a great presentation. The map that he used to explain the flux of migration to the US and the racially diverse structure of labor in this country was very comprehensive and powerful. The US is the only country in the world that extracts labor from all three non-white territories of the globe: Asian, African and Latin America. This phenomenon is not incidental, it is carefully plotted throughout the history through many forms colonialism, slavery, and now free trade and globalization.
"I'm here because you were there." Koy, you said you were colonially Black. That was powerful.
I was reminded of the documentary Maquilapolis (you can watch it on Kanopy). It is about the industrial zone in Tijuana - the city on the border of Mexico and the US. The filmmaker gave several female factory workers cameras so they can make video diaries about their lives and works, about how foreign industries destroyed their homeland, their health, their economy and then disposed them all when there is cheaper labor across the ocean.
If they come to the US at all, they come to get back what they have lost.
The novel The Inheritance of Loss talks about two parallel lives: an Indian young man who works illegally in NYC and an Indian young woman who experiences adulthood in the post-colonial India.
Every restaurant in NYC is a little colony: white masters and workers of color slaving day by day in the kitchen. In India, there are great struggles between the new nationalism and the colonial mentality. Can a culture lost be regained? Did many people cross the ocean in search for what have been taken away from them after the fall of colonialism? Did it ever fall? Or colonialism has become mobile?
I just think these examples are relevant to the presentation.
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