The world according to the blue collar migrant

The words "migrant" and "workers" evoke in our minds, berry pickers and meat packers who cross America's south western borders by legal or illegal means, to make seasonal living in minimum wage conditions.

However, when we use "blue collar" and "migrant worker" together, we come up with a near-empty canvas, because in the history of American labor, blue collar workers have typically been members of a settled community of residents, a local, stable pool of high-school graduates, from whom a Ford, GM or 3M type corporations draw to employ in their factories.

But in a economy that has been affected by globalization, many blue collar workers find themselves migrating from their home states to find jobs elsewhere, to another state, where they live like migrants, i.e. as overnighters with no stable housing or communities available to provide a supportive structure.

Blue collar migrant workers are the subject matter of a new riveting film called The Overnighters. It's a Fast Food Nation gone native.

The overnighters in this case are workers who flock to North Dakota which has been experiencing an oil boom for the last few years, if only because oil is fossil fuel and is not a fungible goods. But as news report after news report has documented, the oil-boon is proving to be a short and long term curse for North Dakota. 

Workers have migrated from all over the country to earn a livelihood and they have been single males with broken families, very little education and some, appallingly, have criminal backgrounds. Furthermore, cities in North Dakota have not planned ahead of time to provide secure housing for the migrant workers, and as the film tells us, many of them end up experiencing homelessness.

The central character of The Overnighters is a local padre who provides shelter to the migrants and earn the locals' displeasure in the process.

Prophets of peace

On the heels of the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize, awarded respectively to Pakistan's Malala Yousufzahi and India's Kailash Satyarthi, both of whom work for the liberation of children from various kinds of exploitation (labor and sexual): Three excellent films by documentarian Errol Morris on Liberian Leymah Gbowee, winner (jointly) of the 2013 Peace Prize, Bob Geldof, the musician who preceded Bono in raising billions for food security in Africa, and Lech Walesa, Polish electrician, labor organizer and leader of Poland's famous union, Solidarity, and winner of the 1983 Peace Prize. 

Three cheers to the principles of peace and non-violence.

Technology novels

The ten top technology novels as listed by PC Magazine.

And this is my shortest blog on record.

Global literature

It used to be that the provenance of literature, especially that of the novel, was the nation.

I may sound a tad anachronistic, but I'd definitely buy into Ian Watt's (in his 1957 book, The Rise of the Novel) thesis that the novel "rose" along with the political strengthening of the nation and in some ways contributed to the myth of the nation.

But today the word transnational is sprouting like weed in our discourses of literary genre, as much as it is pervasive in the corporate parlance. We have the massive transnational corporations whose markets brook no national boundaries.

Novels too, or their provenance rather, are transcending nations in a global age. If the nation was the locus of power in the traditional novel, then what is the corresponding loci of power in global fiction? The world?

Perhaps. In a majority of 21st novels whose provenance spans the globe, one sees another major locus of power--technology. Global novels are typically starting to be concerned about the rise of technological power, a power that has no specific geographical habitus but has a borderless network.

Take for instance Dave Eggers' The Circle; the protagonist pits herself against the might of the global giant Google.

In Spark, John Twelve Hawks' hero is a global assassin and is cast in the mold of an artificial intelligence though he has a body and the form of a fully functional human being. He resembles AI in the sense that he is amoral. As the novel unfolds, the assassin begins to lose his amorality, which signals his return to humanity.

Increasingly, the provenance of the global novel then is technology and the hegemonic rule of the same.

Is the business of the 21st century novel primarily to challenge this hegemonic assertion?

Capital in the 19th century

I had a hunch that slavery was central to the United States' economic development in the early days of capitalism, and that the U.S. became a powerful economic force in the world because so much was produced--cotton and tobacco--on the back of free labor.

We can't imagine the idea of free labor anymore, neither can we imagine the conception of a fellow human as property owned by another as just another institutionalized way of being.

Edward Baptist's new book, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, reminds American readers of the unpleasant truth of the history of the rise of American capitalism.

"The idea", writes Baptist, a native of North Carolina, a state whose past is rife with the brutality of the plantation economy, "that the commodification and suffering and forced labor of African Americans is what made the U.S. powerful and rich is not an idea that people are necessarily happy to hear. Yet it is the truth."

Regarding the general perception that African Americans passively accepted their status as slaves and didn't actively resist the condition of enslavement, Baptist says:

Historians have spent a lot of time talking about whether African Americans resisted. Resistance acquires a different look in forced migrations, where survival is a kind of resistance in finding ways to stand in solidarity with each other and to write stories about themselves to say: This is crime.