Author: Cati Coe
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479808830
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 295
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Book Description
Finalist, 2020 Elliott P. Skinner Award, given by the Association of Africanist Anthropology Examines why African care workers feel politically excluded from the United States Care for America’s growing elderly population is increasingly provided by migrants, and the demand for health care labor is only expected to grow. Because of this health care crunch and the low barriers to entry, new African immigrants have adopted elder care as a niche employment sector, funneling their friends and relatives into this occupation. However, elder care puts care workers into racialized, gendered, and age hierarchies, making it difficult for them to achieve social and economic mobility. In The New American Servitude, Coe demonstrates how these workers often struggle to find a sense of political and social belonging. They are regularly subjected to racial insults and demonstrations of power—and effectively turned into servants—at the hands of other members of the care worker network, including clients and their relatives, agency staff, and even other care workers. Low pay, a lack of benefits, and a lack of stable employment, combined with a lack of appreciation for their efforts, often alienate them, so that many come to believe that they cannot lead valuable lives in the United States. While jobs are a means of acculturating new immigrants, African care workers don’t tend to become involved or politically active. Many plan to leave rather than putting down roots in the US. Offering revealing insights into the dark side of a burgeoning economy, The New American Servitude carries serious implications for the future of labor and justice in the care work industry.
Author: Raka Ray
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 080477109X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 395
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Book Description
Domestic servitude blurs the divide between family and work, affection and duty, the home and the world. In Cultures of Servitude, Raka Ray and Seemin Qayum offer an ethnographic account of domestic life and servitude in contemporary Kolkata, India, with a concluding comparison with New York City. Focused on employers as well as servants, men as well as women, across multiple generations, they examine the practices and meaning of servitude around the home and in the public sphere. This book shifts the conversations surrounding domestic service away from an emphasis on the crisis of transnational care work to one about the constitution of class. It reveals how employers position themselves as middle and upper classes through evolving methods of servant and home management, even as servants grapple with the challenges of class and cultural distinction embedded in relations of domination and inequality.
Author: Christine B. N. Chin
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231109871
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 340
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Book Description
Examining how the shared interests of state elites and the middle classes rationalize mistreatment of domestic workers, the author argues that the "premodern" exploitation of migrant domestic workers is at odds with the global expansion of open markets and free trade.
Author: Farley Grubb
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136682503
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 456
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Book Description
This book provides the most comprehensive history of German migration to North America for the period 1709 to 1920 than has been done before. Employing state-of-the-art methodological and statistical techniques, the book has two objectives. First he explores how the recruitment and shipping markets for immigrants were set up, determining what the voyage was like in terms of the health outcomes for the passengers, and identifying the characteristics of the immigrants in terms of family, age, and occupational compositions and educational attainments. Secondly he details how immigrant servitude worked, by identifying how important it was to passenger financing, how shippers profited from carrying immigrant servants, how the labor auction treated immigrant servants, and when and why this method of financing passage to America came to an end.
Author: John Van der Zee
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
ISBN: 9780671541187
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 388
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Book Description
From 1609 until well after the founding of the Republic, half of all the colonists who came to America did so under some form of involuntary labor. Author John van der Zee draws on original memoirs, newspapers, and pamphlets to re-create the life stories of a number of the remarkable men and women whose enshacklement and destitution paved the way for American freedom. From the narratives of convicts, redemptioners (who accepted servitude in exchange for transportation to America), and those who were "spirited away" (snatched against their will), van der Zee weaves a colorful "people's history" of colonial and Revolutionary times. In their own words and through their own eyes, we meet such men and women as the first labor organizer in America; the young nobleman whose memoirs inspired Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped; and a real-life Moll Flanders. The book also offers a surprising new interpretation of the Revolution as growing out of this widespread practice of servitude.--From publisher description.
Author: Daniel A. Novak
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813164125
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 145
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Book Description
Emancipation brought an end to many of the evils of slavery, but it did not do away with involuntary servitude in the South. Even during Reconstruction, state legislatures passed laws that bound laborers to the landowner with a nearly unbreakable tie—which still chains many a rural black to what a 1914 Supreme Court ruling called an "ever-turning wheel of servitude." Daniel Novak shows how federal, state, and local regulations combined in an undisguised effort to keep southern agriculture supplied with black labor. A freedman who did not immediately enter into a labor contract was subject to arrest as a vagrant. Once a contract was agreed upon, it was a criminal offense for a laborer to fail to carry it out, no matter how unfair the terms might be. If, as was almost inevitable, the freedman fell into debt to the landowner, he could be kept in service until repayment-and exorbitant interest rates and judicious bookkeeping could often postpone that day indefinitely. Novak traces the sporadic efforts of the federal government to do away with this kind of peonage. In studying the details of the legal basis for peonage in the South, he breaks new ground. The institution has aroused surprisingly little interest in the past; this compelling account should do much to establish that peonage is one of the most severe and widespread violations of civil rights in the nation.
Author: Catherine Armstrong
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108753728
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 299
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Book Description
Slavery casts a long shadow over American history; despite the cataclysmic changes of the Civil War and emancipation, the United States carried antebellum notions of slavery into its imperial expansion at the turn of the twentieth-century. African American, Chinese and other immigrant labourers were exploited in the name of domestic economic development, and overseas, local populations were made into colonial subjects of America. How did the U.S. deal with the paradox of presenting itself as a global power which abhorred slavery, while at the same time failing to deal with forced labour at home? Catherine Armstrong argues that this was done with rhetorical manoeuvres around the definition of slavery. Drawing primarily on representations of slavery in American print culture, this study charts how definitions and depictions of slavery both changed and stayed the same as the nation became a prominent actor on the world stage. In doing so, Armstrong challenges the idea that slavery is a merely historical problem, and shows its relevance in the contemporary world.
Author: Mareike Winchell
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520386434
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352
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Book Description
Preface -- Introduction -- Claiming kinship -- Gifting land -- Producing property -- Grounding indigeneity -- Demanding return -- Reviving exchange -- Conclusion : property's afterlives.
Author: Paul Freedman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521548052
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
This 1991 book is an examination of Catalonian peasants in the Middle Ages integrating archival evidence with medieval theories of society.
Author: Douglas A. Blackmon
Publisher: Icon Books
ISBN: 1848314132
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 429
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Book Description
A Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the mistreatment of black Americans. In this 'precise and eloquent work' - as described in its Pulitzer Prize citation - Douglas A. Blackmon brings to light one of the most shameful chapters in American history - an 'Age of Neoslavery' that thrived in the aftermath of the Civil War through the dawn of World War II. Using a vast record of original documents and personal narratives, Blackmon unearths the lost stories of slaves and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude thereafter. By turns moving, sobering and shocking, this unprecedented account reveals these stories, the companies that profited the most from neoslavery, and the insidious legacy of racism that reverberates today.
