The Labouring Subject of Refugee Economies
The CHRLP invites you to a talk by O'Brien Fellow in Residence Ranabir Samaddar. We share the article he will be discussing here [.docx]
Abstract
Most writings on refugee economy or the immigrant economy refer to changes in the immigrant labour absorption policies of the Western governments. In these writings, the refugee economy or the immigrant economy never features directly; refugees are seen as economic actors in the market. But we do not get a full picture of why capitalism in late twentieth or early twenty first century needs these refugee or immigrant labour as economic actors.
The organic link between the immigrant as an economic actor and the global capitalist economy seems to escape the analysis in these writings. Yet, if immigration policies produce precarious labour, this has general significance for the task of theorising the migrant as living labour. The question of the production of living labour is important because it puts in a critical perspective the necessity of the states and the international regime of protection to synchronise the economic and the political strategies of protection.
About the speaker
Ranabir Samaddar belongs to the critical school of thinking and is considered as one of the foremost theorists in the field of migration and forced migration studies. His much-acclaimed The Politics of Dialogue (2004) was a culmination of his long work on justice, rights, and peace.
His later writings, The Materiality of Politics (2007) and The Emergence of the Political Subject (2010), signaled a new turn in critical postcolonial thinking. His co-authored work on new town and new forms of accumulation Beyond Kolkata: Rajarhat and the Dystopia of Urban Imagination (2014) takes urban studies forward in the context of post-colonial capitalism.
