Constructing disposable farmworkers: Interrogating narrative and legal contours of the US racial capitalist state
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: In this paper, I draw on feminist narrative analysis to reconsider the exceptional character of agriculture under the law and its embodied consequences for contemporary agricultural guestworkers in Georgia, USA. Through engaged participant observation alongside farmworker advocates and archival research of legal texts, I consider the interplay between the law and everyday narratives in (re)constructing the racialized agricultural labor system. I interrogate a century of immigration laws, labor laws, and foreign labor schemes and examine how systems of selective inclusion play out on the ground. My analysis is informed by a theoretical framework that asserts that the US racial capitalist state developed in tandem with conceptions linking territory, whiteness, and the virtues of agriculture. Merging literatures on racial capitalism and the racial state, political geographies of immigration, and agricultural exceptionalism, this paper advances an understanding of the importance of interrogating the farm labor system to illuminate key mechanisms of exclusion characteristic of the US racial capitalist state. I argue that the state's construction of “disposable” farmworkers exposes the extent to which the racial capitalist state acts to discipline labor and uphold racialized hierarchies of “American” identity.
Source: Political Geography
Author: Caroline Keegan
Institution: California State University, Sacramento
Language: English
Topic: Migration and Labor Dynamics
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,040
OpenAlex ID: W4401599550