-CANCELLED- Race in the Reproduction of Asian Urbanism: Gendered Subaltern Labour in the Global Household

This event has been CANCELLED due to the university’s recommendation of the cancellation of non-essential gatherings. Thank you for your understanding.
Speaker: Elsa Koleth (Post-Doctoral Fellow, City Institute, York University)
Urbanization is central to Asian futurities. This presentation examines the role of race in creating conditions of possibility for middle-class urbanism, through the ‘global household’ as a site for the enactment of middle-class urban citizenship in Asian cities. It anchors its conceptual inquiry in two different types of global households, namely, households employing transnational migrants as domestic workers in Singapore (Yeoh and Huang 2010), and households of returned transnational IT workers employing internal migrants as domestic workers in India (Bhatt, Murty and Ramamurthy 2010). How can race be theorized in contemporary Asian urbanism as a regionally specific but globally embedded instantiation of racial capitalism and the modalities of dispossession through which it functions? The presentation explores the ways in which middle class urbanisms are reproduced through an interaction between the racialized economies of global migration and the racial economies of subaltern labour in the global household.
Dr. Elsa Koleth is a Post-Doctoral Visitor at the City Institute at York University and a member of ‘Gender and Urbanisation in the Global South: a Transformative Knowledge Network’ (GenUrb), a SSHRC-funded Partnership Grant led by Linda Peake (Social Science). Elsa’s research interests include the spatialities and temporalities of processes of urbanization, migration and mobility, transnationalism and border-making, and the shifting nature of governmentalities and subjectivities, particularly in relation to the intersections of race, gender and class.
This event is presented by the York Centre for Asian Research and the City Institute.