This Blank, Raggy Life: Reading the Remains of Labor Across Time
Poulomi Saha
University of California, Berkeley
Poulomi Saha is Assistant Professor of English at UC-Berkeley. She works on postcolonial studies and a broadly conceived sense of the Anglophone, drawing material and political connections between the decline of British empire and the rise of American.
Abstract
Forging crucial yet overlooked connections between nineteenth-century America and twenty-first century Bangladesh, Poulomi Saha’s paper “This Blank, Raggy Life: Reading the Remains of Labor Across Time” considers the... [ view full abstract ]
Forging crucial yet overlooked connections between nineteenth-century America and twenty-first century Bangladesh, Poulomi Saha’s paper “This Blank, Raggy Life: Reading the Remains of Labor Across Time” considers the transmission of touch, labor, and violence across material (paper and cloth) and medium. She links the particulate remains of Melville’s “The Tartarus of Maids” – and the intimate confluence of labor and body that it limns – to the corporeal traces of the touch of female labor in the 2013 catastrophic disaster at the Rana Plaza garment factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, which ruptured the blank white space of global capital to press the intimacy of labor and its violences onto the bodies of a Global North consumer public. Reading together Melville’s story with images of the Rana Plaza disaster, Saha argues for a hermeneutics of intimate contact across time, for a mode of reading somatic remains of labor as a politics of nonsovereignty.
Authors
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Poulomi Saha
(University of California, Berkeley)
Topic Area
Panel
Session
P92 » Haptic Feelings: Texts, Textures, Textiles (09:00 - Sunday, 25th March, Enchantment A)
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