Scripts Of Servitude

This book examines how language is a central resource in transforming migrant women into transnational domestic workers. Focusing on the migration of women from the Philippines to Singapore, the book unpacks why and how language is embedded in the infrastructure of transnational labor migration that links migrant-sending and migrant-receiving countries. It sheds light on the everyday lives of transnational domestic workers and how they draw on their linguistic repertoires, and in particular on English, as they cross geographical and social spaces. By showing how the transnational mobility of labor is dependent on the selection and performance of particular assemblages of linguistic resources that index migrants as labor and not as people, the book provides a powerful lens with which to examine how migration contributes to relationships of inequality and how such inequalities are produced and challenged on the terrain of language.

In Fictions of Consent Urvashi Chakravarty excavates the ideologies of slavery that took root in early modern England in the period that preceded the development of an organized trade in enslaved persons. Despite the persistent fiction that England was innocent of racialized slavery, Chakravarty argues that we must hold early modern England—and its narratives of exceptional and essential freedom—to account for the frameworks of slavery that it paradoxically but strategically engendered. Slavery was not a foreign or faraway phenomenon, she demonstrates; rather, the ideologies of slavery were seeded in the quotidian spaces of English life and in the everyday contexts of England's service society, from the family to the household, in the theater and, especially, the grammar school classroom, where the legacies of classical slavery and race were inherited and negotiated. The English conscripted the Roman freedman's figurative "stain of slavery" to register an immutable sign of bondage and to secure slavery to epidermal difference, even as early modern frameworks of "volitional service" provided the strategies for later fictions of "happy slavery" in the Atlantic world. Early modern texts presage the heritability of slavery in early America, reveal the embeddedness of slavery within the family, and illuminate the ways in which bloodlines of descent underwrite the racialized futures of enslavement. Fictions of Consent intervenes in a number of areas including early modern literary and cultural studies, premodern critical race studies, the reception of classical antiquity, and the histories of law, education, and labor to uncover the conceptual genealogies of slavery and servitude and to reveal the everyday sites where the foundations of racialized slavery were laid. Although early modern England claimed to have "too pure an Air for Slaves to breathe in," Chakravarty reveals slavery was a quintessentially English phenomenon.

The "Arab Spring" was heralded and publicly embraced by foreign leaders of many countries that define themselves by their own historic revolutions. The contributors to this volume examine the legitimacy of these comparisons by exploring whether or not all modern revolutions follow a pattern or script. Traditionally, historians have studied revolutions as distinct and separate events. Drawing on close familiarity with many different cultures, languages, and historical transitions, this anthology presents the first cohesive historical approach to the comparative study of revolutions. This volume argues that the American and French Revolutions provided the genesis of the revolutionary "script" that was rewritten by Marx, which was revised by Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution, which was revised again by Mao and the Chinese Communist Revolution. Later revolutions in Cuba and Iran improvised further. This script is once again on display in the capitals of the Middle East and North Africa, and it will serve as the model for future revolutionary movements.

This book follows the travels of Nanay, a testimonial theatre play developed from research with migrant domestic workers in Canada, as it was recreated and restaged in different places around the globe. This work examines how Canadian migration policy is embedded across and within histories of colonialism in the Philippines and settler colonialism in Canada. Translations between scholarship and performance – and between Canada and the Philippines – became more uneasy as the play travelled internationally, raising pressing questions of how decolonial collaborations might take shape in practice. This book examines the strengths and limits of existing framings of Filipina migration and offers rich ideas of how care – the care of children and elderly and each other – might be rethought in radically new ways within less violently unequal relations that span different colonial histories and complex triangulations of racialised migrants, settlers and Indigenous peoples. This book is a journey towards a new way of doing and performing research and theory. It is part of a growing interdisciplinary exchange between the performing arts and social sciences and will appeal to researchers and students within human geography and performance studies, and those working on migration, colonialisms, documentary theatre and social reproduction.

A linguistic and historical study of the Manchu script in the early modern world Manchu was a language first written down as part of the Qing state-building project in Northeast Asia in the early seventeenth century. After the Qing invasion of China in 1644, and for the next two and a half centuries, Manchu was the language of state in one of the early modern world's great powers. Its prominence and novelty attracted the interest of not only Chinese literati but also foreign scholars. Yet scholars in Europe and Japan, and occasionally even within China itself, were compelled to study the language without access to a native speaker. Jesuit missionaries in Beijing sent Chinese books on Manchu to Europe, where scholars struggled to represent it in an alphabet compatible with Western pedagogy and printing technology. In southern China, meanwhile, an isolated phonologist with access to Jesuit books relied on expositions of the Roman alphabet to make sense of the Manchu script. When Chinese textbooks and dictionaries of Manchu eventually reached Japan, scholars there used their knowledge of Dutch to understand Manchu. In The Early Modern Travels of Manchu, Mårten Söderblom Saarela focuses on outsiders both within and beyond the Qing empire who had little interaction with Manchu speakers but took an interest in the strange, new language of a rising world power. He shows how—through observation, inference, and reference to received ideas on language and writing—intellectuals in southern China, Russia, France, Chosŏn Korea, and Tokugawa Japan deciphered the Manchu script and explores the uses to which it was put for recording sounds and arranging words.

In the current climate of extreme nationalism and fear-mongering, a new politics for a socially just world is needed more than ever. Featuring internationally-renowned scholars, Applied Linguistics and Politics explores how innovative theories, methodologies and pedagogies in applied linguistics can address the political challenges and issues arising in the 21st century. Adopting a Gramscian theoretical framework, the five parts of this volume focus on the various ways in which the political is discursively and materially realized in its dialogic co-constructions within the media, the economy, culture and identity, affect, and education. Examining the power instantiations of sociolinguistic and semiotic practices in society from a variety of critical perspectives, this book questions how applied linguists can respond to, and challenge, current discourses of issues such as militarism, nationalism, Islamophobia, sexism, racism and the free market, and suggests future directions for research. Making use of a range of methodologies from discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, semiotics and political science, Applied Linguistics and Politics demonstrates how linguistics can intervene in the political and help mobilize and organize for an economically and socially just society.

English is the most widely taught and learned language in the world and is used for communication among speakers from different language backgrounds. How it can be effectively taught and learned, what English means to, and how it can be "owned" by, non-native speakers of English in Asia and elsewhere, are all issues that warrant contemplation. This edited collection addresses these issues and more by looking at a wide range of topics that are relevant and timely in contexts where English is taught as a foreign language. The authors offer novel perspectives gleaned from theory and actual practice that can inform English language teaching in Asia and beyond. This book will be of interest to researchers, policymakers, curriculum developers, and practitioners in the field of English teaching and learning.

How insurgencies—enabled by digital devices and a vast information sphere—have mobilized millions of ordinary people around the world. In the words of economist and scholar Arnold Kling, Martin Gurri saw it coming. Technology has categorically reversed the information balance of power between the public and the elites who manage the great hierarchical institutions of the industrial age: government, political parties, the media. The Revolt of the Public tells the story of how insurgencies, enabled by digital devices and a vast information sphere, have mobilized millions of ordinary people around the world. Originally published in 2014, The Revolt of the Public is now available in an updated edition, which includes an extensive analysis of Donald Trump’s improbable rise to the presidency and the electoral triumphs of Brexit. The book concludes with a speculative look forward, pondering whether the current elite class can bring about a reformation of the democratic process and whether new organizing principles, adapted to a digital world, can arise out of the present political turbulence.