...Paul C. Palmer Copyright © 1966 by Duke University Press 1966 Servant into Slave: The Evolution of the Legal Status of the Negro Laborer in Colonial Virginia Pa ul C. Palmer The origin of chattel slavery in the British colonies of North Amer­ ica remains a subject of debate among American...

...Biao Xiang The increasing labor migration from China to other Asian countries since the late 1980s is often attributed to the ascendance of the free market that has driven China’s internal transformation as well as the Asian regionalization. The actual process of the labor migration is however...

... the acceleration of a specific proletarianization—successive generations of rural migrant workers ( nongmingong ) have become the mainstay of the country’s export-processing sector, but they cannot become “free” laborers in the market. Within the dormitory labor regime, in which work and residence are tightly...

...Bettina Wagner; Anke Hassel This article analyzes the challenges of labor migration for both capital and labor within the European Union (EU). It asks how, in a country with traditionally strong unions and employers’ associations, it has been possible to create and maintain a segment in the labor...

...Stephen Shapiro What lies at the root of academic remuneration in a culture of professionalized celebrity? I take this question as an opportunity to reconsider the notion of cultural capital. Discounting the idea that “intellectual labor” exists, I argue that we need instead to discuss...

...Moishe Postone; Timothy Brennan In this interview, Moishe Postone, author of Time, Labor, and Social Domination , discusses the Marxian critical theory of capitalism against the background of the author's intellectual biography and central historical developments of recent decades. The interview...

... understanding of social contradictions. While it stopped short of framing its critique of metaphysics in Marx's theory of the division between mental and manual labor, which was the real advance of Marx over his antagonist Max Stirner, the Frankfurt School revived the original concept of ideology while...

... of intellectual labor have been radically reconfigured within the academy since the late 1970s and early 1980s. In the wake of much of his political writing about 9/11, an interesting phenomenon has emerged: Chomsky repels his onetime allies within progressive circles, while attracting more and more people among...

...Timothy Brennan Only yesterday a discussion of economics in cultural circles was considered boring—a mere “economism”—but it is now everywhere in the arts. “Labor,” while being summoned as a grand economic category, enters conversations in the humanities today in the form of a theory of the latest...

...Ahmad A. Sikainga This essay examines the role of organized labor in Sudanese politics in the twentieth century. The essay focuses on the development of labor activism among the Sudanese railway workers who were concentrated in the town of Atbara, headquarters of the Sudan Railways...

...Peter Rachleff While the labor uprising in Madison, Wisconsin, in the winter and spring of 2011, was precipitated by a proposal from the Republican governor and senators to strip collective bargaining rights from public employees, the movement itself transcended the ideologies, structures...

...Lisa Adkins Prior to the recent global crisis a consensus was emerging that post-Fordism had ushered in a new sexual contract, one characterized not by exclusion and containment, but by the prospecting for potential, a prospecting that located women’s labor not as a reserve for capital...

... on the streets by working, begging, or stealing, and why they label the whole range of such activities as “work.” In examining the various kinds of labor the children engage in as they try to make a living in Rio’s destructured, largely informal economy, I use “child street labor” to refer to these varied forms...

...Kalindi Vora Affective and biological labor such as that found in call center and surrogacy work are indices of new forms of exploitation and accumulation within neoliberal globalization, but they also rearticulate a longer historical colonial division of labor. In this essay, feminist materialist...

... of mimetic labor in China today. Based on a year of ethnographic research in two vocational schools and theorized using Diane Elson’s value theory of labor, this essay analyzes China’s current regimes of human capital accumulation. I argue that these regimes structure nonelite education such that working...

...Jamie Peck; Nik Theodore The dismantling of the Fordist social contract and the neoliberalization of labor regulation have been associated with a historic shift toward decentralized, commodified, and atomized employment relationships, vividly reflected in the rise of temping and the (re)appearance...

...Morgan Adamson This article revisits the crisis of the American automotive industry and Fordist industrial labor in the late 1960s and early 1970s through the lens of the radical African American labor organization at the heart of that industry. By way of an analysis of the film Finally Got...

... Kong–based activist labor organization Students and Scholars against Corporate Misbehavior, a coalition of environmental organizations headquartered in Beijing, and reporting by journalists, the essay shows how Apple was forced to go public about the myriad environmental, health, and labor problems...

... and its policy of embracing globalization created the conditions for the defeat of China’s traditional urban working class. Coinciding with this moment has been the gradual emergence of a new movement of labor headed by migrant workers who have taken advantage of structural flaws in China’s development...

...Ho-fung Hung This essay outlines the three stages of Chinese capitalist development in the 1980s through the 2000s and discusses how labor politics played out differently in each of the three stages and helped shape the next stage. Whence the erosion of living standards of urban workers amid out...