CULT 320: Globalization and Culture

Kara Heitz, 10/23/2014

“Sleep Dealer” – Larger Themes

Questions of belonging, identity, and space• What and where is “home”? Who am I? Where do I belong?

• Camacho - “Migrant melancholia”

“The material and psychic hungers that propel migrants to abandon the most basic elements of sociality – residence, kinship, language, culture, and landscape – in short, home, for wages exert a violence that immigration and state discourse have yet to fully address.” (302)

• Bauman - tourists and vagabonds– What does each group desire? Where is home?

• Importance of space and location– Does technology change these relationships?

“Sleep Dealer” – Larger Themes

Neoliberal capitalism• Harvey - divergence between philosophy and

practice of neoliberalism– Ex. role of the state in creating and enforcing

privatization

• Harvey - accumulation by dispossession

• Need for cheap labor– Migration, outsourcing

“Sleep Dealer” – Larger Themes

Contradictions of borders in globalizing times“… the contradiction between market demands for mobile labor and consumable goods and the immobility of rights beyond the bounds of the nation-state” (Camacho, 302)

• Who and what is able to be mobile across borders, and why?

• Graham – states increasingly separating risky/unworthy people and circulations from those deemed worthy of protection– Occurs inside but also increasingly outside traditional territorial borders

• Who is responsible for the migrant? Who protects them? Who ensures their rights?