Project acronym COLOUR
Project THE COLOUR OF LABOUR: THE RACIALIZED LIVES OF MIGRANTS
Researcher (PI) Cristiana BASTOS
Host Institution (HI) INSTITUTO DE CIENCIAS SOCIAIS
Country Portugal
Call Details Advanced Grant (AdG), SH6, ERC-2015-AdG
Summary This project is about the racialization of migrant labourers across political boundaries, with a main focus on impoverished Europeans who served in huge numbers as indentured labourers in nineteenth-century Guianese, Caribbean and Hawaiian sugar plantations and in the workforce of late nineteenth and early twentieth century New England cotton mills.
With this project I aim to provide major, innovative contributions on three fronts:
(i) theory-making, by working the concepts of race, racism, racialization, embodiment and memory in association with migrant work across political boundaries and imperial classifications;
(ii) social relevance of basic research, by linking an issue of pressing urgency in contemporary Europe to substantive, broad-scope, and multi-sited anthropological/historical research on the wider structures of domination, rather than to targeted problem-solving research of immediate applicability;
(iii) disciplinary scope, by proposing to unsettle historical anthropology and ethnographic history from within the boundaries of a single empire, and to overcome the limitations of existing comparative studies, by inquiring into the flows and interactions between competing empires.
I will also:
(iv) strengthen the methodology for multi-sited, multi-period research in anthropology;
(v) contribute to an anthropology of global connections and trans-local approaches;
(vi) promote the multidisciplinary and combined-methods approach to complex subjects;
(vii) narrate a poorly known set of historical situations of labour racializations involving Europeans and document the ways they reverberate through generations; and
(viii) make the analysis available to both academic audiences and the different communities involved in the research.
Summary
This project is about the racialization of migrant labourers across political boundaries, with a main focus on impoverished Europeans who served in huge numbers as indentured labourers in nineteenth-century Guianese, Caribbean and Hawaiian sugar plantations and in the workforce of late nineteenth and early twentieth century New England cotton mills.
With this project I aim to provide major, innovative contributions on three fronts:
(i) theory-making, by working the concepts of race, racism, racialization, embodiment and memory in association with migrant work across political boundaries and imperial classifications;
(ii) social relevance of basic research, by linking an issue of pressing urgency in contemporary Europe to substantive, broad-scope, and multi-sited anthropological/historical research on the wider structures of domination, rather than to targeted problem-solving research of immediate applicability;
(iii) disciplinary scope, by proposing to unsettle historical anthropology and ethnographic history from within the boundaries of a single empire, and to overcome the limitations of existing comparative studies, by inquiring into the flows and interactions between competing empires.
I will also:
(iv) strengthen the methodology for multi-sited, multi-period research in anthropology;
(v) contribute to an anthropology of global connections and trans-local approaches;
(vi) promote the multidisciplinary and combined-methods approach to complex subjects;
(vii) narrate a poorly known set of historical situations of labour racializations involving Europeans and document the ways they reverberate through generations; and
(viii) make the analysis available to both academic audiences and the different communities involved in the research.
Max ERC Funding
2 161 397 €
Duration
Start date: 2016-09-01, End date: 2021-08-31
