From the Panama Canal to Post‐Fordism: Producing Temporary Labor Migrants Within and Beyond Agriculture in the United States (1904–2013)

In the historical study of modern American capitalism, labor unfreedom in agriculture has been conceptualized as an exception to liberal labor relations in the post‐slavery polity, from debt peonage to the threat of deportation from workplaces populated by non‐citizen migrants. At the same time, state‐enforced labor compulsions and restrictions are increasingly part and parcel of what scholars call neoliberal exceptionalism. This article argues that agricultural and neoliberal exceptionalisms are related, by tracing the historical genealogy and juridical production of a restrictive work status, the deportable temporary labor migrant, across political economies in the modern United States, from imperial construction in the Panama Canal Zone, to agriculture, to the knowledge economy. Contrary to existing notions of temporary work visas as a new form of unfreedom in neoliberalized advanced capitalist states, I show how the threat of deportation is older and rooted in the rise of the liberal regulatory state in a post‐slavery, yet persistently racial capitalist political economy. The import of understanding this history of government intervention increases as the liberal regulatory state's coercive logics and practices intensify and circulate in agriculture and under a post‐Fordist regime of accumulation, reproducing racial capitalism in the labor process.     

Memory and History: Liturgical Time and Historical Time

This article investigates the differential structure and representation of time in memory and history. It examines two moments in Jewish historical thought—in the Middle Ages, and in works written within and after the Holocaust—and demonstrates the fundamentally liturgical nature of Jewish historical memory in selected texts from these two periods. Following the groundbreaking work of Yerushalmi, it seeks to demonstrate that for Jews, historical experience is incorporated into the cyclical reenactment of paradigmatic events in Jewish sacred ritual. Recent or contemporary experiences acquire meaning only insofar as they can be subsumed within Biblical categories of events and their interpretation bequeathed to the community through the medium of Scripture, that is to say, only insofar as they can be transfigured, ritually and liturgically, into repetitions and reenactments of ancient happening. In such liturgical commemoration, the past exists only by means of recitation; the fundamental goal of such recitation is to make it live again in the present, to fuse past and present, chanter and hearer, into a single collective entity. History, in the sense that we understand it to consist of unique events unfolding within irreversible linear time, is absorbed into cyclical, liturgical memory.
This article argues that the question of Jewish history—both medieval and post-Holocaust—poses in a compelling fashion the question of the relationship between memory and history more generally, and serves to contest the current tendency in academic historiography to collapse history into memory. It claims that to the extent that memory "resurrects,""re-cycles," and makes the past "reappear" and live again in the present, it cannot perform historically, since it refuses to keep the past in the past, to draw the line, as it were, that is constitutive of the modern enterprise of historiography.     

The Ins and Outs of Death in the Iron Age: Complex Funerary Treatments at Broxmouth Hillfort,East Lothian

Evidence for Iron Age funerary treatments remains sporadic across Britain and formal cemeteries are especially elusive. One important exception is Broxmouth hillfort, East Lothian, excavated during the late 1970s but not yet published. New analysis of the human remains from Broxmouth provides evidence for three distinct populations: a formal cemetery outside the hillfort, isolated graves within the ramparts, and a scatter of disarticulated fragments from a range of domestic and midden contexts. The latter group in particular provides significant evidence for violent trauma; isotopic evidence suggests that they may be the remains of outsiders. Together the human remains shed light on complex and changing attitudes to death and the human body in Iron Age Britain. The material from Broxmouth is considered in the light of emerging evidence for fluid and pluralistic treatments of the dead in the Iron Age of south‐east Scotland.     

Law and Famine: Learning from the Hunger Courts in South Sudan

Activists and scholars are seeking to end famine by promoting international legal accountability for starvation. This article deepens our understanding of the relationship between the politics of famine and law by observing the ongoing prevalence and power of legal norms and institutions during times of famine. It reveals the widespread use of hunger courts in famine-prone South Sudan and their role in legally enforcing social networks that provide for the most vulnerable. Based on analysis of country-wide survey data from 2018 and 2019, qualitative interviews from 2019‒22 and in-depth ethnographic observations of hunger courts in one chiefdom in South Sudan during a period of famine-level hunger in 2018 and 2019, the article argues that hunger courts have played a key role in enforcing social networks. These courts have also supported continuity of chiefs’ authority despite crisis. The article concludes by addressing two issues: whether law is necessarily emancipatory in times of famine, and whether legal norms have shifted responsibility for hunger away from the political economies and conflicts that cause famine, instead placing blame and shame on the families of the most vulnerable.