Dies-non: refusal of work in the 21st century

Abstract

My comments aim to cast light on a specific political proposal that can arise from a discussion of the topic of the ‘refusal of work’ and its implications for a social radical change. Autonomist, anarchist and feminist activism, have been and are the main sources of a long-term conceptual and empirical work on the refusal of work. Refusal of work is a very complex concept that has traversed history and is reduced for uncritical dominant common sense to unemployment, laziness, idleness, indolence but it is in reality one of the basic foundational qualification to think any radical change. Among many important intuitions, the added value of Silvia Federici’s work is to have offered a different perspective on the refusal of work discussion and how it can be expressed to develop different forms of communing. Her work provides the backbone for this brief excursion on the issue of the refusal of work. Emerging and consolidated social movements, for example in Southern Europe, have, consciously or not, taken position, often contradictorily, regarding what refusal of work means. In the context of current neoliberal capitalism, an increasing structural unemployment and precarious jobs are one of the trademarks of austerity policies to ‘revive’ economies. Drawing on Federici’s insights on the women exclusion as a useful way of thinking about the spatial dimension of these issues in feminist theory, this article looks at examples of prefigurative politics that define their strategies of refusal of work building significant spatial patterns.     

重商观念与晚清利权意识的演进

在近代中国,利权概念的核心内涵是经济主权,是对经济独立权的诉求。利权意识在20世纪初年的变化加重了晚清重商观念内在矛盾。利权意识的强化虽显示了晚清经济民族主义的勃发,但也展现了重商观念存在着偏差和不成熟的成分。     

游客抽样调查中"拒答"现象的原因分析及应对措施——以崆峒山游客抽样调查为例

本文对游客抽样调查中的拒答现象和拒绝率进行了阐述和分析,探讨了拒答现象产生的原因和应对措施。指出：游客抽样调查中的拒答现象是值得重视又容易忽视的,是旅游流、旅游心理、旅游目的地类型和其他社会因素综合作用的结果,而非单纯地由游客心理决定。所以要降低拒绝率,需要从消除游客心理障碍和提高游客主动参与性入手,促使游客主动配合调查,减少拒绝现象,提高调查的成功率和准确率。     

Proceeding through Colonial Past-Presents in Fieldwork: Methodological Lessons on Accountability,Refusal, and Autonomy

This article examines how the colonial past manifests within the present through an analysis of ethnographic and archival fieldwork. Drawing on feminist geographic scholarship for decolonising knowledge production, I argue that geographers have a responsibility to the people they work with and the places where they conduct research to know what came before. Through an analysis of how the colonial past surfaced in everyday and ongoing experiences of negotiating consent during fieldwork, I show how reflecting on the colonial past-present offers insights into the colonial power geometries of knowledge production. Proceeding through the colonial past-present offers useful lessons on being accountable to people and lands, recognising refusal, and making autonomy. While this article is focused on my experiences as a white settler scholar from the USA who did research in a Mixe community in Oaxaca, Mexico, proceeding through colonial past-presents offers lessons to any and all geographers who struggle to unsettle the persistent colonial power geometries of knowledge production.     

The ruse of consent and the anatomy of ‘refusal’: cases from indigenous North America and Australia

This article takes the notion of ‘refusal’ to be an alternative to recognition politics in settler colonial society. This is argued as alternative with recourse to ethnographic examples that highlight the way in which ‘consent’ operates as a technique of recognition and simultaneous dispossession in historical cases from Indigenous North America and Australia. Attention is paid to the ways in which Indigenous life in these cases refused, did not consent to, and still refuses to be folded into a larger encompassing colonising and settler colonial narratives of acceptance, and in this, a governmental fait accompli. It is those narratives that inform the apprehension and at times, the ethnography and governance of Indigenous life and are pushed back upon in order to document, reread, theorise and enact ways out of the notion of a fixed past and settled present.     

Delusion street: Commemoration and monumentality in post-Ottoman Iraklio,Crete

The complex memorial practices that have developed along the street named in commemoration of a massacre of the Christians of the city by Muslim irregulars in 1898 demonstrate an ambivalence towards the transition to the post-ottoman nation-state, one aspect of which is the dialectic that develops between absence and presence of material traces of the Ottoman past. A second aspect is the non-linear temporality within which historical events are remembered. Official commemoration practices have shaped plural memories and often conflicting accounts of the events into a single narrative of modernization, to justify the rebuilding of the city according to western precepts. Reactions to this process did not take the shape of political resistance, but emerged as acts of refusal that create telling absences in the archive and ironic statements that form a genealogy of the ambivalence contemporary Irakliots feel towards the official state and its account of progress to modernity.     

Refusing to be Toured: Work,Tourism, and the Productivity of “Life” in the Colombian Amazon

Starting from the contention that exercising a “right to tour” is predicated on the work of producing tourability, I examine how tourability itself is a contested process involving relations of land and labour. Examining the current “resource boom” of ecotourism in the Colombian Amazon, I use an analysis of work and capital accumulation to unravel a seemingly small act of refusal by the community of Nazaret that has barred tourists’ entry to their land. I argue that this act of refusal opens up space for critically examining the relationships of land and labour, especially through the production of “life”, in the accumulation of tourable places in contemporary global capitalism. Engaging literature on both tourism studies and land politics in the Amazon region, I contribute to the scholarship on tourism and work while examining how Indigenous landscapes are being made productive towards the ends of capitalism.     

HISTORY WRITING WITHOUT CLOSURE

In The Work of History: Constructivism and a Politics of the Past, Kalle Pihlainen pays tribute to Hayden White's work on narrative constructivism through a comprehensive and critical evaluation of his work. The book's seven chapters are based on previously published and reworked essays, starting with Pihlainen's 2013 essay on narrative truth and ending with his 2006 essay on the confines of the form. The Work of History is timely in light of some world political leaders’ apparent immunity to facts, their use of history, and the role of power, as Pihlainen also discusses the ethics and politics of historical constructivism (xiii). At the same time, the book is “a meta-critical enterprise,” as White states in his foreword (x): it scrutinizes and explains White's work and its reception, including the debates on the production of knowledge, the ontological status of historiography, the various representations of history, and the kinds of audiences historians envision. Although narrative constructivism seems a bit passé, Pihlainen wants to further elaborate this theoretical approach to disentangle and explain some fundamental misconceptions about it that still exist among historians. One misconception is that constructivism inherently neglects the ethical impulse and supposedly lacks the potential for political engagement. Pihlainen urges historians and theorists to find ways of becoming politically committed in their writings and to challenge their readers to do the same.     

Indigeneity and the refusal of whiteness

Drawing on international literature examining mismatch between racial appearance and racial identity, this paper analyses the subgroup of Indigenous Australians who have been identified, and self-identify, as ‘light-’, ‘fair-’, ‘pale-’ or ‘white-skinned’. We utilise the term ‘race discordance’ to describe the experience of regularly being attributed an identity that is different from how one personally identifies. In contrast to existing terms such as elective race, ethnic fraud and transracialism, race discordance does not seek to explain or judge the validity of identity claims that do not match perceived appearance. When unnoticed or unchallenged, ‘race discordance’ corresponds to ‘passing’. We propose the term ‘race refusal’ to describe instances when a person rejects the race they are ascribed to. In the case of white-skinned Indigenous Australians who are frequently assumed to identify as white, race refusal entails the refusal of whiteness. When light-skinned Indigenous people refuse whiteness, what are they refusing? In conversation with Audra Simpson’s notion of refusal of state recognition as an assertion of continued Indigenous sovereignty, we find that these particular micro-politics of race refusal demand rather than negate state recognition. We argue that identity refusal by pale-skinned Aboriginal people acts to disrupt histories of assimilation, white sociality and everyday racialisation while simultaneously reinforcing Australian recognition regimes.