Encoding Race, Encoding Class: Indian IT Workers in Berlin - Hardcover

Amrute, Sareeta

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822361175 ISBN 13: 9780822361176

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

In Encoding Race, Encoding Class Sareeta Amrute explores the work and private lives of highly skilled Indian IT coders in Berlin to reveal the oft-obscured realities of the embodied, raced, and classed nature of cognitive labor. In addition to conducting fieldwork and interviews in IT offices as well as analyzing political cartoons, advertisements, and reports on white-collar work, Amrute spent time with a core of twenty programmers before, during, and after their shifts. She shows how they occupy a contradictory position, as they are racialized in Germany as temporary and migrant grunt workers, yet their middle-class aspirations reflect efforts to build a new, global, and economically dominant India. The ways they accept and resist the premises and conditions of their work offer new potentials for alternative visions of living and working in neoliberal economies. Demonstrating how these coders' cognitive labor realigns and reimagines race and class, Amrute conceptualizes personhood and migration within global capitalism in new ways.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sareeta Amrute is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington.
 

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Encoding Race, Encoding Class

Indian IT Workers in Berlin

By Sareeta Amrute

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2016 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-6117-6

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Introduction: Cognitive Work, Cognitive Bodies, 
PART I. ENCODING RACE, 
Chapter 1. Imagining the Indian IT Body, 
Chapter 2. The Postracial Office, 
Chapter 3. Proprietary Freedoms in an IT Office, 
PART II. ENCODING CLASS, 
Chapter 4. The Stroke of Midnight and the Spirit of Entrepreneurship: A History of the Computer in India, 
Chapter 5. Computers Are Very Stupid Cooks: Reinventing Leisure as a Politics of Pleasure, 
Chapter 6. The Traveling Diaper Bag: Gifts and Jokes as Materializing Immaterial Labor, 
A Speculative Conclusion: Secrets and Lives, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

IMAGINING THE INDIAN IT BODY

Sitting in a café one early autumn afternoon in the trendy East Berlin neighborhood of Prenzlauer Berg, Marika and I drank lattes in the last warm rays of the setting sun. Marika had her feet propped up on the chair opposite her. An older woman with a flower-print scarf tied neatly under her chin walked by, stopped and stared at Marika's feet, and, with a look of horror on her face, strode on. "Their city just doesn't make sense to them any more. Their world is evaporating before their eyes." Marika gestured toward the woman's receding back. In the old Berlin, chairs were for sitting on, and Marika's feet were a sign of bad manners. Out of place on her own street corner, the older resident of the city simply said nothing and moved on. Much like the way Walter Benjamin moved through the city looking for dialectical images that crystallized a portentous moment of change, Berliners new and old could look to such scenes for a message of the world to come.

Marika's commentary on the scene suggested a kinetic image culture in the city. "I feel sorry for her," Marika said, herself from the Eastern European city Riga, "these old East Berliners." In the Berlin of the new millennium, images were highly politicized objects, their portrait functions always imbued with political proxies, and at the same time, even the most political images could always function as spectator commodities — consumed through viewing practices as signs of the future. The circulating images of Indian IT workers were part of this complex new world, and the viewers of these images were engaged in a street-level semiosis that would try to situate the migrant coder and the new German subject in an emerging economy of signs. The appearance of Indian workers on Berlin streets could be interrogated as an indicator of economic change. A discussion of the circulating image of the Indian IT body lays the groundwork for understanding the racialization of Indian coders both inside and outside the office. Like Marika's feet for the older East German woman, the Indian IT worker was a potent sign of seemingly inexorable transformation.

The archive of images assembled here traces out a subterranean story that ran beneath formal debates on visas for high-tech workers. I collected political cartoons, digital memes, and article illustrations over the course of fieldwork from Internet sites, local magazines, and national newspapers. Some appeared as large, full-color photographs in multipage articles about Indian IT workers in Germany. I noticed others, mostly small cartoons, inserted into the blank space at the bottom of a page of movie listings. Still more surfaced in the humor section of a website dedicated to Indians in Germany, which pulled these images from other sources online (www.theinder.net), the original provenance of which I am unable to trace. Collectively, they demonstrate how Indian programmers were mobilized in statements about a highly unstable future. They emerge out of a particular image culture and reiterate the tight bind between the Indian body, the computer as machine, and exotic cultural practices.

The work that goes on in IT offices, called "business process" or "information technology" and related services, is notoriously abstract. Theories of cognitive labor that developed in part through the example of software work tend to emphasize the abstract or "virtual" nature of this work. Cognitive work, as described by autonomist Marxists, emerges out of the replacement of work by machines, which had the effect of further pushing human labor toward abstract, cognitive tasks, including the manipulation of symbols and the evaluation and refinement of emotions and information. Yet, cognitive work is also concrete. In software work, the materialization of the digital is inaugurated by, for example, graphic interfaces that allow users to interact with the underlying structures of programming, the many artists and hackers who tweak existing software to reveal and take advantage of underlying quirks in the machine, or the many metaphors that software engineers use to describe what they do, such as architecture, triage, slave (to describe the process that receives commands from another), or virus.

This chapter looks at the corollary to such machinic materialization for labor. Outside (and sometimes inside) the world of software work, perhaps no other figure best embodies cognitive labor than the Indian IT worker. Software work is made tangible through imagining Indian IT workers as naturally and culturally endowed with particular characteristics that make them good — often machinelike — new economy workers. Racialized images of the Indian coder also incorporate and produce the contradictory possibilities opened up by a cognitive economy. The images that follow — a handful of the many that circulated in Berlin's newspapers, online, and in magazines — are arranged thematically to unpack how Indian IT workers were imagined, how those figurations helped sketch out the meaning of digital technologies for an uneasy German populace, and what a cognitive economy might mean for the future of work in Europe.

Berlin, Electronic Capital of the Twenty-First Century

In Kreuzberg, the halls of the newly constructed Jewish Museum by Daniel Libeskind stood empty for years — no one could decide what to put in them. The political function of the museum was being fought out behind its façade. The museum opened empty for visitors to see the dark spaces, themselves a monument to architectural greatness and historical tragedy. Elsewhere, communist infrastructures were subjected to a similar treatment. The old parliament building was opened as a party and tourist site in the months before it was torn down; there was too much asbestos, according to popular rumors, to keep it hanging around or preserve it. But that did not stop promoters from selling tickets to see its gutted insides one last time. The Reichstag (parliament) building received a new glass cupola, while across the field the Bundeskanzleramt (Chancellery) was erected. The reunited government inhabited these new and rebuilt state structures under the aegis — symbolized by the Reichstag cupola — of transparency. The city presented a layer of images past and future, images of possible utopias long gone and being torn down, images of a city with a new purpose and a new public image as a cosmopolitan European capital.

Berlin is a highly textual city, inhabited by a highly literate public and producing an informed urban citizen through the plaques, memorials, and informational kiosks that erupt from the topography of its streets. Yet, beyond...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822361175
• ISBN 13: 9780822361176
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 280
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande