Everyday Cruelties: Political Economies of Migration and Indifference

Abstract

This article examines how attitudes and structures of indifference to oppression and global inequality—practices of cruelty—are cultivated at both macro (institutional) and micro (everyday life) levels. First, following (Inayatullah and Blaney 2010a, 2010b), I suggest that a core premise of classical political economy—the split between self and other—is depoliticized and rationalized by contemporary discourses of international political economy. This depoliticization is a condition of possibility for attitudes of indifference. Consequently, understanding attitudes and structures of indifference requires re-politicizing political economy as a cultural encounter structured through gendered and racialized hierarchies. Second, I argue that indifference to cruelty is cultivated through recourse to ethical rather than political imperatives, which foreground ethical action in ways that continue to depoliticize the cruelties of global inequality. Two sites animate this project and foreground a form of banal cruelty justified through the cultivation of political indifference: at the microlevel, a dystopian short story that takes an ethicized indifference as the basis for accounting for racialized and gendered labor migration (George Saunders’ “The Semplica Girl Diaries”), and, at the macro-level, Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker programs, which produce depoliticized justifications for systemic racialized exploitation. I argue that this ethicization of political relationships is a way of precluding engagement with the colonial politics of indifference and the everyday cruelties of political economy through which inequalities and exploitations are produced and reproduced.