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Andrea Wright Book Talk: Global Asias
Monday, March 03, 2025, 03:00pm - 05:00pm
March 3 (Monday)
3 PM
Room 6051, Academic Building West
Title: Depoliticizing Labor: Oil and Governance in the Arabian Sea
Description: Workers on the Arabian Peninsula, today, are barred from striking or forming unions. In the oil industry, most labor comes from South Asia and the Philippines. But a look at the region between 1930 and 1970 reveals a rich history of activism at oil projects. This talk explores the progressive evacuation of politics from the oilfields and the solidification of racialized labor hierarchies from the 1940s through the 1960s. During this period, workers influenced corporate management practices and shaped local and imperial governance. In turn, workers’ strikes were shaped by oil company practices that included segregation based on nationality. This examination of mid-century struggles helps us understand how changing notions of citizenship and rights arose in parallel with discourses that linked oil to national security. The result was that the political influence of oil workers was radically curtailed.
Author: Andrea Wright’s research explores the histories of capitalism and its contemporary expression, and her focus is on the ways labor movements and energy production shape governance, economies, and geopolitics in South Asia, the Arabian Peninsula, and globally. She is author of Between Dreams and Ghosts: Indian Migration and Middle Eastern Oil (Stanford University Press, 2021) and Unruly Labor: A History of Oil in the Arabian Sea (Stanford University Press, 2024). Wright received her PhD from the Joint Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan. She is currently Class of 1952 Distinguished Associate Professor of Anthropology and Asian & Middle Eastern Studies at William & Mary, where she has taught since 2016.
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