In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Response to Kathleen Arnold, Review of Breaks in the Chain:What Immigrant Workers Can Teach America about Democracy
  • Paul Apostolidis (bio)

Kathleen Arnold offers generous praise for many aspects of my book, Breaks in the Chain: What Immigrant Workers Can Teach America about Democracy, in her recent review in Theory & Event and I am delighted about that as any author would be. She commends my book for addressing the politics of theory and taking a "collaborationist" approach with respect to the workers whose stories the book explores. She provides a helpful account of the way I theorize the politics of narrative in critical dialogue with Lisa Disch, Wendy Brown, and Antonio Gramsci. Arnold also likes the way this book strives to disclose the complex and sometimes contradictory political implications of the workers' narratives and actions. She writes that I offer "a thoughtful, innovative and worthwhile account of agency," and I'm heartened that she sees the book that way because above all, this project aims to accentuate the capacities of immigrant workers as political, intellectual, and social agents. In addition, Arnold draws attention, again in a way that I appreciate, to the book's argument that legalizing the undocumented represents a very limited goal in comparison to efforts that develop robustly democratic political agency among immigrant workers.

Arnold advances a serious and important criticism when she suggests that I have treated race monolithically and perpetuated the "binary splits between us and them." Arnold writes: "… he claims that the exploitation and biopolitical treatment of these workers allow the rest of 'us' to eat cheaply produced meat and work in relatively better jobs (115, 230-231). But the 'us' to which he refers constantly – except in the last line of the book, is 'whites'…." Because this criticism is so serious, and because I think it is a reading out of context, I take the opportunity to respond, graciously extended by the editors.

If one examines the passages Arnold cites, it is clear that I use the term "us" in the context of phrases like this: "the workers told us how the labor process forced them to endanger their bodies" (Apostolidis 2010, 115; emphasis added); or "The stories told to us by the Tyson/IBP workers detail the sordid characteristics of this relation of biopolitical segregation and domination" (230; emphasis added). My point in adopting such phrasing exemplifies the theory and practice of narrative-politics I develop in the book. I sought to remind the reader periodically about the situated, political quality of the interviews: the idea that these were narratives created in a concrete, particular situation in conversations with "us," the researcher-activists (a situation that I theorize in detail in the book's first chapter). By contrast, when I characterize the biopolitical relation between racially subordinate and racially dominant populations, I self-consciously do not use pronouns carrying the assumption that "we" readers of the text are necessarily white, privileged, and not employed in meatpacking jobs. Instead, I refer to "the racially dominant population in the north" (230), or to "the racially privileged group" (115; see also xlvii, 101-2, 148-49, 229). I had hoped that carefully chosen language would convey my own criticism of precisely the discursive moves that both Arnold and I find troubling but, perhaps, I should have made explicit arguments to that effect.

Arnold also finds that I "actively employ" gender stereotypes when the interviews "do not immediately lend themselves" to analysis according to gendered characteristics. It is puzzling that in making this criticism she cites pages 69, 84-90, and 132 because I do not discuss gender on pages 69, 84-86, 90, or 132 (or even 232, if that is what she means). On 87, I discuss how a worker I call Ramona Díaz was compelled to do all the housework by relatives who housed her after she migrated illegally from Mexico, and how these relatives also demanded she hand over to them all her wages. I go on to note that prior research suggests that women who migrate illegally are fairly commonly vulnerable to this kind of treatment; I cite a well-known empirical source about this (Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994), while also...

Share