Crisis Infrastructures

The Decolonial Question

Part of the drama Khalili builds in the narrative occurs through her telling of the multiple territorial battles over waterways, such as the Suez Canal, and the heroic efforts to nationalize trade routes and resources. As we learn in her account, corporate sovereignty had the capacity at times to trump national sovereignty in international arbitration over land and resource disputes. During the 1950s and 1960s, imperial nation-states and national territoriality itself were being reconstituted alongside Third World struggles for decolonization. By the 1970s, decolonial struggle was deferred, inaugurating a period that saw a broad base reversal of social democratic gains in the Global North, while a combined authoritarianism and liberalization became entrenched in statist economies of the Global South. Khalili homes in on the 1967 Six-Day War, which led to the subjugation of anticolonial efforts by counterrevolutionary and reactionary forces. She observes that “where the war proved most catastrophic, however, was its bookending of the era of decolonization, especially in the Arab world” (246). This included reframing this period of anticolonial struggle as an insignificant blip on the Cold War radar. This period also saw the diffusion of ownership structures, deregulation, accelerated turnaround times, and enlarged ships. She notes that “Euro-American oil companies also accelerated their divestment from their shipping businesses and instead chartered tankers from independent shipping companies” (234). This shift from national shipping companies to chartered tankers illustrates the increasing emphasis on flexible accumulation that, if not completely delinked from the nation-state, de-emphasized or diffused nationality. This diffusion occurs even as we continue to this day to refer to national industries such as “U.S. coal,” “Saudi oil,” or “Chinese steel.”

The question I have comes out of an observation that deterritorializations of the state–capital relation have shifted the terms of decolonial struggle. Given the multiple scales of sovereignty that include state, corporate, and “variegated” sovereignty (in the case of Puerto Rico) that have grown up alongside the maritime infrastructures under discussion, does this require us to recalibrate the objectives of decolonization? In an increasingly connected global infrastructure that circumvents territorial boundaries in the service of capital accumulation, what remains of efforts to restore sovereign territoriality to colonized peoples? In other words, what does it mean to decolonize from an imperial infrastructure that seems to exceed territorial boundaries? In the postwar era, national corporations can exercise sovereign jurisdiction or at least maintain foreign ownership of alien property, while a system of networked military bases securitize supply chain infrastructures. Meanwhile deregulation and “flags of convenience” give cover to byzantine ownership structures that deflect responsibility away from owners and investors—as the 2020 warehouse explosion in Beirut testifies to. Given the power of corporate interests in maintaining an accelerated, frictionless movement of goods over uneven political geographies, how do we distinguish decolonization from anticapitalism?

Racial Proletarianization

Khalili gives a visceral account of the racialized immiseration and precarity of lascars, who are primarily South Asian, Adenese, Yemeni, and African and Chinese seafarers. Their employment was “precisely about the racial hierarchies of labor that structured colonial regimes of exploitation” (227). Their foreign status was clearly a defining aspect of their embodiment as lascars. Khalili’s portrayal of these and other exploited sea crews resonates with the history of Chinese labor recruitment to Canada and the United States during these nations’ infrastructural expansions. Her description of the segregation of “bachelor” migrant laborers from the nonmigrant population on ships further refracts the reproductive management of gendered Chinese migrant bodies in settler states. We also learn about the manufactured hierarchies that accompany dual-wage structures that are written into the neutral language of the law. Khalili’s depiction of workers’ precarity, rightlessness, and deportability seems characteristic of “surplus populations” that global capitalism requires. The conditions of the surplus laboring population are similar yet distinct from workers who are exploited within production. Ken Kawashima proposes a more expansive concept of proletarianization that includes “a surplus population that is exploited and maintained in limbo, in conditions of extreme contingency and precariousness, and therefore in destitution on the exterior cusp of production.”5 Here the proletariat is subject to both overwork and underwork, but their essential condition is that of being surplus and in limbo. The proletariat’s “separation and distance from capital” is acutely mediated by racial foreignness.6 How does the author approach or problematize the relation of race and surplus labor, and what avenues of labor organizing seem most promising within this system?

Beyond Disruption

The shift from coal to oil as the dominant source of energy in the twentieth century had a profound impact on the social and political gains made through labor militancy. The geopolitical infrastructure of oil, which is lighter than coal, helped to erode the power of organized labor because oil could travel by sea and more easily circumvent chokeholds and sites of labor militancy or nationalization efforts. But blockades remain a persistent and effective obstacle. They have been especially problematic for expanding resource infrastructures in North America, from the antipipeline activists protesting the Trans Mountain expansion in British Columbia to the Dakota Access Pipeline. On land and sea, these disruptions have been led by Indigenous activists, environmentalists, and pirates rather than labor militants. Khalili reflects that “blockades, as performatively rich as they are, even as they ‘give our blockaders a sense of where they stand within the flows of capital,’ ultimately are only a set of tactics . . . [and] like any tactic they can be appropriated for less than salutary politics” (215). She reminds us that blockades cut both ways, as her example of a pro-Zionist shipping boycott lays bare. Meanwhile, shipping corporations attempt to win hearts and minds through campaigns to support women seeking abortions (Amazon), artist residencies on container ships (ZIM), and other worthy cultural causes. I closed the book somewhat pessimistic about efforts to undo this spiderweb of maritime infrastructure, whose resiliency is reinforced by corporate arbitration and the political invisibility of these relations. I wondered if Khalili identifies modes of cultural resistance that could move us beyond the level of “tactics.” Identifying the strategies that can work the vulnerabilities in this web is among the defining challenges of our times.

Iyko Day is Elizabeth C. Small Professor and Chair of English and affiliated faculty in the Department of Critical Race and Political Economy at Mount Holyoke College. She is the author of Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2016). She currently coedits the book series Critical Race, Indigeneity, and Relationality for Temple University Press and is a member of the Critical Ethnic Studies journal editorial collective. Her current research focuses on Marxism and racial capitalism, colonialism and nuclear antipolitics, and the visual culture of logistics.