[Englecturers] Talk 3/8: Pheng Cheah, Bio-power and the New International Division of Reproductive Labor

[englecturers at lists.ucr.edu]

It’s late in the quarter and you’re busy and frazzled... why 
not take a break and treat yourself to a fascinating talk 
given by a dynamic speaker?

"Bio-power and the New International Division of Reproductive 
Labor"
Pheng Cheah, (Rhetoric, UC Berkeley)

Tuesday, March 8 at 4 p.m. in 1500 Humanities

Abstract: Gayatri Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?" alerted 
critical theorists to the new international division of labor 
by offering an immanent critique of Michel Foucault's and 
Gilles Deleuze's theories of power.  However, when she 
elaborated on the figures of the superexploited within and 
outside this international division, she turned back to an 
earlier itinerary of muting in the colonial archives instead 
of staying with  contemporary capitalist development in the 
South.  This paper evaluates Spivak's critique of Foucault 
and her claims about the relations between his analytics of 
micro-power and the Marxist concept of ideology by examining 
the viability of his account of bio-power as an analytical 
framework for understanding the transnational traffic in 
domestic labor in hyperdeveloping Southeast Asia.

Pheng Cheah is the author of Spectral Nationality: Passages 
of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of 
Liberation (Columbia, 2003) and co-editor with Bruce Robbins 
of Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation 
(Minnesota, 1998). In addition to being a formidable thinker, 
Pheng is an engaging speaker, and this talk promises to be 
excellent.