The Contemporary Literary Studies Network are pleased to present a research talk and wine reception with Dr Sharae Deckard:
Precarious Work: The Labour and Ecology of Social Reproduction in World-Literature
Labour in the realm of social reproduction draws heavily upon natural “resources” and is preponderantly affected by forms of depletion and environmental crisis including water scarcity, land degradation, and pollution. As Wilma Dunaway has observed, “women's work is dominant in food production and processing, in responsibility for fuel, water, health care, child-rearing, sanitation and the entire range of so-called basic needs”(2001: 16). One of the fundamental social contradictions of capitalist accumulation is that even as it is dependent on exploitation of the world’s households, the modern capitalist world-ecology threatens their survival by expropriating and degrading the land and extra-human nature that is essential to household provisioning. Women in peripheries of the world-ecology are more exposed to toxicity in workplaces and households, and more likely to perform gruelling forms of physical labour in connection to social reproduction, whether as water-carriers or agricultural labourers in peasant, subsistence and peripheral urban situations. Dietary unevenness, malnutrition, and water shocks disproportionately affect women from peripheries, particularly in conditions of drought or famine exacerbated by global warming and resource imperialism. This talk calls for world-literary critics to examine the particularly gendered implications of environmental degradation and to conceptualize how women’s centrality to resource acquisition might be figured in resource fictions and poetics. Comparing texts from Senegal, India, and Turkey, I will analyze world-literary imaginaries of the gendered ecology of social reproduction, focusing on depictions of food-getting, water-carrying, and waste-picking labour gendered as so-called “women's work.” Furthermore, I will examine how novels portray the terrain of social reproduction both as a zone of appropriation and as the potential ground for women’s organized resistance.
Dr Sharae Deckard is Associate Professor in World Literature at UCD. Her research interests intersect environmental criticism and world-systems approaches to world literature, ecology, and culture. In Autumn 2020, she joined Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee as academic Series Editor of Palgrave's New Comparisons in World Literature series. She is the Director of the UCD Environmental Humanities research strand, and a member of the "Environmental Humanities" Steering Group for the Irish Humanities Alliance. Her books include a monograph, Paradise Discourse, Imperialism and Globalization (Routledge 2010) and Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (co-authored with the Warwick Research Collective, Liverpool UP 2015; translated into Portuguese for Unicamp, 2020). With Rashmi Varma, she is co-editor of Marxism, Postcolonial Theory, and the Future of Critique: Critical Engagements with Benita Parry (Routledge 2018), and with Stephen Shapiro, she is editor of World Literature, Neoliberalism and the Culture of Discontent (Palgrave 2019), winner of the BACLS Edited Collection Prize.