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English 223
Term 2, Week 9
“As for the futuristic parts of the book-again, I was just trying
to think and narrate through a contemporary moment. Some of
the major world events that occurred or that I became aware of
during the writing of Salt Fish Girl were the cloning of Dolly
the sheep, the arrival of three rusty ships from China on the
West Coast of British Columbia carrying around 600 Chinese
migrant labourers, Monsanto's suing of a farmer whose canola
crop, probably through natural pollination, had picked up some
of Monsanto's altered DNA, the patenting of slightly modified
basmati rice by a large Texas corporation, the construction of
Celebration, a fully planned ur-American town, by Disney. I
find Celebration freaky and creepy because it imagines a highly
idealized (and frankly proto-fascist) American past that never
existed and puts real people to live there. These people can and
do buy in. It really is living in the simulacra, living in a
representation of something that never existed, but that comes
to exist through this replication of a thing without an original.
A kind of nationalism combines with a kind of corporatism in
a way that seems benign, and yet is utterly sinister. What makes
it extra-creepy is the fact that it points to the way in which
North Americans are living-our cities are replications that claim
histories that have never existed or have existed elsewhere.
These histories are violent because they utterly erase what was
here before.”
Island of Mist and Forgetfulness
“why shed blood
when people can be
bought
and
sold
so easily?”
"For years we thought of
ourselves as a productionoriented company, meaning we
put all our emphasis on
designing and manufacturing
the product. But now we
understand that the most
important thing we do is
market the product. We've
come around to saying that
Nike is a marketing-oriented
company, and the product is
our most important marketing
tool."
-Phil Knight, CEO Nike
“We listened in horror as Sonia 14 recounted the tale.
Because I had no idea what they were planning, the shock
was double for me, and at the same time, less severe because
they weren’t my family. Evie and the Sonias had for months
been planning a massive infiltration of shoe factories at
Redemption, Murphy’s Flats and Trough. In the basement
of the Sonias’ house they had been producing moulds for
the soles of a special edition cross-trained they dubbed
‘sabots.’ Some told the stories of individual Sonias’ lives,
some were inscribed with factory workers’ poems, some
with polemics, some with drawings. The day of infiltration
had occurred during our stint in prison. The Sonias had
decided to go ahead regardless” (249)
“In the 21st century, the substantial over-representation of racialised US groups
among the unemployed and underemployed —“last hired and first fired”—
demonstrates the concessionary, uneven incorporation of these groups into a
system of highly racialised wage differentials, occupational segregation, and
precarious labour. As capital sloughs off these relative surplus populations in the
core, the surplus capital produced by fewer and more intensively exploited
workers in the Global North scours the globe for lower wages, and reappears as
the racial threat of cheap labour from the Global South. In the US, with the end
of secure wage labour and the withdrawal of public welfare provisions, a massive
“post-racial” security state has come into being to manage the supposed
civilisational threats to the nation — by policing black wageless life, deporting
immigrant labour, and waging an unlimited “War on Terror”. The catastrophic
rise of black mass incarceration, the hyper-militarisation of the
southern US border, and the continuation of open-ended security operations
across the Muslim world, reveal how “race” remains not only a probabilistic
assignment of relative economic value but also an index of differential
vulnerability to state violence.” - Chris Chen