Jenny Sharpe considers the visual power of the imperial picturesque. Analyzing touristic photography of Indian field workers in the Caribbean, Sharpe argues that a “coolie picturesque” simultaneously reveals and conceals the permanent settlement of Indians and their racial mixing with Afro-Jamaicans.

Analyzing the staging and composition of archival photography of South Asian laborers in 19th-century Jamaica, Anna Arabindan-Kesson reflects upon the role of photography in evoking particular colonial narratives about indenture, the perception of Indian laborers’ assimilability, and Jamaica’s modernization.

Thousands of Chinese migrants were recruited to work side by side with African Americans on Louisiana’s sugar plantations after the Civil War. Though now a largely forgotten episode in history, their presence in sugar production helped justify racial exclusion after the abolition of slavery.

Iseeyou (2013) is a short film essay by Simon Gush, depicting Johannesburg’s representations of mining. The film deftly questions what is at stake in the visibility and invisibility of labor.

On the mythological and biological necessity of work: "You can only survive if you work, since so much is working against you."

One of the first dramatic conflicts to propel The Map And The Territory, Michel Houellebecq’s latest novel, is a quintessentially French scene of heroism and vexation: the protagonist’s water-heater wheezes, hisses, sputters, peters out and dies.  It’s Christmas Eve (when else for a  water-heater to die but on extended week-end holi