Coerced: Work Under Threat of Punishment

300 Pages·2020·1.228 MB·English

by  Erin Hatton

Coerced

Coerced
work under threat of punishment
Erin Hatton
university of california press
Epigraph: Excerpted from Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi
Coates, copyright © 2015 by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Used by permission of
Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin
Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
University of California Press
Oakland, California
© 2020 by Erin Hatton
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
isbn 978-0-520-30539-7 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-520-30541-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-520-97340-4 (ebook)
Manufactured in the United States of America
27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Felix

You must always remember that the sociology, the history,
the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all
land, with great violence, upon the body.
—Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

Contents
List of Tables xi
Acknowledgments xiii
Foreword xv
Introduction 1
1. “Wicked” and “Blessed”: Cultural Narratives of
Coerced Labor 31
2. “Either You Do It or You’re Going to the Box”:
Coercion and Compliance 62
3. “They Talk to You in Any Kind of Way”: Subjugation,
Vulnerability, and the Body 100
4. “Stay Out They Way”: Agency and Resistance 139
5. “I’m Getting Ethiopia Pay for My Work”: Hegemony
and Counter-Hegemony 171
Conclusion 203
Appendix A. The Story of This Book 213
Appendix B. People qua Data 217
Notes 227
Selected Bibliography 273
Index 279