AAS-in-Asia, Seoul

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Fisheries, Farms and Factories from Asia to the Pacific: Tethered Subjectivities and Human Trafficking

Sat, June 24, 10:00am to 12:00pm, LG-Posco Hall, Floor: 4th Floor, 432

Abstract

A twenty-first century human rights concern is addressing exploitation in global supply chains, such as trafficking into industries like fishing, farming, and factories. In 2005, Kil Soo Lee, the owner of Daewoosa Factory was sentenced for trafficking related charges in Hawaii federal courts; they brought 200 workers from Vietnam to work amongst approximately fifty workers in American Samoa. The employers starved the workers, threatened deportation, restricted the worker’s movement, and beat the workers. One witness described the beatings: it was like “watching a film where the people are being brutally beaten to the point of like a massacre.” Other cases like Equal Employment Opportunity Commission v. Global Horizons (2011) made visible similar experiences in farms in Hawaii where Thai workers experienced: “slapping, punching, humiliation, heavy surveillance and threats of being shot, deported or arrested.” These narratives of human rights violations go hand-in-hand with trafficking narratives surrounding Asians recruited into U.S. farming, fishery, and factory industries. The legal victim is a social construction and the imagining of the trafficking victim is oftentimes interchangeably referred to as sex trafficked where the viewer is called to rescue them. By examining human trafficking of Asians into U.S. global industries in Asia-Pacific, enables unsettling how victimhood is witnessed in human rights discourse. This presentation examines the subjectivities produced in human rights discourse in these cases and the story of “Sonny” trafficked from Indonesia into California fishing industries, to argue that human rights discourses further tethered subjectivities.

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