Questioning Home & Obligation: Witnessing the Trafficking of Asian Diasporas into Domestic Servitude

• In Event: Contested Visions of Home: Asian/American Diasporic Subjectivities in the Media

Abstract

Diasporic subjects are shaped by complicated notions of home: home is a place they leave, home is a place of origins, and home, for the domestic worker, is a place in which one labors. For those who experience violence in the home where they labor, this violence has many faces and names. I focus on a particular type of violence that is deeply tied to home – the trafficking of migrants into servitude. The trafficking of migrants into domestic servitude in the United States is identified by advocates, lawyers, law enforcement, attorneys, social workers, and the many witnesses that are called to action, as commodified intimacy at its worse – euphemistically called “modern day slavery.” Trafficking into domestic servitude is defined by multiple elements of coercion, force, fraud, or debt bondage. Debt bondage is obligations one is forced into because of something owed, and eventually this debt is something that one seems to pay forever – the cost of travel, housing, food, and even a promise of education, to learn how to drive, job access, or the ability to move somewhere new and eventually bring your family. These promises sustain the conditions of obligation for the trafficking victim. But as examined in Jodi Kim’s work, debt relations are gendered and racial, where debt is a deferral of freedom that produces subjectivities. I am interested in the varying notions of debt that shape domestic servitude. In particular, how debt gives meaning to and is derived from the experiences of diasporic subjects – Asian migrants, whose subjectivity in relation to human trafficking is defined by debt. The varying notions of debt explored in this paper include what Saidiya Hartman refers to as indebted servitude, as well as gendered racial debt, debt relations, and debt bondage. The methodology is interdisciplinary and qualitative. I examine 26 cases of domestic workers trafficked from Asia into the United States. This project is a legal and sociological analysis of legal court record and discourse analysis of the news, press releases, and youtube videos by the National Domestic Workers Alliance. As Jodi Kim has provocatively asked, what it would mean to abolish debt relations altogether? But debt deeply shapes relations. And for the diasporic subject, debt has many facets and conditions. Therefore, I answer: what are the new forms of relations that are needed to shift the paradigm of obligations that create and sustain exploitation? What sort of obligations are mandated of societies surrounding diasporic subjects whose legal status is precarious and conditions defined by the dominant society as normalized vulnerability? If freedom created the conditions of indebted servitude, as described by Saidiya Hartman, as the dutiful free laborer, what forms of witnessing and practice can unyoke forms of domination that are imbricated in the experience of transnational economies and diasporic subjectivities? Through what I call an unsettled witnessing, I enact new forms of witnessing of diasporic and gendered subjects whose relation to home is deeply tied to debt – what I call, an unsettled witnessing.

Author

• Annie Isabel Fukushima, University of Utah (UT)