scholarly journals The (Un)Making of a Worker Poet: The Case of Md Mukul Hossine and Migrant Worker Writings in Singapore

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-73
Author(s):  
Zhang Luka Lei
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Social Inequality ◽  
Migrant Workers ◽  
Migrant Worker ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Production Mode ◽  
Publication Process ◽  
Working Class Literature ◽  
Systematic Structure

This article discusses the migrant worker poet Md Mukul Hossine. Showing Mukul as the representative migrant worker poet also severely restricted and complicated his process of ‘becoming’ a poet. From a Marxist standpoint, the Singaporean literati’s dismissal of Mukul reveals the predicament of being a working-class writer in today’s neoliberal market. The particular bourgeoise ‘production mode’ of working-class literature in Singapore first ‘made’, then ‘consumed’ and ultimately ‘condemned’ Mukul. First, I examine the publication process of Mukul’s poetry and its success followed by a series of problems. In the second section, I offer a close reading of Mukul’s poems understanding Mukul’s poetics and struggles as a migrant worker poet as his poetry is seldom examined in  literary criticism. Finally, I argue that the representation of migrant workers writers such as Mukul is problematic due to the nature of the whole system: how they are empowered in such a context equally does harm to them. This mode again reproduces the systematic structure of power hegemony and social inequality through the field of literature.

Musical resistance and musical bodies in the making: A worker-band from southern China

2021 ◽  
pp. 136787792110117
Author(s):  
Vincent Guangsheng Huang
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Migrant Workers ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Migrant Worker ◽  
Southern China ◽  
The Body ◽  
Cultural Resources ◽  
Musical Production ◽  
And Performance

This study explores the role of the body in the making of a migrant worker-band and the potential for musical production and performance activities to reshape workers’ cultural subjectivities. A framework of reflexive embodiment is used to understand how musical production and performance activities shape the cultural subjectivities of migrant workers through three bodily processes: body as text/text as body, body as instrument and body in performance. By highlighting the bodily dimension, this article seeks to broadly engage with and advance scholarship on the nexus between cultural practices and the formation of working-class subjectivity, and to specifically enrich our understanding of the migrant workers in contemporary China. This alternative musical practice is a form of ‘musical resistance’ that is not only culturally remaking working-class bodies but also providing cultural resources for the solidarity of the working-class community.

Labor migration from Southeast Asia to Taiwan: issues, public responses and future development

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jian-Bang Deng ◽  
Hermin Indah Wahyuni ◽  
Vissia Ita Yulianto
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Social Inequality ◽  
Migrant Workers ◽  
Labor Migration ◽  
Migrant Worker ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Research Approach ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Transnational Mobility ◽  
Migrant Laborers

PurposeThis paper is mainly focused on labor migration from Southeast Asia to Taiwan, showing a route of south–south mobility and discussing the causes of migrant workers in Taiwan, the issues faced by migrant workers as well as public response to migrant workers.Design/methodology/approachBesides a literate review on the topic of migrant worker researches in Taiwan, the data for this research was also based on qualitative interviews and observations conducted both in the fieldwork in Taiwan and in Indonesia between June and August during the summer of 2018.FindingsThe transnational mobility let many migrants from Southeast Asian countries to Taiwan end up losing their cultural capital and “make money” instead. For these migrants, they have experienced a downward social mobility of class through transnational mobility.Research limitations/implicationsBecause of the chosen research approach, the research results may lack generalizability. More migrant laborers from various origin countries were encouraged to include for further research.Practical implicationsLabor migration cases from Southeast Asia to Taiwan could very well serve as good examples in the carrying out of a reflection on the limit of focusing on social science only inside nation-states in order to push a forward thinking on the transnationalization of social inequality.Originality/valueThis paper calls attention to the close linkage between transnational mobility and social inequality. It showed how the transnationalization of social inequality could get new faces through the new waves of labor migration.

scholarly journals After Scotland's literary "Golden Age": Locating Agnes Owens

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Rupert Alexander Pirie-Hunter
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Careful Examination ◽  
Aesthetics And Politics ◽  
The West ◽  
Scottish Literature ◽  
Working Mother ◽  
Working Class Literature ◽  
To Come

<p>Celebrations of Scottish literature in the last decades of the twentieth century have neglected one of Scotland’s most important writers: Agnes Owens. Owens’ work and its influence is far more complex, and far greater in reach, than most accounts acknowledge. Her significance is no secret: Alasdair Gray and James Kelman have championed her work; Glasgow University’s Douglas Gifford has said that Owens “can claim to have done more than most in the redefinition of women in fiction.” This paper aims to lay the groundwork from which meaningful criticism of Agnes Owens can be realised in the 21st Century. Taking cue from Walter Benjamin’s “The Author as Producer”, particularly his argument that “the tendency of a work of literature can be politically correct only if it is also correct in the literary sense”, I argue that the aesthetics and politics of Owens’ work deconstruct and redefine traditional models of working-class literature and representation.  The first chapter analyses her first collection of short stories, Gentlemen of the West and its sequel novella, Like Birds in the Wilderness. I challenge the way these texts have been read as realist working-class fiction through a careful examination of her short stories and novellas, offering an alternative framework through which they can be read. Gentlemen subverts notions of societal “initiation” in working-class fiction, with Mac’s attempt to escape his community being undone by the conclusion of Birds. The second chapter is a study of three of her short stories, attending to her minimalist illustrations of the socially condemned, and her confronting exposition of the readers’ gaze. Finally, this thesis discusses the gendered landscape of her novel, A Working Mother. Using Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady as an organising text, I argue that Owens’ treatment of gender relations challenge literary notions of female “hysteria” and madness. Taken as a whole, this thesis addresses Owens’ absence, attempting to locate her work within Scottish literary criticism. It is offered as a way forward for the study of her work in years to come.</p>

scholarly journals After Scotland's literary "Golden Age": Locating Agnes Owens

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Rupert Alexander Pirie-Hunter
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Careful Examination ◽  
Aesthetics And Politics ◽  
The West ◽  
Scottish Literature ◽  
Working Mother ◽  
Working Class Literature ◽  
To Come

<p>Celebrations of Scottish literature in the last decades of the twentieth century have neglected one of Scotland’s most important writers: Agnes Owens. Owens’ work and its influence is far more complex, and far greater in reach, than most accounts acknowledge. Her significance is no secret: Alasdair Gray and James Kelman have championed her work; Glasgow University’s Douglas Gifford has said that Owens “can claim to have done more than most in the redefinition of women in fiction.” This paper aims to lay the groundwork from which meaningful criticism of Agnes Owens can be realised in the 21st Century. Taking cue from Walter Benjamin’s “The Author as Producer”, particularly his argument that “the tendency of a work of literature can be politically correct only if it is also correct in the literary sense”, I argue that the aesthetics and politics of Owens’ work deconstruct and redefine traditional models of working-class literature and representation.  The first chapter analyses her first collection of short stories, Gentlemen of the West and its sequel novella, Like Birds in the Wilderness. I challenge the way these texts have been read as realist working-class fiction through a careful examination of her short stories and novellas, offering an alternative framework through which they can be read. Gentlemen subverts notions of societal “initiation” in working-class fiction, with Mac’s attempt to escape his community being undone by the conclusion of Birds. The second chapter is a study of three of her short stories, attending to her minimalist illustrations of the socially condemned, and her confronting exposition of the readers’ gaze. Finally, this thesis discusses the gendered landscape of her novel, A Working Mother. Using Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady as an organising text, I argue that Owens’ treatment of gender relations challenge literary notions of female “hysteria” and madness. Taken as a whole, this thesis addresses Owens’ absence, attempting to locate her work within Scottish literary criticism. It is offered as a way forward for the study of her work in years to come.</p>

scholarly journals “Under the Sway of Coal,” or a Story of the British Coal Miner Harold Heslop, Who Failed to Become a Soviet Writer

Slovene ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 482-504
Author(s):  
Elena S. Ostrovskaya
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Russian Translation ◽  
International Literature ◽  
Institutional History ◽  
International Union ◽  
Coal Miner ◽  
Working Class Literature ◽  
Red Earth

The paper focuses on the rapid and short-living Soviet writing career of the British coal miner Harold Heslop. Between 1926 and 1931, three novels by Heslop were published in the USSR (in Russian translation) and the translation of a fourth was commissioned and completed, and in 1930 the author himself travelled to the USSR as one of two members of the British delegation at the Kharkov conference of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers (IURW). However, that was the end of his success: the translated novel Red Earth was not published nor were any of his later novels. The only venue for his rare shorter essays and occasional prose excerpts was the magazine International Literature. The paper discusses this curious writer’s biography from different perspectives. It analyzes at length the critical article by Anna Elistratova, published in Na literaturnom postu and International Literature, juxtaposing the two versions and the text of Heslop’s novel to contextualize the writer and his work in the Soviet literary criticism of the time. It explores archival materials—Heslop’s correspondence with different people and institutions as well as institutional papers—to discuss the case as personal as well as institutional history, representative of the situation of the 1930s. Finally the article shifts perspective to discuss the author and his work in the context of the British working-class literature of the time.

Outlaws and Misfits: The Identities of Modernist Criticism

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 337-356
Author(s):  
Ben Knights
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Industrial Capitalism ◽  
Emotional Maturity ◽  
English Departments ◽  
Emotional Autonomy ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Implicit Identity ◽  
The University ◽  
Cultural Positioning

The images of the writer as exile and outlaw were central to modernism's cultural positioning. As the Scrutiny circle's ‘literary criticism’ became the dominant way of reading in the University English departments and then in the grammar-schools, it took over these outsider images as models for the apprentice-critic. English pedagogy offered students not only an approach to texts, but an implicit identity and affective stance, which combined alert resistance to the pervasive effects of mechanised society with a rhetoric of emotional ‘maturity’, belied by a chilly judgementalism and gender anxiety. In exchanges over the close reading of intransigent, difficult texts, criticism's seminars sought a stimulus to develop the emotional autonomy of its participants against the ‘stock response’ promulgated by industrial capitalism. But refusal to reflect on its own method meant such pedagogy remained unconscious of the imitative pressures that its own reading was placing on its participants.

Language competence, identity construction and discursive boundary-making: Distancing and alignment in domestic migrant worker narratives

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (262) ◽  
pp. 97-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans J. Ladegaard
Keyword(s):  
Identity Construction ◽  
Migrant Workers ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
English Language ◽  
Migrant Worker ◽  
Theoretical Concept ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Language Competence ◽  
Boundary Making

AbstractMany people in developing countries are faced with a dilemma. If they stay at home, their children are kept in poverty with no prospects of a better future; if they become migrant workers, they will suffer long-term separation from their families. This article focuses on one of the weakest groups in the global economy: domestic migrant workers. It draws on a corpus of more than 400 narratives recorded at a church shelter in Hong Kong and among migrant worker returnees in rural Indonesia and the Philippines. In sharing sessions, migrant women share their experiences of working for abusive employers, and the article analyses how language is used to include and exclude. The women tell how their employers construct them as “incompetent” and “stupid” because they do not speak Chinese. However, faced by repression and marginalisation, the women use their superior English language skills to get back at their employers and momentarily gain the upper hand. Drawing on ideologies of language as the theoretical concept, the article provides a discourse analysis of selected excerpts focusing on language competence and identity construction.

scholarly journals Addressing the Needs of Migrant Workers in ICUs in Singapore

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 238212052097719
Author(s):  
Crystal Lim ◽  
Jamie Xuelian Zhou ◽  
Natalie Liling Woong ◽  
Min Chiam ◽  
Lalit Kumar Radha Krishna
Keyword(s):  
Migrant Workers ◽  
Healthcare Workers ◽  
Migrant Worker ◽  
Minority Group ◽  
Group Discussion ◽  
Cultural Barriers ◽  
Medical Terminology ◽  
Singapore General Hospital ◽  
Medical Interpreters ◽  
General Wards

Background: With nearly 400 000 migrant workers in Singapore, many from Bangladesh, India and Myanmar, language and cultural barriers posed a great many challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. This was especially so as majority of the COVID-19 clusters in Singapore emerged from their communal dormitories. With concerns arising as to how this minority group could be best cared for in the intensive care units, the need for medical interpreters became clear. Main: In response, the Communication and Supportive Care (CSC) workgroup at the Singapore General Hospital developed the ‘Medical Interpreters Training for ICU Conversations’ program. Led by a medical social worker-cum-ethicist and 2 palliative care physicians, twenty volunteers underwent training. The program comprised of 4 parts. Firstly, volunteers were provided with an overview of challenges within the COVID-19 isolation ICU environment. Discussed in detail were common issues between patients and families, forms of distress faced by healthcare workers, family communication modality protocols, and the sociocultural demographics of Singapore’s migrant worker population. Secondly, key practice principles and ‘Do’s/Don’ts’ in line with the ethical principles of medical interpretation identified by the California Healthcare Interpreters Association were shared. Thirdly, practical steps to consider before, during and at the end of each interpretation session were foregrounded. Lastly, a focus group discussion on the complexities of ICU cases and their attending issues was conducted. Targeted support was further provided in response to participant feedback and specific issues raised. Conclusion: As a testament to its efficacy, the program has since been extended to the general wards and the Ministry of Health in Singapore has further commissioned similar programs in various hospitals. In-depth training on the fundamentals of medical terminology, language and cultural competency should be provided to all pertinent healthcare workers and hospitals should consider hiring medical interpreters in permanent positions.

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