The Art of Living as Surplus – Subversive lessons from Life Work in the Caribbean
A guest lecture by Beverly Mullings of the University of Toronto.
´¡²ú²õ³Ù°ù²¹³¦³Ù:Ìý Across the majority world populations are coming to the realization that the promise of formal waged employment was a cruelly optimistic unattainable ideal. Few today have faith in the teleological narrative of immanent development. And many in certain parts of the majority world have had to acknowledge that they are a relative surplus population - superfluous to the needs of capital and increasingly cut adrift or cast as a threat by those impatient to expropriate the land, the resources and even the devalued labour power of those it excludes. In this talk I explore the lessons we might learn from Caribbean women’s efforts to make life work in conditions of chronic and pervasive precarity. Through an expanded conceptualization of life work, I explore how the strategies and forms of creativity women use to build and reproduce societies challenge the conceptual binaries: formality/ informality; social reproduction/economic production that continue to structure the value of labour under capitalism.
