Introduction 1 Mapping the Invisible: Critical Perspectives on Invisibility

Notes Introduction 1 Although Warhol is credited with this phrase and has used it in an exhibi- tion, photographer Finkensteiln who had taken photos of Warhol claims to have been its real author. He claims that he had said to a crowd of people who had gathered in order to be in a photo with Warhol that they would indeed be famous, but only for 15 minutes. 2 In The Transparent Society (1992 [1989]) Gianni Vattimo interrogates the transparency of the postmodern world. 3 The meaning and impact of Ralph Ellison’s novel will be discussed in Chapter 1. 4 Arundhati Roy also explains that the government had promised financial compensation but this implied filing for these compensations, which for rural populations with a very low literacy rate was an impossible step to take. 5 Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London/New York: Verso, 2006). 6 Rakesh K. Sinha ‘New Delhi: The World’s Shanty Capital in the Making.’ OneWorld South Asia 26, August 2003. 7 Gayatri Spivak ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds) Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (London: Macmillan, 1988). 1 Mapping the Invisible: Critical Perspectives on Invisibility 1 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (London: Penguin, 1965 [1952]). 2 Guillaume Le Blanc, L’Invisibilité Sociale (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2009). 3 David, Macey, Frantz Fanon, A Life (London: Granta Books, 2000). 4 Macey notes that ‘[h]e made no contributions to the journal itself and appears not to have considered it as a potential publisher for Peau Noire. He had, of course, decided to study in Lyon because there were “too many negroes” in Paris. He described himself as being reluctant to live in a purely Martinican environment in France (even though he did frequent precisely that milieu when he was in Paris) and must have been equally reluctant to associate himself too closely with the main journal of negri- tude. As he puts it towards the end of Peau Noire: “In no way must I derive my original vocation from the past of peoples of colour. In no way must I devote myself to resurrecting a negro civilization that has been unfairly misrecognized”’ (quoted in Macey, 2000, 156). 5 Percival Everett, Erasure (London: Faber and Faber, 2001). 187 188 Notes 6 Theorist Arjun Appadurai has stressed the necessity of distinguishing between the various types of diaspora in economic terms and in par- ticular with the different contexts in which the diasporic journey is undertaken. Appadurai himself distinguishes between three types of diaspora, the dispora of hope, the diaspora of terror and the diaspora of despair. Other recent publications in the field of diasporic studies stress the historical context and therefore the type of migration involved; Vijay Mishra’s book The Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary (New York/London: Routledge, 2008) and Mariam Pirbhai’s book Mythologies of Migration, Vocabularies of Indenture: Novels of the South Asian Diaspora in Africa, the Caribbean and Asia-Pacific (2009) are noteworthy examples in this regard. 7 Jan Breman and Arvind Das. Down and Out: Labouring Under Global Capitalism (New Delhi 2000). 8 Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006). 9 Arjun Appadurai, ‘Deep Democracy: Urban Governmentality and the Horizon of Politics’, Environment and Urbanization 13: 2 (October 2001, 27). 10 Pryer explains that in the 1970s there was considerable international concern about Bangladesh’s fast growing population and that the ques- tion was raised as to whether the value of child work incited parents to have large families (Pryer, 2004, 59). In the 1980s child work was under scrutiny again, the argument being that child work was a major obstacle to universal primary education. Then the debate was reactivated in 1992 following the bill proposed by the American Senator Hankin to boycott imports from countries resorting to child labour. 11 For further discussion of the difference between child labour and child work, see Pryer (2003, 68) and J. Boydon, (‘Child work and Policy Makers: A Comparative perspective on the globalisation of childhood’, in A. James, and A. Prout, (eds), Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood (London/New York: The Farmer Press, 1990). 12 Jane Pryer, Poverty and Vulnerability in Dhaka Slums: The Urban Livelihoods Study, Aldershot 2003. 13 BBS stands for Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics, Statistical Yearbook of Bangladesh, Government of Bangladesh, Dhaka, Bangladesh. 14 In The Labouring Poor, Jan Breman argues that one of the main problems with informality is that workers have no contracts and no rights, but there is also another problem which is the gap within this class between those who get overexploited and some who are better off, the worst off being children and women (Breman, 181). See also Jan Breman and Arvind Das, Down and Out: Labouring Under Global Capitalism, New Delhi 2000. 15 For further discussion of invisible migrants see M. Abdul-Wali, They die Strangers. (Austin, TX: The University of Texas at Austin, 2001), J.C. Bacher, Petrotyranny (Toronto: Dundern Press, 2000), A.M. Gardner, City of Strangers: Gulf Migration and the Indian Community in Bahrain (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2010). 16 Lisa Lowe and David Lloyds (eds) The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 1997). Notes 189 17 Davis writes that among researchers, there is a consensus that ‘the 1980s crisis – during which informal sector employment grew two to five times faster than formal-job sectors – has inverted their relative structural posi- tions, establishing informal survivalism as the new primary mode of livelihood in a majority of Third World Cities’ (178). 18 On 6 April 2011, 300 people drowned after a boat capsized off the shores of Sicily (The Guardian, 6 April 2011). 19 On 22nd June 2012 off the shores of Christmas Island a boat carrying 200 people, all asylum seekers, capsized. 109 passengers were rescued but 90 people remained unaccounted for. (http://heraldsun.com.au:news/ victoria/an-asylum-seeker-boat-has-capsized-north-of-christmas-island/ story-e6frf71f-1226404645552, accessed on 2.3.2013) 20 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: the Powers of Mourning and Violence (London/ New York: Verso, 2004). 21 Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Colour: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). For further discussion of ‘whiteness’, as well as colour and American citizen- ship, see David Roediger, Coloured White: Transcending the Racial Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002) and The Wage of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American working class (London: Verso, 1999). 22 ‘When the cream of Miami is the Cuban bourgeoisie, and the best students at MIT are Chinese, and not a candidate can stand before a democratic presidential convention without flashing his racial or ethnic credentials – when everybody sticks out and doesn’t seem to mind, per- haps Jews are less likely to worry about their sticking out; less likely in fact to stick out’ (Milbauer, Asher and Donald Watson (eds) Reading Philip Roth, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988, p. 4). 23 Imagining the Nation: Asian American Literature and Cultural Consent (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 24 The term marielitos refers to the last important wave of Cuban immigra- tion in 1980 who arrived after Castro announced that those who wanted to leave Cuba were free to go and be reunited with their families in the US. What happened in actual fact is he rid the island of a lot of people who were chronically ill or who had a criminal record by sending them off to the United States. One of the effects was that Cubans at large got a bad name on account of the bad reputation that the marielitos had in the United States and which was radically different from that of the previous waves of Cuban immigrants. 25 Jan Breman, Footloose Labour: Working in India’s Informal Economy (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 26 Low income countries were in 1983 countries with a GNP per capita between $695 and $8,626. 27 For further discussion, see Cecilia Zanetta, The Influence of the World Bank on National Housing and Urban Politics: The Case of Mexico and Argentina in the 1990s (Aldershot, 2004, pp. 1994–6). 28 Paul Atkinson, A Handbook of Ethnography (London: Sage, 2001). 29 Vinayak Chaturvedi (ed.) Mapping Subaltern Studies (London: Verso, 2000). 190 Notes 30 In the 1970s Ranajit Guha editor of Subaltern Studies and a group of young historians based in Britain engaged in a reflexion on the contemporary state of South Asian historiography (Partha Chatterjee, Shahid Amin, David Arnold, David Hardiman, Gyanendra Pandrey). The movement gradually became more international in scope; while the focus was initally limited to India (in the 1980s) it reached far beyond the frontiers of its place of birth and in 1993 the Latin America Subaltern Studies group was founded. 31 Chakrabarty concentrates more specifically on the tradition of the adda in the city of Calcutta in the first half of the twentieth century and gives the following definition of the adda: ‘The word adda (pronounced ‘uddah’) is translated by the Bengali linguist Sunitikumar Chatopadhyay as “a place” for “careless talk with boon companions” or “the chats of intimate friends”. [ . ] Roughly speaking, it is the practice of friends getting together for long, informal, and unrigorous conversation.’ 32 Chakrabarty also explains that the addas were not always viewed favour- ably by Bengalis themselves for ‘middle-class addas are usually forgetful of the working classes’ (Chakrabarty, 2000, 181). They were also criticized by feminists who saw them as episodes of male idleness which were taking place in the absence of women who were at work while their husbands indulged in each other’s company.

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