This chapter considers the material and violent circumstances that surrounded Black performers such as Louis Armstrong, Ethel Waters, Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington, Fredi Washington, and Fats Waller, as they produced some of the most memorable work of the Harlem Renaissance. To survive, these artists employed strategies of gender fugitivity to navigate a world of labor, poverty, and policing, while claiming spaces of survival and creativity. The first of three sections explores fugitive gender, arguing that the purposeful instability caused through the relationship between gender and Blackness created the conditions of possibility in everyday life for Black folks. The second section excavates the meanings of Duke Ellington’s cosmopolitan dandyism as seen in the 1929 film Black and Tan.The final section considers the fugitive sociality of rent parties, informal musical venues born of necessity and delight, which served the community of Harlem by providing shelter, food, entertainment, and sexual pleasure.

To describe the transition from slavery to freedom, Chapter 2 centers on the evolution and development of tutelle and its relationship to other forms of servility in nineteenth-century Senegal. It begins with an exploration of slavery in highly stratified Wolof society, and the use of slaves in urban Senegal where domestic labor was pervasive before 1848. Some slaves became part of French naval operations manning garrisons. Others worked as domestics, stevedores, and boat hands. Still others worked as helpers in the construction industry. Slaves were artisans and laptots (sailors). Enslaved minors, mostly female, were largely confined to domestic tasks in urban households headed by signares and others. The chapter traces the roots of engagement à temps – a form of indentured labor to which a significant number of women and children were subjected under the same conditions in Saint-Louis. It deals with the process of redemption from slavery through rachat (ransom), and highlights judicial cases and rulings which demonstrate how the process was abused. The chapter ends with the 1849 decree under which Governor Baudin created guardianship councils for boys and girls in Saint-Louis and Gorée simultaneously.

Having a satisfying romantic relationship and satisfying employment is important to most people but maintaining the balance between these two domains is not easy. Both roles require a significant investment of time, effort, and cognitive and emotional resources. There is an increased realization in academia that the separation between studying relationships and studying work is artificial and does not represent the many intersections of these roles. In this chapter, we discuss how work and romantic relationships can interact with each other and impact individuals’ outcomes. We first cover workplace romantic relationships, workplace sexual harassment, and organizations’ attempt to regulate romantic relationships at work. Then, we continue with reviewing the positive and negative associations of work and romantic relationship. Lastly, we introduce an economic perspective to examining romantic relationships and consider the workplace as a local marriage market.

One of LBJ’s signature civil rights achievements, the 1965 Hart–Celler Immigration Act still stands in providing the overarching structure for immigration regulation in the US today. Its enactment ended decades of overtly racist immigration laws, crowning the almost equally long campaigns by immigration reformers seeking a more egalitarian system. In securing passage of the legislation, LBJ provided essential leadership but accepted significant compromises to do so. The immigration overhaul succeeded in abolishing the most discriminatory aspects of the old system for immigration regulation, even as it has implemented new forms of inequalities that have criminalized migrations particularly from the US’s closest neighbors. This law has transformed the US through the most diverse immigration in national history, even as it has produced a large and persistent caste of second-class residents whose unauthorized immigration bars them from citizenship.

Chapter 6 analyzes firm-level patterns of collective action and finds that law-abiding firms are more likely to experience collective action for interest-based demands. Using the strike map dataset of the China Labour Bulletin, it shows that interest-based protests are less likely to invite state repression, in part because they do not target state authorities. Contrary to the assumption that those protest that ask more than the legal minimum might be more politically threatening than law-based protests, the findings in this chapter demonstrate that interest-based protests rarely breach the physical boundary of individual firms.

Chapter 7 argues that law-abiding firms’ concerns for reputation generate discursive resources, which contribute to workers’ expectations of success. Unlike collective action for legal rights, interest-based protests rarely use disruptive tactics that physically expand the scope of conflict. Instead, workers use publicity tactics to attract the attention of third-party allies who exercise direct influence over the target firm’s policies. The main channel examined in this chapter is media exposure. It shows that workers at law-abiding firms have more discursive resources due to their firms newsworthiness and thus are more prone to expect that their protests would succeed. This shows that even in the more favorable environment for atomized protests, not all workers have the resources to engage in collective action. By limiting social mobilization, the regime has been able to manage the frequency and nature of atomized protests. At the same time, workers with the resources to engage in atomized protests are much less likely to hold the central government responsible for the situation they are in.

The chapter introduces the central arguments and main findings of the book.

What has the Black feminine body meant to literary study? What might it mean in the twenty-first century? This essay argues that African diaspora feminist literary study has often been contained by national boundaries and prescribed readings of the feminine subject “stuck” in masculinist routes and plots. Instead, this chapter turns to the materiality of the body in the work of African feminist writers and artists such as Theresa Ikoko, T. J. Dema, and Wangechi Mutu. The chapter shows how their work moves the labor of constructing, perceiving, and living through feminine embodied experience to the center of theories of diaspora. Focusing on poetry, drama, and visual art, this chapter pushes against the novel’s centrality in formulating theories of the self, nation, and diaspora identity in the field. This body of new writing and expressive culture that centers on the material body offers new routes for feminist diaspora literature and its futures across continents, genres, and contexts.

This chapter follows microcosmic worlds figured in the skyscraper across three “Chicago Schools”: in architecture, in urban sociology, and in political economy. Three novels map three historical phases: Frank Norris’s The Pit (1902), the financialization of wheat in Chicago’s early skyscrapers; Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), the “color line” and the public sphere on Chicago’s South Side; and Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt (1984), the landscapes of oil and steel in Dubai. In each the skyscraper appears fleetingly on the horizon, glimpsed out of the corner of the eye as it shifts scales from stage to prop. The three corresponding “Chicago Schools” are: the architects of early skyscrapers assembled around the slogan “form follows function”; the group of urban sociologists that included St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, authors of Black Metropolis (1945); and the economists who supplied the neoliberal precepts by which oil wealth was converted into speculative real estate in Dubai and elsewhere. The article concludes with a coda that records, with reference to the work of urban sociologist Janet Abu-Lughod and the writer Deepak Unnikrishnan, the stark divisions of labor that haunt these three “Chicagos” and their skyscrapers, from Lake Michigan to the Persian Gulf.

This chapter considers how strategies for representing the skyscraper indexed competing understandings of the nature of organization, a term with multiple valences in the early twentieth century. Whether one judged skyscrapers to be hideous blights or rapturous delights, few in the period failed to marvel at the powerful technic of organization marshaled by and for its mass. But to whom should its beholders credit that technic proved a harder matter to resolve. Descriptions of skyscraper construction by builder William Starrett and writers John Dos Passos and Willa Cather mark an oscillation between viewing this structure’s organization as an art, showcasing not just the skill but also the beauty of capital’s captivating choreography of bodies and materials used to materialize these structures, and organization as a politics, the active mobilization of laborers to resist modes of capitalistic organization by revealing the invisible and unaesthetic exploitation disguised by capitalism’s breathtaking arrangements.

Southern modernism, including later incarnations precipitously labeled postmodern, has been broadly characterized by two often contradictory streams: the pastoral, beginning with the plantation fiction of Joel Chandler Harris and Thomas Nelson Page, and the racial surreal, beginning with Charles Chesnutt’s sly ripostes in his conjure tales. Both respond to the region’s long history of racialized labor exploitation, running from the plantation through Walmart and FedEx, from Parchman through the nation’s current carceral system. As labor sociologists, the new historians of capitalism, and literary scholars such as Michael North have shown, these literary traditions and the history to which they respond do not constitute some quaint exception within ongoing American modernism and modernity but remain central to it, from the plantation house to the Westin Bonaventure and from Pound, Eliot, Faulkner, Du Bois, Hurston, and Welty to William Styron, Toni Morrison, Jesmyn Ward, Natasha Trethewey, and Jericho Brown.

A growing number of researchers have focused on Africa’s capabilities in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Some scholars have analyzed the impacts of mobile internet and broadband on the continent, while others have researched initiatives such as smart cities and the implications of the 4IR on development and manufacturing. Others have touched on the opportunities present in African development and the types of innovation that are already present or can take place. After reviewing the literature, the chapter dives into five critical domains on which the 4IR will change African states, industries, and society. These five domains are economic growth and structural transformation; labor, skills, production; poverty and inequality; power and governance; and peace and security. The chapter concludes with the five key domain summaries and strategies that can be employed in Africa.

Chapter 3 presents the Corporations and Human Rights Database by exploring patterns and trends with descriptive data to illustrate the variation in access to remedy. The CHRD includes over 1,300 allegations of corporate human rights abuse between 2000 and 2014. Chapter 3 explains how my students and I created the CHRD, which is the first systematic database on corporate human rights abuses and access to remedy. This chapter discusses the data collection process and includes descriptive statistics on the type of claim, corporate responses, and associated judicial and non-judicial remedy efforts included in the database. This chapter familiarizes the reader with the data, discusses verification processes, and provides a basic landscape of how the CHRD informs business and human rights in Latin America.