Gandhi... valores para una propuesta de futuro

21 pontificia universidad católica de puerto rico The ship also fosters a new kind of being, a modern. It is in the ship that the diasporic/displaced/transplanted person enters the space of historical modernity. This modernity is created with technology and capital and it depends on deracinated, detribalized people isolated from their kin and culture. The only identity for these people is wage labour. The sea faring experience links Gandhi with indentured and enslaved people. Ships become his second home as he goes back and forth. Gandhi wrote Hind Swaraj on a ship in a flurry of feverish writing, switching to the left hand when his right got tired. It can be considered a diasporic manifesto, a remarkable example of exilic print. He sees his affinity with peoples of different non-European races who were similarly displaced, unlike him, forcibly. Gandhi realizes that people are made laborers just because of their race or skin color. ie. racialization of labor. In India, people of all colors occupied all classes and castes. Their differences in appearance were only because of climate or region. But here your race marked you as a laborer. Welcome to the circumAtlantic world, where exploitation begins with race. His writings on Zulus show his grasp of the economic dimensions of racism. On the Zulus he says: …worst of all, ensuring the African’s complete subjection is taxation: In order to increase [his] wants or to teach him the value of labor a poll tax and a hut tax have been imposed on him. If these imposts were not levied, this race of agriculturalists living on their farms would not enter mines hundreds of feet deep to extract gold or diamonds, and if their labor were not available for the mines, gold as well as diamonds would remain in the bowels of the earth (Gandhi, Satyagraha in South Africa 1928: 25). The coolie in particular occupies a specific position between black and white. Here Gandhi enters into North American debates on color, bringing the coolie into the paradigm: The emancipation of man is the emancipation of labor and the emancipation of labor is the freeing of that basic majority of workers who are yellow, brown and black. (Du Bois 1992: 221)13

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