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Transnational capital needs a global work force to perform immaterial (service) labor, like care-giving and call centers. At the same time corporations must mute the attendant difference of location and culture to deliver the consumer service. These global sensations are often staffed by and are dependent on unseen labor from and in the global south: Filipinos as caregiver, Afro-Caribbeans as nurses, Indians as call center agents. The book project examines the production of racial difference in literary texts and social phenomena outside of race as a visual economy, looking at ways difference through other senses—aural, taste, smell, touch, emotions--are deployed in late capitalism. The postmodern condition (Jean-Francois Lyotard) might perhaps be understood as the assemblage of differences and its management that becomes, not the face, but the /senses/ of globalization. The project makes three interventions in American Studies and Asian American and Critical Race Studies. First, the project focuses on a variety of immaterial (or non-manual) labor performed by Asian diasporics that requires different bodily and affective disciplines. Second, in thinking critically about the transnational markings of this labor the project challenges the binary construction and centrality of the concepts of home and host country. In fact, the assimilation of differences no longer requires physical movement, but rather is achieved through speech and other behavior modification. Third, the project examines minor-minor or global south connections that Francoise Lionnet and Shuh-mei Shih have termed minor transnationalism.
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