Infrastructures of Overlordship

Law, Labor Camps, and the Material Geographies of Servitude

Bibliographic Data

ID3775908
AuthorsD Asher Ghertner (0000-0003-4871-2456, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume113
Issue6
Pages1483-1500
Publication date2023-07-03
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAnnals of the American Association of Geographers (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2469-4452 • E-ISSN: 2469-4460
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/24694452.2023.2187340
OpenAlexW4366816381
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited38

This article examines how the law codifies infrastructural risks into the farm–labor relation, subjecting farmworkers living in U.S. migrant labor camps to conditions considered illegal in otherwise similar residential geographies. To do so, it explores how the labor camp operates as an infrastructure to maximize harvest, arrange labor availability, and embed overlordship—the power to direct other human potentialities through control of their total environment—in a contained geography wherein access to water, shelter, and bodily security is conditional on the employment relation. Using case law pertaining to labor camps in New York, it analyzes the racializing effects of mundane technicalities such as how heating and water systems are inspected, sanitary code is enforced, and housing is classified. Building on insights on infrastructural forms of racial power, it shows how housing and utility systems cement overlordship into the operational landscape of U.S. agriculture and food systems via both the broader immigrant surveillance apparatus and farmworkers’ exclusion from the common-law protections “ordinary” tenants enjoy, such as locally enforced building codes and safety standards. It finds that geographic isolation, infrastructural disconnection, and uneven code enforcement materialize “a pattern of physical restraint” and “real or threatened harm,” components of the legal definition of involuntary servitude. In doing so, it (1) advances a theory of racial overlordship as an infrastructural relation maintained via uneven standards of human treatment, (2) traces the material durability of postemancipation racial overlordship into the present, and (3) demonstrates the powers of camps to variably confine and banish disposable workers

Business · Enforcement · Harm · Law enforcement · Political science · Sociology · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Homelessness and Social Issues · Law · Water Governance and Infrastructure