Research conducted in this track addresses how labour – field and domestic – is created and mediated within the confines of gender, race, racialisation, ethnicity and class formation in Mauritius.
Researchers
Le Petitcorps’ research addresses new forms of exploitation and social tensions in domestic-service relationships in contemporary Mauritius. By exploring subjectivities at work in domestic service, she examines the current memories of plantation life, social order and social conflict, as well as the racialised social hierarchies permanently performed and reshaped in the intimate sphere. Her investigation also highlights how the domestic-service industry emerges alongside with the tourist industry and luxury-residence development plans within the restructuring of the plantation economy. In the context of domestic workers’ commodification for foreign consumption, she also questions women’s subversive relations to domestic wage labour in relation to the ways they organise social reproduction in their own household.
Kantu’s dissertation project is titled Labour and/as Leisure: The Spectacle of Sweet Darjeeling. Labour and/as leisure are modes of labour that exist and reproduce modes of leisure (on plantation estates, creating plantation tourism). This includes the construction of smart cities and integrated resort schemes (IRS). If the colonial plantation system exists outside of agricultural production and into the realm of tourism development, Kantu argues that plantation tourism depends on and reproduces the same practises and representations of racism, racialisation, class, gender and ethnicity as the system upon which it was founded. Thus, the political economy of plantation tourism transforms everyday subjectivities into spectacles of leisure.
Associate Researchers
Publications
Le Petitcorps, Colette. 2021. “Un enjeu de reproduction sociale. Le service domestique du point de vue d’employées de la côte Sud-Ouest de l’Ile Maurice.” Anthropologie et sociétés.
Le Petitcorps, Colette and Amandine Desille. 2020. “Special issue: La colonialité du pouvoir en migration(s).” Migrations Société 182(4)
Le Petitcorps, Colette and Amandine Desille. 2020. “La colonialité du pouvoir aujourd’hui: approches par l’étude des migrations.” Migrations Société 182(4): 17-28
Le Petitcorps, Colette. 2020. “La domestication des femmes pauvres. Histoire et échec d’une entreprise colonialiste ressassée à l’Ile Maurice.” Migrations Société 182(4): 97-112
Le Petitcorps, Colette and Amandine Desille. 2020. “‘La couleur du travail’ : une anthropologie historique de la fabrique de la race dans la plantation. Entretien avec Cristiana Bastos.” Migrations Société 182(4): 113-126
Le Petitcorps, Colette. 2020. “Les sociétés de plantation dans l’économie globale des services domestiques. Le cas de l’île Maurice.” CIDADES, Comunidades e Territórios 40: 1-15
Le Petitcorps, Colette. 2019. “Dissidence dans le service domestique. L’économie morale de femmes, bonnes à l’île Maurice.” Politique africaine 154(2): 29-48
Le Petitcorps, Colette. 2018. “Migrant Women in Trade Unions. Domestic Service Activism in France.” Pp.83-98 in Gender, Work and Migration. Agency in Gendered Labour Settings, ed. Megha Amrith and Nina Sahraoui. London: Routledge
Le Petitcorps, Colette. 2018.“Le service domestique comme rapport social. Subjectivités au travail, service à domicile et migrations féminines en France.” Recherches Féministes 31(2):197-214
Le Petitcorps, Colette. 2018. “Service domestique, sexualité, race et héritages coloniaux à l’Île Maurice.” GLAD !, n°5.
Conferences and seminars
Le Petitcorps, Colette, “Creole class reconstitution: domestic workers’ dissidence and shifting racial categories in post-plantation Mauritius.” paper presentation, Panel P033 “Bringing race-making and class struggles in plantations and export industries back to the research agenda”, 16th EASA Biennial Conference, Lisbon, 22 July 2020
Colette Le Petiticorps. “O espectro da plantação e a atualidade da racialização na exploração e com a resistência de mulheres nas Maurícias.” paper presentation, MR004 “A persistência da plantação: revisitando a racialização do trabalho e o saber insubmisso da antropologia”, 32ª RBA – Reunião Brasileira de Antropologia, 30 Outubro-6 Novembro 2020
International Symposium “Plantations and their afterlives: materialities, durabilities and struggles”, convenors: Marta Macedo, Irene Peano, Colette Le Petitcorps, ICS-ULisboa, 16-18 & 24-25 September 2020
Peerthum, Satyendra. “Commemorating of the ‘Making of our Indentured Labour Heritage’: A Pictorial Presentation of the Historic and Heritage Value of the Unique Indentured Immigration Archives of the Republic of Mauritius, 1826-1950“, paper presentation, panel “Photography and Indentured Labour Session” sponsored by COLOUR, International Workshop “Imagined Pasts: colonialism, photography and archives”, ICS-ULisboa, 5 November 2019
Peerthum, Satyendra. “Indentured Labour Routes Project
They Came to Mauritian Shores’: A Social History of the Indentured Workers in Mauritius & the Aapravasi Ghat World Heritage Site, 1826-2019″, paper presentation, International Conference Landscapes of Indenture: Indian Ocean Routes and Beyond, organized by COLOUR, ICS-ULisboa, 6 November 2019.
Le Petitcorps, Colette. “Lazy Creole Women”. Back to the hidden story of sexual, racial, ethnic category within domestic service relations in Mauritius“, paper presentation, International Conference Landscapes of Indenture: Indian Ocean Routes and Beyond, organized by COLOUR, ICS-ULisboa, 6 November 2019.
Kantu, Rita. “Life after the plantation: heritage tourism and the colonial imaginary in Mauritius“, paper presentation, International Conference Landscapes of Indenture: Indian Ocean Routes and Beyond, organized by COLOUR, ICS-ULisboa, 6 November 2019.
Le Petitcorps, Colette. “Trabalhadoras domésticas, plantação e mercado global“, invited lecture, Sociedade Portuguesa de Antropologia e Etnologia (SPAE) Museu Nacional de Soares dos Reis, Porto, 6 June 2019
Le Petitcorps, Colette. “Les services domestiques à l’Ile Maurice“, paper presentation, Colloque “Domestiques et domesticités dans les pays de langues romanes hier et aujourd’hui”, Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian – Délégation en France, 23 May 2019
Le Petitcorps, Colette. “Conditions de travail, droit, statut juridique“, chair, Colloque “Domestiques et domesticités dans les pays de langues romanes hier et aujourd’hui”, Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian – Délégation en France, 24 May 2019
Le Petitcorps, Colette. “Domestic service and ethnicisation at the age of property development on sugar fields in Mauritius“, paper presentation. Two-day International Workshop “Towards establishing a comparative framework for the study of indentures labour”, The Centre for Research on Slavery and Indenture, University of Mauritius in collaboration with Aapravasi Ghat Trust Fund / Secretariat, Indentured Labour Route Project, COLOUR project and ICS-ULisboa, 5-6 March 2019
Kantu, Rita. “Sweet Darjeeling: land, labour and racialisation in Bois Cheri tea estate, Mauritius“, paper presentation. Two-day International Workshop “Towards establishing a comparative framework for the study of indentures labour”, The Centre for Research on Slavery and Indenture, University of Mauritius in collaboration with Aapravasi Ghat Trust Fund / Secretariat, Indentured Labour Route Project, COLOUR project and ICS-ULisboa, 5-6 March 2019
Le Petitcorps, Colette. “Raça, heranças coloniais e subjectividades ao trabalho no caso das Maurícias”, invited lecture, Faculdade de Economia da Universidade de Coimbra, 2 November 2018