Description
Book SynopsisIn
Encoding Race, Encoding Class Sareeta Amrute explores the lives of Indian IT coders temporarily working in Berlin, showing how their cognitive labor reimagines race and class and how their acceptance and resistance to their work offers new potentials for alternative visions of living and working in neoliberal economies.
Trade Review“What stands out in her well-crafted and thoroughly researched ethnography is how various notions of Indianness ... permeate the transnational/Germany workplace and how it is interpreted, negotiated, and occasionally also appropriated. Drawing on a vast array of representations of Indian IT professionals in German media and elsewhere, Amrute’s analysis ... provides insight on a changing world.” -- Michiel Baas * Economic and Political Weekly *
"A riveting ethnography of the personal and professional lives of short-term Indian IT workers in Berlin, Germany. . . . This book has a wide potential audience, and is essential reading for scholars interested in transnational migration and labour, neoliberal knowledge economies, as well as contemporary South Asia and its diasporas." -- Anar Parikh * Social Anthropology *
"The expressiveness of Amrute’s prose allows what are admittedly complex ideas to become engaging and accessible. This, combined with the strength of her description and the evident timeliness of her subject matter, make
Encoding Race, Encoding Class a remarkably flexible text for teaching. It is an ethnography that will work as well in an undergraduate class as a graduate seminar, since it has the clarity and rigor for both." -- Alisha Wilkinson & Meg Stalcup * Savage Minds *
"A fascinating study that is both informative and narratively compelling. Situated in the era of digital globalization, this complex ethnographic project makes a major contribution to European anthropology and pushes forward the insights of critical race theory, international migration studies, and the sociocultural dimensions of science and technology." -- Uli Linke * Anthropos *
"Extremely timely. . . . The book’s theoretical grounding is convincing and compels the reader to grapple with the contradictions in the Indian IT worker’s world. . . . Amrute expertly weaves race into her analyses." -- Chitra Akkoor * Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Introduction: Cognitive Work, Cognitive Bodies 1
Part I. Encoding Race
1. Imagining the Indian IT Body 29
2. The Postracial Office 54
3. Proprietary Freedoms in an IT Office 86
Part II. Encoding Class
4. The Stroke of Midnight and the Spirit of Entrepreneurship: A History of the Computer in India 111
5. Computers Are Very Stupid Cooks: Reinventing Leisure as a Politics of Pleasure 137
6. The Traveling Diaper Bag: Gifts and Jokes as Materializing Immaterial Labor 164
A Speculative Conclusion: Secrets and Lives 185
Notes 203
Bibliography 231
Index 253
