Publication Date
3-31-2025
Document Type
Article
English Abstract
Workers from the Global South with temporary immigration status provide a transitory, cheap, exploitable workforce that is responsive to economic vicissitudes and supremacist anti-migration discourse. They are created as an exceptional category of persons “essential” for their work but with no right to remain and claim citizenship-type entitlement to the Global North. The programs in agriculture are rooted in the legacies of indentureship, plantation, and other forms of racialized coerced labour. These programs continue to entrench a neocolonial racial capitalist global order where “unfree labour” is sanctified by contemporary liberal laws. Caught in the vice of a hegemonic, racial, state-governed project, migrant farmworkers are caught in what Best and Hartman call a “negative relation to law”—marked by “the necessity of legal remedy” but “the impossibility of redress.” Scholars within the Black radical tradition have configured fugitivity, or the practice of refusal, as a form of liberatory resistance that subverts the politics of recognition. The concept of fugitivity has been used in recent scholarship on illegalized crossings of securitized borders; but fugitive resistance is not meant to be seen in the registers of the established scripts of liberal resistance, such as legal claims. Using empirical evidence from migrant worker organizing in Canada, this paper suggests the possibility of radical legal mobilization that centres a praxis of refusal. This approach uses the law not for statist benevolence but as a counter-pedagogy for challenging neocolonial, racial capitalist sites and reframing the movement of marginalized, racialized persons. Such a legal mobilization enables and supports ‘fugitive’ actions of migrant workers––agentic choices by workers that reject, refuse, and escape the system that creates racialized unfreedoms. I show that radical legal mobilization can be conceptualized to involve three modalities of praxis (subversive legality, relationship-building, and radical knowledge production) that map to the three themes of performance, sociality, and futurity/imagination found in Fred Moten’s work.
Citation Information
Venkatesh, Vasanthi.
"Radical Resistance in the Penumbra of the Law: Legal Mobilization for Migrant Farmworkers under Neo-colonial Racial Capitalism."
Journal of Law and Social Policy
37.
(2025): 22-48.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.60082/0829-3929.1489
https://digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/jlsp/vol37/iss1/3
