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Southeast Asia
Organized Panel Session
This paper theorizes Hawaii as a space of both Asian mobility and disability. Bodies from China, Japan, and the Philippines labored in order to produce capital, yet these bodies were subjected to workplace injuries and were beneficiaries of a flawed healthcare system. Through legal and institutional documents, this essay examines three interwoven case studies. First, the Hawaii Sugar Plantation System’s practice of distributing artificial eyes to laborers who lost their sight, creating a false equivalence between aesthetics and rehabilitation. Second, the work of NGOs in Hawaii to train laborers with eye injuries in new trades. Third, the practice of sending Filipino laborers back to their home country once health conditions sustained from the plantations prevented them from resuming work in the fields. This paper analyzes how Asian migrants who acquired bodily injuries navigated non-state health infrastructures and offers a new lens in which to examine racial capital, in order to explore the question, “What happens to a laboring body when it can no longer labor?”
Christine Peralta
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign