(Global) Capitalism and Immigrant Workers in Gary Paulsen's Lawn Boy: Naturalization of Exploitation

Under the current conditions of global capitalism, with the ongoing systemic exploitation and racially motivated persecution of immigrant workers that characterizes this system, it is important to investigate the kind of work literature performs as a social imaginary and, by extension, a tool of acculturation in Western societies. Because works of fiction arise from specific historical contexts, it is impossible for them to build their literary worlds and subject positions without also invoking, implicitly or explicitly, the socio-political setting in which they are embedded. As a form of social practice, works of fiction thus directly partake in the co-construction or the critical examination of social reality and, consequently, in the tacit validation or transformative redefinition of socio-economic systems and symbolic orders (Eagleton; McLaren; Wilkie-Stibbs). Like other discursive practices, then, literary texts can be understood as "compellingly metonymic" of their "contemporary political climate," where the socio-political context assumes the function of an umbilical cord between "narratives of fiction and narratives of the material world" (Wilkie-Stibbs 9). Given the current practices of exploitation targeted at immigrant workers and coupled with racially motivated stigmatization, it is of crucial importance to ask how children's literature raises and addresses such issues. After all, the practices of children's literature can result either in the implantation and further consolidation of racialized attitudes toward migrant workers and the concomitant justification of their economic exploitation, or in the evocation of the need for social justice and hence in the fostering of critical consciousness on the part of young readers.

My aim here is not to investigate the alternative literature for young readers, which is characterized by the way it challenges hegemonic power structures of neo-imperial Western states. This kind of literature engages in teasing apart the ideology and mechanisms through which narrowly defined subjectivities are constructed, polarized, controlled, and managed within contemporary Western regimes of truth, which are linked to the maintenance of socio-economic relations of subjugation and inequity. Radical children's literature makes use of this kind of interrogation to offer a new vision of common reality and a means of self-actualization by recomposing and repositioning subjectivities that fit socially transformative and liberating alternative modes of being-in-the-world. This line of critical literary investigation has been covered by, among others, Kimberley Reynolds in Radical Children's Literature: Future Visions and Aesthetic Transformations in Juvenile Fiction and Christine Wilkie-Stibbs in The Outside Child In and Out of the Book.

My line of inquiry instead concerns those modes of literary production for young readers that, in the current context of the global restructuration of processes of capital accumulation, "reproduce normative position[s]" (Wilkie-Stibbs 140). Specifically, this article addresses the ways that such mainstream literature for young people uses mechanisms of representation to conceal and mystify exploitative socio-economic relations, leading to the naturalization of structural inequalities and hierarchically organized constructs of identity, which in turn makes this kind of literature complicit with Western hegemonic discourses of power and domination. Within this literary framework, as I demonstrate, the reinscription of inequitable social relations as a form of unproblematic status quo clearly rests upon the recoding and reproduction of Western relationships of difference and otherness. An "[immigrant] Other" whose presence in official discourses is reduced to, and acknowledged only in terms of, a mere economic asset is left again, in Homi Bhabha's words, without "its power to [speak] . . . , to initiate its 'desire,' to split its 'sign' of identity, [and] to establish its own institutional and oppositional discourse" (31). The newly reconstituted Other—a term that in the restructured global world order in fact once again references "socially and economically disinherited underclasses" (Wilkie-Stibbs x)—is allowed to signify only as "the docile [working] body of [inscribed] difference" whose assigned but invisibilized task is to confirm, reflect, and "reproduce[] a relation of domination" (Bhabha 31).

Global capitalism has deepened and exacerbated structural inequalities, which can be witnessed in the increasing income disparities between the ever more differentially segmented workforce on local and global levels, and in the...