Existentially Essential: In/Visibility under Racial Capitalism

This article reflects on the forms of visibility COVID-19 has enabled to reveal how working-class South Asians navigate the stark realities of living and dying under racial capitalism. Focusing on one worker's lived experience during the pandemic, this article highlights the heterogeneity of class experiences among South Asian Americans and explores the ways workers on the factory floor are inducted as existentially essential by the state in an effort to justify their disposability by the market. By subverting this contradictory rhetoric of essentiality, this paper considers the possibility of radical futures that dismantle and transcend these systems of oppression.