In this Book
- Global Heartland: Displaced Labor, Transnational Lives, and Local Placemaking
- Book
- 2016
- Published by: Indiana University Press
- Series: Framing the Global
Global Heartland is the account of diverse, dispossessed, and displaced people brought together in a former sundown town in Illinois. Recruited to work in the local meat-processing plant, African Americans, Mexicans, and West Africans re-create the town in unexpected ways. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in the US, Mexico, and Togo, Faranak Miraftab shows how this workforce is produced for the global labor market; how the displaced workers' transnational lives help them stay in these jobs; and how they negotiate their relationships with each other across the lines of ethnicity, race, language, and nationality as they make a new home. Beardstown is not an exception but an example of local-global connections that make for local development. Focusing on a locality in a non-metropolitan region, this work contributes to urban scholarship on globalization by offering a fresh perspective on politics and materialities of placemaking.
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- pp. xi-1
- Part I. Beardstown: A Place in the World
- 1. Welcome to Porkopolis
- pp. 26-53
- 2. It All Changed Overnight
- pp. 54-76
- Part II. Displaced Labor
- 4. Winning the Lottery in Togo
- pp. 94-112
- Part III. Outsourced Lives
- Part IV. We Wanted Workers, We Got People
- 7. We Wanted Workers
- pp. 160-185
- 8. We Got People
- pp. 186-208
- Conclusion: The Global in My Backyard
- pp. 209-224
- References
- pp. 263-284