Everyday Life of Ready-made Garment Kormi in Bangladesh

This book portrays the scene where corporate international trade agreements, a new neoliberal state regime, and a growing textile market have contributed to the becoming of a new class of Muslim female workerswho labor in Bangladesh's apparel export factories under conditions of neoliberal capitalism. The garment kormioften abstracted by the homogenizing category of the garment workerremain lost in the statistics of development and empowerment or contrarily exploitation. Thereby, focusing on the everyday lives of garment kormi, i.e., workers' stories than on the collective of garment workers as a category, this book at one front highlights the neoliberal structures of difference and inequality, and on the other reflects on the potential of egalitarianism and change in terms of novel ways of comprising and expressing life-worlds. It shows that the values in life and the structures that govern life, such as contemporary Bangladesh's neoliberal order, kinship relationality, and religiosity, are co-constitutive, multi-layered, and always on the move, never fixed.

Complicates the homogenizing category of 'the garment worker' of conventional scholarship on the subject Grounds the analysis of garment workers' everyday lives in emergent neoliberal structures of difference and inequality Tells a story of gender and capitalism that is attentive to the often contradictory worlds of garment workers

Autorentext

Mohammad Tareq Hasan is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. He holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Bergen, Norway. His research interests include minority and ethnic groups, gender relations, collective action, anthropology of work, state formation, political economy, and egalitarianism.

Inhalt
Part I.- 1. Contextualizing Ready-Made Garment Work in Bangladesh.- Part II.- 2. The Roots of Local Capitalism: Outlining and Understanding Global Connections.- 3. Tensions and Negotiations in Neoliberalism: Emergence of Garment Kormi as the Model Citizens.- Part III.- 4. Becoming Garment Kormi: Life in the Garment Factory.- 5. Kinship in the Factory: Garment Kormi Living a Life Away from Home.- 6. Negotiating the Public and the Private: Garment Kormi Becoming Joggo.- 7. Dare to Dream: Remaking Everyday Realities.- Part IV.- 8. Paradoxes of Factory Compliance: Auditing, CSR, and 'New' Dispossession.- Part V.- 9. The Multiple Realities of Neoliberalism and Garment Kormi.- 10. Epilogue: During the Pandemic.- Index.