Abstract
Encoding Race, Encoding Class is a brilliant ethnography of Indian IT workers in Germany. Based on extended fieldwork conducted between 2002 and 2004 with software engineers on the German ‘green card’ scheme, and on the author’s doctoral dissertation, the book unravels the intersecting threads of race, class, precarity, mobility and subjectivity in the information economy. With the sharp demand for temporary IT labour in the OECD countries since the 1990s, and the consequent mobilisation of technical workers from Asian countries such as China and India, culture and cultural difference (in her analysis, race) have become central to the workings of the global economy. Delving deeply into the lives, experiences and narratives of Indian ‘coders’ in Berlin, Amrute presents a sensitive and lucid account of how they negotiate their unstable work and lifeworlds.
Although the engaging ethnography alone is reason enough to read this book, perhaps Amrute’s most important contribution is her extension of the work of the Italian Autonomist Marxists, weaving the workings of race and class into their analysis of neoliberal capitalism and cognitive labour. Amrute also brings questions of embodiment and materiality into the understanding of digital labour, showing how ‘race and class are integral both to producing differently valued bodies at work and to producing the communicative content of so-called material goods’ (p. 18). While one might debate Amrute’s choice of race as the appropriate category through which to make sense of the discourses and management practices that surround Indian IT workers (which are also permeated by the idea of cultural difference), she makes a strong argument—one that is particularly apt in the context of Germany with its distinctive history of racial thought and politics. She argues convincingly that racialisation ‘opens up a variety of ways of imaging the relationship of work and worker subjectivity’ (p. 15). She also points out that a ‘postgenomic understanding of race’—in which race is no longer a fixed attribute but malleable—‘is used to comment on and understand flexible economies and flexible workers’ (p. 15).
The experiences and positionality of Indian IT workers in Berlin are also shaped by Germany’s 19th century Orientalist romance with India and the tense political debates around migration in the context of the controversial green card programme for temporary high-skilled workers. Although Indian coders are, not surprisingly, stereotyped through racialised notions of exotic-yet-backward India and presumptions about their particular capacity for intellectual (but ‘uncreative’) labour, they navigate through the thickets of rigid representations and immigration regimes that frame their employment options in Germany, formulating creative strategies for building their careers and lives in the context of constant uncertainty. Grappling with the insecurities of IT work by charting variable paths of migration and relationships that encompass other sites in Europe, North America or a return to India, their desires and orientations also draw on a very different history and cultural identity—that of the Indian middle class. As racialised subjects outside India and (middle) classed subjects within India who are enmeshed in a labour regime that seeks to colonise the ‘souls’ as well as the time of workers, Amrute shows how Indian coders draw on these encompassing discourses to forge spaces of autonomy and strategies for self-fulfilment beyond hegemonic corporate or middle class models.
After the introductory chapter, the book is divided into two main sections—‘Encoding Race’ and ‘Encoding Class’. The first chapter explores the politics of race and immigration in contemporary Germany and maps the production of cultural representations through a close reading of circulating images and cartoons about Indian IT workers. Chapter 2 analyses the politics of the ‘post-racial’ workplace and the role of ‘cultural difference’, read as a subtle form of racialisation, in maintaining a hierarchised division of labour. Chapter 3 examines in detail the labour of coding and the tactics used by Indian programmers to assert a modicum of ownership over their work product, even though it is a very small piece of a much larger system not designed or controlled by them.
The second section shifts focus to the lives of coders outside work, showing how their desires and strategies are linked to their embedding in Indian middle class notions of propriety and progress. Chapter 4 traces the formation of a ‘technoscientific middle class’ in postcolonial India and the later rise of the software outsourcing industry as embodiment of nationalist entrepreneurship. In Chapter 5, Amrute documents the quest of her Berlin coders for pleasure and self-improvement through leisure activities, and their bracketing out of work through the cultivation of sociality in the intimate spaces of their temporary homes. She adopts Bifo Berardi’s concept of Eros to rethink the dialectics of ‘work’ and ‘leisure’ in this context. In Chapter 6, Amrute focuses on a practice common among mobile Indians and the diaspora—that of carrying or sending small gifts home to a range of relatives. Through the story of a modest diaper bag moving from Germany across three continents and through multiple hands until it reaches its intended recipient in Bangalore, she shows how the circulation of gifts through complex chains of kinship and friendship create networks of social support, mutual obligation and care, which in turn provide a ‘hedge against the risks inherent in short-term programming’ (p. 169). Shadowing her informants as they shop for gifts, she notes that what counts as ‘nurturing objects will depend on the care with which gifts are chosen and the work it takes to send them’ (p. 171).
In the concluding chapter, Amrute suggests that her account of temporary IT workers in Europe points not simply to the precarity of global software work, the colonisation of life by work or the encompassment of working subjects by the overpowering forces of capital or nationalist politics. Instead, by framing race and class as ‘encoded’ in the bodies and subjectivities of Indian software workers, she is able to extend the metaphor of code understood not as a rigid template or ideological frame but as a source of other potentialities and possibilities of life and freedom within cognitive capitalism: the ‘encoding of class and race forges life as a project to be worked on, and unworked, in multiple ways’ (p. 202).
While it is impossible to do justice to the subtleties of Amrute’s arguments here, I highly recommend Encoding Race, Encoding Class to anyone interested in neoliberal capitalism, cognitive labour, regimes of mobility, diaspora and transnational studies or the IT industry. Individual chapters could be productively used in courses on globalisation, contemporary South Asia, race or labour.