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Research ArticleArticle

Migration and Forced Labor in the Social Imaginary of Southern Mozambique, 1920–1964

HÉCTOR GUERRA HERNANDEZ
African Economic History, January 2016, 44 (1) 130-151; DOI: https://doi.org/10.3368/aeh.44.1.130
HÉCTOR GUERRA HERNANDEZ
Hector Guerra Hernandez () has been a Professor of African History at the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR) since August 2012. He earned his PhD in Social Anthropology in 2011 from the State University of Campinas (Unicamp), after earning a Master’s degree in Cultural Anthropology, Contemporary History and Sociology at the Latin American Institute of the Free University of Berlin in Germany in 2005. He has experience in the fields of Anthropology, Sociology and History, and conducts research into postcolonialism, postsocialism, ideology and culture, international migration and social conflicts. He spent many years conducting research into Latin American migration and social conflict in European contexts, before taking up his current research projects into the history and politics of southern Africa, with a particular focus on Mozambique.
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Abstract

This paper revisits the historiography of forced labor and mobility in southern Mozambique during the Portuguese colonial era by reexamining several key works in the field. It seeks to understand how the population of southern Mozambique constructed a social imaginary on the margins of the civilizational fiction designed by colonial rule. Avoiding a state-centered or legalistic reading of this history, the article stresses the fragility of the colonial/modern design and the fundamentally compulsory character of colonial labor, and contrasts these against the diverse responses developed by colonial subjects. In particular, the article seeks to understand how the “repertoires of power” that colonial rulers used to consolidate their power reframed the processes of migration and social mobility. Colonial rule altered preexisting practices and conceptions of mobility within southern Mozambique, transforming them into exercises more analogous to domestic forms of resistance. As the dynamics of social mobility preceded the formation of the modern/colonial state, they can be reconstituted as a parallel logic and rationality, which existed alongside the constructions of the colonial enterprise; as a result, many of the policies undertaken by the colonial state were primarily geared toward ending this relative autonomy and controlling the movement of the colonized population.

  • © 2016 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
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African Economic History: 44 (1)
African Economic History
Vol. 44, Issue 1
1 Jan 2016
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Migration and Forced Labor in the Social Imaginary of Southern Mozambique, 1920–1964
HÉCTOR GUERRA HERNANDEZ
African Economic History Jan 2016, 44 (1) 130-151; DOI: 10.3368/aeh.44.1.130

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Migration and Forced Labor in the Social Imaginary of Southern Mozambique, 1920–1964
HÉCTOR GUERRA HERNANDEZ
African Economic History Jan 2016, 44 (1) 130-151; DOI: 10.3368/aeh.44.1.130
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  • Article
    • Abstract
    • Introduction
    • The Function of Work to the Colonizer: Civilizing with the Law of the Whip
    • The Function of Work to the Colonized: Economic Dynamics of Domestic “Resistance”
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  • Women’s Labor Relations in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Global South Compared, 1800–2000
  • The “Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations”: Putting Women’s Labor and Labor Relations in Sub-Saharan Africa in a Global Context
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