Precarity/Coloniality

Abstract:This paper explores the intricate relationship between precarity and coloniality. It argues that discussions and experiences of precarity—defined as the increased vulnerability to exploitative working and living conditions—are historically steeped in colonial and racial violence. It stages a critique of the recently-emerged scholarship on the future of work that tends to both trivialize the experience of precarity as the deprivation of futurity, and ignore the racialized dynamics through which these experiences are distributed. Through a meditation on the anti-work politics of Autonomia and the armed struggles of the Zapatistas, the argument concludes that it is only by reconnecting the resistances to precarity to the project of decolonization as one against dehumanization that discussions of precarity will find their resonance, strength, and efficacy.