All Work Is Cultural Work: Diasporic Haitian Women, Paid Labor, and Cultural Citizenship

What does it mean to belong in a nation? All Work Is Cultural Work examines how Haitian women living in diaspora find and create status through their work outside the home. Nikita Carney draws on ethnographic data gathered over several years in Boston, Montreal, and Paris with women who left Haiti in search of other things: safety, financial security, and opportunity. Ranging from administrative assistants to dancers to preschool teachers, the women in this study share their rich experiences, teaching us how they found a place in their new host nations through paid labor. Focusing on small, daily interactions in the workplace, these women’s narratives highlight the ways in which often invisible daily cultural practices build and re-build both the nation and the home. Taking into account the overlapping and interlocking systems of oppression her participants face both nationally and globally, Carney uses an intersectional analysis to illuminate how the workplace serves as a central site in which Haitian women become raced, gendered, and classed within the nation. Ultimately, the lives and experiences of these women point to one conclusion: culture is indivisible from labor and labor from culture, with paid labor providing a vital method for national culture to be created and recreated each and every day.

Nikita Carney is an assistant professor of sociology at Bentley University in Waltham, MA.