Colonialism Reiterated: The Racialised Division of Labour in Higher Education and Beyond

Faisal Hamadah and Ella Parry-Davies

This article takes up the invitation to imagine a decolonised performance studies by turning its attention to the legal-material conditions, institutions and practices on which study itself rests. Aligned with thinkers who emphasise the matter of decolonisation—for example through the repatriation of Indigenous land (Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang), or the racialised and gendered division of labour (Françoise Vergès)—we argue that any move to “decolonise” the methodologies or epistemologies of the discipline must first confront the reiterations of colonialism that undergird academic labour. Specifically, we turn to the racialised division of labour—undergirded by migration law and border control—as a key site on which colonial histories shape scholarly practice today.

As scholars such as Nadine El-Enany have shown, the contemporary regulation of transnational migration must be seen as continuous with historical colonial practices; indeed, this regulation is one of the forms that colonialism currently takes. Such continuity indicates that colonialism is not a linear, finite trajectory (which would thus enable the possibility of “de”-colonisation), but instead is iterative (an ongoing process of “re”). That is, colonialism recurs in modulated ways across time and space. Without diminishing the significance of struggles that achieved the formal dismantling of colonial governance in former European and US colonies, or contemporary decolonial struggles in Palestine, North America, and other settler colonies, we agree with Frantz Fanon’s emphasis on the processual nature of decolonisation. As Swati Arora has written in a manifesto to decentre theatre and performance studies, “Occupation and appropriation are not a singular event; they are ongoing, and solidarity cannot be limited to one singular event but requires a continuous commitment” (13). Moreover, as Khwezi Mabasa notes, “the power structures underpinning racial capitalist social formations cut across different social institutions: the state, society, market and family. Examining how these social institutions function and intersect within a racial capitalist framework requires intellectual flexibility” (230). According to Mabasa, addressing these institutional intersections requires us to move beyond “ideational decolonization,” which has become the primary way in which academics and students discuss decolonisation. Instead, by foregrounding how political economy determines academic work, we emphasise “the material basis of modern imperial capitalism without dismissing the social differentiation (race, culture, gender and class) embedded in its genealogy” (229).

What might this call to “intellectual flexibility,” which can only be read as a call to abandon the disciplinarity of the modern academy, offer us in the field of performance studies? What might we offer it? Without keeping these questions in view, the project of decolonisation is all too readily captured by a capitalistically organised academy as a catchphrase or even (after Arora) a “singular event” that subsumes the diversity of struggle and “continuous commitment” that subsumes the diversity of struggle against the historical repetition of colonialism’s legacies.

The problematic of iteration is particularly germane in analyses of performance studies because the field itself has both scrupulously theorised the affixive “re-” of performance and has itself practised a similar move in its disciplinary history and geography. Often seen as a genesis concept in the field, Richard Schechner’s theorisation of “restored behaviour” has been used extensively in scholarship that construes performance as a dual process of repetition and transformation (see, for instance, the work of Rebecca Schneider, Diana Taylor, and Joseph Roach). This is echoed in other fields engaging with a notion of performativity whose power resides in the act of repetition (often via the work of Judith Butler and J. L. Austin). As Sara Ahmed writes, “performativity depends upon the sedimentation of the past; it reiterates what has already been said, and its power and authority depend upon how it recalls that which has already been brought into existence” (92–93). It is through this forceful nexus of sedimentation and modulation that we consider both colonialism and migration law (as one of its contemporary instruments) as performative.

Following Schechner’s dominant staking out of the field from his position at New York University (NYU) Tisch School of the Arts, more recent self-reflexive scholarship in performance studies has addressed the field’s activity outside North America. As stated in the landmark 2012 volume Contesting Performance: Global Sites of Research, “Performance research has gone global” (Jon McKenzie et al. 1). Although the book’s editors advocate for the potential of “global” performance studies to destabilise paradigms produced in the North Atlantic region, they also reaffirm an expansionist trajectory that sees performance studies as fundamentally resilient despite its relocations. They explain: “The NYU research paradigm has been exported, sometimes more, sometimes less successfully, to other parts of the world.” Thus, although the NYU paradigm of performance studies has not remained unchallenged, its inherent flexibility seems to facilitate its integral exportation, thus reaffirming the centrality of the Anglophone North. Writing in the collection of essays The Rise of Performance Studies: Rethinking Richard Schechner’s Broad Spectrum, Yu Jiancun and Peng Yongwen reflect this attitude: “As a global phenomenon, performance studies is constantly evolving, […] and one of its strengths is that different nations and different cultures have interpreted performance studies differently” (98). As suggested by the collection’s subtitle, the very fact that the performance paradigm is so amenable to reinterpretation has sometimes meant that its critique has taken the form of negotiating, nuancing, customising, but eventually recapitulating it elsewhere. Furthermore, the centralisation of methodology when conceptualising the relationships of performance studies to structures of domination and imperialism hinders our ability to address these relationships as material concerns. Instead of (once again) asking “Is performance studies imperialist?” or asking how to decolonise it, we propose a consideration of how performance—both as a mode of study and as a socio-cultural phenomenon—works alongside and through the reiteration of colonialism across time and space.^[1] Thus, while we take performance to be an important coordinate in our theorisation of this reiteration, the material concerns that we discuss here will traverse the boundaries of any particular field of research and deliberately extend opportunities for struggle and solidarity beyond disciplinary boundaries.

This article is structured by moves between three geographic sites: Kuwait, Singapore, and the United Kingdom. Although we do not have space here to analyse colonial reiterations exhaustively in any of these contexts, each analysis offers a conceptual step in our argument. These sites have been selected because they are places in which we have each studied, taught, and conducted research. We offer a transnational comparative model of three sites in order to provincialise the North Atlantic contexts that too often form the centre or norm against which “other” cultural contexts are measured. At the same time, the comparative, collaborative scope of this article reflects the very labour structures that we seek to interrogate, emerging from a collegiality formed in the (post)colonial metropolis of London and contoured by both the inequities of migration law and a shared loneliness amid the prevailing Eurocentrism of the scholarly community in which we were trained. We return to the UK periodically during the article, not as a gesture of recentralisation but in acknowledgement of the gross global asymmetries of academic capital (not least research funding) that have made it our shared site of work, study, and expertise.

Focusing first on Kuwait, we show how contemporary migration is continuous with the colonial regulation of a racialised division of labour, articulated through the specious notion of “skill.” We then move to Singapore to situate a similar division of labour in more direct relation to the academy. Here, we argue that education should be seen not as a neutral register for skill and qualification, but rather as an industry with a vested interest in disguising racialised hierarchies of labour migration behind a veneer of meritocracy. Finally, we turn to the UK, where the lucrative sale of university education by international staff to international students is strategically negotiated in tandem with the explicit articulation of the nation as a “hostile environment” for migrants. We conclude by highlighting an example of direct action that—short of claiming to “decolonise” the university—challenges the extraction of profit from migrant labour.

Global Migration and the Reiteration of Colonialism

As we write these words, the UK Home Office has announced two distinct but equally disturbing migration schemes. One, the so-called High Potential Individual (HPI) visa scheme, is intended to ease the process of migration to the UK for international graduates. While on the surface this seems a welcome breakthrough in the UK’s notoriously complex migration route, its nefariousness becomes more apparent when we note that, out of the fifty universities whose degrees qualify a potential applicant for this new visa, only eight are located outside Australia, North America, and Europe (in Singapore, Japan, and China). This familiar geographic demarcation is built on structural discrimination against the Global South within UK academia. The HPI visa, however, is the less troubling of the two schemes. The second would allow the UK government to relocate asylum seekers to Rwanda, essentially using the country as an offshore migrant detention, processing, and resettlement facility. In these twin schemes, announced a week apart, the reiteration of Britain’s colonial paradigm takes the form of liberal law. The colonial legacy of racialisation is inscribed legally into structures of domination and extraction to which higher education is thoroughly bound.

As a scholar from Kuwait, Faisal has benefited from the history and legacy of such structures. Kuwait, a former protectorate of Great Britain, is today one of the richest states in the world, benefiting tremendously from its place in the postcolonial division of global labour. Owing in part to its massive national wealth, which is derived from the extraction, processing, and sale of hydrocarbons, Kuwait today has one of the most generous welfare states in the world—a welfare state that funded Faisal’s undergraduate studies at New York University through the “Gifted Students” scholarship programme. Much like the UK’s HPI visa discussed above, the Kuwait Ministry of Higher Education funds these higher education scholarships using global ranking tables, which favour universities located in the Global North. Thus, Kuwait’s national wealth awarded Faisal with cultural capital that allowed him to continue his postgraduate studies in the UK and left him free of student debt, a privileged position in higher education. Moreover, and this is despite the obvious racialisation and sanctioned ignorance that Faisal confronted as a graduate student in the United Kingdom, his status as an intellectual migrant sheltered him from the harsh realities faced by many migrants to the UK. But this is not the beginning, nor the end of the reiterative colonialism that links Kuwait to Great Britain.

Kuwait’s own migration law, the kafala (sponsorship) system, developed from the expansion of British colonial-era legal practices, which were solidified as the state gained independence. The kafala system is characterised by the doubling of the employer as the immigration sponsor, which makes it nearly impossible for migrant workers to challenge exploitation without jeopardising their legal status. The codification of kafala practices was contingent on a long history of struggle, repression, and the generalisation of capitalist social relations built on labour exploitation and waged work. This generalisation was itself contingent on Kuwait’s imbrication within a global capitalist division of labour. As scholars including Omar Hesham AlShehabi, Nandita Sharma, and Harsha Walia have noted, nation-states’ migration regimes are colonial reiterations that have achieved the force of law and are upheld by the armed forces and notions of national sovereignty. The threat of violence and of deportation—in other words, of direct danger to the individuals who must contend with migration regimes—is a legitimation of the violence of colonialism that shapes how people survive on a daily basis. As such, it becomes difficult to see where decolonisation begins and class struggle ends.

How do we combat the reiteration of colonialism in law when the law is the basis for the state’s legitimation and the upkeep of civil society? This same law works to repeat and reinforce a division between cognitive and manual labour (seen as skilled and unskilled, respectively) that is colonial in origin, as we have demonstrated, and that takes the form of a racialising social logic. As Neha Vora and Amélie Le Renard (2021) forcefully note: “Terms that invoke nationality are not neutral descriptors in a world marked by stark economic disparities, colonial histories, transnational labor migration and securitization of borders. Instead, references to nationality incorporate both local and transnational hierarchies within which people’s abilities, skills, characters and inherent place in society are naturalized—they are in fact racial categories.” This racial categorisation can be seen in practice in the methods deployed by the kafala system to racialise populations despite their formal equality under the law. In other words, despite the fact that all foreign workers in Kuwait are ostensibly governed through the kafala system, workers are racialised according to their place in a global division of labour occasioned through the colonial encounter. A US academic arriving to teach at the Gulf University of Science and Technology, for example, has a vastly different experience under the kafala system than that of a Filipina domestic worker: from the moment of recruitment, to their arrival and policing within the state in question; and from the housing they are offered, to the legal protections they are afforded, to the social activities available to them. Studying how the concept of “skill” is used to racialise migrants, Natasha Iskandar has observed how designations of skill have established a distinct divide in the politics of work and migration in Qatar:

“Unskilled” migrants were subject to a set of policies that consigned them to second-class status. Bureaucratic roadblocks and migration controls, such as the Ministry of Interior’s energetic anti-absconding campaign against “runaway” workers who quit their jobs, drastically narrowed their ability to access the already limited rights that the legal system afforded foreign workers. Workers classed as unskilled were confined, as a matter of urban policy, to peripheral zones of the city and excluded from most public spaces. Their physical mobility was monitored, sometimes through personalized GPS sensors, and constrained. (8)

Thus, although disparate classes of migrants all fall officially under the purview of the kafala system, only the “unskilled” (or more precisely, the manual and domestic workers migrating from formerly colonised countries) suffer its most stifling and exploitative effects. As we discuss in more detail in the following section, this racialised and gendered division of labour is an iterative performance of the global division of labour instantiated through the colonial encounter itself. If formal decolonisation achieved anything, it is that it enshrined and legitimated this division of labour through liberal law, which is not only written but must also be constantly replayed and repeated (that is, performed) in ways that delineate how the law is lived.

Kuwait’s welfare policies are historically shaped by a colonial division of global labour that categorises people as “skilled” or “unskilled” workers; “high potential” migrants or “gifted” students. These demarcations work to reiterate the colonial relation by determining peoples’ positions and easing or obstructing their migration accordingly. One step towards decolonising the university must surely entail dismantling these categories and undoing their organisational power with regard to who belongs in the university and who does not.

Labour and Leisure in the Global War for Talent

If the colonial relation is performed through the racialised division of “low” and “high” skilled migrant labour in Kuwait, a similar division has also been established in postcolonial Singapore. This division is underwritten by migration law and is rehearsed and legitimated through a discourse of meritocracy. In this section of the article, we apply this insight specifically to higher education in order to show how “expatriate” academics become differentiated from other migrant categories in ways that conceal how our labour is conjoined through the maintenance of the education industry. Amidst such conditions, we argue, any scholarly project of decolonisation must address its material imbrication with migration regimes that legally and symbolically privilege education migrants, while precarising those migrants whose labour makes academic work and study possible.

The Southeast Asian city-state of Singapore was “discovered” by Stamford Raffles in 1819 and was a British colony until self-governance was established in 1959 (this was followed by full independence in 1965); the People’s Action Party (PAP) has been in power ever since. The PAP’s approach to Singapore’s internationalism has entailed a paradox whereby the making of Singapore as a “global city,” thoroughly interconnected with other centres of world power, becomes both a strategy to embrace and a source of anxiety about the fragility of national identity (as discussed in the work of S. Rajaratnam and Terence Chong). In state discourse, Singapore is regularly portrayed as a vulnerable island nation that must compete globally to survive, and whose only resource in doing so is its people. Education is thus a central concern, both as a means of creating a qualified, disciplined, and globally competitive workforce, and as a mode of promulgating a particular narrative of nationhood (through the creation of the National Education curriculum, for instance, as Aaron Koh has shown).

The role that “unskilled” migrant workers have played in Singapore’s globalisation is less visible in this discursive matrix. Singapore is currently home to over 800,000 migrant Work Permit holders (comprising approximately two-thirds of the total foreign workforce) working in industries including construction, manufacturing, marine and service (MOM). Work Permits are secured by employers for up to two years; they are renewable, but they cannot lead to permanent residency and they do not permit workers’ families to join them in Singapore. The legal precarity of Work Permit holders is compounded by their work—often characterised by the “three Ds” (dirty, dangerous, and degrading)—as well as by debt, displacement, and racism, which constitute modes of exclusion from a highly circumscribed notion of Singaporean national identity (see the work of Maria Platt et al., and Wajihah Hamid and Dylan Tutt). In contrast, workers considered “skilled,” such as migrant academics, for instance, are allotted an Employment Pass; these passes are reserved for managerial, executive, or specialised foreign professionals, who must have formal qualifications and an existing job offer paying at least SGD$5,000  per month (MOM). Employment Pass holders can bring certain family members to join them in Singapore and can apply for Permanent Residency after six months. A racialised division of labour is thus actualised in the legal regulation of migrant categories, and simultaneously in a symbolic hierarchy that attempts to naturalise these categories, primarily through a discourse of skill or meritocracy. Although the Singaporean state attempts to articulate this labour-migration hierarchy through its own specifically postcolonial story of survival in a ruthless global marketplace, it nonetheless performs a fundamentally colonial reiteration of class and race.

The role that Singaporean universities play in a “global war for talent” exemplifies how this seemingly meritocratic division of labour contours the higher education industry, as Pak Tee Ng has shown. It is important to note that the loaded language of a “war for talent” only makes explicit a drive that is in fact integral to many higher education industries around the world (not least that of the UK, as we will explore in the final section of the article). The phrase names a scramble for the territorialisation of “human capital” within a transnational knowledge economy sutured by colonially-produced geopolitics. The state construes higher education as a revenue-generating sector, whereby attracting international students and faculty boosts Singapore’s prestige as a marketable “Global Schoolhouse” and promises “economic spin-offs” in the domestic retail and housing rental markets (Ng 282; compare the work of S. Gopinathan and Michael H. Lee). Partnerships with universities abroad, notably the UK and USA, are key. In his history of the colonial-era residential university Raffles College, Philip Holden explores how contemporary partnerships (such as the controversially dissolved Yale-NUS College) were anticipated by the British colonial liberal arts pedagogy with its attendant, contradictory discourses of national citizenship. Holden notes that colonial technologies of self-making deployed at Raffles were actively retained by the post-colonial PAP, who saw educational institutions as “disciplinary sites where the characters of national citizens might be formed” (13).^[2] Today, the higher education industry promotes the ideal of a disciplined, postcolonial Singaporean citizen competing with her peers in a global marketplace (whether abroad or in the cosmopolitan space of the Singaporean university itself), both extending and eliding the colonial history of such an ideal.

Tracing its origins back to Raffles College, the National University of Singapore (NUS) became a corporate entity under the direction of the Ministry of Education in 2006. Among several international “Strategic Partnerships,” it boasts a split-site PhD scholarship with King’s College London, which funded Ella’s stipend and doctorate in performance studies. As a PhD student and teaching assistant at NUS in 2015, Ella entered Singapore with a British passport and a Singaporean ten-year Student Pass. Her work as a teaching assistant involved the delivery of a curriculum dominated by European playwrights, and she was encouraged by her students to perform a specifically white, feminised version of the city-state out of hours. This meant inhabiting a strategically-produced “Renaissance City” designed to house a “globalized knowledge economy capable of attracting ‘foreign talent’” (Ray Langenbach and Paul Rae, 138): that is, to engage with arts and culture as opportunities for casual consumption, to spend her adjunct wages in luxury shopping malls and her weekends at the beach resorts on the manmade island of Sentosa, to enjoy free drinks in expat bars on “Ladies’ Night,” and to eat in popular restaurants like the Tiong Bahru Club, with its astoundingly direct invocation of colonial-era design and leisure (now rebranded as the aptly-named restaurant Privé).

Holding the properties of whiteness and legal status, Ella (unlike her Filipina friends and colleagues) was never questioned about whether she belonged in the lecture hall or the swimming pool; on the contrary, she was offered the benefits of the elitism both spaces in tandem rehearsed. During the academic term, she lived in NUS’ residential campus, U-Town (known to students as U-Topia), which Holden describes as a reterritorialised expression of the colonial liberal arts college ideal (2018: 20): a former golf course rebuilt as a cluster of white towers housing accommodation, classrooms, sports facilities, and a large Starbucks. Like its colonial predecessor Raffles College, the self-contained bubble of U-Topia “abstracted itself from the Asian quotidian, from the hybrid soundscapes and sensory experiences” that characterise the port city (8). Ella’s senior colleagues lived independently or in university accommodation nearby, likely serviced by live-in migrant domestic workers from the Philippines, Myanmar, and elsewhere in the region.

While Ella’s experience is anecdotal, it reflects the ways in which norms of academic work and leisure are predicated on race, gender, and migration status in ways that naturalise a colonial, legally instated division of labour under the guise of meritocracy and cultural difference. In such a context, higher education must be considered not simply as a metric that determines who belongs to skills-based migration categories, but as a site of labour and the territorialisation of capital in itself. Pedagogy is not a neutral ground that distributes knowledge and qualification to deserving recipients, but rather an industry that itself has a vested interest in—and endeavours to normalise and perpetuate—the discourses of meritocracy undergirding class and migration hierarchies in the first place. Moreover, it is serviced by stark inequality, visible in the maintenance of academics’ homes and families by precarious domestic workers, and the migrant construction labourers building parts of the ever-expanding NUS campus while forced to live in crowded shipping containers on the faculty car park.

Study as Extraction

According to “The China Question,” a revealing document published by King’s College London’s Policy Institute, education exports comprise the UK’s single largest service export, topping financial services by almost £2 billion in 2018 (Jo Johnson et al. 41). The document’s co-authors (first among whom is the Right Honourable Jo Johnson, King’s President’s Professorial Fellow and brother of later Prime Minister Boris Johnson) make this statistic the cornerstone of a bid to capitalise on international student finance, while cautioning against the apparent risks arising from China’s stake in British education, research, and intellectual property. King’s College London—where strike action in 2022 by the University and College Union (UCU) highlighted that 57% of academic staff are on fixed term contracts, while the Vice Chancellor is paid a salary of £463,000 p.a.—profits simultaneously from the precarious labour of its staff and the income generated by its students. Moving to higher education in the UK, then, this section of the article builds on the previous sections to demonstrate how colonial, racialised divisions of labour are maintained—but may also be disrupted—within the university itself.

The extraction of capital highlighted in “The China Question” intersects with and is conditioned by migration law in important ways. We first focus on the resulting implications for academic staff, before turning to the implications for students and finally for other workers in the university. More than one fifth of staff employed by UK universities are international; of these, 75.9% are on academic contracts, and a third of that group works in the Humanities (International Facts). Committing to UK academia can “lock out” migrant academics from another international move, even if (or rather, when) working conditions in UK academia have deteriorated, as Toma Pustelnikovaite has shown. Academics holding a Global Talent visa have no recourse to public funds, and any time they spend conducting research abroad can count against their eligibility for indefinite leave to remain.^[3] Alternatively, those employed on a Tier 2 visa must pass general grounds for refusal, must have a “skilled job or a job in the Shortage List” from a sponsoring employer, and must receive a minimum annual salary of £30,000. The Tier 2 visa scheme, much like the kafala system, integrally binds sponsoring institutions to the migration governance regime; indeed, a key duty of sponsors of Tier 2 migrants is to document and report pay reductions and unauthorised absences to the Home Office. The ramification of these requirements were foregrounded during a series of strikes called by the University and College Union (UCU) over pension disputes in 2018, when the Home Office initially stated that universities must report Tier 2 employees who were absent for ten or more days due to strike action. Following correspondence by then General Secretary of UCU, Sally Hunt, to then Home Secretary Amber Rudd, seeking clarification on the issue, the Home Office published new guidance in July 2018, exempting strike action from the conditions for termination of visa sponsorship owing to unpaid absence. However, the debacle demonstrates how migrant academics face increased risks of destitution and/or being forced to leave the UK, and highlights the resultant pressure placed on them to comply with the neoliberal academy’s mounting demands.

Analyses of international students’ “benefit to the UK economy” also reveals the extent to which human capital becomes territorialised and exploited through the governance of migration, as seen previously in the case of Singapore. Universities UK calculates this “benefit” at £109,000 per non-EU student (International Facts). The “economic spin-offs” (to recall Ng) are significant and multifaceted. Consider an international student enrolled on a one-year MA programme at KCL as an example. In addition to £25,950 in tuition fees, she will also pay a visa fee of up to £475 to the Home Office; should she need a secure English language test (SELT), she must take it from one of four Government-approved providers at a cost of around £200. If her country of origin is on a specific list (almost exclusively containing countries previously colonised by Europeans), she may have to register her address with the police within seven days of arrival; should she want this address to be a KCL residence (managed by private “accommodation partners” such as Unite and Urbanest), she will pay rent of between £160 and £335 per week. As is the case for UK nationals (who saw tuition fees tripled to over £9,000 per course year in 2012),^[4] the positioning of international students as tenants and consumers is thoroughgoing. The private company GCP Scape East Ltd., which provides accommodation on the Queen Mary campus in east London (where rent starts at £339 per week for a single-bed studio) makes this economic focus apparent in its disingenuous vow to make it “clear to our staff and our students that we are much more than just a landlord” (Scape). The semantics of students’ relationships with landlords such as Scape—from their online communications, to the design and location of their properties, to the commodification of the “warm communities and lifelong connections” such architecture apparently fosters—are just one facet of how study is performed into being as consumption. Efforts to “decolonise” study have taken hold powerfully in the UK, particularly at the curriculum level, but overlook the material coloniality of neoliberal higher education at their peril. As long as research departments and classrooms are conditioned by attempts to capitalise on students and academics as consumers and suppliers subject to border control at every turn, “decolonising” the curriculum risks cloaking capital extraction on a global scale.

In the face of these concerns, we would like to end by highlighting struggles which cut across the pernicious skilled/unskilled division of labour via which coloniality is reiterated by and through the higher education industry. In November 2020, militant cleaners at the University of London (UoL) achieved a historic victory, fought over more than a decade of collective action. Previously, UoL (a consortium of seventeen institutions) had outsourced its cleaning staff to private firms whose workers received none of the benefits afforded to their directly employed colleagues; three of these benefits—sick pay, holiday pay, and pensions—became the focus of the early Tres Cosas campaign, spearheaded by the Latin American cleaner community. As Richard Braude has shown, the non-automated, labour-intensive nature of cleaning makes wages a contractors’ chief expense, comprising up to 80% or more of a its balance sheet; as such, contractors can compete only by squeezing wages. Drawing on the gendered and racialised devalorisation of cleaning labour, such contractors (and the institutions outsourcing to them) force down wages and deteriorate working conditions. This process is aided by intimidation from immigration enforcement, through the constant underlying threat of removal under the “hostile environment,” as well as in periodic immigration raids. At SOAS in 2009, for instance, management called cleaners to a spurious staff meeting at which forty immigration officers were secretly present; six cleaners were forcibly removed from the UK as a result (Toscano). As we have shown, the nexus of exploitation and racialisation is not an aberration to the modern university but rather one of its defining features; crucial as they are to the university’s continued operation, the cleaners’ exploitation had to be facilitated by their forceful positioning as “unskilled” migrants.

However, the reliance of cleaning contractors on labour power also makes them vulnerable to disruption. In this case, successful strikes, a boycott of UoL’s central meeting and library facility Senate House, and an unprecedented declaration of solidarity from UCU forced UoL to bring the cleaning staff in-house. On the picket line, through the boycott, and in official union communications, this intersectional struggle brought militant university workers together across a normative division of labour.

Short of decolonising the university or any particular field of research, examples of direct action such as this begin to disrupt what we are referring to as the contemporary reiteration of colonialism through a racialised division of labour. As we have argued, global higher education industries do not organically determine who belongs to general labour categories through metrics of skill and qualification, but themselves depend upon an exploitation of labour that is naturalised by the discourse of meritocracy they claim to uphold. This division of labour, shored up by migration law and border control, is a fundamental means by which colonial history shapes the material conditions of scholarly practice today. The call to “decolonise performance studies,” therefore, necessitates that our practice as performance scholars be oriented towards solidarity and struggle with workers whose labour is falsely, and nefariously, divided from our own.

Notes

^[1] This change of focus is even more pressing, we argue, because the modern academy is a (post)colonial institution, which inevitably benefits from the division of the globe following the colonial encounter. In the academy, “cultural capital” is not merely the strained metaphor utilised in Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology, but rather a materially determined hegemony over cultural production, rooted in the Global North’s historical and contemporary economic superiority in relation to the Global South. This situation applies as much to theatre and performance studies as it does to other disciplines. While we commend initiatives such as the International Federation for Theatre Research’s Helsinki Prize or Performance Studies International’s Dwight Conquergood Award, which have begun to address the asymmetry in global knowledge production that results from geographic and economic inequality, these initiatives do not address the reality that the publishing industry, a key seat of epistemological and material gatekeeping, remains firmly rooted in the capitalist core. All eight past winners of the Theatre and Performance Research Association (TaPRA) David Bradby Monograph award have been published by British publishing houses (Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Palgrave Macmillan, and Bloomsbury.), while recipients of the American Society of Theatre Research prizes are split evenly between major US university presses (Michigan and Duke) and British presses (Oxford and Palgrave Macmillan). How can we contend with the question of decolonisation when the professionalisation of higher education, including the fields of theatre and performance studies, is materially and consistently implicated within the legacies of racial capitalism?

^[2] State education in Singapore today makes explicit reference to its ongoing relationship with British colonial pedagogy. Secondary school pupils take Singapore-Cambridge O- and A-Level examinations conducted jointly by state entities and the University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate; although the language of instruction in state education is English, pupils receive “mother tongue” classes allocated on the basis of four state-recognised “racial” categories (see the work of Siew-Min Sai and Lionel Wee).

^[3] A provision stipulating “no recourse to public funds” is attached to most visas in the UK and prevents holders from accessing social housing and other aspects of social welfare, including disability-associated financial support, child benefits, and emergency refuge for survivors of domestic violence.

^[4] Not all UK national students pay this amount; most Scottish undergraduates studying in Scotland, for instance, do not pay tuition fees, but Scottish universities can still charge undergraduate fees of over £9000 per course year to students from other parts of the UK, and Scottish students studying elsewhere pay local tuition fee rates.

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