Paid domestic labour and postcoloniality: narratives of Eritrean and Afro-Surinamese migrant women

Abstract

During the last decades, migrant women have been carrying out an increasingly important role in supporting many European households in their deficit of care and domestic labour. My present work is dedicated to the understanding of how colonial legacies affected the experience of the first postcolonial female migrants who arrived in the former colonising country and worked there as domestics and care workers. On the basis of interviews with Afro-Surinamese women in the Netherlands and with Eritrean women in Italy – all of them migrated before 1980 ? I thus show how pervasively postcoloniality affected the identity formation of these migrants throughout their experience as domestic workers. In the first three chapters of this thesis, I outline the historical, theoretical and methodological background of my work. In particular, I introduce the notions that structure my understanding of the relationship between colonialism, women’s labour and migration in the contemporary world. The remaining chapters analyse the interview material and, in so doing, their order follows the development of the relationship between colonisers and colonised through the successive phases of interviewees' lives: the growing up in the colonial setting of Paramaribo and Asmara, the arrival in Italy and the Netherlands, the entrance in the niche of domestic work, and finally the taking place of everyday labour experiences. In chapters four and five, I outline the normative implications of the fact that Italian and Dutch cultural practices have such a predominant role in other colonised peoples’ culture and I analyse the association between cultural hegemony and the performance of domestic and care work in the colonial setting. In chapter six, the interviewees' arrival in Europe is taken as a turning point in their experiences, a paradigmatic moment in which the clash takes place between the Italy/the Netherlands they had imagined during their youth and the one they actually encounter with their migration. Interviewees’ self-representation, in particular, is at the centre of the phenomenon I illustrate in chapters seven and eight, where I look at the commonalities between the gendered segregation and the ‘racial’/ethnic segregation present in labour markets. These lead to the formation of labour niches, resulting in postcolonial migrant women being placed in sectors at the lower end of the job market, as is the case with domestic work. In chapter nine, I argue that the ‘ethnicisation’ of domestic skills is functional to Eritreans and afro-Surinamese women remaining in the niche of domestic work. However, I also contend that such a positive self-representation remains intrinsically ambivalent as far as it is based on the reproduction of colonial legacies for what concerns the hierarchies between Europeans and black migrants. Finally, in the following chapter, I show how, in some cases, this ambivalence can open the way to various forms of anti-black discrimination. Domestic work, indeed, can be seen as a stage for the re-enactment, in practices pertaining to domestic workers’ experience, of sentiments grounded in colonialism and slavery.