The H-1B Visa and Coolie Form

This paper examines the anti-historicist regime of racial subject formation instantiated by the United States' H-1B visa program as it applies to Indian beneficiaries. Specifically focused on the Indian technology worker, it argues that this subject is racialized through the H-1B visa regime's metabolization of colonial histories of indentured labor, twentieth century post-Fordist shifts toward the total flexibility of capitalist production, and the concomitant cultural modes of representation of postmodernity. By way of a reading of Hari Kunzru's novel Transmission (2004), the paper elaborates a theory of coolie form; shaped by the H-1B visa regime's relation to the history of coolie labor as one of pastiche, coolie form articulates the activation and dispensation of the Indian migrant laborer's historicity as constitutive of their racialization. This theory of coolie form doubly notes the historical cathexis of the Indian subject to coolie labor configurations and the necessarily partial reinscription of this history for the needs of twentieth and twenty-first century American capital. The H-1B visa regime's function in devaluing labor, particularly in service of the needs of a burgeoning U.S. (information) technology industry, by producing its subjects as economically precarious and nationally contingent variously converges with and diverges from the British system of indenture in meaningful ways explored in the paper. However, facilitated by the textualization of history in postmodernity, it is the productivity of this ambivalence for capital which is elucidated by Transmission's self-reflexive mimicry of pastiche via the internalization of fictional intertexts. The failure of the novel's immanent pastiche to obtain in the face of coolie form's evacuation of Indian H-1B immigrants' historicity is ostensive of the connections between history, labor, form, capital, and text which are constitutive of Indian American racialization.