Sari suasion: migrant economies of care in Shailja Patel's Migritude

This essay examines Shailja Patel's 2010 book, Migritude, and its framing of human value in feminist terms and from the vantage point of nonwestern migrants rather than Western human rights activists and investors. I argue that, through the material and affective legacy of the sari, Patel takes up neoliberal rhetorics of globalization and market-based forms of human value in order to reveal their violence, divest them of meaning and power, and imagine an alternative model of worth based in what she calls "care economies," the work of repair and regeneration undertaken (often invisibly) by those most affected by violence and abuses of power.