Contenu du sommaire : Politiser le travail domestique

Dissidence in Domestic Service. The Moral Economy of Women, Housemaids in Mauritius
The female labour force in domestic service has become a main factor of production for property development pursued under the restructuration of the Mauritian sugar economy, especially on the coast. This paper examines the subjective meanings and social practices by which domestic workers living on the coast deal with the transformations of work and land according to the issues of their own household's reproduction. The analysis of their moral economy gives a special insight on the political subject they create from domestic service but also beyond the scope of wage labour.

From ‘‘Boys” to ‘‘House Workers” in Burundi, or how to Domesticate Politics“Boys” (ababoyi) have been omnipresent in urban households in Burundi since the beginning of the 20thcentury. However, academic research has not been interested in this category of workers who are in charge of many household tasks, elsewhere rather entrusted to women. Through a socio-history of these men and their long history of domesticity, this paper intends to (re)inscribe them into the field of action and political mobilizations and show they are involved in economic systems, personal relationships and collective commitments that make them more than atonic subalterns. Beyond the dependency relationships that restrain them, they negotiate their emancipation through various forms of initiatives.

« Saving Malagasy Domestic Workers Abroad ». The Appropriation of « Neo-abolitionist » Rhetoric in Ambositra (Madagascar). By analysing the labour conditions and the points of view of Malagasy domestic workers who worked in Ambositra (Highlands of Madagascar) or abroad (in Lebanon, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Maurice), this article explores the local re-appropriation of a global neo-abolitionist discourse that, by underlining the risks of migration, emerges often as a way to limit the efforts of women who are trying to emancipate themselves from the harsh economic conditions they are experiencing in Madagascar. For most of the domestic workers I met, this discourse runs the risk of hiding the violence and abuses linked to domestic work in Madagascar, of diminishing their opportunities to build effective migratory trajectories, and of re-moralising, for the good of the employers, paternalistic power relations that tend to belittle and infantilize their employees.

“Whitening” Domesticity. The Reproduction of Race, Class and Gender Hierarchies in the Production of Luxury Personnel in South Africa. All over the world, Butler Academies train domestic workers dedicated to the very upper classes. In South Africa, where nearly one in ten worker is a domestic worker, the opening of an academy is promoted as an opportunity to make domesticity more attractive. Open to Blacks and Whites, and women and men from different socio-economic backgrounds, this project seems to challenge the racial, class and gender domination defining domesticity. However, the article shows that by promoting a white male butler model, the training reproduces neocolonial domination.

Domestic Servants in Households in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Attempt of Measure and Analyse
While domestic work in Africa carried out by people outside from the family requires increasing interest, there is a lack of adequate data to measure its extent and analyse its characteristics. The article provides a critical inventory of data sources for capturing domestic situations. Based on the available data, it synthesizes and compares the prevalence levels of the phenomenon between countries, but limited to domestic workers hosted by their employing household, with a more in-depth comparative analysis between Bamako and Dakar.

When Consensus Falls Apart. Revolutionary Process and the Spatialisation of Sudanese Insurgency
The Sudanese revolution that started in mid-December 2018 in cities up-country climaxed in April 2019 with Omar al-Beshir's destitution and the occupation of al-Qiyada Square. This episode represented the end of the first phase of this popular uprising. Beyond a factual account of what happened, the article pleads for the insertion within the longer time frame of Sudan's social and political history of an up-rising that was unprecedented in terms of its magnitude. This study aims to decrypt it along three main lines of analysis. First, the Sudanese revolution must be read against the erosion of the ideological and popular consensus the regime had sought to build since 1989. Then, this article resituates the present period within an earlier process of massification and spread of multifaceted and varied protests. Last, this uprising, that took place within an authoritarian space, can be apprehended through its spatialization and a geography of social inequalities that encourages to understand it as a revolt where mechanisms of class as much as of generation are in force.

In Chad, revenues that are collected through informal fiscal practices are at the core of the state's treasury, and make up the wealth allocated to the ruler's political allies and clients. This situation was accelerated by two concurrent events that shook the country between 2015 and 2016 : the international fall in oil prices and the Boko Haram crisis. Using the country's main trading post as a vantage point, and employing micro-level fieldwork, this paper explores how these all-encompassing events provided the necessary grounds for the Chadian state to reorganize its economic networks and taxation practices under its authority. This process reinforces the regime's indispensable presence as an economic actor. This study attempts to provide a fresh perspective on the internal functioning of post-colonial African states.