Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here .   In Capital, Volume One , Karl Marx shows that capitalism is the thief of time. In pursuit of ever-greater profits, capitalism increases either the working hours or the productivity of those hours in order to cream off the surplus value from the wages paid to workers for maintaining bare life. Individual capitalists cannot help doing so if their business is to stay afloat in the market competition. Since capitalism is pretty much the global mode of production now, national economies cannot escape the logic either. If they cannot exploit their own citizens due to labor laws, they will exploit vulnerable migrant children .  Written in the 1950s, when the American postwar economy was supposedly booming, the play A Raisin in the Sun , by Lorraine Hansberry, revolves ostensibly around a Black family's difficulties in purchasing and owning a house in a white Chicago neighborhood. Yet, to put the emphasi...

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . This spring I started teaching Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun to my VII's (the equivalent of Singapore's Secondary One) with some trepidation. The play, about a Black family living in the segregated Southside of Chicago, required careful contextualization, much of which was new to me. I had to prepare my students to read aloud with accuracy and respect the African American Vernacular English spoken by the Younger family. Throughout the study, I had to be mindful not to make the one Black student in my mainly white class feel either invisible or hypervisible. After reading just the first twenty pages, the students have fallen in love with the play. They identify with young Travis who is about their age. When Travis has to ask for an extra 50 cents for school, they understand why his mother said no, constrained as the family is by financial precarity. They also understand why h...