Josephine

The work interrogates the psychic and physical tensions of legibility, and confronts the precarious conditions of cultural and national belonging. The text and title, based on a children’s book (The Little Engine that Could), appropriates the story’s signature phrases “I think I can” and “I know I can” to examine the story’s intent in reinforcing meritocratic values of hard work and optimism, to instead examine the exploitation, alienation, and dispossession prevalent within immigrant life and labour. Extending the text to nationhood, the work materializes the psychic burden of identity, language, and belonging as a physical one that colonizes and reconditions the immigrant body of colour.