Maid of memory: the trajectories of scripts of servitude - Beatriz Lorente @ SOAS 2026

Maid of memory: the trajectories of scripts of servitude Speaker(s): Beatriz Lorente Recorded Day 2 – Archipelagic Tongues: SOAS Philippine Studies Conference 2026, 4:00–5:00 (Room KLT) Session: Diaspora, Hybridity, and Global Language Beatriz Lorente is a lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Bern. Abstract: Scripts of servitude are templates of language practices that index being a domestic worker (Lorente, 2017). As a form of conduct of conduct (Foucault, 1982), these templates link particular personhoods, relationships between speakers and interlocutors, and social practices to moral questions of what constitutes good, appropriate and responsible conduct (Dean, 2010). This paper examines and compares artifacts of such scripts of servitude, namely texts that describe and prescribe the linguistic practices of female domestic workers and their female employers. The texts are drawn from different historical moments: (1) the ‘era’ of British and American colonization in Asia when phrasebooks, household manuals and memoirs for and about American and British memsahibs were produced, and (2) the contemporary ‘era’ of transnational migration where phrasebooks for transnational domestic workers (e.g. Arabic language and culture for transnational Filipino domestic workers), and for employers of domestic circulate. By tracing these texts’ discourse trajectories (Blommaert, 2005) that bridge the boundaries of time and space, this paper shows how consequential imaginaries of racialized and gendered Others estranged from a moral order and subject to containment, linguistic and otherwise, are produced.