About the Book
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.
Much of Hollywood’s computer-generated imagery is produced far from the studios that claim authorship over it. Since the 1990s, Hollywood studios have cut costs by outsourcing the time- and labor-intensive work of creating CGI to countries with low wages and skilled workforces. This book offers both a history and an ethnography of the craft of visual effects in India, one of the principal offshore sites where Hollywood’s digital effects are produced. The work performed by Indian artists is routinely framed as back-end: not creative in itself, but rather in service of the creativity and vision of Hollywood clients. Demonstrating how notions of creativity are made to align with global divisions of labor, One-Stop Sweatshop reveals a system in which devalued workers locked into conditions of precarity and immiseration perpetually produce devalued work in an ongoing race to the bottom.