Description
Book SynopsisFor much of the twentieth-century, the US working class was personified by a white, male, hard-hat wearing industrial worker. In the age of globalization other narratives about work and workers have emerged. This book examines these stories and, in the process, offers a new reading of American fiction and film through the lens of precarious work.
Trade ReviewLiving Labor aims to update the critical discussion of contemporary American working-class literature to reflect the complex and contested realities of the current era, in which class itself has become increasingly contingent. The book is clear, persuasive, informative, and thought-provoking." —Sherry Linkon, Georgetown University
"
Living Labor offers a vocabulary for a global, post-Fordist working class, through a number of important, sometimes well-known, sometimes obscure novels and films that document working-class characters in the U.S. from the 1980s to the present. The book is lucid, precise, and engaging, and helps us to understand how 'class' and its many representations are made and remade through the contradictions of capitalism. Entin has written a necessary and provocative intervention into the field." —Benjamin Balthaser, Indiana University South Bend
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Narratives of Living Labor
- Chapter 1. “We are the Planet”: Impossible Solidarities in Russell Banks’s Continental Drift
- Chapter 2. “Maps of Labor”: Globalization, Migration, and Contemporary Working-Class Literature
- Chapter 3. Living Labor, Dead Labor: Cinema, Solidarity, and Necrocapitalism
- Chapter 4. “The Uprooted Worker at the Center of the World”: Labor, Migration, and Precarity on the Urban Underside of Independent Cinema
- Coda: Forms of Solidarity in Precarious Times
- Index
