Academic literature on the topic 'Precarity in literature'

While much critical attention as been devoted to the representation of precarity on the European stages, and in British theatre in particular, dramatic texts produced in the United States that concern, depict and represent the lives of members of the so-called precariat have barely been the object of critical scrutiny. This article traces the emergence of a growing concern with economic hardship in the second decade of the twenty-first century in American drama and presents a case study of Annie Baker’s The Flick (2013). Baker’s play is illustrative of an aesthetics of precarity that refrains from victimizing the members of the precariat and that plays out the paradoxes of scenarios of precarity as being at once troubling and enabling transformation and visions of possibility.

PurposeThis article explores the initial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on international school teachers, using the findings to theorise agency and elective precarity amongst self-initiated, middling expatriates.Design/methodology/approachContent analysis of online posts on a teaching abroad discussion forum is used to critically examine the thesis that international school educators form part of a global precariat (Bunnell, 2016; Poole, 2019a, 2019b). Thematic analysis charts participants' discussion of aspects of precarity as consequences of the pandemic.FindingsThe data suggest that whilst dimensions of precarity have been exacerbated by the pandemic some dimensions of privilege remain. The term elective precarity is employed to describe the position of international school teachers, and it is noted that the pandemic has eroded the sense of agency within precarity. Posts suggest that teachers are reluctant to be globally mobile when lacking this sense of agency.Research limitations/implicationsFurther research is needed to establish whether agency and elective precarity are useful concepts for exploring the experiences of other self-initiated expatriates during the pandemic. There is a need for further research into the supply of international school educators as key enablers of other forms of global mobility.Originality/valueThe paper proposes two new concepts, elective precarity and agency within precarity, to capture the discourse of self-initiated expatriates. It contributes to the emerging literature charting the impact of the pandemic on self-initiated expatriation.

Drawing insights from the literature around cultural discourse theory, urban informality, and precarity, this article explores how a group of unlicensed hawkers in Hong Kong engage in a place-making process of precarity. Existing research on precarity has examined the structural change in the labor market in advanced economies and labor unions’ collective resistance. Few empirical studies, however, have explicated how informal workers experience precarity in their everyday life. To contribute to this literature, therefore, this study examines how hawkers in Hong Kong constitute their class identities and the meanings of place while facing legal and spatial ambiguities on a daily basis. While interlocutors articulate different class identities, they constitute themselves as precarious beings through spatial practice. Rather than engaging in collective resistance against precarity, hawkers develop culturally distinctive practices to adapt to the power structure in which they operate. This article highlights the dialectical relationship between spatial practice and precarity as contextualizing precarity in developing Asia.

This paper charts emerging scholarship on what I conceptualise as 'compensatory cultures'; cultures that are, in essence, compensatory responses to crisis, but are presented and received as desirable, even preferable ways of organising life. Since the 2008 crash, precarity has become a new normal and a dominant structure-of-feeling in the global north. I argue that compensatory cultures alleviate precarity's affective impacts, enabling 'business as usual', yet do so in ways that perpetuate that precarity and the conditions that reproduce it. I survey literature on compensatory urbanisms, compensatory labour and compensatory consumption; demonstrating the compensatory as a pervasive mechanism operating across various cultural settings in the post-recession, austerity context. The work explored reveals compensatory cultures as central in remaking places, structuring social relations and producing meaning in crisis times.

This dissertation attempts to read Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole’s fiction and essays as sustained demonstrations of precarity, as theorised by Judith Butler in Precarious Life (2004). Though never directly cited by Cole, Butler’s articulation of a shared condition of bodily vulnerability and interdependency offers a generative critical framework through which to read Cole’s representations of black bodies as they move across space. By presenting the ‘black body’, rather than ‘black man’, as the preferred metonym for black people, Cole’s work, which I argue can be read as peculiar travel narratives, foregrounds the bodily dimension of black life, and develops an ambivalent storytelling mode to narrate the experiences of characters who encompass multiple spatialities and subjectivities. Through close analysis of the novels Open City (2011) and Every Day is for the Thief (2007), and essays from the collection Known and Strange Things (2016), principally “Black Body” and “Unmournable Bodies”, I argue that Cole’s work subverts certain tropes in the tradition of black literary cosmopolitanism, as exemplified by James Baldwin, at the same time as Cole self-consciously situates himself within that tradition. It is the insistence on the black body as site of publicity at once desirable and vulnerable, to paraphrase Butler, that allows Cole to make these interventions. A tentative critical consensus on Cole’s work has begun to emerge: his oeuvre is read alongside a cohort of contemporary African and black diasporic writers whose works navigate the tenuous boundary between Western centers and peripheral Africa. It is not my intention in this dissertation to argue against those readings, but rather to offer the concept of precarity as productive framework that allows for readings that other spatio-temporal frameworks may occlude.

This dissertation examines urban walking in Canada as it deviates from a largely male peripatetic tradition associated with the flâneur. This new incarnation of the walker—differentiated by gender, race, class, and/or sexual orientation—reshapes the urban imaginary and shifts the act of walking from what is generally theorized as an individualistic or simply transgressive act to a relational and transformative practice. While the walkers in this study are diverse, the majority of them are women: writers Dionne Brand, Daphne Marlatt, Régine Robin, Gail Scott, and Lisa Robertson and performance artists Kinga Araya, Stephanie Marshall, and Camille Turner all challenge the dualism inscribed by the dominant (masculine) gaze under the project of modernity that abstracts and objectifies the other. Yet, although sexual difference is often the first step toward rethinking identities and relationships to others and the city, it is not the last. I argue that poet Bud Osborn, the play The Postman, the projects Ogimaa Mikana, [murmur] and Walking With Our Sisters, and community initiatives such as Jane’s Walk, also invite all readers and pedestrians to question the equality, official history and inhabitability of Canadian cities. As these peripatetic works emphasize, how, where and why we choose to walk is a significant commentary on the nature of public space and democracy in contemporary urban Canada. This interdisciplinary study focuses on Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal, cities where there has been not only some of the greatest social and economic change in Canada under neoliberalism but also the greatest concentration of affective, peripatetic practices that react to these changes. The nineteenth-century flâneur’s pursuit of knowledge is no longer adequate to approach the everyday reality of the local and contingent effects of global capitalism. As these walkers reject an oversimplified and romanticized notion of belonging to a city or nation based on normative identity categories, they recognize the vulnerability of others and demand that cities be more than locations of precarity and economic growth. This dissertation critically engages diverse Canadian peripatetic perspectives notably absent in theories of urban walking and extends them in new directions. Although the topic of walking suggests an anthropocentrism that contradicts the turn to posthumanism in literary and cultural studies, the walkers in this study open the peripatetic up to non-anthropocentric notions as the autonomous subject of liberal individualism often associated with the male urban walking tradition is displaced by a new focus on the interdependent, affective relation of self and city and on attending to others, to the care of and responsibility for others and the city.

This thesis focuses on the possibilities of precarity as a perspective in the field of literary studies in order to analyse how insecurity is portrayed in literature. Sweden has a great tradition of proletarian literature, but researchers in the neoliberal era find it problematic to understand the emancipating aspects of the new proletarian literature that does not focus on collective movement and articulated emancipation. This thesis explores the possibilities of precarity as a perspective for analysing how literature narrated through an individual and passive perspective can work as a social critique. The analysis focuses on the novels Kärlekens Antarktis [The Antarctica of Love] by Sara Stridsberg and De afghanska sönerna [The Afghan Sons] by Elin Persson and tries to answer questions about how these novels portray precarity and how the perspective of precarity enables an understanding of how the novels work as social criticism. The thesis mostly uses theories by Judith Butler and Isabell Lorey, and the analysis uses a comparative method in combination with a reading that focuses on the thematics of precarity. This is disposed in connection to Lorey’s three dimensions of precarity – precariousness, precarity, and governmental precarization. The analysis results in an understanding of how these kinds of novels can capture the biopolitical perspective, where politics and life emerge. The reading’s focus on the aspect of the body, followed by the hierarchical and societal aspects, shows how the novels’ individual perspectives can have collective tendencies in connection to the reader’s ability to feel solidarity with the characters.

Esta tesis analiza las transformaciones del campo intelectual español en la década inmediatamente posterior al crack financiero que a nivel mundial se dio en 2008, para ponerlo en relación con el surgimiento de una experiencia de la precariedad ―y su correspondiente exploración filosófica― que ha conllevado, según se propone, la aparición de nuevas voces intelectuales que vehiculizan un pensar vulnerable. Para ello, se dedican los dos primeros capítulos a examinar, en primer lugar, la reordenación sociológica que el ámbito cultural pudo contemplar a partir de la muerte de Franco y la gestación de una cultura dominante que se da en llamar “socio-liberal”, en la que la empresa periodística de El País, las políticas culturales del PSOE y los agentes y editoriales afines lograron polarizar el campo asentándose como autoridad democrática. En segundo lugar, se recorren algunas de las consecuencias más inmediatas de la crisis económica en las formas de producción, difusión y consumo culturales en esferas concretas como la universidad, la gestión estatal de los presupuestos dedicados a cultura, el ámbito periodístico o el papel de la revolución digital en los modos de leer y compartir información. Igualmente, se atiende a los debates ideológicos de la izquierda española en la última década, especialmente aquellos que tienen que ver con la reapertura de algunas cuestiones que habían sido anteriormente desplazadas a un segundo plano, como la pregunta sobre la condición democrática y sobre el sistema capitalista en su forma actual de existir; dos cuestiones que han generado, en el panorama intelectual del país, una clara fisura ―no sólo generacional― entre posiciones socialdemócratas y otras más radicales o imaginativas. Por ello, también se dedican unas páginas a observar las reacciones de algunas de las figuras intelectuales más destacadas de las décadas anteriores en el nuevo escenario mediático, político y social. El tercer capítulo explora el horizonte conceptual y filosófico de la precariedad que ha ido elaborándose recientemente a partir de las propuestas teóricas de pensadores internacionales (Butler, Lorey, Standing, etc.) y nacionales (Garcés, Rendueles, Pérez Orozco, López Gil, etc.). Igualmente se presta atención a nociones periféricas de este campo semántico como las de “cuidados”, “sostenibilidad de la vida”, “(pro)común” o “bienes comunes”, entre otros. Además, se propone un acercamiento a diversos modos de praxis política y cultural que han surgido en los últimos años en forma de redes de sostenimiento, movimientos y colectivos, como la PAH, el 15M o Fundación de los Comunes, respectivamente. Los últimos capítulos parten de la pregunta sobre las posibilidades de la escritura (ensayística) para vehiculizar un pensar vulnerable, en un campo cultural cada vez más indiferenciado de las lógicas mercantiles y que, por acción y efecto del nuevo entorno digital, está substituyendo el predominio del paradigma lineal de narración textual por el mapeo, lo audiovisual y el hiperlink. En este sentido, primero se dedica un capítulo a reflexionar sobre la potencialidad del género del ensayo, mientras que el último aborda algunas de las prácticas ensayísticas actuales que podemos identificar como poéticas de la vulnerabilidad y que se proponen poner su escritura reflexiva al servicio de una diversidad de experiencias precarias, como el desahucio, la falta o temporalidad del empleo, la especificidad del trabajo cultural como laboratorio de explotación contemporánea, la enfermedad, el suicidio o la maternidad. A través de ensayos de escritores como Remedios Zafra, Marta Sanz, Javier López Alós, Cristina Fallarás, Santiago López Petit o Jorge Moruno, sostenemos que en estas poéticas se pone en juego una nueva figura de intelectual que explora modos de ejercer una razón pública más allá de las tradicionales lógicas de distinción o jerarquización cultural y epistemológica.
This thesis dissertation examines the transformations of the Spanish intellectual field in the decade after the financial crack of 2008, and the emergence of an experience of precariousness - and its corresponding philosophical exploration. I propose that this transformation entailed the rise of new intellectual voices that convey what we can call a vulnerable thinking. To this aim, this dissertation is divided in two different parts. The first two chapters are dedicated to analyzing the sociological reorganization that the cultural field after the death of Franco and the gestation of a dominant culture that may be called "socio-liberal”. This culture was articulated around the newspaper El País, in alliance with the PSOE’s cultural policies and other related agents and publishers, and it polarized the intellectual field, managing to establish itself as a “democratic authority”. Secondly, this work examines some of the most immediate consequences of the economic crisis in cultural production and circulation that can be noticed in specific areas such as the university, the state management of budgets, the journalistic field or the role of the digital revolution in the ways of reading and sharing information. The third chapter explores the conceptual and philosophical horizon of precariousness that has been recently developed from theoretical perspectives by some thinkers, both international (Butler, Lorey, Standing, etc.) and national (Garcés, Rendueles, Pérez Orozco, López Gil, etc.). Also, peripheral notions related to this semantic field are addressed, such as “care”, “sustainability of life” or “commons”, among others. In addition, this work proposes an approach to various ways of political and cultural praxis that have emerged in recent years in a wide diversity of modes, like structures of mutual support, movements and collectives, such as PAH, 15M or “Fundación de los Comunes”, respectively. The fourth chapter is devoted to reflecting on the potential of the essay genre, while the last one deals with some of the current essay practices that I propose to think as conveying a “poetics of vulnerability”. These essays propose to put their reflexive writing at the service of a diversity of precarious experiences, such as eviction, lack or temporary employment, the specificity of cultural work as a laboratory for contemporary exploitation, illness or maternity. Through them, written by thinkers such as Zafra Remedies, Marta Sanz, Javier López Alós, Cristina Fallarás, Santiago López Petit or Jorge Moruno, we maintain that in these poetics a new intellectual figure is put into play. One that explores ways of exercising a public reason beyond the traditional logics of cultural or epistemological hierarchy or distinction.

This chapter examines the concept of precariousness in work in relation to income and labour market polarization. Although there is growing interest in the separate but related notion of precarity in human geography, economic and labour geographers have engaged less with the literature on precarious work and the decline of the standard employment relation. This chapter provides a brief overview of how precarious employment is understood, before turning to focus on two particular dimensions: the role of labour market intermediaries, and the challenges of regulation in an era of flexible work.

This introductory chapter develops an original framework to explain why unions are more or less successful in containing the spread of precarious work. It argues that employment precarity is both an outcome of and a central contributing factor to a mutually reinforcing feedback relationship between labour market, welfare state, and collective bargaining institutions; worker identity and identification; and employer and union strategies. This framework builds on academic discussions of institutional change, dualism, and precarious work from three broad research traditions: comparative political economy, critical sociology, and comparative employment relations. The chapter reviews this literature, outlines the framework, and discusses the chapter findings in the book with reference to the framework.

This book explores an archive of modernist literature that conceives survival as a collective enterprise linking lives across boundaries of race, time, class, species, gender, and sexuality. As social Darwinism promoted a selfish, competitive, and combatively individualistic understanding of survival, the four modernists examined here countered by imagining how postures of precarity, vulnerability, and receptivity can breed pleasurably and environmentally sustainable modes of interdependent survival. These modes prove particularly vital and appealing to queer bodies, desires, and intimacies deemed unfit, abnormal, or unproductive by heterosexist ideologies. Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” opposes “survival of the fittest” doctrines and Progressive-era masculinity with a feminist-inspired cultivation of ecological humility and interspecies collaboration. Oscar Wilde develops an autobiographical form that expresses collective subjectivity in De Profundis, an epistolary testament to the constitutive role of suffering in queer community formation. E. M. Forster imagines, in Howards End, how queer ideas and intimacies survive courtesy of invitations that awaken both inviters and invitees to unexpected relational possibilities freed from conventional timelines of development and realization. In Forster’s A Passage to India, the pursuit of “queer invitations” models an evolutionary succession defined by careful attention to creaturely inheritance and by ethical responses to the countless lives, including those obfuscated by imperial privilege, required for the successful survival of any individual life. Finally, Willa Cather’s short and long fiction, including “Consequences,” Lucy Gayheart, and The Professor’s House, argues for suicide as a way of life as it transforms the impulse to throw life away into an ethical alternative to the greedy logics of capitalism.