PRECARITY IN CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE AND CULTURE ii PRECARITY IN CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE AND CULTURE Edited by Emily J. Hogg and Peter Simonsen BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 Copyright © Emily J. Hogg and Peter Simonsen and Contributors, 2021 Emily J. Hogg and Peter Simonsen and Contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. x–xi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Jade Barnett Cover image © David Wall / Getty Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-6670-7 ePDF: 978-1-3501-6671-4 eBook: 978-1-3501-6672-1 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www .bloomsbury .com and sign up for our newsletters. CONTENTS List of figures vii List of contributors viii Acknowledgements x INTRODUCTION 1 Emily J. Hogg Part One FEELING Chapter 1 ANXIOUS READING: THE PRECARITY NOVEL AND THE AFFECTIVE CLASS 27 Liam Connell Chapter 2 ANXIETY IN THE PRECARIAT: THE AFFECTS OF CLASS IN JAMES KELMAN’S FICTION 42 Mathies G. Aarhus Chapter 3 PERFORMING PRECARITY: THREATENING THE AUDIENCE IN GARY OWEN’S IPHIGENIA IN SPLOTT 56 Peter Simonsen Part Two BODIES Chapter 4 IMAGINED SOVEREIGNTY: MAPPING AND RESISTING PRECARITY IN INDIRA ALLEGRA’S WOVEN ACCOUNT 75 Marianne Kongerslev Chapter 5 PRECARIOUS BODIES ON THE MOVE, PRECARIOUS BODIES UNDER ATTACK 91 Katharina Pewny and Tessa Vannieuwenhuyze vi Contents Chapter 6 DEATH KNELLS AND DEAD ENDS: LATENT FUTURITY IN MASANDE NTSHANGA’S THE REACTIVE AND MOHALE MASHIGO’S ‘GHOST STRAIN N’ 109 Sophy Kohler Part Three TIME Chapter 7 PERIODIZATION AND PRECARIOUS LABOUR: THE WORK OF GENRE IN LA LA LAND AND SORRY TO BOTHER YOU 127 Alissa G. Karl Chapter 8 SUBSTANCELESS SUBJECTIVITY: FROM PROLETARIANIZATION TO PRECARIZATION IN BRITISH EXPERIMENTAL FICTION 143 Benjamin Kohlmann Chapter 9 THE FUTURE IS A GHOST: PRECARITY, ANTICIPATION AND RETROSPECTION IN ANNELIESE MACKINTOSH’S ‘LIMITED DREAMERS’ AND LEE ROURKE’S VULGAR THINGS 160 Emily J. Hogg Chapter 10 MAKE IT NOW: POETRY, PRECARITY AND SECURITY IN JORIE GRAHAM AND GHAYATH ALMADHOUN 176 Walt Hunter Chapter 11 FINDING TIME IN COMMON: SPECULATIVE FICTION AND THE PRECARIAT IN ROBINSON’S NEW YORK 2140 189 Bryan Yazell Index 203 FIGURES 5.1 Misplaced Women? Project (2009–20). Dedicated to the missing and murdered indigenous women in Canada. Performed by Tanja Ostojić 96 5.2 Misplaced Women? Project (2009–20). ‘Which Colonial Comfort Would You Like to Consume Today?’ Performed by Rhea Ramjohn 99 7.1 Cash in his cubicle in Sorry to Bother You, directed by Boots Riley 128 7.2 Overpass choreography in ‘Another Day of Sun,’ in La La Land, directed by Damien Chazelle 128 CONTRIBUTORS Mathies G. Aarhus is a postdoc in literature at the University of Southern Denmark. His research interests include affect theory, social class and gender in British, American and Scandinavian literature. Liam Connell teaches literature at the University of Brighton. He is the author of Precarious Labour and the Contemporary Novel (2017) and the editor of Literature and Globalization: A Reader (2010). Emily J. Hogg is Associate Professor of contemporary anglophone literature in the Department for the Study of Culture, University of Southern Denmark. Her research focuses on contemporary literature’s social uses in relation to human rights, gender inequality, alcohol and precarity, and has appeared or is forthcoming in English Studies, Textual Practice and Criticism, among other venues. Walt Hunter is Associate Professor of world literature at Clemson University. He is the author of Forms of a World: Contemporary Poetry and the Making of Globalization (2019) and the co-translator, with Lindsay Turner, of Frédéric Neyrat’s Atopias: Manifesto for a Radical Existentialism (2017). Alissa G. Karl is Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York, Brockport. She is the author of Modernism and the Marketplace (2009) and co-editor of Neoliberalism and the Novel (2015), and her work has appeared in venues including Novel, American Literature, Textual Practice and Modern Fiction Studies. Her research investigates the relationships between economics, labour and cultural and literary forms in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Sophy Kohler is a PhD student in the Department for the Study of Culture at the University of Southern Denmark, where she is part of a research group formed around Rita Felski’s Uses of Literature. She has an MA in literature and modernity from the University of Cape Town. Benjamin Kohlmann teaches English literature at the University of Regensburg, Germany. He is the author of two monographs, Committed Styles: Modernism, Politics, and Left-Wing Literature in the 1930s (2014) and Speculative States: British Literature, Institutionality, and the Idea of the State (forthcoming). His most recent articles on the intersections between literature and politics have been published in ELH, PMLA and NOVEL. With Matthew Taunton he has recently co-edited A History of 1930s British Literature (2019). Contributors ix Marianne Kongerslev is Assistant Professor of US literature and cultural studies at Aalborg University, Denmark. She has carried out research on Native American literature, US popular culture, feminisms/gender studies and critical race studies. In 2018, she started researching spite and precarity in US literatures and culture, in a project funded by the Carlsberg Foundation. Katharina Pewny is a Berlin-based yoga teacher with a specialization in inclusive and accessible practice. From 2009 to 2019 she served as Professor of Performance Studies at Ghent University. Her current research interests are the ethics of spirituality and/in movement studies. With Yana Meerzon she edited the collection Dramaturgy of Migration: Staging Multicultural Encounters in Contemporary Theatre (2020). Her anthology on ‘the drama of the precarious’ (Das Drama des Prekären) (2011) was the first study on precarity in theatre and performance within the German-speaking contexts. Peter Simonsen is Professor of European literature at the Department for the Study of Culture, University of Southern Denmark. He has researched, published, taught and disseminated widely in fields such as Wordsworth studies, British romanticism, book history, literary and cultural gerontology, Scandinavian literatures and the welfare state as well as literary studies in the precariat. Tessa Vannieuwenhuyze is a doctoral researcher with a specific interest in the theatrical presence of music performers. Currently she is preparing PhD research on how these musical personae interact with dimensions of precarious identity within our contemporary context of social media performance and new technologies. After studying art history, musicology and theatre studies at Ghent University and the Free University of Berlin, she obtained an advanced master’s degree in literature studies from KU Leuven. She also dramaturgically assists the contemporary operatic performances of multidisciplinary arts company OYSTER and writes for several cultural platforms. Bryan Yazell is an Assistant Professor in the Department for the Study of Culture and the Danish Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Southern Denmark. With assistance from the Danish National Research Foundation (grant no. DNRF127), his research focuses on the various ways that literary sources inform public debates regarding social welfare and migration in the United States. Examples of this work appear in Modern Fiction Studies, The Journal of Transnational American Studies and Configurations.