“Precarity is everywhere today”, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu announced in a lecture in 1997 (qtd. in Springveld 26). “[P]recarity is not a passing or episodic condition, but a new form of regulation that distinguishes this historical time”, American philosopher Judith Butler writes in her foreword to German political theorist Isabell Lorey’s study State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious (2015). In a similar vein, American anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, in The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015), asks: “What if […] precarity is the condition of our time – or, to put it another way, what if our time is ripe for sensing precarity?” (20). Finally, according to British economist Anthony B. Atkinson, “poverty is one of the two great challenges facing the world as a whole today, along with climate change” (1). This list of prominent voices from different academic disciplines clearly testifies to the centrality of poverty and precarity for our time.
Poverty and precarity are among the most pressing social issues of our day and their potential impact on political (in)stability and social cohesion has become the subject of intense political debate in many societies. The last two decades have seen an ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor across the globe as well as an exponential growth in the number of forcibly displaced persons. In 2019, almost a fourth of the world’s population lived in poverty (undp, “Global”), with global income and wealth inequality steadily increasing since 1980,1 and 79.5 million people worldwide had been forced to leave their homes by the end of 2019 (unhcr). It has been argued that “it is the poorest who are, and will be, hit earliest and hardest” by the global climate crisis and the damage from climate change (Stern 232). Of course, poverty and precarity can take many shapes and have many different causes. At the time of
The last two decades have also seen a steady growth of fictional and non-fictional representations of disenfranchised groups and individuals as well as an intensification of research into the visual and narrative forms of these representations. The contributions to this volume address conceptualisations of poverty and precarity from the perspective of literary and cultural studies as well as linguistics and investigate the ethics and aesthetics of representing poverty and precarity across the postcolonial world. While there is no doubt that poverty reduction and the amelioration of precarious lives require political measures, scholars agree that representations impact on “the public imagination or ‘social imaginary’, that is, the knowledge, values, attitudes and emotions with which societies and individuals perceive poverty and take measures against it” (Korte and Zipp 2). Of course, as Gareth Griffiths reminds us, this social or cultural imaginary has always been the foundation upon which “both oppressor and oppressed” have constructed their identity and social environment (9). Representations of poor and precarious lives suffering from deprivation, insecurity, violence, and social and political exclusion thus might also serve the purpose or have the effect of stabilising prejudices against the objects of representation, furthering their exclusion and silencing, eliciting no response other than sympathy or compassion on the part of the listener. At the same time, socio-political change requires an act of the imagination to envisage alternative futures, to assume responsibility and spur action. As Griffiths has pointed out: “Imagination allows human beings to conceive of a reality different from that which they are experiencing and to understand their world as part of a changeable past and future. The exercise of this power to imagine allows human beings to manipulate their world in a unique way” (9).2
The “new poverty studies” (Christ) and the “turn to precarity” (Morrison) are firmly embedded in ethical criticism analysing the frameworks of representation that facilitate or disavow the affective and ethical responses to precarious subjects. Originally concerns of social studies and economics, poverty and precarity have increasingly been discussed in literary and cultural studies in recent years. This growing interest can be attributed not only to the mediatised awareness of the emergence of new forms of precarity, subalternity and
Above all, the recent surge of poverty and precarity studies might be related to a shift in definitions that links them more closely to questions of justice and human rights. For many years, poverty was conceived of primarily in monetary terms of income and consumption;4 more recently, social scientists such as Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum have argued that poverty is linked with deprivation of social capabilities that limits people’s freedom to pursue their goals in life and to participate fully in society. This approach, which is also endorsed by the United Nations Development Programme, implies that poverty must be understood “not only […] as (relative) material deprivation, but also as encompassing socio-cultural exclusion and a lack of agency, opportunities and access (to knowledge, traditions, rights and capabilities)”, as Barbara Korte and Georg Zipp summarise in their study Poverty in Contemporary Literature (2).
Precarity5 is a term widely used in recent years by political and social scientists in the context of growing insecurity within labour markets and contingent employment, also referred to as “precaritization”,6 which according to Guy Standing is leading to the emergence of “a new dangerous class”, the “precariat” (cf. During). Scholars in the humanities draw especially on Judith Butler’s conceptualisation of precariousness and precarity in her studies Precarious
Of course, poverty and precarity are contested terms and have different meanings in different parts of the world, which is a challenge this collection of essays with its focus on the postcolonial world faces. Butler’s humanist ethics of vulnerability and cohabitation has been charged with substituting “abstract humanity for historical humanity” (Danewid 1683) and turning “questions of responsibility, guilt, restitution, repentance and structural reform into matters of empathy, generosity, and hospitality” (1675), resulting in “a politics of pity rather than justice” (1681). At the same time, her conceptualisation of precarity challenges us to explore changing and historically contingent practices and structures that enhance vulnerability in particular times and places. It is no doubt essential, as Jens Elze argues, “to speak of a distinctive, rather than an all-encompassing condition of precarity, especially in a postcolonial context, as colonial domination partly enabled the earlier social compromises in the West and neocolonial exploitation still mitigates some effects of neoliberal accumulation through maintaining widespread consumption” (27).
In literary and cultural studies, inquiries into representations of poverty and precarity are closely tied to the ethical and social turns in criticism and informed by the current debate about the legacies of poststructuralism, in particular the tension between materiality and signifying practices.
Gavin Jones’s American Hungers is considered a foundational text in the field and the first to make poverty the “organizing frame” (149) of inquiry into literature. By making poverty his principal category of inquiry, he circumvents the complex relationship between poverty and social class, arguing that “class analysis often fails to focus sharply on what poverty means as a social category” (8). He defines poverty as “a specific state of social being, defined by its socioeconomic suffering” (3) and thus characterised by both the “materiality of need” and “the nonmaterial areas of psychology, emotion and culture” (3), positing a “dialectical relationship between the material and the discursive” (4) and poverty as a category of social being marked by in-betweenness. “At once outside the discourse of identity altogether, in the realms of social structure, institutional organization, and material conditions, poverty is clearly connected to the cultural questions of power, difference, and signifying practice that animate any discussion of social marginalization in its most basic and universal sense”, he already argued in his 2003 article on “Poverty and the Limits of Literary Criticism” (778), adding as further evidence “how socioeconomic factors have gone hand in hand with culturally based factors of racism and sexism throughout American history” (778).
In terms of scholarship, precarity has become the most productive category, generating a growing corpus of research not only in the social and political sciences but also in literary and cultural studies. At the time of writing, the academic database Project Muse connects to more than 3,800 articles and books containing the keyword “precarity”, and the term has meanwhile also been included in standard English dictionaries (Buchanan). In literary and cultural studies, investigations under the heading “precarity” or “precariousness” range
The use of the concept of precarity is by no means uncontested. As Buchanan notes, precarity “is an expansive concept, used to apply to a wide variety of situations in which people feel precarious”. Its rapid spread has been seen to carry the danger of its decaying into an “empty buzzword”, “a trendy thing to say to forestall rather than develop analyses” (Horning).14 Critics usually target the concept’s predominance in Western discourse and its tendency towards universalising and thus obscuring historically specific contexts and meanings,15 which takes us back to the already stated requirement to always historicise and pay due attention to the specificities of context. Defenders of the concept have foregrounded its “reformist and critical dimension” (Lemke, Inequality 17); if conceptualised in a more dynamic sense rather than as a static condition of suffering, precarity opens up moments of resistance and prefigures alternative imaginaries that contest the condition of precarity and might hold the possibility for political mobilisation (cf. Butler, “Foreword”, and Lorey). Whether responses to representations of precarious lives ultimately reinforce precarity or translate into transformative politics emerges from the specific interaction of individual texts and visual artefacts and their readings.16 Scholars in the field of literary and cultural studies have readily embraced the framework of precarity for their analyses of representations of disenfranchised groups and individuals in literature and the visual arts; 2018 also saw the foundation of the international network “Challenging Precarity: A Global Network” (cf. Wilson et al. 443).
[t]he operational plasticity of precarity as a theoretical concept of literary and cultural analysis allows for emerging synthesis with other modes of methodological enquiry such as subaltern, feminist, postcolonial,
environmental, or disability studies which, in turn, have traditionally addressed – and still do address – issues that are framed by familiar categories of analysis such as race, class, or gender, in areas of research that explore unequal power relations. (440).
There is methodological affinity in particular between poverty and precarity studies and postcolonial studies, given that the latter field has long been concerned with conceptualisations and analyses of marginalisation and subalternity, with the asymmetry of discursive power between the observer and the observed, with constructions of identity and alterity and processes of othering, as well as with questions of voice and agency. The suitability of a postcolonial framework for the inquiry into representations of poverty and precarity is not uncontested: While During sees precarity studies as compatible with subaltern studies (84) and argues that “postcolonialism retain[ing] a connection to the thematics of anxiety, dislocation, conceptual instability, uneasiness […] can today be used to think the condition of precarity” (76), Kennedy (“Urban”; Narratives 26–27, 217–218) addresses the failure of postcolonial critics to consider the material realities and historical roots of poverty, precarity and inequality.
While poverty and precarity are global phenomena, their representation in literature and other fictional and non-fictional media, we argue, can be approached by using the established frameworks of postcolonial studies. Since the representational appropriation of disenfranchised groups with usually limited access to self-representation poses both an ethical and an aesthetic challenge, investigations therefore address the power of and over representations, questions of agency and voice (speaking for/about/as the other), of authenticity and essentialisms, of marginalisation and subalternity, including material conditions and the legacies of a long history of colonisation with its concomitant history of impoverishment and subjugation. Scholars in the field of poverty studies have amply commented on the pitfalls resulting from the asymmetries of power between those represented and those representing (cf. Korte and Zipp 3–5, 12–15; Christ 36–47; Lemke, Inequality 6–9). To give but a few examples, representations of precarious lives can serve to make visible marginalised groups and thus raise awareness and empathy, or they can confirm stereotypes of diverse kinds. They can call for political action or merely serve the emotional needs of readers. They can spectacularise those represented into passive victims and objects of the voyeuristic gaze or emphasise their agency and resilience. Othering can work to stabilise the boundaries between those represented and those representing, but it can also serve to
With regard to the function of representations of poverty in literature – and this holds true for both other media of representation and representations of precarious lives more generally –, Jones has argued that “[l]iterature reveals how poverty is established, defined, and understood in discourse, as a psychological and cultural problem that depends fundamentally on the language used to describe it” (American 4). Much therefore depends on the way such narratives are framed or configured. “The frame”, Judith Butler has pointed out, “does not simply exhibit reality, but actively participates in a strategy of containment, selectively producing and enforcing what will count as reality” (Frames xiii). Ethics and aesthetics are, of course, closely entangled. A novel’s formal properties, such as mode, perspective or voice, a film’s camera work and mise-en-scène, and a newspaper article’s phrasing frame readers’ and viewers’ affective responses towards the lives represented, which may range from empathy to revulsion or detachment, and impact their attitudes towards them. Scholars exploring representations of poverty and precarity are therefore required to critically reflect their own (privileged) position of listening and speaking and to constantly revise their epistemic frames. This echoes the warning against Western intellectuals’ assumed capability to represent the other, the kind of imperialist knowledge production that was already famously criticised by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: “The clearest available example of such epistemic violence is the remotely orchestrated, far-flung, and heterogeneous project to constitute the colonial subject as Other. This project is also the asymmetrical obliteration of the trace of that Other in its precarious Subjectivity” (280).
The contributions to this volume investigate conceptualisations of poverty and precarity from the perspective of literary and cultural studies as well as linguistics and explore the ethics and aesthetics of representing poverty and precarity in the work of writers and artists from regions as diverse as India and Australia, Britain and the United States, Uganda, Nigeria, South Africa, and the Caribbean. Central, and partly overlapping, concerns, which form the five thematic clusters of this volume, are the ways in which representations of poverty and precarity are impacted by different media and genres, the ways in which poverty and precarity intersect with race, class and gender, institutional frameworks of publishing and their impact on the writers and stories published, environmental precarity in local and global perspective, and, finally, the framing of the representation of refugees and migrants as precarious subjects in fictional and non-fictional accounts.
The present volume is a selection of papers presented at the annual conference of the Association for Anglophone Postcolonial Studies/Gesellschaft für
We would like to conclude by commemorating our contributor, friend and colleague Geoffrey V. Davis, who passed away in November 2018. A dedicated pioneer in the field of postcolonial studies, he was one of the founders of the Association for the Study of the New Literatures in English (gnel/asnel), now gaps, in 1989 and co-editor of the Cross/Cultures series, in which this volume appears, not to mention his roles as Chair of both the European and the international branches of the Association of Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (eaclals, aclals) and as co-editor of matatu: Journal for African Culture and Society. We retain fond memories of numerous meetings with Geoff Davis at conferences or board meetings over the decades. In particular, we remember listening to his presentation at our conference, captivated by the force and energy of his delivery and the story, meticulously researched and exciting at the same time, he told us about his encounter with members of the Budhan Theatre in a slum on the outskirts of Ahmedabad in Gujarat, India. We sadly miss him.
Overview
The contributions in Part 1 highlight in particular the specific possibilities that different genres and media open up for representing poverty and for engaging with public discourses on precarious lives. clelia clini argues that a distinct (neo)orientalist stance has emerged in a number of Western and Indian films produced in the course of the last few years. Instead of unfolding a potential for social and political criticism, which one might expect in recent representations of poverty, the films analysed by Clini tend to depict slums primarily as a spectacle that supports ‘Dark India’ narratives (e.g. Slumdog Millionaire (2008) and Lion (2016)); alternatively, some films (Eat, Pray, Love (2010) and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011)) treat poverty as a ‘normalised’ ingredient of a supposedly authentic image of India. The other two films discussed by her – Peepli Live (2010) and Dhobi Ghat (2011) – are examples of Hindi cinema that, according to Clini, provide a somewhat more complex response to the political dimension of precarity, even if these movies are likely to be marketed as ‘Dark India’ narratives, which have proved to be appealing to a socially privileged, global audience.
In her article on Aboriginal short story cycles, dorothee klein likewise examines literary voices that seek to undermine hegemonic accounts of precarious living conditions. While public discourse in Australia is still likely to perpetuate fairly homogeneous accounts of the causes and consequences of Indigenous poverty, the short story cycles discussed by Klein first and foremost stress the heterogeneity of precarious lives in contemporary Australia. In her analysis of selected short stories from Tara June Winch’s Swallow the Air (2006), Klein, for instance, argues that these narratives are informed by the genre of the bildungsroman and trace a life trajectory that is undeniably shaped by loss, by the experience of precarious living conditions and the protagonist’s exposure to domestic violence. Still, this short story cycle also provides room for a development from what Klein refers to as a ‘crisis of nonrelation’ towards a sense of belonging.
Part 2 comprises four contributions that focus especially on intersectional approaches in discussions of poverty and precarity. In her article on the short story collection Common People (2017) by Australian Indigenous author Tony Birch, sue kossew shows how these stories challenge preconceptions that are all too often perpetuated in hegemonic discourses; for instance, a foregrounding of working-class and underclass realities serves to undermine the myth of a classless society. Presenting precarity as a result of institutional failure, stressing the resilience of the marginalised, and featuring precarious individuals as story-tellers are some of the strategies Kossew identifies as characteristics of Birch’s attempt to represent poverty as a heterogenous phenomenon. Kossew shows that the emphasis on survival and even hope in some of Birch’s stories is complemented by a succinct critique of condescending acts of charity that reiterate racist thought patterns.
maryam mirza discusses Sunjeev Sahota’s The Year of the Runaways (2015) from an intersectional angle, examining primarily how female agency, religious faith, and the impact of (patriarchal) family structures are intertwined in the lives of the novel’s two female protagonists. According to Mirza, the
The concept of a ‘black male underclass’ is at the centre of anna lienen’s contribution. She compares representations of marginalised male identities in two contemporary British novels – Alex Wheatle’s East of Acre Lane (2001) and Stephen Kelman’s Pigeon English (2011) – and reaches the conclusion that the two authors imagine the black male underclass in radically different ways: Wheatle explores why marginalised people become involved in crime and stresses the potential effects of police violence by choosing the perspective of a character who commits crimes. Kelman’s narrative, by contrast, privileges the point of view of an 11-year-old victim of and witness to crime and essentially ends up reproducing binary oppositions of good and evil, as Lienen shows in her analysis. She emphasises that the different perspectives that are chosen in the two novels play a vital role for articulating two very different ideological positions.
julia hoydis revisits a classic of nineteenth-century literature, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), i.e., a novel that, as various postcolonial critics have shown, links precarity with matters of race and class in its depiction of the protagonist Heathcliff. The novel The Lost Child (2015) by Black British writer Caryl Phillips is among those contemporary literary responses to Brontë’s novel that take their cue from the mystery surrounding Heathcliff’s background in the Victorian text. Hoydis’ comparative analysis moves from a reading of Wuthering Heights that examines the nexus of race, class and gender in this particular novel to an intertextual interpretation of Phillips’ The Lost Child. Hoydis discusses specifically the effects resulting from the juxtaposition of various plotlines in The Lost Child: a narrative about Heathcliff’s origin story, a segment focussing on Emily Brontë, and a plotline set in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century that revolves around homelessness, unemployment, prostitution, and mental instability.
The two contributions in Part 3 shift the focus from close readings of individual literary texts to an exploration of the impact social and institutional frameworks and specifically opportunities for publishing one’s works have on representations of poverty and precarity. susan nalugwa kiguli provides an account of the agenda and of selected activities of femrite, the non-profit Women Writers Association founded in Uganda in 1996. She points out that femrite has primarily aimed at fostering networks and at offering female
While Kiguli focuses on the voices of (women) writers in Uganda, sule emmanuel egya widens the scope and addresses the role of African writers in the context of globalisation. He deplores the fact that a growing number of African authors are leaving their countries of origin to benefit from the better publishing conditions in Europe or North America. According to Egya, the pronounced ‘migration impulse’, which can be noticed since the 1990s, means that African literature in European languages today looks very different from its post-independence beginnings, when authors saw the necessity of writing from Africa and not just about Africa. Today, Egya argues, African literature increasingly becomes diasporic literature, which tends to present African countries from a certain distance and in ways that seek to cater to the expectations of non-African readers. These ‘extroverted’ literary texts are also likely to imagine poverty and precarity through a diasporic lens, often reflecting Western/metropolitan discourses and preconceptions.
Environmental precarity, which is addressed in the articles in Part 4, is a facet of precarity that has become more and more prominent in recent years, as the awareness of the dangers associated with global warming has increased substantially. malcolm sen discusses the consequences climate change already has and is bound to have in the near future in one particular region of the world: the Sundarban islands in the Bay of Bengal, whose inhabitants have a long history of destitution and of being marginalised by the state and who now face the imminent loss of their livelihood. In his article, which stresses the interdependence of the global and the local, Sen pays attention to the past, the geography, the economic background, and the ecology of the Sundarbans, all of which are vital to understanding the reality of a region where human subsistence is apparently at odds with an ethics of conservationism that has been imposed on the people in the Sundarbans by turning the area into a unesco World Heritage site in 1987.
jan rupp focuses on another region of the world where the interdependence of the local and the global is particularly tangible. He argues that environmental precarity is a major theme in Anglophone Caribbean literature, citing texts
The final four contributions (in Part 5) examine representations of refugees and immigrants. j.u. jacobs discusses two narratives from South Africa about refugees from southern Sudan (Aher Arop Bol’s The Lost Boy, 2009) and Somalia (Jonny Steinberg’s A Man of Good Hope, 2014). The two texts differ very much in terms of authorship: The Lost Boy is a memoir in which the author looks back on his childhood during the Second Civil War in Sudan in the 1980s, when he was among the more than 20,000 orphaned Dinka and Nuer children. A Man of Good Hope, which tells the story of a boy’s flight from Mogadishu, by contrast, is an example of a mediated, collaborative life narrative, which is based on interviews with the former refugee as well as on further sources. Jacobs argues that both accounts of refugee experience have to be understood as the outcome of complex processes of meaning-making, which show the impact of narrative patterns, motifs, and tropes structured around the notions of home and ‘unhoming’.
julian wacker’s analysis of Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers (2016) shows how this particular ‘Afropolitan’ novel revisits and problematises the concept of the American Dream, which functions as a pull factor for the protagonists’ migration from Cameroon to New York and which is shown to lead to precarious lives. Wacker stresses the timeliness of both Mbue’s focus on the significance of citizenship and the writer’s exploration of the impact the American neo-liberal economic system has on a global scale. He argues that the over-use of dream tropes in Behold the Dreamers even serves to present the American Dream as a highly ambivalent notion for those American citizens whose alleged financial security was compromised by the 2008 financial crisis. Still, the Cameroonian migrants in Mbue’s novel ultimately simply seem to ‘translocate’ the American Dream upon their return to their home country.
Within the theoretical framework of Critical Discourse Analysis, andreas musolff examines a facet of racist hate speech: occurrences of dehumanising metaphors referring to immigrants as ‘social parasites’ in British media discourses. In his corpus-based analysis, he compares data from three different types of sources: firstly, mainstream UK newspapers and magazines, secondly,
In the last article, janet m. wilson examines three refugee narratives: Sunjeev Sahota’s novel of migration The Year of the Runaways (2015), Refugee Tales (2016), a collection of stories edited by David Herd and Anna Pincus, which is the result of a collaboration involving refugees, people working with them, and British authors, and Abu Bakr Khaal’s semi-autobiographical novel African Titanics, which traces the flight of a group of people from Eritrea to Europe and combines different modes of representation (e.g. songs and oral testimony). In her analysis of these works, Wilson addresses complex questions regarding the ethics of representation and the danger of commodifying precarity raised by these three texts, which exemplify types of refugee narratives that are increasingly common and are likely to influence the public perception of refugees and asylum seekers and of a particular type of precarity.
Poverty and inequality are linked, but they are not the same: inequality is a matter of unequal distribution of wealth and income and concomitant social capital. According to the “Human Development Report 2019”, published by the United Nations Development Programme, global income and wealth inequality has been increasing since 1980, as a result in particular of “the growing inequality of asset return rates, as the returns on financial assets, disproportionately owned by the wealthy, increased.” (132).
See also Melissa Kennedy on the relevance of the imaginary to neoliberal critique, in Narratives of Inequality: Postcolonial Literary Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, p. 218.
Cf., e.g., Roy and Crane, Harris and Nowicki (388–389), Kennedy (“Postcolonial” 54–56) and Kennedy (Narratives 6).
For a variety of definitions and measurements of poverty, see chapters 2 and 3 in Atkinson. Atkinson’s study was published posthumously and has remained in part a fragment. See also Lister, chapters 1 and 2, and Pete Alcock, chapters 5 and 6.
For the etymology of the term, see Lemke (Inequality 14) and Elze (24, 66–67).
See, e.g. Lorey, according to whom precaritisation is “a technique of governing [i.e., also of individual self-government] that is in the process of being normalized” in the neoliberal present (66); cf., in the same vein, Harris and Nowicki, who also point out that their self-precaritisation is even glamourised by young urban middle-class Londoners (389).
For surveys of poverty research in the humanities, see Christ; with a focus on American Studies, Lemke “Facing Poverty”, “Poverty and Class Studies” and Inequality, Poverty, and Precarity (esp. 6–9); with a focus on British Studies, Korte “Dealing with Deprivation”.
On class, see Lemke (“Poverty”) and Butter/Schinko.
Extensive research has been submitted by Sieglinde Lemke in the field of North American Studies and Barbara Korte in the field of British Studies. See especially Lemke’s 2016 study Inequality, Poverty and Precarity in Contemporary American Culture, and Barbara Korte and Georg Zipp’s 2014 study Poverty in Contemporary Literature: Themes and Figurations on the British Book Market, as well as the collections of essays Narrating Poverty and Precarity in Britain, edited by Barbara Korte and Frédéric Regard (2014) and Narrating Precariousness: Media, Modes, Ethics, also edited by Barbara Korte and Frédéric Regard (2014). For a more detailed account of the “new poverty studies”, cf. Barbara Schmidt-Haberkamp, “Introduction”, Representing Poverty in the Anglophone Postcolonial World, edited by Verena Jain-Warden and Barbara Schmidt-Haberkamp (2021).
On this diagnosis, see already Korte (“Indigent” 294, 306 n4). While there are quite a number of critical articles that explore representations of poverty in selected texts from the postcolonial world, there are only few book-length studies; examples include Nandi with a focus on India, Butale with a focus on Southern Africa, and Dalcastagnè with a focus on Brazil.
Kennedy’s 2017 monograph Narratives of Inequality: Postcolonial Literary Economics explores “fictional portrayals of poverty and inequality” (211); see, e.g., also Kennedy (“Postcolonial”).
Cf., e.g., the collections of essays edited by Bartels et al., Postcolonial Justice (2017), and Griffiths and Mead, The Social Work of Narrative: Human Rights and the Cultural Imaginary (2018).
Cf. Lemke for a survey of the pioneers in precarity studies in the social and political sciences (Inequality 15–18) and for a list of scholars from a variety of academic disciplines (169 n3).
For an engagement with this criticism, cf. Nyong’o, who quotes Horning.
Trenchant criticism of the concept of precarity as an analytical tool is, for example, voiced by political scientists Samid Suliman and Heloise Weber.
On the ethics and aesthetics of representing precarity, cf. Schmidt-Haberkamp (“Imagining”, forthcoming).
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