Suchergebnisse

This article compares cultural production about 1980s working-class industrial England with that of contemporary, middle-class rural Ireland in order to identify aesthetic through lines in the portrayal of social reproductive violence across both early- and later-stage neoliberalism. It argues that, despite their differences in setting and demographic, novels by Pat Barker and Mike McCormack use peripheral political experience to show the bodies of women bearing the brunt of late capitalism's horrors. Barker's Union Street (1982) serves as an early warning of the neoliberal consensus-to-come, bringing to life the geographic peripheralisation that would accompany deindustrialisation. It portrays the conflicted dynamic between childhood and capital, also anticipating the ways in which care work would increasingly be externalised onto women in the latter half of the twentieth century and beyond. This overlaps with the 1987 film Rita, Sue and Bob Too's portrayal of childhood sexual vulnerability, as well as Letter to Brezhnev (1985) and its rendering of capitalism's consumption of women. Instead of the realism for which these films are known, Union Street uses gothic modes and the motif of vomiting in 'irrealist' fashion. So too, Mike McCormack's Mayo-set 2016 novel Solar Bones employs spectrality, as well as ideas of contamination, to evoke the damage wrought by a now-entrenched neoliberalism as it imperils the middle classes. The novel's recognition of female social reproductive labour is more oblique, but women are again shown to be at the coalface of neoliberal violence, their very bodies marshalled to detect and, crucially, resist gendered precarity. In this, I draw parallel with the Dundalk-set film Kissing Candice (2017) , which uses gothic tropes to show rural dispossession writ large through the body of a teenage girl.

In the 1960s, George Lamming and Sylvia Wynter dismissed the highly successful novelist John Hearne, arguing that his work was weakened by its nostalgic focus on the plantocracy. Their assessment shaped scholarly opinion until the present. This chapter departs from Lamming and Wynter by claiming that Hearne's novels offer an importantly nuanced depiction of the middle class as well as an important vision of the Caribbean as part of a hemispheric American culture stretching from North to South America. While suggesting the critically misunderstood value of Hearne, however, the chapter ultimately argues that after his first novel, Hearne's focus on an Afro-creole planter class – depicted with an apparently unconscious nostalgia – constitutes a failure to engage with the region's political present and future.

Nalo Hopkinson's work holds an important place in the newly emerging and widely contested field of Caribbean queer studies. Yet, to date, her contribution has not been fully theorized. Her 2003 novel The Salt Roads evokes a continuum of loving encounters between women, which correspond to Audre Lorde's emphasis on the resources provided by the erotic realm and the radical potentiality of shared connection with an other. Hopkinson's most distinctive intervention, however, comes with her harnessing of racial, sexual and stylistic diversity. The same engagement with generic forms that has hindered critical reception of her work can also be viewed as a tactic through which she inserts a black, female and queer voice. Yet, at the same time as she deploys the genre conventions of speculative fiction, her writing also undermines the politics of empire subtly encoded within much of this oeuvre. Rather than simply providing a Caribbean twist to established genres, Hopkinson's destabilizing of formal distinctions is itself rooted in the creolization emblematic of the Caribbean. The author's assertion that speculative fiction allows her to imagine the impossible therefore signals the close connection between her subversion of genre codes and the sexual and racial expansiveness characteristic of her authorial vision.

Rooted in the movement of disparate peoples and cultures around the globe, both European colonization and the transatlantic slave trade it engendered were infused from the outset by a complex web of competing nostalgias. Colonizers and colonized alike held idealized conceptions of home, which were employed to varying effect in the new lands, shifting and revising as time went by. This variety of nostalgic affiliations led to scenarios where those we might least expect grew to use the nostalgic terminologies of other, seemingly opposing groups. The Caribbean author Paule Marshall makes this proliferation of nostalgic modes clear. The subversive, reflective nostalgia she ultimately champions in her novel The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969) exposes the political resonances of the seemingly personal desire for home, connecting with wider debates about the utility of nostalgia within postcolonial studies.

This dialogic roundtable discussion elaborates the possibilities opened up by the use of social reproduction theory in intersection with world-literary, materialist feminist, queer Marxist and world-systems approaches to literature and culture. In particular, contributors consider how the analysis of social reproduction might illuminate the politics of everyday life, the representational challenges accompanying the banality or ubiquity of women's work, the potential gaps of social reproduction feminism, and the aesthetic challenges accompanying or following from an interest in social reproduction. Topics covered include digital media as foundational operating mode of Hindu nationalism, the sexuality- and race-based exclusions of employment in higher education, Philippine literature as 'reproductive fiction', the Latin American novel vis-à-vis its registration of domestic service, the short story as bellwether for global issues surrounding women's labour, and questions of complicity in the kinds of labour some women and sexual minorities enact for larger authoritarian, patriarchal projects. If women do much of the work of producing the everyday then we must also ask how women might re-make the everyday along more radical, and radically egalitarian lines.