Living Labor: Fiction, Film, and Precarious Work

For much of the twentieth-century, the U.S. working class was personified by a white, male, hard-hat wearing industrial worker. In the age of globalization, however, other narratives about the work and workers have emerged. Living Labor examines these stories and, in the process, offers a new reading of American fiction and film through the lens of precarious work. It argues that since about 1980, novelists and filmmakers--including Russell Banks, Helena Viramontes, Karen Tei Yamashita, Francisco Goldman, David Riker, Ramin Bahrani, Clint Eastwood, Courtney Hunt, and Ryan Coogler--have produced narratives that recount the demise of the predominately white, industrial working class, and the tentative and unfinished emergence of a new, much more diverse working population. In bringing together stories of work that are also stories of race, ethnicity, gender, and colonialism, Living Labor challenges the often-assumed division between class and identity politics.