No Country : working-class writing in the age of globalization / Sonali Perera.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Perera, Sonali, 1971-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Working class writings--History and criticism.

Working class writings.

Working class in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (249 p.)

Place of Publication:

New York, [New York] ; Chichester, [England] : Columbia University Press, 2014.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Can there be a novel of the international working class despite the conditions and constraints of economic globalization? What does it mean to invoke working-class writing as an ethical intervention in an age of comparative advantage and outsourcing? No Country argues for a rethinking of the genre of working-class literature. Sonali Perera expands our understanding of working-class fiction by considering a range of international texts, identifying textual, political, and historical linkages often overlooked by Eurocentric and postcolonial scholarship. Her readings connect the literary radicalism of the 1930's to the feminist recovery projects of the 1970's, and the anticolonial and postcolonial fiction of the 1960's to today's counter globalist struggles, building a new portrait of the twentieth century's global economy and the experiences of the working class within it. Perera considers novels by the Indian anticolonial writer Mulk Raj Anand; the American proletarian writer Tillie Olsen; Sri Lankan Tamil/Black British writer and political journalist Ambalavaner Sivanandan; Indian writer and bonded-labor activist Mahasweta Devi; South African-born Botswanan Bessie Head; and the fiction and poetry published under the collective signature Dabindu, a group of free-trade-zone garment factory workers and feminist activists in contemporary Sri Lanka. Articulating connections across the global North-South divide, Perera creates a new genealogy of working-class writing as world literature and transforms the ideological underpinnings casting literature as cultural practice.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction. World Literature or Working-Class Literature in the Age of Globalization?

1. Colonialism, race, and class. Mulk Raj Anand's Coolie as a Literary Representation of the Subaltern

2. PostcolonIal Sri Lanka and "Black struggles For socialism". Socialist Ethics in Ambalavaner Sivanandan's . When Memory Dies

3. Gender, genre, and globalization

4. Socialized labor and the critique of identity politics. Bessie Head's A Question of Power

Epilogue: Working-Class Writing and the Social imagination

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780231525442

0231525443

OCLC:

870597426