Damon R. Young
Peer Reviewed Articles
Boredom in Contemporary African American Literature
Aida Levy-Hussen
😂; or, The Word of the Year
C. Namwali Serpell
Angela Davis, the L.A. Rebellion, and the Undercommons
Casey J. Shoop
Cryptographic Reading: Machine Translation, the New Criticism, and Nabokov’s Pnin
Sean Michael DiLeonardi
Painful Repetition: Service Work and The Rise of the Restaurant Novel
Since the 1970s, the composition of the working class in the United States has changed dramatically. Service work now dominates the labor market. The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that…
Philippine Reproductive Fiction and Crises of Social Reproduction
The quietest, most docile worker could, behind her apron or her uniform, be sharpening a blade. —Mia Alvar, “The Miracle Worker”1 On July 19th, 1994, Sarah Balabagan, a fourteen-year-old overseas…
American Graphic Design in the 1990s: Deindustrialization and the Death of the Author
This essay offers an account of one profession’s attempt to come to terms with the meaning of work in a context of economic and technological flux. Bound from the beginning…
The Politics of Language Writing and the Subject of History
Timothy Kreiner
TV and Tipworkification
Contemporary TV demonstrates a conspicuous interest in two related kinds of employment: tipwork (waiting tables, bartending, making espressos) and the more recent form of work termed “gigwork” (temporary, project-based freelance…