The presidency of Donald Trump has yielded a daily glut of information and misinformation. Alongside the undermining of truth itself and the devaluation of expertise, this glut challenges traditional forms…
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Contemporaries Essays, Critique in the Trump Era
Issue 1: Deindustrialization and the New Cultures of Work, Peer Reviewed Articles
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…
Issue 1: Deindustrialization and the New Cultures of Work, Peer Reviewed Articles
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…
Issue 1: Deindustrialization and the New Cultures of Work, Peer Reviewed Articles
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…
Issue 1: Deindustrialization and the New Cultures of Work, Peer Reviewed Articles
Issue 1: Deindustrialization and the New Cultures of Work, Peer Reviewed Articles
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…
Issue 1: Deindustrialization and the New Cultures of Work, Peer Reviewed Articles
The Effective Turn: Affect, Gender, and the Wages of the Labor Film
No observer of contemporary American economic life can overlook the fact that real wages have remained almost unchanged for over forty years.1 Stagnant wages seemingly scandalize liberal platitudes of progress….
Issue 1: Deindustrialization and the New Cultures of Work, Peer Reviewed Articles
Character, Genre, Labor: The Office Novel after Deindustrialization
“Minor characters,” writes Alex Woloch, “are the proletariat of the novel.”1 Defined entirely by the functional role they play — gardener, maid, or mechanic — they are never treated to…
Issue 1: Deindustrialization and the New Cultures of Work, Peer Reviewed Articles
Introduction: The Spirit of Capital in an Age of Deindustrialization
Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic famously seeks out what he terms a “spirit of capitalism” in the development of “duty in a calling.” For Weber, the peculiarly unfulfilling experience of…
Contemporaries Essays
My Struggle, vol. 6: Dan, January 4
Greenpoint, NY Dear friends, It is, he claims—all of it—a marriage fight. Call it marital realism, a demon released by the couple form. Call it a gaslight novel. Linda projected…