Inequality, Poverty and Precarity in Contemporary American Culture

Abstract

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Of Precarity and Conspiracy: Introducing A Socio-Functional Model of Conspiracy Beliefs

“…From early on, precarity was therefore conceived as through a social-psychological prism, marked by a heightened sense of personal uncertainty and unpredictability in life circumstances, hence theoretically distinct from poverty exclusively (although the two are empirically correlated, see Lemke, 2016). Precarity is best defined as the subjective experience of permanent social and psychological insecurity, stemming from objective conditions of affiliative and economic deprivation.…”

Intimations of Precarity in Twenty-First-Century U.S. Drama: Faltering Voices of the Precariat in Annie Baker’s The Flick

“…It might be argued, in fact, that in the public sphere the confrontation with the structural inequalities that have grown with globalization was mainly coded through narratives of crisis, rather than conceptualizing it as precarity (Fernández-Caparrós and Brígido Corachán, 2017). As Lemke (2016) suggests, perhaps due to its negative connotations, the term precarity has not caught on in the United States, nor have the tenets of the new and expanding field of research and inquiry trickled down to the public. This might be related to the deeply ingrained belief in the U.S. of its exceptionalism, that is, the way its citizens define, sustain, and protect their national identity, based, within domestic affairs, on a view that heralds America as the land of opportunity and on being an exemplary democracy.…”

“…In order to analyze the representational strategies and affective devices deployed to invite audiences to care about lives informed by neoliberal restructuring this essay zooms in on Annie Baker's The Flick as being arguably the most illustrative depiction on the contemporary American stage of labor precarity within a working environment and also, following Lemke (2016), a "precarious text" itself. The "remarkably tepid and lapidary" (Butler 2014: 179) description of the play on the Pulitzer Prize website describes it as "a thoughtful drama with well-crafted characters that focuses on three employees of a Massachusetts art-house movie theate rendering lives rarely seen on the stage" ("Drama", 2020).…”

“…While the play was not deliberately conceived as an overt exploration of the trials and tribulations of the precariat, in its exploration of the contemporary moment from within that moment, and as an "aesthetically mediated affective response" (Berlant, 2011: 3) to it, it shall be regarded as a dramatic text that most truthfully depicts the "distinctive relations of production (patterns of labour and work)" (Standing 2018: 117) proper of a new class; and how precarization affects interpersonal intercourse and can erode the sense of trust and community. As it will be shown, relying on dramatic analysis and on the work of cultural critics that have examined precarity in American culture (Berlant, 2011;Lemke, 2016), The Flick, like most American drama concerned with the precarization of livelihoods, plays out the paradoxes of precarity as a reality that can be at once troubling and enabling (Fragkou, 2019: 7) and is a theatrical text that ultimately resists a representation of precarity as 'crisis' thus avoiding participation in conservative discourses that normalize it as a threat.…”

The social imaginary of precarious Europeans: the cultural representation of European socio-economic precarity in Tascha and Bande de Filles

“…The notion of "poverty porn" points in this direction (Ibrahim, 2018). These critical observations are part of the growing interest in studying the representation of poverty and precarity, dominated by attention within American Studies as a glance at the field reveals (see for example Kaplan, 2000;Gandal, 2007;Jones, 2009;Lemke, 2016). The situation within European cultural studies is, however, more dire.…”