Labor’s gloves are off, and the country is rocked by waves of strikes, all backed by militant battle songs. The Pullman Strike brings to the fore Eugene Debs and other champions of labor and socialism, Coxey’s Army marches on Washington (singing), German immigrants fly the red flag of Anarchism (in song), and Jews fleeing from Russian pogroms swell the streets and sweatshops of New York’s Lower East Side, transforming the national soundscape with Yiddish labor anthems and laying the foundations of modern musical theater. The Mexican corrido becomes more prominent amidst white nativist hostility, and in California the Chinese community continues to pit their authentic songs of struggle against the slanders of minstrelsy and the insult of the Chinese Exclusion Act. On the western plains, the Lakota Ghost Dance and its attendant songs drive the US government into a panic born of ignorance, culminating in the massacre at Wounded Knee. With the frontier officially closed and white settler colonialism entrenched from sea to shining sea, the champions of Manifest Destiny look further westward, to the Pacific islands, where a songwriter named Lili’uokalani, the queen of Hawai’i, awaits her overthrow.

This chapter considers the difficulty that economics has found in defining labor as a practice separate from its product. Looking first at classical and Marxist economics, it uses feminist economics to highlight the omissions that conventional definitions of labor contain, especially concerning the work of women. By comparing feminist economics with recent novels by women, including Halle Butler’s The New Me (2019), Alice Furse’s Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (2014), Heike Geissler’s Seasonal Associate (2014), Hilary Leichter’s Temporary (2020), and Ling Ma’s Severance (2018), it argues that contemporary fiction has been attentive to the same omissions. Through a reading of the techniques of literary fiction, including realism and a range of experimental narrative devices, the chapter proposes that the contemporary novel offers kinds of writing that expand our conception of labor. Contemporary fiction contains narratives that highlight the work of social reproduction as a central component of the economies of labor and offer a wider critique of economic categories of value.

In the book’s afterword, I suggest that the period studied in this book has drawn to a close, as literary liberals have become both less interested in responding to postmodernism and more interested in rejecting free-market politics, including the centrist, communitarian version of this politics. To illustrate this shift, I compare texts published on either side of the 2008 financial crisis. In Then We Came to the End (2007), Joshua Ferris experiments with a collective first-person narrator in order to dramatize the tensions of office life, tensions which he figures in terms of the oppositions between elitism and egalitarianism and between sincerity and irony. Ferris’s self-reflexive interest in forging empathetic connections between workers, bosses, readers, and writers makes his novel a quintessential post-postmodern text. Philipp Meyer’s American Rust (2009) and Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs (2009) by contrast, are precisely the kind of “angry” books “about work” that Ferris rejects. In formally distinct ways, both novels offer a political vision skeptical of centrism and committed to the irreducibility of class as a source of political and economic conflict.

This introduction offers an extended reading of David Foster Wallace’s 2000 foray into political journalism, “Up, Simba,” which illustrates what will be the central claim of this book: that literary post-postmodernism is best understood as the means by which left-leaning writers negotiate the neoliberal turn — a version of, rather than an alternative to, this new consensus. To make that case, I trace connections between the communitarian logic of the so-called New Sincerity, the form of post-postmodernism most closely associated with Wallace, and the interventions of Bill Clinton and the New Democrats, who rejected key New Deal principles in favor of a "third way" between liberalism and conservativism. This introduction also historicizes "postcritique" and the various "post-ideological" accounts of neoliberal culture, accounts which, in my view, reproduce contemporary liberalism’s ambivalence about the free market and free-market politics, and therefore can be understood as symptomatic of the very changes they seek to interpret.

This chapter, on literatures of labor and poverty, centers on Philadelphia and considers narratives of a group often sidelined in critical discourse: the “free” laboring poor, especially the mobile poor, both black and white. Illuminating the rich, complex interrelationship between oral and literary culture in this period, these narratives reveal a fascination with the voice of the poor that was evident throughout early national culture. The chapter first takes up a variety of poverty narratives, from enforced narratives delivered at the Philadelphia Almshouse to written begging letters to published beggar narratives and other autobiographical texts; it then explores how oral testimonials of the poor shaped the dialogic form of the early American novel.

The first chapter claims that the imperial fiction of Joseph Conrad and William Faulkner rejects accounting as a totalizing logic, and by extension, questions the English novel’s complicity in propagating that false logic. Accounting, which had remained unobtrusively immanent to realist novels of empire, surfaces to the diegetic level in a classic instance of a thematization of the device and becomes available for critical contemplation. Drawing from Max Weber, Mary Poovey, and Georg Lukács, I attend in particular to the dandy accountant of Heart of Darkness, the accretive narrative structure of Nostromo, and Shreve’s recasting of Sutpen’s life as a debtor’s farce in Absalom, Absalom! If Conrad equates accounting with lying, Faulkner reveals secrets elided in rows of debit and credit one by one as sensational truths; to those ends, both writers invoke Gothic conventions. By dispatching the totalizing technique that had been invented by early modern merchants and finessed by realist novelists to generate faith in a transnational fiduciary community, Conrad and Faulkner impel the discovery of original forms with which to express the modern transnational world order.

The second chapter begins with a consideration of Beckett’s resistance to the logic of quid pro quo, which, organizing life in the metropolis, impoverishes the imagination. Beckett discovers in listing a form to counteract that urge to calculate. Against older readings of Beckett, recent French readers such as Pascale Casanova and Alain Badiou find the Irish writer revolutionary, associating him with beginnings, resistance, and even happiness. Similarly, I claim that Beckett’s works are surprisingly recuperative. The high modernists used the stream-of-consciousness to emphasize the evanescence and meaninglessness of present action. Transferring that technique to the past tense, Beckett records dissipating practices of everyday life. What’s more, Beckett’s garbled lists provoke readers to impose sense by drawing upon a shared cultural grammar. Beckett’s verbal hoarding makes conceivable a collective bound by shared axioms that reduce abstract multiplicities into knowable situations. Beckett thus posits infranational communities that are consolidated not by institutionally underwritten concepts such as nationality or ethnicity but by remembered practices of everyday life.

Spectacular immigration enforcement—large-scale, highly-publicized immigration enforcement efforts in concentrated geographic spaces—plays an important role in the maintenance of the racial order of the United States and of the global region that it dominates. These enforcement efforts, like prison walls and border walls, act as high-visibility markers of socio-political exclusion and inclusion. Spectacular immigration enforcement has a direct, material effect: through these efforts, officials signal the condition of deportability to immigrant workers without significantly undercutting the industry’s labor supply. But they also have a more diffuse effect on the structure and understanding of power and of belonging. By focusing on spectacular immigration enforcement efforts at the site of animal slaughter, this chapter sheds light on how immigrant deportability is facilitated by and reinforces structural racism. It also underscores the salience of race in shaping how people see – or fail to see – the exercise of state and private violence.

The precarity of the 1930s undergirded major transitions in Arna Bontemps’s waged and writerly labor. The flusher years of the 1920s saw him winning prizes, teaching school, and writing poetry, but the 1930s saw him take a decidedly historical turn, penning historical novels Black Thunder (1936) and Drums at Dusk (1939) and training to be a curator. This tracks alongside broader shifts in African American literature during the decade, both formally, as a bridge to social realism, and politically, through engagement with Marxism. By excavating Bontemps’s archive, this chapter confirms that he was an innovator who repurposed the historical novel to critique racial capitalism. At the same time, he sought to create saleable products and enhance his career. This paradox illuminates how African American literature of the 1930s was generated from the tension between leftist solidarity and the persistent notion of the talented tenth. Ultimately, Bontemps’s work emerges from the nexus of two radical projects: historical preservation and self-preservation, which together enabled the transition from New Negro aesthetics to the protest literature of the 1940s.

This opening chapter raises the research questions that motivate this book. It briefly introduces the state of mineral exploration in China and the ensuing impacts on the Chinese economy and society and pinpoints the puzzling existence of a contained resource curse in China. After critically reviewing the existing debate on the resource curse, it proposes an original theory about how mineral resources affect state–capital–labor relations, which can explain the empirical observations in China. This chapter lays out the roadmap of the whole book and explains the research methods and data sources for the empirical analysis in the following chapters.

In contrast to the benefits that capital enjoys, Chapter 3 shows in detail the largely negative impacts of mineral extraction on labor. Based on qualitative evidence on the working conditions and employment opportunties in mining industries, it reveals that resource boom in general does not benefit common citizens as the labor force. Moreover, mining industries generate various negative externalities to local communities, which impose heavy financial and health costs on local citizens. Statistical analysis corroborates the empirical observations and shows that resource abundance diminishes employment opportunities in not only high-tech but also labor-intensive industrial sectors and represses labor income in both urban and rural areas. The findings suggest that the resource sector can be characterized as pro-capital and anti-labor, which generates profound implications for social equality and stability.

The Introduction situates the reader in our present social and environmental era, specifically in a globally enmeshed United States. It explains our conception of the book’s three central terms: America, Environment, and Literature. It gives an overview of the history of ecocriticism, especially pertaining to North America, and how our authors contribute to, and innovate, that tradition. It ends with a summary of each chapter.

This chapter explores a set of marginal characters of topmost importance: hats. The marginality of hat study is all too apparent; it smacks of esoteric trivia. I argue that such a commonsensical assumption is at odds with Conrad’s fictional hats: their variety, number and position in the texts. From the bowler to the Bersagliere, there are more than twenty-five types of hat in his fiction. They are used for fiddling, collecting nails, catching butterflies, transporting cakes, holding strips of beef, carrying secret messages, and saving a “homeless head from the dangers of the sun.” Conrad leaves us with the idea that while we may think that we wear hats, hats are clothed in meaning and may even wear us; there is no clear boundary between object and person; an everyday material object can be a key to understanding a complex individual and vice versa.

This chapter addresses efforts to increase racial and ethnic diversity on US public lands and in US outdoor recreation through a case study of the organization Latino Outdoors. It argues that Latino Outdoors works to upend the exclusion of Latinx peoples from outdoor recreation and public lands through constructing and disseminating a Latinx Outdoor Recreation Identity. In doing so, Latino Outdoors disrupts a US cultural logic which incorporates the labor of Latinx peoples while denying their substantive citizenship as well as their political and ecological belonging. In contrast to legacies of Latinx outdoor labor, Latino Outdoors embraces Latinx leisure, and specifically Latinx outdoor leisure. Furthermore, the organization emphasizes historical forms of Latinx environmental knowledge, and thus environmental belonging. Latino Outdoors creates new forms of Latinx environmental belonging founded on leisure rather than labor. These forms of environmental belonging operate within Latino Outdoors as a proxy for political belonging and the grounds for political action.