Living Labor: Fiction, Film, and Precarious Labor

Conclude International Workers’ Day (May 1) with a book talk and discussion with Joseph Entin, Sherry Lee Linkon, and Cynthia A. Young about Entin’s Living Labor: Fiction, Film, and Precarious Labor (University of Michigan Press, 2023), which examines contemporary American fiction and film through the lens of precarious work. The book argues that since the 1980s, novelists and filmmakers—including Russell Banks, Helena Víramontes, Karen Tei Yamashita, Francisco Goldman, David Riker, Ramin Bahrani, Courtney Hunt, and Ryan Coogler—have chronicled the demise of the industrial proletariat, and the tentative and unfinished emergence of a new, much more diverse and perilously positioned working class.

In bringing together stories of work that are also stories of race, ethnicity, gender, and colonialism, Living Labor challenges the often-assumed division between class and identity politics. Through the concept of living labor and its discussion of solidarity, the book reframes traditional notions of class, helping us understand both the challenges working people face and the possibilities for collective consciousness and action in the global present. Entin, Young, and Linkon will talk briefly about labor, literature, and work in our lives and society today.