In her 2014 monograph, No Country: Working-Class Writing in the Age of Globalization, Sonali Perera asks: “What does it mean to invoke working-class writing as a mode of internationalism in an age of comparative advantage and outsourcing?” (4) Perera calls for a reconsideration of the category of working-class writing in light of the economic, cultural, and political transformations entailed in processes of globalization, and challenges scholars to move beyond the national paradigms which have structured the study of working-class culture. The participants of this session take up Perera’s question to suggest alternative ways that working-class writing, as a capacious and intersectional cultural formation, both facilitates a unique understanding of our present conditions and challenges the capitalist forces which disperse, isolate, and set in competition transnational working-classes. The panel engages with the presidential theme by exploring how the literature of global working-classes imagines new forms of community and solidarity through and across national and social borders. Situated at the intersection of American, British, and postcolonial working-class studies and histories, the session hopes to suggest the generative possibilities of reading the literature of global labor for its capacity to imagine alternative working-class subjectivities, politics, histories, and futures.

The panel begins with the recovery of an understudied working-class history and subjectivity. Sabujkoli Bandopadhyay attempts to theorize the figure of the subcontinental servant as a legal, economic and cultural entity. Drawing on imaginative, autobiographical and factual/journalistic accounts of the servant in late-colonial, postcolonial and transnational-era of the 21^st century respectively, her study begins with an identification of the primary challenges in constituting such a theory. As Marx himself contended, conceptualization of the “Servant” as the social producer – a working-class member, remains largely neglected as the service provided by the servant is often consumed by the employer as pure “service”, thus never culminating in a product or commodity separable from the worker. Thus, the servant’s labour is exercised and consumed within the precarious margins of the “domestic” which maintained a sharp distinction from the public or social in the subcontinental societies. As a result, it is not only the “labour” of servitude that remain disconnected from public life, it is also material-existential site of production and consumption of the servant’s labour that pose a significant challenge in qualifying the servant as a working-class member partaking in the production of social labour in subcontinental societies. Bandopadhyay’s paper attends to the omission of the servant from the fields of working-class studies by offering a historical overview of the representation of the servant in subcontinental literature and illuminating alternative ways in which labor relations have been historically performed.

If Bandopadhyay presents us with a new theoretical foundation for reading working-class history, Jeremy Rosen’s paper projects us forward into a possible future with his analysis of Change-Rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (2014), a piece of contemporary speculative fiction. Lee’s novel envisions a form of labor that has not yet come into being: the farming of fish in giant tanks, after Earth’s oceans have become too toxic for marine life. The novel imagines a near-future, in which Chinese laborers have fled their ecologically-ravaged homes and settled in labor communities built on the sites of blighted U.S. cities. Set primarily in B-Mor, a future Baltimore, the novel examines the way collectivist labor ideology can be harnessed by global commodity production that perpetuates social stratification and inequality. According to Rosen, Lee suggests that rather than work in the service of socialist or communist movements for equality, collectivist ideology has been co-opted by global capitalist producers. The residents/workers of Lee’s B-Mor envision themselves as a community and profess how the interests of that community supersede those of any individual. Lee registers this commitment to community with his distinctive use of a first-person plural (“we”) narration. But while the B-Mors’ ideals are collectivist, they see their collective as fundamentally devoted to work and capitalist production that serves the needs of wealthy consumers. The collective self-esteem of B-Mor moves in concert with the price of their fish, soaring and then plunging with rumors that the fish contain carcinogens. Rosen argues that Lee’s depiction may have its roots in how today’s China reconciles its Maoist past with its capitalist present, but it also stands as a warning about how collectivist labor ideology might undergird, rather than dismantle, capitalist futures—even in the wake of climate catastrophe.

Rosen’s paper expands the category of working-class writing to include speculative fiction, and demonstrates how its orientation towards the future attunes us to present threats to the collectivism which has long characterized the international organization of labor. The final panelist, Ryan Brooks, also takes up speculative fiction as a form of working-class writing, showing how it may theorize alternative visions of transnational solidarity and uncover the unseen forms of labor which sustain global capital. According to Brooks, in her otherwise incisive analysis of Alex Rivera’s 2008 science-fiction film Sleep Dealer, critic Lysa Rivera elides the role of student debt in shaping the virtual labor of a character named Luz Martinez. But Luz is actually a recent Mexican college graduate, selling the stories of other working people on the Internet to service her student loan debt. Brooks argues that this fact about Luz is not trivial but absolutely crucial to the film’s political vision, which reimagines labor politics for the global era, a vision that ultimately unites farmers and various types of “node-workers” (a debt-driven cyber-writer, a drone pilot, and a virtual maquiladora worker) on either side of the U.S.-Mexico border. Brooks argues that it is precisely the representation of transnational, cross-occupational solidarity that make such works “speculative,” as they articulate a vision which rejects the neoliberal consensus that exclusion from global networks – through, for example, barriers to citizenship – is a more important problem than exploitation. This thematic experimentalism is echoed on the level of form, moreover, as these speculative texts, which synthesize literary experimentalism and mass-market genres like science fiction, can be read as allegories for coalition-building between educated “creative” workers and more traditional working-class constituencies.