While SRT is increasingly influential in feminist studies, it has been less explored in literary criticism, particularly world-literary approaches to contexts outside of the capitalist North. Thus, this roundtable seeks to investigate methodologies using SRT to interpret literature of the capitalist world-system. With a comparative scope spanning multiple regions, eight participants will examine questions including how social reproduction is represented in literary aesthetics; how contemporary literature mediates what Nancy Fraser has called ‘a crisis of care’; and how social reproduction crises are compounded by racism and ecological crisis.
The following speakers will offer 7-minute ‘lightning talks’ and ‘literary snapshots’, followed by 20 minutes of audience discussion facilitated by the organizers:
Sharae Deckard sketches an approach to analyzing world-literary imaginaries of the ecology of social reproduction, focusing on depictions of food-getting, water-carrying, and waste-picking labour gendered as “women's work.” She argues that world-literary fiction portrays the terrain of social reproduction both as a zone of appropriation and as the potential ground for organized resistance.
Myka Tucker-Abramson argues for the fruitfulness of approaching the question of social reproduction and literature through feminist engagements into critical geography. She contends that considerations of scale, consumption, and topography are particularly useful for theorising literary engagements with social reproduction theory, and will offer a way of bringing together aesthetic and geographic insights.
Daniella Sánchez shines a light on the prominence of reproductive labor in Latin American literature through a reading of José Donoso’s novel Obscene Bird of Night (1970). She argues that Latin American literature can be examined as an archive from which important information regarding capitalism’s constant exploitation of the reproductive sphere can be excavated.
Treasa De Loughry follows Giovanna Di Chiro’s argument for a “coalitional” approach to social reproduction as an environmental issue in order to examine global representations of magic and witchcraft in women’s fiction as registrations of neoliberal “extractivist heteropatriarchal capitalism.” Her talk considers how contemporary Argentinian and West African speculative fiction deploys witches and supernatural powers to mediate upticks in global extractivism and the impact of toxic harm as incursions into the commons of bodily and environmental health.
Christine Okoth invokes Silvia Federici’s work on debt crisis, Africa, and new forms of enclosure, which observes that “the village” or the communal rural lands of African nation-states act as ‘a reproductive basis’ for urban workers whose wages are too low to maintain their own reproduction in the continent’s growing cities. Focusing on two modes of rural land enclosure –the park and the ranch–Dr. Okoth explores how narrative form in the work of Tsitsi Dangarembga and Yvonne Owuor responds to the postcolonial reconfiguration of the space of social reproduction.
Alden Sajor Marte-Wood argues that recent literary texts from the Philippines and its global diaspora that are explicitly about overseas reproductive laborers—teachers, nurses, domestic workers, elder and child caregivers—are now departing from the long tradition of Filipino social realism. He contends that Philippine “peripheral reproductive fiction” does not merely represent literal reproductive labor, but also reveals how the contradictions of capital’s combined and uneven development are always, at some fundamental level, experienced as crises of social reproduction that are then disproportionately carried by racialized and gendered workers through the complex global circuits of care.
Amy Rushton focuses on the ‘crisis of care’ identified by Nancy Fraser as a consequence of capitalism’s tendency to overwhelm the possibilities for functional social reproduction. Examining two recent narratives of familial trauma, Terese Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries (2018) and Vigdis Hjorth’s Will and Testament (2019), Dr. Rushton argues that such texts imagine the resistant potential of familial trauma to disrupt the function of social reproduction in neoliberal capitalism.
Kate Houlden’s talk concentrates on Pat Barker's Union St (1982) in order to explore the effect on white working-class English women of the ‘new regime’ of ‘financialized capitalism’ arising in the 1970s, showing how fiction might map how women’s increasing recruitment into the paid workforce happened at the same time as they faced greater social reproductive demands due to ‘state and corporate disinvestment from social welfare’, which diminished their ‘capacity to perform’ domestic labour.