In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • No Country: Working-Class Writing in the Age of Globalization by Sonali Perera
  • Michelle M. Tokarczyk
Sonali Perera. No Country: Working-Class Writing in the Age of Globalization. New York: Columbia UP, 2014. Pp. 230.

Working-class writing is still a neglected and under-theorized genre. Associations with it follow a familiar and reductive pattern: literature written about, and often by, white men from the global North. Often this literature focuses on pivotal moments in labour history, notably strikes or the Great Depression. Literature about workers by writers from the global South is queasily placed in the category of postcolonial literature. The erasure of working-class writing from the global South impedes not only the advancement of literary study, but also the recognition of an international workers’ literature that might reflect worker identification, if not solidarity.

Sonali Perera’s No Country stands as a corrective to a Eurocentric male conceptualization of working-class literature. Her slim but pithy text considers writers across continents: Muk Raj Anand from India and Mahasweta Devi from Bangladesh, Ambalavaner Sivanandan from Sri Lanka, the fiction and poetry of Dabindu (a collective of garment workers in Sri Lanka), and Bessie Head from South Africa. Mindful of the pitfalls of adding a minority or neglected strain of literature to a genre-what [End Page 586] can be called the “add global writers and stir” approach-Perera revises theories of working-class literature, asking “What does it mean to invoke working-class writing as a mode of internationalism in an age of comparative advantage and outsourcing?” (4). In addition to challenging Eurocentrism and white male dominance, it means challenging other commonplaces of what constitutes working-class literature.

One of these constructions is of the proletarian writing of the 1930s as the heyday of working-class literature. Carefully reading Marx, especially his later, unfinished work, and drawing upon Raymond Williams, Perera writes against the historicism theorized in working-class writing, in which she finds a tendency to privilege fixed beginnings and endings rather than fluidity or, more important, interruption. Repeatedly, she evokes Marx’s statement, “Proletarian revolutions constantly engage in self-criticism and repeated interruptions of their own course.” The texts she examines are marked by interruptions, deferrals, and open or unfinished endings.

In her focus on non-linear forms, Perera follows a feminist strain that critiques the straightforward narrative of progress. She extends her critique to a rights-based agenda that sees caring for others as contrary to self-interest and counters with a responsibility-based ethics in which care of the self necessitates care of others, an ethics that can only emerge by substituting an individual sense with a collective one.

The first chapter in No Country, on Mulk Raj Anand, notes that this anticolonialist and modernist (he lived in London and knew T.S. Eliot and E.M. Forster) claimed to have written Coolie (1936) as an answer to Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. The divergent fates of the two are epitomized by their names: Kipling creates an individual, fortunate character, while Anand represents the nameless impoverished Indian workers in cities. In analyzing ellipses, interruptions, and shifts in focalization, Perera unearths the tensions of an international socialist writer in a nation striving for independence. The close readings are well chosen and carefully rendered, though the argument here is not as convincing as in later chapters.

The second chapter marshals Sivanandan’s conception of black socialism for a consideration of ethics in When Memory Dies (1998). Here Perera sees an ethics of care, and I would say affiliation, as an alternative to an ethics of self-interest that characterize nationalist moves. As Perera notes, placing the adjective “immigrant” before “worker” others workers of different origins. Sivanandan’s own ethical development, Perera argues, coincides with a move from journalism to literature, entailing a dialectical thinking that grapples with the complexities of shifting race and class positionalities. The novel’s breaks in chronology and its polyvocalism break the confines of historicism and linearity. This intergenerational tale is further read as a critique of attempts to locate labour in specific origins rather than recognizing the undecidibility of origins, which is a particularly cogent point given the history...

pdf

Share