Joseph B. Entin - Living Labor: Fiction, Film, and Precarious Work

Page ii Class : Culture

Series Editors

Amy Schrager Lang, Syracuse University, Bill V. Mullen, Purdue University, and Kasturi Ray, San Francisco State University

Recent Titles in the Series:

Living Labor: Fiction, Film, and Precarious Work

Joseph B. Entin

Sit-Down: The General Motors Strike of 19361937

Sidney Fine, with a new foreword by Kim Moody

Strike for the Common Good: Fighting for the Future of Public Education

Rebecca Kolins Givan and Amy Schrager Lang, Editors

Clothed in Meaning: Literature, Labor, and Cotton in Nineteenth-Century America

Sylvia Jenkins Cook,

Of Vagabonds and Fellow Travelers: African Diaspora Literary Culture and the Cultural Cold War

Cedric R. Tolliver

Dirty Work: Domestic Service in Progressive-Era Womens Fiction

Ann Mattis

Dialectical Imaginaries: Materialist Approaches to U.S. Latino/a Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism

Marcial Gonzlez and Carlos Gallego, Editors

The Half-Life of Deindustrialization: Working-Class Writing about Economic Restructuring

Sherry Lee Linkon

Middle Class Union: Organizing the Consuming Public in PostWorld War I America

Mark W. Robbins

The Poverty Law Canon: Exploring the Major Cases

Marie A. Failinger and Ezra Rosser, Editors

Dreams for Dead Bodies: Blackness, Labor, and the Corpus of American Detective Fiction

Marie A. Failinger and Ezra Rosser, Editors

Anti-Imperialist Modernism: Race and Transnational Radical Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War

Benjamin Balthaser

Black America in the Shadow of the Sixties: Notes on the Civil Rights Movement, Neoliberalism, and Politics

Clarence Lang

Dividing Lines: Class Anxiety and Postbellum Black Fiction

Andre N. Williams

Joseph B. Entin

University of Michigan Press Ann Arbor

Page iv Copyright 2023 by Joseph B. Entin

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Published in the United States of America by the

University of Michigan Press

Manufactured in the United States of America

First published May 2023

A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data has been applied for.

The University of Michigan Presss open access publishing program is made possible thanks to additional funding from the University of Michigan Office of the Provost and the generous support of contributing libraries.

ISBN 978-0-472-07519-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-472-05519-7 (paper : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-472-90314-6 (open access ebook)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11738099

Page v For my students

and

For Miriam and Rachel

Digital materials related to this title can be found on the Fulcrum platform via the following citable URL: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11738099

When I look back over the long and at times difficult process of writing this book, I am filled with gratitude. Writing often feels solitary, but it never is. One writes in dialogue with others and with the support of family, friends, colleagues, and comrades. My interest in and understanding of labor can be traced back to my grandparents: my maternal grandmother worked long days in a farm kitchen, feeding and caring for family members and field hands; my maternal grandfather picked, sorted, and sold vegetables, and did everything else to keep a small family farm running; my paternal grandfather, an immigrant from Russia, sold stoves, choir gowns, and hunting camouflage to earn a living; my paternal grandmother worked stints as an executive secretary and a cosmetics and silverware salesperson, and labored as a mother and homemaker. From them all, I inherited a sense that labor makes and remakes the world, and remakes the people who work, too. Thank you to all the Bunces and Entins for their love and their labors.

I wrote Living Labor over the course of several years, during which I also collaborated with friends and colleagues on a range of other projectscoedited collections, special journal issues, union and other social justice struggles, coteaching experiments, and student programs. Those acts of collective labor sustained me, even as they took me away from work on this book, and reminded me how fortunate I am to have such stellar people in my orbit. For vital lessons in collective editing and writing, I am grateful to Liz Duclos-Orsello, Rebecca Hill, Jesse Schwartz, Belinda Wallace, Jocelyn Wills, Irvin Hunt, Kinohi Nishikawa, and Clare Callahan. In recent years, several editors, including Ichiro Takayoshi, Kevin McNamara, Christie Launius, Page x Leslie Bow, and Russ Castronovo, have supported my work, providing valuable feedback on my prose and ideas. I am grateful to all of them for their willingness to publish writing about the nexus of literature, class, and labor, which continues to be a neglected scholarly subject. Thanks to Immanuel Ness and Polina Kroik for publishing the first kernel of this book years ago. I am forever thankful for my editorial adventure with Sara Blair and Franny Nudelman, whom I cherish as both friends and mentors; their kindness continues to buoy me.

Many people have expanded and refined my thinking about the intersection of labor and culture, including Nicholas Coles and Paul Lauter, who generously edited an earlier version of chapter 2 and who have contributed so much to the study of working-class literatures; so many others, including but not only Larry Hanley, Janet Zandy, Sherrie Linkon, Michael Denning, Sujatha Fernandez, Sara Appel, Clare Callahan, Sonali Perera, Laura Hapke, Paula Rabinowitz, Bill Mullen, Amy Schrager Lang, Tillie Olsen, and Benjamin Balthaser have directly or indirectly inspired and improved my work. I am especially grateful to Sara Appel, Paula Rabinowitz, Benjamin Balthaser, and Sherrie Linkon for critical readings of versions of the manuscript of this book; their feedback improved it immeasurably. All faults are mine alone.

For funding that provided critical time for reflection, research, and writing, I am grateful to the PSC-CUNY faculty research program, which supported several summers of intellectual labor; the CUNY Graduate Centers Center for the Humanities, through which I participated in a terrific year-long seminar under the direction of Gunja SenGupta and Jessie Daniels, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; the CUNY Graduate Centers Committee on Globalization and Social Change, where I spent a generative and genial year in the company of Gary Wilder and several dynamite faculty and student fellows; the Brooklyn College Wolfe Institute of Humanities and its then-director Robert Viscusi for a year-long fellowship during which a substantial portion of this book was drafted; the Brooklyn College Tow Research and Creativity Grant, which provided funds to support this books completion. An earlier version of chapter 1 appeared in