Labor in Culture, Or, Worker of the World(s)

This book is a cultural critique of labor and globalization that considers whether one can represent the other. The cultural representation of labor is a challenge in how globalization is understood. Workers may be everywhere in the world but cultural correlatives are problematic. By elaborating cultural theory and practice this book examines why this might be so. If globalization unites workers via production and capital flows, it often writes over traditional or progressive forms of unity. Worlds of work have expanded in the last half century, yet labor has receded within cultural discourse. By considering critical and historical concepts in the workers' inquiry, the subject, and value, and provocative projects in cultural representation itself, this study expands our lexicon of labor to understand more fully what workers of the world means under globalization. As such the book offers broad appeal to students and teachers of Global and Cultural Studies and will interest all those who take seriously how the worker is articulated at a global scale.

Acknowledges the continuing transformation of labor without either romanticizing its past formations nor idealizing its current constellations Reads labor's absence/presence at the volatile meeting point of theories of the subject, representation, and valuean analytic that has not to this point been attempted on the question of labor's relationship to globalization Offers a critical template on literature, photography, and film that can be extended to other forms in provocative ways

Auteur

Peter Hitchcock is Professor of English at Baruch College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, USA. He is also the Associate Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics. His books include Dialogics of the Oppressed, Oscillate Wildly, and The Long Space.

Contenu
Preface.- 1. An Inquiry of Labor.- 2. The Worker Subjects.- 3. On the Cultural Representation of Labor (Value).- 4. Sensing Class in John Berger's 'Into Their Labors' Trilogy.- 5. A Gift: Workers to Sebastião Salgado.- 6. The Paradox of Moving Labor: Workers in the films of Jia Zhang-ke.-