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Work and Idleness in the Age of the Great Recession
This special issue of Periscope on “Work and Idleness in the Age of the Great Recession,” reconsiders our sense of what qualifies as work or idleness when there is little or no work to be had. The role idleness might play in our lives, and in our collective imaginaries, may strike some as unthinkable or even irresponsible when so much suffering and uncertainty has been triggered by high unemployment rates. Yet perhaps now more than ever we have arrived at a moment that necessitates a critical rethinking of the normative institutions of work—in the form of employment or occupation, amongst others—under capitalism, especially during this time when “Right to Work” legislation, notions of a “jobless recovery,” and austerity measures have been proposed and implemented as the means of resolving various crises, both social and economic, in the U.S. and other parts of the globe. The contributors to this dossier seek to understand and challenge prevailing understandings of work and idleness in their many social and temporal configurations, in no small part because those prevailing understandings can no longer account for the problems we currently face, or the context in which we face them. Guest Editor: Alex Wescott. Contributions from: John Andrews | Jac Asher | Peter Coviello and Elizabeth Freeman | Gregory Dobbins | Karen Tongson | Kathi Weeks | Alex Wescott | Genevieve Yue
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Cruel Optimism
Lauren Berlant’s most recent book, Cruel Optimism (Duke UP, 2011), undertakes the ambitious and necessary project of thinking the political present. Cruel Optimism attends closely to what goes undernoticed about living in relation to waning or worn-out models of legibility, sovereignty and sustainability. Working through the rhythms of crisis ordinariness, patiently tracking the emergence of new genres, styles and modes of response to the diffused conditions of precariousness that constitute contemporary life, revising critical models of agency to incorporate the floundering and gestural ways people attempt to make sense of their worlds, Cruel Optimism extends Berlant’s longstanding critical concern with the development of intimate publics into the present, exploring “what happens to fantasies of the good life when the ordinary becomes a landfill for overwhelming and impending crises of life-building and expectation whose sheer volume so threatens what it has meant to ‘have a life’ that adjustment seems like accomplishment.”
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This dossier assembles responses to the book by scholars Kandice Chuh, Lisa Duggan, Micki McGee, José Muñoz, Sianne Ngai, Kathryn Bond Stockton, Kyla Wazana Tompkins, and Rebecca Wanzo. In a dialogue with dossier editor Dana Luciano, Berlant engages these responses in turn and reflects on her own recent and forthcoming projects.
What Democracy Looks Like
Click here to read a special online dossier of critical reflections from activist-scholars that problematizes the popular Occupy Wall Street slogan “This Is What Democracy Looks Like!” taking it less as a self-congratulatory, if confrontational, chant and more as a literal goal. Essays gauge Occupy’s impact on a rainbow of social movements, from educational and student activists to trade unions, from debt abolitionists to LGBTQQ activists. They assess Occupy’s pitfalls and promises for trans-national and trans-ideological solidarity, as well as the roles of mutual aid, consensus and the police in stretching Occupy’s boundless energy into the future.
Guest Editors: A.J. Bauer, Cristina Beltran, Rana Jaleel, and Andrew Ross.
Contributions from: Anthony Alessandrini | A.J. Bauer | Suzanne Collado | Andrew Cornell | Rana Jaleel | Nicholas Mirzoeff | Manijeh Nasrabadi | Michael Ralph | Andrew Ross | Stuart Schrader | Zach Schwartz-Weinstein
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