Rethinking Working-Class Literature

Abstract

Rethinking Working-Class Literature Ulka Anjaria (bio) Sonali Perera, No Country: Working-Class Writing in the Age of Globalization. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. xiv + 230 pp. $50. Sonali Perera’s book No Country: Working-Class Writing in the Age of Globalization offers a compelling reading of the nature of working-class literature in a putatively postclass era. Perera offers a third way between, on one side, scholarship on the literatures of migrancy and diaspora that focuses on cultural hybridity and textual difference rather than class and, on the other, criticism that offers a historicist critique of postcoloniality, but in order to do so mobilizes a universal (European) understanding of class.1 Perera argues that we neither have to do away with the category of “working-class writing” in this globalized age nor cling to it nostalgically, as the expression of the “true” subject of revolutionary history. Rather, she says, we must see how writings on class from the colonized and postcolonial world are working to rethink what class is in the first place. Thus we might find novels in which the building of working-class solidarity fails, or texts deliberately resistant to the progressive telos of subaltern awakening. These are [End Page 792] not, Perera argues, failures in writing revolution, but representations of the difficulty of doing so under conditions of colonialism, uneven development, or globalization. Rather than looking for a more perfect representation of working-class solidarity, we should read these texts wisely for what they say about the reality of difference, even as they add to our understanding of the constantly shifting parameters of the very categories of class. Perera’s introduction sets out her theoretical framework, which is refreshingly lucid: taking her title from Karl Marx’s injunction that “the working men have no country,” Perera traces how Marx himself is ambivalent about what class is in his unfinished writings, especially in Capital, volume 3. She reads Marx’s elliptical texts as an allegory for the perennially incomplete project of defining class, despite the fact that later Marxists have taken from his writings a fixed sense of the “proletariat” and “bourgeoisie.” Those attempts Perera sees as damaging to Marx’s original—ambivalent—project. Using Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s work on Mahasweta Devi in Imaginary Maps,2 Perera shifts this ambivalence around the content of class into the positive notion of ethics, which she claims is a way of thinking about “social justice in the absence of guarantees” (20). A focus on ethics “carr[ies] over the idealism of the revolutionary moment into the transformative task-oriented daily work that can only take place in the everyday” (20). This strategy allows Perera to consider class not only as a masculine project of progressivist history but also as a gendered imaginary of vulnerability and even love, whose future directions are as yet unknown. Chapter 1 presents a beautiful reading of Mulk Raj Anand’s 1936 novel Coolie that exhibits precisely the theoretical vision advanced in the introduction. Rightly arguing against the various readings of Coolie that fixate either on its postcolonial “writing back” to Rudyard Kipling’s Kim or on its “failed” revolutionary potential (the protagonist Munoo dies before he can join the workers’ movement), Perera begins her analysis at this point of “failure” and considers what Anand might have been trying to say by means of it. Using this putative lack as a guide through the text—which she reads, I [End Page 793] think absolutely convincingly, as a text primarily of gaps rather than certainty—she interprets the novel as the story of the disjuncture between a universalized account of working-class progressivism and the everyday reality of colonial subjection. Thus when Munoo finds himself unable to comprehend the political economy of the products he carries on his back, or when he is summarily shooed away from a conversation among the factory bosses, these moments of “scripted silence” (46) write the unmaking of class solidarity which, Perera argues, reveals the disjuncture between the rhetoric of class empowerment and the experience of subaltern subjectivity. In thus invoking both the colonial Bildungsroman and the revolutionary tract, Anand writes the story of the misfit between them. This is...