Surviving the Ordinary

Abstract

Abstract This article analyzes Tash Aw's novel We, the Survivors and Jewel Maranan's documentary film In the Claws of a Century Wanting, works that trace a poetics of survival as neoliberalism's good-life fantasies become decreasingly credible. It proposes that Aw's and Maranan's texts delineate part of a framework for narrating endurance under capitalism, contributing to an archive of detachment from neoliberal narrativity. Capitalism's modes of violence are embedded in ordinary life and legitimized through a pervasive neoliberal ideology that espouses heroic individualism, personal responsibility, and free-market dynamics. The politics of everyday worlds interpreted through neoliberal storytelling fail to show the contested entanglements of affect and exhaustion that make up endurance under capitalism. The texts analyzed here present their subjects as nonsovereign and embedded in the nonhomogeneous project of global capitalism and engage an eventfulness that exposes capitalism's subtle modes of violence. Moreover, through an ambiguous construction of subjects, they orient readers toward an implicated solidarity while refusing to locate a resolution within neoliberal ontology. This article contributes to the emergent aesthetics of survival detached from the good life promise of neoliberalism.