“WE ARE THE PLANET”: INCIPIENT SOLIDARITIES IN RUSSELL BANKS'S CONTINENTAL DRIFT

Abstract

This essay explores the way writers address the formation and fate of the contemporary American working class in an age of neoliberal globalization. Specifically, the essay examines Russell Banks's 1985 novel Continental Drift, which interweaves the stories of two characters who pull up stakes and head to Florida in search of a better life: an oil furnace repair man from New Hampshire and a young, single mother from Haiti. In bringing together these two narratives, Banks's novel insists that the story of the White, U.S. working class in an increasingly post‐industrial, globalized era is also a story of the hemispheric, migratory underclass, composed in large part by poor people of color. Following the fate of questing workers in an ultimately fruitless search for well‐being and wealth, Continental Drift stresses the urgency of class consciousness in a neoliberal world, even as it finally insists that the historic legacies and still ongoing dynamics of slavery, colonialism, and the geographically and culturally uneven dimensions of capitalist development make such consciousness in and of itself insufficient to establish a sense of solidarity among laboring peoples from disparate racial and national contexts.