Labour and Freedom Intersected: Literary and Cultural Reflections from Du Bois to Butler - Einzelansicht

How does working class struggle overlap with the fight for gender equality, civil rights and decolonization? Beyond the spheres of economics and sociology, what literary and cultural forms have emerged as responses to resistance and empowerment? This seminar examines the fraught concept of ‘intersectionality’ through key critical and creative texts, dramas and films of the 20th and 21st centuries. Spanning contexts such as the black power movement in the US, post-war Britain, and current-day neoliberalism and identity politics, we will examine how attitudes to labour illuminate a notion of human dignity up to the present day. 

Key texts/films include:

W E Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk

James Baldwin (Raoul Peck), I am not your Negro

Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man

Toni Morrison, ”The work you do, the person you are"

E P Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class

Philip Larkin, The Whitsun Weddings

Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

Caryl Churchill, Cloud Nine

Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs

Nancy Fraser, "Rethinking Recognition"

Judith Butler, ”Merely Cultural”