“Work” is a keyword of contemporary fiction and theory alike. Over the past several decades, as the deepening contradictions of neoliberal capitalism have dovetailed with acute financial crises, the changing nature of work—for example, the decline of historically-specific forms of putatively secure industrial employment and concomitant rise of more precarious sites and modes of labor—has been registered by an expanding assemblage of novels. Novels such as Sarah Thankam Mathews’ All of this Could be Different, Hilary Leichter’s Temporary, Ling Ma’s Severance, Hiroko Oyamada’s The Factory, and Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People—among many other recent fictions—evince the different ways in which work is today organized and experienced, across capital’s disparate spatial and temporal coordinates. Notable theoretical interventions, meanwhile, have likewise made vivid the emergent configurations of work in the twenty-first century: the ongoing displacement and transformation of labor by technologies of automation (as explored by Annie McClanahan and Aaron Benanav); the resurgence of care-, sex-, and other socially reproductive forms of work and their integration into a global labor market (as taken up by Neferti X.M. Tadiar); models of racialization that enable different forms of workplace exploitation (as in the work of Colleen Lye and Iyko Day); the enmeshment of human labor power in the broader ecology, or energy regime, of the “capitalocene” (as theorized by Jason Moore and Andreas Malm); and the social and cultural consequence of particular patterns of labor migration and remittance (as elaborated by Paul Nadal). Read comparatively, these and cognate works of fiction and theory possess a dialectical attention to the distinctive political valences and determination of “work” in the current conjuncture—the dialogue between new relations or structures of expropriation and new enunciations of labor movement (within and beyond the space of the formal trade union).

We encourage paper submissions that rethink the relationship between work and literary or cultural form. How do the formal qualities of cultural texts crystallize, in other words, the general shape of capitalist social relations, or the temporality of the working day/life? How does contemporary fiction represent, or reckon with, the manifold experiences and resonances of work in the present, or across time? We are, at the same time, interested in contributions that approach the contemporary articulations of work through a primarily theoretical lens. How has contemporary theory illuminated the forms and relations of work that are paradigmatic—symbolically or materially—to our present, while bringing into view not merely the newness of those forms but their continuity with deeper histories of capitalist unfreedom or depredation (including slavery, indenture, and both waged and unwaged modalities of dispossession)?