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This thesis looks at the impact of economic informality on the novel form across the modern world-system. By analysing Memoirs of a Militia Sergeant (1854), Dom Casmurro (1899), Heading South (2006), The Pickup (2001), The Reactive (2014), and Wizard of the Crow (2006), I argue that narratives of precarious workers in casual or informal employment in different parts of the world-system are shaped by uneven and combined development. While the concept of the ‘informal economy’—Keith Hart’s term for the nonwage labour sector in Ghana—has been used primarily by scholars of African society and culture, I argue that by looking at work on economies of favour, unofficial or extra-legal forms of governance or resource distribution, and nonwage sectors, from various locations across the world-system, we will see that social and economic informality is a common thread of global capitalist modernity. Looking at criticism and fiction from Brazil, Haiti, South Africa, and Kenya, I explore the aesthetic features that arise from and grapple with the restlessly oscillating social dynamic of economic informality. Putting into dialogue ideas such as Chabal and Daloz’s concept of the institutionalisation of disorder in Africa, and Brazilian critic ’s dialectic of order and disorder, I attempt to show how informal economies can be grasped, in their broadest sense, as locations of strategy and improvisation whose subjects must shift constantly between officialdom and underground networks, between the realms of the licit and illicit. This produces highly heterogenous narratives oscillating between different tones and registers (unserious and tragic), social spaces (working-class and elite), and conceptions of reality. Archival work reveals that the authors of these works are often caught between competing imperatives as well. By comparing the various situated aesthetics of informality, we instrumentalise the Warwick Research Collective’s compelling but nebulous idea of a world-literature that “variously registers” a “singular modernity” (49). |
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