This chapter employs an archive that was counterinsurgent in its creation in order to tease out an insurgent narrative of the uprisings, spotlighting the demands and experiences of working people as it traces the spread of labor unrest across various plantations that year. The central argument is that despite racialized job segmentation, residential segregation, and disparate historical experiences, the unrest demonstrates active cooperation among the Black and Indian communities that confronted the sugar industry and colonial state. In this case, strong racial identities did not preclude joint action. The chapter demonstrates that laborers were not only aware of their position in the colonial economy, but also advanced a vision of modern politics and connected their interests to global concerns of their day, particularly the invasion of Ethiopia and ideas about communism.

The conclusion explores the meaning and takeaways of the 1935 uprisings and explores ideas about solidarity that gain power from recognizing and understanding difference, and it notes this legacy of possibility.

This chapter concerned with Kathy Acker’s experimental novel of 1984 Blood and Guts in High School describes the frisson between material and immaterial forms of labor for the economically disenfranchised. In Acker’s novel Janey is the concomitant tragic figure whose deathward passage from shop worker to sex slave calls forth the very origins of tragedy and tragic theory. This novel combines tragic classicism with an interest in the subsumption of sex sexuality and desire more generally. Commencing in New York City – specifically in that urban milieu’s complete degradation during the 1970s – the novel’s plot reaches outward and away from the United States to what might be described as the peripheries of geopolitical hegemony dovetailing with a story of slavery set within North Africa and the Middle East. Extending and exemplifying the fragmentation of a coherent subjectivity in the pull of neoliberal marketization this novel responds to neoliberalism with tragedy at the moment of its violent imposition as economic shock doctrine.

This chapter is about William Gaddis’ 1955 novel The Recognitionsand its depiction of creative labor in the thoroughly commercialized space of New York City’s culture industry. In this novel the classically tragic trope of recognition or anagnorisis plays out against a social backdrop of art and commerce and within a narrative whose dominant mood is comic. In this way Gaddis’ novel presents a dialectical movement between the comic and melancholicregistering tragedy above all in the stylistic shifts that occur between long stretches of dialogueon the one hand and omniscient description on the other. Here a profound melancholia registers in the exchange between the Faustian satire performed at the level of narrative content and the sincerely wrought descriptions of art studios and the urban environment. Specifically tragic affect persists within scenic descriptions of postwar New York as though to recognize the exhaustion and defeat of artists laboring under the emergent regime of consumer capitalism.

The Introduction theorizes the relationships between tragedy affect and labor within modern US fiction. Affect is key to showing how and in what forms a classical mode like tragedy persists into late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century novels. Likewise a study of the changing organization of labor – a shift in wage work toward jobs described as immaterial or affective – is central to understanding why and under which historical conditions we see the resurgence of tragedy as affect in major works of literature. Literature in this argument articulates the collective imaginary of a people in a specific time and place. The chapter proposes that the apposition of an ill-fated and newly created class of immaterial laborers during the economic and political crises of the postwar period generates a tragic structure of feeling. Tragedy resides as both a form and a feeling that are as much concerned with the fearful misery of singular characters caught up in domestic dramas as with collective suffering played out on a public (and more overtly political) stage.

This chapter is centered on a reading of Sylvia Plath’s only novel The Bell Jar (1963). Locating that novel within its author’s confessional poetry this chapter describes the relationship between reproductive labor and the creative economy as framed by the capitalist world-system at a time of geopolitical and ideological contest with the socialist states. For Plath tragic affect is born from the convergence of creative and reproductive labor wherein both types of work are subject to a process of reification: the reification of human misery registering above all in the exhaustion of a lyric voice as it is buried under the weight of a commercially viable syntax. The chapter shows how Plath’s novel combines a pervasive mood of melancholy with critical self-reflection about creative labor wherein tragedy is ultimately displaced into the realm of affect.

In this chapter on Philip Roth’s novel The Human Stain (2000) tragedy takes shape in the nexus of class and race and under the neoliberal mechanisms that enable affectively precarious types of work even in rarefied middle-class settings. The novel’s protagonist Coleman Silk is the exemplary scapegoat who pays the ultimate price for gaining membership to the institutions and structures of the American dream – all of which is revealed as harboring a nightmarish underside. In this novel suffering reads not just in relation to the unemployed or even the low-paid sectors of service and care but as a force that travels upward through the workforce into jobs that are preoccupied with not just the performance but also the bureaucratic management of feelings. The chapter concludes by drawing attention to the sort of labor involved in gaining access to the aspirational myths of the American dream as well as gesturing toward the violence that forms the underside of that dream in the first place.

If there is one author in the postwar period concerned with the formal instantiation of a reserve army of unemployed workers then that author is Thomas Pynchon whose 1973 modern epic Gravity’s Rainbow is the subject of this chapter. For Pynchon tragedy takes shape between the central and sacrificial figure Tyrone Slothrop on the one hand and a chorus of silently sufferingracialized and colonized multitudes on the other. While Gravity’s Rainbow exemplifies the comic treatment of suffering tragic affect persists in style as focus shifts from Slothrop’s individual suffering to the deracinated places inhabited by anonymous and minor characters. There prose style captures the tragedy of the collectively dispossessed.

This chapter examines how US post-conflict diplomacy toward Italy evolved from the final phase of World War II to the early Cold War. Initially shaped by the need for wartime stabilization, the American “good occupiers” gradually shifted from providing tentative support for antifascist moderates to adopting a proactive strategy of anticommunist containment. The chapter demonstrates how the Italian case fits the broader pattern of American post-conflict diplomacy, which involves transforming former adversaries into partners. However, it also highlights the essential role of Italian agency in this process. As the Truman administration came to view Italian stability as vital for Western security, Italian pro-Western moderates, in turn, used US aid and political support to secure reconstruction and international rehabilitation. Finally, the chapter highlights the contribution of official and unofficial diplomatic networks, including labor and cultural exchanges, to shaping US–Italian relations during this process.

Chapter 7 focuses on subsistence and prosperity in the Homeric world. It treats farmers and shepherds, sailors and traders, smiths and craftsmen, and the blurred boundary between commerce and raiding. By tracing how wealth is made, displayed, and lost, the chapter argues that the poems preserve a practical memory of work, vulnerability, and the precariousness of material security.

This chapter systematically moves through the key questions of critique as a mode of building and improving knowledge in the humanities. It surveys key works in the conversation in relation to a variety of critical conversations and traditions, relating the questions of critique to major projects and goals in the field.

Hypoxemia poses a significant threat to fetal survival and development, often leading to neurodevelopmental disabilities including cerebral palsy or death. However, predicting and intervening in these cases remains challenging, despite advancements like therapeutic hypothermia. Abnormal fetal heart rate patterns provide only weak predictions of risk of acidemia and associated outcomes. Although severe metabolic acidemia correlates more strongly with neonatal outcomes, many infants with acute hypoxic–ischemic encephalopathy present with milder abnormalities, highlighting the complexity of hypoxic events. Modern studies indicate that only a fraction of cases of cerebral palsy are directly linked to intrapartum hypoxia-ischemia, and that a significant proportion of severe cases develop antenatally. This chapter will explore the mechanisms through which fetal adaptation to hypoxemia operates, circumstances that lead to failure of adaptation and subsequent brain injury, and the factors influencing the fetus’s ability to mitigate damage from hypoxia–ischemia.

This chapter challenges the prevailing narrative that the release of open-source models constitutes the “democratization” of generative AI (GenAI). Arguing that genuine democratization requires far more than mere access, the analysis posits that openness is a necessary but insufficient condition. Current initiatives often create a “techno-utopian mirage,” benefiting only those who already possess the requisite expertise, computational power, and economic resources. The concentration of GenAI use in wealthy, English-speaking nations reveals a digital and linguistic divide, while the industry’s reliance on a workforce of low-wage global laborers highlights exploitative practices antithetical to democratic ideals. Furthermore, companies often protect proprietary trade secrets like reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) methods, which are central to model quality. Until these systemic issues are addressed, “democratization” will remain a marketing slogan rather than a meaningful reality.