Precarious Fictions: Migration and Globalisation in the Work of Karen Tei Yamashita, Judith Butler, and Kiran Desai

This final chapter considers the emergence and endurance of our own century’s dominant conception of work as precarity. Here I examine the provenance and explanatory power of precarity and vulnerability and its place in the changing landscape of labour defined by global capital’s dominance. I explore these questions through analyses of three writers, each representing different stages of precarity’s life since the late 90s: 1) one of the first attempts to thematise localised precarious workers and their entanglements with global and indeed cosmic scale in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange; 2) the concept of precarity’s golden age and fullest abstraction in the work of Judith Butler, where the idea approximates a metaphysics; and 3) the return to actually existing working conditions in geography of US migration, invoked in a realist tradition by Indian novelist Kiran Desai.