The Literary Worlds of Workers: Narratives of Art from the Margins

TLDR: The authors argue that workers are reflective beings who narrate their life worlds using literary tropes to outline their resistance and compromise with the extractive economy of organizations, and uncover two literary tropes of jokes and horror to outline how workers yearn for agency to reimagine material worlds in which they are immersed.

Abstract: In this study, we engage with marginal workers who are employed as security guards and janitors in India to understand how they re-enact stories of artefacts of the culture industry. We engage with workers using a narrative methodological frame to understand how literary tropes of workers could provide insights about the politics of disobedience and consent in which they may be implicated. We argue that workers are reflective beings who narrate their life worlds using literary tropes to outline their resistance and compromise with the extractive economy of organizations. We uncover two literary tropes of jokes and horror to outline how workers yearn for agency to reimagine material worlds in which they are immersed. At the same time, we outline how limits of the discursive vocabulary of workers limit their literary challenges to prevailing genres of inequality.