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Chapter 17 - Imagining and Occupying Wall Street

from Part II - Histories

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 July 2025

Paul Crosthwaite
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
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Summary

This chapter describes the critical and speculative capacities of the Occupy novel, or contemporary novels that represent Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy movement more broadly. It argues that such fiction represents the financialization of everyday life, that is, the colonization of personal life and political subjectivity by Wall Street or finance capital. In doing so, it returns the question of social class to the center of US political debates. However, the Occupy novel also speculates on the possibilities of postcapitalist social life; it treats Occupy Wall Street as prefiguring new kinds of economic relations and social conducts. The chapter frames the Occupy novel in terms of its predecessor, the fiction of the post-2008 financial recession (“crunch lit”). Whereas crunch lit diagnoses financialization as a problem of households (personal debt, family crisis, and so on), the Occupy novel asks whether literature (and art in general) might have the capacity to engage in social struggle, to imagine new forms of public life.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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