Inequality, Poverty and Precarity in Contemporary American Culture

Sieglinde Lemke is Senior Professor of English at the University of Freiburg, Germany and a permanent Fellow at the W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute at Harvard University, USA. She is the author of Primitivist-Modernism: Black Origins of Transatlantic Modernism (1996) and Vernacular Matters in American Literature (Palgrave, 2010). She received her PhD from the Free University of Berlin, Germany.

• .Introduction.-.1. Discourse: The Great Inequality Debate.-.2. The Documentary: Barbara Ehreneich's Nickel and Dimed and David Shipler's The Working Poor.-.3. The Icon: Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother.-.4. The Precarious Gaze: Contemporary Documentary Photography by Jeff Wall and Tom Stone.-.5. The Nation: American Exceptionalism in Our Time.-.Conclusion: Precarity.