For a recent review in Spectre Journal, Sarah Brouillette reviews Beneath the Wage: Tips, Tasks, and Gigs in the Age of Service Work by Annie McClanahan. Click here to learn more about the book. Click here to read the full review. An excerpt appears below:

“It is rare that a book manages to pull off both a major intervention in Marxist theory and an important piece of cultural analysis. Beneath the Wage does just this. McClanahan’s first book, Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First-Century Culture, looked at the cultural effects of the experience of deepening indebtedness, with its prevailing currents of unease, coercion, domination, and anxiety. Beneath the Wage engages, in a similar fashion, with the varied and complex ways that culture mediates contemporary service work—similar in that its point is not a dense theorization of the nature of aesthetics, but rather a crystalline description of the way that culture registers capitalist social relations. A common Marxist interpretive move is to privilege works of masterful cognitive mapping that attempt to provide a full picture of the complexities of global capital flows. McClanahan, instead, follows the lead of her materials to argue that cultural engagement with service work is often more intimate in focus (she studies literary fiction, poetry, television, and forms of workers’ inquiry). It is more attuned to the minute details of the workday and its personal encounters, figuring “intimacy and totality at once,” just as service work by its nature ‘yokes our everyday lives to the broader communal relations that ensure our common survival.'”