ABSTRACT
Ross Raisin’s Waterline (2011) depicts a protagonist made abject by the ideologies of neoliberal capital. Mick Little is a former Glaswegian shipbuilder, a man made homeless by the forces of deindustrialisation, industrial disease, and the disintegration of his community. Raisin’s novel and, in turn, Chapter 4 takes up a significant position as the starting point for Part Two in this study of twenty-first-century British working-class fiction. It brings together some of the themes of the previous three chapters – class struggle and industrial action (Chapter 1), nostalgia and class memory (Chapter 2), deindustrialisation and trauma (Chapter 3) – while also providing a link to the notions of racialised class abjection explored in Chapters 5 and 6. It works through these connecting themes in order to plot a way forward through Part Two, drawing together the pressures specific to working-class experience in order to illuminate an understanding of how class stigma has evolved into the form it takes in twenty-first-century Britain. Through its central protagonist, Raisin’s novel explores shame as a form of working-class masculinity and illuminates an understanding of how it connects to the neoliberal mantra that personal failure is a result of personal failings. The chapter also examines the text’s engagement with the destructive legacies of working-class patriarchy and industrial disease, and it illuminates an understanding of the racialisation of labour; the precarious nature of work in the twenty-first century and the mobilisation of a global working class (the global precariat) will be a central concern.
