ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 examines two novels by Sunjeev Sahota: Ours are the Streets (2011) and The Year of the Runaways (2015). Following on from a critical exploration of the social abject in the previous two chapters, this one examines another contemporary figuration of the abject, that of the racialised working-class ‘other’. It explores the search for identity and belonging in Sahota’s texts and analyses the ways in which the novel meditates upon colonial history, empire, and the impact of deindustrialisation and unemployment on working-class communities. Sahota’s debut novel recounts the radicalisation of its first-person narrator: a young, working-class Muslim from Sheffield. His second book depicts the experiences of illegal immigrants working in Sheffield and across Britain, engaging with the global precariat and the formulation of racialised abject labour as a manifestation of the neoliberal economy. The crafting of the social abject to justify the inequality of contemporary capitalism, eliding the contradictions in its construction, will be one focus. The figurations of work and racialised labour in both of Sahota’s novels will be another, in order to examine the contradictions of neoliberal capitalism. Therefore, the chapter explores how Sahota’s texts both illuminate an understanding of the intersections between race and class in twenty-first-century Britain and offer resistance to the historical construction of the racialised class subject.
