ABSTRACT
Drawing on oral history interviews with former furniture workers in Gardner, Massachusetts, this chapter explores the affective atmosphere that pervades working-class communities beset by suicide and addiction in the wake of industrial decline. Pushing back against popular narratives that attribute nativist politics and ‘deaths of despair’ to white resentment and rage against racialized others, I seek to recognize the traumatic affects/effects of ongoing ruination and precarity. We must attend not only to the loss of futurity produced by economic violence, I argue, but also to widespread prohibitions against grieving the demise of working-class worlds.
