ABSTRACT
This concluding chapter proposes the notion of division (and a number of conceptual variations, including war and enclosure) as a capacious framework for the literary interpretation of crisis in contemporary capitalism. Buchi Emecheta’s novelIn the Ditchis read as a prescient engagement with the crisis of Fordism through experiences of separation and indiscipline among poor and migrant women. The chapter then turns to Anna Burns’ Milkman as a recent iteration of the intuition that, several decades after the collapse of Fordism’s imaginaries of social pacification, capitalism continues to experience its social and economic dynamics as a series of antagonistic divisions than no fresh initiative can effectively halt or contain. The chapter concludes with a general reflection on the place of this divisive logic in literary engagements with the history of capital since the eighteenth century.
