ABSTRACT
The book closes with an examination of the Other America’s refusal of consumerism. The art analysed here cultivates a counterculture that rejects neoliberalism and elects simplicity over wealth, failure over success and solidarity over competition, resuscitating utopian instincts in times when utopian thought is dismissed as unnecessary fantasy. The works of the Other America recuperate a culture of the people that defies current tendencies of isolationism, greed and selfishness that define consumerism. The rejection of materialism animates some of the protagonists of Auster’s books, the lone characters of Jarmusch’s films and the wanderers of Waits’s albums. Against consumer culture and materialism, Auster, Jarmusch and Waits propose a return to an ideal Whitmanesque human brotherhood.
