“And What About Class?”

Abstract This roundtable focuses on the connections between art or culture and class, and on the multiple forms this connection takes today. Even as class distinctions have evolved over the years, and even as the role played by social class in contemporary struggles for social justice and recognition has been obscured, class remains formative of late capitalist subjectivity and continues to have a significant, if mostly unacknowledged, impact on our lives. We have invited scholars and artists who work with the question of class relations in culture to address a series of pertinent questions: does class still function as catalyst for solidarity and a sense of social belonging beyond the nostalgic fantasy of the white male? To what extent does the cultural apparatus in capitalist democracies participate in the reproduction of social relations rather than supporting their change? How and by what means can artworks make class and its formative impact on social relations visible? What are the modes of the appearance of class struggle today, as we lack large-scale revolutionary mass movements? This roundtable joins ongoing conversations about these and related questions.