Powers of the Inhuman: Representations of the Working Class in the New International Division of Humanity (ACLA 2025)

Organizer: Marcela Romero Rivera

Vijay Prashad, from the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, recently proposed that the genocidal wars and policies that define our political moment as hyper-imperialist affect not only the populations that they directly target, rather, they signify an epochal shift that he calls a "New International Division of Humanity." Today, the international working class finds itself in the crosshairs of new forms of exploitation and dispossession predicated necessarily on the assumption of the inhuman character of the worker. Culture —specially literature and film— has picked up on this phenomenon and we have now a growing number of representations of this figure of the inhuman; in some cases, they are obscure menacing characters, while in others they are figures of resistance and struggle. In many contemporary cultural products, monsters, ghosts, cyborgs, beasts or the undead, they are all stand-ins, more or less explicitly, for the working-class poor, the dregs which society can no longer integrate or make sense of. They are those opaque figures that reveal the anxieties of other characters, narrators or of the author.


This panel wants to invite contributions that explore the political implications of how this "inhuman figures" are captured in current cultural products, particularly those coming from or about the Global South.