Forecasting Catastrophes of Whiteness: Affects of Neoliberal Realism and Visions of a Terrorized Multiracial Precariat in Atticus Lish’s Preparation for the Next Life

Abstract

Neoliberalism’s Real Victims: Affects of Worldly Realisms and the Depressed Wages of Whiteness n the eve of the Trump era that it so predicted, Atticus Lish’s 2014 novel Preparation for the Next Life was uniformly lauded by the Anglo-American literati as a “profoundly political book” (Flanery) that, as Cathleen Schine itemized in her New York Review of Books article, surveys “the greatest contemporary failures of this country―immigration policy, poverty, racism, prisons, war” (Schine). Indeed, Lish’s text hurtles from the first catastrophe of the twenty-first century―the post-9/11 R A C H E L A. W A L S H