This book analyzes the discourse generated by pundits, politicians, and artists to examine how poverty and the income gap is framed through specific modes of representation. Set against the dichotomy of the structural narrative of poverty and the opportunity narrative, Lemke's modified concept of precarity reveals new insights into the American situation as well as into the textuality of contemporary demands for equity. Her acute study of a vast range of artistic and journalistic texts brings attention to a mode of representation that is itself precarious, both in the modern and etymological sense, denoting both insecurity and entreaty. With the keen eye of a cultural studies scholar her innovative book makes a necessary contribution to academic and popular critiques of the social effects of neoliberal capitalism.

This book brings the emergent interest in social class and inequality to the field of television studies. It reveals how the new visibility of class matters in serial television functions aesthetically and examines the cultural class politics articulated in these programmes. This ground-breaking volume argues that reality and quality TV's intricate politics of class entices viewers not only to grapple with previously invisible socio-economic realities but also to reconsider their class alignment. The stereotypical ways of framing class are now supplemented by those dedicated to exposing the economic and socio-psychological burdens of the (lower) middle class. The case studies in this book demonstrate how sophisticated narrative techniques coincide with equally complex ways of exposing class divisions in contemporary American life and how the examined shows disrupt the hegemonic order of class. The volume therefore also invites a rethinking of conventional models of social stratification.

Lemke's book proffers a bold new account of the origins of modernism. By focusing upon cubism, primitivist-modernism, jazz, and Josephine Baker's performance, Lemke demonstrates that black art exerted a crucial if masked presence in both Euro-American high art and popular culture. American and European modernism each owes much of its symbolic capital to its black cultural other.