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Document Type

Article

Author Biography

Paul Stasi is an associate professor at SUNY Albany, where he teaches twentieth-century Anglophone literature. He is the author of The Persistence of Realism in Modernist Fiction (2022), Modernism, Imperialism and the Historical Sense (2012), and numerous essays and the editor of the forthcoming Realism and the Novel: A Literary History.

Abstract

This essay argues that season 2 of The Wire—often neglected in considerations of David Simon’s groundbreaking show—is, in fact, central to its understanding of the complicated intersection of race and class under contemporary neoliberalism. Focusing on a set of dockworkers in Baltimore’s port, season 2 offers us a kind of prehistory of season 1, demonstrating how the steady erosion of work leads directly to the criminal activities we observed in the first season. What separates the first and second seasons is not only, or even primarily, race, as is often assumed, but rather the presence of the union, which provides a form of support for both Black and white dockworkers that is absent from the inner-city corners. If The Wire illustrates the ways in which racialization is reinforced by people’s lived environments, it also shows how it can be countered by a different form of sociality, one grounded in experiences the working classes have in common, which can mitigate, if never entirely efface, the lived reality of racialized capital. Season 2 thus offers one way we might overcome the racialized divisions that persist in contemporary American life.

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