Narratives of Disposability in Contemporary British Fiction: Monica Ali's In the Kitchen and John Lanchester's Capital

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to analyse Monica Ali's In the Kitchen (2009) and John Lanchester's Capital (2012). I draw on the notion of disposability (Evans and Giroux, Standing, and Bauman) to delve into the concepts of neoliberal subjectivity and exclusion for the analysis of the characters that in the novels embody subjectivities shaped by the logic of finance (economic migrants or asylum seekers). I argue that both works narrate different personifications of disposability resulting from neoliberal violence. In In the Kitchen and Capital, both Ali and Lanchester map a dark cartography of neoliberal British society. Both novels picture a society that is either indifferent to the violence provoked by neoliberalism, or unable to fight it back; the two works map a journey that slides from an apparently multicultural and opulent society down into a kind of dantesque social Inferno.