Capitalist Realism: Glimmers, Working-Class Authenticity and Andrea Dunbar in the 21st Century

This article thinks through how registers of ‘the real’ have operated in working- class representations, from social realism (in film, theatre, drama and soap opera) to reality television and appeals to ‘authenticity’ in publicity and marketing mate- rials for cultural products purporting to represent the working class. It argues that the ubiquity of ‘the real’ in representations of working-class experience is one way in which Fisher’s ‘capitalist realism’ asserts itself. The article argues that experi- ments with form and intertextuality can offer ‘glimmers’ through which slippages in claims to absolute reality are revealed. It explores the possibility for such ‘glim- mers’ in experimentations with Andrea Dunbar’s work in the twenty-first century, reasserting the importance of form in dismantling the neo-liberal political project