Undeserving of the Union: The American Idea of the 'Underclass' in Europe, 1992-2011

The aim of this project is to write a cultural history of the different ways in which the American construct of the ‘underclass’ was exported to different European national contexts in the twenty years following the Maastricht Treaty. Through a web of transatlantic relations, the concept was modified and adapted to those segments of the population that were hit the hardest by the ongoing processes of deindustrialisation, thus impacting the way in which Europeans problematized poverty and marginalisation. Academic writing, journalism and politicians’ speeches became the vectors of a gradual change that involved public policy at all levels, as well as national common sense. The project aims at verifying the hypothesis that the importation and adaptation of the concept of ‘underclass’ was functional to the differentiated implementation of neoliberal policies in different but interrelated contexts. It focuses such exploration on Italy, Germany and the United Kingdom. The choice of making it as cultural history is based on the premise that the magnitude of this shift in policy and mentality can only be gauged through an interdisciplinary methodology integrating analytic tools from history, sociology and cultural studies. Thus, as a scholar of literature and culture, I have chosen as my prospective supervisors two sociologists. Should my application be successful, I would be working with Professor Fabio Perocco at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, who has long worked on the comparative sociology of inequality, and with Professor Loïc Wacquant at the University of California, Berkeley, whose symbolic-sociological analysis of various aspects of neoliberalism has informed much of the theoretical frame of this project, and who has done extensive work on the history of the concept of ‘underclass’ in the United States.