Hvem kan tale for prekariatet – og hvorfra? In the Ghetto med Kristian Bang Foss, Morten Pape, Yahya Hassan, Karina Pedersen og prinsesserne fra blokken

The essay is about how the precariat figures in four significant texts in contemporary Danish literature and a popular documentary television series from the Danish Broadcasting Corporation. The introduction connects the crisis in the Nordic welfare model, recent Danish literary criticism and tendencies in international literary theory. The analyses focus on the question of narrative point of view, recognition and representation in a series of treatments of life in a modern concrete ghetto. The literary texts fall into two main types: descriptions from without and from within – the latter combined with an autobiographical element. However, on closer inspection both types entail a detachment from the ghetto as place, and from life as precarious. The television series utilizes other narrative ploys, but here we also end by emphasizing that the force of the cultural representation is not related to naïve realism and a utilitarian moral as the horizon of expectation, but instead inheres in the ways in which literature and television can render visible and sensible, and thus comprehensible, the differences across which a renovated solidarity must be established.