After precarity: A geography of dark news and digital hope on the island of Lolland

Abstract

Journalists and artists in the global North tend to amplify certain geographies as go-to scenes of post-industrial abandonment. But sometimes those who live in these geographies foreground hope against this dark imaginary. How do we make sense of a situation that seemingly calls for an analysis of precarious life when those who live in that situation do not want to be understood in precarious terms? By enjoining cultural representations and empirical fieldwork on the Danish island of Lolland with Eve Kosofky Sedgwick’s essay on symptomatic and reparative reading, I show how a troubled post-industrial geography challenges us to open an analysis where both precarity and hope remain available. I begin with interpreting the figuration of Lolland in media and popular culture as symptomatic reading, a reoccurring interpretation of the island as precarity’s prime example. I then work through the locally popular hash-tag of #LollandFalsterLovestorm to show how the jamming of darkness by digital optimism can foreground reparative reading, a willingness to analyze the place in terms of the affective resources it has to offer the self. I finally bring out the mutuality of reparative and symptomatic analysis on Lolland: in representations, strategies and the ordinary, hope moves through precarity in geographies of compromised upwards mobility.