Southernizing the North: Lived Precarity and Britain’s “Internal South” in Wang Bang’s The Texture of Hard Times

Abstract

This article reads Wang Bang’s The Texture of Hard Times through the concept of “southernization” within the Global North, understood here as the production of peripheralized conditions within the capitalist core. Through a close analysis of Wang’s nonfictional narrative, it examines four interconnected dimensions of lived precarity: cross-class mobility and unstable labor, the sensory experience of inadequate housing, bodily need and shame in contexts of period poverty and fuel poverty, and localized practices of mutual aid. Wang’s migrant perspective reveals how neoliberal policies, particularly housing privatization and welfare retrenchment, have eroded the postwar social contract and rendered basic needs precarious for marginalized groups in the UK. By framing these conditions as an “internal South,” the article challenges rigid North–South binaries and argues that capitalist modernity distributes vulnerability not only across nations but also within them. Wang’s work further highlights how grassroots care networks offer fragile but meaningful forms of support within systemic insecurity, helping preserve dignity amid structural inequality.