Paper Short Abstract:

This paper examines the "superfluous person" in pre-WWII media, exploring how inscriptions made marginalized individuals legible yet erased complexity. These portrayals balanced empathy and control, revealing tensions in class boundaries and marginality through care and violation.

Paper Abstract:

This paper examines the figure of the "superfluous person" as a lens to explore how pre-WWII media—textual, visual, and performative—inscribed and unwrote marginality. Associated with Russian literature, the term "superfluous people" referred to those deemed unnecessary to societal functioning due to their dislocation from traditional structures of labor, community, and identity. Migrants, vagrants, and radicals were often framed as "superfluous" in middle-class narratives of the era, represented through journalism, social photography, and other media. These portrayals alternated between humanizing and dehumanizing, offering typologies that ranged from pitiable figures deserving care to dangerous outsiders requiring control.

This paper explores how such individuals were made legible to middle-class audiences through conflicting surfaces of care and violation. Social photographers like Jacob Riis evoked empathy and mobilized charity but often reinscribed stereotypes they sought to critique. Similarly, journalists ventriloquized the voices of vagrants and migrants, framing them as moral exemplars or cautionary tales. By analyzing these mediated representations, the paper investigates how the superfluous person was simultaneously preserved and erased, rendered visible for philanthropy or surveillance.

This study contributes to the panel's exploration of inscription and unwriting by showing how the superfluous person served as a reflective and refractive surface in pre-WWII media. Through close readings of specific examples, it examines how these acts of inscription navigated tensions between care and control, preservation and violation, shedding light on how marginalized individuals redefined class boundaries while confined by limiting typologies.