According to Zygmunt Bauman, globalisation generates ‘a new sociocultural hierarchy’ of free market mobility and wealth that immobilises a growing number of ‘others’ who ‘sink ever deeper into despair born of a prospectless existence’ (Bauman 2000 [1998]: 70). Similarly, angled towards outsiders rendered uncomfortable with mainstream values and engulfed by contemporaneity, Ali Smith's fiction offers a response to the effects of neoliberal globalisation. She is interested precisely in those ‘others’ identified by Bauman who are casualties of global power, such as homeless, and thus economically immobilised, Else in Hotel World (2001). More recently, Smith's work is resonant of Bauman's identified precariat in her depiction of characters who suffer the uncertainty of zero hours and casual contracts, with the perpetual anxiety of becoming an outsider. In this exegesis of others in Smith's more recent works where demarcations of social stratification are disrupted, I consider the composite nexus evident between Scotland, cosmopolitanism and anachronism, which forges a queer resistance to global temporality.

Her main characters in There But For The (2011, hereafter abbreviated to TBFT) occupy peripheral positions in British society and its hegemonic endorsement of globalisation: Anna Hardie is an exiled unemployed Scot in her mid-forties; Mark Palmer is a 59-year-old gay man who is five years bereaved of his partner, Jonathan, while still grieving the suicide of his artist mother, Faye, in his childhood; elderly May Young feels discarded by society; and precocious child Brooke Bayoude is bullied for being intelligent and black. TBFT is set in Greenwich in 2009, during London's global financial dominance, and Smith's seasonal quartet-in-progress (Autumn (2016) and Winter (2017) published at time of writing) directly engages with globalisation's impact upon British and American national discontents. As Bauman berates globalised accelerated capitalism's immobilisation of others, similarly, Autumn's Elisabeth Demand, a ‘no fixed-hours casual contract junior lecturer at a university in London’ (Smith 2016: 15), exists in the precarious freefall of neoliberal economic insecurity. While TBFT charts globalisation's impact upon others, Autumn and Winter disclose its blowback experienced during the increasingly neoconservative populism of 2016's EU referendum and the US election of President Trump.