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Weekly UpdatesJohn Russo and Sherry Lee Linkon, eds., New Working-Class Studies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2005)
EVERY ONCE in a while a book comes along that all labour historians should read and own. New Working-Class Studies edited by John Russo and Sherry Lee Linkon is one of those books. The book reflects the remarkable achievements of Russo and Linkon in founding and codirecting the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University. Their success in building a new kind of multidisciplinary working-class studies that can appeal simultaneously to working-class students as well as to humanities and social science scholars shines through in this important new book.
The book reads as a moment of reflection as some of the leading practitioners of the new working-class studies have paused to evaluate the parameters of a field in construction and to identify the work that remains to be done. It is easy to imagine that in a few short years, as more teachers discover what Michael Zweig calls here the "working-class majority" and as the Youngstown State working-class studies conference continues to grow, this volume could be reedited and reissued with an entirely new set of powerful essays. The essays here are mostly short and thematic, laying out topics, methods, and teaching strategies for a new field. They must, therefore, be considered collectively. This is not a collection from which to read selectively; it should be evaluated in its totality for the challenges the essays together present to labour history and cultural studies. Labour history can rightly be accused of methodological insularity, largely unwilling and incapable of moving beyond social history or of incorporating ideas beyond the field of history. Cultural studies, while unquestionably multidisciplinary and innovative, has been resistant to working-class themes and questions.
One of the real advances of the new working-class studies, in general, and this volume, in particular, is in identifying a wealth of cultural production by and about working people. This book traces the terrain of the new working-class studies by describing the representations of class and work within poetry, autobiography, film, and popular music. But as Rachel Lee Rubin correctly argues in her discussion of working-class studies and popular music, addressing what Michael Denning has elsewhere described as the working-class "accents" of American popular culture is not simply a question of introducing new topics. New methods must be imagined. As Jim Daniels suggests, working-class poetry, for example, is distinctive insofar as it is often production about production, written in response to difficult and disheartening working and living situations. One must examine the poetry for its "impulse," a 'deep' reading that demands moving beyond metre and image to histories of lived experience. Similarly, as Tom Zaniello on film and as Rubin on music both demonstrate, elements of popular culture must be explored for how they are used by working-class subjects. This process of appropriation--what might be called re-production--is crucial for determining individual and social meanings.
Working-class production--whether that is the material of cultural work, waged or salaried labour, or unpaid work--cannot be examined in isolation, set apart from use and the sedimentation of meaning. The country music song, for example, must be examined for the experience of its writer and performer, as well as for its received meanings, the site of its singing, and the way it is remade and, often, rewritten to match new contexts. The examination of working-class culture, therefore, depends on what the editors call "intersections" between fields and methods. Thus, Elizabeth Faue offers a reappraisal of the way working-class consciousness is mediated through gender, and David Roediger explores the intertwining of class and race. Both highlight the importance of looking beyond the traditional sources of union records, for example, to literature, autobiographies, and memoirs.
Their insights capture the way working-class studies has depended on a cross-fertilization among disciplines and a consciousness of what it means for the classroom. Working-class studies has flourished in the social sciences. For example, economics, as Michael Zweig demonstrates, is revisiting the issue of class. The humanities, like literature, have rediscovered that class matters. Paul Lauter offers new ways of reading and defining working-class literature.
Yet, interestingly, historians have been some of the most reluctant to engage with this multidisciplinary field. As the book demonstrates, working-class studies poses a potent challenge to recent trends in labour history. Faue describes working-class studies as a direct inheritance of the new labour history of the 1960s and 1970s. However, labour history has since then focused increasingly on institutions and unions and, ironically, while it has produced wonderful work on issues of race and gender, has been less successful at theorizing class. Thus, despite the important focus on culture in the early New Labour History, the best work on class is being done outside of history, in literature and anthropology programs.
While working-class studies challenges the fundamental direction of labour history, many of the same questions that have long dogged labour historians still need to be asked of working-class studies. Because of its multidisciplinary base in the humanities and social sciences, conceptions of class vary broadly in the volume. It is grounded at times in economic conditions and, elsewhere, in identity. It is useful to resist the urge to define class narrowly. Yet the inability of cultural studies to engage critically with issues of class can be explained partly through the difficulty of theorizing class and the working class. Even in this volume, working class becomes reduced at times to the experience of work. Can the working class be understood equally in terms of leisure or is the experience of recreation always mediated through that of work? Moreover, despite the important plea of Kimberly Phillips in her study of African Americans and the question of class to expand our understanding of labour, factory work still seems to loom as the defining experience of labour.
Finally, in his comparative oral histories of deindustrialization, Alessandro Portelli suggests an important reminder to consider the relation of the nation and the state to working-class studies. Working-class studies has largely been developed in the United States by scholars working on American topics. As scholars beyond the American border begin to engage with its insights, it is all the more important to explore how conversations about work and class exist within national as well as transnational contexts.
But this is work for new volumes and for new sessions at the Youngstown State conference. New Working-Class Studies is a wonderful collection of accessible theory, clear and personal writing, and pointed challenges. It captures the incredible potential and achievements of a field still in production.
Daniel E. Bender
University of Toronto
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