Provincializing Capital: The Work of an Agrarian Past in South Indian Industry

2004 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 760-785 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sharad Chari
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
Small Firms ◽  
Indian Industry ◽  
Class Mobility ◽  
Peasant Workers ◽  
South Indian ◽  
Peasant Worker

During the last two decades of the twentieth century, Tiruppur town in Tamilnadu state became India's centerpiece in the export of cotton knitted garments. Between 1986 and 1997, Tiruppur's export earnings skyrocketed from $25 million to $636 million, the number of garments exported increased more than nine-fold, and Tiruppur shifted from basic T-shirts to diversified multi-product exports of fashion garments. This industrial boom has been organized through networks of small firms integrated through intricate subcontracting arrangements controlled by local capital of the Gounder caste from modest agrarian and working-class origins. In effect the whole town works like a decentralized factory for the global economy, but with local capital of peasant-worker origins at the helm. What is more, these self-made men hinge their retrospective narratives of class mobility and industrial success on their propensity to ‘toil’: the word ulaippu is distinct from the conventional Tamil word for work. How did Gounder peasant-workers remake the dynamics of work through their toil, to make Tiruppur a powerhouse of global production?

scholarly journals Transatlantic Translations of the Button-down Shirt

2014 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 97
Author(s):  
Nathaniel Weiner
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ivy League ◽  
Class System ◽  
Class Mobility ◽  
National Imaginary ◽  
Youth Subcultures ◽  
Class Youth

This article looks at how the button-down shirt has been translated in the American and British contexts. Employing Barthes’ notion of ‘fashion narrative,’ I describe how in the United States, the button-down shirt is closely associated with the Ivy Look, a style that had emerged from the elite Ivy League universities but became mass fashion by the mid-1960s. While the garment remained youthful, continuing to draw on the collegiate fashion narrative, it also spoke to an American national imaginary of affluence, abundance and class mobility. Both the garment and its paratextual meanings circulated through the global fashion system, emerging in a very different context in 1960s Britain. Speaking to British imaginings of America, it remained youthful but was transformed by the particularities of the British class system, becoming closely associated with two of Britain’s working-class youth subcultures: the mods and the skinheads. Emblematic of the subterranean passion for clothing that characterised the culture of young working-class men in Britain during the latter half of the twentieth century, the button-down shirt became a subcultural icon. In turn, the historicisation and commodification of these subcultures has ensured the button-down shirt’s place in the British national imaginary. Comparing publicity materials produced by American and British clothiers, I examine how the garment’s fashion narratives, both British and American, continue to circulate.

The Strange Radicalism of Thomas Carnduff and St John Ervine

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Connal Parr
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
First World War ◽  
Class Consciousness ◽  
World War ◽  
Abbey Theatre ◽  
Unpublished Work ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World

St John Ervine and Thomas Carnduff were born in working-class Protestant parts of Belfast in the 1880s, though Ervine would escape to an eventually prosperous existence in England. Orangeism, the politics of early twentieth-century Ireland, the militancy of the age—and the involvement of these writers in it—along with Ervine’s journey from ardent Fabian to reactionary Unionist, via his pivotal experiences managing the Abbey Theatre and losing a leg in the First World War, are all discussed. Carnduff’s own tumultuous life is reflected through his complicated Orange affiliation, gut class-consciousness, poetry, unpublished work, contempt for the local (and gentrified) Ulster artistic scene, and veneration of socially conscious United Irishman James Hope. It concludes with an assessment of their respective legacies and continuing import.

Golden Opportunities: Jewelry Making in Birmingham between Mass Production and Specialty

2003 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 272-298 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca Carnevali
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mass Production ◽  
Small Firms ◽  
Product Market ◽  
Industrial Districts ◽  
Mass Consumption ◽  
Industrial History ◽  
Flexible Specialization ◽  
Productive System ◽  
History Of

Narratives of flexible specialization as an alternative to mass production are largely absent from the industrial history of twentieth-century Britain. In this article, I challenge the notion that we should relegate small firms and industrial districts to a marginal place in the historiography of this period. Drawing from a range of sources, I explore the history of Birmingham's jewelry makers to show how they adapted the traditional productive system of the district to respond in a dynamic way to the challenges of rapid product market differentiation. As jewelry increasingly became a commodity for mass consumption, the firms in the Birmingham district used a combination of specialty and mass production as a strategy to both satisfy and create demand.

"Us" vs. "Them". Communist Dialectical Images from Interwar Europe and Soviet Russia

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adri Kácsor
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Political Propaganda ◽  
Political Transformations ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Soviet Russia ◽  
Interwar Europe

Brawny male workers vs. bulging bourgeois men. Working-class mothers burdened by the hardship of poverty and childcare vs. elegant upper-class women enjoying a lifestyle of privilege. Such juxtaposed images of workers and the rich were prevalent in the visual culture of communism throughout the twentieth century, appearing on posters, illustrations, and other genres of political propaganda across countries and continents. Although these didactic propaganda images have rarely been considered in histories of modernism and the avant-garde, this article argues that they were among the key visual inventions of twentieth-century communist visual culture given their highly innovative aesthetics and juxtaposed structure that provided them a potential to become dialectical. Drawing on examples from interwar Europe and Soviet Russia, this article examines how didactic juxtapositions could become dialectical images, triggering political transformations while also making revolutionary class consciousness visible for the viewer.

Late Twentieth-Century Psychoanalytic Interpretations of Sects and Cults: Weston La Bare, Norman Cohn, & E. P. Thompson

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-46
Author(s):  
Stephen Kent
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Native American ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Class Consciousness ◽  
Freudian Psychoanalysis ◽  
Ghost Dance ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Religious Sects ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Before the diminished influence of classical psychoanalysis in the late twentieth century, several now-classic studies of sectarian religions contained Freudian psychoanalytic perspectives on religious sects or cults. These studies included Weston La Barre’s analyses of both serpent handlers and the Native American Ghost Dance; Norman Cohn’s panoramic examination of medieval European sectarian apocalyptic movements; and E. P. Thompson’s groundbreaking examination of Methodism within the formation of English working-class consciousness. Regardless of the problems that are endemic to the application of Freudian psychoanalysis to history, the sheer (although sometimes flawed) erudition of these three authors suggests that classical psychoanalysis had an important interpretive role to play in the study of some sectarian and cultic groups.

Ugliness and Beauty: the Politics of Landscape in Walter Greenwood's Love on the Dole

2013 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-47
Author(s):  
Claire Warden
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The Other ◽  
Surrounding Area ◽  
North West ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The North ◽  
The One ◽  
The University ◽  
Open Fields

The multi-spatial landscape of the North-West of England (Manchester–Salford and the surrounding area) provides the setting for Walter Greenwood's 1934 play Love on the Dole. Both the urban industrialized cityscape and the rural countryside that surrounds it are vital framing devices for the narrative – these spaces not simply acting as backdrops but taking on character roles. In this article Claire Warden reads the play's presentation of the North through the concept of landscape theatre, on the one hand, and Raymond Williams's city–country dialogism on the other, claiming that Love on the Dole is imbued with the revolutionary possibility that defines the very landscape in which it is set. From claustrophobic working-class kitchen to the open fields of Derbyshire, Love on the Dole has a sense of spatial ambition in which Greenwood regards all landscapes as tainted by the industrial world while maintaining their capacity to function independently. Ugliness and beauty, capitalist hegemony and socialistic hopefulness reside simultaneously in this important under-researched example of twentieth-century British theatre, thereby reflecting the ambivalent, shifting landscape of the North and producing a play that cannot be easily defined artistically or politically. Claire Warden is a Lecturer in Drama at the University of Lincoln. Her work focuses on peripheral British performances in the early to mid-twentieth century. She is the author of British Avant-Garde Theatre (Palgrave MacMillan, 2012) and is currently writing Modernist and Avant-Garde Performance: an Introduction for Edinburgh University Press, to be published in 2014.

Exploring Working-Class Consciousness: A Critique of the Theory of the ‘Labour-Aristocracy’*

2010 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 3-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Post
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Alternative Explanation ◽  
World Market ◽  
Capitalist Class ◽  
Capitalist Production ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject

AbstractThe notion of the labour-aristocracy is one of the oldest Marxian explanations of working-class conservatism and reformism. Despite its continued appeal to scholars and activists on the Left, there is no single, coherent theory of the labour-aristocracy. While all versions argue working-class conservatism and reformism reflects the politics of a privileged layer of workers who share in ‘monopoly’ super-profits, they differ on the sources of those super-profits: national dominance of the world-market in the nineteenth century (Marx and Engels), imperialist investments in the ‘colonial world’/global South (Lenin and Zinoviev), or corporate monopoly in the twentieth century (Elbaum and Seltzer). The existence of a privileged layer of workers who share monopoly super-profits with the capitalist class cannot be empirically verified. This essay presents evidence that British capital’s dominance of key-branches of global capitalist production in the Victorian period, imperialist investment and corporate market-power can not explain wage-differentials among workers globally or nationally, and that relatively well-paid workers have and continue to play a leading rôle in radical and revolutionary working-class organisations and struggles. An alternative explanation of working-class radicalism, reformism, and conservatism will be the subject of a subsequent essay.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document