INVENTING THE ‘TRADITIONAL WORKING CLASS’: A RE-ANALYSIS OF INTERVIEW NOTES FROM YOUNG AND WILLMOTT'S FAMILY AND KINSHIP IN EAST LONDON

2016 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 567-593 ◽  
Author(s):  
JON LAWRENCE
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Social Democracy ◽  
London Borough ◽  
Class A ◽  
Personal Testimony

ABSTRACTThis article examines surviving notes from interviews conducted by Michael Young and Peter Willmott in the London Borough of Bethnal Green and the Essex ‘overspill’ estate of ‘Greenleigh’ (Debden) in the mid-1950s to ask how far they support the central arguments about kinship, community, and place advanced in their classic 1957 book Family and kinship in East London. These interviews are used to suggest that Young and Willmott's powerful a priori models about ‘community’ and working-class kinship, and their strong political investment in the idea of a decentralized social democracy based on self-servicing, working-class communities, led them to discount testimony which ran counter to their assumptions as ‘aberrant’ or ‘exceptional’. Though it is difficult to draw strong conclusions from thirty-seven interviews, it is suggested that the snippets of personal testimony that survive in Michael Young's papers reinforce the arguments of historians who seek to question cataclysmic accounts of the consequences of working-class suburbanization in the mid-twentieth century. Culture and lifestyle changed much less with the move out to suburban Essex than Family and kinship would suggest, partly because Bethnal Green's family and neighbourhood networks were considerably less cohesive than they claimed.

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Unpublished Work ◽  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.

Pragmatic Reconstruction in Jurisprudence: Features of a Realistic Legal Theory

2021 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 171-202
Author(s):  
Brian Z. Tamanaha
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Coercive Force ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Conceptual Analysis ◽  
Legal Theory ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Planning System ◽  
Universal Feature ◽  
Moral Problems ◽  
Theory Of Law

A century ago the pragmatists called for reconstruction in philosophy. Philosophy at the time was occupied with conceptual analysis, abstractions, a priori analysis, and the pursuit of necessary, universal truths. Pragmatists argued that philosophy instead should center on the pressing problems of the day, which requires theorists to pay attention to social complexity, variation, change, power, consequences, and other concrete aspects of social life. The parallels between philosophy then and jurisprudence today are striking, as I show, calling for a pragmatism-informed theory of law within contemporary jurisprudence. In the wake of H.L.A. Hart’s mid-century turn to conceptual analysis, “during the course of the twentieth century, the boundaries of jurisprudential inquiry were progressively narrowed.”1 Jurisprudence today is dominated by legal philosophers engaged in conceptual analysis built on intuitions, seeking to identify essential features and timeless truths about law. In the pursuit of these objectives, they detach law from its social and historical moorings, they ignore variation and change, they drastically reduce law to a singular phenomenon—like a coercive planning system for difficult moral problems2—and they deny that coercive force is a universal feature of law, among other ways in which they depart from the reality of law; a few prominent jurisprudents even proffer arguments that invoke aliens or societies of angels.

"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.

scholarly journals The Tragic Mulatta and Storytelling in Their Eyes Were Watching God

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 71-88
Author(s):  
Ana Belén Pérez García
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Zora Neale Hurston ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Female Identity ◽  
Female Character ◽  
Black Race ◽  
Antebellum Literature ◽  
Literary Character ◽  
White Person ◽  
Do So

The figure of the tragic mulatta placed its origin in antebellum literature and was extensively used in the literature of the nineteenth and twentieth century. Much has been written about this literary character in a time when the problem of miscegenation was at its highest point, and when studies established that races were inherently different, meaning that the black race was inferior to the white one. Many authors have made use of this trope for different purposes, and Zora Neale Hurston was one of them. In her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston creates Janie, a mulatta that a priori follows all the characteristics of this type of female character who, however, breaks away from most of them. She overcomes all stereotypes and prejudices, those imposed on her because of her condition of interracial offspring, and is able to take charge of her own life and challenge all these impositions feeling closer to her blackness and celebrating and empowering her female identity. In this vein, storytelling becomes the liberating force that helps her do so. It will become the tool that will enable her to ignore the need of passing as a white person and provide her with the opportunity to connect with her real identity and so feel free and happy, breaking with the tragic destiny of mulatta characters. Keywords: storytelling, tragic mulatta, blackness, Hurston.  

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