Working-Class Comic Book Heroes

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Comic Book ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Economic Interests ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
High Profile ◽  
The Walking Dead ◽  
The Galaxy

The Occupy Wall Street protests popularized the notion that “We are the 99 percent” mobilized against the political and economic interests of “the top 1%.” Some protestors wore Guy Fawkes masks in honor of the anarchist hero V, from Alan Moore’s comic book V for Vendetta. The 2016 United States Presidential election saw further evidence of populist unrest, with Democratic Primary candidate Bernie Sanders and Republican Party nominee Donald J. Trump making the economic fears of the beleaguered working- and middle-classes centerpieces of their campaigns. Since populist movements play an increasingly important role in global politics, it is important to consider how the often dismissed and demonized members of the working-classes are represented in popular culture. This book is about how these individuals – and the class conflicts they face in their daily lives – are depicted in comic books and their high-profile film and television adaptations. The essays in this book examine the horror-westerns The Walking Dead and Preacher, and the superhero comics Daredevil, Luke Cage, Jessica Jones, Superman, The Fantastic Four, and Guardians of the Galaxy. Superpowered and non-superpowered comic book heroes provide a unique opportunity to reflect upon the emotionally charged issues surrounding “class” in a borderline safe space. The scholars who wrote these essays hope that, by discussing fictional working-class superheroes such as Spider-Man and Lois Lane in both an intellectual and entertaining manner, they will encourage more fruitful and enlightened ways of discussing vitally significant issues of wealth disparity and class identity in the real world.

scholarly journals Anthropology of the Working-class: Documentary Literature of 1930s Britain

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Timothy Grgec
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Political Commitment ◽  
Literary Value ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The Road ◽  
The Social ◽  
Aesthetic Autonomy ◽  
The Two Cultures ◽  
Documentary Literature

<p>Bookmarked neatly by the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, the 1930s are often characterised as the decade in which writers felt compelled to engage in politics. According to one predominant critical narrative, modernist subjectivity and notions of aesthetic autonomy were eschewed in favour of a more direct involvement with the social and political realities of the time. This thesis explores, and follows in part, this interpretation of the decade’s literary direction by examining British documentary literature and its engagement with the social distress of the Depression.  Driven by an intense fascination with the domestic working-classes (from which each of my professional “authors” remained outsiders), documentary writers journeyed to Britain’s industrial centres to experience working conditions directly. Writers of documentary literature took 1930s realist preoccupations to their most extreme by assuming the role, intentionally or not, of the anthropologist. Paradoxically, this move towards the empirical functioned as a means of crossing what C. P. Snow would later describe as the divide between the “two cultures” of science and arts. I apply Snow’s notion analogously, with documentary literature representing a bridging (depending on each text) of the divides between social science and literature, realism and modernism, political commitment and aesthetic autonomy, North and South, and between the working and middle-classes.  My first chapter discusses Priestley’s English Journey (1934), which while crossing class and geographical divisions, stylistically remains the most conservative of my chosen texts and offers the most moderate example of a generic cultural crossing. The second chapter explores Grey Children (1937) by James Hanley, whose journalistic arrangement of verbatim working-class voices develops a modernist aesthetic. I then move to Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), which unusually for a text by a “literary” author includes extensive figures and statistics, but is more successful in documenting the gritty realities of working life through literary means. The final chapter centres on Mass-Observation’s The Pub and the People (1943) whose obsessive recording of even the most minute details of pub life develops into a bizarre, almost surrealist work of literature. The order of my four chosen texts does not imply a sense of literary value but rather traces a trajectory from the least to the most radical experiments in documentary literature.</p>

scholarly journals Anthropology of the Working-class: Documentary Literature of 1930s Britain

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Timothy Grgec
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Political Commitment ◽  
Literary Value ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The Road ◽  
The Social ◽  
Aesthetic Autonomy ◽  
The Two Cultures ◽  
Documentary Literature

<p>Bookmarked neatly by the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, the 1930s are often characterised as the decade in which writers felt compelled to engage in politics. According to one predominant critical narrative, modernist subjectivity and notions of aesthetic autonomy were eschewed in favour of a more direct involvement with the social and political realities of the time. This thesis explores, and follows in part, this interpretation of the decade’s literary direction by examining British documentary literature and its engagement with the social distress of the Depression.  Driven by an intense fascination with the domestic working-classes (from which each of my professional “authors” remained outsiders), documentary writers journeyed to Britain’s industrial centres to experience working conditions directly. Writers of documentary literature took 1930s realist preoccupations to their most extreme by assuming the role, intentionally or not, of the anthropologist. Paradoxically, this move towards the empirical functioned as a means of crossing what C. P. Snow would later describe as the divide between the “two cultures” of science and arts. I apply Snow’s notion analogously, with documentary literature representing a bridging (depending on each text) of the divides between social science and literature, realism and modernism, political commitment and aesthetic autonomy, North and South, and between the working and middle-classes.  My first chapter discusses Priestley’s English Journey (1934), which while crossing class and geographical divisions, stylistically remains the most conservative of my chosen texts and offers the most moderate example of a generic cultural crossing. The second chapter explores Grey Children (1937) by James Hanley, whose journalistic arrangement of verbatim working-class voices develops a modernist aesthetic. I then move to Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), which unusually for a text by a “literary” author includes extensive figures and statistics, but is more successful in documenting the gritty realities of working life through literary means. The final chapter centres on Mass-Observation’s The Pub and the People (1943) whose obsessive recording of even the most minute details of pub life develops into a bizarre, almost surrealist work of literature. The order of my four chosen texts does not imply a sense of literary value but rather traces a trajectory from the least to the most radical experiments in documentary literature.</p>

Workers and Political Voice

2019 ◽  
pp. 133-162
Author(s):  
Christopher Martin
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Labor Unions ◽  
Presidential Election ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Tea Party ◽  
Occupy Wall Street ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Silent Majority ◽  
The Media ◽  
Political Voice

Chapter 5 exploresthe idea of political voice. It charts how the shift in journalism’s positions about labor unions and the working class relates to the shift in focus of the Democrat and Republican parties in the late 1960s and early 1970s and the concept of the “Silent Majority” encouraged by the Republican Party. As the media and politicians talked less about class, and the working class lost their voice,they found it again in the nascent Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements, which had similar origins, but wildly divergent solutions. The chapter also looks at the case of Iowa’s shift in political voice in the 2016 presidential election.

Abdullah Quilliam

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammad Siddique Seddon
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Political Influences ◽  
Union Movement ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Conversion To Islam ◽  
Class Struggles ◽  
Legal Advisor ◽  
Shed Light

This chapter explores the religious and political influences that shaped Abdullah Quilliam’s Muslim missionary activities, philanthropic work and scholarly writings in an attempt to shed light on his particular political convictions as manifest through his unique religiopolitical endeavors. It focuses especially on Quilliam’s Methodist upbringing in Liverpool and his support of the working classes. It argues that Quilliam’s religious and political activism, although primarily inspired by his conversion to Islam, was also shaped and influenced by the then newly emerging proletariat, revolutionary socialism. Quilliam’s continued commitment to the burgeoning working-class trades union movement, both as a leading member representative and legal advisor, coupled with his reputation as the "poor man’s lawyer" because of his frequent fee-free representations for the impoverished, demonstrates his empathetic proximity to working-class struggles.

BALANCE OF OPINION IN NEWSPAPERS THROUGH EDITORIAL AND OP-ED GENRES

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (105) ◽  
pp. 78-86
Author(s):  
EKATERINA A. NIKONOVA
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Wall Street Journal ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
The New York Times ◽  
White House ◽  
The Wall Street Journal

The article deals with the analysis of the balance of opinion in the newspaper, which is originally realized through editorial and op-ed genres. We analyzed 20 articles from “The Wall Street Journal” and “The New York Times” in the genres of editorial and op-ed about events in Afghanistan in August 2021, which were interpreted differently in mass media due to the role of the White House. The findings prove that in the context of new digital reality the op-ed has lost its original function of conveying alternative positions to the ones stated in the editorial; at the same time newspapers tend to advocate the positions shared by the political parties they have historically developed close relations with: “The Wall Street Journal” - with the Republican Party, “The New York Times” - the Democratic Party.

scholarly journals Riots, social movements and the “making of the working class”: forms of popular organization and urban protest in São Paulo (1945-1964)

2015 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 34
Author(s):  
Marcos Virgílio da Silva
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Sao Paulo ◽  
São Paulo ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Urban Protest ◽  
Rare Phenomena ◽  
Brazilian History

The present article investigates the expressions of popular demands and discontent within three forms of manifestation: riots, non-class-based “social movements”, and movements organized by the “working classes” or “workers”. By examining these different movements we expect to problematize the recurring literature surrounding these movements, which has often characterized them as being insufficient or incomplete, reactive and subordinate to higher authorities, thus being void of any transforming power. It is therefore hoped that this article may contribute to a debate that would seek to transcend the very frequently encountered viewpoint that popular protests have been sporadic, rare phenomena throughout Brazilian history.

scholarly journals Creating an Authentic Experience

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Sarah Osolen ◽  
Leah Brochu
Keyword(s):  
Visually Impaired ◽  
Comic Books ◽  
Comic Book ◽  
Library Service ◽  
National Network ◽  
Narrative Story ◽  
The Walking Dead ◽  
Audio Description ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Walking Dead

While working as production assistants for the National Network of Equitable Library Service (NNELS), an organization that creates and shares accessible versions of books to people with print disabilities, we were tasked with a challenging request from a user: Could we make an accessible version of the comic book The Walking Dead? Audio description services are available to the visually impaired in a few different venues such as television, movies, and live theatre. Guidelines for the creation of these descriptive texts are available to potential creators, but in our case, we could find nothing that would help guide us to create a described comic book. While some people and organizations have created prose novelizations of comic books, these simply tell the story, and do not include the unique visual aspects of reading a comic book. We have found that it is possible to create a balanced description that combines the visual grammar of a comic with the narrative story. In addition to creating a described comic book, we are developing guiding documentation that will be a necessary tool to ensure that visually impaired readers have a comic book experience (CBE) that (a) closely matches the CBE of a sighted reader, and (b) is standardized across producers, so that the onus of understanding the approach to comic book description (CBD) is not put on the visually impaired reader. At this point in our work, we need more feedback from users with print disabilities to ensure we are meeting the highest standards.

scholarly journals Economic Interests and the Framing of the 1988 and 1992 Deomcratic and Republican Party Platforms

1995 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 79-93
Author(s):  
Terri Susan Fine
Keyword(s):  
Labor Unions ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Active Role ◽  
Economic Interest ◽  
Economic Interests ◽  
Trade Associations ◽  
Group Participation ◽  
Party Platforms ◽  
Business Interests ◽  
Equal Interest

In this paper, the role that economic groups play in attempting to shape party platforms is examined by analyzing economic group presence at the 1988 and 1992 Democratic and Republican platform writing hearings. Whether the same economic groups participating as witnesses in the platform writing hearings also contributed to the presidential campaigns is also explored. The findings suggest that economic interest group participation varied widely between 1988 and 1992 and declined across years. Trade associations dominated economic group participation whereas labor unions did not take an active role. Business interests showed a strong preference for the Republicans in 1988 and reasonably equal interest in both parties the following year. The participatory decline among these groups may be explained by a growing perception that platforms are less effective as campaign guides and policy tools in an era dominated by candidate centered elections, split ticket voting and increasing independent identification, all indicators of decreasing reliance on the parties at the mass and elite levels.

A working-class artist is something to be

2022 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenn Taylor
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Real Power ◽  
The Real ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Rightful Place ◽  
Cultural Sector

The creative and cultural sectors in the United Kingdom largely exclude the working classes. Even the small number of working-class people who do ‘make it’ into these sectors often find themselves and their work badly treated by those who hold the real power. This article explores some of the experiences of working-class artists navigating the cultural sector and how exclusion, prejudice and precarity impacted and continue to impact them. It takes as its focus the filmmaker Alan Clarke and the playwright Andrea Dunbar, who were at the height of their success in the 1980s. It also considers the writers Darren McGarvey and Nathalie Olah, whose work has achieved prominence in recent years. It is through this focus I hope to demonstrate the long continuum of challenges for working-class creatives. This article also considers how, on the occasions when they are allowed the space they deserve, working-class artists have created powerful shifts in cultural production. Finally, it details some of the changes needed for working-class people to be able to take their rightful place in contributing to cultural life and the societal risks involved if they are denied that place.

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