scholarly journals From Red Scare to Capitalist Showcase: Working-Class Literature from Singapore

2020 ◽  
pp. 139-164
Author(s):  
Luka Zhang Lei
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Red Scare ◽  
Historical Overview ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
Working Class Literature

In Singapore, discourse on working-class culture, especially working-class literature, is mostly scant. This paper aims to begin constructing such a discourse by analysing from a historical perspective three working-class writers. By discussing Chong Han (1945- ), Tan Kok Seng (1939- ) and Md Sharif Uddin (1978- ) and their works, I reflect on the particular historical, social-political and aesthetic features that make each writer unique and relevant at different stages in Singaporean history. I will delineate a rudimentary historical overview of working-class literature in Singapore, stressing the different possibilities and limits under various "production modes". By doing so, I hope to show the distinctive predicaments of working-class literature and various issues in today's scholarship on working-class literature.

scholarly journals Labour Conflicts and Working-Class Culture in Early Modern Holland

1990 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 377-420 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rudolf Dekker
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Textile Industry ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Economic Recession ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
Informal Workers ◽  
Ancien Régime ◽  
Modern Era

SUMMARYFrom the 15th to the 18th century Holland, the most urbanized part of the northern Netherlands, had a tradition of labour action. In this article the informal workers' organizations which existed especially within the textile industry are described. In the 17th century the action forms adjusted themselves to the better coordinated activities of the authorities and employers. After about 1750 this protest tradition disappeared, along with the economic recession which especially struck the traditional industries. Because of this the continuity of the transition from the ancien régime to the modern era which may be discerned in the labour movements of countries like France and England, cannot be found in Holland.

Red Vienna: Experiment in Working Class Culture, 1919-1934

1995 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 343
Author(s):  
Eric D. Kohler ◽  
Helmut Gruber
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Class Culture

scholarly journals Them and Uz: Harrison and me

2022 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. M. Francis
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Personal Essay ◽  
Class Culture

The working-class writer, having moved into a middle-class dominated field, often feels alienated from their old and new cultures – separated as they are from their heritage and not quite grounded in the new elite circle. The markers of working-class culture are much harder to define in our hyper-modern situation, and this exacerbates the alienation. This position opens up possibilities in perception and expression from those in the margins and off-kilter positions. Tracing the multivoiced qualities of Tony Harrison’s ‘V’ and R. M. Francis’s poetics, alongside biographical and autobiographical details, this hybrid article argues that off-kilter and outcast voices, like those in the aforementioned class liminality, are in the best place to explore and discuss the difficult to navigate cultures, communities and identities. This fusion of personal essay, poetry and literary criticism considers the unusual, marginal and liminal positioning of working-class writers, researchers and academics.

Photoromance, she read: Fandom and the politics of Italian media

2022 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paola Bonifazio
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Global Market ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Cultural Products ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Women's Emancipation ◽  
Privately Owned

This article examines Italian non-fiction media productions of the late 1950s and 1960s that represent the photoromance industry and its female fans. I argue that state-controlled and/or privately owned media outlets and their contributors (among them, Cesare Zavattini and Mario Soldati) scapegoated photoromances in defence of moral, social and cultural respectability, but also on the basis of anxieties towards the increasing role played by female audiences in the making of culture. Furthermore, I show that politically engaged documentaries similarly chastised the photoromance industry without necessarily serving the cause of women’s emancipation. Blaming photoromances for the degeneration of Catholic values, for the debasement of working-class culture and for the degradation of consumerist society, all films serve the same purpose of maintaining a patriarchal society’s status quo, of diverging attention from ‘higher’ cultural products and their exploitation of women’s bodies and of minimizing the important role that female fans played in the success of a global market.

Working-Class Culture as Political Participation: Reading Trump as Revolt Against a Middle-Class Public Sphere

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-132
Author(s):  
Liberty Kohn
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Knowledge Construction ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Communication Style ◽  
Deep Foundations ◽  
Master Narrative ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
2016 Election ◽  
White Working Class

The 2016 election cycle and ensuing presidency of Donald Trump has been attributed in large part to his support among working-class whites (Gest 2016, p. 193; Tyson and Maniam 2016). Their reasons for support, however, are open to interpretation. This article will suggest that elements of Donald Trump’s public communication style and ethos align with elements of working-class culture, language use, and knowledge construction. Trump’s anti-institutional, anti-government rhetoric reifies these components of working-class culture because of institutions’ and government’s deep foundations in middle-class culture, language use, and knowledge construction—and the working-class’s, especially the white working-class’s, alienation from these institutions, with the result being anger or apathy (Lareau 2003; Jensen 2012; Gest 2016). These values are often embedded in a master narrative that defines white working-class life as one of victimization (Hochschild 2016; Gest 2016; Cramer 2016). The article next suggests that Trump’s oft-used rhetorical framework of not just immigrants as threat, but of immigrants as protected and valued by institutions that overlook white workingclass concerns (Gest 2016), opens up one possible persuasive framework to legitimate Trump’s xenophobia and racism through white working-class attitudes.

The Limits of Economic Restructuring

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles S. Maier
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Economic Restructuring ◽  
Coal Industry ◽  
Red Scare ◽  
World War ◽  
Middle Classes

This chapter examines the problems encountered by France, Germany, and Italy as they each embarked on economic restructuring after World War I. A new bourgeois equilibrium seemed attainable in each country during the period; it rested on a consensus that united elites and middle classes against militant working-class claims. Capitalism and bourgeois hierarchies proved more resilient than either defenders or attackers had assumed. Furthermore, the movement of restoration was wider than the three societies. Across the Atlantic, “red scare” and recession were ushering in the era of normalcy. The chapter considers the evolution of leftist objectives in France, Germany, and Italy that accompanied the transition from the turmoil of 1918–1919 to the bourgeois recovery of 1920–1921. It also discusses the strategies of bourgeois defense and the failure of socialization in the German coal industry.

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