The Oriental and the Music Hall: Sound and Space in Thomas Burke’s Limehouse Chinatown

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Kendall
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Chinese Culture ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Music Hall ◽  
East End ◽  
Bourgeois Culture ◽  
Sax Rohmer

Dr Fu Manchu has proved the most enduring of the chinoiserie associated with Limehouse, however, this chapter concentrates on the representation of the space of Chinatown, rather than the representation of any one individual. It begins with a brief consideration of the Limehouse lair created for Fu Manchu by Sax Rohmer, before focusing attention on the less remembered but once infamous literary chinoiserie of Thomas Burke. In particular, it examines the depiction of sound and music in his early works, and their utilisation in the construction of a Chinatown which was enmeshed within the wider East End, and whose Oriental practices intersected with Victorian music hall. In his combination of ancient Chinese melodies and pre-commercialised music hall, Burke assigned his Chinatown and East End to a previous era, his Limehouse was separated from the rest of London by time, as well as race and class. Although Burke in one sense offers Chinatown as a nostalgic alternative to the encroachment of the modern state and bourgeois culture, he also depicts it as a brutal slum where murder and suicide were commonplace. Burke’s subtly subversive chinoserie oscillates between negative and positive constructions of his synthesis of Victorian working-class and Chinese culture.

Coming Back Home to Live and Not Die: A Human Geography of a Working-Class Black Gay Male Navigating the Local Higher Education Pipeline

2021 ◽  
pp. 004208592098729
Author(s):  
Amalia Z. Dache ◽  
Keon M. McGuire
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Policy Research ◽  
Human Geography ◽  
Community Based ◽  
Industrial City ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Gay Male ◽  
Education Pipeline ◽  
Post Industrial ◽  
Narrative Mapping

The purpose of this study is to illustrate how in the span of three decades, a working-class Black gay male college student residing in a post-industrial city navigated college. Through a postcolonial geographic epistemology and theories of human geography, we explore his narrative, mapping the terrain of sexual, race and class dialects, which ultimately led to Marcus’s (pseudonym) completion of graduate school and community-based policy research. Marcus’s educational human geography reveals the unique and complex intersections of masculinity, Blackness and class as identities woven into his experiences navigating the built environment.

scholarly journals Male Impersonation in the Music Hall: the Case of Vesta Tilley

1988 ◽  
Vol 4 (15) ◽  
pp. 247-257 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elaine Aston
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Music Hall ◽  
Cross Dressing ◽  
Male Impersonation

Music hall has only recently been treated to ‘serious’ as distinct from anecdotal study, and the ‘turns’ of its leading performers remain largely unexplored. Particularly revealing, perhaps, are the acts of the male impersonators – whose ancestry in ‘legit’ performance had been a long one, yet whose particular approach to cross-dressing had a special social and sexual significance during the ascendancy of music hall, with its curious mixture of working-class directness, commercial knowingness, and ‘pre-Freudian innocence’. The most successful of the male impersonators was Vesta Tilley, whose various disguises, the nature of their hidden appeal, and the ‘messages’ they delivered are here analyzed by Elaine Aston.

The Making of a Working-Class Suburb in Hamilton's East End, 1900-1945

1994 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 486-511 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Harrs ◽  
Mast Sendbuehler
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
East End

Ally Sloper on Stage

2009 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-225
Author(s):  
Roger Sabin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Moral Outrage ◽  
Commercial Exploitation ◽  
Music Hall

The article argues that the significance of the nineteenth-century comics character Ally Sloper cannot be understood without reference to the parallel career that this fictional celebrity developed across other media, most notably music hall. The history and evolution of the textual character, and of his various incarnations on stage and screen, are chronicled, with the aim both of documenting the expansion of working-class leisure culture and of demonstrating the centrality of Sloper to the development of a specifically British theatrical tradition that moved away from earlier continental models. Contemporary responses to Sloper, including moral outrage, are discussed, and the article concludes by analysing the skilled commercial exploitation of the character which would influence later practices in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

From Happy Individuals to Universal Sisterhood

Walter Besant ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 187-202
Author(s):  
Vicky Cheng ◽  
Haejoo Kim
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Familial Bonds ◽  
East End ◽  
Walter Besant ◽  
Liberal Thought

This essay traces the shifting frameworks of affective reform proposed by Walter Besant in two of his novels about the East End, All Sorts and Conditions of Men (1882) and Children of Gibeon (1886). While the cultivation of individual happiness based on bourgeois domesticity offers a strategy for reorienting working-class values in the former novel, the latter promotes a pursuit of communitarian values rooted in universal sisterhood, which supersedes familial bonds and class distinctions. Reading these two novels in conversation with each other reveals a narrative critique of rights-based individualism along the lines of revisionist liberal thought, and redirects affective attention toward fostering kinship associations for communal mutuality.

Presumed Mexican Until Proven Otherwise: Identity Work and Intersectional Typicality among Middle-Class Dominican and Mexican Immigrants

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irene Browne ◽  
Katharine Tatum ◽  
Belisa Gonzalez
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Mexican Immigrants ◽  
Identity Work ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Class Stratification ◽  
Context Specific ◽  
Positive Traits ◽  
Negative Stereotyping ◽  
Selection Of

Abstract Non-Latino natives often conflate “Latino” with “Mexican,” treating Mexican as a stigmatized group. Latinos often engage in “identity work” to neutralize this stigmatized identity. We link these micro processes of identity work with macro structures of stratification through “intersectional typicality.” We argue that the selection of which positive traits immigrants highlight to avoid stigma is systematic and tied to intersecting dimensions of race and class stratification at the macro level. We argue that this process is context-specific. We use the case of middle-class Dominicans and Mexicans living in Atlanta. Our findings show that both groups perceive that the pervasive image of the typical Latino in Atlanta is that of a working-class Mexican. While both groups perceive this image to be low-status, they diverge in their strategies for countering this presumption. Mexicans emphasize their middle-class status and often try to change the typical image of Latinos. Dominicans emphasize that they are not Mexican and highlight their atypicality. Interview data show that Dominicans are concerned about the Mexican label because of embedded working-class assumptions. We argue that although many respondents successfully avoid negative stereotyping, their identity work actually reaffirms the low-status meaning of the typical Latino category.

Whitechapel Boy

Race & Class ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 67-74
Author(s):  
Chris Searle
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Western Front ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Forthcoming Book ◽  
East End

Excerpts are provided here from a forthcoming book to mark the centenary of the poet Isaac Rosenberg, who died in France on the Western Front in 1918. The author, who was able to interview Rosenberg’s contemporary Joseph Leftwich, explains Rosenberg’s experiences of anti-Semitism, including in the army, and his roots in London’s working-class, Jewish East End.

scholarly journals CONRAD AND THE COMIC TURN

2015 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 149-168 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas Kerr
Keyword(s):  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
Ford Madox Ford ◽  
Financial Centre ◽  
Music Hall ◽  
East End ◽  
City Of London ◽  
Secret Agent ◽  
The City

Of his nineteen years as a sailor, from 1874 to 1894, Joseph Conrad actually worked on ships for ten years and eight months, of which just over eight years were spent at sea, including nine months as a passenger (Najder 161–62). During these nomadic years, London was the place to which he returned again and again to seek his next berth, staying in a series of sailors’ homes, lodgings, and boarding houses. How did he spend his time, a single man with no family and few friends, whose main occupation was waiting? He recalled, in the preface toThe Secret Agent, “solitary and nocturnal walks all over London in my early days” (7). Ford Madox Ford says that Conrad knew all the bars around Fenchurch Street (which links the financial centre of the City of London to Whitechapel and the East End) from his days of waiting for a ship. Returning to the area later in life, according to Ford's slightly improbable memory, he “became at once the city-man gentleman-adventurer with an eye for a skirt,” who “could tell you where every husky earringed fellow with a blue, white-spotted handkerchief under his arm was going to. . . .” (Joseph Conrad116, 117). The reality of these London sojourns was probably less romantic, most of the time. But there was one place where a sailor ashore, without much money, could always go for company and entertainment: the music-hall.

scholarly journals Claude McKay, The Workers' Dreadnought, and collaborative poetics

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-48
Author(s):  
Stephanie J Brown
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Political Judgment ◽  
Claude Mckay ◽  
The Arts ◽  
East End ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Holistic Representation

This paper considers the journalism and poetry Claude McKay produced for Sylvia Pankhurst's communist weekly Workers' Dreadnought in 1920 as a collaboratively produced body of work. This allowed Pankhurst to have a Black communist commentator on hand to cover workers' issues, and McKay used Pankhurst's periodical as a platform from which to dramatise the aesthetic and political potential inherent in collaboration between working-class activists, journalists, and artists for the paper's readers. In the Dreadnought's pages, McKay's poems very publicly weighed the value of collaborative labour and considered the arts' place in the class struggle. He simultaneously produced journalism that advocated collaboration among races to resist the racial antagonism that sparked violence in the most impoverished East End communities in the summers of 1919 and 1920. Ultimately, McKay's work for the Dreadnought produced a holistic representation of working-class intellectual life founded on the production of beauty and the exercise of aesthetic as well as political judgment, one that depicts these activities as inevitably commingled and collaboratively produced.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document