scholarly journals First Left, Guv? Mapping the Class-encoded Agency of Commercial Television's Spy-cop Archetype, 1967–78

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 462-483
Author(s):  
Philip Kiszely
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
New Left ◽  
Focus Of Attention ◽  
Commercial Television ◽  
In Series ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Raymond Williams ◽  
Hero Archetype ◽  
Police Detective ◽  
View Class

This article examines depictions of class-encoded agency in the English spy operative and police detective protagonists that appeared on commercial television during the late 1960s and 1970s. Its purpose is to discover connections between constructions of this agency and class-based discourses relating to what Michael Kenny (1995) has termed the ‘first New Left’ (1956–62). The focus of attention is The Sweeney's DI Jack Regan (John Thaw), the most recognisable and fluent expression of the male ‘anti-hero’ archetype in question; but in order to frame an analysis that deals with interrelationships at the level of metanarrative, the article also traces a process of genre interconnection and development. Considerations of class in series such as The Sweeney (ITV, 1975–8), Callan (ITV, 1967–72) and Special Branch (ITV, 1969–74) tend to offer meaning along the lines drawn by the likes of E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart, as well as other figures associated with the first New Left. The article proposes that key first New Left themes – working-class men finding ‘voice’; empiricism/theory binaries; and discourses of Americanisation and anti-Americanism – not only provide a historical/contextual lens through which to view class-encoded agency, but also constitute a mechanism through which it is expressed.

From Syndicalism to Seattle: Class and the Politics of Identity

2005 ◽  
Vol 67 ◽  
pp. 1-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Verity Burgmann
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
Politics Of Identity ◽  
Corporate Globalization ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Raymond Williams ◽  
Political Communities ◽  
The 1960S

In the first half of the twentieth century the labor movement promoted the notion of separate working-class values and interests—evident for example in American and European syndicalism, British interwar Communism and Australian interwar Laborism—and was thus identifiable as a social movement. Like the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, this prewar identity politics successfully mobilized imagined political communities. By contrast, the retreat from emphasis on class difference and the turn to “equality of opportunity” politics, which Raymond Williams identified at midcentury and warned against, demobilized and weakened the labor movement. With class-based inequalities increasing from the 1970s, the decline of working-class identity politics ensured that the discrepancy between the objective importance of class and its subjective significance became especially marked. However, a newly forged identity politics of the world's economically exploited has recently reemerged in the movement against corporate globalization. From syndicalism to Seattle, we have witnessed the rise, retreat and resurgence of class identity politics.

scholarly journals THE CONCEPT OF “EXPERIENCE” AND THE MAKING OF THE ENGLISH WORKING CLASS, 1924–1963

2015 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 179-208 ◽  
Author(s):  
STUART MIDDLETON
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
New Left ◽  
Cultural Criticism ◽  
Conceptual History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Raymond Williams ◽  
A Site

Despite intense scholarly interest in the “Anglo-Marxism” that rose to prominence in Britain from the mid-1950s, its intellectual lineaments and lineages have yet to be fully accounted for. This is particularly the case with the concept of “experience,” which was a central category in the work of two of the most influential figures of the early “New Left” in Britain: Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson. This essay traces a conceptual history of “experience” from its emergence in Cambridge literary criticism during the 1920s and 1930s, and in the quasi-Marxist literary culture of the 1930s, to the confluence of these two currents in the work of Williams and Thompson. Reassessing the nature of each thinker's engagement with Leavisite literary and cultural criticism, and of Thompson's attempted reformulation of Marxism, it argues that recovering their widely differing usages of “experience” illuminates their distinctive conceptions of “culture” as a site of political action.

Labor History and Public History: Introduction

2009 ◽  
Vol 76 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Miller Klubock ◽  
Paulo Fontes
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social History ◽  
Public History ◽  
Labor History ◽  
New Left ◽  
The United States ◽  
Working Class History ◽  
History Of ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

Labor history and public history have had a long relationship in the United States, as James Green argues in Taking History to Heart, dating back to Progressive-era historians like Mary Ritter and Charles A. Beard. Labor historians like Phillip Foner, who identified with the “Old Left,” made labor history public history through ties to labor organizations and the Communist Party. Then, during the 1960s, historians identified with the “New Left” and inspired by E.P. Thompson, worked to extend social history and working-class history “from the bottom up” beyond the confines of the academy, even as they shifted their focus from the institutional histories of unions and political parties, to make the history of “ordinary people” and “everyday life” public history. The organization of history workshops and the proliferation of oral history projects reflect the ways in which historians of the working class made their practices public history in new ways during the 1960s and 1970s while expanding the sphere of both “the public” and “labor” to include histories of women, gender and patriarchy, and ethnic and racial minorities.

scholarly journals Memoria y Estudios Culturales Un acercamiento al relato sobre la propia historia de vida en Raymond Williams y Richard Hoggart

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 015-031
Author(s):  
Sebastian Matias Stra
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Historia De Vida ◽  
Raymond Williams ◽  
Estudios Culturales

Este trabajo intentará recuperar, de forma parcial yfragmentaria, las maneras en que el testimonio en primerapersona articulado en el formato de memorias de lapropia historia de vida tiene un posible valor metodológicoen algunos textos seminales de la conformación de losestudios culturales ingleses.Hablamos particularmente del libro de 1957, The Usesof Literacy: Aspects of Working-class Life, with SpecialReference to Publications and Entertainments, de RichardHoggart y del tradicional artículo Culture is Ordinaryde Raymond Williams, publicado en 1958 y que incluyede forma más rudimentaria algunas definiciones queconformaron la primera parte de la obra del autor galés,constituida por los libros Culture and Society y The LongRevolution.

“This Room is Yours, Personal!”: The Rise and Fall of Middle-Class Decoration Expertise in the Bedrooms of America’s Teens, 1900–1985

2011 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-129
Author(s):  
Jason Reid
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Room Design ◽  
Do It Yourself ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

This article also examines how the decline of teen-oriented room décor expertise reflected significant changes in the way gender and class influenced teen room culture during the tail end of the Cold War. Earlier teen décor strategies were often aimed towards affluent women; by contrast, the child-centric, do-it-yourself approach, as an informal, inexpensive alternative, was better suited to grant boys and working class teens from both sexes a greater role in the room design discourse. This article evaluates how middle-class home décor experts during the early decades of the twentieth century re-envisioned the teen bedroom as a space that was to be designed and maintained almost exclusively by teens rather than parents. However, many of the experts who formulated this advice would eventually become victims of their own success. By the 1960s and 1970s, teens were expected to have near total control over their bedrooms, which, in turn, challenged the validity of top-down forms of expertise.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 370-382
Author(s):  
Michael Goldfield
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Landscape ◽  
United States Today ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
1960S And 1970S

The conclusion looks at the implications of the failure to organize southern workers for the United States today and asks how successful southern organizing might have led to different outcomes. Foremost is the possibility that the civil rights movement of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s would have been much more powerful if more white working-class support had been enlisted. This possibility, which the book asserts was real, had the potential to make the contemporary social and political landscape of the United States vastly different.

scholarly journals Marking the Moral Boundaries of Class

2006 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 145-157 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Kirk
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Middle Part ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Heavy Industry ◽  
Cultural Conditions ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Moral Boundaries ◽  
Raymond Williams ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Determining Factor

This article welcomes the recent renewed interest in the topic of class within sociology and cultural studies. This comes after a long period – from around the middle part of the 1980s and into the 1990s – during which social class was dismissed as a mode of understanding socio-economic and cultural conditions on the part of both academics and mainstream political organisations alike. Working-class formations in particular came under scrutiny, increasingly seen to be in terminal decline and fragmentation through the impact of post-industrialisation processes set in train in western economies from the turn of the 1980s onwards. The demise of heavy industry – steel, coal, textiles, for instance – profoundly altered working-class communities, transforming the material world and cultural life of the British working class, powerful developments reinforcing the ‘end of class’ debate. Allied to this, the emergence within the academy of new theoretical frameworks associated with postmodern thought claimed to undermine traditional understandings around class. This article insists on the continuing significance of class and does so by focussing on an important recent response to the class debate, Andrew Sayer's The Moral Significance of Class (2005). This book stakes a lucid claim for the importance of recognising class as a powerful determining factor of subjectivity. While drawing upon aspects of Sayer's theoretical framework and argument to examine class experience, it is also the intention of the article to supplement Sayer's work by developing related theoretical propositions derived from the writing of Raymond Williams and the Russian linguist and cultural critic Volosinov/Bakhtin.

Class Underside and Ethnic Outside

Worldview ◽  
1974 ◽  
Vol 17 (10) ◽  
pp. 45-48
Author(s):  
John Murray Cuddihy
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Evelyn Waugh ◽  
Education Act ◽  
Raymond Williams

Thanks to England's 1944 Butler Education Act, in the immediate postwar years a generation of gifted working-class youngsters like Martin Burgess Green (b. 1927), Raymond Williams, and Richard Hoggart made their way from the English provinces to Oxford and Cambridge. Green, author of The von Richthofen Sisters: The Triumphant and the Tragic Modes of Love (Basic Books; 395 pp.; $12.50), was one such scholarship boy—one of the “école de Butler,” as the ever kindly Evelyn Waugh would put it—who in 1945 went to Cambridge and read English, and who experienced the university's pervasive ethos of gentlemanliness as a form of domestic colonialism. He soon entered the circle of Downing College's brilliant F.R. Leavis, editor of the influential literary quarterly Scrutiny.

Identity Politics and the Fragmenting of the 1970s Evangelical Left

2011 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
David R. Swartz
Keyword(s):  
Identity Politics ◽  
Social Action ◽  
New Left ◽  
Conservative Politics ◽  
Cultural Conservatism ◽  
Religious Cultures ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Evangelicals For Social Action ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Economic Injustice

AbstractIn the early 1970s, a group of progressive evangelicals challenged the mid-century cultural conservatism of their tradition. Activists associated with Reformed, Anabaptist, and neo-evangelical institutions denounced militarism, racism, sexism, economic injustice, and President Richard Nixon's “lust for and abuse of power.” When this coalition met in 1973 to issue the Chicago Declaration, delegates effused a profound sense of optimism. The evangelical left held very real potential for political impact.Within a decade, however, the movement seemed to be in disarray. This article suggests the centrality of identity politics to evangelicalism in the 1970s and outlines the fragmentation of the progressive evangelical coalition along gender, racial, and theological lines. The formation of the Evangelical Women's Caucus, the growing stridency of the National Black Evangelical Association, and the divergence of Anabaptist-oriented Evangelicals for Social Action and the Reformed-oriented Association for Public Justice sapped the evangelical left of needed resources and contributed to its impotence into the 1980s. The forces of identity politics, which also plagued the broader political left, were powerful enough to sabotage even a group of evangelicals with remarkably similar theological convictions, religious cultures, and critiques of conservative politics. The story of the fragmenting evangelical left, however, reflects more than broader culture's preoccupation with identity. It points to often-overlooked religious elements of the broader left. And alongside the New Left and the New Right, the evangelical left's debates over racial, sexual, and theological difference added to the disruptions of the liberal consensus in the 1960s and 1970s.

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