A study of/on India’s middle class

Novos Debates ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-46
Author(s):  
Soumodip Sinha
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Max Weber ◽  
Economic Liberalization ◽  
Paper Briefly ◽  
New Middle Class ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

In order to establish the context of its emergence and the contemporary nature of the Indian middle class, this paper briefly presents its intricate link with colonialism and with economic liberalization. While this debate is focused and concentrated on the discussions in India, it also outlines how international approaches have been used to study it. In doing so, it assesses the ways in which contemporary scholarship is expanding on the theories of class as designed by late nineteenth and early twentieth century thinkers, Karl Marx and Max Weber. It then examines how the ideas of late twentieth century theorists such as Pierre Bourdieu are integrated in understanding and comprehending the new middle class in its relationship with capitalism.

Beckett's Present Moments

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-25
Author(s):  
Rodney Sharkey
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
European Society ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Aesthetic Form ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Liberal Capitalism ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

As a comfortable middle-class Protestant in Southern Ireland, Beckett was well placed to live the life of what Badiou ironically refers to as ‘the deserving body’ (59). However, Beckett moved beyond such home comforts to witness at close hand some of the most disruptive moments of twentieth century European history. This essay proposes that his work is both a manifestation of that history and a complex response to it in its content, and, particularly, in its form. In Aesthetic Theory, Theodore Adorno proposes that ‘the unsolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as immanent problems of form’ (7). Exemplifying Adorno's proposition that ‘aesthetic form is sedimented context’ (9) Beckett's work remains disruptive of Western late capital commodification through the restatement of historical antagonisms that involve characters having to choose between privilege and impoverishment, quietism and protest, and being and its obliteration. The result is a body of work that continues to present, for its readers’ consideration, the parameters of a politics of choice which are repeatedly instantiated by the traces of the tumultuous history the work carries within itself. As the decisions facing Beckett's characters reflected those faced by late twentieth century European society, so too his work now resonates in the present moment as the contemporary world struggles in the shadow of neo-liberal capitalism and COVID-19.

The Book as Waste: Henry Mayhew and the Fall of Paper Recycling

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leah Price
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Electronic Media ◽  
Wood Pulp ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Pulp Paper ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This chapter suggests that two phenomena that usually get explained in terms of the rise of electronic media in the late twentieth century—the dematerialization of the text and the disembodiment of the reader—have more to do with two much earlier developments. One is legal: the 1861 repeal of the taxes previously imposed on all paper except that used for printing bibles. The other is technological: the rise first of wood-pulp paper in the late nineteenth century and then of plastics in the twentieth. The chapter then looks at Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1861–62), the loose, baggy ethnography of the urban underclass that swelled out of a messy series of media. Mayhew's “cyclopaedia of the industry, the want, and the vice of the great Metropolis” so encyclopedically catalogs the uses to which used paper can be turned.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-44
Author(s):  
Gavin Miller
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Psychological Knowledge ◽  
Reflexive Function ◽  
And Function ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

For the purposes of this book, science fiction is defined broadly in the terms advanced by Darko Suvin, with a focus on the genre from the late nineteenth century onwards. Psychology is conceived as the modern Western discipline, running from the origins of experimental psychology in the late nineteenth century to the ascendance of neuroscience as a disciplinary rival in the late twentieth century. Five different functions for psychological discourses in science fiction are proposed. The didactic-futurological function educates the non-specialist through extrapolation of psychological technologies, teaching within the context of futurological forecasting. The utopian function anchors in historical possibility the imagining of a currently non-existent society, whether utopian or dystopian. The cognitive-estranging function defamiliarizes and denaturalizes social reality by extrapolating current social tendencies and/or construct unsettling fictional analogues of the reader’s world. The metafictional function self-consciously thematizes within narrative fiction the psychological origins, nature, and function of science fiction as a genre. The reflexive function addresses the construction of individuals and groups who have reflexively adopted the ‘truth’ of psychological knowledge.

Globalization as a ‘determinant of the determinants of health’

2019 ◽  
pp. 24-46
Author(s):  
Ronald Labonté ◽  
Arne Ruckert
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Global Health ◽  
International Health ◽  
Health Financing ◽  
Determinants Of Health ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Causal Pathways ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

International health, a concern with the high burden of preventable disease in poorer countries, is long-standing. In late nineteenth century sanitary reforms and early twentieth century philanthropic financing to control infectious diseases in the Americas, this concern also foreshadows more contemporary debates over global health financing and the ‘health securitization’ of wealthier nations against diseases spreading from poorer ones. By the late twentieth century, however, there was a shift in discourse from ‘international’ to ‘global’ health underpinned by the growing awareness that there are inherently global reasons for why some countries are wealthier and healthier, while others remain poorer and sicker. Two different frameworks are used to unpack these causal pathways, in which globalization processes are regarded as meta-determinants of health inequities within and between nations. Although researchers argue that globalization processes have been good for health, others are much less sanguine on this claim.

Walls of Silence and Late Twentieth Century Representations of the Foreign Female Domestic Worker: The Case of Filipina and Indonesian Female Servants in Malaysia

1997 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 353-385 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine B. N. Chin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Domestic Workers ◽  
Labor Rights ◽  
Nonstate Actors ◽  
Domestic Worker ◽  
Labor Legislation ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Employment Agencies

This article analyzes the distinct ways in which public walls of silence continue to surround the absence of labor rights and benefits for foreign female domestic workers in the receiving country of Malaysia. Key state and nonstate actors involved in regulating and/or encouraging Filipina and Indonesian female domestic workers’ migration to, and employment in, Malaysia are identified. It is argued that the actions and perceptions of labor-sending and receiving state officials, middle-class employers, and representatives from private domestic employment agencies have had the effect of representing Filipina and Indonesian female domestic workers respectively as economic soldiers, criminal-prostitutes and pariahs, girl-slaves, and/or commodities. Taken individually and collectively, such representations obscure the fact that foreign female domestic workers are workers who ought to be protected by labor legislation.

scholarly journals The Myth of Perfect Fidelity

2021 ◽  
pp. 16-43
Author(s):  
Melle Jan Kromhout
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Noise Reduction ◽  
Random Noise ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Sound Media ◽  
The Many ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Chapter 1 gives a brief history of the noise of sound media from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century, tracing the development of different concepts of noise in dialogue with and reaction to ever more complex and sophisticated technologies. It explores the many ways in which inventors, engineers, producers, and musicians have sought to prevent, reduce, and eliminate this noise. The chapter thereby draws the contours of a myth of perfect fidelity or the idea that reproduced sound can in principle be separated from the noise of the medium and complete similitude between original and copy can be achieved. This myth is illustrated by two examples of noise-related technologies: Dolby analog noise reduction, which actively reduces the noise of sound media, and the counterintuitive practice of “dithering” in digital recording, by means of which small amounts of random noise are introduced to reduce digitization errors.

scholarly journals At your Cervix Madam: a Socio-Historical Study of Cervical Cancer from the Late Nineteenth Century to the Late Twentieth Century

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Pamela Hyde
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cervical Cancer ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Medical Profession ◽  
Medical Knowledge ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

<p>This thesis is a socio-historical study of cervical cancer from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. It explores the ways in which discourses have constituted knowledge, social practices and subjectivities in relation to cervical cancer. It also explores the ways in which power has operated on the bodies of New Zealand women. In doing so it criticises orthodox histories of medicine, problematises the knowledge claims of medicine and argues for a sociological account of medical knowledge. In this thesis discourses on cervical cancer have been subjected to a feminist-Foucauldian analysis which reveals their historical specificity and their social location. The gendered bodies of women are placed at the centre of this analysis. This thesis challenges constructionist accounts of medicine which do not pay sufficient attention to the role of gender relations in the construction of bodies. This thesis also develops against feminist theorists a view of women as actively constituting their bodies by responding to and challenging medical discourses whilst at the same time being shaped by these discourses. In this study, cervical cancer is subjected to a sociological analysis which problematises its existence as an unalloyed biological phenomenon. It is argued that women's bodies have been the contested sites for knowledge/power and that the cervix and its diseases have been constituted as variable medical artifacts throughout specific historical periods from the 1890s to the 1990s. The study also shows however, the ways in which women have been active participants in the disciplining of their bodies. In this thesis, the medical profession, state actors and feminists are shown to interact in an interweave of power. In doing so the socially negotiated status of medical knowledge of cervical cancer is revealed.</p>

scholarly journals At your Cervix Madam: a Socio-Historical Study of Cervical Cancer from the Late Nineteenth Century to the Late Twentieth Century

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Pamela Hyde
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cervical Cancer ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Medical Profession ◽  
Medical Knowledge ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

<p>This thesis is a socio-historical study of cervical cancer from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. It explores the ways in which discourses have constituted knowledge, social practices and subjectivities in relation to cervical cancer. It also explores the ways in which power has operated on the bodies of New Zealand women. In doing so it criticises orthodox histories of medicine, problematises the knowledge claims of medicine and argues for a sociological account of medical knowledge. In this thesis discourses on cervical cancer have been subjected to a feminist-Foucauldian analysis which reveals their historical specificity and their social location. The gendered bodies of women are placed at the centre of this analysis. This thesis challenges constructionist accounts of medicine which do not pay sufficient attention to the role of gender relations in the construction of bodies. This thesis also develops against feminist theorists a view of women as actively constituting their bodies by responding to and challenging medical discourses whilst at the same time being shaped by these discourses. In this study, cervical cancer is subjected to a sociological analysis which problematises its existence as an unalloyed biological phenomenon. It is argued that women's bodies have been the contested sites for knowledge/power and that the cervix and its diseases have been constituted as variable medical artifacts throughout specific historical periods from the 1890s to the 1990s. The study also shows however, the ways in which women have been active participants in the disciplining of their bodies. In this thesis, the medical profession, state actors and feminists are shown to interact in an interweave of power. In doing so the socially negotiated status of medical knowledge of cervical cancer is revealed.</p>

Drag, camp and gender subversion in the music and videos of Annie Lennox

Popular Music ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
GILLIAN RODGER
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Musical Theatre ◽  
Gender Construction ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Gender Trouble ◽  
Gender Subversion ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Radical Shift

In this article I examine Lennox's earliest performance strategies, and her reasons for employing them, as well as some of the reactions to her adoption of transvestism as a sartorial style. I discuss three videos from Lennox's 1988 LP Savage, which, in my view, marked a radical shift in her approach to depicting gender through performance. I argue that Lennox may be more productively viewed by keeping in mind performance ideals of music hall and other popular musical theatre styles of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Finally I discuss Lennox's challenge to late twentieth-century gender construction using Judith Butler's theories of the performative nature of gender and of the subversive reiteration of gender, outlined in her books Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter, and suggesting ways in which Lennox's performance embodies these theories, while extending them to include a broader range of sexualities.

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