Abandoned Being: The Aesthetic of Inhabiting in Meridel Le Sueur’s The Girl

This article reads the vocabulary of “being” scattered throughout Meridel Le Sueur’s The Girl as exposing the ontological dispossession underlying the economic and political abandonment of the poor. The Girl’s search for a way “to be,” however, also disrupts the economy of representation by which the state monitors and assesses, through a rhetoric of uplifted subjectivity, the behaviors of the women who depend on state relief programs. In The Girl, homeless women’s discovery of forms of being within precarious living conditions constitutes an ontological repossession through which Le Sueur imagines alternative feminist socioeconomic structures and, by extension, alternative forms of subjectivity that emerge within subrepresentational spaces.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the rise of a nonregular workforce in Japan. Around the middle of the first decade of the 2000s, nonregular workers were identified as a key group whose members were suffering from low wages and insecure employment. As part of this growth in nonregular employment, Japan has also witnessed a growing number of workers' protests, which have both sought to highlight the plight of Japan's precarious workers and attempted to oppose and resist the new conditions that they were experiencing. Indeed, over the past twenty years, Japan has witnessed the emergence of a new form of labor activism. This book investigates the way in which Japanese capitalism has undergone a process of restructuring, with a particular focus on the workplace and how changing socioeconomic structures have affected workers. It explores how workers have responded and contributed to the construction of the Japanese political economy, as well as how the country's model of capitalism has been transformed as a result.

Don’t Need Their Coal

This chapter evaluates contemporary homesteading and rural subsistence in eastern Kentucky as a form of activism and resistance. It argues that homesteading alone is not a particularly effective means of changing larger socioeconomic structures, such as capitalism and plutocracy. However, homesteading, when pursued with skill, is capable of surprising achievements: it can be an effective means of reducing a household’s reliance upon the mainstream economy; shifting work away from wage labor; fostering frugality; bringing homesteaders into closer interaction with the natural world; and serving as a living laboratory for appropriate technologies. These are real accomplishments that explain the continued attraction of this particular form of activism.

How the Ritual Murder Accusation Persisted in the Soviet Landscape

Chapter 4 explains the endurance and permutation of the ritual murder accusation in the Soviet landscape of the interwar years. The occurrence of the blood libel epitomizes some aspects of the nature of the Bolshevik experiment, and becomes an indicator of the limits (and triumphs) of the Soviet attempt to modernize society. Ritual murder accusations grew out of the power of slander and denunciatory frenzy that enveloped Soviet society. But the accusation also resulted from the encounter between Jews and peasants in the context of a system that violently promoted urbanization and new socioeconomic structures. The intensity of the anti-religious propaganda inadvertently played a role in maintaining this powerful anti-Jewish myth, as the attack on circumcision and kosher slaughtering reinforced anti-Jewish stereotypes. Finally, the transformation of ritual murder echoes the process of Jewish women’s empowerment: only in Soviet society could Jewish women become perpetrators of ritual murder.

Situating Ethical Costs in Context

This chapter argues that ethical costs are unfairly leveled on students born into disadvantage for three contingent reasons: socioeconomic segregation, an inadequate safety net, and cultural mismatch. It shows how several of the ethical costs strivers face are not a necessary feature of striving itself but are instead dependent on how opportunities are unequally distributed in the United States. The chapter explains how strivers are more likely to bear ethical costs in a society that suffers from socioeconomic segregation, inadequate safety net, and cultural forces that privilege those who are already otherwise advantaged. It talks about how strivers are liable to face tragic conflict more frequently than those who are better off because of the socioeconomic structures into which they are born. It also points out ethical costs that are embedded in larger social, economic, and cultural structures that do not occur in a vacuum and affect everyone equally.

Typologies of pre-modern societies beyond feudalism: exploring alternative possibilities and the problem of their applicability in cases of peripheral European societies

The most traditional approach of medievalists to articulate classification of pre-modern European societies is to consider whether particular pre-modern society is feudal or not. However I argue that this approach is quite complicated because of ambiguity and polysemy of the term. There are at least several Marxist and non-Marxist alternatives instead. Transcending the horizon of debates about feudalism proposes more creative possibilities and enlarges analytical capacities. Although discussion about the notorious Asiatic mode of production seems obsolete nevertheless there are other more promising and up-to-date concepts like the tributary mode of production, patrimonialism versus feudalism dichotomy or the so-called type/model of early Central European state (the system of Ius Ducale). The application of the concept of the African mode of production in the case of typology of some European pre-modern peripheral societies despite of its astonishing etymology also is plausible. Another perspective way of elaboration comparative researches of pre-modern European peripheries is combining Marxist and non-Marxist concepts (like patrimonialism and the tributary mode of production, for example). I would also like to emphasize that in some cases in order to develop adequate typological concepts the combining of evaluation of internal (evolving of socioeconomic structures) as well as estimation of external impact is inevitable.

Intersectionality challenges for the co-production of urban services: notes for a theoretical and methodological agenda

The co-production of urban services, such as water, energy or sanitation, is a vital tool to advance service delivery and to challenge socioeconomic structures that reproduce urban inequalities. This article examines the crossovers between debates on intersectionality and the co-production of urban services. Intersectionality is a critical lens for an engaged critique of the dynamics of exclusion that may challenge service co-production. The paper draws attention to three key insights: 1) the need for an explicit questioning of processes to define vulnerability, particularly when they rely on bounded, fixed identity categories; 2) a recognition of the complex and multiple lived experiences of inequality and marginalization in any given context; and 3) a conceptualization of social identity as constituted through dynamic processes and always open to revision.

Error correction and social transformation in Creole studies and among Creole speakers: The case of Haiti

Mark Lewis asks that socially engaged linguists go beyond Labov's (1982) principle of error correction (PEC) so that we can enlist critical race theory (CRT) to address ‘more difficult and fundamental questions of the sociohistorical conditions of a representation of language, challenging its premises and showing its connections to racial, economic, or other forms of violence’ (Lewis, this issue, p. 341). The ultimate goal is the actual transformation of the socioeconomic structures responsible for structural violence against speakers of stigmatized languages.