The Making of Homo Socialist: The Discursive Analysis of the Ideological Production of Class in China, 1949–1976

Based on a critique of the history project titled “Oral History of Peasants’ Ordinary Life in the Revolutionary Era of China,” this article provides an analysis of class ideology production from Land Reform Movement to the Cultural Revolution in China. Thirty years of socialist construction in China was based on the craft of making the Homo Socialist. The focus here is on how personal experiences were transformed into state-endorsed conduct via the discourse of class and class struggle. Over the course of the sociopolitical transformations leading to the Cultural Revolution, “class” changed from a socioeconomic designation to a political behavioral metaphor, and in the end a purely symbolic gesture; personal experiences were transformed from hallmarks of class privilege to virtual identification with imagined class struggle. And the peasants went from being “owners of bitterness” to “debtors of bitterness” on the way to becoming “sinners of the revolution”—who gradually submitted themselves to the regime in the name of revolution, liberation, and redemption. These transformations were realized through discursive practices connecting personally embodied experiences with the abstract Marxist theory of class and class struggle. Examining the shifting nature of class ideology production helps to explain how the Chinese Communist Party understood the effects of its governance and how people found class ideology meaningful to them, even when it reached the point of absurdity.

Introduction

This chapter provides an overview on the central argument of the book, namely, that the Catholic Church in Ireland, and especially from the time of national independence in 1922 until 1967, resisted questioning by non-clerics of its overall approach to education. As a result, it opposed involving lay people, including parents, in the exercise of what it claimed was its right and responsibility to provide secondary schooling. The State acquiesced willingly, thus allowing priests who were teachers, religious teaching brothers, and female teaching religious to promote unhindered sets of pedagogical, administrative and leadership practices aimed at the salvation of souls and the reproduction of fellow clerics and a loyal middle class. That situation, in turn, led to the promotion of piety and the upholding of class privilege as core characteristics of secondary schooling. Successive governments were pleased with the circumstances, partly because the great majority of the nation’s politicians and public servants were themselves loyal middle-class Catholics. Equally pleasing to them was the fact that the Church, for a fraction of the cost that would need to be paid by the State, was willing to fund secondary school education, and in so doing was prepared to meet the needs of the mercantile class, the public service, and the professions, for educated individuals in their late teenage years.

'I wanted to offer my sympathy ... woman to woman': Reading The Crown during a conjuncture of crisis

The fourth season of Netflix's award-winning The Crown was released during a moment of crisis, when the UK was under a second lockdown to stem the Covid-19 pandemic. National restrictions, and the pandemic more generally, have exposed a 'crisis of care' in the UK and around the world. With schools closed and many working at home, people, particularly women, have been faced with the 'double burden' of childcare, domestic care, other caring responsibilities and paid work. The pandemic also drew further attention to classed, gendered and racialised polarities, with symbols of privilege (like access to a garden) made spectacular as lockdown restrictions were tightened. Enter The Crown. Series 4 focuses on the 1970s and 1980s, particularly centred around intimacies of three well-known female figures: Margaret Thatcher, the Queen and Princess Diana. The Crown's representation of Thatcher and the Queen speaks to broader issues of failed femininities, the collapsing of private/public and home/work, specifically through mothering and unpaid care work/paid labour; class privilege and cultural capital; the politics of 'wokeness'; and moral responsibility. The Queen is portrayed as the guardian of moral responsibility, the mother of the nation and the British empire, while Thatcher is shown to push forward neoliberalism and free market ideologies. But ultimately these representations are two sides of the same coin. Through the oppositional representations of the Queen and Thatcher the show raises contemporary critiques of neoliberalism, gender and the aristocratic imperial state, only to empty its political potential because such representations are spoken by these elite women, in the context of their families and the home. Such issues have a particular cultural and collective resonance at a conjuncture of lockdown and the pandemic.

Skin whitening as a menace to African identity through Tony Morrison's 'The Bluest Eyes': An Afrocentric examination

The African democratic forces, among other things, aimed to resuscitate and re-essentialise African identities that the colonial administration had endangered earlier. These autonomous corps dispensed mechanisms to champion Africanism and conscientise African natives about their heritage. The cherishing of African identities automated decolonial shifts and inculcated an urge into Africans to be proud of who they are and where they come from. Notwithstanding these efforts, the study diagnoses skin whitening as a stubborn nemesis that menaces the authenticity of Africanism in the present day. Many Africans, especially black women appear to be gravitated to skin whitening. This act embraces the attempt to alter one’s dark skin tone to be bright. Most of the skin whiteners are postulated to whiten their skins in an effort to qualify into the modern-day Eurocentric criterions of beauty at the expense of their black (African) identity. This paper employed a qualitative methodology and has relied on secondary data to unveil the extent to which skin whitening imperils African identities. It has employed Morrison’s The Bluest Eyes as a lens to crystalise the impacts of skin whitening on Africanism. The study has discovered that the skin-whitening phenomenon epitomises and perpetuates Eurocentric ideologies and it is preferred by most women because of the assumed glory that comes with the white identity such as social class, privilege, attractiveness, favour, and admiration.

Controversies in the Periodical Press

This chapter argues that the periodical medium played a fundamental role in the construction of literary cosmopolitanism as a discursive phenomenon. It focuses on two periodicals launched in the fin de siècle: the American Cosmopolitan and the European Cosmopolis. The commercially oriented and middle-brow Cosmopolitan promoted cosmopolitanism as a female-gendered social identity linked to class privilege, as testified by the serialization of Elizabeth Bisland’s round-the-world trip in 1889. However, it also interrogated the cosmopolitan tendencies of modern American literature embodied by the writings of Henry James. By contrast, the short-lived Cosmopolis was a high-brow periodical that aimed to revive Kant’s Enlightenment ideal and Goethe’s notion of world literature. It was committed to multilingualism and to fighting nationalism. The chapter closes with an analysis of Cosmopolis as a competitor to the iconic 1890s English literary periodicals, the Yellow Book and The Savoy.

Between Rough and Refined

In this chapter Mapes elaborates on the rhetorical strategies of historicity, simplicity, lowbrow appreciation, pioneer spirit, and locality/sustainability. She turns to a data set of 90 corresponding Instagram (@nytfood) posts, documenting the multimodal tactics by which food media writers and users perform a kind of acceptable or “palatable” eliteness. One such tactic is the framing of “rough” and “refined,” and the juxtaposition of various forms of supposedly low and highbrow cultural artifacts or practices. These tactics, in turn, help establish two interdependent strategies or rhetorics for manufacturing status in capitalist society: fetishism and condescension. She argues that these two processes support the production and maintenance of elite authenticity and class privilege.

Enraged, Rattled, and Wronged

The political context producing the Donald Trump presidency put into stark relief the confusion, feelings of victimization, and rage of some constituencies that voted for him. Enraged, Rattled, and Wronged: Entitlement’s Response to Social Progress explores the role of entitlement in fostering inequality in the United States. Scholars and activists in recent decades have correctly incorporated the topic of privilege into discussions of prejudice and discrimination. White privilege, male privilege, heterosexual privilege, and class privilege exemplify the unearned advantages given to socially preferred groups—advantages not enjoyed by marginalized groups. As a result, activists and scholars of prejudice integrate an examination of discrimination against target groups, alongside the corresponding benefits that come to those viewed as the societal norm and ideal (e.g., Whites, heterosexuals, and men). Enraged, Rattled, and Wronged examines psychological entitlement as an overlooked but essential feature of persistent inequality. Psychological entitlement refers to one’s sense of deservingness. In understanding resistance to social progress we must understand how members of advantaged groups come to understand their belief in their own worthiness relative to those in disadvantaged groups. The task of this project is an urgent inquiry given our current political context: What happens to entitled people when they feel pushed aside? What are they willing to tear down as they scramble to keep their grip on relative status and power? This book explores the predictable and unpredictable ways in which entitlement preserves and perpetuates inequality.

Food consumption, habitus and the embodiment of social change: Making class and doing gender in urban Vietnam

This article draws on Bourdieu’s concept of habitus as a means to analyse social distinction and change in terms of class and gender through the lens of food consumption. By focusing on urban Vietnam, this qualitative study looks into the daily practices of food consumption, dieting and working on the body as specific means to enact ideal body types. Economically booming Vietnam has attracted growing investment capital in the fields of body and beauty industries and food retail. After decades of food insecurity, urban consumers find themselves manoeuvring in between growing food and lifestyle options, a nutrition transition, and contradicting demands on the consumer to both indulge and restrain themselves. Taking this dynamic urban context as its point of departure and adopting an intersectional perspective, this article assesses how eating, dieting and body performance are applied in terms of making class and doing gender. It shows that the growing urban landscape of food and body-centric industries facilitates new possibilities for distinction, dependent not only on economic capital but on bodily and cultural capital also, and furthermore, how social habitus regarding food–body relationships are gendered and interlaced with class privilege.

Terroir and Tourism in the Age of Mass Production

The concept of terroir has an extensive history in France linking a multitude of agricultural products to climate, soil, and local knowledge. More recently, terroir is used in viticulture to emphasize the distinctiveness of wine with respect to regional natural and cultural resources and in so doing has become important to tourism. This article addresses terroir by pointing to its substantial virtues while unveiling its potential for mystification. In the age of mass production, terroir offers distinction, an essential attribute for touristic appeal. However, in its emphasis on climate and soil in the viticultural domain, terroir conceals important historical processes that in the end speak as much, if not more, to how we rank and regard wine. Moreover, the focus on natural conditions rather than those that are social also masks social relations that are embedded in class privilege and thus give the impression that wine has a life of its own independent of its historical and social contexts.

Neoliberal Meritocracy: How 'Widening Participation' to Universities in England Reinforces Class Divisions

This essay details the processes through which English universities reinforce existing social class divisions while at the same time extending access for populations that had historically been excluded from universities. Practices commonly referred to within higher education policy as ‘widening participation’ that purport to show solidarity with previously excluded student populations, we argue, function to maintain not diminish inequalities. While the meritocratic ideals underpinning the social mobility narrative of widening participation encourage economic and employment aspirations as prime motivations for applying and entering university, widening participation has not coincided with meaningful mobility. Through an analysis of major shifts in higher education policy, we argue that categorisations of the ‘disadvantaged’ student are manufactured to assist universities to fund and legitimate themselves as vehicles of social mobility. In this context, we argue that a precarious legitimacy exists because social mobility operates within a wider culture of embedded class privilege, and this is constantly managed by state regulatory frameworks which reshape and repurpose universities to fit a neoliberal meritocratic image of the larger society and the role of universities within it. Ideas of ‘disadvantage’ service solidarity not with the ‘disadvantaged’ but with educational service providers, as they offer a target for the promotion of neoliberal meritocracy. In the course of this, class differentials are reinforced by channelling ‘disadvantaged’ and ‘advantaged’ students into different niches of the labour market, preserving existing inequalities, and sorting graduates into winners and losers.