Conclusion

The conclusion revisits the three major inquiries addressed in the text, drawing together the evidence and contexts provided in the previous seven chapters. The first investigates the role of objective settings, such as the systemic and symbolic violence of landscapes and semiotic systems of racialization in justifying or triggering moments of explicit subjective violence such as the Lattimer Massacre. The second inquiry, traces the trajectory of immigrant groups into contemporary patriotic neoliberal subjects. In other terms, it asks how an oppressed group can become complicit with oppression later in history. The third inquiry traces the development of soft forms of social control and coercion across the longue durée of the twentieth century. Specifically, it asks how vertically integrated economic and governmental structures such as neoliberalism and governmentality which serve to stabilize the social antagonisms of the past are enunciated in everyday life.

An Archaeology of the Twentieth Century in the Anthracite Coal Region of Northeast Pennsylvania

Chapter 1 provides a broad theoretical, historical, and ethnographic context to the research, and an overview of the major research questions addressed in the book. Topics such as the approach to the structural violence of everyday life in the twentieth century, the relationship between migrants and the sovereignty of political states, racialization, and the labor needs of late industrial capitalism are addressed. Relevant theoretical concepts from scholars such as Giorgio Agamben, Walter Benjamin and Karl Marx are introduced here. The ethnographic and discursive context of immigrant discrimination in the present, and the manner in which it informs the broad trajectory of the research is presented. Lastly, the manner in which interdisciplinary data is applied to this research is also presented.

Migration, Part 1

Chapter 4 examines the material dimensions of structural violence underpinning the explicit subjective violence of the massacre. The chapter outlines the history of migration to the Anthracite region’s company towns, explicating the material and spatial factors creating and maintaining the racialized labor hierarchy. Specifically, the chapter describes the development of shanty towns on the periphery of company-built housing around the last two decades of the nineteenth century. This chapter concludes that these ethnic enclaves mark out new spaces of exception in the landscape of the town. Their presence materializes ownership’s new dependence upon immigrant surplus labor pools and mechanized work processes to capitalize upon the exigencies of the industry, economic depression, stiff competition, and an increasingly organized craft labor force.

History of the Anthracite Region, 1830 to 1897

Chapter 2 provides a historical context of the Anthracite region against the background of industrialization, modernity, and mass immigration. In this chapter the development of the anthracite industry is inextricably linked to broader historical contingencies. Global depressions, political developments, and mass migrations shaped the social and economic patterns in the region.

The Destructive Character

Several planning documents connected to redevelopment efforts of the last quarter of the twentieth century are examined in chapter 7 in combination with drastic changes in the landscape of the town and altered community social interactions. I assert that urban renewal resulted not only in drastic changes in the material and economic landscape, but more importantly, was also a process of subjectivization. Increasingly residents subjected each other to bureaucratic demands suggesting that, at least tactically, they had adopted the language of neoliberalism--renewal, and management--enunciating a new community comprised of atomized individuals adopting entrepreneurial attitudes to space, labor, and governance. At stake was the capacity for the materiality of landscape to remember, reproduce, and channel social relations in a manner responsive to the exigencies of uncertain economy.

The Archaeology of Machinic Mass Consumerism and the Logistics of the Factory Floor in Everyday Life

Chapter 5 examines the rise of what I describe as machinic mass consumerism on a national context as well as its materialization in the local community. The chapter outlines a context for its rise in the latter half of the twentieth century, beginning with structural changes in political economy and national infrastructure during the Interwar Period. Specifically, the chapter connects the efforts of industrialists and social scientists concerned with the suppression of radical behavior and the profiteering of surplus production by the development of a consumer democracy. The archaeological evidence used in the chapter, from a shanty in Lattimer No. 2, contributes to a multiscalar analysis examining the implications of mass consumerism for the class positions of these most prototypical of producers, immigrant laborers and their families.

The Memory of Violence

Chapter 3 describes the historical context immediately leading up to the Lattimer Massacre, then recounting the event itself and the trial that followed as recorded in textual sources. This history is followed by an account of the archaeological survey conducted in the autumn of 2011 with the members of BRAVO (Battlefield Research and Volunteer Organization) of Monmouth, New Jersey. A theoretical context for understanding explicit moments of subjective violence without distracting from the contexts of structural or objective violence is also presented here.

Migration, Part 2

Chapter 6 takes up the changing spatial landscape explored first in chapter 4 in a much-altered political and economic environment, the decline of the anthracite coal industry in mid-century. This is also a period of emancipation for the company town accompanied by the development of new forms of identification and immigration of a different sort than that covered in previous chapters. Attention to the material record suggests that this emancipation from industrial control signalled the development of new forms of collectively organized communal improvements through direct democracy. Landscape archaeology also suggests that the intersection of contemporary subjectivity and space such as aspects of privacy, ownership, and differentiation also begin to take hold in this period.

Introduction

The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are “still” possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history that gives rise to it is untenable. Walter Benjamin (1970: 259)...