Class Tensions Research Articles

International Celebrities and Irish Identity in the United States and Beyond, 1840–1860

This article uses Antonio Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony to analyze how a relatively small Irish-American bourgeoisie legitimated its authority over the broader Irish ethnic community during the antebellum era. As part of the massive wave of immigrants that left Ireland during and after the Great Famine of the mid-1840s, the Irish Catholic middle class was saddled with a dually marginal status. On the one hand, its members maintained only tenuous authority over the hundreds of thousands of peasants and laborers that made up the bulk of the Irish-American community. On the other hand, they were deeply distrusted by important elements of native American society that associated them with the supposed superstition, laziness, and violence of their lower-class fellow countrymen. The bourgeoisie responded by using the celebrity status of Irish political exiles to achieve the twin project of simultaneously obscuring intra-ethnic class tensions while proving its suitability for American domestic politics. Famous personalities and the editors who lauded them employed celebrity to consolidate their leadership status in America.

“What Daughters, what Wives, what Mothers, Think You, They are?” Gender and the Transformation of Executions in theUnitedStates

AbstractThe transformation from public to private executions is generally understood as a consequence of the rationalization of authority in conjunction with growing class tensions and the emergence of bourgeois sentimentality. What is missing from this analysis is the role gender played. The exclusion of women from the execution site captures a more general tension around womanhood in the nineteenth century, but that tension was expressed differently depending on women's class and race locations. Using newspaper coverage of executions as my primary data source, I show that the interpretive challenges posed by women at the execution site varied by the social positions they occupied.

Geographies and strategies of caregiving among skilled Ghanaian migrant women

Synopsis Research on migrant women tends to address the experiences of women located in low skilled, low-paid work like domestic care work in receiving countries. Less attention has been directed towards the mobility and experiences of skilled and elite professional women who, while pursuing their professional careers and livelihood strategies, must also attend to social reproductive roles. Drawing on research with two groups of skilled Ghanaian women – nurses in England and professionals who have returned to Ghana – this paper analyzes how they navigate multiple caregiving responsibilities. The women's movements produced family separations that engendered a myriad of multiscalar strategies to negotiate and reconfigure care relationships and obligations. Among nurses who are not from elite backgrounds, their formal care work and competing caring roles are shaped beyond, but in constant reference to, demands placed on them in multiple local and transnational settings. Among highly skilled migrants, their class status, access to resources and mobility mitigate the challenges of caregiving and the impacts of familial separation. In conclusion, the paper contributes to the literature on skilled migration and care by presenting the gender and class tensions that the combination of professional and personal caregiving create for skilled and mobile African women.

Race, Class, and the Neoliberal Scourge

Race, Class, and the Neoliberal Scourge

Your Place or Mine? Beliefs About Inequality and Redress Preferences in South Africa

This article examines the nature of and change in beliefs about inequality and preferences for redistribution in South Africa between 2003 and 2012 using data from the South African Social Attitudes Survey series and 2009 round of the International Social Survey Programme. Inequality aversion, stratification beliefs, perceptions of class tensions and legitimate earnings are tracked, together with support for government redistribution and for specific redress policies. Overall, the findings portray South Africans as keenly aware of the economic inequality that beleaguers their society, and express a preference for greater distributive fairness. Broad support is also reported in relation to state-led redistribution, though a moderate declining trend is observed over the interval. Race and class differences characterise the survey results, though a majority of better-off South Africans (white, tertiary educated and non-poor citizens) still tend to be inequality averse and voice support for redistribution. Greater polarisation is evident with respect to inequality-related social policy, especially those designed to overcome historical racial disadvantage, though these intergroup differences converge considerably when referring to class-based policy measures. One surprising finding is the evidence that South Africa’s youngest generation, known as the ‘Born Frees’, tend to adopt a similar predisposition to redress policy as older generations, thus confounding expectations of a post-apartheid value change. Nonetheless, even though South Africans may not fully agree about the specific elements comprising a socially just response to the country’s inequality problem, there does seem to be a stronger basis for a social compact for an inequality reduction agenda than is typically assumed.

Mad Dogs and Animal Protectionists: Rabies in Interwar Poland

This article examines the strategies adopted by the Polish Second Republic (1918 to 1939) to control the spread of rabies and focuses particularly on the response of the animal welfare movement to these strategies. Animal protectionists were critical of what they saw as an irrational and inflexible approach to rabies control, one which, they said, treated all dogs—who were the main vectors of rabies transmission—as potentially rabid, and which failed to make distinctions based on dog breed or supposed quality of the dog owner. Examining the content of protectionists’ criticisms tells us about the Polish animal welfare movement as a whole, about its prejudices, priorities, and ambitions. It tells us, too, about class tensions in independent Poland. Protectionists’ analysis of the rabies problem reflected their own urban middle-class milieu and was in keeping with their general desire as animal welfare advocates to reform, enlighten, and civilize certain kinds of people. Looking at rabies in interwar Poland encourages us, moreover, to reconsider the lines that separate human from non-human animals and to interrogate the role that humans play in zoonotic disease transmission.

Slaves for Hire: Renting Enslaved Laborers in Antebellum Virginia by John J. Zaborney (review)

Reviewed by: Slaves for Hire: Renting Enslaved Laborers in Antebellum Virginia by John J. Zaborney Nicholas Wood (bio) Keywords Slavery, Virginia, Slave trade Slaves for Hire: Renting Enslaved Laborers in Antebellum Virginia. By John J. Zaborney. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012. Pp. 218. Cloth, $42.50.) Examining an understudied topic, John J. Zaborney demonstrates the extent, variety, and importance of slave hiring in antebellum Virginia. Slave hiring was a profit-maximizing practice that often belied paternalistic notions of slavery. Planters with surplus slaves could supplement their income by hiring out a few slaves or hire them all out while traveling for extended periods of time. Churches, orphanages, and schools raised funds by hiring out slaves they owned for that purpose. Males and females were hired in roughly equal numbers as field hands, domestic servants, coal miners, and railroad builders. By the 1850s slave hiring was so commonplace that rental agreements were standardized and preprinted, as were insurance policies for hired slaves working in especially dangerous occupations. Drawing on deep archival research and weaving many compelling anecdotes into a coherent whole, Zaborney demonstrates how the hiring process shaped the lives of white Virginians, the enslaved, and the institution of slavery itself. Zaborney characterizes the existing scholarship on slave hiring as "polarized: hired slaves either enjoyed nearly full autonomy, which weakened slavery generally, or they endured ruthless exploitation" (2). While this binary is somewhat exaggerated, it helps place Zaborney's work in the context of larger debates about slave agency and the compatibility of slavery and modernization. He argues that "most Virginia hired slaves' experiences differed little from those of nonhired slaves and that slave hiring made Virginia slavery stronger, not weaker, during the years before the Civil War" (3). Slave hiring helped slaveholders adapt to the dynamic and unpredictable economic changes that characterized the market revolution. Hired slaves also helped build transportation infrastructure and worked in factories, demonstrating the compatibility of enslaved labor with a modernizing economy. Renting slaves could create conflicts of interests between owners and hirers, thus creating opportunities for slaves to exert a greater level of agency, themes examined at length in the only other full-length study on [End Page 580] the subject.1 By contrast, Zaborney focuses more on the mutual interests of white Virginians and the ways that slave hiring increased white solidarity. It helped reduce class tensions by allowing tenant farmers to rent slaves they could not afford to buy and thereby achieve the "free and independent status [of] white men who controlled slaves" (108). Hiring a female domestic slave could save a white wife from household drudgery, allowing her to emulate middle-class gender ideals without the full expense of slave ownership. For white men, attending slave hiring days (generally at the start of the year) provided opportunities to publicly display their masculinity and mastery as they examined slaves and haggled over prices. Thus the economic, cultural, and social implications of slave hiring increased support for slavery even among non-slave-owning whites. Zaborney gives examples of some slaves who earned significant sums of money through incentives for overtime, or turned the competing economic interests of owners and hirers to their own advantage. But he also reports cases in which slaves' attempts to exert agency resulted in whipping or sale as punishment, arguing that slaves' agency remained sharply curtailed in most situations. Moreover, even when slaves successfully used opportunities created by hiring to exert more influence over their own lives, it was generally with the goal of mitigating problems resulting from being hired out in the first place, such as family dislocation and brutal work conditions. As Zaborney shows, slaves always struggled to preserve a level of stability and autonomy in their lives, but hiring created at least as many problems as opportunities. Throughout his book, Zaborney touches on connections between slave hiring and the domestic slave trade. Slave owners and hirers viewed renting slaves as an alternative to the domestic slave trade; slaves were more likely to be hired out at least once than they were to be sold; and slaves who created trouble for their owners or hirers might be sold as punishment. Like the slave trade, slave hiring...

Ownership and access in the work of John Muir, John Buchan and Andrew Greig

John Muir left Scotland in 1849 for America and became famous for the concept formulated in his book Our National Parks (1901). Issues of access and ownership in the Highlands were the background to a novel by Andrew Greig published in 1996, The Return of John Macnab, which took its title from John Buchan's novel of 1925, John Macnab. A comparison of the two novels reveals not only their historical differences and similarities in radicalism on these issues, but the problem of expressing a connected relationship with a national landscape (that Muir spent his lifetime seeking) when nature cannot be conceived except through the frames of politics and culture. Post-devolution, are these novels little more than historical curiosities today, given that Scotland now has national parks and the granting of a right to roam in 2003? Part of a historical momentum, these novels also explore key class tensions and landscape values for present readers.

Black Radicalism, Marxism, and Collective Memory: An Interview with Robin D. G. Kelley

Black Radicalism, Marxism, and Collective Memory: An Interview with Robin D. G. Kelley Jordan T. Camp (bio) This interview was occasioned by the twentieth anniversary of Robin D. G. Kelley’s Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), an anniversary that fell amid the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Conducted in Los Angeles during 2011, it has been since edited and revised. It aims to clarify the historical lessons of the black freedom and radical labor struggles in the 1930s for confronting the current crisis. Jordan T. Camp 2010 marked the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Hammer and Hoe. It began as your dissertation in the history department at UCLA, which you completed in 1987. Can you talk about how the conjuncture shaped your study? Robin D. G. Kelley The timing is really important. The project was conceived in the early 1980s. My interest was in southern Africa, specifically the South African Left. At the same time, the Jesse Jackson campaign and the Rainbow Coalition was taking off, as was the idea of multiracial and multiethnic organizing actually led by people of color. I was involved in campaigns at UCLA and was simultaneously trying to write about an original rainbow coalition. My dissertation began as a comparative study of radicalism in South Africa and the US South. I ended up dropping the South Africa piece because I was denied access to the country. Yet with a South African framing of what became a US story I was forced to think hard about things like intraracial class tensions and conflicts. I had to look at Alabama differently. I couldn’t look at the black working class as a kind of solid whole, nor could I look at the white working class in the same way. Part of what Hammer and Hoe tried to do was look at Alabama society as whole, not just black workers. [End Page 215] Camp How have you felt about its reception over the past two decades? Kelley It’s been interesting. I am really happy with that book. Looking over it again, I am not sure what I would do differently because I said what I needed to say. The reviews over all have been great, but more importantly the way a number of activists and organizers on the Left have talked about that book has been very heartening. For many readers, the book does three things. First, it demonstrates that substantial, effective organizing can occur under the worst of circumstances; that immense poverty, depression, and violence weren’t successful deterrents to movement building. Second, that even the most ardent racists are not fixed in their ideology. People can be transformed in the struggle. Racism is definitely a fetter to multiracial organizing, but Hammer and Hoe shows how people built a movement across the color line in the most racist place of all. Anyone watching footage of Bull Connor in Ingram Park in 1963 could not believe that thirty years before that there had been an interracial group of five thousand people in Birmingham standing on the street demanding relief, jobs, and an end to police brutality. Third, that class politics are alive and well. But any class politics that pretend that race and also gender get in the way of class organizing miss the point altogether. You can actually build white support for antiracism, male support for antisexism, and black support for white working-class justice. People can and do cross the boundaries that historians and scholars impose on people. The levels of empathy that many of the people in Hammer and Hoe showed—the fact that people were willing to be beaten or die for others—is an extremely important lesson. We spend so much time theorizing race, class, and gender and wondering whether or not you can get people of a particular identity to move, but we don’t even ask the question “Can you get Steve to risk his life for Hosea Hudson?” It is not that Steve is supporting Hosea Hudson because he is black and male; Steve is supporting Hosea Hudson because he is part of a...

Why George? Hagiographic Elements in Matute’s Primera memoria

Since its publication in 1960, Ana Maria Matute’s novel, Primera memoria, has earned substantial amounts of scholarship and a place in the canon as it pertains to Spanish Peninsular literature of the twentieth century. Its continued relevance has much to do with its discursive and thematic richness, fruitfully explored by readers. Primera memoria takes place on the island of Mallorca during the first months of the Spanish Civil War. Among other topics, its fourteen-year-old narrator, Matia, alludes to class tensions, youthful rivalries, feelings of estrangement, her love of fairy tales, mysterious adults, the conversos known as chuetas, expectations for girls, and unsettling violence. Studies of the text have examined it principally as a bildungsroman and a political allegory, centering on aspects such as Biblical motifs, symbols, archetypes, myths, female adolescent development and so on. One prominent element, however, has not received sustained attention—the legend of St. George, both as set forth in medieval hagiography and as manifested in folk customs. The present article seeks to pursue this line of inquiry: in view of the enigmatic character named Jorge de Son Mayor and the repeated references to San Jorge at the local church: how does parsing the saint’s tradition inflect and enrich our readings of Matute’s book? In other words, why George?

Car Country: An Environmental History by Christopher W. Wells William Cronon

 OHQ vol. 114, no. 3 regionalism have preceded it,but this leads the way. All Westerners should have a good look. Walter Nugent University of Notre Dame (emeritus) Car Country: An Environmental History by Christopher W. Wells foreward by William Cronon University of Washington Press, Seattle and London, 2013. Illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, index. 464 pages. $40.00 cloth. In this well-written and broadly conceived work,ChristopherWellsoffersanewinterpretation of the way automobiles have reshaped the Americanlandscape.Herejectstwopopulartraditions :theonethatemphasizesthattheAmerican love affair with automobiles compelled rebuilding American urban environments to accommodatetheminanywayimaginable,and the other that sees darker corporate forces foisting on Americans a suburban world in which the automobile is a hard-and-fast necessity. Wells walks the line between these arguments, stressing the relationship between automobiles andthelandscapesbuilttoaccommodatethem. Theresultisananalysisthatrevealsmuchof the structuralfunctionalist’sinterestinequilibrium andsocialstabilityandeschewsthekindof dark culturalanalysesof automobilesthatbeganwith scholars such as Robert and Helen Lynd in the Middletown studies. The story Wells tells begins before the development of the automobile,with efforts to clean up urban filth and remove both urbanites and rural folk from the muck and mire of dirt roads. Although rural populations had to be convinced — often by urban bicyclists who saw good roads as a source of healthy leisure — Wellsnotesthatthemovement,consolidatedby the automobile, solved the serious problem of rural isolation.Good roads restructured towns and villages, made local environs less essential for farmers than the nearest large towns, and resolved class tensions that periodically appeared over road building. The persistent poor quality of rural roads affected the kind of automobiles that Americans manufactured, putting a premium on light vehicles that had a great deal of clearance — something Henry Ford was able to produce with increasing efficiency . Continued improvements in design and production gave the automobile a growing presence, especially in the cities where engineers sought to understand traffic flows on periodically congested and now fully paved streets to maximize movement in urban cores. It was a losing proposition,though,as there was continued growth in the number of automobiles sold — though never so prolifically as in the postwar era, when annual sales regularly exceeded the 1929 prewar record of nearly five million automobiles. It was not until the postwar era, when a number of forces came together, that “Car Country”came fully into being.Wells discusses the role of the federal government in encouraging suburban residential development that one might find in earlier books by Kenneth Jackson or Lizabeth Cohen, including the funding of interstates and mortgage guarantees by the FHA, but he also notes the impact of policies such as accelerated deprecation that provided tax incentives to engage in the costly process of planning suburban shopping centers . By the 1960s, a fully developed suburban complex effectively required residents to own automobiles. Wells concludes with a research study from the University of Michigan that found auto ownership and total miles traveled were highly correlated to whether one lived in a city largely built before the automobile. Presumably, people who have fewer cars and live in denser cities would continue to live without cars — even if parking were not such a headache. In this regard, he concludes that our love for automobiles has been mediated by the degree to which the built environment has  Reviews compelled it.Whether or not one fully buys the argument — and the acknowledged inability of interwar urban engineers to keep up with the demands of traffic would suggest that there are still compelling reasons to think that it was the automobile that brought forth suburbia — the book provides a lot to think about with regard to the relationship between technology and the built environment. Moreover, there is a wealth of interesting information about automobiles and road building, the kind of details that will enhance cocktail conversation and class lectures alike for years. Lawrence M. Lipin Pacific University Morris Graves: Selected Letters edited by Vicki Halper and Lawrence Fong University of Washington Press, Seattle and London, 2013. Illustrations, index. 320 pages. $45.00 cloth. “[Frederick] Wright says in his recent catalog for the Whitney retrospective that I am a wanderer — a nomad.I think that misses the point or is the wrong way of saying it. I think I am, in this way, no more than another...

A Black Soldier’s Story: The Narrative of Ricardo Batrell and the Cuban War of Independence

A Black Soldier’s Story: The Narrative of Ricardo Batrell and the Cuban War of Independence

The Crimean War, 1853-56

The Crimean War, 1853-56 Mara Kozelsky (bio) Ian Almond , Two Faiths, One Banner: When Muslims Marched with Christians across Europe's Battlegrounds. 246 pp., illus. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. ISBN-13 978-0674033979. $29.95. Candan Badem , The Ottoman Crimean War (1853-1856). 432 pp., illus. Leiden: Brill, 2010. ISBN-13 978-9004182055. $229.00. Ol´ga Vasil´evna Didukh , Donskie kazaki v Krymskoi voine 1853-1856 gg. (Don Cossacks in the Crimean War, 1853-1856). 173 pp., illus. Moscow: VINITI, 2007. ISBN-13 978-5785604940. Orlando Figes , The Crimean War: A History. 540 pp., illus. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2011. ISBN-13 978-0805074604. $35.00. Iuliia Aleksandrovna Naumova , Ranenie, bolezn´ i smert´: Russkaia meditsinskaia sluzhba v Krymskuiu voinu, 1853-1856 gg. (Injury, Disease, and Death: Russian Medical Service in the Crimean War, 1853-56). 314 pp., illus. Moscow: Regnum, 2010. ISBN-13 978-5918870020. A. D. Panesh , Zapadnaia Cherkesiia v sisteme vzaimodeistviia Rossii s Turtsiei, Angliei, i imamatom Shamilia v XIX v. (do 1864) (Western Circassia in the System of Russian Interaction with Turkey, England, and Imam Shamil in the 20th Century [until 1864]). 240 pp. Maikop: Adygeiskii respublikanskii institut gumanitarnykh issledovanii im. T. M. Kerasheva, 2007. ISBN-13 978-5889410355. Until recently, the Crimean War (1853-56) has been much neglected in Russian history. Few English-language monographs devoted themselves to [End Page 903] the Russian Crimean War.1 The Soviet historian Evgenii Viktorovich Tarle wrote the last major Russian monograph on the topic during World War II.2 As opposed to World War I and World War II, in which the tragedy of the eastern front is fairly well documented in the literature, the British experience dominates the general narrative of the Crimean War.3 The 150th anniversary of the Crimean War has inspired new interest, however, among Russian area scholars. Although much of this work is popular or commemorative in nature, the books under review here offer a variety of innovative approaches to the war and make substantial contributions to the field.4 The Crimean War was a Russo-Turkish War first and a European war second—or to borrow from David Goldfrank, the Crimean War consisted of "two wars and a diplomatic struggle," the latter referring to Austria's and Prussia's involvement from the sidelines.5 Russia and the Ottoman Empire initially went to war in October 1853 over Russia's rights to intervene in the affairs of Orthodox Christians living in Ottoman territory. France and Britain entered in March 1854, after the Russian-Ottoman conflict had clearly turned in Russia's favor. The war had multiple fronts in the Danubian Principalities, the Black Sea, the Baltic Sea, the White Sea, and the Pacific and ended with an Ottoman defeat in Kars in November 1856.6 With Kars, [End Page 904] Winfried Baumgart notes, Russia "controlled more square miles of enemy territory than did the sea powers." In Baumgart's reading of the treaty and preceding events, therefore, Russia came to the Peace of Paris not as the vanquished but as an equal participant.7 The war heralded Russia's transition into the modern era by exposing class tensions and introducing technological and scientific advancements. As the most violent episode of the Eastern Question in the 19th century, it profoundly influenced the history of the Black Sea region, the Caucasus, and the Balkan Peninsula. After the Crimean War, Russia and the Ottoman empires swapped hundreds of thousands of Muslims and Christian refugees, in what Brian Williams has called the "Great Retreat" of Muslims from Europe.8 Whether due to battles, population exchanges, or nationalist movements caused by the war, the present-day states of Ukraine, Moldova, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, Turkey, Armenia, Georgia, and regions such as Crimea and the Caucasus all changed in small or large ways due to this conflict. Today, historians of these regions are investigating the Crimean War as a transformative event.9 The six works under review offer new insights into the war and hence expand our understanding of the Nikolaevan era, Russian-Ottoman borderlands, the role of religion in the war, and the vast number of people(s) whose lives were forever changed by the...

Work House Blues: Black Musicians in Chicago and the Labor of Culture During the Jazz Age

This article examines the laboring culture of African American jazz and blues musicians in Chicago in the 1920s. It explores the musicians' efforts to forge an occupational identity in the context of race and class tensions in the Chicago job market as well as their experiences in both the day jobs needed to pay the bills and the performance jobs in clubs, theaters, and recording studios. The author draws from the memoirs and songs of Earl Hines, Mahalia Jackson, Willie “the Lion” Smith, and Big Bill Broonzy, among others, to uncover the impressions of musicians' working conditions in Chicago during the “golden age” of jazz.

Black Women's Labor and the Melodrama of Class Mobility in Sutton Griggs's Overshadowed

May the work I've done for me , May the work I've done for me , When I'm resting in my grave, there is nothing that can be said , May the work I've done for me . --African American spiritual (1) For the past two decades, scholarship in class studies has traced the literary representation of work in Gilded Age America. (2) As scholars note, struggles over the modes and compensations of labor often emerged through the pages of late nineteenth-century newspapers, religious tracts, and novels, as writers vied for cultural influence to shape readers' sentiments toward work and class. Yet studies seldom have examined how African American writers contributed to these literary mediations of work. As Carla Peterson has observed, this inattention to black labor reflects scholars' privileging of certain interpretive paradigms to the exclusion of others. as well as a narrow focus on only the most canonical postbellum black texts (104). (3) For example, well-known authors Frances E. W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins, and Charles W. Chesnutt all wrote about the relation between labor conditions and black advancement in their lesser-known fiction, speeches and essays; however, these authors' most frequently studied novels--Iola Leroy (1892), Contending Forces (1900), and The Marrow of Tradition (1901), respectively--belie the writers' fuller engagement with labor issues. (4) In order to recover the discourse of labor in African American literary history, this essay builds upon Peterson's observations by examining a little-studied black narrative whose focus is on work, Sutton E. Griggs's second novel, Overshadowed (1901). The novel's title has unintentionally prophesied its critical neglect. Even as scholars including Arlene Elder, Wilson Jeremiah Moses, and Finnie Coleman have aimed to restore attention to the author's oeuvre, Griggs's second novel is overshadowed by critical attention to his first, Imperium in Imperio (1899). (5) In each of his five novels, published between 1899 and 1908, as well as his nonfiction social theory, Griggs (1872-1933) highlights how African Americans pursue and interpret their work, particularly within racially proscribed labor markets. (6) Yet Overshadowed places work at its center by following Erma and John Wysong, siblings who must forego their life of relative comfort to seek self-sustaining work after their parents' death. Focusing primarily on Erma's precarious work conditions as a black female laborer, the novel features African Americans performing a range of domestic service, self-employment, homemaking, industrial work, imprisoned labor, and professional occupations. As African Americans determine the extent to which their labor can speak for them in shaping their identities, the novel refutes the stigma of physical labor (industrial, service, and manual) to further affirm the work ethic. Yet the text ultimately notes how white prejudice and black intraracial class tensions often inhibit advancement by even the most diligent black workers. Though Griggs's melodramatic novels often have been dismissed as artistically flawed, I argue that in Overshadowed, melodramatic form productively aligns with the novel's thematic focus on labor and class mobility. (7) Characterized by stark changes in characters' social positions, emotional excess and trauma, and life-altering moral choices, melodrama demonstrates the extreme possibilities of an individual's fate. As such, melodrama's multiclimactic narrative structure simulates the serial, sudden reversals of fortune that may occur for workers in an unstable job market, especially for African American female workers facing hiring discrimination, sexual vulnerability, and other unfavorable conditions related to employment. In elucidating how melodrama conveys the exigencies of black women's labor, I draw on Peter Brooks's analysis of the genre as primarily concerned with establishing virtue through trials: The reward of virtue . …

Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure: Forced Entertainment, Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service (review)

Reviewed by: Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure: Forced Entertainment, Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service Dan Venning Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure: Forced Entertainment, Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service. By Sara Jane Bailes. New York: Routledge, 2011. Cloth $115.00, Paper $39.95. 256 pages. It can be very difficult to write about postmodern performance. Sara Jane Bailes, in her book Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure, argues that just as attempts to comprehend or analyze such productions can miss the mark, such shows themselves are often constructed around the very idea that theatrical representation is always imperfect, and the possibility that failure can be intentionally productive. Bailes begins with Beckett, who sparked her interest in avant-garde theatre and who she sees as the father of such performance theatre; she argues that he sees failure as “a constituent feature of the existential condition that makes expression possible” (1) and thus allows audiences to question expected outcomes. Looking to J. L. Austin’s concept of infelicitious or misapplied, badly executed acts, Bailes argues that performance, because it is predicated upon liveness and impermanence, at times exists in a constant state of failure. She goes on to suggest that contemporary theatre groups such as Sheffield-based Forced Entertainment (founded 1984), Chicago-based Goat Island (1987–2009), and New York-based Elevator Repair Service (founded 1991) have used and constructed failure as an integral part of their performances. In the second chapter, “World(s) After a Different Image: Marxism, Slapstick, Punk,” Bailes examines some of the many theoretical concepts she uses to underpin her studies of the aforementioned theatre groups. Marxism, she argues, calls for alternatives to rich, polished professionalism—a centerpiece of Brecht’s epic theatre. Bailes defines slapstick—that long-time performance staple—as the failure of a [End Page 246] seemingly simple task that is nevertheless bungled optimistically. Bailes connects this theatrical style to the history and aesthetics of punk, the musical movement that expressed the disillusionment that followed the 1960s and opposed itself to harmony, virtuosity, and material success. The following chapters each examine one company’s work in detail. In “Profane Illumination: Theatre and Forced Entertainment,” Bailes examines a company that often plays with ideas of coercion and the apparent requirement that theatre entertain its audience. She discusses how the company members “refus[e] to demonstrate their own skill” (108) in shows such as Club of No Regrets (1993), in which the use of an inept narrator reveals the inadequacy of theatrical conventions. Bailes also explores the company’s politics, juxtaposing Forced Entertainment’s avant-garde drama with Thatcher’s conservative vision for Britain. The author notes that the company has faced significant resistance from conservative forces; based in the former mining town of Sheffield, Forced Entertainment has become an artistic lightning rod for class tensions in the U.K. The fourth chapter, “News from Nowhere: Goat Island Performance Group,” also examines a politically motivated performance group. Starting with a discussion of Ernst Bloch’s conceptions of “openness and non-fixity . . . hope and possibility” (116), Bailes examines a company that created shows that consist of a “non-hierarchical inventory” (136) of characters, images, and actions latticed around a particular social theme. Goat Island’s shows were often based around the theme of a particular social trauma, such as the suicide of Paul Celan (When will the September roses bloom? Last night was only a comedy [2004]), and contained long sequences of “impossible dances” in which the company members dramatized their production process. Through her analysis of Goat Island, Bailes argues that failure is both necessitated by the theatrical form, and also simultaneously oxymoronic and impossible in the theatre, since whatever happens onstage in front of the audience indeed happens, imperfect as it may be. In her final chapter, “Dislocations of Practice: Elevator Repair Service,” Bailes examines this company’s “made work . . . created from disparate ideas, sources, and formal ideas” (168), situating their work within a somewhat broader discussion of New York’s “downtown” theatrical scene. Instead of discussing any of the company’s more famous later works such as Gatz (2006), Bailes focuses on Elevator Repair Service’s earlier works, Cab Legs (1997...

Sonny Montes and Mexican American Activism in Oregon by Glenn Anthony May

 OHQ vol. 113, no. 4 reviews Sonny Montes and Mexican American Activism in Oregon by Glenn Anthony May Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2011. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. 314 pages. $24.00 paper. In a historical biography that resembles a climactic thriller,GlennAnthony May gives voice to the struggles and experiences of Mexican Americans in Oregon, filling a gap in socialmovement history. To readers, the revised images of Chicano resistance and empowerment correct the historical invisibility and recover the historical memory of the Chicano struggle for social justice. Above all, the book powerfullycapturesthehumanity,courage,and conviction of Sonny Montes, a tireless political and community activist for farmworkers and working-class Mexican Americans. It will increase our understanding of Chicanos in Oregon and influence the field of Chicano/a Studies regionally and more broadly. A historian trained at Yale University with a specialization in Chicano history, May tells three related stories: Montes’s activism, the Mexican American community in Oregon, and the development of a Chicano movement. Taking a linear focus, May deftly documents these stories with over thirty-three individual interviews conducted over an eight-year period, along with archival research in private collections and trial records. Using social movement theory, May privileges the experiences of Celedonio Montes, Jr., or “Sonny,” whose gradual ascent into political activism was shaped by his own racialized experiences. By age five, he was working as a migrant farmworker, moving from Weslaco to Fort Worth, Texas, and then to Oregon, with an interim stop in California. He experienced Jim Crow–era segregation in South Texas and institutional racism in schools,where his teachers and counselor told him he was“not college material.”May’s account makes room for feelingswithinsocial -movementtheory,discussing experiences of humiliation, dehumanization, and racial violence. In the chapter“Contexts,”May examines the history of colonization in Oregon, contrasting the land assets of white settlers with the mostly landless economic status of migrant farm laborers, including braceros, who comprised an internal colony a century later. Hypersegregation , intense political repression, and their status as members of internal colonies contributed to the deplorable working conditions of Mexican Americans. The story of the Valley Migrant League (VML), created to assist migrants who wanted to leave the migrant stream and settle in Oregon ,begins during Pres.Lyndon Johnson’sWar on Poverty during the 1960s.Farmworkers used the “Tio Tomás” (“Uncle Tom”) racial epithet to level accusations atVML’s political machination of token representation and control. May alludes to the internal and external colonization that Chicanos struggled with; however, Chicanos’ bicultural identity belies the simple monolithic binary that ignores heterogeneity and the tension of identity politics. Gradually, the VML’s paternalistic and individualistic ideology shifted to community development that examined power relations. Federal regulations and rifts between growers and workers hampered the work and autonomy of theVML. “The Revolution” chapter chronicles John Little’s tenure as director of the VML, relying heavily on organizational minutes and reports. At a study session with farmworker clubs, six resolutions to increase farmworker representation were adopted. The Office of Economic Opportunity’s (OEO) Migrant Division undercut their efforts,however,which prompted the first outreach to politicians. In a  Reviews sequential move,theVML motioned to require “farmworker background” in all key positions and eliminated “educational requirements for VML employment,” thus challenging racial exclusion. Meetings with Little ignited in Montes the fire for racial justice and raised his ethnic consciousness and activist zeal. The “ethnic dimension” was a visible effect of an emerging Chicano movement in Oregon. The VML was portrayed as a collective action group that coalesced with such allies as Los Amigos — what May calls a Mexican American network. That concept, however, ignores the sexist oppression of Chicanas within the male-dominated movement that marginalized them. In the “Activist” chapter, May examines Montes’s personal challenges, in particular his marriage and intrafamily class tensions. May’s analysis conceals Montes’s first wife Librada’s emerging subjectivity and liberation by redefining her own family networks. In the next few chapters, May examines the historical context of Chicano/a Studies in colleges and universities. As the Ethnic Affairs Director for Mount Angel College, Montes recommitted the college to fulfill its mission to the...

The “Swinish Multitude”

In the first half of the nineteenth century, New Yorkers fought passionately over the presence of hogs on their streets and in their city. New York’s filthy streets had cultivated an informal economy and a fertile environment for roaming creatures. The battles—both physical and legal—reveal a city rife with class tensions. After decades of arguments, riots, and petitions, cholera and the fear of other public health crises ultimately spelled the end for New York’s hogs. New York struggled during this period to improve municipal services while adapting to a changing economy and rapid population growth. The fights between those for and against hogs shaped New York City’s landscape and resulted in new rules for using public space a new place for nature in the city.

The Cinematic Incarnation of Frazier's Black Bourgeoisie: Tyler Perry's Black Middle-Class

Images of Black Americans in modern cinema often depict negative stereotypes of working- and lower-class Blacks. Yet, with the rise of the Black middle-class and the increasing inclusion of Blacks in positions of power within the mass media, more images of middle-class Blacks have begun to appear, particularly through the work of Tyler Perry. We find that Perry’s images largely reflect E. Franklin Frazier's characterization of middle-class Blacks in The Black Bourgeoisie (1957), where Perry frames them as (1) materialistic and status-obsessed, (2) dysfunctional and abusive, and (3) disdainful of working- and lower-class Blacks. We also argue that he is creating new controlling images like the “Emasculated Black Gentleman.” In these ways, Perry’s images may have detrimental consequences including perpetuating Black stereotypes, reinforcing existing class and gender tensions in Black America, and impeding the life chances of middle-class Blacks by suggesting that they are unsuitable for assimilation and integration.

Brotherhood, Business, and White Male Respectability

This article examines the dramatic growth and popularity of secret fraternal organizations such as the Freemasons, the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, and the Sons of Temperance in Virginia just before the Civil War. Young Virginians who came of age during the antebellum era lived through a time of tremendous economic, cultural, and political upheaval. The spread of a market economy into the cities and towns of the Old Dominion promoted a cultural ethos that rewarded individual ambition, altered long-standing social relationships, and aggravated class tensions between working-class white men and new middle-class businessmen, merchants, and professionals. In a state increasingly pulled between the demands of the growing market and the long-established tradition of unfree labour, secret fraternal orders, played a special role in assuaging class tensions between white working and middle-class men. As the market economy grew and expanded these two groups of men had many reasons to be at odds with each outside of the lodge room. Instead, they chose to join lodges that stressed brotherly love and fraternal bonds. Ultimately, based on these ideals, secret fraternal orders created a civic brotherhood among white men in Virginia that softened class distinctions and carved out a non-political pathway to civic authority for white men.