Middle-class Discourse Research Articles

Nuisance Talk and the Propriety of Property: Middle Class Discourses of a Slum‐Free Delhi

Abstract: This paper examines the narratives through which associations of private property owners in Delhi depict slums as zones of incivility and “nuisance.” In tracing how this “nuisance talk” travels into and gains legitimacy in popular and state visions of urban space, the paper shows the role of discourse in justifying and enacting exclusionary urban imaginaries. As a lay term, nuisance is widely used to identify forms of aesthetic impropriety. But, as a primary element of environmental law, nuisance operates discursively as a catchall category allowing diverse private grievances to be expressed in terms of environmental welfare and the public interest. The widening depiction of slums as nuisances hence reworks the public/private divide, inserting once local codes of civility into the core of public life. By examining how nuisance talk circulates between property owners' associations, the media, and the government, the paper shows how slum demolitions have become widely read as a form of environmental improvement.

"A Nation's Need—Good and Well Trained Mothers": Gender, Charity, and the New Urban South

"A Nation's Need—Good and Well Trained Mothers"Gender, Charity, and the New Urban South Thomas C. Henthorn (bio) In the first decades of the twentieth century Houston, Texas, underwent profound economic and social changes resulting from oil strikes on the Texas Gulf Coast and a subsequent population explosion. In response a unified coalition of reform-minded city builders, yearning for a more orderly community, implemented a host of bureaucratic solutions to ameliorate the dynamics of urbanization. The realization of this community, known universally among reformers as the New South, depended on the effective regulation of the economy, but also control of the social environment in which this new economy would operate.1 It was within this larger commitment to Southern progress that the modernization of social services and charity developed within Houston. Armed with an unequivocal commitment to New South ideology, a core coalition of reformers—elite boosters, club women, and educated urban clergy—embarked on an ambitious social uplift scheme to bring the city in line with national standards in health, education, and social services. To progressives in Houston social uplift encompassed a number of health and welfare policies included as part of city builders' vision to build Houston into a grand metropolis of the New South. An overriding consideration by reformers as they modernized and centralized social services was guarding family life against the ravages of the city. Within this context Southern progressives premised their policies on the belief that building a great city and redeeming Southern society depended on a patriarchal hierarchy of healthy children, dedicated mothers, and hardworking fathers. The discussions that emerged among the coalition of reformers flowed from a decidedly class-bound vision of families. Central to these discussions were representations of women and their contributions to civic life. These representations drew upon middle-class discourses that articulated a racialized version of femininity in which the ideal civic function for women was motherhood. The result was a set of welfare practices that defined working-class [End Page 71] men and women's public civic capacity by their private paternal and maternal roles. Such representations had real social and economic effects on the lives of working-class women and their families. These gendered concepts of the civic form allowed reformers to set the terms of the debate about the proper place of men and women in a rapidly changing urban society. Hence, as city builders erected the built environment, they wished to construct, simultaneously, good mothers and good fathers as means of mediating the unwieldy dynamics of urbanization. Constructing representations of motherhood as a way to influence the distribution of limited social welfare resources also constituted a particularly intense struggle around race. As residents of a Southern city, Houston's city builders saw maintaining racial hierarchies amid changing social and economic circumstances as fundamental to the New South's civic culture. Southern views on race emphasized the differences between black and white. But at the dawn of the twentieth century the lines between race and what Americans refer to as ethnicity were not clear. This fluidity in racial thinking was due to large numbers of foreign-born immigrants who had been streaming into American cities for the past several decades. And this fluidity complicated the overly simplistic view of race in Houston. Even though reformers characterized some of their efforts as "immigrant work," when it came to uplifting families, charity workers only seldom racialized their gendered representations of the family in a manner that distinguished foreign-born women from native-born whites. Rather, a shared racial identity between foreign-born and native-born white women crystallized poignantly the necessity, reformers believed, to impress upon all newcomers normative Anglo middle-class ideals—religious faith, good citizenship, an appreciation for hard work, and moral strictness.2 Charity workers, however, consistently reproduced racialized narratives about the fitness of Mexican, and especially black, families in social policies that addressed health and hygiene, child care, and settlement work. Progressive economic and social uplift policies in the New South were foremost predicated on the assumed inferiority of blacks. Jim Crow laws and the traditions of a segregated society meant that any social service provided to African Americans would be...

The changing image of the Kurds in Turkish cities: middle-class perceptions of Kurdish migrants in İzmir

ABSTRACT Saraçoğlu deals with the ways in which the Kurdish migrants living in the western cities of Turkey have been identified in middle-class discourse by certain pejorative labels and stereotypes. He argues that this new Kurdish image demonstrates the ethnicization of longstanding anti-migrant sentiments in Turkey. He develops and substantiates the argument by means of qualitative data gathered in a field study in İzmir between June 2006 and July 2007. The study involved ninety in-depth interviews with middle-class individuals living in the city and explored their anti-Kurdish attitudes. Through a close analysis of two of the common stereotypes that these interviewees deployed in the interviews—namely, that the Kurds were ‘benefit scroungers’ and that they ‘disrupt urban life’— Saraçoğlu explores the formation of the urban social context in which such perceptions have emerged. Close examination of the narratives of the middle-class respondents indicates that the development of a new image of the Kurds has occurred in an urban context shaped by the neoliberal transformation of Turkish cities, on the one hand, and the internal displacement of Kurdish migrants, on the other.

Aestheticizing labour: an affective discourse of cooking in colonial Bengal

This article examines how a gendered discourse of taste was formulated in colonial Bengal by the Bengali Hindu middle classes, which in its turn facilitated the self-fashioning of Bengali bhadralok. This discourse of taste was articulated specifically through the culture of food. The middle-class Bengali Hindus constituted a new rhetoric of cuisine that enabled them to distance themselves from their ‘others’, especially the lower classes. Often this distancing was done through aestheticizing women's cooking that assimilated gender with class. Undoubtedly, women were the signpost of ‘tradition’ in the middle-class discourse. However, the same discourse also assigned them the responsibility for producing a ‘modern’ Bengali cuisine.

Staging the Garveyite Home: Black Masculinity, Failure, and Redemption in Theodore Ward's Big White Fog

When Theodore Ward's Big White Fog was produced by Chicago Negro Unit of Federal Theatre Project in April 1938, it was hailed by fellow artists as an important and original play. Langston Hughes thought it the greatest encompassing on Negro life that has ever been written. If it isn't liked by people, it is because they are not ready for it, not because it isn't a great play (qtd. in Hatch 279-80). Ralph Ellison found Big White Fog to be like no other Negro ... in its three-act attempt to probe most vital problems of Negro experience (qtd. in Hatch 279). It was precisely Ward's attempt to explore those problems that proved so controversial, provoking black community leaders in Chicago to condemn as dangerously realistic and likely to tear down unity between races as well as within race (qtd. in Graham, Memorandum n. pag.). Big White Fog explores black masculinity in relation to three political movements and ideologies with competing visions for black progress in years between 1922 and 1932. Garveyism, capitalism and communism are each represented by a male figure who embodies promise of redeemed black manhood. Each ideology, in turn, offers to restore pride, dignity and status of black men, who have been excluded from and defined in opposition to hegemonic notions of manliness. Previous studies have tended to examine political positions explored in and concluded that Ward shows a preference for communism. The appearance on stage of large numbers of communists at play's end has seemed to support this reading of play. (1) I argue, however, that does not reach a dramatic resolution in favor of any one movement, but rather offers a critique of their different paths to manhood. The purpose of this article, then, is to investigate how uses staged representations of Garveyism, capitalism and communism to explore competing ideals of manliness. By manliness, I mean a specific, historically contingent version of masculinity, which aims to achieve political and social cachet of manhood. The term manhood identifies a form of maleness that functions as a claim to political and social (including domestic) legitimacy and power. In nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, manliness was a middle-class discourse that was characterized by self-restraint and control of masculine passions and which gave certain men authority over those weaker than they, such as women, African Americans, and working-class men (Bederman 11-12). (2) For example, in capitalist, Jim Crow America, economic discrimination against black men meant that they were seldom able to act as exclusive breadwinners within their families; this was an inferior and dependent status that precluded certain kinds of authority associated with manhood. It is black man's quest to redeem his manhood that is central to Ward's examination of black culture and politics in interwar America. Ward's study of competing paths to black manhood attracted considerable attention during its initial run, and yet gender politics of Big White Fog has received surprisingly little analysis both in accounts of black cultural politics in interwar period and in black theater history. (3) This article is an attempt to redress this oversight and to suggest that Ward's unresolved and uncomfortable portrayal of predicaments and paradoxes of black masculinity in interwar America marks a significant moment in black theater history. Ward should both be acknowledged as an early exponent and understood within context of an important black theatrical tradition that used black family drama to interrogate contemporary black political discourse. Ward's concern with black man's dream of a better life and failure to achieve manhood in his domestic and work life are themes which inform Richard Wright's collaboration with Paul Green on stage version of Nalive Son (1940) as well as they also inform Lorraine Hansberry's drama Raisin in Sun (1959). …

Disciplining the Working Classes: Neoliberal Designs in Vocational Education

This essay critiques the neoliberal reorganization of vocational education, finding that the notion of democratic schooling has been diminished as the differential needs of working-class students are unrecognized and unmet. Instead, these students are faced with the false promises of merit advanced in the middle-class discourses of college-for-all. Vocational education reforms support the privatization movement through the creation of charter schools, as well as the cessation of control to industries for work-ready testing, employability certification, and business-defined career clustering. Vocational institutions are expected to be entrepreneurial in this neoliberal climate of strategic global advantage, encouraged to enter into public-private partnerships for economic development, and asked to manage costs with declining support from the taxpaying public.

Making of ‘Modern’ Theatre and Actresses’ Question: Negotiation and Contestation

Theatre was an important representation site of the burgeoning middle class during the colonial period in its search for cultural identity. ‘Modern’ theatre of the middle class was linked up with its quest for respectability and the question of respectability assumed its sharpest form when the issues concerned women. The politics of social class, gendered ideologies and nationalism permeating the theatre space came to construct the female performer/actress as the ‘other’ of the domesticated, ‘pure’ and ‘spiritual’ middle class women. The paper looks at the construction of actresses as the ‘other’ in the middle class discourse. For the actresses despite their tremendous artistic talent, all evidences of respectability were ruled out. The actresses’ lives were indicative of the contradictions of a new world of middle class cultural production. The paper also makes an attempt to move beyond the paradigm of respectability discourse by fore-fronting the other identities of the actresses, which hitherto has not received scholarly attention. The whole middle class respectability discourse by invisibilizing the other identities of actresses forecloses their struggles and contestations.

‘Los Argentinos Descendemos de los Barcos’: The Racial Articulation of Middle Class Identity in Argentina (1920–1960)

This essay examines some aspects of the making of middle class identity in Argentina during the first half of the 20th century. Its main argument is that this identity only crystallized when it was articulated through racial discourses accompanying the empowerment of the Peronist working class during the 1940s and 1950s. If a middle class identity was not clearly articulated earlier, it was due, in part, to ‘common sense’ understandings of the nation as homogeneously white, European, and socially mobile, notions that did not favor the circulation of the concept of a middle class. This paper thus analyzes two processes–the profound and persistent identification of the Argentine nation with Europe, and the racialization of the social and political ‘Other’ performed by anti-Peronist forces–in order to better understand the relatively late appearance of an unambiguously middle class discourse, as well as the intertwined construction of whiteness and middle class identity in Argentina.

Stellvertreterkriege. Politik mit Musik des deutschen und englischen Bürgertums im frühen 19. Jahrhundert

Proxy Wars. The Politics of Music of the German and English Middle-class in Early 19th Century The European middle-classes used opera houses and concert halls as public arenas to establish their own identity. In these spheres they could celebrate their cultural and political ideals and thereby mark the differences with the aristocracy. The article focuses on the middle-class discourses about music and on the behaviour of audiences. The middle-classes used their allegedly superior musical understanding to deprecate the nobility. Especially in England, but to some extent in Germany as well, the love for Italian opera was regarded as a distinctly aristocratic fashion, while in both countries the middle-class believed in the superiority of instrumental music. This phenomenon raises the question how and why images of «true» and «superficial» artists were created and how seemingly non-political assessments became political issues.

Thinkable Alternatives in African American Studies

Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794–1861. By John Ernest. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. 426 pages. $59.95 (cloth). $21.95 (paper). Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North. By Patrick Rael. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. 421 pages. $55.00 (cloth). $19.95 (paper). If we consider scholarship an indication of the health of a discipline, Patrick Rael's Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North and John Ernest's Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794–1861 suggest that recent reports of the death of African American studies have been greatly exaggerated.1 Rael, a historian, and Ernest, a literary historian and critic, have produced interdisciplinary scholarship that speaks to the ongoing value of studying African Americans' challenge to, participation in, and "cofabrication" of Euro-American definitions of history, culture, and racial identity. Both books greatly enrich our study of antebellum African American thought, archivally and historically, with a wide range of insights pertaining to antebellum black Americans' negotiation of the contradictions inhering in U.S. nationalist ideology and in a democracy increasingly polarized around race. To this end, Rael and Ernest significantly broaden contemporary definitions of "protest" to include discourses of respectability and to revise assumptions of black history as merely "acts of record." Like all good books, however, these texts also point to work that still needs to be done, particularly around our understandings of what constituted "politics" in largely disenfranchised black communities during the periods under consideration; how and if cultural forms substituted for politics; and the role, if any, of disagreements among African Americans in the consolidation of "black" racial identity, protest, and history. If formulations of antebellum "black identity" are in some sense the fruit of many decades' engagement with the [End Page 245] thought and writings of black leaders, they still demand further interrogation into how processes of racial formation among blacks were influenced and modified by the challenges that intraracial difference of various kinds—class, gender, region, religion, and color—posed to them. In a field wherein we no longer assume (thankfully) the value of static and ahistorical notions of race—white or black—the challenge now lies in tracing the contradictions and constraints, as well as the opportunities, inhering in black Americans' adaptation of various languages for racial legitimacy, whether those of "morality," "respectability," "protest," or "history." Patrick Rael's formulation of "black protest" and its links to black racial identity intervene in contemporary debates about antebellum black leaders whose middle-class values of thrift, industriousness, and respectability were often identified as "bourgeois" and inauthentically black in identity politics discourses. Building on Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham's provocative and influential coining of the phrase "the politics of respectability," Rael's main argument is that African Americans "cofabricated" a discourse of respectability that was central to their racial activism and that this discourse constituted a form of protest against racial inequality. He makes a convincing case for recognizing that African Americans contributed to and influenced notions of character and respectability in their efforts for "elevation," notwithstanding their demographic, political, and cultural marginalization. In conventions and in the black press, in freemason and abolitionist societies, African Americans forged a "coherent structure of values and ideological presuppositions" to inequality that Rael argues displays "the integrity of their thought" and that is mistakenly viewed as foreign to African Americans as a group (7). This analysis exposes the ironic similarities that exist between twentieth-century expectations of black authenticity and racist antebellum whites' disparagement of middle-class blacks. To this end, Rael's close study of Edward Clay's series of lithographs "Life in Philadelphia" illuminates the nineteenth-century minstrelsy-derived lineage of twentieth-century black middle-class ridicule. Middle-class discourse in the United States may have demographically excluded the majority of African Americans, but Rael shows that black leaders made long unrecognized cultural contributions that reaffirm African Americans' foundational role in the shaping...

The Scientisation of Culture: Colonial Medicine's Construction of Egyptian Womanhood, 1893–1929

From Great Britain's colonial takeover of Egypt's School of Medicine and adjoining hospital in 1893 until its return to Egyptian control in 1929, this study argues that colonial medical discourse constructed a trope of the ‘modern Egyptian woman’ as a byproduct of the discursive exchange between Victorian and Egyptian medicine. As evidence, this study identifies the colonial reforms of Egyptian medical institutions. Through analysis of governmental documents, medical treatises, curriculum, periodicals, travel literature and memoirs, this foray argues that Egyptian medical institutions were Anglicised, creating for the ‘modern Egyptian doctor’ an unprecedented level of socio‐political authority. Paradoxically, this same process of medical professionalisation disempowered the Egyptian midwife. Furthermore, through the modern authority of the doctor, Egyptian discourse constructed medico‐nationalist rationalisations of female domesticity, or ‘republican motherhood’.

"Eawr Folk": Language, Class, and English Identity in Victorian Dialect Poetry

THE INTRODUCTION TO THE COLLECTED WRITINGS OF SAMUEL LAYCOCK, one of the most popular Victorian working-class dialect poets, comments that Laycock wrote the elevation, the enjoyment, and the consolation of. . . the 'toilers and moilers' of Lancashire's towns and villages. [1] Such poetry--the literary fruits of an expressive impulse arising from the conditions of working-class life, aimed at the betterment of that life and formed in the very idiom of that life--would seem to offer much promise to the contemporary reader and scholar. One might hope to find here poetic engagement with the material conditions of the Victorian working class and perhaps significant counter-voice to the dominant middle-class discourse of Victorian England. Yet scholars who write on Victorian dialect poetry often seem disappointed, their commentaries ranging in tone from apologetic to overtly critical. Brian Maidment, for instance, characterizes Victorian homely rhyming as predominantly conciliatory and conservative, [ 2] while Susan Zlotnick argues that after the failure of Chartism, the working class and its writers turned inward by turning indoors, embracing the ideology of domesticity, and participating in an apotheosis of the home and family similar to that of the Victorian middle classes. [3] Generally, the alleged failings of dialect poetry are ascribed at least in part to the influence of middle-class patronage, [4] but whatever the cause, two conclusions are prevalent: first, dialect poetry tends to re-inscribe rather than resist middle-class ideology, and second, this poetry is ultimately stylistically conservative--written in conventionalized poetic idiom with tenuous relationship to the actual speech of its writers. These critics may have in mind such poems as Laycock's Homely Advice for the Unemployed: While th' wealthy are feastin' we're starvin', An' for this, lads, ther' must be cause; Aw know pratin' Tom ull put this deawn To injustice an' the badness o'th' laws. Well, ther' may be some truth i' what Tom says, But aw know what th' real cause is aw think: For while Tom's woife an' childer are starvin', He's spendin' his eamin's o' drink. Yo' may prate o'er yo'r wrongs until doomsday, An' blame what are coed th' upper class; But ole yo'r complaints will be useless, Till yo'n th'e sense to tak' care o' yo'r brass. Turn o'er new leaf, fellow-toilers, An' let common-sense be yo'r guide; If ther's one happy spot under heaven, Let that spot be yo'r own fireside. Get ceaw, if yo'con, an' three acres, An' i' future, employ yo'r spare heawers I' readin' good books; an' yo'r windows, Fill these up wi' plants an' wi' fleawers. Get yo'r wives an' yo'r childer areawnd yo', Sing an' among 'em loike mad; An' if this doesn't mak' yo' feel happier, Throw th' blame on A LANCASHIRE LAD. (pp. 111-112) This poem begins by invoking class division and class inequity but rather than addressing any systematic social or economic wrongs, the speaker focuses on the behavior of the poor themselves as the implicit source of the problem. The escapism of such homely advice is striking. While thrift and temperance are laudatory and sensible practices in the face of poverty, advising the urban poor to get a ceaw, if yo'con, an' three acres borders on absurdity, while to gather one's family and whistle among 'em loike mad would indeed seem insanity. Thus rather than invoking the conditions of Victorian urban working-class life and advocating realistic course of social activism, this poem suggests simple change in attitude and seeks consolation in the vision of mythical agrarian past. As critics suggest, this seems less valid construction of working-class identity than the grafting of middle-class domestic ideology onto working-class culture. …

The masochistic pleasures of sentimental literature

For generations, critics have noticed in nineteenth-century American women's sentimentality a streak of masochism, but their discussions of it have over-simplified its complex relationship to women's power. Marianne Noble argues that tropes of eroticized domination in sentimental literature must be recognized for what they were: a double-edged sword of both oppression and empowerment. She begins by exploring the cultural forces that came together to create this ideology of desire, particularly Protestant discourses relating suffering to love and middle-class discourses of "true womanhood." She goes on to demonstrate how sentimental literature takes advantage of the expressive power in the convergence of these two discourses to imagine women's romantic desire. Therefore, in sentimental literature, images of eroticized domination are not antithetical to female pleasure but rather can be constitutive of it. The book, however, does not simply celebrate that fact. In readings of Warner's The Wide Wide World , Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin , and Dickinson's sentimental poetry, it addresses the complex benefits and costs of nineteenth-century women's literary masochism. Ultimately it shows how these authors both exploited and were shaped by this discursive practice. The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature exemplifies new trends in "Third Wave" feminist scholarship, presenting cultural and historical research informed by clear, lucid discussions of psychoanalytic and literary theory. It demonstrates that contemporary theories of masochism--including those of Deleuze, Bataille, Kristeva, Benjamin, Bersani, Noyes, Mansfield--are more relevant and comprehensible when considered in relation to sentimental literature.