Representations Of Labor Research Articles

Work and the Smoke Break in the Art of the USSR from the 1940s Through the Early 1960s

The article outlines changes in the representation of labor in Soviet art, primarily painting, from the 1940s through the early 1960s. The author argues that during the final formulation of Stalin’s Socialist Realism in the 1940s, the ideology associated with labor in Soviet art changed. Labor was interpreted no longer in terms of effort, achievement and similar activist categories, but rather in terms of relief from work or the “smoke break” — a slang term for a pause in work equivalent to the English “coffee break,” a respite or time out. During Khrushchev’s subsequent cultural reforms, the heroism of labor no longer appeared in Soviet art. It was replaced by the notion that labor is “enduring.”

Subversive Mobility: Migrant Labor and the Visual Politics of Representation

Abstract California has existed in the collective imagination of popular American culture as the “Land of Promise,” or Eden of the American West, at the very least since its state ratification in 1850. Early representations of the American West drew many to the California landscape in search of this mythical “garden.” This article examines how landscape, operating as a visual ideology, impacted social relations in the California agricultural industry during the 1930s. My argument is that landscape as a visual ideology imposed severe restrictions on the representation of migrant labor through what I define as the “cultural optics of labor.” The article explores how John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939) mediates the complex exchanges between labor, landscape, and representation during the Dust Bowl Era, suggesting that the novel develops a set of possibilities for worker revolution along the two ideological lines of space and class.

The Labor of “a Human without a Tongue” - A Study on the Representation and Meaning of Labor in the Korean and Japanese Literature of 1900-10s -

The Labor of “a Human without a Tongue” - A Study on the Representation and Meaning of Labor in the Korean and Japanese Literature of 1900-10s -

웨스커의 The Kitchen, 출구는 있는가?

This paper explores the representation of labor in Arnold Wesker’s play, The Kitchen. It explicates the ways in which the sinister vicious circle of labor, laborers, labor environment, a capitalist and the society are constructed in the kitchen at the restaurant Tivoli, the metaphor of the industrial capitalist society.BR It also pursues how the play’s pseudo absurd theater techniques such as the fragmented plot development, undeveloped characters, the chaotic exchanges of words and movements, the isolated spaces contribute to the intensity of the vicious circle without providing the solution to the problems. This paper finds that both the cooks and Marango are portrayed as the components of the vicious circle. Because they do not have meaningful identity separated from their work, they do not seem to have means to escape or break the circle. The society that values money and shows lack of sympathy for the weaker and the poorer seem to be the main cause of the vicious circle. Also this paper probes whether there are clues to resolve the vicious circle in the play. Even though one of the goals of Wesker’s theater is to educate the laborers, The Kitchen asks questions to the audience about what to do with the vicious circle rather than provides concrete suggestions or definite guidelines to solve the problems. None of the characters attain the definite ideas about how to abolish the vicious circle. The communal social awareness of employment-friendly labor environment is not attained. In the play there is no easy exit from the vicious circle. What the audience is expected to do is to find the qualities that all of the staff, Marango and their society do not achieve, such as sensitivity to the capitalist working system, the future vision for the service industry and the sympathy for the underdogs. Obviously their insensitivity and ignorance block their exit. The play using the kitchen, the uglier version of the capitalist society, challenges the audience to see what would happen to themselves if they lack the education that Wesker’s theater intends to provide. While enriching the social play’s tradition with various non-representational characteristics, The Kitchen not only embraces the labor class who has been isolated from the British theater monopolized by the upper class but also attains the goal of education, as Wesker intended to.

The digital labor of queering feminist Web TV

Episodes in two queer and feminist Web TV programs, Orange Is the New Black and Her Story, feature ambivalent representations of labor and social reproduction. These narratives suggest implications for digital economy, particularly its algorithms and its connection with the disruption of conventional social and economic categories. This comparative analysis mobilizes theories from feminist media studies and cultural studies to present the viewing of queer and feminist Web TV as forming networks of care and, potentially, resistance in addition to producing economic value.

The Persistence of Plantation Paternalism: Moving Image Representations of Agriculture on O'ahu, Hawai'i

The Persistence of Plantation PaternalismMoving Image Representations of Agriculture on O'ahu, Hawai'i Monique Mironesco (bio) Using moving images from the 1940s–60s, this Forum contribution examines the development of cultural representations of food systems in Hawai'i, detailing a series of erasures enacted by promotional films from the pineapple and sugar industries of the 1940s and 1960s. Approximately 85–90 percent of the food consumed in Hawai'i is imported from the U.S. mainland or farther afield. This is a far cry from traditional Native Hawaiian agriculture, which was based on a land stewardship system whereby there was/is no ownership of the land. The concept of mālama 'āina (commonly referred to as caring for the land) actually reflects a deeper meaning, because 'āina isn't just defined as land but rather as "that which feeds." The notion that food and agriculture are integral to the well-being of people is intrinsic to indigenous views of land stewardship. To this end, Native Hawaiians worked through an ingenious system of land divisions, or ahupua'a—wedge-shaped sections of land that included mountains from which to gather/ harvest wood for canoes and homes; freshwater streams; flat land for taro cultivation using stream water as irrigation in lo'i kalo (irrigated taro fields); shallow reef areas for nearshore fishing; and access to the ocean for deep-sea fishing. Stewardship of these resources was ingrained in the Hawaiian culture through a series of kapu, or taboos, strictly dictating certain seasons for cultivating, harvesting, and resting both the people and the land. While this is necessarily an abbreviated view of Hawaiian history, it is clear that the Native Hawaiian food and watershed system fed from three hundred thousand to one million people, independent from any outside inputs until about fifty years after the arrival of Captain James Cook in 1778.1 After this period, and with [End Page 141] the support of American business interests,2 the Māhele of 1848 took place, dividing all of the lands in Hawai'i and rezoning them into three categories: Crown lands (about 23 percent); konohiki lands, to be divided among 245 chiefs (40 percent); and government lands, to be awarded to commoners who worked the land as active tenants (37 percent).3 With the subsequent Kuleana Act of 1850, a great theft of land from Native Hawaiians occurred because the law facilitated the consolidation of land into large congruent tracts ripe for plantation owners to take advantage of cheap imported Asian labor.4 Large plantations provided economies of scale for capital investments, the funding for which only wealthy landowners could afford. Owing to a lack of understanding of and/ or access to the process for petitioning for ownership of the land, eligible commoners, or maka'āinana, were not able to claim their land titles. The law was purposely written to make the procedures onerous to prevent claimants from pursuing their appeals for fee simple ownership. After the Māhele and the Kuleana Act eased the way, the plantations became larger and larger, importing thousands of laborers from a variety of Asian countries to do the hard labor of growing and processing sugarcane and pineapple.5 Both territorial and state government in Hawai'i gave legislative and material support to the plantation system to foster its continued growth and development. However, as a result of globalization, cheaper labor available in developing countries, and other factors, most plantations closed in the 1990s, leaving large swaths of land fallow on all the islands. This land remains idle and is now ripe for (re)development. Focusing on media representations of plantation life and labor demonstrates how the plantation system continues to influence agricultural and land policy during a critical juncture in Hawai'i's land use history. The state can continue to support large landowners through legislative policy, or it can pivot toward a new narrative that encourages less dependence on imported foods and promotes smaller-scale farming operations, with a variety of sustainable models and distinct emphases. "THE STORY OF SUGAR IS REALLY THE STORY OF HAWAII": MOVING IMAGE LITERATURE The strategic erasures enacted by promotional films from the pineapple and sugar industries of...

From the Editors Cinema: Labor

From the Editors Cinema: Labor Karen Pinkus and John David Rhodes Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 3] This issue appears at a moment when “precarious” is the term most likely to precede the word “labor” in scholarly, academic, and activist conversations. Today surplus populations find work in unimaginably degrading circumstances while skilled individuals may find themselves performing provisional delivery work or driving taxis. The job security of skilled modes of intellectual labor, like higher education, have been shown to be nostalgic fictions; “green jobs” represent a promise for a future that may already be past; and plaintive laments for Fordist modes, which were probably never what is recalled in retrospect, are sung in the public sphere. We live in a period of labor unrest. The ascendance of far-right and neofascist political movements has succeeded to no small degree thanks to their facility in exploiting resentment regarding deindustrialization, automation, unemployment, underemployment, and wage stagnation—resentment, in other words, about the status and value of labor. These same movements have also been adept in manipulating social media and broadcasting their anger via moving images. In developing this special issue we asked ourselves, what can we learn from thinking about labor (or its refusal) in relation to cinema, today, when “cinema” bears an archeological relationship to new media just as “labor” bears an ambivalent relationship to terms like the assembly line, wages, unions, collective action, time clocks, the working day, and strictly regulated gender divisions? How does work get worked out on the film screen (traditionally conceived) and in relation to the movement of the film stock, as opposed to the flow of video or the disposition of digital information reassembled in image-making today? The essays in this special issue attempt responses by deploying various tools to think labor with cinema: from the formal to the historical, from the psychoanalytic to the technological. As is well known, “cinema” encounters “labor” at its origins, in the Lumière Brothers’ 1895 short “actuality” (documentary) film of the workers leaving their own (film) factory at the end of the working day. But the connection between the factory and cinema is fraught. Harun Farocki, the German artist and filmmaker, explored the end of the shift and cinema in ways that are still reverberating. Cinema has traditionally been repelled by the factory, the voice-over in his essay-film Workers Leaving the Factory (1995) asserts. And then, broadly speaking for proprietary reasons, the camera is often not permitted inside the factory; but just as often, the cinema has judged the factory as beneath its notice. To rephrase the question posed by Isabelle in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1982 film Passion, one of the key films of our collective inquiry: why would anyone want to film factory work? There are spectacular exceptions of course: Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 Modern Times, for instance. And even when engaged filmmakers did gain access to factories, how long could the camera linger on repetitive motions on the assembly line before fatigue would set in? [End Page 4] Despite the apparent non-reciprocity of filmmaking and the labor process, the history of cinema offers a rich archive of representations of labor: slave labor, domestic labor, reproductive labor, sex work, affective labor, office work, not to mention the backstage musical’s elaborate attempts to represent the labor of cinematic entertainment itself. Radical and anti-institutional forms of filmmaking, like those associated with the experiments of the postwar American avant-garde, were as much demands for an autonomous labor process as they were for aesthetic autonomy; in fact, the autonomies are inextricable. Cinema has been primarily understood (for the spectator) as a means of escaping labor, or (for the worker in a Hollywood studio) as one of the most rigorous examples of what has been called the “division” of labor. The rise and fall of the studio system itself is but a slightly delayed retelling and indexing of the story of the reorganization and re imagining of labor in the postwar years. And yet, the film industry in the US is one of the last domains in which labor unions still exert a tremendous authority. The relocation of studio filmmaking...

Affective Iconoclasm: Codes of Labour as a Human Characteristic

Abstract This text argues that a number of recent works of contemporary art have developed an anthropomorphised code to signal “humanness.” Primary within this code is representations of labour, which the artworks connect to mimetic or realist stylisation as well as to the history of image production and often specifically Western art-making. It elaborates this thesis with regards to recent videos by Pierre Huyghe and Sidsel Meineche Hansen, and at a critique of social media labour in a lecture-performance by Jesse Darling, which all draw a link between human and non-human subjectivities and economic productivity. In focusing on different examples of nonhuman likenesses, the text also uses primatology to suggest that the colonial relationship between labour and species and racial hierarchies continues to colour representations of labour today.

Transforming Work: Early Modern Pastoral and Late Medieval Poetry. Katherine C. Little. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013. Pp. vii+256.

<i>Transforming Work: Early Modern Pastoral and Late Medieval Poetry</i>. Katherine C. Little. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013. Pp. vii+256.

Illumination or Illusion: Women Inventors at the 1893 World’s Columbian Fair

THE 1893 COLUMBIAN WORLD'S FAIR IN CHICAGO was an opportunity for America to showcase nations progress all realms of scientific, manufacturing, and industrial achievements. Although it was not first American worlds fair, it was certainly biggest and most progressive example of American ingenuity and technological progress to date. It was also biggest presentation of women inventors ever at an American worlds fair. But did more than estimated 350 women who exhibited their inventions at fair share illumination of American progress or did their experience reveal that progress for women scientific, manufacturing, and industrial sectors was simply an illusion presented part of magic of Great White City?The Great White City was a popular name for Columbian World s Fair because of more than 120,000 incandescent lights and 7,000 are lights used to illuminate exposition grounds, fountains, and waterways at night, more than any other previous fair anywhere world.1 Although Great White City celebrated and illuminated American progress, light shed on women inventors was considered by some to be good, but could have been better.2 How women inventors were promoted, judged, and valued provides insight about their identity, status, and influence, which extended into twentieth century and beyond and continues to beg question why women inventors never again exhibited equal numbers at an American world fair.World fairs United States have been studied extensively, but very little scholarship has focused on women inventors, part, because their participation a group has been limited. There has, however, been a substantial body of scholarship documenting womens participation world fairs starting with 1876 Philadelphia Centennial, which was first time women had a separate building. This was also first fair that included a significant number of women inventors with at least seventy-nine inventions by women on exhibit.3 Following 1876 Centennial, women's buildings appeared as many seven world fairs and national fairs between 1893 and 1939 United States. But after Columbian Worlds Fair 1893, women inventors were not identified again group at a fair, and their experiences were absorbed the centrality of work a mainstay of womans identity.4 Scholarship on womens activities subsequent fairs emphasized their participation governance, organization, and representation of womens work and labor. As noted by historian Robert W. Rydell, there is a rich body of documentary and theoretical scholarship about changing forms and functions of worlds fairs.5 Recent feminist scholarship on world fairs broadens boundaries of womens history to include an accounting for gender shaper of ideological and material reality, but to date, women inventors have yet to be identified that larger discussion of work, labor, and professionalism.6 Nevertheless, women inventors did engage serious labor resulting successful inventions, which were part of American celebration of progress promoted at Columbian Worlds Fair.Rewarding Domesticity Over InnovationIt was hoped women inventors exhibit Womans Building, well their inventions exhibited other fair buildings, would clear up existing misconceptions to originality and inventiveness of women.7 The claim was made that exhibits by women would be a unique and distinctive feature of fair, such never before was presented to world, such never before was attempted. It was hoped that, even more important than discovery of Columbus was fact that general government has discovered woman and in a measure there would be a dispelling of prejudices and misconceptions.8And it seemed though there were some womens inventions that might have supported this lofty goal based on inventions that exhibited mechanical complexity and commercial potential. …

Neoliberal Labour in Ramin Bahrani’s Films: Uneven Development, Entrepreneurial Governmentality, and Political Resistance

The essay analyzes representations of neoliberal labour in two films by the U.S. filmmaker Ramin Bahrani: Man Push Cart (2005) and Chop Shop (2007). By focusing on working-class labour in New York’s informal economy, the films undermine the prevalent characterization of contemporary labour as “immaterial” and fundamentally new. The essay argues that, in the latter film, the Willets Point neighbourhood appears as an area of “uneven development,” which gives the working-class characters a modicum of autonomy and a chance to transform their spaces. Yet the films’ greatest strength is their resistance to clichéd representations of working-class characters as oppressed “others”—objects of ethnographic fascination and paternalistic sympathy. Instead, Bahrani encourages the audience’s identification with the characters by using innovative filmmaking practice and focusing on the structures of “entrepreneurial governmentality,” usually associated with white-collar work. Bahrani’s films also highlight the contradictions of contemporary filmmaking and neoliberal culture.

Women's War: Media Representations of Female Civil Labour during World War I

This paper looks at the coverage of women’s civil labour during WWI in two magazines, Maclean’s in Canada and L’Illustration in France, supplemented with material from war museums and academic works. Our concern is media representations of the indispensible participation of these women, not as victims and passive entities in the conflict, but as individuals who have significantly contributed to the war effort. We contend that the magazines’ content did not reflect the magnitude of women’s civil labour during WWI and the importance they had not only in sustaining the war effort, maintaining a general level of production that would allow their countries to remain significantly involved in the war, but also in their contribution to the modernisation of society.

Fantasies of Participation: The Situationist Imaginary of New Forms of Labour in Art and Politics

The Situationist International (SI) have become a canonical reference point when discussing artists’ participation in political action or activism. This article attempts to decentre the SI from this position, by tracing their theories and representations of political agency and labour. I argue that their notion of agency is deeply conflicted, epitomized by the dual invocations ‘never work/all power to the workers’ councils. I examine how the SI’s representations of agency betray an attraction to and fascination with 1960s reactionary fantasies around brainwashing, conditioning, control and torture. Their practical descriptions of a constructed situation, which ‘makes people live’ are, in fact, closer to torturous state control than total liberation. The notions of agency they mobilise draw on colonial and classist sources, which actually deny the agency of radical movements. As a result, the SI produce a series of weak fantasies of participation, in which agency is denied and ‘demanding the impossible’ is actually a demand to constitute and police the impossible. Artistic-political agency was both guarded centre and constituent other. The SI’s policing of their identity, tied in name to the agency of ‘situations’, involved the ongoing exclusion and repression of other artists’ more practically-engaged labour within social movements.

Women, Work, and Revolution: A Do-It-Yourself Practice

Through a study of images of women engaged in work both in and outside the home found in the Cuban magazine Mujeres during its initial decade of production, this article examines the magazine’s representations of labor as a means of fostering collective participation and loyalty to the new regime in post-revolutionary Cuba. Mujeres aimed to propagate images of women participating in revolutionary life to engender collective support for the Fidel Castro regime, which simultaneously reinforced and subverted existing gender stereotypes and, in the process, defined the new Cuban woman. In fact, the editors of Mujeres encouraged a do-it-yourself approach to household maintenance and care that prompted readers to embrace self-directed, creative design strategies as a component of their revolutionary activism.

‘Cultivated Idleness’: Carlyle, Wilde, and Victorian representations of creative labour

This article defines two visions of artistic creation prevalent in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. The first is typified by Ford Madox Brown’s Work (1852–65), an image that champions the nobility of physical labour, and sees its literary rendering in Thomas Carlyle’s œuvre. Using the story of the writing and destruction of Carlyle’s French Revolution manuscript as a guiding example, it is argued that a narrative equating intellectual and creative production with hard, physical labour was consciously developed and mediated by the press and public. While this model of authorial industry and effort has for many come to stand for high Victorian creative agency, it was not uncontested in its time. In contrast, the article traces an equally compelling, concurrent counter-narrative, one that was codified by Henry Wallis’s post-Romantic image of the dying poet Chatterton and which was exemplified in Oscar Wilde’s affectation of authorial indolence. These contrasting versions of artistic agency demonstrate the negotiation of creative labour that defined the reception of British authors and their work from the 1850s to the fin de siècle.

A “sort of psychodrama”: Cinema verité and France’s self-analysis

Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch conceived of cinema verite as a “sort of psychodrama” elevating cinema to a medium for self-analysis, to test and promote authentic social relations. This essay locates their self-reflective poetics as part of a conspicuous trend for psychosocial methodologies throughout the fifties, and it contextualizes the migration of two psychosocial praxes and ideas into cinema—Kurt Lewin’s Research Center for Group Dynamics and Jacob L. Moreno’s sociometric and psychodramatic sessions—at a moment of heightened identity crisis and self-examination in France. Boldly pushing the effects of drama into a real zone of disturbance, Rouch asked French and African students in a high school to act out the roles of racists in The Human Pyramid (Rouch, 1959–61), revealing the impasses in changing interracial relations in West Africa. A similar sensitivity to the gaps in French discourse is at stake in Chronicle of a Summer’s (1960) attempt to counter the specter of forced confessionals (in Algeria) and the shadow of Stalinist authoritarianism, by promoting collective and democratic forms of self-baring. The essay rethinks the potential and limits of these two films as laboratories of self-awareness. It discusses the effectiveness of role reversal in revealing and combating racism in THP and it analyses the relevance of psychodynamic for Marxist discussions around the representation of labor, leisure and self-determination, as Chronicle essays a transition in leftist politics.

The (im)mobilities of assembly-line work: Choreographing the movements of corporate globalization in Ursula Biemann’s Performing the Border

Abstract This article discusses Swiss artist Ursula Biemann’s video-essay Performing the Border (1999), a work that critically examines the feminization of low-skilled factory labour in the city of Ciudad Juárez in northern Mexico. Home to large assembly lines, known as maquiladoras, Juárez is often the place where large corporations send their electronic equipment and machinery to be produced and assembled. Whilst these technologies help speed up the processes of contemporary capitalism, the city’s infrastructure is so poor that it consumes most of the factory workers’ free time. These women have to spend long hours commuting to work and often live in homes with no electricity or running water. Locating Biemann’s work within other representations of factory labour, this article examines the aesthetic and critical strategies that she employs to highlight the economic and social imbalances created by the forces of neo-liberalism as they impact the lives of maquiladora workers.

‘It’s just a very male industry’: gender and work in UK design agencies

The article focuses upon gender divisions of labour in the UK design sector as a means of highlighting a relatively understudied segment of the creative industries. Drawing upon a wider study of design consultancy firms across London, Birmingham, Manchester and Newcastle, it considers how configurations of gender division are bound up with everyday representations of design labour. The article reveals how associations between craft, skill and masculinity appear, and are reinforced in design practice. It also points to the ways in which design work is valorised within and through constructed geographies of difference between London and the regions, emphasising that hegemonic masculinities are reinforced and reproduced in reference to understandings of activities in place.

(Re)constructing the Pipeline: Workers, Environmentalists and Ideology in Media Coverage of the Keystone XL Pipeline

Environmental protection is presumed to damper economic growth and media accounts of resource extraction often portray trade-offs between jobs and the environment. However, there is limited evidence that environmental protection universally costs jobs and heavily polluting industries provide few jobs in comparison to environmental impacts. Therefore, how has media discourse contributed to the taken-for-granted division between the economy and the environment? This paper uses the Keystone XL pipeline controversy as a case of the symbolical conflict between supporters of growth and conservation to explore the role of ideology and power in media discourse. I use frame analysis of newspaper articles to explore the representations of labor and the environment and how hegemonic ideology legitimizes resource extraction. My analysis reveals binary framing that constructed the pipeline as a political controversy over the trade-off between the environment and the economy, which made conflict between workers and environmentalists sensible, and silenced alternatives.

‘How Writers Work’: Interviewing the Author in Everyman

Drawing on the archives of publishers and individuals, this article analyses the space of the study and the marketplace in a series of interviews by American journalist Louise Morgan, published in the London-based middlebrow Everyman magazine in the early 1930s. A form largely unstudied by literary scholars, the interview offers an important space for exploring issues of publicity and privacy, representations of literary labour and the profession of authorship in this period. In the moment before Q.D. Leavis published Fiction and the Reading Public, before literary studies began to be institutionalised, before New Critical distaste for authorial intention, personae and study of the marketplace largely excluded the interview and the middlebrow from critical study, Morgan's series offers a productive site from which to consider the space of production, the marketplace and, indeed, the work of writing itself.