Working-class Culture Research Articles

Language, belief, and cultural resilience: Rastafarian discourse in Britain

This paper explores the intricate relationship between language, belief, and cultural resilience within the Rastafarian movement in Britain. Drawing upon interdisciplinary perspectives from linguistics, religious studies, cultural anthropology, and sociology, the paper delves into the unique linguistic practices, spiritual beliefs, and cultural expressions of Rastafarians in Britain.The paper examines the evolution of Rastafarian discourse, highlighting its distinctiveness and resilience within the context of Jamaican Patois and British multiculturalism. It analyses the role of language in shaping Rastafarian identity, resistance, and community cohesion, considering how linguistic practices reflect and reinforce Rastafarian beliefs and cultural norms.Furthermore, the paper explores the religious beliefs and practices that underpin Rastafarianism, particularly the reverence for Emperor Haile Selassie I and its implications for Rastafarian identity in Britain. It investigates how Rastafarian beliefs intersect with broader social and political issues, including race, colonialism, and social justice, shaping the movement’s engagement with British society.Finally, the paper examines the concept of cultural resilience within the Rastafarian community, analysing how Rastafarians in Britain have preserved and adapted their cultural traditions in the face of challenges such as racism, discrimination, and cultural assimilation. Overall, this paper contributes to a deeper understanding of the Rastafarian movement in Britain and its significance in the context of language, belief, and cultural resilience. It underscores the enduring impact of Rastafarian discourse and practices in shaping diverse cultural landscapes and fostering social change./ Keywords: Rastafarian colonial discourse, global dynamics, racial politics, Britain, societal integration, policy measures, fragmentation, Afrocentric interpretations, colonial resistance, prophetic salvation, cultural revitalization, London, African exploitation, white working-class culture

The Working Class Culture in Bursa

The Working Class Culture in Bursa

Adaptation, change and reaffirmation: investigating the limits of young working-class men adapting to elite higher education institutions

ABSTRACT Historically, and in contemporary society, the pursuit of higher education remains an integral part of social mobility. The research presented in this article aligns with previous research capturing the complexities many students from non-traditional backgrounds face in transitioning to tertiary education. We focus on a small cohort of young men from working-class backgrounds who were able to access elite higher education institutions. Statistically, this population is the least likely to attend university or engage in post-secondary education and training. We explore how they adjust aspects of their identities to align with their perception of an elite university context. We see their journeys as a process of negotiation, of identifying with certain aspects associated with elite settings while rebuffing others often through reference of historically embedded aspects of working-class culture. To decipher these negotiations, we focus specifically on four key themes present in the data: a sense of exceptionalism; confronting the competitive culture; fitting in; and reaffirmations of working-class culture.

A Politics of Working-Class Culture and the Culture of Working-Class Politics: The Aesthetics and Activism of Amber Film and Photography Collective and the Berwick Street Film Collective

This paper examines how Amber Film and Photography Collective’s working-class affiliations and Berwick Street Film Collective’s middle-class makeup shaped their divergent approaches to depicting ‘working-class issues’ by drawing on the films of both collectives, alongside archival materials and oral testimonies. By engaging in a comparative reading, I highlight the breadth of Amber’s oeuvre, tracing the development of their filmmaking strategies—which included agitprop, the fusion of factual and fictional formal elements and transnational collaboration with the German DemocraticRepublic’s film production company, Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft (DEFA)—to demonstrate that, contrary to criticisms levelled by contemporary theorists clustered around Screen magazine and the British Film Institute, Amber transcended the constraints of Documentary Realism by incorporating radical avant-garde aesthetics into their oppositional practice. Concomitantly, Amber’s radical filmmaking is positioned as relative to its members’ working-class solidarities, with their concern for championing working-class cultures contrasted with Berwick Street’s broader political agendas. Through foregrounding this politics/culture dialectic, the practical repercussions of Berwick Street’s middle-class representation of ‘working-class interests’ are investigated while the theoretical criteria by which avant-garde depictions of ‘working-class issues’ are evaluated are themselves assessed.

‘Obliged in self-defence to retaliate’. Violent sailors in nineteenth-century Bristol

This article is a study of merchant sailors in Bristol between 1850–1914. There is a stereotypical perception of the sailor as being a drunken, promiscuous, violent nuisance on the streets of a port town. This perception has been fashioned through popular imagery and imagination but also through an historiography that has largely investigated sailors in maritime and nautical contexts. Here I take a different approach and investigate one aspect of working-class culture, namely a man’s propensity for violence, in the context of Bristol’s urban, working-class culture. It will be argued that in their use of violence sailors were not the perceived breed apart but were an integrated presence in Bristol’s wider working-class culture. The reasons for violence, the methods used and the chosen victims of it were not the product of any maritime identity but were constructed from an urban one. Naturally, many sailors continued to display the stereotypical behavioural traits of sailors but there were also those who were aligned to a more respectable way of living. Cultural forces towards masculine respectability tempered some of sailors’ violent behaviours, as did the space available for violence, and consequently places sailors firmly within working-class culture.

Retour à Oxford avec Annie Ernaux: casting light on class migrant experience

The documents added to the new edition of Ernaux's Retour à Yvetot (2013, 2022), written during her student years, represent the process and affects of class transition, without the benefits of hindsight, experience, and the readings in sociology, particularly of Bourdieu, that inform her literary texts. I analyse them here both in relation to Ernaux's published works, particularly La Honte and Mémoire de fille and to the letters I wrote at a similar period and phase of my life, as a first-generation student at St Hugh's College, Oxford in the early 70s. At the time, like Annie Duchesne, 1 I had no political or sociological understanding of my experience; reading Ernaux 20 years later in the early 90s was a literary epiphany, illuminating my trajectory from a working-class culture of origin to a middle-class life and career. My engagement with Ernaux over 30 years has also involved a continuous correspondence with the writer, which I draw on here, illustrating the blurred boundaries between intimacy and research discussed by Fraser and Puwar (2008) . This mise en scène of my reading self is placed within the context of the wider communities of class migrant readers of Ernaux: the lay readers studied by myself and Isabelle Charpentier, Ernaux specialists in academe, and the younger writers discussed by Aurélie Adler in this special issue.

“And you think you’re so clever and classless and free” : Television and the working class in British films (1959-2021)

Many British feature films have presented a rather critical view of television since its development, especially when related to the representation of the working class, because of its ambivalent ideological damage. Since 1959, television has thus often been presented as both a tool to depoliticise and indoctrinate its audience. Yet, over the decades, the representation of television and its impact on British working-class households has morphed and become more nuanced as the medium went mainstream. By the late 1960s, television was less of a vehicle for the directors’ and their heroes’ misogyny and fear of “dumbing down” through advertising and consumerism. Instead, it was associated with more positive aspects of working-class culture and family entertainment. But the advent of real TV shows has proved to be the latest development in the class opposition that has always underlain the representation of television in British films. The irony being that television in films was initially criticised for its potentially damaging classlessness yet it has always remained a channel for cinema to express its class-related bias. Because whether British cinema looks at how the working class watches television or at how television shows the working class, the representation mostly results from one class (the upper-middle class) watching another.

From Sideshow to Centre Ring: The Historiography of Popular Entertainment

The academic interest in popular entertainment was long retarded by a class attitude that regarded it as a cultural phenomenon of inferior quality. Those who researched it were collectors and enthusiasts rather than professional scholars. The disdain of the Frankfurt School was also a factor. In the 1960s, with the rise of leisure studies and a Marxist-inflected interest in working-class culture, this began to change. The study of popular forms is now an accepted, even dominant part of the humanities curriculum, though still occasionally tinged with apology.

Why did Trump call prayers politically correct? The coevolution of the PC notion, the authenticity ethic, and the role of the sacred in public life.

Trump's crusade against PC played a key role in his political rhetoric and resonated well among his supporters, yet his notion of PC differed greatly in meaning from earlier uses of the term and was used to denounce a much wider range of socio-political behaviors. Based on a systematic analysis of Trump's use of this notion, I identified five main normative propositions organizing Trump's anti-PC rhetoric. Viewed together, these propositions add up to a rehabilitation of White working-class culture but also outline an emerging late-modern version of the authenticity ethic, whose power extends far beyond the working class. This ethic (as manifested in Trump's anti-PC rhetoric) transforms the role of morality and the sacred in political drama and in symbolic struggles over social worth. Rather than presenting his commitment to moral values, ideals, and allegedly-universal rules, Trump used anti-PC rhetoric to expose and criticize the symbolic self-interests of others who speak on behalf of these values, rules, and ideals to claim superiority (and thus ironically mimicked the sociological critique of symbolic violence to legitimize bigotry). Yet, the sacred is not completely banished from political drama: authenticity as a principle of worth guiding moral evaluation and argumentation is revealed as a sacred in denial. The case of Trump's anti-PC rhetoric thus allows theorizing the implications of the authenticity ethic for the dynamics of social struggles over recognized worth and for the role of ideals in the presentation of self in politics and beyond.

‘They were like soldiers.’ The case of the Polish builders in Czechoslovakia and their perception by Czechs (1967-1990)

ABSTRACT This article deals with Polish construction companies in Czechoslovakia during the last two decades of state socialism. Although Czechoslovakia became the largest importer of Polish construction services in the world, this aspect of the relations between the two countries remains almost entirely unknown. I am seeking the answers to two questions. First, why did Czechoslovak leaders grant the Poles such a large share of crucial investments in the modernization of the country, even though the services were not cheap? Second, how did the local population integrate encounters with foreign builders into their working-class culture and their ethnic stereotype of the Poles? I argue that Polish construction companies, operating under de facto market conditions, achieved significantly better and faster results than their Czechoslovak counterparts. In the second part of the article, I explain the paradox of why the Czech population held the Polish builders in high esteem while simultaneously rejecting them as role models. I argue that the Poles were discredited because they seriously violated the Czechs’ deep-held sense of egalitarian values. Yet in their interactions both Czechs and Poles defended their working-class values and maintained a perceived moral superiority over each other and the communist regime.

Remembering Herbert Gutman's Work, Culture, and Society Fifty Years On

Remembering Herbert Gutman's <i>Work, Culture, and Society</i> Fifty Years On

Bridging the Divide: Working-Class Culture in a Middle-Class Society, Jack Metzgar (2021)

Review of: Bridging the Divide: Working-Class Culture in a Middle-Class Society, Jack Metzgar (2021) Ithaca, NY and London ILR Press, x + 229 pp., ISBN 978-1-50176-031-0, h/bk, £35.00

D. H. Lawrence’ın Lady Chatterley’in Sevgilisi Romanında Üst ve Alt Kültür İkilemi

Lawrence, in Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), reflects the post-war modern British society which condemns its individuals into a psychological trauma of ongoing conflicts between different classes and cultures. Advocating the exigency of a classless society, Lawrence shatters the hegemonic ideology of the highbrow culture which disdains working class culture as vulgar, coarse and commonplace. Reacting against the cultural displacement of working classes who are considered as masses, Lawrence indulges in revealing the authenticity and earnestness of the working class culture. Lawrence’s depiction of an uncorrupt ethical standing of the working class culture is the negation of the concept of culture, associated with high class manners and ways of life. The prevailing concern of this study, therefore, will be to analyze Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover from the perspective of cultural studies to unravel the clash of high and low cultures in relation to the hierarchical class structure of the post-war England.

In search of unbordered homelands: Exploring the role of music in building affective internationalist politics of solidarity

As racial nationalist regimes across the globe consolidate their power through their interconnections, so their efforts to divide people along lines of ‘race’, ethnicity, faith, nationality, immigration status and differentiated citizenship laws continue apace. With social media trolling and ‘fake news’ increasingly used as additional sources of power for the radical right, challenging racial nationalist narratives requires innovative forms of affective politics. One among these that can build transnational solidarity and also potentially celebrate working-class cultures is music. This article explores connections being made through music within and across national boundaries and across time. Case studies include music developed by those struggling against discriminatory (anti-Muslim) citizenship laws and state violence in India, and socialist internationalist Yiddish music – originally developed to protest against both anti-Semitic pogroms and exploitative employment conditions and currently being revived in the US, Europe and elsewhere.

The Lettered Barriada: Workers, Archival Power, and the Politics of Knowledge in Puerto Rico

The Lettered Barriada: Workers, Archival Power, and the Politics of Knowledge in Puerto Rico

Achieving active inclusion in an industrial community? Appropriating working-class culture in the local activation of unemployed

ABSTRACT As a way of managing the challenges posed by automation, relocation of production, and economic crises, the Western welfare states have sought to implement so called active societies fostering changeable and self-reliant citizens able to navigate flexible capitalism responsibly. Increasingly, this plays out at the local level. Under the banner of active inclusion, a sense of community is here thought to turn the unemployed and presumably excluded into active and productive citizens. Drawing on much-needed ethnographical observations from a local activation scheme situated in a former industrial community, this article highlights the difficulties of implementing the active society locally. Employing Boltanski and Thévenot’s ‘worlds of worth’ framework, it is shown how the management of the operations sought to balance the fostering of employable individuals with maintaining institutionalised community obligations. Ultimately, the article raises questions of the ideals inherent in the active society policy orientation, and what tensions it entails.

Boredom: Mike Leigh’s Meantime and Working-Class Youth in Thatcher’s Britain

This article traces the socio-cultural effect of neoliberalism on working-class youths by analysing Mike Leigh’s cinematic portrayal of boredom in Thatcher’s Britain, Meantime. As a state of disenchantment that stems from a sense of inadequacy, boredom in his films afflicts unemployed young people living in London, whose everyday life is pervaded by the sense of being excluded by the dominant national narrative of free-market capitalism. In various locations, boredom emerges in the daily experience of the characters, who feel the disconnection between officially sanctioned national aspirations and their own private sense of failure. For Mark and Colin, the city is an empty place where the demolition of traditional working-class culture has left them no story to tell about themselves. Exploring how the affective value of the national fantasy influences the reproduction of a lifestyle that can be inherently damaging to those who invest in it, I argue that boredom in the film nonetheless possesses an unexpected utility that runs counter to Thatcher’s neoliberal vision of development and progress, and provides these young people with an opportunity to reimagine ways of keeping on living together in a time of crisis.

Working-Class Women and the Buying and Selling of Stolen Goods in Urban Communities in the North West of England and Belfast, 1918–1960

Abstract The buying and selling of stolen goods by working-class women was a relatively widespread and accepted practice in some inner urban communities in the North West of England and in Belfast between 1918 and 1960. It relied on the training and engagement of children and the co-operation and compliance of neighbours, and was facilitated by the spatial dynamics within inner urban terraced homes. This article analyses local court records, memoirs and contemporary social surveys to demonstrate that, after 1918, the buying and selling of stolen goods by working-class women did not just play a part in people’s economic lives. It argues that, even outside times of poverty, in certain neighbourhoods the practice reinforced strong community bonds and allowed some women to contest the inequalities they experienced by consolidating their position within strong supportive networks against a society that afforded them little formal power. Together, these sources present a quotidian culture of minor criminality that challenges received views of working-class cultures of domesticity, family life and ‘respectability’, suggesting that trading in stolen goods could afford women offenders status and respect within their neighbourhoods. The article highlights the enduring practice of home-based buying and selling of stolen goods across the period, particularly in areas untouched by housing clearance and redevelopment. Despite significant developments in the state provision of welfare and greater scrutiny of working-class families, the offence endured as a way to bolster close-knit community bonds in protest against the harsh living conditions and persistent inequities many still experienced.

Academic Work as Factory Work: A Former Blue-Collar Worker’s Observations on Class and Caste in the Academy

What was it like to have come of age after the Glorious Thirty (1945-1975), an era Jack Metzger (2016; 2021a) describes as a time when the working-class bettered their lives? I had the misfortune to have worked in several Metropolitan Detroit factories during the period of decline after the Glorious Thirty. During that time, I witnessed what the journalist George Packer (2013) has called ‘the Unwinding,’ the unraveling of the social contract that has left the working class to their own devices to find success and salvation. In keeping with the tradition in working-class studies of sharing lived experienced of class (Linkon, 2021, pp. 20-31; Strangleman, 2005, pp. 137-51), I highlight my multiple working-class lives to show that academic life is increasingly becoming more like blue-collar labor. Through a discussion of the concepts of class and caste, and the uniqueness of working-class culture, I propose that working-class academic crossovers are essentially ghosts trapped in a liminal limbo in an intellectual version of a contemporary factory that is largely devoid of the benefits of working-class culture.

Rural Working-Class Males in Sweden and Reading: Processes for Re-appropriating Written Culture

This article explores the intersection of place-based reading practices of rural working-class males and reading practices in school. Life story interviews have been conducted with six men in different ages (age 19-63) living in a rural region in Sweden, focusing on their reflections on their own relation to reading across a life span from the standpoint of the present. The analysis shows that there is a unique combination of factors at work when rural working-class men culturally re-appropriate written culture in ways that are sympathetic, and socially acceptable to a manual working-class culture. These factors include the processes of oralising and manualising and are often related to things learned in specific ancestral heartlands.