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Berger, Stefan;Berger, Stefan;High, Steven
doi: 10.1215/15476715-7269314pmid: N/A
After theorizing and situating nostalgia in the academic discourses surrounding deindustrialization, this article will address the deindustrialization process and the accompanying heritagization of the Ruhr before investigating the different meanings and layers of nostalgia that are attached to industrial heritage discourse in the region. It will discuss why certain representations of the industrial past do not appear under the spotlight of the Ruhr’s heritage industry and will conclude by using the case study of the Ruhr Museum to illustrate what appears today as a/the dominant and widely uncontested heritage discourse in the Ruhr.
Fontaine, Marion;Berger, Stefan;High, Steven
doi: 10.1215/15476715-7269326pmid: N/A
The aim of this article is to explore the way in which mining identity has been put to political use in the northern mining region—the most important in France—over the past century. The article describes images and representations that define, in political terms, mining identity. Attention is also paid to the different political actors producing these narratives. The article begins with the construction and evolution of the political myth surrounding mining identity, especially after the Second World War. Then it examines the controversies and debates concerning the management of mining identity during the period of pit closures. Finally, it attempts, from a historical point of view, to show how the evolution of these political narratives can help us understand the present situation in the former mining basin of the north.
Taksa, Lucy;Berger, Stefan;High, Steven
doi: 10.1215/15476715-7269338pmid: N/A
Despite Australia’s long history of immigration, its cultural diversity, and its commitment to multiculturalism since 1973, migrant workers, their work, and their struggles for rights and improved conditions have been marginalized and in some cases entirely overlooked as part of migration heritage and industrial heritage. This article examines how such neglect contributes to a collective forgetting that has implications for understandings of class politics in the past and also for class politics in the present. Through snapshots of industrially and politically active migrants who worked at one of Australia’s most significant industrial heritage sites, the article challenges myths about non–English-speaking migrant workers and distinctions between them and both Australian-born workers and English-speaking migrants. The paper suggests that the failure to incorporate the intangible cultural heritage associated with migrant labor as part of industrial heritage severs links between past and present struggles and contributes to anti-immigration and anti-immigrant politics in Australia today.
MacKinnon, Lachlan;Berger, Stefan;High, Steven
doi: 10.1215/15476715-7269350pmid: N/A
Displaced industrial workers frequently reflect upon the landscape of their former workplaces with unease. These sites, whether left in ruin or put to “creative re-use,” come to represent the symbolic displacement of working-class cultures and concerns. When working-class men and women try to influence the development of such sites through public history interventions, they frequently come into conflict with the desires of community developers, local boosters, or pro-business organizations. This article traces the barriers faced by former steelworkers in Sydney, Nova Scotia, in their attempt to establish a museum dedicated to the history of their steel mill. Although their efforts ultimately failed, this article reflects upon the contestations that are at the heart of commemorating the industrial past, the role of class in mediating public history, and the role of the state in rectifying the many inequities wrought by deindustrialization.
High, Steven;Berger, Stefan;High, Steven
doi: 10.1215/15476715-7269362pmid: N/A
Sociologist Beverley Skeggs argues that the shift from redistributive politics to the politics of recognition has placed considerable emphasis on the “individual morally authorizing themselves through their own experience.” Indeed, Skeggs claims that “the wounded attachment is premised on the belief that the experience of pain, hurt and oppression provides greater epistemological authority to speak.” If wounding and pain become the measure of injustice, those hurt by structural violence and inequality are usually ill-positioned to be seen or heard. With this in mind, this article shifts our attention to the violence regularly inflicted on industrial workers in a capitalist economy, taking Sherry Lee Linkon’s notion of the half-life of deindustrialization and applying it to the long-term emotional fallout of job loss revealed in oral history interviews conducted with industrial workers in Detroit, Michigan. These interviews reveal a kaleidoscope of emotions, ranging from fear and anxiety to pride, irony, absurdity, loss, confusion, defiance, hope, shame, and, most of all, betrayal. Oral history interviews make clear that class values and working-class identity in Detroit were inculcated in childhood within blue-collar families. Men and women grew up in an industrial culture where trade unionism was a badge of honor. The actions of employers are therefore read through a moral lens; you can hear the hurt in people’s voices. In some cases, their sense of themselves as displaced workers was reforged in the fires of deindustrialization into a new class identity.
Stanton, Cathy;Berger, Stefan;High, Steven
doi: 10.1215/15476715-7269374pmid: N/A
Most scholarship on labor relationships within industrial heritage settings has focused on experiences of deindustrialization within economic restructuring of the past few decades, missing the much longer genealogy that shows how contemporary conventions and locations of industrial display can trace their roots to practices that emerged concurrently with industrialism and perhaps with capitalism itself. This article begins to sketch a chronological framework for such an expanded genealogy, considering the production of imagery and ideas surrounding industry very broadly and suggesting lines of continuity and influence among the seemingly distinct sectors of active industry, preservation, and interpretation of defunct industries and among types of display within industrial and postindustrial settings more generally. This longer timeline challenges us to rethink the labor of display as a means of explaining, legitimizing, occasionally challenging, and often repairing the effects of industrial capitalism in its expansive as well as contractive moments.
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