The Wounds of Class

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“The Wounds of Class”: A Historiographical Reﬂection on the Study of

Deindustrialization, 1973–2013
Article in History Compass · November 2013

DOI: 10.1111/hic3.12099
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History Compass
“ ‘The wounds of class’: A Historiographical Reflection on

the Study of Deindustrialization, 1973-2013.
Journal: History Compass

Fo
Manuscript ID: HICO-0694.R1
Wiley - Manuscript type: Article
North America < Compass Sections, Labor History < Social History <
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History < Subjects, Historiography < Study of History < History <
Subjects, Urban History < History < Subjects, Economic History < History
Keywords:
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< Subjects, Cultural History < History < Subjects, capitalism < Key Topics,
globalization < Key Topics, social change < Key Topics, 1900 - 1999 <
1000 - 1999 < Period
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“The Wounds of Class” 1

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“THE WOUNDS OF CLASS”:
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7 A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL REFLECTION ON THE STUDY OF
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9 DEINDUSTRIALIZATION, 1973-2013
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12 ABSTRACT
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14 “ ‘The wounds of class’: A Historiographical Reflection on the Study of Deindustrialization,
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1973-2013.
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This article examines forty years of multi-disciplinary scholarship on deindustrialization in North
America and the United Kingdom. This field of research emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as a
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20 political response to successive waves of mill and factory closures that devastating industrial
21 towns and cities, displacing millions. A way of life seemed to be passing out of existence. Why
22 was this happening? What did it mean? Could it be stopped? This essay identifies three distinct
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waves of scholarship. The economic, cultural and class dimensions will be explored. Historians
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have been central to the study of deindustrialization. As we will see, the scholarly focus has
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26 largely shifted from the causes of industrial decline and resistance to job loss, to its effects and
27 long-term consequences.
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31 ARTICLE MANUSCRIPT:
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36 “[T]he wounds of class are deeper than broken backs and broken lungs. They sink into
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37 the soul and erode people’s sense of themselves and of their environment.”
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39 - Alessandro Portelli, 2010 1
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“The debate over deindustrialization … is fundamentally a debate about who is going to
43 control the future.”
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45 - Kathryn Marie Dudley, 1994 2
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49 Deindustrialization may not be a recent phenomenon but the study of it is. Historian Christopher
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51 H. Johnson has noted that the word has its origins in the Second World War when the Nazis
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53 stripped occupied areas of their industry. The term was then picked-up by the Allies in the war’s
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56 immediate aftermath to describe “possible postwar retribution against Germany.3 It was only in
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the midst of the economic crisis of the 1970s and 1980s, however, that deindustrialization re-
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6 surfaced as an explanation for economic change. Put simply, mills and factories closed because
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8 companies moved production to lower wage areas leaving towns, regions, and countries without
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an industrial base. The study of deindustrialization thus emerged in response to the catastrophic
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13 decline of employment in manufacturing and basic industries. By the early1980s, North America
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15 and Western Europe were hemorrhaging tens of millions of industrial jobs and trade union
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18 membership collapsed in many countries. Inner city areas were particularly hard-hit, accelerating
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20 the flight of North America’s middle-class to the suburbs. This out-migration was of course
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22 highly racialized.4 A way of life seemed to be passing out of existence. Why was this happening?
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What did it mean? Could it be stopped?
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28 Working-class resistance to this unprecedented crisis was uneven. In the United States,
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30 trade unions have been criticized for carrying on as though it was business-as-usual.5 The anti-
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communist purges of the Cold War had left unions de-mobilized and the scale and scope of the
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35 crisis was such that trade unions staggered from one tragedy to the next. Entire unions passed out
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37 of existence. Hence, the locus of anti-plant closing activism in the US was located in loose
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community-union coalitions at the local and state levels.6 To a large degree, these alliances
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42 proved incapable of altering the deteriorating situation. Only a handful of local and state
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governments passed legislation that would soften the blow, even minimally. Not so in Canada
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47 where workers tapped into a deep wellspring of nationalist anxiety about the foreign ownership
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49 of the economy.7 Yet factories continued to close and unions had to merge together to pool their
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52 depleted memberships. My father’s union, the Canadian Brotherhood of Railway, Transport and
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54 General Workers (CBRT & GW) was one of these casualties – its unique history now all but
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56 forgotten. Perhaps the fiercest examples of working-class resistance to deindustrialization were
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to be found in the United Kingdom and continental Europe. But, even there, we see political
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6 defeat. The destruction of the once mighty miners’ union in the UK, by a determined Margaret
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8 Thatcher, signalled that no-one was safe.8 Working-class resistance continues to this day, but
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much has been lost in the intervening decades.
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14 Inevitably, this rapidly changing political and economic context has profoundly shaped
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16 the study of deindustrialization. At the outset, the politics of the field differed from other
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emerging areas of research such as industrial archaeology or heritage.9 With few exceptions,
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21 deindustrialization scholars before the millennium saw their research as being part of the wider
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23 political mobilization against mill and factory closings. Deindustrialization, as an explanatory
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26 framework, emphasizes loss over more positive readings. Its politics is therefore far from that of
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28 Alvin Toffler, Daniel Bell, and Richard Florida who have heralded the economic transformation
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30 underway as the dawning of a bright new age for humanity.10
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The emotive bonds of family, community, and class tie many of the scholars in the field
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36 to their subjects of study. A book’s preface often tells us a great deal about the author’s social
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38 and political location. Many authors it seems had roots in the very working-class communities
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41 that they studied, outing themselves as the sons and daughters, or grandchildren, of industrial
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43 workers. A handful of researchers such as sociologist Tim Strangleman once worked in these
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45 declining industries. As a group, they therefore straddled the insider-outsider divide. It is
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48 important to acknowledge this proximity, as it helps us to understand the field. In the preface of
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50 The End of the Line, for example, anthropologist Kathryn Marie Dudley notes that she grew up
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only a few miles from the Kenosha (Wisconsin) automotive manufacturing plant that is at the
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55 heart of her book. She therefore had a front-row seat to its demise. Listen as she describes the
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57 impact of job loss on her grandfather whose own plant closed:
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“I saw in his loneliness why the loss of an industrial job can be so devastating.
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5 Friendships built up over twenty years on the shopfloor gradually fade away, and with
6 them the sense of community that gives us all a meaningful place in the world. My
7 grandfather is not alive to read this book; I can only hope it conveys my appreciation for
8 the life he lived.”11
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10 As a young doctoral student in the mid-1990s, Dudley’s comments resonated with me. I think for
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13 many of us, our decision to investigate deindustrialization was an intensely personal one. In
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15 reflecting on the historiography of deindustrialization, this essay identifies three distinct waves
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17 of scholarship. The economic, cultural and class dimensions will be explored. As we will see, the
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20 scholarly focus has largely shifted from the causes of industrial decline and resistance to job loss,
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The deindustrialization thesis emerged in Canada during the early 1970s as part of a wider anti-
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31 imperialist critique of United States domination of the country’s economy. From a rash of mill
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33 and factory closings, left-wing nationalists concluded that “deindustrialization is the most
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36 important result to Canada of integration in the American empire.”13 US-based multinational
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38 corporations, they argued, were pre-disposed to close their Canadian branch-plants when times
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40 got tough. The economic nationalist policies of the Nixon Administration – which actively
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43 sought to repatriate jobs – only served to confirm their suspicion. “Nixonomics means
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45 deindustrialization,” wrote Jim Laxer in (Canada) Ltd: The Political Economy of Dependency. 14
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47 Published in 1973, the book provided the world with the first sustained discussion of
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50 deindustrialization.15 In fact, the book’s editor and contributors (a who’s who of Canadian left-
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52 nationalism of the time) went further, speaking of it in terms of a “major thesis” or explanatory
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framework. 16 “De-industrialization,” Laxer argued, “is the price workers’ pay for Canada’s
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57 dependent status in the American empire. As the American empire enters a period of decline, the
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costs of is decline are passed in disproportionately high amounts to workers in dependent
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6 countries like Canada and to minorities like blacks within the United States.”17
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9 The book offered Canadian leftist-nationalists an analysis and a strategy. In its initial
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11 formulation, “the term ‘de-industrialization’” referred “not to the general phenomenon of the
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14 reduction of the percentage of the work force employed in manufacturing (evident in most
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16 countries), but to the special distorting effects of US ownership of Canadian manufacturing, in
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particular, US attempts to enhance American employment at home at the expense of Canada.”18
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21 To prove their point, the book’s contributors included a detailed examination of employment
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23 trends in Canadian manufacturing. Not only were the employment numbers in absolute decline
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26 but US-owned companies appeared to lay-off more Canadian workers than did other
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28 companies.19 Robert Laxer believed that the deindustrialization thesis could “become a tool, a
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30 rallying cry for Canadians to join the movement for independence through socialism and
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socialism through independence.” And, for a time it did. Canadian trade unionists wrapped
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35 themselves in the Canadian flag, pushing politicians to legislate advance notice of layoff,
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37 preferential re-hiring rights, pension insurance, and severance pay. 20 In a few instances, the state
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40 opted to nationalize failing industries (such as aeronautics) and to run them as crown
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42 corporations. Only later did it become apparent that US-based multinationals were no more loyal
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to Detroit (Michigan) than they were to Windsor (Ontario). If anything, the devastation wrought
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47 by deindustrialization seemed greater in the United States.21
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50 The tsunami of mine, mill and factory closures that struck North America and Western
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Europe with devastating force in the early 1980s produced wide-ranging explanations and a great
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55 deal of “doomsday talk.”22 It was in this crisis atmosphere that the deindustrialization thesis
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57 resurfaced, this time in the United States, with the publication of Barry Bluestone and Bennett
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Harrison’s 1982 book, The Deindustrialization of America. Its subtitle, “Plant Closings,
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6 Community Abandonment, and the Dismantling of Basic Industry,” signalled the scale and scope
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8 of the problem and the urgency of the moment. Bluestone and Harrison, both economists,
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emphasized the problem of companies moving production to lower wage areas located outside
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13 the United States. American workers could not compete. “Deindustrialization does not just
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15 happen,” they argued. “Conscious decisions have to be made by corporate managers to move a
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18 factory from one location to another, to buy up a going concern or to dispose of one, or to shut
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20 down a facility altogether.”23 International competition and rising costs (often blamed on trade
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22 unions) caused companies to disinvest from one geographic location and invest in another.
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Capital flight was thus central to their analysis. “At the root of all of this,” they wrote, “is a
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27 fundamental struggle between capital and community.”24 In this articulation, deindustrialization
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was understood as the outcome of the global economic crisis.
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Significantly, both of these ground-breaking studies originated within wider political
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35 movements against capital flight. In the first instance, Canada, Inc began as a series of public
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37 lectures sponsored by the Toronto Education Committee of the Ontario Waffle Movement for an
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42 New Democratic Party (NDP) leftward towards a policy of aggressive nationalization of foreign-
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owned companies operating in the country.25 For its part, The Deindustrialization of America
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47 originated in a research project commissioned in 1979 by a broad-based coalition of trade unions
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49 and community groups “concerned with the causes and consequences of plant closings all across
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52 the United States.”26 Bluestone and Harrison thus dedicated the book to those who “resist the
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54 economic destruction of their communities…”27 Clearly, then, both books should be read as a
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56 product of and a contributor to North American resistance to mill and factory closings. A similar
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politics infuses the many other works published on deindustrialization during the 1980s and
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6 1990s. 28
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9 This first wave of scholarship focussed on the underlying economic and political causes
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11 of industrial decline, the scale and scope of the problem, and its immediate social and economic
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14 impact. A sense of political urgency and moral outrage animate many of these studies as activist-
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16 minded scholars made the case for government intervention and/or popular resistance. Marxist
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geographers mapped the rise and decline, pointing to a rapidly changing international division of
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21 labour.29 While globalization had yet to take hold as an alternative explanatory framework,
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23 deindustrialization scholars were already taking note that the phenomenon was not confined to
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26 any one country but part of a world-wide economic shake-down. Wider critiques of global
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28 capitalism followed.
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31 With the crisis still unfolding, few historians were in the ranks of the first-wave of
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activist-scholars. Perhaps more time needed to pass before historians felt authorized to write.
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36 Some looked for signs of deindustrialization in earlier times. Christopher C. Johnson’s The Life
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38 and Death of Industrial Languedoc and Ian McKay’s The Quest for the Folk revealed
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41 deindustrialization’s long history and far-reaching economic and cultural impact.30 It was only in
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43 the late 1990s that historians began to engage directly with post-1945 deindustrialization. 31
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45 Historian Jefferson Cowie’s book, Capital Moves, which followed RCA as it moved production
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48 from one city to another over a seventy year period, revealed how the company relocated
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50 production in each instance in reaction to rising labour costs and trade union militancy. Capital
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flight was thus “a means of countering that control as the company sought out new reservoirs of
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55 controllable labor.”32 Corporate “[c]ommand of spatial relations” became “a crucial weapon in
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57 management’s arsenal.”33 Other labour historians followed.34 In this first extended wave of
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scholarship, workers, their unions, and corporate decision-making, were at the centre of our
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6 analysis. This would not necessarily be the case in the years to come, as the field shifted
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8 decisively to the cultural meaning of deindustrialization.
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THE CULTURAL MEANING OF DEINDUSTRIALIZATION
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15 With the 2003 publication of Beyond the Ruins: The Cultural Meaning of Deindustrialization,
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17 historians Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott proclaimed that “the time is right to widen the
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19 scope of the discussion beyond prototypical plant shudowns, the immediate politics of
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22 employment policy, the tales of victimization, or the swell of industrial nostalgia.”35 The editors
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24 of the collection of essays sought to shift the conversation away from the “body count” of job
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losses to interrogate the cultural meaning of deindustrialization in the aftermath of mill and
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factory closings. “Today,” they wrote, “the struggle to preserve basic industry that fired
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31 Bluestone and Harrison’s project is all but gone, but the legacy of deindustrialization remains.”36
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Continuing, “[w]hat was labelled deindustrialization in the intense political heat of the late 1970s
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36 and early 1980s turned out to be a more socially complicated, historically deep, geographically
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38 diverse, and political perplexing phenomenon than previously thought.”37 As a result, Cowie and
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41 Heathcott sought to demystify deindustrialization, urging those in the field to “overcome” what
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43 they labelled “smokestack nostalgia.”38
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46 Earlier the idea that deindustrialization challenged “our sense of community at the
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49 deepest level,” had been broached by anthropologist Kathryn Marie Dudley in her 1994 book on
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51 Kenosha, Wisconsin. The North American rust belt was “not a static landscape of slag heaps and
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53 desolate smokestacks. It is a cultural drama of communities in transition and ordinary people
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56 struggling to find a place for the past in the present.” Dudley concluded from her interviews that:
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“When a plant closes, workers lose a social structure in which they have felt valued and
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6 validated by their fellows.”39 Middle class professionals, by contrast, viewed the shift as “highly
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8 desirable.”40 For many, the highly paid autoworkers were a moral affront to their sense of
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individual merit.41 Economic actions, Dudley writes, “are also, in a fundamental sense, moral
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13 actions.”42 A similar struggle over memory and social standing can be found in Sherry Lee
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15 Linkon and John Russo’s Steeltown USA (2002). In the aftermath of the mill closings,
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18 Youngstown, Ohio became a place of dueling discourses and economic desperation.43
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21 Workers’ remembered lives are often central to the growing number of books that
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23 combine photography and oral history or ethnography. In Portraits in Steel, Michael Rogovin
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26 photographed Buffalo-area steel workers at work and at home, and again years later after their
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28 mills closed.44 Oral historian Michael Frisch then interviewed them about the intervening years.
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30 It remains a classic study in the field. In Closing, Bill Bamberger and Cathy Davidson gained
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access to a closing furniture factory in North Carolina and documented its final days.45 In both
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35 books, we hear and see the profound connections that workers made to their places of work. At
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37 present, Tim Strangleman is completing a similar project in the UK on the closed Guinness
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Brewery in London, contributing to an emerging visual approach to oral history.46 Other studies
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42 have looked at the aftermath of mill closings without losing sight of displaced workers and their
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families.47 Not so the burgeoning literature on industrial heritage, ruination and urban
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47 exploration.
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50 Ruins and ruination have long held the imagination of the middle and upper classes.
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Valued for their mystery and sense of time passing, ruins were incorporated into 18th century
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55 English gardens and became sites of excursion and pilgrimage. 48 Post-colonial scholar Ann
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57 Laura Stoler reminds us that ruin is both a verb and a noun. To ruin, “is to inflict or bring great
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and irretrievable disaster upon, to destroy agency, to reduce to a state of poverty, to demoralize
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6 completely.”49 Accordingly, ruination “is an act purpetrated, a condition to which one is subject,
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8 and a cause of loss.” It is a “political project that lays waste to certain peoples and places,
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relations and things.”50 This political context is vital, argues Alice Mah in an important new
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13 transnational study on Industrial Ruination, Community and Place.51
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16 In Corporate Wasteland (2007), Steven High argued that industrial ruins became a
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magnet for middle-class “urban explorers” who liked the feeling of melancholy and loss derived
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21 from their elicit encounters with abandoned spaces. The thrill of transgression permeates their
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23 many online accounts. It also infuses some of the new scholarship, most notably in geographer
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26 Tim Edensor’s book Industrial Ruins.52 Rubble was aestheticized into ruin, and urban wastelands
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28 transformed into post-industrial playgrounds. Predictably, this political critique of urban
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30 exploration was not welcomed by enthusiasts who dismissed High as an academic who wanted
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urban explorers to know their history. This misses the point, frankly. When middle class urban
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35 explorers routinely distinguish themselves from working-class trespassers, when they care so
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37 little about why these places were abandoned, then we have to ask ourselves what is the political
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40 logic of what is going on. Of course, urban explorers are a diverse lot and some scholar-explorers
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42 have engaged thoughtfully with the political implications.53 But recent years have seen
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photographers, artists, urban explorers, and (yes) scholars flood into deindustrialized cities like
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47 Detroit, prompting a public backlash against “ruin porn” and the commodification of misery.54
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50 The work of Canadian performance theorist Julie Salverson is useful to this discussion.
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Writing about a student play on landmines, Salverson expressed concern over the voyeurism of
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55 performing someone else’s pain. “What disturbed me,” she wrote, was that “audience members
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57 were neither asked nor able to implicate ourselves. Audience and actors together were looking at
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some exoticized and deliberately tragic other.” 55 More discomforting still, Salverson continues,
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6 “was the almost erotic quality of the manner in which the actors performed pain. There was
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8 pleasure in it.” If moved, she asks, “by and towards what?” Is feeling good about feeling bad for
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others, enough? In responding to these questions, Salverson urges us to go beyond melancholia –
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13 a “narcissistic response that subsumes the lost other into the self.”56 These comments are highly
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15 relevant to our discussion of urban exploration and industrial ruination. As Spanish historians
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18 Francisco José Tovar, Maria Arnal, Carlos de Castro have argued, these ruined buildings produce
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20 “pain and sadness, they are the wounds or scars of a city and society.”57 But it is important to
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22 remember that not everyone is scarred by deindustrialization. It is experienced differently.
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26 Other kinds of concerns have been raised about industrial heritage preservation. “As the
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28 industrial era fades,” historian Lucy Taksa writes, societies “are gradually beginning to grapple
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30 with the cultural significance of their industrial heritage.”58 She believes that public history has
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largely failed to go beyond the “collection of industrial relics” and the kind of technological
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35 history that celebrates the birthplace of industry. The history of work, and working-class
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37 struggle, rarely make it into the interpretation. Taksa has gone so far as to suggest that public
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history is incompatible with labour history.59 But this is not the only erasure. In a former North
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42 Carolina milltown, working-class nostalgia for the textile mill served to silence the history of
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racism and workplace segregation.60 In many ways, these sanitized approaches to working-class
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47 and industrial history are a fitting companion to the façade-ism of a great deal of adaptive reuse
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49 and industrial heritage preservation.
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In her prize-winning study of the Lowell National Historic Park in Massachusetts,
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55 established in 1978, public historian Cathy Stanton asserts that this unwillingness to tackle
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57 present-day issues serves to depoliticize the message. By design, conflict is safely located in the
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distant past. A sense of disconnection with the present is thus an integral part of historic site
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6 interpretation. In effect, Stanton shows us that “[u]nofficially, but powerfully, the site’s main
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8 function is precisely to mask these connections, by placing visitors within a linear progression
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where manual labor is framed as past and as less evolved.”61 The logic of culture-led
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13 redevelopment, she argues, “dictates that certain relationships and cultural productions will be
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15 nurtured while others – those that somehow violate or defy the underlying economic purposes of
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18 the project – will not receive the kind of long-term support that they need in order to survive.”62
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21 Despite these challenges, most would agree that there is value in preserving vestiges of
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23 our industrial past.63 Some scholars suggest that their preservation enables local and national
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26 communities to better remember their industrial pasts. A great deal of cultural erasure
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28 accompanies deindustrialization. A team of Spanish researchers, for example, explored the
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30 relationship between industrial heritage preservation and local identity in two deindustrialized
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towns.64 Despite longstanding efforts to preserve former industrial buildings, they concluded
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35 that “the traces of industrial and workers’ heritage are losing their relevance.”65 The authors
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37 wonder what will be left in a generation or two. How long can these memories “survive” when
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40 there are no material traces? While abandonment and destruction of mills and factories
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42 “contribute to the oblivion of workers’ cultural heritage,” their preservation is no guarantee of a
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different outcome. Part of the problem is that mainstream approaches to industrial heritage are
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47 anchored in aesthetics, making it vulnerable to the same kinds of political pitfalls discussed in
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49 relation to urban exploration.
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WORKING CLASS CULTURE IN A POST-INDUSTRIAL AGE
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Deindustrialization not only caused the ruination of factories but the destruction of
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6 working-class neighbourhoods as well. Though space limitations prevent me here from engaging
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8 with the substantial scholarship on urban decline, suffice it to say that this has been a popular
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point of entry for historians interested in the social and economic effects of deindustrialization.66
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13 Many have built on Thomas Sugrue’s pioneering research on white flight. The environmental
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15 and political legacies of deindustrialization have also been the subject of recent historical
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18 research.67 But what I propose to do here is examine a third wave of scholarship that has
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20 focussed on working-class culture and politics in a post-industrial era.68 Many take their cue
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22 from E.P. Thompson who sought to avoid obscuring the agency of working people even in
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political defeat, when history itself seemed to be against them.69
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28 There is a particularly rich literature on the persistence working-class culture in former
er
29
30 mining regions in the United Kingdom.70 David Byrne has argued that the “culture of
31
32
industrialism” in the British Northeast “survives” despite the closure of the industry.71 Mining
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33
34
35 communities continue to parade behind their banners and bands a decade after the last pit closed
36
vi
37 in the region, reaffirming a pride in their collective past. For example, Mary Mellor and Carol
38
39
ew
40 Stephenson point to the continuation of certain mining traditions such as the Durham Miners’
41
42 Gala. Traditionally, they note, the Gala had “represented the spirit of the Durham mining
43
44
45
communities, the link between industry, community and union.”72 A much more pessimistic
46
47 viewpoint can be found in the ground-breaking work of John Kirk, Sylvie Contrepois, and Steve
48
49 Jefferys. “Identity,” they argue, “becomes bound up in this historical development, with work,
50
51
52 producing culturally distinct traditions that shape everyday life.”73 Deindustrialization thus
53
54 served to “undermine traditional collective identities.” The “material world and cultural life of
55
56 working-class communities across Europe have come to be regarded, it seems, as extinct, or as
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increasingly obsolete and, in recent years, the object only of heritage spectacles and exercises in
4
5
6 nostalgia.”74
7
8
9 A similar point is raised in Jackie Clarke’s ongoing work with former Moulinex workers
10
11 in France. In a recent article, she considers the visibility and invisibility of industrial labour in a
12
13
14 post-industrial era.75 Despite the defiant response from working people, a discourse of
15
16 inevitability predominated nationally. The idea that industry (and with it, industrial labour) is
17
18
part of the past, not the present or the future, overstates the transformation: one in five still work
Fo
19
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21 in France’s industrial sector. Clarke’s theoretically informed use of “invisibility”, as
22
r
23 encompassing various forms of marginalization and disqualification, rather than outright
24
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25
26 disappearance, contributes to our understanding of the cultural erasure that accompanies
27
28 deindustrialization.
er
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30
31 A number of scholars, particularly working in the United Kingdom, have turned to
32
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34
Raymond Williams’ concept of “structures of feeling” to help understand how a “place-bounded
35
36 dimensions of identity practice, as it is embedded in historical time, becomes ‘an important
vi
37
38 source of meanings for individuals [and groups] which they can draw upon to tell stories and
39
ew
40
41 thereby understand themselves and their positioning within the wider society.”76 According to
42
43 Kirk and his collaborators, we can see how “practical consciousness,” or a way of life, becomes
44
45 generalized in a locality or region.77 Particularly helpful in this regard is Williams’ notion of
46
47
48 “residual” and “emergent” structures of feeling.78 Williams has also proven useful in
49
50 understanding changing workplace cultures. Tim Strangleman, for example, notes that what is
51
52
lost is a sense of the permanency or predictability of work. Formerly, the “relative stability” that
53
54
55 once prevailed “gave the workplace a predictability that allowed a certain moral order to emerge
56
57 and be reproduced.”79 Older workers expressed this sense of change, or loss, through the
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juxtaposition of their own experiences and attitudes with that of younger workers. Continuing,
4
5
6 Strangleman writes:
7
8
9 “Williams argued that this recurring appeal to a golden age could be seen as a reaction to
10 the unfolding development of capitalism and the perceived erosion of autonomy,
11 creativity and authenticity in people’s lives. The notion of structure of feeling is
12
13 important for our purposes in terms of the purchase it offers in understanding the
14 changing nature of ideas and their influence on successive generations. Williams talks of
15 three forms of the structure of feeling –emergent, dominant and residual. In many ways
16 this last category, residual, is obviously related to notions of remembrance and marking
17 of a past.”80
18
Fo
19 Hence, “[t]heir sense of loss is part mourning for the eclipse of their own structure of feeling and
20
21
22 the sense that it now provides no, or at least little, value for subsequent generations. What is
r
23
24 captured here is the content of that residual structure of feeling, recognizing difference across
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26
age, place and occupation.”81
27
28
er
29
30 Deindustrialization shakes the political and cultural foundations of once highly
31
32 industrialized areas. Historian Jeff Manuel, for example, reveals the “slow disassembly” of the
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33
34 political culture of industrial liberalism in the post-industrial Iron Range of Northern Minnesota:
35
36
“Deindustrialization and industrial decline hollowed out older connections between industrial
vi
37
38
39 labor and liberalism. The result of this process was a postwar political culture that made
ew
40
41
42
industrial labor increasingly marginal as a vital contributor to the nation’s future.”82 A similar
43
44 story is told by James Rhodes who has examined the rise of the right-wing British National Party
45
46 in the former textile town of Burnley in East Lancashire. He usefully applies sociologist Loic
47
48
49 Wacquant’s notion of “advanced marginality” to help understand territorial stigmatization based
50
51 on class.83 Referring to the former meatpacking centre of Berisso in Argentina, historian Daniel
52
53 James similarly finds that “[p]art of the crisis of contemporary memory in working class
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3
communities is precisely the crisis of such social spaces that have fallen victim to the destructive
4
5
6 power of de-industrialization, social dislocation, and simple irrelevance.”84
7
8
9 Industrialization and deindustrialization scarred people and landscape. In oral historian
10
11 Alessandro Portelli’s epic 2010 book, They Say in Harlan County, we see how class defiance
12
13
14 turned to resignation over the course of the twentieth century. In popular memory, Harlan
15
16 County, Kentucky, is remembered as “Bloody Harlan”, the site of labour militancy and violence
17
18
as miners confronted the raw power of the coal companies. It is a story of political and cultural
Fo
19
20
21 defeat at the hands of those willing to use violence, even murder, to retain control. At times, the
22
r
23 class war resembled a civil war. By the time Portelli began to visit the area in the 1980s, the
24
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25
26 mines were mostly gone, but the political, psychological, and environmental scars remained.
27
28 Coal mining was hard and dangerous work, and interviewees had stories of death, injury, and
er
29
30 disease: “In memory, all these strikes overlap and run together. Miners and their families
31
32
remember less a series of discrete labor conflicts than a continuous state of war, marked by the
Re
33
34
35 violence of company guards, scabs, lockouts, evictions, the National Guard, and the blacklist.” 85
36
vi
37 Portelli suggests that while Harlan County miners were defeated in the 1930s, a “deeper defeat
38
39
took place on the cultural plane: as they lost the strike miners also lost their reason for it.” 86 A
ew
40
41
42 similar point could be made about the political defeat of trade unionism that accompanied
43
44
45
deindustrialization in North America and Western Europe. A deeper cultural defeat has sapped
46
47 the spirit of working men and women as well as their remaining institutions.
48
49
50 CONCLUSION
51
52
53 To conclude, the study of deindustrialization emerged as a political response of scholars – in
54
55
56 many disciplines and from many countries –to the unprecedented collapse of manufacturing and
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3
basic industries. Towns and regions were devastated. As it has developed, the field has focussed
4
5
6 primarily on those places where deindustrialization was most visible: towns of single-industry
7
8 located in the industrial heartlands of North America and Europe. The automotive, steel and
9
10
11
mining industries have received the lion’s share of public and scholarly attention. This is not
12
13 coincidental, as these industries employed the classic male proletarian worker. By comparison,
14
15 women in the rapidly deindustrializing clothing, textile and electrical industries have received far
16
17
18 less attention.
Fo
19
20
21 Deindustrialization has been applied less frequently in other contexts as well. In Canada,
22
r
23 for example, economic change on the resource frontier is often understood in terms of boom-to-
24
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25
26 bust, as resource economies highly susceptible to cyclical downturns.87 Many large metropolitan
27
28 centres, or global cities, like New York, Toronto, and Paris have likewise resisted the
er
29
30 deindustrialization label. They are now so thoroughly post-industrial that their former industrial
31
32
lives have been all but forgotten. In these cases, economic change has been recast in terms of
Re
33
34
35 urban or neighbourhood change.88 With its sights firmly set on the middle-class, the
36
vi
37 gentrification scholarship now mentions deindustrialization as little more than background

38
39
ew
40 footnote. Indeed, Brad Slater and others have argued that gentrification scholars have turned
41
42 their backs on working-people and the politics of resistance that once animated that field.89 One
43
44
45
wonders if a similar fate awaits the study of deindustrialization itself. Will Canadian left-
46
47 nationalists, British miners, and American anti-shutdown activists one day be viewed with the
48
49 same incomprehension and derision as the Luddites of old? In this spirit, I would like to end with
50
51
52 the words of historian E.P. Thompson, in his classic book on The Making of the English Working
53
54 Class:
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“Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their
4
5 communitarian ideals may have been fantasties. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may
6 have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and
7 we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience…”90
8
9
10
11
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34 University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988.
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49 Manchester University Press, 2012.
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51 Portelli, Alessandro. They Say in Harlan County. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
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53 Raines, John C. Lenora E. Berson and David McI.Grace, eds. Community and Capital in
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7 Slater, Tom. “Missing Marcuse: On Gentrification and Displacement,” City 13, 2-3 (2009).
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9 Stanton, Cathy. The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Postindustrial City. Amherst:
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12 Stein, Judith. Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the
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14
15 Stoler, Ann Laura. “Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination,” Cultural
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18 Strangleman, Tim. “The Nostalgia for the Permanence of Work? The End of Work and its
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20 Commentators,” Sociological Review 55, 1 (2007), 81-103.
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22 Strangleman, Tim. “Picturing Work in an Industrial Landscape: Visualising Labour, Place and
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23 Space,” Sociological Research Online 17, 2 (2012).
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Strangleman, Tim. “Representations of labour: Visual sociology and work,” Sociology Compass
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25
26 2, 5 (2008), 1491-1505.
27
28 Strangleman, Tim. Work Identity at the End of the Line? Privatisation and Culture Change in the
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29 UK Railway Industry. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

30
31 Sugrue, Thomas. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit.
32
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.
Re
33
34
35
Taksa, Lucy. “‘Hauling an Infinite Freight of Mental Imagery’: Finding Labour’s Heritage at the
36 Swindon Railway’s Workshops’ STEAM Museum,” Labour History Review 68, 3 (December
2003), 391-410.
vi
37
38
39 Taksa, Lucy. “Labor History and Public History in Australia: Allies or Uneasy Bedfellows?”
ew
40 International Labor and Working-Class History 76, 1 (2009), 82-104.

41
42 Taksa, Lucy. “Machines and Ghosts: Politics, Industrial Heritage and the History of Working
43 Life at the Eveleigh Workshops,” Labour History 85 (2003), 65-88.
44
45
46 Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Vintage, 1968
47
48 Toffler, Alvin. Future Shift. New York” Random House, 1970.
49
50 Tovar, Francisco José, Maria Arnal, Carlos de Castro, et al, “A Tale of Two Cities: Working
51 Class Identity, Industrial Relations and Community in Declining Textile and Shoe Industries in
52
Spain,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 17, 4 (2011).
53
54
Wacquant, Loic. Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality.
55
56 Cambridge: Polity, 2008.
57
58
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2
3
Watt, Paul. “The Only Class in Town? Gentrification and the Middle Class Colonization of the
4
5 City and the Urban Imagination,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32, 1
6 (2009), 206-121.
7
8 Wilson, Gregory S.. Communities Left Behind:The Area Redevelopment Administration, 1945-
9 1965. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2009.
10
11 Zukin, Sharon. Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places. New York: Oxford
13
14
15 1
Alessandro Portelli, And They Say in Harlan County (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 261-2.
16 2
Kathryn Marie Dudley, The End of the Line: Lost Jobs, New Lives in Postindustrial America (Chicago: University
17 of Chicago Press, 1994), 27.
18 3
Christopher H. Johnson, “Introduction: De-industrialization and Globalization,” International Review of Social
Fo
19 History 47 (2002), 7.
20 4
Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton
21 University Press, 1996).
22 5
Kim Moody, US Labor in Trouble and Transition (New York: Verso, 2007). See also, Ronald L. Filippelli and
r
23 Mark McColloch, Cold War in the Working Class: The Rise and Decline of the United Electrical Workers (Albany:
24 State University of New York, 1995).
Pe
25 6
Jeremy Brecher, Banded Together: Economic Democratization in the Brass Valley (Chicago: University of Illinois
26 Press, 2011).
27
7
28 Steven High, Industrial Sunset: The Making of North America’s Rust Belt, 1969-1984 (Toronto: University of
er
29 Toronto Press, 2003), especially chapter 6.

8
30 See for example Jim Philips, Collieries, Communities and the Miners’ Strike in Scotland, 1984-85 (Manchester:
31 Manchester University Press, 2012). The resounding political victories for trade unionists in the early1970s would
32 not be repeated. John Foster and Charles Woolfson, The Politics of the UCS Work-In (London: Lawrence and
Re
33 Wishart, 1986).
9
34 For a useful overview see, Eleanor Conlin Casella and James Symonds, eds. Industrial Archaeology: Future
35 Directions (New York: Springer, 2005).
10
36 Alvin Toffler, Future Shift (New York” Random House, 1970); Daniel Bell. The Coming of Post-Industrial
vi
37 Society (New York: Basic Books, 1973); Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s
38 Transforming Work, Leisure and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002).
11
39 Dudley, The End of the Line, xi-xii.
ew
12
40 As always, there are notable exceptions such as: Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded
41 Factories for Finance in the Seventies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); and, Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’
42 Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: New Press, 2010). One can also point to
43 recent contributions by Gregory S. Wilson, Communities Left Behind:The Area Redevelopment Administration,
44 1945-1965 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2009); Guian A. McKee, The Problem of Jobs: Liberalism,
45 Race, and Deindustrialization in Philadelphia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); D. Koistinen, “Public
46 Policies for Countering Deindustrialization in Postwar Massachusetts,” Journal of Policy History 18, 3 (2006), 326-
47 61; and Timothy J. Minchin, “Us is spelled US’: The Crafted With Pride campaign and the fight against
48 deindustrialization in the textile and apparel industry,” Labor History 53, 1 (2012), 1-23.
13
49 Bob Laxer, foreword, in Robert M. Laxer, ed. (Canada) Ltd: The Political Economy of Dependency (Toronto:
50 McClelland and Stewart, 1973), 9.
14
51 Jim Laxer, “Canadian Manufacturing and US Trade Policy,” in Robert M. Laxer, ed. (Canada) Ltd: The Political
52 Economy of Dependency (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1973), 134.
15
53 The term was also in circulation in Great Britain in the 1970s. Christopher H. Johnson, “Introduction: De-
54 industrialization and Globalization,” International Review of Social History 47 (2002), 7.
16
55 Robert Laxer, foreword, in Laxer, (Canada) Ltd, 9
17
56 Jim Laxer, “Canadian Manufacturing,” in Laxer, (Canada) Ltd, 146.
18
57 Jim Laxer and and Doris Jantzi, “The De-industrialization of Ontario” in Laxer, (Canada) Ltd, 150.
19
58 Ibid., 147-8
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2
3
4 20
Steven High, Industrial Sunset: The Making of North America’s Rust Belt, 1969-1984 (Toronto: University of
5
Toronto Press, 2003).
6 21
Dimitry Anastakis, for example, argues that Ontario’s auto industry avoided being deindustrialized due to the
7 actions of Canadian policy-makers. See his “Industrial Sunrise? The Chrysler Bailout, the State and the
8 Reindustrialization of the Canadian Automotive Sector, 1975-1986,” Urban History Review 35 (Spring 2007), 37-
9 50.
10 22
This reference comes from Thomas Dublin and Walter Licht, The Face of Decline: The Pennsylvania Anthracite
11 Region in the Twentieth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 3. The idea that national economies were
12 experiencing “deindustrialization” was in general circulation by the late 1970s. British economists, for example, met
13 to debate the onset of deindustrialization in a 1978 conference organized by the National Institute of Economic and
14 Social Research. “The purpose of the conference,” wrote Frank Blackaby, “was to subject the phrase to … critical
15 scrutiny.” Frank Blackaby, “Introduction,” in Frank Blackaby, ed. De-industrialisation (London: Heinemann
16 Educational Books, 1978), 1.
17 23
Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, The Deindustrialization of America: Plant Closings, Community
18 Abandonment, and the Dismantling of Basic Industry (New York: Basic Books, 1982), 15.
Fo
19 24
Ibid., 19.
20 25
John Bullen, “The Ontario Waffle and the Struggle for an Independent Socialist Canada: Conflict within the
21 NDP,” Canadian Historical Review 64, 2 (1983), 188-215.
22 26
Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, The Deindustrialization of America, ix.
r
23 27
Ibid., x.
24 28
The twin themes of resistance and abandonment are central to the first wave of scholarship. In Canada, see:
Pe
25 Rianne Mahon, The Politics of Industrial Restructuring: Canadian Textiles (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
26 1984); J. Paul Grayson, Corporate Strategy and Plant Closures: The SKF Experience (Toronto: Our Times, 1985);J.
27 Paul Grayson, Plant Closures and De-Skilling: Three Case Studies (Ottawa: Science Council of Canada, 1986);
28 Daniel Drache, The Deindustrialization of Canada and Its Implications for Labour (Ottawa: Canadian Centre for
er
29 Policy Alternatives, 1989); and, Jane Jenson and Rianne Mahon, eds. The Challenge of Restructuring: North
30 American Labor Movements Respond (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993). In the United States, see:
31 Staughton Lynd, The Fight Against Shutdowns: Youngstown’s Steel Mill Closings (San Pedro, CA: Singlejack
32 Books, 1982); John C. Raines, Lenora E. Berson and David McI.Grace, eds. Community and Capital in Conflict:
Re
33 Plant Closings and Job Losses (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982); Thomas G. Fuechtmann, Steeples
34 and Stacks: Religion and Steel, Crisis in Youngstown (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Dale A.
35 Hathaway, Can Workers Have A Voice? The Politics of Deindustrialization in Pittsburgh (University Park:
36 Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993); Scott D. Camp, Worker Response to Plant Closings: Steelworkers in
vi
37 Johnstown and Youngstown (New York: Garland Publishers, 1995); Bruce Nissen, Fighting for Jobs: Case Studies
38 of Labor-Community Coalitions Confronting Plant Closings (Albany: State University of New York, 1995); Steven
39 P. Dandaneau, A Town Abandoned: Flint, Michigan, Confronts Deindustrialization (Albany: State University of
ew
40 New York, 1996); and Martha Baum and Pamela Twiss, eds. Social Work Intervention in an Economic Crisis: The
41 River Communities Project (New York: Howarth Press, 1996).
29
42 Doreen Massey, Spatial Divisions of Labour: Social Structures and the Geography of Production (London:
43 Macmillan, 1984); Peter Dicken, Global Shift: Industrial Change in a Turbulent World (London: Harper& Row,
44 1986).
30
45 Christopher Johnson, The Life and Death of Industrial Languedoc, 1700-1920 (New York,1995); Ian McKay, The
46 Quest for the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (Montreal: McGill-
47 Queen’s University Press, 1994).
31
48 The first historian to engage with deindustrialization in a monograph length study may have been urban historian
49 John Cumbler in A Social History of Economic Decline: Business, Politics, and Work in Trenton (New Brunswick:
50 Rutgers University Press, 1988).
32
51 Jefferson Cowie, Capital Moves: RCA’s 70-Year Quest for Cheap Labor (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999),
52 4.
33
53 Ibid., 185.
34
54 See, for example, High, Industrial Sunset.
35
55 Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott, eds. Beyond the Ruins: The Meaning of Deindustrialization (Ithaca:
56 Cornell University Press, 2003). 1-2.
36
57 Ibid.,6.
37
58 Ibid., 2.
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2
3
4 38
Ibid., 14-15.
5 39
Dudley, The End of the Line, 47, 134.
6 40
Ibid., 27.
7 41
Ibid., 79
8 42
Ibid., xix-xx.
9 43
Sherry Lee Linkon and John Russo, Steeltown USA: Work and Memory in Youngstown (Lawrence: University of
10 Kansas Press, 2004), 2-3.
11 44
Michael Frisch and Michael Rogovin. Portraits in Steel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).
12 45
Bill Bamberger and Cathy Davidson. Closing: The Life and Death of an American Factory (New York: W.W.
13 Norton, 1999).
14 46
Tim Strangleman, “Picturing Work in an Industrial Landscape: Visualising Labour, Place and Space,”
15 Sociological Research Online 17, 2 (2012); and, Tim Strangleman, “Representations of labour: Visual sociology and
16 work,” Sociology Compass 2, 5 (2008), 1491-1505.
17 47
Judith Modell and Charlee Brodsky, A Town Without Steel: Envisioning Homestead (Pittsburgh: University of
18 Pittsburgh Press, 1988).
Fo
19
48
20 Andreas Huyssen, “Nostalgia for Ruins,” Grey Room 23 (Spring 2006), 6-21.
21
49
22 Ann Laura Stoler, “Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination,” Cultural Anthropology (Spring 2008),
r
23 5.
24 50
Ibid., 8.
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25
26 51
27 Alice Mah, Industrial Ruination, Community and Place: Landscapes and Legacies of Urban Decline (Toronto:
28 University of Toronto Press, 2012).
er
29 52
Tim Edensor, Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality (London: Berg, 2005).
30 53
See Bradley L. Garrett, “Assaying history: Creating Temporal Junctions through Urban Exploration,”
31 Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29 (2011), 1048-67.
32 54
Paul Clemens, for example, writes about the “arty delectation of Detroit’s destruction.” Punching Out: One Year
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33 in a Closing Auto Plant (New York: Anchor Books, 2011), 34-5.

34 55
Julie Salverson, “Anxiety and Contact in Attending to a Play About Land Mines,? In Critical Perspectives on
35 Canadian Theatre in English 17 (Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2010), 78.
36 56
“In a sense,” Taksa argues, “the melancholic replaces the lost object with the experience of loss itself.” Ibid., 80.
vi
37 57
Francisco José Tovar, Maria Arnal, Carlos de Castro, et al, “A Tale of Two Cities: Working Class Identity,
38 Industrial Relations and Community in Declining Textile and Shoe Industries in Spain,” International Journal of
39 Heritage Studies 17,4 (2011), 339. See, also, Elisabeth Clemence Chan, “What roles for ruins? Meaning and
ew
40 Narrative of Industrial Ruins in Contemporary Parks?” Journal of Landscape Architecture 4, 2 (2009), 20-31.
41 58
Lucy Taksa, “Machines and Ghosts: Politics, Industrial Heritage and the History of Working Life at the Eveleigh
42 Workshops,” Labour History 85 (2003), 65-88.
43 59
Lucy Taksa, “Labor History and Public History in Australia: Allies or Uneasy Bedfellows?” International Labor
44 and Working-Class History 76, 1 (2009), 82-104.
45 60
Leon Fink, “When Community Comes Home to Roost: The Southern Milltown as Lost Cause,” Journal of Social
46 History 40, 1 (2006), 119-145.
47 61
Ibid., 182.
48 62
Cathy Stanton, The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Postindustrial City (University of Masschussets Press,
49 2006), 235. See, also, Lucy Taksa, “ ‘Hauling an Infinite Freight of Mental Imagery’: Finding Labour’s Heritage at
50 the Swindon Railway’s Workshops’ STEAM Museum,” Labour History Review 68, 3 (December 2003), 391-410.
51 63
See, for example, Luis Loures, “Industrial Heritage: The Past in the Future of the City,” WSEAS Transactions on
52 Environment and Development 8, 4 (2008), 687-696.
53 64
Francisco José Tovar, Maria Arnal, Carlos de Castro, et al, “A Tale of Two Cities: Working Class Identity,
54 Industrial Relations and Community in Declining Textile and Shoe Industries in Spain,” International Journal of
55 Heritage Studies 17,4 (2011), 339.
56 65
Ibid..
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3
4 66
Amongst the best of the recent scholarship are S. Paul O’Hara. Gary: The Most American of All American
5
Cities(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011); Colin Gordon, Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the
6 American City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); T. Dingle and S. O’Hanlon, “From
7 Manufacturing Zone to Lifestyle Precinct: Economic Restructuring and Social Change in Inner Melbourne, 1971,”
8 Australian Economic History Review 49, 1 (2009), 52-69; and Seamus O’Hanlon and S. Sharpe, “Becoming Post-
9 Industrial: Victoria Street, Fitzroy, c. 1970 to Now,” Urban Policy and Research 27, 3 (2009), 289-300;
10
11 67
Andrew Hurley, Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945-1980
12
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).
13
14 68
15 It represents a counterpoint to the “end of work” scholarship of the 1990s. Tim Strangleman, “The Nostalgia for
16 the Permanence of Work? The End of Work and its Commentators,” Sociological Review 55, 1 (2007), 81-103;
17 Strangleman has returned to this question time and again, see his: Work Identity at the End of the Line? Privatisation
18 and Culture Change in the UK Railway Industry (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
69
Fo
19 E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1968), especially preface.
70
20 John Kirk, with Steve Jefferys and Christine Wall, “Representing Identity and Work in Transition: The Case of
21 South Yorkshire Coal-mining Communities in the UK,” in Kirk, Contrepois and Jefferys, eds. Changing Work and
22 Community Identities in European Regions: Perspectives on the Past and Present (London: Palgrave Macmillan,
r
23 2012), 191.
71
24 David Byrne, “Industrial Culture in a Post-Industrial World: The Case of the North East of England,” City 6, 3
(2002), 281.
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25 72
26 Mary Mellor and Carol Stephenson, “The Durham Miners’ Gala and the Spirit of Community,” Community
27 Development Journal 40, 3 (2005), 343-4.
73
28 John Kirk, Sylvie Contrepois and Steve Jefferys, “Approaching Regional and Identity Change in Europe,” in Kirk,
Contrepois and Jefferys, eds. Changing Work and Community Identities in European Regions: Perspectives on the
er
29
30 Past and Present (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 7.
74
Ibid., 9.
31 75
Jackie Clarke, “Closing Moulinex: thoughts on the visibility and invisibility of industrial labour in contemporary
32
France,” Modern & Contemporary France 19, 4 (2011), 443-458.
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33 76
Kirk, Contrepois and Jefferys, “Approaching Regional and Identity Change in Europe,” 13.
34 77
Ibid., 11.
35 78
Byrne, 286
36 79
Ibid., 419.
vi
37 80
Tim Strangleman, “Work Identity in Crisis? Rethinking the Problem of Attachment and Loss at Work,” Sociology
38
46, 3 (2012), 415.
39 81
Ibid., 422.
ew
40 82
Jeff Manuel, “Developing Resources: Industry Policy and Memory on the Post-Industrial Iron Range.” (PhD,
41 2009), 6.
42
43 83
James Rhodes, “Stigmatization, space, and boundaries in de-industrial Burnley,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 45, 4
44 (April 2012), 696; Loic Wacquant, Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality
45 (Cambridge: Polity, 2008).
46 84
Daniel James, Dona Maria’s Story: Life History, Memory, and Political Identity (Durham: Duke University Press,
47 2000), 156.
48 85
Portelli, And They Say in Harlan County, 177.
49 86
Ibid., 202.
50 87
Steven High, “Introduction”, Urban History Review (Special Issue on The Politics and Memory of
51 Deindustrialization in Canada) 35, 2 (2007), 2-13.
52 88
See Sharon Zukin’s excellent Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places (New York: Oxford
53 University Press, 2010).
54 89
There has been some recent debate about the place of working people and deindustrialization in the field. See:
55 Tom Slater, “Missing Marcuse: On Gentrification and Displacement,” City 13, 2-3 (2009); Paul Watt, “The Only
56 Class in Town? Gentrification and the Middle Class Colonization of the City and the Urban Imagination,”
57 International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32, 1 (2009), 206-121.
58
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4 90
E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1968), 13.
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“THE WOUNDS OF CLASS”:
4
5
6
7 A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL REFLECTION ON THE STUDY OF
8
9 DEINDUSTRIALIZATION, 1973-2013
10
11
12 “[T]he wounds of class are deeper than broken backs and broken lungs. They sink into
13
14 the soul and erode people’s sense of themselves and of their environment.”
15
16 - Alessandro Portelli, 2010 1
17
18
Fo
19 Deindustrialization may not be a recent phenomenon but the study of it is. Historian Christopher
20
21
22 H. Johnson has noted that the word has its origins in the Second World War when the Nazis
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24 stripped occupied areas of their industry. The term was then picked-up by the Allies in the war’s
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26
27
immediate aftermath to describe “possible postwar retribution against Germany.2 It was only in
28
er
29 the midst of the economic crisis of the 1970s and 1980s, however, that deindustrialization re-
30
31 surfaced as an explanation for economic change. Put simply, mills and factories closed because
32
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34 companies moved production to lower wage areas leaving towns, regions, and countries without
35
36 an industrial base. The study of deindustrialization thus emerged in response to the catastrophic
vi
37
38 decline of employment in manufacturing and basic industries. By the early1980s, North America
39
ew
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41 and Western Europe were hemorrhaging tens of millions of industrial jobs and trade union
42
43 membership collapsed in many countries. Inner city areas were particularly hard-hit, accelerating
44
45
the flight of North America’s middle-class to the suburbs. This out-migration was of course
46
47
48 highly racialized.3 A way of life seemed to be passing out of existence. Why was this happening?
49
50 What did it mean? Could it be stopped?
51
52
53 Working-class resistance to this unprecedented crisis was uneven. In the United States,
54
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56 trade unions have been criticized for carrying on as though it was business-as-usual.4 The anti-
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communist purges of the Cold War had left unions de-mobilized and the scale and scope of the
4
5
6 crisis was such that trade unions staggered from one tragedy to the next. Entire unions passed out
7
8 of existence. Hence, the locus of anti-plant closing activism in the US was located in loose
9
10
11
community-union coalitions at the local and state levels.5 To a large degree, these alliances
12
13 proved incapable of altering the deteriorating situation.6 Only a handful of local and state
14
15 governments passed legislation that would soften the blow, even minimally. Not so in Canada
16
17
18 where workers tapped into a deep wellspring of nationalist anxiety about the foreign ownership
Fo
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20 of the economy.7 Yet factories continued to close and unions had to merge together to pool their
21
22 depleted memberships. My father’s union, the Canadian Brotherhood of Railway, Transport and
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General Workers (CBRT & GW) was one of these casualties – its unique history now all but
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25
26
27 forgotten. Perhaps the fiercest examples of working-class resistance to deindustrialization were
28
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29
to be found in the United Kingdom and continental Europe. But, even there, we see political
30
31
32 defeat. The destruction of the once mighty miners’ union in the UK, by a determined Margaret
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34 Thatcher, signalled that no-one was safe.8 Working-class resistance continues to this day, but
35
36
much has been lost in the intervening decades.
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37
38
39
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40 Inevitably, this rapidly changing political and economic context has profoundly shaped
41
42 the study of deindustrialization. At the outset, the politics of the field differed from other
43
44
45
emerging areas of research such as industrial archaeology or heritage.9 With few exceptions,
46
47 deindustrialization scholars before the millennium saw their research as being part of the wider
48
49 political mobilization against mill and factory closings. Deindustrialization, as an explanatory
50
51
52 framework, emphasizes loss over more positive readings. Its politics is therefore far from that of
53
54 Alvin Toffler, Daniel Bell, and Richard Florida who have heralded the economic transformation
55
56 underway as the dawning of a bright new age for humanity. The politics of deindustrialization
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studies was nonetheless profoundly influenced by differing national contexts, be it the anti-
4
5
6 nationalism of many in the American New Left or the intense nationalism of the Canadian left.
7
8
9 The emotive bonds of family, community, and class tie many of the scholars in the field
10
11 to their subjects of study. A book’s preface often tells us a great deal about the author’s social
12
13
14 and political location. Many authors it seems have roots in the very working-class communities
15
16 that they studied, outing themselves as the sons and daughters, or grandchildren, of industrial
17
18
workers. A handful of researchers such as sociologist Tim Strangleman once worked in these
Fo
19
20
21 declining industries. As a group, they therefore straddled the insider-outsider divide. It is
22
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23 important to acknowledge this proximity, as it helps us to understand the field. In the preface of
24
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26 The End of the Line, for example, anthropologist Kathryn Marie Dudley notes that she grew up
27
28 only a few miles from the Kenosha (Wisconsin) automotive manufacturing plant that is at the
er
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30 heart of her book. She therefore had a front-row seat to its demise. Listen as she describes the
31
32
impact of job loss on her grandfather whose own plant closed:
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34
35
36 I saw in his loneliness why the loss of an industrial job can be so devastating.
vi
37 Friendships built up over twenty years on the shopfloor gradually fade away, and with
38 them the sense of community that gives us all a meaningful place in the world. My
39
grandfather is not alive to read this book; I can only hope it conveys my appreciation for
ew
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41 the life he lived.10
42
43 As a young doctoral student in the mid-1990s, Dudley’s comments resonated with me. I think for
44
45 many of us, our decision to investigate deindustrialization was an intensely personal one. In
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47 reflecting on the historiography of deindustrialization, this essay identifies three distinct waves
48
49
50 of scholarship. The economic, cultural and class dimensions will be explored. As we will see, the
51
52 scholarly focus has broadened from the causes of industrial decline and resistance to job loss, to
53
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55
its effects and long-term consequences.11
56
57
58 ACTIVIST BEGINNINGS
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The deindustrialization thesis emerged in Canada during the early 1970s as part of a wider anti-
4
5
6 imperialist critique of United States domination of the country’s economy. From a rash of mill
7
8 and factory closings, left-wing nationalists concluded that “deindustrialization is the most
9
10
11
important result to Canada of integration in the American empire.”12 US-based multinational
12
13 corporations, they argued, were pre-disposed to close their Canadian branch-plants when times
14
15 got tough. The economic nationalist policies of the Nixon Administration – which actively
16
17
18 sought to repatriate jobs – only served to confirm their suspicion. “Nixonomics means
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20 deindustrialization,” wrote Jim Laxer in (Canada) Ltd: The Political Economy of Dependency. 13
21
22 Published in 1973, the book provided the world with the first sustained discussion of
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24
deindustrialization.14 In fact, the book’s editor and contributors (a who’s who of Canadian left-
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27 nationalism of the time) went further, speaking of it in terms of a “major thesis” or explanatory
28
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29
framework.15 “De-industrialization,” Laxer argued, “is the price workers’ pay for Canada’s
30
31
32 dependent status in the American empire. As the American empire enters a period of decline, the
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34 costs of is decline are passed in disproportionately high amounts to workers in dependent
35
36
countries like Canada and to minorities like blacks within the United States.”16
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37
38
39
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40 The book offered Canadian left-nationalists an analysis and a strategy. In its initial
41
42 formulation, “the term ‘de-industrialization’” referred “not to the general phenomenon of the
43
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45
reduction of the percentage of the work force employed in manufacturing (evident in most
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47 countries), but to the special distorting effects of US ownership of Canadian manufacturing, in
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49 particular, US attempts to enhance American employment at home at the expense of Canada.”17
50
51
52 To prove their point, the book’s contributors included a detailed examination of employment
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54 trends in Canadian manufacturing. Not only were the employment numbers in absolute decline
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56 but US-owned companies appeared to lay-off more Canadian workers than did other companies.
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Robert Laxer believed that the deindustrialization thesis could “become a tool, a rallying cry for
4
5
6 Canadians to join the movement for independence through socialism and socialism through
7
8 independence.” And, for a time it did. Canadian trade unionists wrapped themselves in the
9
10
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Canadian flag, pushing politicians to legislate advance notice of layoff, preferential re-hiring
12
13 rights, pension insurance, and severance pay. 18 In a few instances, the state opted to nationalize
14
15 failing industries (such as aeronautics) and to run them as crown corporations. Only later did it
16
17
18 become apparent that US-based multinationals were no more loyal to Detroit (Michigan) than
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20 they were to Windsor (Ontario). If anything, the devastation wrought by deindustrialization
21
22 seemed greater in the United States.19
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26 The tsunami of mine, mill and factory closures that struck North America and Western
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28 Europe with devastating force in the early 1980s produced wide-ranging explanations and a great
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30 deal of “doomsday talk.”20 It was in this crisis atmosphere that the deindustrialization thesis
31
32
resurfaced, this time in the United States, with the publication of Barry Bluestone and Bennett
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34
35 Harrison’s 1982 book, The Deindustrialization of America. Its subtitle, “Plant Closings,
36
vi
37 Community Abandonment, and the Dismantling of Basic Industry,” signalled the scale and scope
38
39
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40 of the problem and the urgency of the moment. Bluestone and Harrison, both economists,
41
42 emphasized the problem of companies moving production to lower wage areas located outside
43
44
45
the United States. American workers could not compete. “Deindustrialization does not just
46
47 happen,” they argued. “Conscious decisions have to be made by corporate managers to move a
48
49 factory from one location to another, to buy up a going concern or to dispose of one, or to shut
50
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52 down a facility altogether.”21 International competition and rising costs (often blamed on trade
53
54 unions) caused companies to disinvest from one geographic location and invest in another.
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56 Capital flight was thus central to their analysis. “At the root of all of this,” they wrote, “is a
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fundamental struggle between capital and community.”22 In this articulation, deindustrialization
4
5
6 was understood as the outcome of the global economic crisis.
7
8
9 Significantly, both of these ground-breaking studies originated within wider political
10
11 movements against capital flight. In the first instance, Canada, Inc began as a series of public
12
13
14 lectures sponsored by the Toronto Education Committee of the Ontario Waffle Movement for an
15
16 Independent Socialist Canada. The “Waffle” had tried, with some success, to push Canada’s
17
18
New Democratic Party (NDP) leftward towards a policy of aggressive nationalization of foreign-
Fo
19
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21 owned companies operating in the country.23 For its part, The Deindustrialization of America
22
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23 originated in a research project commissioned in 1979 by a broad-based coalition of trade unions
24
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26 and community groups “concerned with the causes and consequences of plant closings all across
27
28 the United States.”24 Bluestone and Harrison thus dedicated the book to those who “resist the
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30 economic destruction of their communities…”25 Clearly, then, both books should be read as a
31
32
product of and a contributor to North American resistance to mill and factory closings. A similar
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35 politics infuses the many other works published on deindustrialization during the 1980s and
36
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1990s. 26
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39
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41 This first wave of scholarship focussed on the underlying economic and political causes
42
43 of industrial decline, the scale and scope of the problem, and its immediate social and economic
44
45 impact. A sense of political urgency and moral outrage animate many of these studies as activist-
46
47
48 minded scholars made the case for government intervention and/or popular resistance. Marxist
49
50 geographers mapped the rise and decline, pointing to a rapidly changing international division of
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labour.27 While globalization had yet to take hold as an alternative explanatory framework,
53
54
55 deindustrialization scholars were already taking note that the phenomenon was not confined to
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any one country but part of a world-wide economic shake-down. Wider critiques of global
4
5
6 capitalism followed.
7
8
9 With the crisis still unfolding, few historians were in the ranks of the first-wave of
10
11 activist-scholars. Perhaps more time needed to pass before historians felt authorized to write.
12
13
14 Some looked for signs of deindustrialization in earlier times. Christopher C. Johnson’s The Life
15
16 and Death of Industrial Languedoc and Ian McKay’s The Quest for the Folk revealed
17
18
deindustrialization’s long history and far-reaching economic and cultural impact.28 It was only in
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21 the late 1990s that historians began to engage directly with post-1945 deindustrialization. 29
22
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23 Historian Jefferson Cowie’s book, Capital Moves, which followed RCA as it moved production
24
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26 from one city to another over a seventy year period, revealed how the company relocated
27
28 production in each instance in reaction to rising labour costs and trade union militancy. Capital
er
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30 flight was thus “a means of countering that control as the company sought out new reservoirs of
31
32
controllable labor.”30 Corporate “[c]ommand of spatial relations” became “a crucial weapon in
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35 management’s arsenal.”31 Other labour historians followed. In this first extended wave of
36
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37 scholarship, workers, their unions, and corporate decision-making, were at the centre of our
38
39
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40 analysis. This would not necessarily be the case in the years to come, as the field shifted
41
42 decisively to the cultural meaning of deindustrialization.32
43
44
45 THE CULTURAL MEANING OF DEINDUSTRIALIZATION
46
47
48
49 With the 2003 publication of Beyond the Ruins: The Cultural Meaning of Deindustrialization,
50
51 historians Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott proclaimed that “the time is right to widen the
52
53 scope of the discussion beyond prototypical plant shudowns, the immediate politics of
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56 employment policy, the tales of victimization, or the swell of industrial nostalgia.”33 The editors
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of the collection of essays sought to shift the conversation away from the “body count” of job
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6 losses to interrogate the cultural meaning of deindustrialization in the aftermath of mill and
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8 factory closings. “Today,” they wrote, “the struggle to preserve basic industry that fired
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Bluestone and Harrison’s project is all but gone, but the legacy of deindustrialization remains.”34
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13 Continuing, “[w]hat was labelled deindustrialization in the intense political heat of the late 1970s
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15 and early 1980s turned out to be a more socially complicated, historically deep, geographically
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18 diverse, and political perplexing phenomenon than previously thought.”35 As a result, Cowie and
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20 Heathcott sought to demystify deindustrialization, urging those in the field to “overcome” what
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22 they labelled “smokestack nostalgia.”36
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26 Earlier the idea that deindustrialization challenged “our sense of community at the
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28 deepest level,” had been broached by anthropologist Kathryn Marie Dudley in her 1994 book on
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30 Kenosha, Wisconsin. The North American rust belt was “not a static landscape of slag heaps and
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desolate smokestacks. It is a cultural drama of communities in transition and ordinary people
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35 struggling to find a place for the past in the present.” Dudley concluded from her interviews that:
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37 “When a plant closes, workers lose a social structure in which they have felt valued and
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validated by their fellows.”37 Middle class professionals, by contrast, viewed the shift as “highly
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42 desirable.”38 For many, the highly paid autoworkers were a moral affront to their sense of
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individual merit. Economic actions, Dudley writes, “are also, in a fundamental sense, moral
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47 actions.”39 A similar struggle over memory and social standing can be found in Sherry Lee
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49 Linkon and John Russo’s Steeltown USA (2002).
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Workers’ remembered lives are often central to the growing number of books that
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55 combine photography and oral history or ethnography. In Portraits in Steel, Michael Rogovin
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57 photographed Buffalo-area steel workers at work and at home, and again years later after their
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mills closed.40 Oral historian Michael Frisch then interviewed them about the intervening years.
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6 It remains a classic study in the field. In Closing, Bill Bamberger and Cathy Davidson gained
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8 access to a closing furniture factory in North Carolina and documented its final days.41 In both
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books, we hear and see the profound connections that workers made to their places of work.
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13 Other studies have looked at the aftermath of mill closings without losing sight of displaced
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15 workers and their families.42 Not so the burgeoning literature on industrial heritage, ruination and
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18 urban exploration.
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21 Ruins and ruination have long held the imagination of the middle and upper classes.
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23 Valued for their mystery and sense of time passing, ruins were incorporated into 18th century
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26 English gardens and became sites of excursion and pilgrimage.43 Post-colonial scholar Ann
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28 Laura Stoler reminds us that ruin is both a verb and a noun. To ruin, “is to inflict or bring great
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30 and irretrievable disaster upon, to destroy agency, to reduce to a state of poverty, to demoralize
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completely.”44 Accordingly, ruination “is an act perpetrated, a condition to which one is subject,
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35 and a cause of loss.” It is a “political project that lays waste to certain peoples and places,
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relations and things.”45 This political context is vital.
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41 In Corporate Wasteland (2007), photographer David W. Lewis and I argued that
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43 industrial ruins became a magnet for middle-class “urban explorers” who liked the feeling of
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45 melancholy and loss derived from their elicit encounters with abandoned spaces. The thrill of
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48 transgression permeates their many online accounts. It also infuses some of the new scholarship,
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50 most notably in geographer Tim Edensor’s book Industrial Ruins. Rubble was aestheticized into
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ruin, and urban wastelands transformed into post-industrial playgrounds. Predictably, this
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55 political critique of urban exploration was not welcomed by enthusiasts who dismissed me as an
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57 academic who wanted urban explorers to know their history.46 This misses the point, frankly.
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When middle class urban explorers routinely distinguish themselves from working-class
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6 trespassers, when they care so little about why these places were abandoned, then we have to ask
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8 ourselves what is the political logic of what is going on. Of course, urban explorers are a diverse
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lot and some scholar-explorers have engaged thoughtfully with the political implications. But
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13 recent years have seen photographers, artists, urban explorers, and (yes) scholars flood into
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15 deindustrialized cities like Detroit, prompting a public backlash against “ruin porn” and the
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18 hipster commodification of misery.47
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21 The work of Canadian performance theorist Julie Salverson is useful to this discussion.
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23 Writing about a student play on landmines, Salverson expressed concern over the voyeurism of
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26 performing someone else’s pain. “What disturbed me,” she wrote, was that “audience members
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28 were neither asked nor able to implicate ourselves. Audience and actors together were looking at
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30 some exoticized and deliberately tragic other.” 48 More discomforting still, Salverson continues,
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“was the almost erotic quality of the manner in which the actors performed pain. There was
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35 pleasure in it.” If moved, she asks, “by and towards what?” Is feeling good about feeling bad for
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37 others, enough? In responding to these questions, Salverson urges us to go beyond melancholia –

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a “narcissistic response that subsumes the lost other into the self.”49 These comments are highly
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42 relevant to our discussion of urban exploration and industrial ruination. As Spanish historians
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Francisco José Tovar, Maria Arnal, Carlos de Castro have argued, these ruined buildings produce
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47 “pain and sadness, they are the wounds or scars of a city and society.”50 But it is important to
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49 remember that not everyone is scarred by deindustrialization. It is experienced differently, with
50
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52 winners and losers.
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55 Other kinds of concerns have been raised about industrial heritage preservation. “As the
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57 industrial era fades,” historian Lucy Taksa writes, societies “are gradually beginning to grapple
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with the cultural significance of their industrial heritage.”51 She believes that public history has
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6 largely failed to go beyond the “collection of industrial relics” and the kind of technological
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8 history that celebrates the birthplace of industry. The history of work, and working-class
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struggle, rarely make it into the interpretation. Taksa has gone so far as to suggest that public
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13 history is incompatible with labour history.52 But this is not the only erasure. In a former North
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15 Carolina milltown, working-class nostalgia for the textile mill served to silence the history of
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18 racism and workplace segregation.53 In many ways, these sanitized approaches to working-class
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20 and industrial history are a fitting companion to the façade-ism of a great deal of adaptive reuse
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22 and industrial heritage preservation.
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26 In her prize-winning study of the Lowell National Historic Park in Massachusetts,
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28 established in 1978, public historian Cathy Stanton asserts that this unwillingness to tackle
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30 present-day issues serves to depoliticize the message. By design, conflict is safely located in the
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distant past. A sense of disconnection with the present is thus an integral part of historic site
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35 interpretation. In effect, Stanton shows us that “[u]nofficially, but powerfully, the site’s main
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37 function is precisely to mask these connections, by placing visitors within a linear progression
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where manual labor is framed as past and as less evolved.”54 The logic of culture-led
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42 redevelopment, she argues, “dictates that certain relationships and cultural productions will be
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nurtured while others – those that somehow violate or defy the underlying economic purposes of
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47 the project – will not receive the kind of long-term support that they need in order to survive.”55
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50 Despite these challenges, most would agree that there is value in preserving vestiges of
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our industrial past. Some scholars suggest that their preservation enables local and national
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55 communities to better remember their industrial pasts. A great deal of cultural erasure
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57 accompanies deindustrialization. A team of Spanish researchers, for example, explored the
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relationship between industrial heritage preservation and local identity in two deindustrialized
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6 towns. Despite longstanding efforts to preserve former industrial buildings, they concluded that
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8 “the traces of industrial and workers’ heritage are losing their relevance.”56 The authors wonder
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what will be left in a generation or two. How long can these memories “survive” when there are
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13 no material traces? While abandonment and destruction of mills and factories “contribute to the
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15 oblivion of workers’ cultural heritage,” their preservation is no guarantee of a different outcome.
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18 Part of the problem is that mainstream approaches to industrial heritage are anchored in
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20 aesthetics, making it vulnerable to the same kinds of political pitfalls discussed in relation to
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22 urban exploration.
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26 WORKING CLASS CULTURE IN A POST-INDUSTRIAL AGE
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Deindustrialization not only caused the ruination of factories but the destruction of
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31 working-class towns and neighbourhoods as well. Though space limitations prevent me here
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from engaging with the substantial scholarship on urban decline, suffice it to say that this has
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36 been a popular point of entry for historians interested in the social and economic effects of
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38 deindustrialization.57 Many have built on Thomas Sugrue’s pioneering research on white flight
39
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41 as well as on those who have examined the close relationship between race and industrial
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43 restructuring in North America.58 The environmental and political legacies of deindustrialization
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45 have also been the subject of recent historical research.59 But, given my interest in labour
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48 history, what I propose to do here is to examine a third wave of deindustrialization scholarship
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50 that has focussed on working-class culture and politics in a post-industrial era.60 Many take their
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cue from E.P. Thompson who sought to avoid obscuring the agency of working people even in
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55 political defeat, when history itself seemed to be against them.61
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There is a particularly rich literature on the persistence of working-class culture in former
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6 mining regions in the United Kingdom.62 David Byrne has argued that the “culture of
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8 industrialism” in the British Northeast “survives” despite the closure of the industry.63 Mining
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communities continue to parade behind their banners and bands a decade after the last pit closed
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13 in the region, reaffirming a pride in their collective past. For example, Mary Mellor and Carol
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15 Stephenson point to the continuation of certain mining traditions such as the Durham Miners’
16
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18 Gala. Traditionally, they note, the Gala had “represented the spirit of the Durham mining
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20 communities, the link between industry, community and union.”64 A much more pessimistic
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22 viewpoint can be found in the ground-breaking work of John Kirk, Sylvie Contrepois, and Steve
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Jefferys. “Identity,” they argue, “becomes bound up in this historical development, with work,
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27 producing culturally distinct traditions that shape everyday life.”65 Deindustrialization thus
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served to “undermine traditional collective identities.” The “material world and cultural life of
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32 working-class communities across Europe have come to be regarded, it seems, as extinct, or as
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34 increasingly obsolete and, in recent years, the object only of heritage spectacles and exercises in
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nostalgia.”66
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39
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40 A similar point is raised in Jackie Clarke’s ongoing work with former Moulinex workers
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42 in France. In a recent article, she considers the visibility and invisibility of industrial labour in a
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post-industrial era.67 Despite the defiant response from working people, a discourse of
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47 inevitability predominated nationally. The idea that industry (and with it, industrial labour) is
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49 part of the past, not the present or the future, overstates the transformation: one in five still work
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52 in France’s industrial sector. Clarke’s theoretically informed use of “invisibility”, as
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54 encompassing various forms of marginalization and disqualification, rather than outright
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disappearance, contributes to our understanding of the cultural erasure that accompanies
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6 deindustrialization.
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9 A number of scholars, particularly working in the United Kingdom, have turned to
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11 Raymond Williams’ concept of “structures of feeling” to help understand how “place-bounded
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14 dimensions of identity practice, as it is embedded in historical time, becomes ‘an important
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16 source of meanings for individuals [and groups] which they can draw upon to tell stories and
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thereby understand themselves and their positioning within the wider society.”68 According to
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21 Kirk and his collaborators, we can see how “practical consciousness,” or a way of life, becomes
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23 generalized in a locality or region.69 Particularly helpful in this regard is Williams’ notion of
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26 “residual” and “emergent” structures of feeling.70 Williams has also proven useful in
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28 understanding changing workplace cultures. Tim Strangleman, for example, notes that what is
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30 lost is a sense of the permanency or predictability of work. Formerly, the “relative stability” that
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once prevailed “gave the workplace a predictability that allowed a certain moral order to emerge
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35 and be reproduced.”71 Older workers expressed this sense of change, or loss, through the
36
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37 juxtaposition of their own experiences and attitudes with that of younger workers. Continuing,
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40 Strangleman writes:
41
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43 Williams argued that this recurring appeal to a golden age could be seen as a reaction to
44 the unfolding development of capitalism and the perceived erosion of autonomy,
45 creativity and authenticity in people’s lives. The notion of structure of feeling is
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important for our purposes in terms of the purchase it offers in understanding the
48 changing nature of ideas and their influence on successive generations.72
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50 Hence, “[t]heir sense of loss is part mourning for the eclipse of their own structure of feeling and
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52 the sense that it now provides no, or at least little, value for subsequent generations. What is
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captured here is the content of that residual structure of feeling, recognizing difference across
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57 age, place and occupation.”73
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Deindustrialization shakes the political and cultural foundations of once highly
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6 industrialized areas. Historian Jeff Manuel, for example, reveals the “slow disassembly” of the
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8 political culture of industrial liberalism in the post-industrial Iron Range of Northern Minnesota:
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“Deindustrialization and industrial decline hollowed out older connections between industrial
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13 labor and liberalism. The result of this process was a postwar political culture that made
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15 industrial labor increasingly marginal as a vital contributor to the nation’s future.”74 A similar
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18 story is told by James Rhodes who has examined the rise of the right-wing British National Party
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20 in the former textile town of Burnley in East Lancashire. He usefully applies sociologist Loic
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22 Wacquant’s notion of “advanced marginality” to help understand territorial stigmatization based
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on class as well as race.75 Referring to the former meatpacking centre of Berisso in Argentina,
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27 historian Daniel James similarly finds that “[p]art of the crisis of contemporary memory in
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working class communities is precisely the crisis of such social spaces that have fallen victim to
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32 the destructive power of de-industrialization, social dislocation, and simple irrelevance.”76
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35 Industrialization and deindustrialization scarred people and landscape. In oral historian
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37 Alessandro Portelli’s epic 2010 book, They Say in Harlan County, we see how class defiance
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39
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40 turned to resignation over the course of the twentieth century. In popular memory, Harlan
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42 County, Kentucky, is remembered as “Bloody Harlan”, the site of labour militancy and violence
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as miners confronted the raw power of the coal companies. It is a story of political and cultural
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47 defeat at the hands of those willing to use violence, even murder, to retain control. At times, the
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49 class war resembled a civil war. By the time Portelli began to visit the area in the 1980s, the
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52 mines were mostly gone, but the political, psychological, and environmental scars remained.
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54 Coal mining was hard and dangerous work, and interviewees had stories of death, injury, and
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56 disease: “In memory, all these strikes overlap and run together. Miners and their families
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remember less a series of discrete labor conflicts than a continuous state of war, marked by the
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6 violence of company guards, scabs, lockouts, evictions, the National Guard, and the blacklist.” 77
7
8 Portelli suggests that while Harlan County miners were defeated in the 1930s, a “deeper defeat
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took place on the cultural plane: as they lost the strike miners also lost their reason for it.” 78 A
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13 similar point could be made about the political defeat of trade unionism that accompanied
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15 deindustrialization in North America and Western Europe. A deeper cultural defeat has sapped
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18 the spirit of working men and women as well as their remaining political and social institutions.
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21 CONCLUSION
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24 To conclude, the study of deindustrialization emerged as a political response of scholars – in
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many disciplines and from many countries –to the unprecedented collapse of manufacturing and
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basic industries. Towns and regions were devastated. As it has developed, the field has focussed
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31 primarily on those places where deindustrialization was most visible: towns of single-industry
32
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located in the industrial heartlands of North America and Europe. The automotive, steel and
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36 mining industries have received the lion’s share of public and scholarly attention. This is not
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38 coincidental, as these industries employed the classic male proletarian worker of the industrial
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41 age. By comparison, women in the rapidly deindustrializing clothing, textile and electrical
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43 industries have received far less scholarly or public attention.
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46 Deindustrialization has been applied less frequently in other contexts as well. In Canada,
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49 for example, economic change on the resource frontier is often understood in terms of boom-to-
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51 bust, as resource economies highly susceptible to cyclical downturns rather than industrial
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53 communities experiencing deindustrialized decline. However, this, too, is changing as permanent
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56 mill closures have devastated dozens of forestry communities in recent years. My home region of
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Northern Ontario has been left reeling.79 Many large metropolitan centres, or global cities, like
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6 New York, Toronto, and Paris have likewise resisted the deindustrialization label. They are now
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8 so thoroughly post-industrial that their former industrial lives have been all but forgotten. In
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these cases, economic change has been recast in terms of urban or neighbourhood change.80 With
12
13 its sights firmly set on the middle-class, the gentrification scholarship now mentions
14
15 deindustrialization as little more than a background footnote. Indeed, Brad Slater and others have
16
17
18 argued that gentrification scholars have turned their backs on working-people and the politics of
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20 resistance that once animated that field.81 One wonders if a similar fate awaits the study of
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22 deindustrialization itself. Will Canadian left-nationalists, British miners, and American anti-
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shutdown activists one day be viewed with the same incomprehension and derision as the
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27 Luddites of old? In the words of labour historian E.P. Thompson: “Their [Luddites] hostility to
28
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the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have
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32 been fantasties. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived
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34 through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not.”82
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48 WORKS CITED
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50 Anastakis, Dimitry. “Industrial Sunrise? The Chrysler Bailout, the State and the
51 Reindustrialization of the Canadian Automotive Sector, 1975-1986,” Urban History Review 35
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54 Bamberger, Bill and Cathy Davidson. Closing: The Life and Death of an American Factory.
55
56 New York: W.W. Norton, 1999.
57
58 Blackaby, Frank., ed. De-industrialisation. London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1978.
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Bluestone, Barry and Bennett Harrison, The Deindustrialization of America: Plant Closings,
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5 Community Abandonment, and the Dismantling of Basic Industry. New York: Basic Books,
6 1982.
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8 Brecher, Jeremy. Banded Together: Economic Democratization in the Brass Valley. Chicago:
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11 Bullen, John. “The Ontario Waffle and the Struggle for an Independent Socialist Canada:
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14 Bush, Parry Rust Belt Resistance: How a Small Community Took On Big Oil and Won. Kent:
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Byrne, David. “Industrial Culture in a Post-Industrial World: The Case of the North East of
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21 Camp, Scott D.. Worker Response to Plant Closings: Steelworkers in Johnstown and
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24 Casella, Eleanor Conlin and James Symonds, eds. Industrial Archaeology: Future Directions.
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27 Chan, Elisabeth Clemence. “What roles for ruins? Meaning and Narrative of Industrial Ruins in
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30 Clarke, Jackie. “Closing Moulinex: thoughts on the visibility and invisibility of industrial labour
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32 in contemporary France,” Modern & Contemporary France 19, 4 (2011), 443-458.
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34 Clemens, Paul. Punching Out: One Year in a Closing Auto Plant. New York: Anchor Books,
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Cowie, Jefferson. Capital Moves: RCA’s 70-Year Quest for Cheap Labor. Ithaca: Cornell
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40 Cowie, Jefferson. Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class. New York:
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43 Cowie, Jefferson and Joseph Heathcott, eds. Beyond the Ruins: The Meaning of
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Deindustrialization. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003.
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Cumbler, John T.. A Social History of Economic Decline: Business, Politics, and Work in
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50 Dandaneau, Steven P.. A Town Abandoned: Flint, Michigan, Confronts Deindustrialization.
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53 Dicken, Peter. Global Shift: Industrial Change in a Turbulent World. London: Harper& Row,
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56 Dublin, Thomas and Walter Licht, The Face of Decline: The Pennsylvania Anthracite Region in
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Dudley, Kathryn Marie. The End of the Line: Lost Jobs, New Lives in Postindustrial America.
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5 Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
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7 Edensor, Tim. Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality. London: Berg, 2005.
8
9 Eley, Geoff, and Keith Nield, The Future of Class in History: What’s Left of the Social? Ann
10 Arbor: University of Michigan, 2007.
11
12 Fink, Leon. “When Community Comes Home to Roost: The Southern Milltown as Lost Cause,”
13 Journal of Social History 40, 1 (2006), 119-145.
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15 Foster, John and Charles Woolfson. The Politics of the UCS Work-In. London: Lawrence and
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18 Frisch, Michael and Michael Rogovin. Portraits in Steel. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993.
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20 Garrett, Bradley L.. “Assaying history: Creating Temporal Junctions through Urban
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24 Garrett, Bradley L..“Place Hacking: Tales of Urban Exploration.” London: PhD Geography,
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27 Gordon, Colin. Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City. Philadelphia:
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30 Hathaway, Dale A.. Can Workers Have A Voice? The Politics of Deindustrialization in
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33 High, Steven. Industrial Sunset: The Making of North America’s Rust Belt, 1969-1984. Toronto:
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University of Toronto Press, 2003.
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High, Steven. “Placing the Displaced Worker: Narrating Place in Deindustrializing Sturgeon
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38 Falls, Ontario,” in James Opp and John Walsh, eds. Placing Memory and Remembering Place in
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41 High, Steven and David Lewis. Corporate Wasteland: The Landscape and Memory of
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44 Hurley, Andrew. Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary,
45 Indiana, 1945-1980. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.
46
47 Huyssen, Andreas. “Nostalgia for Ruins,” Grey Room 23 (Spring 2006), 6-21.
48
49
James, Daniel. Dona Maria’s Story: Life History, Memory, and Political Identity. Durham: Duke
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52
53 Jenson, Jane and Rianne Mahon, eds. The Challenge of Restructuring: North American Labor
54 Movements Respond. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993.
55
56 Johnson, Christopher H.. “Introduction: De-industrialization and Globalization.” International
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3
Johnson, Christopher. The Life and Death of Industrial Languedoc, 1700-1920. New York, 1995.
4
5
6
Kirk, John, Sylvie Contrepois and Steve Jefferys, eds. Changing Work and Community Identities
7 in European Regions: Perspectives on the Past and Present. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
8
9 Laxer, Robert M., ed. (Canada) Ltd: The Political Economy of Dependency. Toronto:
10 McClelland and Stewart, 1973.
11
12 Linkon, Sherry Lee and John Russo, Steeltown USA: Work and Memory in Youngstown.
13 Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2004.
14
15 Lynd, Staughton. The Fight Against Shutdowns: Youngstown’s Steel Mill Closings. San Pedro,
16 CA: Singlejack Books, 1982.
17
18 McKay, Ian. The Quest for the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-
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20 Century Nova Scotia. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994.
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22 McKee, Guian A.. The Problem of Jobs: Liberalism, Race, and Deindustrialization in
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23 Philadelphia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
24
Mahon, Rianne. The Politics of Industrial Restructuring: Canadian Textiles. Toronto: University
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26 of Toronto Press, 1984.
27
28 Manuel, Jeff. “Developing Resources: Industry Policy and Memory on the Post-Industrial Iron
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29 Range.” PhD, Minnesota, 2009.

30
31 Martin, Ron and Bob Rowthorn, eds. The Geography of De-industrialisation. London:
32
Macmillan, 1986.
Re
33
34
35
Massey, Doreen. Spatial Divisions of Labour: Social Structures and the Geography of
36 Production. London: Macmillan, 1984.
vi
37
38 Mellor, Mary and Carol Stephenson, “The Durham Miners’ Gala and the Spirit of Community,”
39 Community Development Journal 40, 3 (2005).
ew
40
41 Modell, Judith and Charlee Brodsky, A Town Without Steel: Envisioning Homestead. Pittsburgh:
42 University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988.
43
44 Moody, Kim. US Labor in Trouble and Transition. New York: Verso, 2007.
45
46 Nissen, Bruce. Fighting for Jobs: Case Studies of Labor-Community Coalitions Confronting
47 Plant Closings. Albany: State University of New York, 1995.
48
49
O’Hanlon, Seamus and S. Sharpe, “Becoming Post-Industrial: Victoria Street, Fitzroy, c. 1970 to
50
51 Now,” Urban Policy and Research 27, 3 (2009), 289-300.
52
53 O’Hara, S. Paul. Gary: The Most American of All American Cities. Bloomington: Indiana
55
56 Philips, Jim. Collieries, Communities and the Miners’ Strike in Scotland, 1984-85. Manchester:
57 Manchester University Press, 2012.
58
59
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1
2
3
Portelli, Alessandro. They Say in Harlan County. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
4
5
6
Raines, John C. Lenora E. Berson and David McI.Grace, eds. Community and Capital in
7 Conflict: Plant Closings and Job Losses. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982.
8
9 Rhodes, James. “Stigmatization, space, and boundaries in de-industrial Burnley,” Ethnic and
10 Racial Studies 45, 4 (April 2012).
11
12 Salverson, Julie. “Anxiety and Contact in Attending to a Play About Land Mines,? In Critical
13 Perspectives on Canadian Theatre in English 17 Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2010.
14
15 Self, Robert O.. American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton:
16 Princeton University Press, 2003.
17
18 Slater, Tom. “Missing Marcuse: On Gentrification and Displacement,” City 13, 2-3 (2009).
Fo
19
20 Squires, Gregory D.. Capital and Communities in Black and White: The Intersections of Race,
21
22 Class and Uneven Development. Albany: State University of New York, 1994.
r
23
24 Stanton, Cathy. The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Postindustrial City. Amherst:
University of Masschussets Press, 2006.
Pe
25
26
27 Stein, Judith. Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the
28 Seventies. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.
er
29
30 Stoler, Ann Laura. “Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination,” Cultural
31 Anthropology (Spring 2008).
32
Re
33 Strangleman, Tim. “The Nostalgia for the Permanence of Work? The End of Work and its
34
35
Commentators,” Sociological Review 55, 1 (2007), 81-103.
36
Strangleman, Tim. Work Identity at the End of the Line? Privatisation and Culture Change in the
vi
37
38 UK Railway Industry. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
39
ew
40 Sugrue, Thomas. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit.
41 Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.
42
43 Taksa, Lucy. “‘Hauling an Infinite Freight of Mental Imagery’: Finding Labour’s Heritage at the
44 Swindon Railway’s Workshops’ STEAM Museum,” Labour History Review 68, 3 (December
45 2003), 391-410.
46
47 Taksa, Lucy. “Labor History and Public History in Australia: Allies or Uneasy Bedfellows?”
48
49 International Labor and Working-Class History 76, 1 (2009), 82-104.
50
51 Taksa, Lucy. “Machines and Ghosts: Politics, Industrial Heritage and the History of Working
52 Life at the Eveleigh Workshops,” Labour History 85 (2003), 65-88.
53
54 Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Vintage, 1968.
55
56
57
Thompson, Heather Ann. Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City.
58 Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001.
59
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1
2
3
Tovar, Francisco José, Maria Arnal, Carlos de Castro, et al, “A Tale of Two Cities: Working
4
5 Class Identity, Industrial Relations and Community in Declining Textile and Shoe Industries in
6 Spain,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 17, 4 (2011).
7
8 Watt, Paul. “The Only Class in Town? Gentrification and the Middle Class Colonization of the
9 City and the Urban Imagination,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32, 1
10 (2009), 206-121.
11
12 Zukin, Sharon. Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places. New York: Oxford
13
University Press, 2010.
14
15
16 1
Portelli, And They Say in Harlan County, 261-2.
17 2
Johnson, “Introduction,” 7.
18 3
Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis.
Fo
19 4
Moody, US Labor in Trouble and Transition.
20 5
Brecher, Banded Together.
21
22 6
Thankfully, there are exceptions to this generalization. See Bush’s excellent Rust Belt Resistance.
r
23 7
High, Industrial Sunset, especially chapter 6.
24 8
See for example Phillips, Collieries, Communities and the Miners’ Strike in Scotland, 1984-85. The resounding
Pe
25 political victories for trade unionists in the early1970s would not be repeated. Foster and Woolfson, The Politics of
26 the UCS Work-In.
27 9
For an overview see, Casella and Symonds, eds. Industrial Archaeology.
28 10
Dudley, The End of the Line, xi-xii.
er
29 11
As always, there are notable exceptions such as: Stein, Pivotal Decade; Cowie, Stayin’ Alive; and McKee, The
30 Problem of Jobs.
31 12
Bob Laxer, foreword, in Laxer, ed. (Canada) Ltd, 9.
32 13
Jim Laxer, “Canadian Manufacturing and US Trade Policy,” in Laxer, ed. (Canada) Ltd, 134.
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33 14
The term was also in circulation in Great Britain in the late 1970s, when it “‘gate-crashed’ the economic
34 literature.” Martin and Rowthorn, The Geography of De-industrialisation, xv. See also Johnson, “Introduction,” 7.
35
36 15
Robert Laxer, foreword, in Laxer, (Canada) Ltd, 9
vi
16
37 Jim Laxer, “Canadian Manufacturing,” in Laxer, (Canada) Ltd, 146.
17
38 Jim Laxer and and Doris Jantzi, “The De-industrialization of Ontario” in Laxer, (Canada) Ltd, 150.
18
39 High, Industrial Sunset.
ew
19
40 Anastakis, for example, argues that Ontario’s auto industry avoided being deindustrialized due to the actions of
41 Canadian policy-makers. See his “Industrial Sunrise?” 37-50.
20
42 Dublin and Licht, The Face of Decline, 3. The idea that national economies were experiencing
43 “deindustrialization” was in general circulation by the late 1970s. British economists, for example, met to debate the
44 onset of deindustrialization in a 1978 conference organized by the National Institute of Economic and Social
45 Research. “The purpose of the conference,” wrote Frank Blackaby, “was to subject the phrase to … critical
46 scrutiny.” Frank Blackaby, “Introduction,” in Blackaby, ed. De-industrialisation, 1.
21
47 Bluestone and Harrison, The Deindustrialization of America, 15.
22
48 Ibid., 19.
23
49 Bullen, “The Ontario Waffle and the Struggle for an Independent Socialist Canada,” 188-215.
24
50 Bluestone and Harrison, The Deindustrialization of America, ix.
25
51 Ibid., x.
26
52 The twin themes of resistance and abandonment are central to the first wave of scholarship. In Canada, see:
53 Mahon, The Politics of Industrial Restructuring; and, Jenson and Mahon, eds. The Challenge of Restructuring. In
54 the United States, see: Lynd, The Fight Against Shutdowns; Raines, Berson and McI.Grace, eds. Community and
55 Capital in Conflict; Hathaway, Can Workers Have A Voice?; Camp, Worker Response to Plant Closings; Nissen,
56 Fighting for Jobs; and Dandaneau, A Town Abandoned.
27
57 Massey, Spatial Divisions of Labour; Dicken, Global Shift.
28
58 Johnson, The Life and Death of Industrial Languedoc, 1700-1920; McKay, The Quest for the Folk.
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4 29
One of the first historians to engage with deindustrialization was Cumbler in A Social History of Economic
5
Decline.
6 30
Cowie, Capital Moves, 4.
7 31
Ibid., 185.
8 32
For a wider perspective on the shift from historical materialism to cultural history, see Eley and Nield, The Future
9
of Class in History.
10 33
Cowie and Heathcott, eds. Beyond the Ruins, 1-2.
11 34
Ibid.,6.
12 35
Ibid., 2.
13 36
Ibid., 14-15.
14 37
Dudley, The End of the Line, 47, 134.
15 38
Ibid., 27.
16 39
Ibid., xix-xx.
17 40
Frisch and Rogovin. Portraits in Steel.
18 41
Bamberger and Davidson. Closing.
Fo
19 42
Modell and Brodsky, A Town Without Steel.
20
21 43
Huyssen, “Nostalgia for Ruins.”
22
r
44
23 Stoler, “Imperial Debris,” 5.
24
45
Pe
25 Ibid., 8.
26 46
27 Garrett, “Place Hacking.” See also, Garrett, “Assaying history.”
47
28 Clemens, for example, writes about the “arty delectation of Detroit’s destruction.” Punching Out, 34-5.
48
er
29 Salverson, “Anxiety and Contact in Attending to a Play About Land Mines?, 78.
49
30 “In a sense,” Taksa argues, “the melancholic replaces the lost object with the experience of loss itself.” Ibid., 80.
50
31 Tovar, Arnal, de Castro, et al, “A Tale of Two Cities,” 339. See, also, Chan, “What roles for ruins?,” 20-31.
51
32 Taksa, “Machines and Ghosts.”
52
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33 Taksa, “Labor History and Public History in Australia.”

53
34 Fink, “When Community Comes Home to Roost.”
54
35 Stanton, The Lowell Experiment, 182.
55
36 Ibid., 235. See, also, Taksa, “‘Hauling an Infinite Freight of Mental Imagery’.”
56
Tovar, Arnal, de Castro, et al, “A Tale of Two Cities,” 339.
vi
37 57
38 Amongst the best of the recent scholarship, see: O’Hara. Gary; Gordon, Mapping Decline; and O’Hanlon and
39 Sharpe, “Becoming Post-Industrial.”
ew
58
40 Squires. Capital and Communities in Black and White; Thompson, Whose Detroit?; and Self. American Babylon.
41
59
42 Hurley, Environmental Inequalities.
43
60
44 It represents a counterpoint to the “end of work” scholarship of the 1990s. Strangleman, “The Nostalgia for the
45 Permanence of Work?” Strangleman has returned to this question time and again, see his: Work Identity at the End
46 of the Line?
61
47 Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, especially preface.
62
48 Kirk, with Jefferys and Wall, “Representing Identity and Work in Transition: The Case of South Yorkshire Coal-
49 mining Communities in the UK,” in Kirk, Contrepois and Jefferys, eds. Changing Work and Community Identities in
50 European Regions, 191.
63
51 Byrne, “Industrial Culture in a Post-Industrial World, 281.
64
52 Mellor and Stephenson, “The Durham Miners’ Gala and the Spirit of Community,” 343-4.
65
53 Kirk, Contrepois and Jefferys, eds. Changing Work and Community Identities in European Regions, 7.
66
54 Ibid., 9.
67
55 Clarke, “Closing Moulinex.”
68
56 Kirk, Contrepois and Jefferys, “Approaching Regional and Identity Change in Europe,” 13.
69
57 Ibid., 11.
58
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4 70
Byrne, 286
5 71
Ibid., 419.
6 72
Strangleman, “Work Identity in Crisis?” 415.
7 73
Ibid., 22.
8 74
Manuel, “Developing Resources,” 6.
9
10 75
Rhodes, “Stigmatization, space, and boundaries in de-industrial Burnley,” 696.
11 76
James, Dona Maria’s Story, 156.
12 77
Portelli, And They Say in Harlan County, 177.
13 78
Ibid., 202.
14 79
High,“Placing the Displaced Worker.
15 80
See Zukin’s excellent Naked City.
16 81
There has been some recent debate about the place of working people and deindustrialization in the field. See:
17 Slater, “Missing Marcuse”; Watt, “The Only Class in Town?” 206-121.
18
Fo
82
19 Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 13.
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37 gentrification scholarship now mentions deindustrialization as little more than background

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25 Review 49, 1 (2009), 52-69.

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29 UK Railway Industry. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

40 International Labor and Working-Class History 76, 1 (2009), 82-104.

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29 Toronto Press, 2003), especially chapter 6.

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33 in a Closing Auto Plant (New York: Anchor Books, 2011), 34-5.

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37 others, enough? In responding to these questions, Salverson urges us to go beyond melancholia –

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