Year: 1995
Type: article
Abstract: Despite reports to the contrary, labor history is very much alive and well, as demonstrated by the sixteenth annual North American Labor History Conference.Organized under the able direction of Elizabeth Faue, panelists explored promising avenues of scholarship within an international and comparative framework.The innovative tenor of the research revealed that labor historians are engaging in broad theoretical dialogues as well as expanding the parameters of study beyond the limits of national boundaries.Presentations included work on Africa, Britain, France, Italy, Sweden, Canada, and Australia, and addressed issues of migration and immigration in the United States.Three primary themes emerged from the conference: the utility of a nationally comparative model; the existence of a transnational working class; and the importance of questions of identity and ideology, particularly as reconfigured by the "linguistic turn" of postmodern scholarship.In the first plenary session ("Is Class Still a Subject?") Geoff Eley provocatively addressed the tension between discourse and class analysis.Drawing on work in progress with collaborator Keith Nield, Eley argued that class is only one strand in the multiplicity of identities that govern human behavior, positioning class identity as "always in the making," unstable, shifting, and unfixed.Though he emphasized that discursive understandings are grounded in a materialist base, Eley questioned the primacy of materialist causality.He suggested that, if social history, focusing on class as a demonstrable socioeconomic fact, has failed to provide a satisfactory explanation for political choices, then perhaps a focus on the discourse of class as created in the political arena would provide a better basis for continued investigation and mobilization.Needless to say, the implications of his analysis elicited a lively response from the audience.A number of the participants addressed the complexities of identity.In analyzing Italian immigrant workers, Franco Ramella found that a persistent focus on class obscures the importance of ethnic identity-an identity that, in his view, was largely imposed by the dominant class as a means of exclusion.In a similar vein, Kevin Kenny argued that the mythic identity of the Molly Maguires in America was manufactured almost wholly by hostile witnesses, reflecting more about contemporary nativism and anti-Catholicism than about actual Irish-American labor activism.Mary McGuire examined the ideology of American and German postal workers, concluding that the constructed identity of "public servant" and its concurrent conception of duty to the state legitimized but also limited the scope of
Institution: Duke University
Language: English
Topic: Labor Movements and Unions
Subfield: Public Administration
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2148446486