Beyond Aesthetics: Visibility and Invisibility in the Aftermath of Deindustrialization

Abstract

AbstractThis special issue on “Crumbling Cultures,” the first to appear on deindustrialization in a labor history journal, confirms the historiographical trend away from displaced industrial workers themselves and the cultural meaning of job loss, to a wider reflection on the cultural consequences and representations of deindustrialization. The subject, here, is the cultural agency or resilience of working-class communities broadly defined. This shifting focus reflects the evolving baseline, as the political heat of the 1980s and 1990s cools and rates of unionization plummet. For the most part, the sense of cultural continuity, or working class persistence, so evident in this issue, is found in places where not much has filled the economic and cultural vacuum. As a result, nobody in this issue speaks to the deindustrialization of large metropolitan cities. There, the actions of the state, and middle-class gentrifiers, are weighed and measured as old mills and factories are demolished or converted into condominiums or art spaces. In effect, deindustrialization and the subsequent postindustrial transformation deliver a one-two punch against working-class neighbourhoods and the old culture of industrialism. The resulting break with the industrial past may therefore be greatest where the outward signs of industrial ruination are least visible. The rise of middle-class ruin-gazing within popular culture and the academy, and the global circulation and commodification of these images and experiences, nonetheless raises important questions about its underlying politics. As historian Jackie Clarke has noted elsewhere, what is rendered visible and invisible in a post-industrial era is highly significant.