Heritage, Labour and the Working Classes
Edited by Laurajane Smith, Paul Shackel, Gary Campbell
Routledge – 2011 – 312 pages
Series: Key Issues in Cultural Heritage
Heritage, Labour and the Working Classes is both a celebration and commemoration of working class culture. It contains sometimes inspiring accounts of working class communities and people telling their own stories, and weaves together examples of tangible and intangible heritage, place, history, memory, music and literature.
Rather than being framed in a 'social inclusion' framework, which sees working class culture as a deficit, this book addresses the question "What is labour and working class heritage, how does it differ or stand in opposition to dominant ways of understanding heritage and history, and in what ways is it used as a contemporary resource?" It also explores how heritage is used in working class communities and by labour organizations, and considers what meanings and significance this heritage may have, while also identifying how and why communities and their heritage have been excluded. Drawing on new scholarship in heritage studies, social memory, the public history of labour, and new working class studies, this volume highlights the heritage of working people, communities and organizations. Contributions are drawn from a number of Western countries including the USA, UK, Spain, Sweden, Australia and New Zealand, and from a range of disciplines including heritage and museum studies, history, sociology, politics, archaeology and anthropology.
Heritage, Labour and the Working Classes represents an innovative and useful resource for heritage and museum practitioners, students and academics concerned with understanding community heritage and the debate on social inclusion/exclusion. It offers new ways of understanding heritage, its values and consequences, and presents a challenge to dominant and traditional frameworks for understanding and identifying heritage and heritage making.
1. Introduction Laurajane Smith, Paul Shackel and Gary Campbell 2. The 1984/85 Miners' Strike: re-claiming cultural heritage Michael Bailey and Simon Popple 3. Remembering Haymarket and the control for public memory Paul Shackel 4. The social and environmental upheaval of Blair Mountain: a working class struggle for unionization and historic preservation Brandon Nida and Michael Jessee Adkins 5. This is our island: multiple class heritage or ethnic solidarities? Richard Courtney 6. Don’t mourn organize: heritage, recognition and memory in Castleford, West Yorkshire Laurjane Smith and Gary Campbell 7. Images, icons and artefacts: maintaining an industrial culture in a post-industrial environment David Wray 8. A working town empowered: retelling textile history at Cooleemee, North Carolina Tamasin Wedgwood 9. The silencing of Blackball working class heritage, New Zealand Paul Maunder 10. Working class autobiography as cultural heritage Tim Strangleman 11. You say ‘po’-boy’, I say poor boy: New Orleans culinary and labour history sandwiched together Michael Mizell-Nelson 12. Swedish working class literature and the class politics of heritage Magnus Nilssen 13. Singing for socialism Kate Bowan and Paul Pickering 14. ‘Faces in the Street’: the Australian poetic working class heritage Sarah Attfield 15. Industrial folk song in our time Mark Gregory 16. ‘The world’s most perfect town’ reconsidered: negotiating class, labour and heritage in the Pullman community of Chicago Jane Eva Baxter and Andrew H. Bullen 17. Tolpuddle, Burston and Levellers: the making of radical and national heritages at English labour movement festivals Hilda Kean 18. Working class heritage without the working class. An ethnographic inquiry on gentrification in Ciutat (Mallorca) Marc Morell
Laurajane Smith is ARC Future Fellow in the Research School of Humanities and the Arts, the Australian National University, Canberra. Her previous publications include Archaeological Theory and the Politics of Cultural Heritage (2004); Uses of Heritage (2006) and Intangible Heritage (with Natsuko Akagawa, 2008). She is editor of the International Journal of Heritage Studies.
Paul Shackel is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Maryland. He has written several articles and books on labour, including The Archaeology of American Labor and Working-Class Life (2009) and Culture Change and the New Technology: An Archaeology of the Early American Industrial Era (1996).
Gary Campbell is an independent researcher. He has worked and published with Laurajane Smith on working class heritage, and has a background in industrial sociology and political science. He has worked as a researcher for the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union.