purpose is not to gainsay these perspectives, but to identify, complementarily, how Our Nig, the work of a Northern free black, also provides a working-class portrait of New England farm life, removed from the frontier that dominates accounts of American agrarian life.3 The novel articulates a young female farm servant’s class position and lack of agency.4 Consequently its engagement with the pastoral is highly original – an originality promoted by Wilson’s AfricanAmerican identity: the pastoral tradition to hand was a white Western one, from which she was largely
just a few kilometres but completely disconnected, having in common only the hundreds and thousands of workers who cross the entire region to carry out their daily tasks for the care and comfort of Santiago’s upper classes. In Chile, just like in other contexts in Latin America, there is a specific taxonomy to name these high-income sectors of society: they are called cuicos . Of course, the cuicos are not only recognizable by their accumulated capital. They behave in a certain way and have an identifiable
women occupied in Indonesian society. Before they could train as nurses, girls were required to have finished primary school. In principle, girls from poor families did not attend school. Girls from the middle and upper classes often did but it was considered culturally improper for upper-class girls – the ones among the population who could afford to study – to live outside their parents’ home when they were of marriageable age (fourteen to sixteen). The poor reputation of the hospitals made them appropriate workplaces only for lower-class women and for women whose
determination and their immediate needs – money. Still, the salary they offered seemed to me then enormous. I had my son to educate, and I have always had an irresistible urge to try my hand at any new job which offered itself, just to see if I could do it, so I signed the contract, hastily put together an act and bought some dresses. (Constanduros, 1946: 50) The pressing financial need is, of course, accounted for in the seemingly unavoidable expenditure for a middle-class parent – the fees for her son’s schooling at preparatory and public school. There is also though the
geography in terms of nearness to school being a criterion of admission as well as the practicalities of a child attending a school which is far from where they live. Much of the geography of choice is, of course, mediated by classed and racialised geographies and the level of income of the parents, as well as sometimes being dependent on the employment situation of one or both parents. Thus, as we have seen in the previous chapter, one process of choosing a school, for those who can, is to move into an area which has a desirable school or choice of schools in it. In many
Vic01 10/15/03 2:09 PM Page 16 Chapter 1 Context: the emergence of the British Labour Party The Labour Party emerged in a very specific context, namely to represent the working class of the most powerful nation of its day. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Britain’s dominant position in the world, her economic, military and political power, were largely taken as given, and Labour’s world-view and foreign policy developed within this environment of Britain as global hegemon. This is not something that the founders of the Labour Party necessarily
5 Everyday violence and Mai Mai militias in Eastern DRC What would you do if the state was a man? I’ll kill him.1 A From words to weapons lthough there were skirmishes, especially throughout the 1990s, Chapter 3 has already exposed how the first phase of the conflict was the defining moment in which the armed mobilisation of subordinate classes took place. The fact that the AFDL war was conducted under the guise of a national liberation movement and led by Laurent-Désiré Kabila succeeded in reviving the Mai Mai historical sentiment of fighting against
victims of murder have ‘a colour, a class and an address’. And in making the victims visible, in humanising the data, he argues that Rio de Janeiro can be seen as a microcosm of the country at large. Soares has described his own paradoxical love–hate relationship with the city in the extraordinary book Rio de Janeiro: Extreme city ( 2016 ). The book is part autobiography of his own attempts to challenge the pandemic of violent death, and part an interdisciplinary mixture of a sociology of the city’s favelas, an anthropology of the regimes of metropolitan governance
6 SITES OF STRUGGLE: DISABILITY IN WORKING-CLASS COALFIELDS LITERATURE In Lewis Jones’s dramatic retelling of the Tonypandy ‘Riots’ of 1910–11 in Cwmardy (1937), a young communist challenges the authorities to ‘come and work the coal themselves if they want it. Let them sweat and pant till their bodies twist in knots as ours have.’ He knows, however, that ‘[t]hey will do none of these things’, and tells the striking men to take heart, for: While it is true our bodies belong to the pit, so also is it true that this makes us masters of the pit. It can’t live
projecting an image of unanimity and grandeur. It also operates as concealment and stigma, as a way of externalising blame for failure and as a way to stigmatise dissent. They create a pose, illustrating that authority claims generate mutual constraints of behaviour on both authorities and subordinate classes and that consent is not ‘the whole story’ (Scott 1990: 2). In the DRC, although counterdiscourses are part of the public domain, they are constructed in the safety of anonymity. The chapter will proceed as follows. Firstly, it analyses peacebuilding’s public