New Working-Class Studies (review)

Ten years ago, the formation of the Working class Academics group and the establishment of the Center for Working class Studies (CWCS) at Youngstown State University marked the beginning of new organizations devoted to working class issues. This book, New Working Class Studies, is the culmination of efforts by the CWCS and other individual academics, artists, and activists to organize an emerging body of knowledge referred to as New Working Class Studies.

New Working-Class Studies is organized into four parts: Part 1: New Working-Class Studies at the Intersections; Part 2: Disciplinary Perspectives; Part 3: Representations; and Part 4: Politics and Education. This approach provides a useful framework for conceptualizing the areas of study that comprise this body of work.

John Russo and Sherry Linkon's introductory chapter, "What's New about New Working-Class Studies?," does an excellent job of contextualizing new working-class studies in the larger perspective of neighboring bodies of knowledge that includes American studies, labor history, and cultural studies. The authors document the ongoing absence of social class in the national discussion of diversity surrounding their crystallizing 1995 question, "When will class be invited to the diversity banquet?" In addition, they acknowledge the assertion of "working-class" as a cover term for "white, male, racist, and sexist" (p. 3), and argue that social class should be taken as seriously as race and gender.

Part 1: New Working-Class Studies at the Intersections focuses on social class intersections with race and gender and includes several interdisciplinary essays that also focus on race and gender to illustrate that issues of race, gender, and class are not zero-sum identity propositions. Elizabeth Faue recounts developments in women's labor history, and David Roediger's provocatively titled chapter, "More Than Two Things," alludes to the usefulness of focusing on all three constructs in the field of creative writing to inform discussions of U.S. labor history. Kimberley Phillips traces African American working-class history since 1945 and the role of the military in social mobility.

Part 2: Disciplinary Perspectives addresses the contributions of three academic disciplines to the development of new working-class studies. Paul Lauter continues the discussion on working-class literature and focuses on the long-standing definitional problem of who is working-class. Don Mitchell's chapter reviews the literature on the radical geography of capitalism from a working-class perspective, and Michael Zweig presents a wide-ranging economic analysis of U.S. labor unions, globalization, and the market.

Part 3: Representations explores how working-class people represent themselves and how they are represented in poetry, memoir, film, and music. Jim Daniels reviews the literature on working-class poetry and provides a number of insightful examples that document daily working-class life. British railway autobiography is the subject of Tim Strangleman's chapter and represents an interesting, but often overlooked, aspect of the "history from below" movement. Tom Zaniello provides a useful review of both Hollywood and documentary films on unions, workers, and working-class issues. To conclude this section, Rachel Lee Rubin analyzes the race, gender, and social class perspectives of American music in a variety of genres.

Finally, Part 4: Politics and Education examines working-class life from the twin perspectives of academic study and lived experience. Jack Metzgar's chapter on politics analyzes the value of two recent books (Texeira & Rogers, 2000; Zweig, 2000) and their implications for the 2000 presidential election and the social class vernacular. Renny Christopher's essay, "New Working-Class Studies in Higher Education," may be the most relevant chapter for readers of this journal; however, the wide-ranging discussion is limited to introductory perspectives on the demographics of new students, social class influences on pedagogy, and the preparation of future faculty. The final chapter in the book is Robert Bruno and Lisa Jordan's assessment of a labor education-based course. It describes their approach to raising the class...