“Ruination is an act perpetrated, a condition to which one is subject, and a cause of loss.”
—Ann Laura StolerFootnote 1“Class is something beneath your clothes, under your skin, in your reflexes, in your psyche, at the very core of your being.”
—Annette KuhnFootnote 2The contributors to this special issue on “Crumbling Cultures” explore the cultural and political legacies of deindustrialization in the United States and Great Britain. In their introduction, the editors call for more careful attention to the cultural significance of economic change over the longue durée. Deindustrialization, they remind us, is a continuing process, as is the struggle over meaning and collective memory. Let me offer an example from my own Canadian research. Ten years ago, Weyerhaeuser closed the corrugated paper mill in Sturgeon Falls, Ontario. One hundred and forty workers lost their jobs. It was not a big mill closure in the larger scheme of things, but it dealt a huge blow to this small town of six thousand. Workers' efforts to reopen the mill failed, and it eventually was demolished. The excavators started with the newer parts of the century-old mill and worked their way back. Its production records, documenting its rich history, were also shredded by the departing company. “Boxes, and boxes, and boxes,” reported Hubert Gervais in an oral history interview.Footnote 3 The protesting workers had managed to turn back the mobile shredding van at the front gate, but it returned to finish the job. When the mill shut in 2002, it had occupied a central place in Sturgeon Falls for 105 years—of which Weyerhaeuser was there for three. Whose history was it, really?
Unless you are from Northern Ontario, as I am, you have probably never heard of Sturgeon Falls. It was never known as a site of labor militancy, nor did it become a poster child for industrial decline. There were no national or international headlines, and few politicians visited looking for photo ops. The mill closing drama played itself out almost exclusively on the pages of the local newspaper. “One of the great ironies of differential regional deindustrialization, which is the standard form of capitalist ‘crisis,’ ” writes historian Christopher H. Johnson, “is that it hardly leads to revolution, but rather engenders quiescence, the internalization of despair.”Footnote 4 Anyone who has interviewed displaced workers, or is from a working-class family, has seen or felt some of the pain and suffering that has resulted. In the bitter aftermath of deindustrialization, working-class communities are often enveloped in silence and contend with stigmatization. Culturally, working people are increasingly made to feel ashamed of their class origins. Working-class people in the United Kingdom, for example, have been mocked and derided as “chavs” in recent years.Footnote 5 “When they are stripped of their workplace identities,” writes American anthropologist Kathryn Marie Dudley, “dislocated workers face an external culture that no longer seems to value, or grant social legitimacy to, the kind of work they do.”Footnote 6 The scale and scope of deindustrialization is staggering.
Writing about deindustrialization requires that we try to understand the world as the marginalized see it, without downplaying the structural forces they are up against. “The history of capitalism,” David Harvey writes, “is punctuated by intense phases of spatial reorganization.”Footnote 7 Old places are devalued and destroyed, new places created.Footnote 8 Without question, capital's command of spatial relations is “a crucial weapon in management's arsenal.”Footnote 9 I have come to view mill and factory closings as willful acts of violence perpetrated against working people. The destruction of industrial areas, and the people who call these places home, is not altogether different from what happens in wartime. Robert Bevan's work has helped me make this linkage. In The Destruction of Memory, Bevan notes that “to lose all that is familiar can mean a disorienting exile from the memories they have invoked.”Footnote 10 The attempted cultural erasure of your enemy is thus a “means of dominating, terrorizing, dividing, or eradicating it altogether.”Footnote 11 In ethnic cleansing, for example, the destruction of “memories, history and identity attached to architecture and place—enforced forgetting—is the goal itself.”Footnote 12 These brutal acts of enforced forgetting extend to peacetime processes of economic change and deindustrialization. An industrial closure, its demolition, and the shredding of its history, all contribute to the climate of fear that pervades working-class communities—“to lower morale and speed defeat.”Footnote 13 Old solidarities are eroded, and working-class institutions crumble under the weight of the crisis.
Clearly, deindustrialization is not a “politically-neutral economic process,” as Jim Phillips reminds us here, but it is “willed” into being. In a postindustrial era, industrial workers are assigned to the past, not the present—even though a sizeable percentage of the workforce remains employed in traditional blue-collar occupations. Historian Jackie Clarke asks, what accounts for their invisibility? In a 2011 article on displaced Moulinex workers in France, Clarke concluded that new forms of working-class invisibility have emerged since the 1980s. Interestingly, Clarke uses the term invisibility to “signal not total disappearance, but various forms of marginalization, occlusion and disqualification from the mainstream political and media discourses which play an important role in shaping public understanding of the social world.”Footnote 14 The collapse of trade unionism in many countries is thus part of a wider cultural and political defeat of working people. Jackie Clarke's wider conception of invisibility therefore helps us move beyond the either/or dichotomies in the “end of class” debate.Footnote 15 What is rendered visible or invisible, audible or inaudible, in our postindustrial and postmodern times is thus highly significant.
To understand the far-reaching significance of this transformation, the editors of this special issue speak to the need for new methods and different types of evidence. Only by widening the circle in the conversation, they suggest, are we going to better understand “what it means and how it feels to live in a deindustrializing society.” Artists, photographers, filmmakers, novelists, digital practitioners, and others therefore have vital contributions to make. The essays in this issue explore the cultural meaning of deindustrialization from various angles, shifting our attention away from the loss felt by industrial workers to cultural agency, resilience, and flux in formerly industrial towns and regions. There is a danger, James Rhodes cautions, in exaggerating the degree to which cultural erasure accompanied deindustrialization. Working-class cultures formed around sites of industrial production may have been devastated, but for now at least, these cultural formations persist in the hardest-hit places, such as Youngstown, Ohio.
Industrial Culture and Smokestack Nostalgia
In the past decade, it has become commonplace to say that deindustrialization is a cultural and political process as well as an economic one. Recent years have seen the release of a large number of scholarly books and articles that interrogate the underlying cultural significance of the contemporary crisis in industrial capitalism. Hundreds of coffee table books, novels, popular websites, arts projects, and films explore ruined industrial landscapes. This collection brings sustained scholarly attention to this diverse cultural production. It would be easy, Tim Strangleman writes, to dismiss this “rich and powerful collection of highly aestheticized portraits” as yet another expression of creeping “smokestack nostalgia.”Footnote 16 A “more generous” reading of these “manifestations of crumbling cultures,” he argues, presents us with an invaluable opportunity to “understand both contemporary assumptions about work, industry and class as well as throwing new light on industrial culture itself.” Even smokestack nostalgia, he insists, tells us something meaningful about our times.
There is, of course, a huge scholarship on nostalgia. Svetlana Boym, for example, noted that nostalgia is a “defense mechanism” in a time of “accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheavals.”Footnote 17 She called this sentiment of loss and displacement a profoundly “historical emotion.” However, feelings of nostalgia are not restricted to what is personally experienced but can be found in generalized sentiments in wider circulation.Footnote 18 We see this in the rise of what Raphael Samuel called “resurrectionary enthusiasms,” such as industrial archaeology, railway clubs, and collection mania more generally.Footnote 19 Contributors to this special issue, most notably Sherry Lee Linkon, emphasize that deindustrialization is a long-term cultural process. In some locales, she argues, deindustrialization has even become “the defining characteristic of community identity.” As a result, it is only natural that many cultural producers now representing deindustrialization have no personal experience with mill or factory work or their closure. They are nonetheless profoundly marked by the industrial age and its demise.
A better understanding of how this works in practice is one of the great strengths of this special issue. For example, deindustrialization is shown to be an “active presence” in the novels examined by Sherry Lee Linkon, providing the setting and significant plot elements. The fictional writings of Christopher Barzak and Michael Zadoorian, for example, resist nostalgia “not only by emphasizing the way of life that was lost when the mills closed but also by suggesting the community's unwillingness to simply let it go.”Footnote 20 In the process, they “make visible” the contested nature between past and present. Notably, Linkon concludes from this discussion that there is an “emerging variation on ‘smokestack nostalgia,’ ” one in which “images of deindustrialization serve not only as representation of the past but also as a resource for imagining the future.” The tensions between the industrial past, a deindustrialized present, and an uncertain or contested future, contribute to the dramatic structure of the novels. In time, deindustrialization has come to serve as a framework for understanding, writes Linkon:
These landscapes contain more than economic loss, more than the evocative decay that make them such appealing images to photographers and media producers, more than the memories of past lives that make them meaningful to remember the good old days before the mill closed. They also provide a framework for thinking about how those who have inherited these places, both individuals and communities, imagine their own lives.Footnote 21
A similar story is told by James Rhodes in his examination of the real-life story of Youngstown's Kelly “The Ghost” Pavlik, the world middleweight boxing champion from 2007 to 2010. In his essay, Rhodes shows us how the city's gritty working-class identity contributed to how Pavlik was represented. In many ways, Pavlik—the son of a former steelworker—seemed to embody the city's industrial past: now remembered as white, working-class, and male. If deindustrialization raised troubling questions about place identity in its aftermath, destabilizing long-held place narratives, Rhodes convincingly shows us that its immediate cultural impact may be overstated in the scholarship.Footnote 22 Youngstown's working-class identity did not completely break down following the closure of Mahoning Valley's steel mills. “What we see instead,” he writes, “is a more complex interaction of space and time.” Here, as elsewhere, “the spectre of the industrial past still illuminates the contemporary landscape and construction of place.” In the story of Pavlik, then, we see cultural continuity rather than rupture. This sentiment cannot be dismissed as simply smokestack nostalgia, Rhodes insists.
Is it an example of “radical nostalgia,” perhaps? In his often fascinating study of American veterans of the International Brigades after the Spanish Civil War, Peter Glazer maintained that nostalgia need not be politically reactionary or eulogistic. It can reinfuse “lost histories with credibility, substance, and emotional resonance.”Footnote 23 While there is nothing overtly “politically progressive” in Pavlik's image, it did offer Youngstown residents a sense of pride in their industrial working-class culture. One does wonder about the racial and gender politics: Did the appeal of Pavlik's masculine image represent a lament for a past that was remembered (however wrongly) as white and male as well as working-class? On this very point, Leon Fink has raised some troubling questions about the racial politics of mill town nostalgia in the US South.Footnote 24 Of course, the political possibilities of “the local” as a site of working-class resistance have been the subject of much debate by the likes of David Harvey and Doreen Massey.Footnote 25 Though the contributors to this special issue work at varying geographic scales, I don't have a clear sense here of the ways in which scale matters when considering the cultural meaning of deindustrialization.Footnote 26
Nowhere has the past overshadowed the present quite so much as in the former coalfields of the United Kingdom, which “long formed the bedrock of discussions of class and place.”Footnote 27 In this issue, Jim Phillips helps us understand how government-orchestrated pit closures triggered the 1984–1985 British miners' strike. Deindustrialization was a long-running thing in the Scottish coalfields, starting in the 1950s. How these closures were handled by the state-owned National Coal Board, however, changed in the 1970s and early 1980s. The shifting balance of class power, which culminated in the election of the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher, caused the state to violate the long-established practice of negotiating pit closures and finding alternative industrial employment for those displaced. Phillips calls this practice the “moral economy” of the coalfields. Andrew Perchard picks up the story of the Scottish coalfields where Phillips left off, exploring the “cultural scars” of deindustrialization on Scottish national consciousness. The precipitous decline of shipbuilding, steel manufacture, and coal mining in the region became a cause célèbre for Scottish nationalists and left its political and cultural imprint. As a stateless nation, Scotland was not in a position to intervene to turn things around or to soften the blow. The specter of deindustrialization, however, nourished Scottish nationalist demands for political sovereignty or self-government.
Though a similar story played itself out here in Canada during the 1970s vis-à-vis the United States, deindustrialization and the failure of liberal or left-wing political formations to respond effectively was and is far more likely to lead to political demobilization, disillusionment, and a rightward shift in electoral politics.Footnote 28 France's extreme right-wing Front National, for example, has its electoral base in former industrial areas such as Pas-de-Calais that once voted Communist or Socialist. The British National Party's emergence in deindustrialized cities like Burnley is another case in point.Footnote 29 The same is true of parts of the United States that were once associated with industrial liberalism.Footnote 30 In the recent US presidential election, Harlan County, Kentucky—historically, an important site of working-class mobilization and union struggle and the subject of a marvelous recent book by Alessandro Portelli—voted massively for Republican challenger Mitt Romney (81.2 percent) and against Barack Obama (17.2 percent).Footnote 31 Why some areas politically mobilized in the face of deindustrialization, or in its aftermath, and other places demobilized remains an open question. Much more research needs to be done.
To a considerable degree, the essays in this special issue rely on Raymond Williams' notion of “structures of feeling” to provide them with a framework to understand changing (or fracturing) class subjectivities.Footnote 32 A structure of feeling is best understood as the “sentiments, which inform and construct ‘ways of life.’”Footnote 33 These thoughts and feelings are grounded in experience and embodied presence. To demarcate change and alternative or oppositional positions within a culture, Williams' identified three types of structures of feeling: dominant, residual, and emergent.Footnote 34 For John Kirk, these structures of feeling constitute “a site where a specific sensibility can be encountered” without losing the ability to “think about identity in action as a more fluid process.”Footnote 35 Hence, once-dominant industrial cultures became residual ones in the aftermath of deindustrialization. Too often, writes Kathryn Marie Dudley, industrial workers are “portrayed as a vanishing breed, the contemporary representatives of a dying way of life.”Footnote 36
“Ruins Are Not Just Found, They Are Made”Footnote 37
If the contributors to this special issue focus on the ways in which people live in and with industrial ruination, this emergent sociocultural approach runs counter to more aesthetic approaches to industrial ruins. In recent years, there has been an “extraordinary intensification” of interest in the aesthetics of industrial ruins.Footnote 38 In their introduction to this special issue, the editors highlight the interdisciplinary work of Tim Edensor and others who work on the aesthetics and materiality of industrial ruins, heralding the power of these ruins “to provoke, to elicit, and to conjure up.” In his own essay on the visual imagery of deindustrialization, Tim Strangleman pushes this idea further when he challenges critics of Edensor (such as myself) to be more “generous” and less “reductive” in our criticisms. Sherry Lee Linkon makes a similar point in her study of literary sources in the United States, appealing to historians to “take these representations seriously.” These texts, she argues, “reveal the way contemporary people—the writers as well as the characters—make sense of the past.”
As always, Strangleman and Linkon are highly reflexive in their writing and raise important points. Underlying each essay, however, appears to be an assumption that disciplinary insularity or snobbery is behind these scholarly criticisms. “Historians may be tempted,” writes Linkon, “to dismiss these creative texts as trivial.” We are unfortunately left to wonder why historians might be so tempted, as we have long engaged with literary and visual sources. They are hardly controversial, at least in my experience. So why raise it? From what I can tell, charges of disciplinary tunnel vision often come in response to scholars who are, in fact, engaging critically with the work of cultural producers. Taking these cultural producers “seriously,” however, requires that we inquire into their underlying logic. The proliferating images of industrial ruins may “act to stimulate and provoke,” as Tim Strangleman suggests here, but what are their politics?
It is the class politics of Tim Edensor's 2005 book Industrial Ruins that I objected to.Footnote 39 While Edensor praises the social, aesthetic, and sensual value of industrial ruin, his gaze is a universalizing one that aestheticizes rubble into ruin. The aesthetic charge of these sites is lionized. He goes on to celebrate these abandoned areas as “unpoliced, extra spaces,” existing outside of capitalism.Footnote 40 In our “over-regulated” cities, these areas provide a space of relative freedom. Within Edensor's ruin-gaze, there is little desire to inquire into adjoining working-class neighborhoods or even to ask what happened here. It is the aesthetic beauty of the ruins themselves that are visible in his writing, not other living people. Fundamentally, for Edensor, these are sites of “redundant power” where old industrial hierarchies have fallen into ruin.Footnote 41 Ironic readings of the “petty authority” of old signage, telling workers what to do and what not to do, follow. I find Edensor's reading problematic, as it misses the big picture. The ruination of the factory itself stands as clear evidence that these old class hierarchies are very much intact. An aesthetic reading, rather than a wider social or political one, misses this fundamental point.
I made my criticism of Edensor's theoretically sophisticated and provocative work in the context of a wider political critique of the ruin-gazing practiced by youthful “urban explorers” who covertly reconnoiter abandoned areas, “leaving only footprints and taking only pictures.”Footnote 42 In Corporate Wasteland, I argued that there was a great deal of similarity in Edensor's aesthetic approach to industrial ruins and the online writings and photography of these overwhelmingly white middle-class enthusiasts. They are clearly drawn to the sense of melancholic loss found in these often sublime abandoned spaces as well as by the thrill of transgression and danger as they journey across the social and geographic distance. It is not insignificant that virtually none of the thousands of online posts and blogs, zines, articles, and books that I read refer to family memories of industrial work of any kind or to personal ties to adjacent residential areas. They were not so much “going back” as they were venturing out. One's social location does matter. We see this play out in any number of ways, including the rhetorical distinction drawn between the higher purpose of middle-class explorers and the baser instincts of working-class trespassers: a sure case of middle-class High Diction. My interpretation may be ungenerous, though I don't believe it is, but it takes the cultural and political work of these urban explorers seriously.Footnote 43 Their explorations tell us a great deal about this historical juncture, raising all kinds of intriguing questions. What inspires these young people to seek out and explore industrial ruins? Once there, what do they see and do? How do they make sense of it later? Is it nostalgia, or something else?
We have already heard the ways in which nostalgia can be detached from one's own lived experience and popularized more generally.Footnote 44 However, I am not convinced that the impulse behind urban exploration, and other forms of ruin-gazing, is primarily a lament for the loss of industry. Unlike industrial archaeology or steam railway enthusiasts, urban explorers are not all that interested in what these mills or factories did or why they closed. Their emotional appeal is aesthetic and experiential rather than historical. Ruin-gazing may therefore be more usefully understood as voyeuristic rather than nostalgic. Typically, the voyeur finds pleasure in observing the intimate lives of others, sometimes even finding pleasure in other people's pain or loss. It is as though the voyeur is “looking at some exoticized and deliberately tragic other.”Footnote 45 Here, Julie Salverson makes a political distinction between melancholy and mourning. Drawing inspiration from Freud, she writes that mourning is a psychic response to loss that maintains the integrity of the other, whereas with melancholia “[w]hat is lost is internalized and becomes the focus of one's own psychic pain.”Footnote 46 Another's loss therefore becomes our own.
Taking the broader historical view, the “cult of ruins” has inspired elite and middle-class imaginations for centuries.Footnote 47 Romantic values endowed abandoned places with special meaning, aestheticizing rubble into ruin. These “icons of wistful romantic loss” were sites of tourism and travel.Footnote 48 A tourist evaluation of place is usually aesthetic, with travellers valuing “feeling and imagination in their encounters.”Footnote 49 In her perceptive study of elite tourists to nineteenth-century Canada, for example, historian Patricia Jasen wrote, “Romanticism not only clothed places and cultural objects with thick layers of meaning, it offered an ideology which enabled travellers to these places to see themselves as more sensitive and original than other tourists, as members of an aristocracy of inner feeling.”Footnote 50 The rise of antimodernism, at the time, saw a growing “feeling of over civilization” among the privileged who sought out authentic places in their secular pilgrimages.Footnote 51 T. J. Jackson Lears explained this phenomenon as part of a wider trans-Atlantic “dissatisfaction with modern culture.”Footnote 52 The history of tourism is thus infused with the language of class.Footnote 53 A similar point can and should be made of ruin-gazing. “Other forms of capital,” writes John Kirk, “cultural, social, linguistic and symbolic capital—all operate in variable ways to reproduce class divisions.”Footnote 54
Post-colonial scholar Ann Laura Stoler has called on us to go beyond the “melancholic gaze” to embrace a more “critical vantage point” with respect to ruins and ruination.Footnote 55 “Asking how people live with and in ruins redirects the engagement elsewhere,” she writes.Footnote 56 To ruin “is to inflict or bring great and irretrievable disaster upon, to destroy agency, to reduce to a state of poverty, to demoralize completely.”Footnote 57 Who is mobile and who is not is, of course, significant here. “Mobility and control over mobility,” notes geographer Doreen Massey, “both reflect and reinforce power.”Footnote 58 In her theoretical work on class and gender, sociologist Beverley Skeggs similarly observes that mobility “is a resource in which not everyone has an equal partnership.”Footnote 59 Accordingly, immobility, its inverse, “increasingly acquires the connotation of defeat, of failure and of being left behind, of being fixed in place.”Footnote 60
As Tim Strangleman shows so well in his essay, the notion of “ruin porn” has surfaced in recent years to denote the “exuberant connoisseurship of dereliction” exhibited by filmmakers, photographers, and other artists flooding into Detroit and other hard-hit cities in search of the good stuff.Footnote 61 Ruin photography, in particular, “has been criticized for its ‘pornographic’ sensationalism,” writes John Patrick Leary.Footnote 62 These young and privileged white “creatives” gloss over Detroit's “deep structural problems” and “aestheticize poverty without inquiring of its origins.”Footnote 63 For Detroit-based author Paul Mullins,
At least obliquely, the porn metaphor suggests the covert excitement of viewing ruins from the privileged standpoint of the bourgeois, and in this respect it borrows from a long-established tradition of slum tourism by White bourgeois that swept Europe and America in the late 19th century… This reduction of impoverishment to an aesthetic was its own pornographic gaze…Footnote 64
Clearly, the commodity life of industrial sites did not end with their ruination. It is therefore hardly surprising that people in Detroit object to this “voyeuristic viewing.”Footnote 65
In a related point, Sharon Zukin sees authenticity as a “cultural form of power over space.”Footnote 66 Claims of authenticity usually arise in times of uncertainty or instability. However, we only notice it from the outside, looking in. Formerly associated with a particular quality in people, our understanding of the location of authenticity has “migrated” to a particular quality in things or experiences. To be associated with an authentic act (like urban exploration) or location, Zukin contends, “confers an aura of moral superiority.”Footnote 67 Nineteenth-century bohemian attitudes live on, she says, in the new “hipster” districts of New York City. Warehouse parties, arts spaces, lofts, all become locales for “cool cultural consumption.” A similar kind of gritty urban aesthetic appears to buttress the aesthetic appeal of industrial ruins. Capitalism has proved adept at synthesizing “dirt and danger into new cultural commodities.”Footnote 68
A recent article by Caitlin De Silvey and Tim Edensor notes the “recurrent tension” between assertions that modern ruins “challenge and critique normative social and material formations” and counter-arguments about their “aestheticized passivity.”Footnote 69 Notably, De Silvey and Edensor acknowledge the “persistent tendency” in ruin scholarship to privilege the aesthetic and the general failure to engage with economic and social contexts.Footnote 70 “In many ways,” they write, “ruin-imagery has become complicit in the logic of the global marketplace.”Footnote 71 It is this point, above all, that warrants further discussion in Tim Strangleman's otherwise insightful contribution to this special issue. The central place of artists in the gentrification process has long been hotly debated in urban studies.Footnote 72 A similar debate seems to be emerging here within the context of deindustrialization/postindustrialism more generally. Whether or not you agree with the idea that artists and urban explorers are active participants in the postindustrial transformation, and are thus a “colonizing arm” of the middle class, there is little doubt that they are implicated as much as we are as scholars.
In Thom Davies contribution to this issue on the “visual geography” of Chernobyl, site of the world's worst nuclear power accident, we see a scholar consider his own political and ethical implication in the story he is telling. Here, the focus is on the people who remain behind and the ways in which the “invisible tragedy” is rendered all too visible in the images of family members clutching old photographs of lost loved ones. Davies critically reflects on this public performance of grief and his own part in it, as he and the other photographers “hustle” for the “best position to ‘regard the pain of others.’ ” It is this self-awareness about one's own social location, and the politics of one's own actions, that is missing in so much of the urban exploration and industrial ruination scholarship.
Conclusion
This 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. As a result, except for Phillips' and Perchard's essays, trade unions are hardly mentioned here. The subject, instead, 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. As John Kirk wrote some time ago, “[e]conomic obliteration incurs a cultural and social cost.”Footnote 73 Working-class cultures formed during the industrial era may not have been erased, as many contributors point out here, but the last few decades have represented a devastating political and cultural defeat for working people. Who could have imagined Michigan as a “right to work” state even a few years ago? The locus of working-class identity and resistance, it seems, has shifted from sites of industrial production to sites of cultural production or community identification. The contributors to this special issue therefore have little to say about postindustrial processes of enforced forgetting.
This shift in emphasis is made easier here, perhaps, by the selection of geographic study areas. 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. The industrial past and its ruination therefore loom especially large. “Important things happen in small places,” writes Jim Phillips.Footnote 74 Yet nobody speaks to the deindustrialization of large metropolitan cities such as New York, London, or Montreal. This is no accident, as economic change in large and relatively prosperous cities is often understood in terms of urban or neighbourhood change. 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 neighborhoods 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. What is rendered visible or invisible in the aftermath of deindustrialization is, hence, the result of “the erasure of industry and industrial workers and of resistance to erasure.”Footnote 75 The essays in this collection reveal the diverse ways in which the sediment of the history of deindustrialization is deposited over time, reminding us once again that the process is “socially complicated, historically deep, geographically diverse, and politically perplexing.”Footnote 76
