The Literary Worlds of Workers: Narratives of Art from the Margins
28 Apr 2019-pp 113-134
TL;DR: The authors argue that workers are reflective beings who narrate their life worlds using literary tropes to outline their resistance and compromise with the extractive economy of organizations, and uncover two literary tropes of jokes and horror to outline how workers yearn for agency to reimagine material worlds in which they are immersed.
Abstract: In this study, we engage with marginal workers who are employed as security guards and janitors in India to understand how they re-enact stories of artefacts of the culture industry. We engage with workers using a narrative methodological frame to understand how literary tropes of workers could provide insights about the politics of disobedience and consent in which they may be implicated. We argue that workers are reflective beings who narrate their life worlds using literary tropes to outline their resistance and compromise with the extractive economy of organizations. We uncover two literary tropes of jokes and horror to outline how workers yearn for agency to reimagine material worlds in which they are immersed. At the same time, we outline how limits of the discursive vocabulary of workers limit their literary challenges to prevailing genres of inequality.
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TL;DR: This paper explored data relating to reading preferences in the 2012 British Cohort Study using a Bourdieusian class scheme and found that gender is far more important to the structuring of literary taste than Bourdieu ever supposed.
Abstract: In Distinction, Bourdieu indicated that literary taste was just as homologous with social class as tastes in music, food or art, even if it received comparatively little attention. Recent scholarship across various nations aiming to test, update and refine Bourdieu’s thesis has generally confirmed a relationship between cultural capital and reading habits, but neglect of Bourdieu’s multidimensional view of class, as well as reliance on rather undifferentiated genre categories, has tended to limit the conclusions. On top of that, gender is often flagged as far more important to the structuring of literary taste than Bourdieu ever supposed. This article seeks to overcome the limitations of extant research and clarify the relationship between class and gender in structuring literary taste, and thus symbolic domination, by exploring data relating to reading preferences in the 2012 British Cohort Study using a Bourdieusian class scheme.
28 citations
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TL;DR: In this article, jokes that Czech informants transmitted to their London government in exile from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, a nazi rump state carved from the former Czechoslovakia in March 1939, were analyzed.
Abstract: This article analyses jokes that Czech informants transmitted to their London government in exile from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, a nazi rump state carved from the former Czechoslovakia in March 1939. The first half of the article explores the informants’ claims that jokes constituted a particular form of resistance [odboj] and Czech nationalism in the face of an oppressive and ‘Germanizing’ nazi regime. The second half of the article complicates the informants’ interpretations, suggesting other ways in which we might understand Czech jokes and joke-telling under nazi rule. At times the Czechs’ ‘resistance’ was individual, personal and local, not necessarily part of any collective, national project. Further, jokes show that ambiguity and uncertainty constituted the essence of everyday life for most Czechs in the Protectorate. While challenging the resistance/collaboration and Czech/German dichotomies that have informed history writing on the Protectorate, the article proposes a different app...
24 citations
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TL;DR: The authors argue that the intermingling of philosophy and autobiography can tell us something new about the dangers and difficulties of post-colonisation inquiry, and the hesitant incursion of the autobiographical subject into Derrida's later texts dramatises this aporia and its effects on postcolonial debate.
Abstract: The question of Derrida's relationship with postcolonial theory has for a long time been a fraught one. Some of the major postcolonial critics engage directly with Derrida's reflections on dissemination and excentricity, while others argue, on the contrary, that his mode of thinking is too abstract to tell us anything informative about the mechanics of colonial and neo-colonial oppression. This article responds to these postcolonial critics, and analyses two recent texts, L'Autre Cap and Le Monolinguisme de l'autre , in order to argue that the intermingling of philosophy and autobiography can tell us something new about the dangers and difficulties of postcolonial inquiry. These works attempt to examine the damaging effects of European cultural hegemony, and the imposition of the colonial language in Algeria, but, in including anxieties about this project expressed in the first person, they also convey a sense of doubt about the appropriateness of universalising philosophical language. The philosopher grapples with an aporia between the need to describe the universal experience of alienation and dispossession in language (since this indeed weakens the coloniser's assumed position of dominance and ownership), and attention to the very singularities that colonial culture oppresses, and that resist theorisation in general terms. The hesitant incursion of the autobiographical subject into Derrida's later texts dramatises this aporia and its effects on postcolonial debate.
9 citations
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TL;DR: The authors examines Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi's project of literary self-determination, as articulated in two programmatic essays published in the Hindi journal Sarasvati under his editorship (1903-1920), scrutinising his construction of literature as a culturally embedded category of national consequence.
Abstract: This article examines Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi’s project of literary self-determination, as articulated in two programmatic essays published in the Hindi journal Sarasvati under his editorship (1903–1920), scrutinising his construction of literature as a culturally embedded category of national consequence. His theorisation of Hindi literature as broadly inclusive in terms of its basic definition and function supported the growth of what he considered a national treasury of literature. His discussion of its historical and linguistic parameters and his emphasis on a prioritised plan of literary production, reified the notion of a modern discipline oriented towards a narrowly constructed national collective that sought to establish its sovereign identity via literature in Khari Boli Hindi. Though not explicit in its anti-colonial nationalism, this project nevertheless privileged Hindi as the projected lead language of a modern sovereign nation, with all the risks that delimitation entailed.
6 citations
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TL;DR: In this article, the authors highlight the significance of the contribution that literary researchers make in the area of policy and politics, which they call "researchers-as-artists".
Abstract: This article notes the significance of the contribution that literary researchers - who must see themselves as `researchers-as-artists' - make in the area of policy and politics. The `researcher-as-artist' chooses words aesthetically to tell stories that construct new stages for debate and discussion, and that inspire governments and policy-makers, They push intellectual boundaries; they challenge; they stimulate and confer visibility on creative ideas; they provoke - artistically, educationally and morally; and make connections. They encourage new ways of looking and seeing. Thus, for example, they can contribute to discussions of soap operas and connect them to folk-tales - tales of the folk, endlessly repeated variations on common themes. Using a literary optic in this way demonstrates not only the evolutionary powers of literature, but the vital role of literary researchers and of the stories they tell.
6 citations