Since the 1970s, the closure of mines, mills, and factories has marked a rupture in working-class lives. The Deindustrialized World interrogates the process of industrial ruination, from the first impact of layoffs in metropolitan cities, suburban areas, and single-industry towns to the shock waves that rippled outward, affecting entire regions, countries, and beyond. Scholars from France, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States share personal stories of ruin and ruination and ask others what it means to be working class in a postindustrial world. Part 1 examines the ruination of former workplaces and the failing health and injured bodies of industrial workers. Part 2 brings to light disparities between rural resource towns and cities, where hipster revitalization often overshadows industrial loss. Part 3 reveals the ongoing impact of deindustrialization on working people and their place in the new global economy. Together, the chapters open a window on the lived experiences of people living at ground zero of deindustrialization, revealing its layered impacts and examining how workers, environmentalists, activists, and the state have responded to its challenges.

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A Fascinating Investigation of Industry’s Modern Ruins and the "Deindustrial Sublime."

"Koistinen puts the ‘political’ back in political economy in this fascinating account of New England’s twentieth-century industrial erosion. First-rate research and sound judgments make this study essential reading."--Philip Scranton, Rutgers University--Camden "Well-organized and clearly written, Confronting Decline looks at one community to understand a process that has become truly national."--David Stebenne, Ohio State University "Koistinen’s important book makes clear that many industrial cities and regions began to decline as early as the 1920s."--Alan Brinkley, Columbia University "Sheds new light on a complex system of enterprise that sometimes blurs, and occasionally overrides, the distinctions of private and public, as well as those of locality, state, region, and nation. In so doing, it extends and deepens the insights of previous scholars of the American political economy."--Robert M. Collins, University of Missouri The rise of the United States to a position of global leadership and power rested initially on the outcome of the Industrial Revolution. Yet as early as the 1920s, important American industries were in decline in the places where they had originally flourished. The decline of traditional manufacturing--deindustrialization--has been one of the most significant aspects of the restructuring of the American economy. In this volume, David Koistinen examines the demise of the textile industry in New England from the 1920s through the 1980s to better understand the impact of industrial decline. Focusing on policy responses to deindustrialization at the state, regional, and federal levels, he offers an in-depth look at the process of industrial decline over time and shows how this pattern repeats itself throughout the country and the world.

Winner of CLR James Book Prize from the Working Class Studies Association and 2nd Place for the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing. In 1980, Christine J. Walley’s world was turned upside down when the steel mill in Southeast Chicago where her father worked abruptly closed. In the ensuing years, ninety thousand other area residents would also lose their jobs in the mills—just one example of the vast scale of deindustrialization occurring across the United States. The disruption of this event propelled Walley into a career as a cultural anthropologist, and now, in Exit Zero, she brings her anthropological perspective home, examining the fate of her family and that of blue-collar America at large. Interweaving personal narratives and family photos with a nuanced assessment of the social impacts of deindustrialization, Exit Zero is one part memoir and one part ethnography— providing a much-needed female and familial perspective on cultures of labor and their decline. Through vivid accounts of her family’s struggles and her own upward mobility, Walley reveals the social landscapes of America’s industrial fallout, navigating complex tensions among class, labor, economy, and environment. Unsatisfied with the notion that her family’s turmoil was inevitable in the ever-forward progress of the United States, she provides a fresh and important counternarrative that gives a new voice to the many Americans whose distress resulting from deindustrialization has too often been ignored. This book is part of a project that also includes a documentary film.

Pigeon Trouble chronicles a foreign-born, birdphobic anthropologist's venture into the occult craft of pigeon shooting in the depths of Pennsylvania's anthracite coal country. Though initially drawn by a widely publicized antipigeon shoot protest by animal rights activists, the author quickly finds himself traversing into a territory much stranger than clashing worldviews—an uncanny world saturated with pigeon matters, both figuratively and literally. What transpires is a sustained meditation on self-reflexivity as the author teeters at the limit of his investigation—his own fear of birds. The result is an intimate portrayal of the miners' world of conspiracy theory, anti-Semitism, and whiteness, all inscribed one way or another by pigeon matters, and seen through the anguished eyes of a birdphobe. This bestiary experiment through a phobic gaze concludes with a critique on the visual trope in anthropology's self-reflexive turn. An ethnographer with a taste for philosophy, Song writes in a distinctive descriptive and analytical style, obsessed with his locale and its inhabitants, constantly monitoring his own reactions and his impact on others, but always teasing out larger implications to his subject.

A novel account of the relationship between postindustrial capitalism and postmodern culture, this book looks at American poetry and art of the last fifty years in light of the massive changes in people's working lives. Over the last few decades, we have seen the shift from an economy based on the production of goods to one based on the provision of services, the entry of large numbers of women into the workforce, and the emergence of new digital technologies that have transformed the way people work. The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization argues that art and literature not only reflected the transformation of the workplace but anticipated and may have contributed to it as well, providing some of the terms through which resistance to labor was expressed. As firms continue to tout creativity and to reorganize in response to this resistance, they increasingly rely on models of labor that derive from values and ideas found in the experimental poetry and conceptual art of decades past.