Detroit Tales: Short Fiction from the Motor City

Detroit Tales: Short Fiction from the Motor City

A reading from Detroit Tales. The stories in Detroit Tales aren't just tales about Detroit—they are tales about urban, working-class America. In these stories, people struggle both to remain in the city and to escape the city. The three main forces in this book are the city, the workplace, and the automobile. In their cars, the people in these stories negotiate the territory between work and home. The conflicts arise in the characters' impulses to veer off their well-worn paths. What can they do? Where can they go? What forces pull them away, and what forces pull them back? In attempting to answer these questions, the characters search for what can provide them with spiritual sustenance. Often, the relief from the drudgery of their daily lives is provided in the fleeting dazzle of fireworks or Christmas lights, but they take what they can. If these stories have one unifying theme, it's that escape is not the answer. When the pulls of friendship and love and personal responsibility draw us back to our ordinary homes and our ordinary jobs, we must trust those pulls, and we must lead those lives with as much dignity as we can muster.

First, administrators and faculty and staff members frequently use a “student body” trope for differentiating between campuses, referring to the distinct character of the student body on the branch campuses. This kind of rhetoric invariably gets knowing nods from fellow constituents—not surprising, given how class is literally written on the bodies of students on both the main and the regional campus. In Unbearable Weight, Cultural critic and feminist Susan Bordo has revealed how the body becomes a cultural image capable of taking active roles in identity formation. Queer feminist and fiction writer Dorothy Allison has described how social class is one of the key factors determining how the body reflects one’s identity. The “student body” on the main campus is often pampered, white, and extremely skinny, while the “regional campus” body is more likely to be of color and of size and have the markings of various kinds of labor (blue-collar, maternal, etc.). These are physical markings, apparent to the naked eye, so it is obvious why discussion of “student body” has become such a dominant trope.

My presentation analyzes the absence of class in the discourse used by constituents of both campuses. Using the theoretical work of Bordo and Allison, I argue that more explicit and thoughtful attention to issues of class in this discourse would be more productive. The “student body” trope has outlasted its usefulness, becoming a euphemism. In particular, I argue that a nuanced class consciousness that acknowledges that the “body” is different (in part) because of a different class affiliation could serve transformative and even activist functions on regional campuses, helping the regional campuses (proudly) define themselves as “working class.”

Page Dougherty Delano, Borough of Manhattan Community College/CUNY, paged1@earthlink.net

Sweater Wars: Sex, Class and the Nationalization of Morality in World War II

Traditional literary studies tend to perpetuate a view that American women on the World War II home front were ineffectual, removed from national concerns, focused on bobby pins and food rationing. A companion view suggested that women were overly sexed, and careless to the point of being enemies of the state, as seen in the alarm about teenage promiscuity, “amateur” prostitutes, the rising rate of venereal disease, gossipy, selfish women who could thoughtlessly pass on information about troop movements, and a high absentee rate which deemed women workers removed from the war effort. Working class women in particular were often viewed as loose, outside the acceptable (or respectable) parameters of citizenry. Narratives that embed women as citizens, or keep them legitimately excluded, are clearly at stake here.

Narratives about loose women, about “sex in the factories”—as a Time article announced, about the sweater wars allow us to examine more closely the ways that working class women were marginalized and kept from the master (masculine) narrative of wartime. Texts written by women who worked in factories, a smattering of fiction from the war period about working class women, women’s journalistic commentaries, and contemporary news articles about women workers in wartime reveal concerns about working women that complicated wartime narratives. Additionally, I look at wartime discussions of morale and morality to suggest that the anxiety about women’s independence during wartime needed to be contained by emphasizing their ‘essential’ bent towards dependence and immorality. In an increasingly centralized government and economy, a mobilized society nonetheless required imagination, new ways of doing things, and individual initiative, but representations of the war period reveal the many ways women were kept from this realm.

Suzanne Diamond, Youngstown State University, sdiamond@ysu.edu

An American Pathology: Erased Histories in Two Hollywood Film Adaptations

The 1951 film, A Place in the Sun, and the 1999 film, The Talented Mr. Ripley, share a quintessentially American preoccupation with the quests of ambitious but disadvantaged central characters. Accordingly, the opening scenes in both films effectively compel empathetic attachment toward these characters and their plights: A young Montgomery Clift, in the earlier movie, is first depicted on a roadside, thumbing a ride out of middle-American obscurity under the intimidating shade of an Eastman Company billboard. This scene amounts to a cinematic template for an identically compelling opening scene in Ripley, where an earnest Matt Damon plays piano under the intimidating shade of a socialites’ gathering, dressed in a borrowed sport jacket with a university emblem. Employing these opening tableaux, both films direct their viewers’ focus towards the pathos of outsiderhood and the ascendant futures presumably merited by their underclass protagonists.

Treating the plights of either protagonist skeptically requires information about characters’ pasts which is critical to the novels’ plots but curiously omitted from both film adaptations. It would be useful, for instance, for the film viewer to know that Dreiser’s Clyde Griffiths had abandoned the scene of a fatal automobile accident or that Highsmith’s Tom Ripley had engaged in forgery and extortion, both prior to the pathos-inspiring situations employed to open the two films. I argue that these and other omissions from the film plots evidence an American meta-narrative, a mystification about origins with deeply relevant political implications; that the future is everything and that the past is—or should be—irrelevant is urged by each movie’s plot. Whereas the novels equip critical readers to interpret characters’ dismissals of their histories as an “American pathology,” the films implicitly join their protagonists in this selective, skewed and self-serving worldview, a phenomenon which curtails the critical response to social mobility upon which the source novels had insisted.

Paul Durrenberger, Penn State University, epd2@psu.edu

A Dialogue Between Academics and Activists (roundtable)
Public Intellectuals and Working-Class Struggles: Where do we go from here?

Paul Durrenberger received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Urbana in 1971 and is a Professor of Anthropology at Pennsylvania State University. He has done ethnographic fieldwork with tribal and peasant people in northern Thialand, Iceland, Alabama, Mississippi, Iowa, Chicago and Pennsylvania. He studies political-economic systems. He is also an applied anthropologist who has researched labor unions, and a member of the American Anthropology Association’s newly formed Labor Commission. Paul’s latest book, co-authored with Suzan Erem, is entitled Class Acts: An Anthropology of Service Workers and Their Union.

Other panelists in this roundtable include Suzan Erem, Staughton Lynd, Jennifer Nicols, and Rob O'Brien. With a focus on working-class advocacy, this roundtable takes a critical look at the relationship between scholarship and activism today.  We will open a dialogue between activists working outside of academia, and scholars who attempt to lobby for the interests of working-class and poor people from their positions within the Ivory Tower.  Drawing from the biographies and experiences of panelists and audience members, we will posit the question of whether, and to what extent, the feeling of a need to "exit" academia, in order to support social change in the "real world," is as strong today as it was a generation ago.   Building toward a constructive dialogue, this roundtable discussion will also focus on concrete examples of how alliances between labor and social justice activists working inside and outside of academia might be strengthened.

Terry Easton, Emory University, teaston@emory.edu

Atlanta’s “New” Working Class: Latino Day Laborers
Latinos in the South work in a variety of occupational settings, including onion and tobacco fields, carpet factories and chicken processing plants, hotels and restaurants, construction sites and private homes. In the early stages of the recent Latino migration to the South, men sent money home to support their families in Mexico and Central and South America; more recently, women and children are arriving in greater numbers to join their husbands and fathers. These men and women generally labor where working conditions are dirty and dangerous, health benefits are few, and wages are low. In addition to these workplace issues, Latinos in the South encounter language barriers, cultural differences, and xenophobia.

The hiring, working, and living conditions of Atlanta’s Latino day laborers comprise the primary subjects of this presentation. Latino day laborers wait for work at street corners and in for-profit temporary staffing agencies and non-profit hiring halls. They labor primarily in the construction, landscaping, and hospitality industries. Day laborers who wait for work on street corners sometimes get paid less than promised, or they don’t get paid at all. If Latino day laborers are injured at a jobsite, they likely won’t have health insurance or workers’ compensation insurance. Robberies and beatings of Latino day laborers are not uncommon, but these incidents are seldom reported to the police. In this paper, I discuss the plight of Atlanta’s Latino day laborers within the framework of contingent employment, race relations, and local and state codes and legislation.

  

    Suzan Erem is freelance writer for unions and nonprofits. She spent more than a dozen years working as a union organizer and staff representative, eventually serving seven years as the communications director of a 25,000-member SEIU local in Chicago. She also served for many years as an elected (volunteer) leader in the National Writers Union, UAW Local 1981 until recently stepping down. She is currently finishing up an NSF grant with Paul Durrenberger studying unions and democracy, and they have begun work on their next book about Charleston longshoremen. Her book, Labor Pains: Inside America's New Union Movement, was applauded by Barbara Ehrenreich who said, "I love it! It's about time somebody wrote about union organizing as the adventure it truly is!"