Smith, Leonie and Archer, Alfred (2024) Industrial Nostalgia and Working-Class Identity. In: The Routledge Handbook of Nostalgia :. Routledge, London, pp. 341-353. ISBN 9781032429205
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
This chapter brings together important contributions from geographers, historians, sociologists and media theorists and looks at these through the lens of social philosophy on the nature of resistance and oppression, to articulate and understand both the positive and negative ways in which industrial nostalgia shapes present-day working-class identities. Celebrations of abandoned industrial sites have been criticised by some as inflicting a form of violence on working-class people, transforming sites of working-class loss into objects of nostalgic appreciation in ways which marginalise those who worked there, and which close the past off from the working-class present. More positive views about industrial nostalgia argue that it provides a way to assert working-class pride in hostile environments, serving as a basis for present-day solidarity. By examining this existing literature on deindustrialisation through a social philosophical perspective, our aim here is to shed some light on this phenomenon, in which industrial nostalgia can function both as a tool of oppression but also as a form of resistance against oppression.