Performing the Hidden Injuries of Class in Coal-Mining Heritage

Abstract

Industrial heritage deals directly with working-class experience in a very public forum, but has not really been analysed in relation to class issues. This article discusses the case of ex-workers re-employed as heritage guides to tell the story of their own lives at a living history coalmining-museum, exploring the nature of the performances/representations of class that are produced. Heritage performance is caught up in a double bind that is familiar to other kinds of working-class representation: a continual equivocation between foregrounding dignity and autonomy on the one hand, and acknowledging subjugation and defeat on the other.This tension is played out, though differently, both in the guides' past occupations and their present ones.The article examines the public narratives they produce for visitors in the here and now as well as locating these in an understanding of their current positions as tour guide employees and their living through of their memories and identities as mineworkers.

Disciplined Mobility and the Emotional Subject in Royal Dutch Lloyd's Early Twentieth Century Passenger Shipping Network

“…One lesson among others is the need, in the examination of the disciplinary aspects of any regulation of bodies across territories, to consider the emotional dimensions of both the historical and contemporary journeys that this regulation implicates. As the "tween-deck" passenger migrants discussed in this paper occupied the lower strata of social hierarchies of their day, an examination of their agony, hurt and marginalization connects contemporary emotional geographic approaches with longstanding concerns with the felt subjugation in classed experiences (Dicks 2008) or "hidden injuries of class" (Sennett and Cobbs 1972). This is why we have sought to expose some of the emotional responses of passenger-migrant subjects as they reflected upon their departures, their experiences of and negotiations with the medical and bureaucratic gaze, their time in the Lloyd Hotel, their life on board the "tween decks" of the RDL liners and their conditions, aspirations and disappointments upon arrival at Buenos Aires; we have used these reports on the emotion of travel and migration in order to highlight the importance of incorporating in our work the felt and experienced aspects of any disciplined mobility, regardless of origin, time and nature.…”

Peri-urban agriculture and cultural heritage. The public potential of the in-between areas

“…In these places, as often noted by scholars who have studied semiotics, the crisis that led to the closure of the factory is often relegated to a secondary narrative construct in respect to an epic dimension of choral narration of industrial production. The reason for the closure of the factory, and the resulting substantial uselessness of the factory, are aspects that are usually only described and interpreted, on a rhetorical level (Dicks, 2008). Indeed, when the closed factory survives change, and appropriates its new features, it is too often linked to a non-productive dimension.…”

The authenticating discourses of mining heritage tourism in Cornwall and Wales

“…In her analysis of similar data at Rhondda Heritage Park (another mining heritage site in south Wales), Dicks () notes that the vernacularity of miners’ voices is a salient feature of their accounting. She writes that ‘[heritage] both effaces and summons up class and presents the autonomous individual as a stand‐in for the collective’ (Dicks : 440).…”