(De-)Industrial Heritage

The radical restructuring of the international division of labor has meant that huge swaths of Europe and North America have experienced painful deindustrialization since the 1960s. In itself, this is nothing new, as capitalist development has always been geographically uneven.1 It is also a global phenomenon, with newly industrialized areas experiencing decline soon after the initial areas.2 What differed in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s was the scale of the unfolding crisis in North America and Europe, as industrial heartland areas lost their economic raison d’être. Millions of industrial workers were displaced, leaving once vital economic centers stricken. Across the industrialized world, union density plummeted. For example, the rate of unionization in the United States dropped from 34 percent in 1973 to just 11 percent in the 2000s (or a little over 6 percent in the private sector).3It was in this crisis atmosphere that the cross-disciplinary study of deindustrialization emerged, as did industrial heritage as a preservation impulse and an area of further research. Indeed, the term deindustrialization was coined in the 1970s and then taken up by researchers and anti–plant closing activists in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States. The most famous distillation of the “deindustrialization thesis” was offered by radical US economists Barry Blue-stone and Bennett Harrison in their celebrated 1982 book The Deindustrialization of America, which saw the conflict as one that pitted “capital” against “community.”4 By contrast, the deindustrialization thesis was tied to an anti-imperialist critique of foreign direct investment (usually American) by Left nationalists in other countries.5Now, looking back nearly forty years later, we see a field that encompasses a huge diversity of studies. An early focus on the political economy of deindustrialization as well as on resistance movements has given way to wider examination of the toxic sociocultural, environmental, health, and political aftermath. The 2003 publication of Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott’s celebrated edited volume Beyond the Ruins: The Meanings of Deindustrialization was a milestone in this shifting perspective.6 Sherry Lee Linkon’s more recent recognition of the lasting effects of these closings over their “half-life”—first expressed in the 2013 special issue of International Labor and Working Class History, “Crumbling Cultures of Deindustrialization” and then expanded upon and refined in her 2018 monograph—reminds us that the devastating consequences of deindustrialization persist long after the mines, mills, and factories are closed and their physical remains demolished or converted to new uses.7Deindustrialization’s half-life also helps us understand the political linkages between late twentieth-century deindustrialization and the twenty-first-century rise of right-wing populism in North America and Europe. While these links are still fiercely debated, there is little doubt in our minds that the moral and political rage felt by those left behind in deindustrialized areas contributed to the shock election of Donald Trump as president of the United States, the British vote to exit the European Union, and the rise of the Rassemblement National (previously Front National) in France and of the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, to name just four of the most obvious political aftershocks. In each instance, as will be discussed below, race and immigration were bound up in working-class anger over deindustrialization.Right from the beginning, one important strand within deindustrialization studies focused on the lived experience of deindustrialization as narrated by displaced workers themselves. Oral history interviewing and participant observation were employed to help us understand what is lost in economic displacement, its cultural meaning, and its far-reaching consequences as the force of the shock wave traveled outward through individual lives, families, and wider working-class communities.8 In her important 1994 study on Kenosha, Wisconsin, anthropologist Kathryn Marie Dudley notes that plant closings serve as a “status-degradation ritual—a cultural recognition that blue-collar laborers are of a lower social status than they have been pretending to be.”9 She was also one of the first to speak of displaced industrial workers as culturally displaced persons: “People who once stood at the center of things now seem out of place.”10 Since then, many others, including ourselves, have picked up on these early insights. For example, Jackie Clarke, a historian of France, speaks of “new forms of working-class invisibility” that have taken hold that lead us to locate industrial workers in the past, not the present, even though sizeable numbers of industrial workers remain in “deindustrialized” countries.11 One can go further, as historian John Kirk does, noting that the pervasive “de-recognition of class, and class struggle [inside and outside our universities], has the effect of debilitating the working class, both in terms of the politics of cultural recognition and questions of political and economic justice.”12 The ways that industrial heritage counters or reinforces this de-recognition are at the heart of this special issue.With the cultural turn in the human sciences and the rise of memory studies from the 1980s onward, scholars from different disciplines sought to de-essentialize the category of experience by turning their attention to narratology.13 They were interested in recovering lived experiences but understood that remembering is a social and political process and that forced forgetting is an integral part of the deindustrialization process. Narratives of deindustrialization are also present in a whole variety of industrial heritage initiatives. These include industrial museums and other heritage tourism sites that present their own narratives of industrialization and deindustrialization—processes that, as Tim Strangleman has pointed out, are tightly connected.14 The setting up of industrial heritage has been promoted by a wide variety of heritage actors, including former workers, trade unionists, employers, state representatives, politicians, scholars from a variety of different disciplines, museum and heritage professionals, architects, artists, and others. These industrial heritage actors are all studied by the contributors here. Industrial heritage activists have often faced public opposition and some ambivalence from industrial workers themselves, which is why their initiatives have frequently been the subject of controversial debates in the media.15 The media, in turn, have become a central site for narrating industrial heritage in deindustrializing localities, regions, and nations.In this introductory essay, we would like to draw out five themes that run like red threads through the articles that follow. First, we recognize that industrial heritage initiatives are bound up in wider deindustrialization and gentrification processes: they are inseparable. We therefore have to approach them critically, in terms of their site interpretation but also in terms of their very existence. As always, context matters. We would like to reflect here on how the stories we tell within the dual frames of “industrial heritage” and “deindustrialization studies” are narrated differently depending on whether we are dealing with industrial heartland areas or outlying places where industries were of secondary economic and cultural importance. Does it make a difference if we are studying or interpreting (de-)industrial history in single-heritage industrial towns, in regions of heavy industry, or in multi-heritage towns, where industrial heritage has never been the only “show” in town? Whose working lives are visible and whose are not? The stories of deindustrialization and industrial heritage are profoundly gendered. How, then, are stories about work related to constructions of both masculinity and femininity? Conversely, to what extent is deindustrialization bound up in a crisis of working-class masculinity?Second, we would like to reflect further on the interplay between place-based and nonlocalized understandings of industrial heritage during deindustrialization’s half-life. To what extent does scale matter? Not only are different spaces—the factory, the neighborhood, the city, the region, the nation, and transnational spaces—interrelated, but all spatial narrativizations are interlinked with nonspatial ones, such as narratives of class, race/ethnicity, religion, and gender, to name just the most obvious ones. There has always been a certain tension between class and community in labor history, as they have been sometimes competing modes of identification.16 But as geographer Doreen Massey reminds us, localities are made from within and without.17 The “community” versus “capital” paradigm, long prevalent in deindustrialization studies in the United States, has its interpretative limits. As the contributors to this special issue show, deindustrialization is messy business. The extent to which industrial heritage discourse and specific sites acknowledge this messiness—or even locate deindustrialization within the discourse’s interpretative framework—is highly relevant to our discussion about class politics.Third, we would like to make some observations regarding the place of violence in the deindustrialization process and how it then gets represented or reproduced in industrial heritage. Mine, mill, and factory closures are acts against contributors speak of the and violence that But it does not violence is in the plant stories by displaced workers years and can be or in industrial heritage discourse and site One of the consequences has been the of narratives and sometimes by to what has been the of is an important one in both processes: and many of the to this special issue up the of and its in of deindustrialization and the industrial We would like to what of be As is often to a politics of we how such a politics is in those through of We also who is for what and for which are of related to the of for the how can we make a politics of in forms of the of forms of industrial is tightly related to heritage we will further about the of different actors in industrial heritage is the remembering and the What political behind specific forms of memory What forms of memory we in the stories that are on we will with some regarding the of studies dealing with the unfolding between industrial heritage and all of the articles in this issue a focus on industrial heartland where and class over a and the have long stood at the economic and cultural center of industrial heartland areas in Europe and North As in her the of the of North in were central to the in that The be of in the or of the and of the of these industries to and was with mill, and factory The new economy other and other Deindustrialization therefore an economic and cultural crisis for industrial workers, their and industrial heartland It was also a crisis in as the was demolished in many working-class as as the and themselves. social up over was The new economic often meant that new over further to a crisis of masculinity in the of industrial work has the of in industrial were on the of these industries and in other industries of secondary importance. and their and or and where in These industries were visible in and in an to or helps to its physical remains once that is for areas such as where industries most industrial museums and heritage sites are focused on contributors to this special issue the of preservation from to to even a industrial The most industrial heritage work is in a that has become an industrial heritage to the scale of the preservation is by some as an “industrial is an industrial in that now and such as a that the of the In a has been converted an industrial with a a and other The of these and other by and has from and to the these sites of these sites have even become for or cultural that to North America in places such as As in industrial heritage has as the heritage discourse in the very different in North to lives but its political has as the and once in the are by the right-wing populism of the Rassemblement As there were also important in how the industrial heritage in the of has in heritage with the most important the In the we also the that an to as it is and serve as the for a of the can also be in the this political in France, ambivalence about heritage initiatives former that is in other Industrial workers not a Industrial heritage discourse and are from the political preservation are in the of interpretation at the in a to a museum in deindustrializing for to forced forgetting were by of which were focused on the of the The was that the industrial was an that to be and not the former industrial were which to the industrial and labor The between the physical site and of industrial work workers does not leaving workers and their place of their own to The for them an one as a heritage and to is one of the of that in this special even are and industrial are what is then on a of or what industrial heritage preservation can serve to further class struggle and social working-class or the history of this has that labor and public history in be to this special issue our attention to the place of labor in site interpretation at the heritage site that has studied over many has and In some of the these in have In some the of the industrial past, of their have become for The of industrial at at a has become even more to in the We also a between of deindustrialization and place in the of The heritage of the of France was in terms of their the of the by the in the and more by the right-wing Rassemblement of was also in during the 1970s and 1980s, where factory closures were with workers the the union By in the trade were to important that the of and in some contributed to the of industrial in the of not only and but transnational ones. for example, the in has often been as the heart of European industrialization after as the of the European and European these spatial constructions of have been with nonspatial of the most were of were to a extent by the labor to the of class there are also narratives of that nonspatial of in industrial and In most industrial regions of the world, industrialization was by and labor a part in the of industrial In many this labor first from within the later, from In the we of and in industrial and within the working class, as was often the with workers in the and in the United States But as out for the in labor of also their own of and often with from their places of of trade and labor politics that in turn a on their The of forms of labor has more become the focus of attention in labor more and class narratives are also in some of the that follow. For example, how the of France from working-class to working-class after the turn of the in The of the to the for the Rassemblement and once the were and the their working-class the Front National was to the political in the The also that class were by and race in twentieth-century history of labor In the United States and other of race and the of and often or even class with deindustrialization and the of class to workers of been or by political and trade As to this special issue as it is on the plant stories with the of lost over working and of not in the class or the labor left some of the anger and that many working-class to from to Donald Trump in nothing a vote for a right-wing like Trump is a to a status that is not working for many deindustrialized of this special issue on the by us to of heritage in and there are of of with displaced industrial workers by heritage the industrialized In five and four that with back in to the of deindustrialization and the of this example, we can see the ways that history help us a more heritage. has been of industrial which has as a in of North America and How, then, we go and with the politics of industrial and the who to in and with this It is important to the and violence of to in this violence of and the experience of and spatial speaks of the that the of is not as we have in the of our contributors speak to its and the and the ways that industrial heritage some of cultural it is that only one of the articles in this special issue on industrial heritage in a that has made the economic Industrial heritage is at its most visible in areas that have to make the By contrast, like and have experienced a the and factories then the were demolished or as these industrial heritage is often to the of industrial that are new questions about the between industrial heritage preservation and cultural these further, there is also the issue of in former industrial or to The place of and immigration in the stories we tell in industrial heritage in an immigration has become is the offered by but it in other that of immigration be in heritage but not more recent from outside Europe. as in an study of public remembering in a working-class that has experienced deindustrialization and how we what was what the or former factory be the new or cultural in her study of the place of that community in the industrial heritage as that community after the a not to the one by in North where or even the history of be it or highly to painful that can have a on the violence is present in or of with an and and with a and It is an important whether forms of industrial heritage speak to such forms of and out of them a as discussed in that is for social in the all the in this special the one that is most with industrial is on the of industrial as with the of industrial as of the up the of of for a politics to forms of industrial heritage. of blue-collar from and workers many of then it to the we can how such can has since these were in one how the present have this through forms of industrial heritage be to to a politics of recognition that to lives them still the of heritage many of the we can how industrial are with to working-class that in a as of working-class In the plant stories that at the center of the is by some workers as a and community by plant and As the community narratives in France and are to a we not the to but the of is the the of community has taken in the United States, there is a of the industrial Conversely, as the industrial can also be with the to some in to that it were that it first and a political also the in While the and its and the and the the of It was only from the 1990s that heritage initiatives in the North have been related to the of and more memory of the to which was then by the Rassemblement contrast, the memory is the of that has taken place in the over the It is a that did not an of and social behind the the and that on the industrial heritage is more with the of deindustrialization in and history in an than an In of the United States and the United Kingdom, the of workers and industrial work and the of the of industrial work have to in industrial heritage itself, where and the on one and the labor and heritage scholars on the other are in over working-class It is that we such in the heritage by in and by in As we can in the plant stories in the devastating experience of deindustrialization can lead to and a in the of a forms of memory in industrial heritage be to a way out of such by on that run to narratives the of at have many heritage activists and in our of the questions about who is in heritage labor and how their work and class have over heritage actors have been to forms of In her which on the United States, a on the of heritage labor over the She between actors, including and highly workers, all of are cultural workers with highly class to cultural workers in the the a variety of cultural workers for They to in a for which tourism and are of in turn, has to a of heritage workers have to the that in capitalist heritage labor often a is not that are represented heritage have been a in the of industrial heritage in the in the of France, and in of the heritage back to the can be back to and As out in her the first industrial museums in the United States were up by in the While they were to the and economic of their they have from of class or the or violence of deindustrialization narratives are offered that are with in and heritage is the The heritage of the would be the and of the and of the the the the of North and the actors the of what to with the deindustrialized of a They have been vital in museums and other industrial heritage sites Europe. even in the United at during the the state more in forms of heritage labor to the of the economic to be to industrial heritage it can be made and a heritage and social political are more to public in industrial heritage important is the labor in its Labor activists to the of heritage in deindustrializing places once the for a was As is in the articles that their one we can be of the of the labor in the of the as an industrial heritage the we can understand the of some industrial heritage to with former is that for the of In former labor activists have in the heritage of former regions out of a to a to the political of also a of heritage Industrial heritage and deindustrialization many of them the and of the displaced workers of the late are not or or For the most they with their working-class still to of like have a special on the part of the for shifting attention to the of working the of an of heritage scholars with workers, area and the labor to politics and these scholars their own labor often on how deindustrialization in their or their own economic was and as in Germany, scholars be to the of class and constructions of heritage and heritage. The more and deindustrialization the more the constructions of of industrial heritage We can see this tension not only within the articles that but within this While from lived in the United between and that we to be not to be in our or heritage a that industrial heritage workers as there is little and memory are not only between but also different social We and in different industrial heritage Deindustrialization The contributors to this special issue the politics of industrial heritage in the of still the shifting class of heritage to the politics of industrial heritage discourse itself, the contributors a on the subject at As notes there is an to understand what industrial heritage is in and on the By the interpretative the of the heritage the contributors from the physical remains of lost and of and the and of lost for those left industrial heritage is up in wider tied to which often have a effect on the very that once at these We to more about the between industrial heritage sites and these or we to to the to the place of industrial heritage discourse and sites in the and cultural of To we to go studies. We also to how race and class in the of including the ways that industrial heritage can be tied to a more articles in this special issue also us to make or up our from the site to industrial heritage in its and transnational It would be to how political on the Left and on the approach industrial heritage. the in North America and Europe has been the of deindustrialization for its own it to study the politics of in a transnational which we this special issue to