Conference: Pop History of Deindustrialization: Narratives, Economies, Identities. “The West” in Global Perspective (Cambridge, 14-16 November 24)

Dimoni Industrial/Industrial Devil. (Idranx from Badalona, SPAIN, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons).

Since the 1970s, deindustrialization – or the massive reduction in industrial production, facilities, and jobs – has fundamentally changed Western societies. This history has tended to be narrated in terms of decline and loss, usually within a local or national locus. Recently, scholars have challenged the isolated directionality of these narratives by bringing global and cross-industrial perspectives to the fore. Deindustrialization instigated an uneven set of experiences in different spaces, and forms of rupture and continuity. Those experiences have been reflected in various forms of pop culture. As examples from Germany and Great Britain demonstrate, Western deindustrialization unfolded in the midst of global, and particularly Asian, industrialization, reinforcing each other, as the example of South Korea illustrates.

Continue reading

Writing Europe into British Cultural History (CBH theme issue on Popular Culture)

Contemporary British History 35 (2021) 3

In Britain the history of culture – and popular culture especially – is often written within a national paradigm. Books about British pop music, British cinema, British music hall, British musical and so on abound. If other parts of the world are included at all, then mostly with an eye to the United States, or regions belonging to the (former) British Empire or the Commonwealth. Contacts, connections and transfers between Britain and continental Europe are often ignored. The CBH theme issue “Writing Europe into British Cultural History” wants to highlight these omissions and to try out ways to bring them into focus.

Continue reading