What the English Know as Class

Marc Blecher

ISBN 10: 1482573768 / ISBN 13: 9781482573763

Published by CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013

About this Item

Zustand: Sehr gut | Seiten: 290 | Sprache: Englisch | Produktart: Bücher.

Seller Inventory # 24055369/2

Bibliographic Details

• Title: What the English Know as Class
• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Publication Date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1482573768
• ISBN 13: 9781482573763
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: Sehr gut

About this title

Synopsis

As the curtain falls on Blood Brothers, the classic Willy Russell musical in which twin brothers reared apart in poor and wealthy homes are both killed in a struggle over power, money and love, the narrator asks: “Could it be what we, the English, have come to know as class?” The play’s thirty year run makes it plain that questions of class have continued to resonate in Britain. Just as it opened in 1983, a new generation of intellectuals and politicians associated with rising neoliberalism began to develop a contrarian discourse that class is dying out. Yet economic inequality has grown exponentially, and the 2008 crash helped bring class back into political focus. In 2012, Oberlin College students interested in exploring these questions came to Britain, where class remains closer to the surface of people’s lives and thinking than in the US. They delved into a wide range of arenas, yet their findings evince one common theme: wherever one looks, class-based inequality and politics are alive and well, and they hurt.

About the Author

Marc Blecher is Professor of Politics at Oberlin College, and author of Micropolitics in Contemporary China, Tethered Deer: Government and Economy in a Chinese County, and China Against the Tides, now in its third edition, as well as dozens of articles on Chinese politics and political economy, especially the politics of the country's farmers and workers. Devon Rettew, Oberlin College 2013, is a Politics and East Asian Studies double major, with a minor in History. While attending Saint Ann's High School at Saint Ann's School, he spent a semester abroad studying in Shanghai, and has returned to China three times since.