The Half Life of Deindustrialization: Working-Class Writing about Economic Restructuring

The course treated film, fiction, and all matter of non-fiction as textual representations equally worthy of critical analysis.Distinctions between signifiers from domains traditionally labeled "rhetoric" and those from domains labeled "poetics" held no water.Like Linkon's syllabus from two decades ago, The Half Life of Deindustrialization assumes that all texts have the potential to reveal important insights about cultural myths and values.Her engaging study looks at texts from a wide range of genres that offer representations of deindustrialization in the United States.Linkon sees memory, nostalgia, socio-economic insecurity, community, pride, and politics through a critical lens, offering a nuanced and compelling portrait of how deindustrialization still reverberates, even decades after initial waves of plant and factory closings.Linkon's exigence for writing this book is the same exigence that should prompt readers of Community Literacy Journal to read this book.During the Trump era, there is an imperative for deeper engagement with working-class communities-for critical, intersectional, ethical scholarship that centers, for instance, places and persons directly impacted by deindustrialization or recession, for more and better ethnographic research, more and better community-based and service learning teaching projects in these communities, for more textual and rhetorical analyses of representations of working-class life.For readers of CLJ who do community-based work in these communities and/or who wish to engage questions about how resentment and anger-but also civic pride and strong community bonds-foment therein, Linkon's book is a must read.The book's preface situates Linkon's analysis within the current political moment in the U.S., reviewing the prevalence of stories invoking the "white working class" and their support for candidate Donald Trump.(The metro area surrounding my hometown of Youngstown, Ohio, long a Democrat stronghold, voted overwhelmingly for President Trump.)Linkon alludes to the intriguing paradox that both mass culture