From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Fri Mar 03 2006 - 06:03:51 EST
Important study of how the meanings of freedom and coercion, independence and dependence came to be practically defined in the United States in terms of racial and gender categories. To the extent that some workers came to understand themselves as not non white in a society in which lifetime and intergenerational racial slavery had long been the economic pivot they came to see themselves as free and independent, thereby compromising class consciousness. Glenn's work is thus in the tradition of whiteness studies which has been criticized for caricaturing the consciousness of not not white workers, though of course the past time of black minstrelsy has suggested to many the importance of this reactive identity formation (though Glenn does not speak about this much theorized practice). We see even today the categorical refusal by so called free wage laborers to recognize proletarian commonality with capitalist plantation slaves, thought the burdens of commodity production via an exclusively racial plantation slavery were uniquely horrific. Not all proletarians suffer alike but they do share a coerced dependence on capital. It was exactly anxiety about this common position that led not non white workers to distinguish themselves from slaves and their heirs. In this struggle for identity, freedom and and independence came to have a practical but limited meaning (freedom from criminal and other nonpecuniary penalties for labor contract breaches, freedom not to have wages withheld, and freedom to vote). But this was a freedom to which only white men were to have access for much of American history. Glenn shows how whole categories of workers were denied even such freedoms. Racialized workers often found themselves bound by debt via contract labor or sharecropping arrangements, paid in scrips, and conscripted to degraded work through vagrancy laws. Political power was denied and legal protections against even horrific extra legal violence were often practically non existent. Women workers were also treated as inherently dependent and practically denied access even to the upper echelons of the working class. Even if one could establish that capitalist exploitation is only contingently related today to such identity sensitive mechanisms there is still the question of why they were so intertwined in US American history and what effect that history has on present social relations. rb Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor Evelyn Nakano Glenn Product Details: ISBN: 0674013727 Format: Paperback, 306pp Pub. Date: January 2004 Publisher: Harvard University Press FROM THE PUBLISHER "The inequalities that persist in America have deep historical roots. Evelyn Nakano Glenn untangles this complex history in a unique comparative regional study from the end of Reconstruction to the eve of World War II. During this era the country experienced enormous social and economic changes with the abolition of slavery, rapid territorial expansion, and massive immigration, and struggled over the meaning of free labor and the essence of citizenship as people who previously had been excluded sought the promise of economic freedom and full political rights." After an overview of the concepts of the free worker and the independent citizen at the national level, Glenn vividly details how race and gender issues framed the struggle over labor and citizenship rights at the local level between blacks and whites in the South, Mexicans and Anglos in the Southwest, and Asians and haoles (white planters) in Hawaii. She illuminates the complex interplay of local and national forces in American society and provides a dynamic view of how labor and citizenship were defined, enforced, and contested in a formative era for white-nonwhite relations in America. SYNOPSIS Glenn (ethnic and women's studies, U. of California at Berkeley) studies the complex history of the inequalities that exist in America with a comparative regional study from the end of Reconstruction to the eve of World War II. Following an overview of the concepts of the free worker and the independent citizen at the national level, she reveals the interplay between local and national forces and discusses how race and gender issues influenced the struggle over labor and citizenship rights at the local level between blacks and whites in the South, Mexicans and Anglos in the Southwest, and Asians and white planters in Hawaii. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR Table of Contents PREVIEW WHAT'S INSIDE Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments Introduction 1 1 Integrating Race and Gender 6 2 Citizenship: Universalism and Exclusion 18 3 Labor: Freedom and Coercion 56 4 Blacks and Whites in the South 93 5 Mexicans and Anglos in the Southwest 144 6 Japanese and Haoles in Hawaii 190 7 Understanding American Inequality 236 Notes 267 Index 301
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