The Making of the Middle Class: Toward a Transnational History PDF
Preview The Making of the Middle Class: Toward a Transnational History
a book in the series radical perspectives: a radical history review book series Series editors: Daniel J. Walkowitz, New York University Barbara Weinstein, New York University History, as radical historians have long observed, cannot be severed from autho- rial subjectivity, indeed from politics. Political concerns animate the questions we ask, the subjects on which we write. For over thirty years the Radical History Review has led in nurturing and advancing politically engaged historical research. Radical Perspec- tives seeks to further the journal’s mission: any author wishing to be in the series makes a self-conscious decision to associate her or his work with a radical perspective. To be sure, many of us are currently struggling with the issue of what it means to be a radical historian in the early twenty-first century, and this series is intended to provide some signposts for what we would judge to be radical history. It will offer innovative ways of telling stories from multiple perspectives; comparative, trans- national, and global histories that transcend conventional boundaries of region and nation; works that elaborate on the implications of the postcolonial move to ‘‘provin- cialize Europe’’; studies of the public in and of the past, including those that consider the commodification of the past; histories that explore the intersection of identities such as gender, race, class, and sexuality with an eye to their political implications and complications. Above all, this book series seeks to create an important intellectual space and discursive community to explore the very issue of what constitutes radical history. Within this context, some of the books published in the series may privilege alternative and oppositional political cultures, but all will be concerned with the way power is constituted, contested, used, and abused. A central objective of this series is to broaden the range of issues that can be addressed and reinterpreted from a radical perspective; this volume is therefore a very welcome addition. The Making of the Middle Class: Toward a Transnational History chal- lenges longstanding assumptions about middle-class formation and identity construc- tion and deepens our understanding of the middle class as a historical agent in loca- tions ranging from South Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, to Latin America, Canada, and the United States. These essays and commentaries by historians and historically minded scholars invite us to reflect on the ways a segment of society designated as middle class has shaped—and been shaped by—the historical construc- tion of modernity. Taken together, they allow us to conceptualize middle-class forma- tion as a transnational historical process occurring in multiple places across the globe, rather than simply as a phenomenon that begins in Western Europe and radiates outward from there. It also traces the genealogy of a category that has become the standard of social existence in a remarkable range of cultural and economic settings. Hence the (deliberately ironic) title of the introduction—‘‘We Shall Be All’’—a phrase historically associated with the struggles of laboring peoples, but which may now more accurately reflect the seemingly endless celebration and promotion of middle-class lifestyles and ‘‘values’’ even in a world where ‘‘the middle’’ threatens to disappear. The Making of the Middle Class .................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... The Making of the M I D D L E C L A S S .................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... Toward a Transnational History A. Ricardo López and Barbara Weinstein, editors Afterword by Mrinalini Sinha duke university press | durham and london | 2012 ∫ 2012 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper $ Designed by Kristina Kachele Design, LLC Typeset in Chaparral Pro by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction: We Shall Be All: Toward a Transnational History of the Middle Class A. Ricardo López with Barbara Weinstein 1 Part I The Making of the Middle Class and Practices of Modernity .................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... Thinking about Modernity from the Margins: The Making of a Middle Class in Colonial India Sanjay Joshi 29 The African Middle Class in Zimbabwe: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives Michael O. West 45 Between Modernity and Backwardness: The Case of the English Middle Class Simon Gunn 58 ‘‘Aren’t We All?’’ Aspiration, Acquisition, and the American Middle Class Marina Moskowitz 75 The Gatekeepers: Middle-Class Campaigns of Citizenship in Early Cold War Canada Franca Iacovetta 87 commentary on part i Barbara Weinstein 107 Part II Labor Professionalization, Class Formation, and State Rule .................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... The Conundrum of the Middle-Class Worker in the Twentieth-Century United States: The Professional-Managerial Workers’ (Folk) Dance around Class Daniel J. Walkowitz 121 Becoming Middle Class: The Local History of a Global Story— Colonial Bombay, 1890–1940 Prashant Kidambi 141 Conscripts of Democracy: The Formation of a Professional Middle Class in Bogotá during the 1950s and Early 1960s A. Ricardo López 161 The Formation of the Revolutionary Middle Class during the Mexican Revolution Michael A. Ervin 196 commentary on part ii Mary Kay Vaughan 223 Part III Middle-Class Politics in Revolution .................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... A Middle-Class Revolution: The apra Party and Middle-Class Identity in Peru, 1931–1956 Iñigo García-Bryce 235 Revolutionary Promises Encounter Urban Realities for Mexico City’s Middle Class, 1915–1928 Susanne Eineigel 253 Being Middle Class and Being Arab: Sectarian Dilemmas and Middle-Class Modernity in the Arab Middle East, 1908–1936 Keith David Watenpaugh 267 commentary on part iii Brian Owensby 288 Part IV Middle-Class Politics and the Making of the Public Sphere .................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... The City as a Field of Female Civic Action: Women and Middle-Class Formation in Nineteenth-Century Germany Gisela Mettele 299 Putting Faith in the Middle Class: The Bourgeoisie, Catholicism, and Postrevolutionary France Carol E. Harrison 315 Siúticos, Huachafos, Cursis, Arribistas, and Gente de Medio Pelo: Social Climbers and the Representation of Class in Chile and Peru, 1860–1930 David S. Parker 335 ‘‘Los Argentinos Descendemos de los Barcos’’: The Racial Articulation of Middle-Class Identity in Argentina, 1920–1960 Enrique Garguin 355 commentary on part iv Robyn Muncy 377 .................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... afterword Mrinalini Sinha 385 bibliography 395 contributors 431 index 435 viii Contents acknowledgments ..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... T his volume has been long in the making. The project has its roots in two panels on the history of the middle class organized by Robert Johnston and Iñigo García-Bryce for the 2004 annual meetings of the American Histori- cal Association and the Conference on Latin American History. Those two stimulating panels on the middle class around the world made it evident that there was a pressing need for a deeper and wider scholarly conversation about the history of the middle class. With this concern in mind, we organized a conference at the University of Maryland’s Miller Center for Historical Studies, in the spring of 2006, that brought together scholars from a variety of locations and specializations. Ti- tled ‘‘‘We Shall Be All’: Toward a Global History of the Middle Class,’’ this three-day symposium extended and amplified the conversation begun by the previous panels as scholars researching a variety of historical contexts re- flected on the ways in which members of the middle class have shaped—and been shaped by—the historical construction of modernity. Since then there has been a steady stream of publications about the middle class, and we can now say with confidence that it has become a central part of scholarly dis- course and political debate. As is argued in the introduction to this volume, so many of the political, social, and economic hopes associated with modernity
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