Fear of a Working Planet

In the essay "More Than Two Things," David Roediger takes up the issue of how to deal with diversity within working class studies, especially under the auspices of the cultural studies mantra "race, class and gender." I'm attracted to his novel interpretation of "state of the art" to include older cultural forms that directly deal with the intersections of multiple identities, but I am still struggling with the difficulties of providing full coverage to academic work. It seems that any politically conscious study always runs up against the wall of "You forgot about someone!" For example, not a single text that we've dealt with this semester has addressed sexuality in any manner. Occasionally the authors we've read have thrown out a sentence acknowledging the oppression of heteronormativity, but then each text goes back to a largely heterocentric view of humanity and a totally binary construction of gender. And I don't think that's necessarily a huge blemish on the works. There is something to be said for focused research projects and specific studies that treat a single subject. EP Thompson got enough pages written just by focusing on white, male working people in Britain, and I shudder to think about how large his book would have been if he had addressed women. And I think that is the real benefit of the field as an organizing structure; it's unreasonable to fully consider all of the elements that go into a cultural moment.

However, the field is also a limiting factor in what is studied. While Roediger comes up with some great heuristics for analyzing identity intersections, he leaves a lot of elements out. Though we can take individual texts as a starting point for understanding race and class, a scholarly approach also benefits from the sort of broad contextualization that Kelley brought to "Race Rebels." The depth of case study needs to be scaffolded by broad historical frames that will inevitably leave certain factors out of consideration. In an increasingly complex world, we need increasingly complex and innovative methods for interrogating the world and getting to the bottom of things. Despite our desires for an overarching theory of everything, like was promised by older theorists, the current world needs a multiplicity of lenses and disciplines to accurately reflect the changing culture.