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How do we make sense of the social problems that continue to plague
Canadian society? Our understanding of issues such as poverty,
racism, violence, homophobia, crime and pollution stems from our
view of how society is structured. From the dominant neoliberal
perspective, social problems arise from individuals making poor
choices. From a critical perspective, however, these social
troubles are caused by structural social inequalities. Disparities
in economic, social and political power -- that is, relations of
power based on class, race, gender and sexual orientation -- are
the central structural element of capitalist, patriarchal,
colonialist societies. The contributors to Power and Resistance use
this critical perspective to explore Canadian social issues such as
poverty, colonialism, homophobia, violence against women, climate
change and so on. This sixth edition adds chapters on the
corporatization of higher education, the lethal impacts of
colonialism, democracy, the social determinants of health, drug
policy and sexual violence on campus.
From Robert Southey to William Morris, British social critics in
the Romantic tradition consistently stigmatized industry as a
threat to aesthetic or humanistic "culture." Joseph Bizup argues
that early Victorian advocates of industry sought to resist the
power inherent in this opposition by portraying automatic
manufacture itself as a cultural force or agent. He traces the
contours of this new proindustrial rhetoric as it coalesced in two
mutually reinforcing discourses: the contentious debate over the
factory system and its social consequences that raged throughout
the 1830s and 1840s, and the extensive discussions of the social
and commercial benefits of good design that culminated in the Great
Exhibition of 1851.
Through careful readings of a diverse array of texts, including
treatises on factories and machinery, medical studies of the
working classes, theoretical discussions of the decorative arts,
and lectures on the Great Exhibition, Bizup shows that liberal
proponents of industry such as Andrew Ure, Charles Babbage, James
Phillips Kay, and Henry Cole aestheticized manufacture by
interpreting its concrete agents and products--whether they be
factory operatives, systems of machinery, mass-produced copies, or
elaborately crafted "art manufactures"--as emblems of a prior
conceptual unity or beauty. They thus allied industry with culture
by portraying industry as one realization of the organic ideal
central to the idea of culture. Bizup concludes with an examination
of John Ruskin's and William Morris's efforts to counter this sort
of rhetorical maneuvering by treating cultured manliness as a
figure for the cooperative impulse they both hoped would replace
competitive self-interest as society's organizing value.
By showing that culture could not be opposed to industry in any
pure or absolute sense, Manufacturing Culture both enriches our
understanding of the Victorian debates over industrialization and
contributes greatly to the ongoing scholarly exploration of the
complex genealogy of our modern concept of culture.
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