Obstinate memory: Working-class politics and neoliberal forgetting in the United Kingdom and Chile
Journal article
Authors | Watkins, Heather and Urbina Montana, M. |
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Abstract | In the 40 years since Chile and the United Kingdom became the crucibles of neoliberalization, working-class agency has been transformed, its institutions systematically dismantled and its politics, after the continuity neoliberalism of both the UK Blair government and the Chilean Concertación, in a crisis of legitimacy. In the process, memories of struggle have been captured within narratives of ‘capitalist realism’ (Fisher) – the present, past and future collapsed into Walter Benjamin’s ‘empty homogeneous time’. This article explores ways in which two traumatic moments of working-class struggle have been narrativized by the media in the service of this ‘presentism’: the 1973 coup in Chile and the 1984–1985 Miners’ Strike in the United Kingdom. We argue that the use of ‘living history’ or bottom-up approaches to memory provides an urgently needed recovery of disruptive narratives of class identity and offers a way of reclaiming alternative futures from the grip of reductive economic nationalism. |
Keywords | Chile; collective memory; media; neoliberalism; presentism; United Kingdom |
Year | 2022 |
Journal | Memory Studies |
Journal citation | 15 (5), pp. 1127-1141 |
Publisher | SAGE Journals |
ISSN | 1750-6999 |
Digital Object Identifier (DOI) | https://doi.org/10.1177/17506980211073111 |
Web address (URL) | https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17506980211073111 |
Publisher's version | License File Access Level Open |
Output status | Published |
Publication dates | |
Online | 08 Feb 2022 |
Publication process dates | |
Deposited | 26 Jul 2023 |
https://repository.derby.ac.uk/item/9x68q/obstinate-memory-working-class-politics-and-neoliberal-forgetting-in-the-united-kingdom-and-chile
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