Obstinate memory

Working-class politics and neoliberal forgetting in the United Kingdom and Chile

Bibliographic Data

ID12905620
AuthorsHeather Watkins (0000-0001-7550-9838, Nottingham Trent University, corresponding author), María L Urbina Montana (0000-0002-6354-9653, University of Wolverhampton)
Year2022
Volume15
Issue5
Pages1127-1141
Publication date2022-02-08
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueMemory Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1750-6980 • E-ISSN: 1750-6999
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/17506980211073111
OpenAlexW4210864225
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited42

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

Legitimacy · Narrative · Nationalism · Neoliberalism (international relations · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Realism · Sociology · Working class · Gender Studies · Law · Music History and Culture · Political and Economic history of UK and US · Political and Social Dynamics in Chile and Latin America

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