Tag: janet zandy

2020 Working-Class Studies Association Lifetime Achievement Award ~ Janet Zandy

PRESS RELEASE

July 21, 2020

CONTACT:

Terry Easton, past WCSA president

The WCSA, an international network of scholars, activists, and artists interested in working-class issues, offers lifetime achievement awards to those who have made significant, long-running contributions to the field of Working-Class Studies.

Janet Zandy’s body of work fuses the lived experience of working-class people with theoretical sophistication and commitment to democratic ideals. For over thirty years, her scholarship has provided foundational ideas and texts for the emergence of working-class studies as a field. In Calling Home: Working-Class Women’s Writing (1990), Zandy challenges canonical notions of literary value when introducing readers to the lived and imagined experiences of working-class and poor women writers. In Liberating Memory: Our Work and Our Working-Class Consciousness (1994), Zandy reveals the power of memory and identity as a usable past through voices of academic and cultural workers from working-class origins who had migrated to middle-class institutions or settings. Emerging from an expanded version of the 1995 special issue of Women’s Studies Quarterly on class, What We Hold in Common: An Introduction to Working-Class Studies (2001) connects the visionary with the possible through scholarship, creative writing, educational initiatives, syllabi, and bibliographies from new and established writers and workers. In Hands: Physical Labor, Class, and Cultural Work (2004, Honorable Mention, John Hope Franklin Prize in American Studies), Zandy creates a juncture where seemingly disparate voices and events coalesce to enable meditation on the architectonics of human bodies, particularly workers’ hands, the body part that provides “lucid maps to the geography of human complexity” (1). Zandy’s collaboration with Nicholas Coles, American Working-Class Literature: An Anthology (2007), offers an astounding collection of 150 non-canonical and canonical writers of varied races, ethnicities, genders, geographies, and religious backgrounds across 400 years of cultural expression, and has become an essential sourcebook for working-class studies pedagogy and historical reclamation.

After developing a course in photography and writing in 2005, Zandy turned her scholarship toward photography, probing how class shapes the history of photography. She published two articles in exposure, “Photography and Writing: A Pedagogy of Seeing,” and “Seeing Beyond Dirt: The Language of Working-Class Photography,” a study of photography by and about workers that received the Society for Photographic Education award for outstanding historical and cultural writing on photography in 2010.  Zandy received an Ansel Adams Research Fellowship and Peter E. Palmquist award for research on women photographers Hansel Mieth and Marion Palfi at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona. Her book on Mieth and Palfi, Unfinished Stories: The Narrative Photography of Hansel Mieth and Marion Palfi, was published in 2013. Zandy also published on photographer Milton Rogovin in New Labor Forum and Transformations. Forthcoming in the Routledge International Handbook of Working-Class Studies is “Mapping Working-Class Art,” a chapter that led to her current project, Common Art/Common-ing Art, a book on class, art, and workers that identifies power relationships and constitutive elements of working-class art expressed in presentations of laborers, slaves, peasants, servants, sowers, planters, and reapers in printmaking, painting, photography, and sculpture.

Pedagogy is another component of Zandy’s contribution to the field of working-class studies. As a professor in the English Department at Rochester Institute of Technology (now Professor Emerita), where for many years she taught up to nine courses a year, Zandy guided several generations of undergraduate students through analysis of the intersections of class, gender, race, sexuality, and environmental justice. With a devotion to teaching as energetic as her attention to writing, Zandy’s students learned how to see themselves as part of something larger. In an end-of-the-semester reflection in her New American Literature course, a student responded to Zandy’s prompt drawn from Antonio Gramsci’s  ideas about the purpose of education (“to know oneself better through others and to know others better through oneself”): “We rarely are pressed to look at the world through other people’s eyes. We are allowed to sit in our quiet comfort zones and dwell on our own lives. Therefore, when given a book where the characters’ lives are so dramatic and filled with emotion the only way to give justice to the work is to leave our comfort zones and become a part of the text ourselves.” Akin to Lewis Hine’s work with a camera, so too did Zandy’s classroom labor enable students to cultivate a new way of seeing, a class-consciousness, and a sense agency.

In 2020, as we create a world – a text – where empathy bends the moral arc toward justice, Zandy’s scholarship, historical reclamation, and pedagogical legacy are central to a field that demands answerability through dialogic approaches to texts, art, and political terrain, widely defined. Read one of her books, talk to her at one of our conferences, or join her in Rochester, New York, for Workers Memorial Day, an annual public gathering that commemorates the thousands of workers whose deaths, injuries, and occupational illnesses result from their jobs; in this heteroglossic space where workers names are read aloud, testimony unites the living and the dead where the past is remembered, current struggles are acknowledged, and worker safety is demanded.

In 1995, at the Working-Class Lives/Working-Class Studies Conference in Youngstown, Ohio, Zandy presented on “traveling working class.” She describes the conference as a “jubilant occasion” where she and others felt a “new trajectory” that “validated the importance of carrying the best of working-class values, ethos, and knowledge into the academy, and of using that rich, complex, even discordant heritage to expand what constitutes knowledge.” To her delight she realized that people no longer had to work in isolation, but instead had allies, “builders from inside and outside working-class lived experience” (What We Hold in Common ix). Since that touchstone 1995 conference, Zandy’s light continues to shine through generations of scholars she has mentored. In her oeuvre, Zandy illustrates that working-class voices are tools of resistance to class domination and cultural elision. Let’s cinch up our shoes and keep traveling working class as we honor Janet Zandy for her work in forging a multi-voiced, mellifluent, and discordant collective designed by, for, and in the interests of working-class people.

~Terry Easton

John Crawford Remembrance

john

Photo by Miriam Sagan, Tres Chicas Books

John Crawford (1940-2019), professor emeritus, University of New Mexico, died on January 1, 2019 at the age of 78.  John was an editor, scholar, writer, publisher, activist, and teacher. His knowledge of literature was encyclopedic. He was general editor of the Bedford Anthology of World Literature and a contributing editor to Oxford’s American Working-Class Literature. A fine writer who never got around to writing his own memoir, although many of his friends urged him to do so, John lived a deeply political and intellectual life, complicated by many physical challenges.

John Crawford was a great friend to Working-Class Studies, having published worker writers long before this organization came into existence. Even if you have not met him personally, many of you know him as publisher of West End Press and his list of 150 or so titles of poetry, drama and fiction. The origin of West End Press is a typical John Crawford story.  It began by John as West End Magazine around 1971 while he was a grad student at Columbia University and frequented The West End Bar, located on Broadway, across from Columbia University. A native Californian, John carried the name, West End Press, established in 1975, from New York to the Midwest to Albuquerque. The range of writers he published constitutes a small history of working-class and multicultural writing, including Meridel LeSueur, Thomas McGrath, Don West, Pablo Neruda, and Cherrie Moraga. His relationship with Meridel and the LeSueur family highlights a hidden radical history of farmer/laborer politics in the early 20th century in the American Midwest that challenges contemporary assumptions about coastal thinking and Midwest conservatism.

Voice was very important to John Crawford.  By voice he meant writing from within one’s life experience.  He was concerned that the multi-cultural working classes have opportunities to be heard in their own words from their own perspective. “It’s not just a matter of dignity, it’s completely one of accuracy,” he said.

And then there is John’s own voice. This is from his proposal to present at a 2005 Working-Class Studies conference in Youngstown, Ohio:

The history of the working class in America is a fighting history.  It has been ignored or elided in most of our history books.  We need to recapture that history.  We need to show how economic relations first created, then exploited the working class . . . .

We need to study the artistic representation of the working class . . . .We need to study the history of the body under stress. We need to study the vulnerability of the working class in other respects, from childhood hunger to a lifetime job in a factory to service in the wars to imprisonment.  We need to study class in real relationship to race and gender, as a principal site of victimization and oppression . . . .

We need to see that ‘family values’ are not inventions of the bourgeoisie, but that working class life is a constant struggle to keep the family connection open, to find community and solidarity in numbers, and to resist alienation, economic dispersal, and spiritual impoverishment.  We need to understand the place of celebration, optimism, and spirituality in the midst of all working class struggles for survival.  …”

I wish to give the last word about John to one of the poets he published at West End, Jason L. Yurcic.  I quote from Yurcic’s dedication in his book of poems, Odes to Anger:

To John Crawford who may think his job is to edit and publish books, but in reality has walked into the darkness of my heart with a kind smile, kindled the spirit fire with knowledge, helped the embers of hope to come alive, and is dancing around the flames of my creation asking nothing in return.  Thank you.

Janet Zandy

September 2019