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The main goal of this work is to provide a metaphysical account of properties and of how they are related to concrete particulars. On the broadest level, this work is a defense of tropes and of trope bundle theory as the best accounts of properties and objects, respectively, and, second, a defense of a specific brand of trope nominalism, Natural Class Trope Nominalism. Each of these tasks is pursued separately, with the first Part of this work acting as a general introduction and defense of tropes and trope bundle theory, and the second Part acting as the more specific defense of Natural Class Trope Nominalism. In Part 1 it is argued that there are tropes. Part 1 also provides an outline of what tropes can do for us metaphysically, while remaining neutral between different theories of tropes. Included in Part 1 are an account of the universal–particular distinction, an argument for the existence of tropes based on the phenomenon of moving properties, the development of a trope bundle theory of objects and a trope-based solution to the problems of mental causations. The second Part presents a fuller picture of what a trope is by way of Natural Class Trope Nominalism, according to which a trope's nature is determined by membership in natural classes of tropes. In addition, in Part 2 a defense is developed of Natural Class Trope Nominalism against what have been thought to be fatal objections to this view, a defense grounded in property counterpart theory without modal realism.

Rank and file soldiers were not ‘the scum of the earth’. They included a cross section of working-class men who retained their former civilian culture. While they often exhibited pride in regiment and nation, soldiers could also demonstrate a growing class consciousness and support for political radicalism. The book challenges assumptions that the British army was politically neutral, if privately conservative, by uncovering a rich vein of liberal and radical political thinking among some soldiers, officers and political commentators. This ranges from the Whig ‘militia’ tradition, through radical theories on tactics and army reform, to attempted ultra-radical subversion amongst troops and the involvement of soldiers in riots and risings. Case studies are given of individual 'military radicals', soldiers or ex-soldiers who were reforming and later socialist activists. Popular anti-French feeling of the Napoleonic Wars is examined, alongside examples of rank and file bravery which fostered widespread loyalty and patriotism. This contributed to soldiers being used successfully in strike breaking, and deployed against rioters or Chartist revolts. By the late Victorian period, popular imperialism was an important part of working-class support for Conservatism. The book explores what impact this had on rank and file soldiers, whilst outlining minority support for socialism.

Free Jazz/Black Power is a treatise on the racial and political implications of jazz and jazz criticism published in 1971 by two French jazz critics, Philippe Carles and Jean-Louis Comolli. The goal of the book was to show that the strong and mostly negative reactions provoked by free jazz among classic jazz critics on both sides of the Atlantic could be better understood by analyzing the social, cultural and political origins of jazz itself, exposing its ties to African American culture, history, and the political struggle that was still raging in early 1970s USA. The authors analyze the circumstances of the production of jazz criticism as discourse, a work of cultural studies in a time and place where the practice as such was completely unknown. The book owes much to African American cultural and political thought. Carles and Comolli suggest that the African American struggle had to be seen as a singular branch of a worldwide class struggle, echoing more famous figures of the French Left of the time, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, or Jean Genêt. Yet few were those that had articulated this de rigueur political backing with an in-depth cultural critique and analysis of the condition of African Americans informed by African Americans themselves.

Socialism and the Diasporic ‘Other’ simultaneously examines how left-wing politics functioned within the diasporic communities and how Irish and Jewish populations were viewed by the wider socialist and trade union movements. It discusses the similarities and differences in how politics and communal dynamics were apparent in the Irish and Jewish East Ends, and the relationships formed between Irish and Jewish women, men and children in numerous contexts. It also compares the structures and agendas of the Jewish and Catholic metropolitan hierarchies, and how communal leaderships attempted to maintain control over working class migrant communities. The book emphasises the lack of consistency in progressive attitudes towards ethnic and religious minorities in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, and the use of ethnic difference as a way of demarcating political space in an often chaotic and fractured London left. It argues that there were two key major differences in the ways in which communal politics functioned in Jewish and Irish Catholic East London, the first based around the nature of hierarchical authority, and the second on how class relations manifested themselves in the communities. It roots the divergent paths that Jewish and Irish communal East End politics took before the First World War in these differences.

Much has been published on the history of Japanese immigration to Brazil, Japanese Brazilians in Brazil, and Japanese Brazilians’ “return” labor migrations to Japan (known as dekassegui). Yet none has gone beyond and above the essentialized categories of “the Japanese” in Brazil and “Brazilians” in Japan. This book demonstrates that Japanese Brazilian identity has never been a static, fixed set of traits that can be counted and inventoried.  Rather it is about being and becoming, a process of identity in motion responding to the push-and-pull between being positioned and positioning in a historically changing world.  The book is based on the author’s painstaking research in Brazil and Japan between 1997 and 2013, involving extensive life history interviews (and follow-ups) with 116 Japanese Brazilians of several generations and diverse social backgrounds, in combination with substantial archival research and multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork.  This book examines Japanese immigrants and their descendants’ historically shifting sense of identity that comes from their engagement or experience of historical changes in socioeconomic and political structure.  Each chapter illustrates how Japanese Brazilian identity is in formation, across generation, across gender, across class, across race, and in the movement of people between nations.

Beyond the conventional sources of racial inequality—racism for liberals and a dysfunctional black culture for conservatives—lies a source of racial inequality little discussed or studied in our society. This book maps out that terrain, using the term “racial subordination” to define racial inequality that is a byproduct of individual or institutional action that consciously forgoes an opportunity to advance racial progress for the sake of pursuing a legitimate, nonracist competing interest. While not racism, this non-nefarious source of racial inequality is not racial innocence. Though the subordinator is not on the same hook as the racist, he or she is still on the hook—a different hook. Moving the debate over racial inequality from discrimination discourse to subordination discourse, this book demonstrates how the Supreme Court engages in “juridical subordination” and how the American mainstream culture, even with its commitment to cultural diversity, commits “cultural subordination” time after time. Racism remains a large problem in our society but eliminating it will not end racial inequality. Racism and racial inequality are not coterminous. Unless we also deal with racial subordination, blacks, or African Americans, will effectively face a racial glass ceiling. Breaking through that ceiling involves confronting complex and uncomfortable questions about what we value most as Americans.

The poor have always been with us. In the rural American South, the “bottom half” languished on the edge of survival since Reconstruction. When the Great Depression hit, their plight worsened. The New Deal – and the nation – responded with a radical and innovative solution. Model communities were created to help the rural poor, if not to attain full middle-class status, at least to escape peasantry. These communities, which I have dubbed “American Goshens,” would provide adequate nourishment, shelter, and financing plans for the working poor Remarkably, these 200-plus “Goshens,” such as the Tupelo Homesteads and Dyess Colony in Arkansas, were not just forged by New Deal policy-makers. A coalition of liberal Christians – led by Reinhold Niebuhr, and the Socialist Party of America built a bi-racial cooperative farm in the Mississippi Delta, the Delta Cooperative Farm at Hillhouse, Miss. The appeal of new and clean cottages, a parcel of land, and a liberal financing arrangement must have seemed to plain folk much like biblical Goshen seemed to the children of Israel. Indeed the announcement of the imminent creation of “Goshen” caused heretofore reluctant-to-write plain folk to inquire further of the conditions, of the requirements for admittance, and for information on how to apply. Ultimately, all the Goshens, designed to redeem and rescue the plain folk of the rural South, failed. This book examines why they were created, the economic theories that justified them, how they were built and managed, and why plain folk refused to live in Goshen.

This book analyses how racism and anti-racism influences Black British middle class cultural consumption. In doing so, this book challenges the dominant understanding of British middle class identity and culture as being ‘beyond race’. Paying attention to the relationship between cultural capital and cultural repertoires, this book puts forward the idea that there are three black middle-class identity modes: strategic assimilation, class-minded, and ethnoracial autonomous. People towards each of these identity modes use specific cultural repertoires to organise their cultural consumption. Those towards strategic assimilation draw on repertoires of code-switching and cultural equity, consuming traditional middle class culture to maintain an equality with the white middle-class in levels of cultural capital. Ethnoracial autonomous individuals draw on repertoires of browning and Afro-centrism, self-selecting out of traditional middle- class cultural pursuits they decode as ‘Eurocentric’, while showing a preference for cultural forms that uplift black diasporic histories and cultures. Lastly, those towards the class-minded identity mode draw on repertoires of post-racialism and de-racialisation. Such individuals polarise between ‘Black’ and middle class cultural forms, display an unequivocal preference for the latter, and lambast other black people who avoid middle-class culture as being culturally myopic or culturally uncultivated. This book will appeal to sociology students, researchers, and academics working on race and class, critical race theory, and cultural sociology, among other social science disciplines.

Intended for researchers, students, policymakers and practitioners, this book draws on detailed longitudinal fieldwork in rural south India to analyse the conditions of the rural poor and their patterns of change. Focusing on the three interrelated arenas of production, state, and civil society, it argues for a class-relational approach focused on forms of exploitation, domination and accumulation. The book focuses on class relations, how they are mediated by state institutions and civil society organisations, and how they vary within the countryside, when rural-based labour migrates to the city, and according to patterns of accumulation, caste dynamics, and villages’ levels of irrigation and degrees of remoteness. More specifically it analyses class relations in the agriculture and construction sectors, and among local government institutions, social movements, community-based organisations and NGOs. It shows how the dominant class reproduces its control over labour by shaping the activities of increasingly prominent local government institutions, and by exerting influence over the mass of new community-based organisations whose formation has been fostered by neoliberal policy. The book is centrally concerned with countervailing moves to improve the position of classes of labour. Increasingly informalised and segmented across multiple occupations in multiple locations, India’s ‘classes of labour’ are far from passive in the face of ongoing processes of exploitation and domination. Forms of labouring class organisation are often small-scale and tend to be oriented around the state and social policy. Despite their limitations, the book argues that such forms of contestation of government policy currently play a significant role in strategies for redistributing power and resources towards the labouring class, and suggests that they can help to clear the way for more broad-based and fundamental social change.

Car workers’ union activism has long held a strong grip on popular memories of the post-war period. Working in the quintessential industry of modernity their labour militancy has been linked to narratives of economic decline and of rising working-class living standards. Yet despite their centrality to understanding of this period, car workers’ capacity for collective action has often been taken for granted, with mobilisation attributed to uncomplicated economic motivations or the last gasps of a declining “traditional class consciousness”, and the effects of the post-war settlement. This book looks at the changing forms of agency and subjectivity expressed by labour militancy, considering workplace activism in the motor industry as a specific historical creation of post-war Britain, rather than a reflection of “tradition”. It traces the origins of shop-floor organisations which first emerged in the 1950s, studying the processes by which workers built their union cultures, and exploring the capacity of car workers to generate new solidarities and collective values in this period. Focus then turns to the 1960s and 1970s and the social practices and cultural norms that resulted from this cultural assembling, looking to understand how worker activism shaped the agency of car workers in post-war Britain, influencing the forms that strike action took. Through a mixture of oral history interviews, letters, meeting minutes and periodicals, this book analyses the meanings workers attributed to industrial conflict, asking whether factory activism generated attitudes distinct from the dominant values of wider British society.

At its heart, I Fight for a Living is a book about black men who came of age in the Reconstruction and early Jim Crow era--a time when the remaking of white manhood was at its most intense, placing vigor and physicality at the center of the construction of manliness. The book uses the stories of black fighters’ lives, from 1880 to 1915, to explore how working-class black men used prizefighting and the sporting culture to assert their manhood in a country that denied their equality, and to examine the reactions by the black middle class and white middle class toward these black fighters. Through these stories, the book explores how the assertion of this working-class manliness confronted American ideas of race and manliness. While other works on black fighters have explored black boxers as individuals, this book seeks to study these men as a collective group while providing a localized and racialized response to black working-class manhood. It was a tough bargain to risk one’s body to prove manhood, but black men across the globe took that chance.