Sherry Lee Linkon (she/her) is a Professor of English and American Studies at Georgetown University. Her research and teaching cover a wide range of fields, including American literature and culture, interdisciplinary teaching and learning, and working-class studies. From 1997 to 2012, she was Co-Director of the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University, where she also directed the American Studies Program. With John Russo, she co-authored Steeltown USA: Work and Memory in Youngstown (Kansas, 2002) and co-edited New Working-Class Studies (Cornell, 2005). Her latest book, The Half-Life of Deindustrialization: Working-Class Writing about Economic Restructuring (Michigan, 2018), examines contemporary writing that reflects the continuing effects of deindustrialization on ideas about work, place, and working-class culture. She was the founding President of the Working-Class Studies Association and editor of the Working-Class Perspectives blog.
Research Project: Against Erasure: Black Women’s Experiences of Deindustrialization
Black women’s perspectives have rarely been central in public or scholarly discussions of deindustrialization in America, and their absence raises questions about what our narratives of industrial decline and its long aftermath might be missing. but since the early 2010s, Black women have been producing narratives and images that resist that erasure. Their work is expanding and shifting public discourse about the intersections among race, class, gender, and deindustrialization, and it deepens our understanding of how the effects of economic restructuring extend from the workplace into communities, interpersonal relationships, the home, and the body. This chapter will examine the work of four artists who construct inclusive narratives of economic and social change: playwrights Lynn Nottage and Denise Morrisseau, novelist Angela Flournoy, and photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier. Through photographs and narratives, these artists reveal both working-class solidarities across racial divides and persistent rifts rooted in historic and ongoing inequities. Equally important, they take us inside Black working-class lives, capturing intimate, interpersonal perspectives. These approaches help us understand not only what deindustrialization did to Black women and their families but also how people responded and resisted. Together, these projects contribute to what Frazier has envisioned as “monument and a museum of workers’ thoughts” (MoMA Scholars Day, 30:49), featuring voices and stories we often miss.