Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

identity construct #2: class 117
• Parker is obviously challenging prior conceptualizations of class.
But he does not jettison them as useful intellectual concepts. As he puts it,
“Is anything gained, therefore, by using the concept of class, specifi cally
‘the middle class,’ to tell the social history of clerks and bureaucrats in
twentieth-century Peru? In my view the answer remains an emphatic
yes.” How can Parker say this? It may help you to think of the issue of
race and consider classist thinking in the same way we suggested redefi ning
race as racialist thinking.
• How does Parker’s argument about language (as being neither
entirely determinant or entirely malleable) refl ect earlier arguments (e.g.,
Hall’s) that seek to balance essentialist and semiotic interpretations?
Notes
1. Patrick Joyce has played a key role in redefi ning class from a cultural
theory perspective in Class (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995) and Visions of the
People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1848–1914 (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1991).
2. David Parker, The Idea of the Middle Class: White Collar Workers
and Peruvian Society, 1900–1950 (University Park: Penn State UP, 1998).
Excerpt comes from 2–3, 5–7, 9–14, 16–17, 20–21. As of 2007, David Parker
was serving as an associate professor of history and the chair of undergraduate
studies at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada.
3. John J. Johnson, Political Change in Latin America: The Emergence of
Middle Sectors (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1958).
4. The SEC is the Sociedad de Empleados de Comercio (Commercial Employees
Society).