Exit Zero

Family and Class in Postindustrial Chicago

Christine J. Walley

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780226871806, 9780226871790
• eBook ISBN: 9780226871813
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

Winner of CLR James Book Prize from the Working Class Studies Association and 2nd Place for the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing. 

In 1980, Christine J. Walley's world was turned upside down when the steel mill in Southeast Chicago where her father worked abruptly closed. In the ensuing years, ninety thousand other area residents would also lose their jobs in the mills—just one example of the vast scale of deindustrialization occurring across the United States. The disruption of this event propelled Walley into a career as a cultural anthropologist, and now, in Exit Zero, she brings her anthropological perspective home, examining the fate of her family and that of blue-collar America at large.

 

Interweaving personal narratives and family photos with a nuanced assessment of the social impacts of deindustrialization, Exit Zero is one part memoir and one part ethnography— providing a much-needed female and familial perspective on cultures of labor and their decline. Through vivid accounts of her family's struggles and her own upward mobility, Walley reveals the social landscapes of America's industrial fallout, navigating complex tensions among class, labor, economy, and environment. Unsatisfied with the notion that her family's turmoil was inevitable in the ever-forward progress of the United States, she provides a fresh and important counternarrative that gives a new voice to the many Americans whose distress resulting from deindustrialization has too often been ignored.

This book is part of a project that also includes a documentary film.

INDEX

Abbott, Edith, 177n25

Abu-Lughod, Lila, 171n7, 173n24, 186n12

activism. See environmental activism

Addams, Jane, 177n30

Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP), 184n46

African-Americans, 41, 54–55, 71, 77, 96, 132–33, 136–38, 176n22, 178n36, 188n22, 193n32, 196n44, 197n4, 198n13

Agent Orange, 164

Alberti, Mike, 184n46

Aldrich, Nelson, Jr., 187n22

Altgeld Gardens, 132–38, 193n32, 194n37, 195n41

Alvarez, Louis, 185n9

American dream, ix, 3, 6, 8, 23, 68, 71, 83, 89, 91, 98, 105, 116, 158, 166

anthropology, 97, 104–5, 172n20, 173n24, 186n10

antitrust, lack of enforcement, 83, 183n44

Appalachia, 36, 101

Appy, Christian, 187n20

arsenic, 127–28, 190n17, 198n15. See also toxic pollutants

Audley, John J., 198n7

auto industry, 58, 182n31

autoethnography, 14–15, 165, 173n26

automation, effect on the working class, 7

Babcock, Elizabeth, 197n54

Baden, Brett, 195n41, 197n53

Baker, Martin, 183n41

Balanoff, Clem, 134

Balshem, Martha, 189n8

bankruptcy law, rewritten, 79, 83, 184n44

Bartlett, Donald, 183n36, 183n42, 184n44

Bell, Shannon, 194n34

Bensman, David, 64, 79, 169n1, 178n1, 179n5, 179n7, 179n10, 180n14, 180n15, 180n19, 180n20, 183n33, 188n5, 189n6, 197n2

benzene, 127–28. See also toxic pollutants

Bergsvik, Robert, 180n21

Besteman, Catherine, 169n3, 197n3

Bethlehem Steel, 81, 140

Bettie, Julie, 44, 139, 172n14, 172n16, 172n17, 172n18, 178n34, 172n19, 185n3, 196n45

Bhowmik, Nani G., 190n19, 192n27

Birnbaum, Linda S., ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Map of Southeast Chicago
• Introduction
• One / A World of Iron and Steel: A Family Album
• Two / It All Came Tumbling Down: My Father and the Demise of Chicago’s Steel Industry
• Three / Places Beyond
• Four / The Ties That Bind
• Conclusion / From the Grave to the Cradle
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index