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Youngstown's ‘Ghost’? Memory, Identity, and Deindustrialization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 January 2014

James Rhodes
James Rhodes*
Affiliation:
University of Manchester, UK
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Abstract

This article considers the highly contested and contradictory uses of the industrial past that continue to animate questions of place-based identity in the wake of large-scale deindustrialization. Drawing on media accounts as well as qualitative interviews with city residents, the representations surrounding Youngstown, Ohio's former middleweight boxing champion, Kelly Pavlik, and his asserted relationships to the city are considered. It is argued that through the various depictions of Pavlik, we see how deindustrialization has led to a more complex interaction of space and time—rather than marking a material and symbolic break from the era in which heavy industry dominated the city and its sense of identity—as aspects of the past are alternately disavowed, recovered, rearticulated, and reconstructed in relation to shifting economic, social, and cultural contexts.

Type
Crumbling Cultures: Deindustrialization, Class, and Memory
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 84: Crumbling Cultures: Deindustrialization, Class, and Memory , Fall 2013 , pp. 55 - 77
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2013 

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References

NOTES

1. There is debate about how Pavlik got this nickname. It is often explained as either a result of his elusiveness as an amateur boxer or a nod to his “whiteness” in a sport, and particularly a weight division, that has been dominated by black fighters in recent decades. Here the term can also be thought of as the way in which Pavlik has been cast as simultaneously of the past and the present.

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