Rancière - Proletarian Nights
Rancière, J. (2012 [1981]). Proletarian Nights: The Workers' Dream in Nineteenth-Century France. London: Verso. ISBN: 978-1-84467-778-8
In this book, Rancière examines the dreams, concrete experiences, and cultural meanings developed and promoted by particular sectors of the working class in the middle of the 19th century. The book provides a very interesting insight into workers’ minds and workers’ cultural reality in a particular period of French history, which can be seen as a matrix for 20th and 21st century workers’ lives.
The book can help develop thinking about culture on the basis of workers' experiences, either at the factory or in other workplaces and institutional settings. Workers’ experiences are made up of a mixture of efforts: suffering and pain, but also hopes, joy, and sometimes even happiness. Parts of these individual and collective experiences are the material for a genuine imaginary of creations and inventions. Although dealing with French culture, the book may help reformulate a programme for an inclusive Europe of culture, which should not deny but take as central the realities of various diverse groups.
Jacques Rancière “Proletarian Nights: The Workers' Dream in Nineteenth-Century France”