Abstract
The loss of a united working-class identity in post-industrial Wales can be understood through historical and cultural changes. These can be tracked through the comparison of Lewis Jones's Cwmardy and Rachel Trezise's Easy Meat. From a Marxist perspective, the way in which alienation and individualism cause fragmentation in the work place is exemplified in Trezise's text. Political unity amongst the workforce is disallowed meaning the workers lack a common goal so retreat into groups that share instead the commonality of national identity. Therefore, I argue, that the disassembly of unions at least partly catalyses working-class anti-European attitudes within Trezise's text.
About
Lizzy Cullen is a first year English Literature student at Swansea University. Her thesis looks to contemporary Welsh writing in English literature to explore the event of Brexit.
Abstract
It has frequently been argued that Soseki Natsume’s novel The Miner (1908) is an exceptional work, on the grounds that it is not a genuine fiction but is based on someone else’s actual experience. This is not the manner in which Soseki wrote the other novels; indeed, the narrator himself often confesses that this narrative cannot be written in a novel form. The narrative focuses on an upper-middle-class male character who becomes a miner, although the reasons for this are not explicitly delineated. It is noteworthy that his encounter with an exceptional miner from the upper-middle class is regarded as ‘a novel.’ This can be understood to suggest that a novel is perceived as a narrative form that reflects the values of the upper-middle class. In this sense, The Miner can be regarded as ‘exceptional’ due to its thematic focus on the narrator’s difficult experiences as a miner, a subject that is dramatically exceptional for his social class.
Kojin Karatani has observed that Soseki’s oeuvre is fundamentally divided into two themes: ethical and ontological. The former pertains to what Karatani terms ‘consciousness,’ and the latter to ‘nature.’ The former is predicated on middle-class ethics, while the latter is concerned with a far more radically ontological anxiety. Karatani emphasises that the concept of ‘nature’ in Soseki’s work is rooted in a pre-19th-century societal conception, akin to that of Hobbes. Indeed, Soseki’s ontological insight is exemplified in his remarks in a notebook: ‘the same space cannot be occupied by two persons simultaneously.’ However, Soseki’s attempts to reduce such an ontological theme to bourgeois ethical values are ultimately unsuccessful.
In this sense, The Miner can be regarded as a text that is not ‘exceptional’ in Soseki’s oeuvre. The narrative structure is radically divided into two: the upper-middle narrator’s ‘stream of consciousness’ and the ‘mass’ of other miners as class others. In the other works of Soseki, whose settings are based on the upper-middle milieu, the characters’ sense of ontological anxiety cannot be presented by what T. S. Eliot terms ‘objective correlative.’ Despite the difference in class settings, this is also the case in this narrative: any possible relevance cannot be found between the narrator’s upper-middle consciousness and the miners whose physical presence is abhorred by the former. Consequently, The Miner emerges as a seminal ‘ur-text’ in Soseki’s oeuvre. Karatan’s focus is on the manifestation of Soseki’s metaphysical anxiety in a physical form, exemplified by the miners in The Miner as physicalisations of such metaphysical and ontological affect. As in Eliot’s Hamlet, it should be added, these physicalisations of metaphysical affect do not function as sufficient objective correlatives, but the metaphysical intensity exceeds such materialisation.
This textual structure is reminiscent of Paul de Man’s deconstruction of romantic texts, in which such a division between inner consciousness and outer landscape is metaphorically resolved. His reading is an attempt to foreground the impossibility of this metaphorical identification in such a way as to indicate that this kind of rhetorical strategy contributes to the obliteration of its own radical impossibility. Accordingly, De Man’s assertion that the evasion of this textual predicament constitutes the origin of modern literature is a critical response to the tendency to overlook this fundamental issue. Given this form of deconstructive regression to the origin of modern literature, Soseki’s The Miner can be regarded as a privileged ‘ur-text’ in this historical context.
About
Dr Fuhito Endo is Professor of English at Seikei University in Tokyo. He was previously a visiting professor at UCL from 2012 to 2013 and a senior research fellow at UCL from 2023 to 2024. He has worked extensively on the relationship between British modernism and contemporary psychoanalytic discourses. His recent publications include chapters in Knots: Post-Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film (Routledge, 2019) and The Bloomsbury Handbook to Literature and Psychoanalysis (Bloomsbury, 2023). They are concerned with Conrad, Woolf, Eliot and Lawrence, and their interventions into and re-appropriations of Freudian and Kleinian languages. He also co-edited The Pleasure in/of the Text: About the Joys and Perversities of Reading (Peter Lang, 2021). This is an attempt to re-interpret the Barthean ‘pleasure of the text’ in multiple interdisciplinary contexts.
Abstract
Doris Lessing, who is the author of The Golden Notebook, was born in Iran and raised in Zimbabwe. She moved to the UK at the age of 30 and began her career as a writer. During her time in Africa, she was involved in political activities and was a member of the British Communist Party until 1956. After that, she continued to be involved in political protests and marches. In 1950s London, Lessing encountered miners from a Welsh pit in the lobby of the House of Commons. While they waited for the MPs they were looking for, they talked and became friends. However, in her autobiography, Walking in the Shade, Lessing reflects on how these miners fail to convey their situations to Welsh MPs, who are old friends of theirs.
In this presentation, I will explore this scene in relation to debates about the ethics of care and empathy. Why do the Welsh miners and Welsh MPs fail to reach a mutual understanding, while Lessing is able to show some understanding with the miners? Why is the reluctance of the Welsh miners so strong? I would like to consider these questions with Michel Slote’s idea of empathy. In his 2007 book, The Ethics of Care and Empathy, Slote argues that empathy is not about identifying with another person’s feelings. Instead, it involves understanding and perceiving the other person’s situation while acknowledging their individuality. In other words, empathy does not require identification or alignment with others. It presupposes a recognition of differences. Slote also points out that empathy develops through the sharing of feelings and concern. Empathy can be spread through social interaction. Drawing on Slote’s ideas, this presentation examines the role of empathy in the interactions between the Welsh miners, Welsh MPs, and Lessing and explores the significance of Lessing’s depiction of this scene in her autobiography.
About
Kanae Sekino is a junior associate professor at Iwate University, Japan. Her earliest research focused on Margaret Drabble and the representation of the mother-daughter relationship. Her current research interests have expanded to contemporary women’s writing, feminist literary criticism, and the ethics of care. She completed her MA degrees at Hitotsubashi University (Japan) and the University of Leeds. She is currently working on her PhD dissertation, which explores care work and caregiving in Doris Lessing’s 1980s novels. Her recent publications include “Reading Stories of Failure: Care in Doris Lessing’s Ben, in the World” in Virginia Woolf Review (2022; written in Japanese) and “Doris Lessing and Women's Liberation Movement: Her Distance from the Movement and the Possibility of Pessimism” in Artes Liberales (2024; written in Japanese). Since moving to Iwate for work, she has started watching Ice Hockey games. She is secretly attempting to get a uniform for the Cardiff Devils during a visit.
Contact: ksekino@iwate-u.ac.jp
Abstract
The folk revival, a cultural movement that sought to revive traditional folk songs through the medium of the mass media, coffee houses and folk clubs became an international phenomenon in the 1950s and 1960s. The seeds of the folk revival were sown in Japan when American folk groups such as The Kings Trip, The Brothers Four, Peter, Paul and Mary and folk singers such as Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan, were introduced to Japanese audiences in the 1960s. Fascinated by their lyrics and melodies, some young Japanese people began to recognise the roots of American traditional folk songs brought by European immigrants and passed on by working-class communities. While the folk boom in Japan took place in the context of American commercialism, another alternative folk song movement gradually emerged, centred around the Kansai region including Osaka and Kyoto. Starting with their own translations of English folk songs into Japanese, pioneering folk singers such as Takaishi Tomoya (1941-2004), Takada Wataru (1924-2005), Okabayashi Nobuyasu(1946-) and Nakagawa Goro (1949-) gradually began writing new lyrics for existing folk tunes or creating their own folk songs, reflecting the social conditions and struggles of the working class, including day labours and coal miners in post-war Japan. Their songs, which described the everyday lives of working-class people, resonated deeply with young Japanese who were questioning the entrenched Japanese economic, political, and social structures. In 1969, in opposition to the Vietnam War, the weekly rallies and folk song concerts were held at the West Underground Plaza of Shinjuku Station. This presentation will analyse labour-related lyrics and the activities of folk singers, focusing on how the Japanese folk movement, which emerged as a backlash against commercialised and mainstream music culture, provided a political and cultural platform for the New Left protest movement of the 1960s, in which people could build solidarity through creating and singing songs.
About
Emi Hirose is an Assistant Professor at Juntendo University, specialising in British literature and culture, with a particular focus on the 20th-century folk revival in Britain. She researches how folk songs were preserved and reinterpreted through the efforts of folk song collectors, singers, and institutions. She is also interested in how folk songs are represented in literary works by Thomas Hardy, George Borrow and Arnold Wesker and in other cultural expressions.
She holds an MA in History from Goldsmiths and a PhD in Literature from Japan Women's University. She has contributed two articles to the Reymond Williams Studies, "How the Anti-Nuclear Song, 'Never Against the A-Bomb,' Transitioned from the Singing Voice of Japan to the British Folk Revival of the 1950s and 1960s" (2021) and "Coal Songs and Common Culture: A. L. Lloyd's Collection and Adaptation of Folk Songs" (2019). She also wrote “Ewan MacColl’s Radio Ballad the Big Hewer and the British Folk Revival: A Representation of Coal Miners and Their Folklore” in Eibeibunka: Studies in English Language, Literature and Culture. (2023) Her favourite folk singers are Martin Carthy, Shirley Collins, Nick Drake, and Sandy Denny. She has been practising fingerstyle guitar for three years. She also enjoys making omelettes.
Abstract
Four decades on from the mass closure of pits, the pervasive and enduring impact of the coal industry and its subsequent decline remains palpable in and beyond the former mining regions of the UK, exerting a discernible influence on numerous aspects of people's lives. These effects encompass a range of socio-economic concerns, including elevated unemployment rates and a shrinking workforce, as well as environmental issues such as an increased risk of landslides at slag heaps during periods of heavy rainfall. Furthermore, the aforementioned impacts are also observed in qualitative socio-cultural dynamics, such as the long-term shifts in the cultures and mentalities cultivated in the coal communities. In this sense, the legacy, or the "after life," of coal has not been entirely erased. A notable illustration of this legacy from cultural and societal perspectives can be seen in the activism of women during and following the 1984-1985 Strike. This phenomenon has been a subject of extensive research and analysis from various academic vantage points. While some researchers regard women's support movements as a vital part of the women's lib movement in a heroic mode of narrative, others recently offer more nuanced details of women's experience. However, the question of how and where women in coalfields gained and retained their strength to keep the year-long strike has yet to be explored. Some of the news reports at that moment depicted the movements as to be “sprang up” unexpectedly, neglecting to consider their complex historical and regional contexts.
This presentation focuses on the women’s inter-regional and inter-generational mutual (un)learning process during and after the 1984-1985 Strike. While the process of ‘housewifisation,” in which working women were chased out of their working places in and the top of mining pits, played a significant role in the history of coalfield women, it didn’t necessarily mean that women unlearned their sense of independence and become mere “domestic servants.” Rather, there seem to be a cultural and traditional process in mining communities, in which housewives retained, even strengthened, their agency in their own ways. In order to articulate it, continuity and discontinuity of strikes will be briefly examined.
About
Ryota Nishi is an associate professor at Chuo University in Tokyo, Japan. His original academic field of interest is postcolonial literary theories. However, after the Great East Japan Earthquake of 11 March 2011 and the subsequent severe accidents at the Fukushima nuclear power plants, he began to research the labour movements in the coalfield and how they were represented as a critical issue of postcolonial studies in Japan. He is also interested in other fields in relation to this subject, including historical analysis of women's activism in coalfields, ecological discourse, migration and refugee, and theoretical analysis of labour. Welsh writing in English is also included in his interests. He translated Ron Berry's "Time Spent" into Japanese. He occasionally enjoys playing guitar, electric bass, and some percussions. He has dreamed to sing like Bob Marley, play bass like Willie Weeks, guitar like Eric Clapton. But the dream has still yet to come true.
Contact: ryota.245@g.chuo-u.ac.jp
Abstract
What happens to former coal mines once extraction ends? The answer often depends on the social and political context of the region. In the United States, particularly in Central Appalachia, former coal-mining sites have been repurposed into carceral spaces, with more than 30 state penitentiaries established on these lands since the late 20th century. Promoted as an economic revitalization strategy, prison construction has instead reinforced cycles of poverty and incarceration, with even correctional officers often earning wages below the national poverty line. In this sense, the prison industry operates as a new form of economic extraction in post-industrial coal-mining communities.
In Japan, by contrast, the closure of coal mines in the 1960s led to their transformation into tourist sites, often obscuring histories of labor struggle. The Mitsui Miike Coal Mine in Kyushu, for instance, was the site of a prolonged strike in 1960, marking a critical moment in Japan’s labor activism. U.S. policymakers played a role in fostering "cooperative unionism" as a means of labor pacification, while at the same time, cultural interventions—such as William Faulkner’s tour of Japan—were strategically deployed to counteract union influence. The repurposing of coal mines into amusement parks and other attractions can thus be understood as a political act, erasing labor’s collective memory.
By juxtaposing these two cases, this presentation explores how the afterlives of extractive industries reflect broader structures of economic and ideological control, whether through carceral capitalism or historical erasure.
About
Hiromi OCHI is Professor of American Literature at Senshu University, Tokyo. Her interest is in the literature of the American South, the political aspects of New Criticism, and Cold War cultural politics. Her publications include: The Southern Moment of Modernism: Southern Poets and Cold War (Kenkyusha, 2012, in Japanese); “Democratic Bookshelf: American Libraries in Occupied Japan” in Pressing the Fight: Print, Propaganda, and the Cold War (U of Massachusetts P, 2010); “The Reception of American Literature during the Occupation” in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature (Oxford, 2017); “Translations of American Cultural Politics into the Context of Post War Japan” in Routledge Companion to Transnational American Studies (Routledge, 2019); “Seminar in the Ruins: The Salzburg Seminar and Its Significance in Cold War Cultural Diplomacy in East Asia," Miles Chilton, Yukari Yoshihara and Steve Clark eds., Asian English: Histories, Texts, Institutions (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022) ; and “The Distribution and Reception of American Literature in Cold War Japan.” Greg Barnhisel, ed.The Boomsbury Handbook to Cold War Literary Cultures (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022.
Contact: HiromiOchi@isc.senshu-u.ac.jp
Abstract
Coal was understood differently in Wales prior to industrialisation. Being a densely wooded country, Wales had a thriving charcoal industry which powered the furnaces needed for metals, glass, ceramics and enamelling. Coal was second best, proving domestic heating, cooking and small-scale industrial uses. It was plentiful. cheap, and for surface coal, less labour-intensive than charcoal. This is a forgotten phase of the coal industry, and the later years of intensive industrialisation looked back on it with a contradictory mixture of romanticisation and dismissiveness. A similar tension exists in the current post-industrial age, where the heritage sector often finds it difficult to celebrate the industry and mourn its loss, to deprecate the appalling conditions and grinding poverty of its workers, while taking pride in the riches it created and its imperial reach.
Dr Peter Morgan Barnes is an art historian and in a former life directed opera, recently completing Pasticcio Opera in Britain: history and context (MUP, 2024). He currently writes about heritage issues and last year wrote Unsung Heritage: Neath Port Talbot’s Roman and early medieval sites and artefacts for the Richard Burton Centre.
Abstract
In my presentation I would like to introduce a brief history of Chosei Colliery, which is located near my hometown in Yamaguchi, in western Japan. Chosei Colliery, which was an underwater coal mine opened in 1932, was closed after an inundation incident in 1942, in which 136 workers from the Korean Peninsula and 47 Japanese coalminers lost their lives. At the incident, the entrance to the coal mine was sealed in front of the wailing families, and as of now, their bodies have not been recovered in spite of recent efforts to do so. I would locate the colliery and the incident in a vast industrial structure in Japan before and during the war, which utilised conscripted/forced labourors from Korea. The incident itself was a result of Japan’s wartime effort to enhance coal production. Chosei Colliery is a dark epitome of the Japanese industry before the war which depended on the ‘international’ workforce. My presentation will also focus on how the incident has been memorialized and narrativised, and how there have been efforts to erase Korean names from its history and memory. At the same time, I will look at the recent efforts not only to physically recover the bodies, but also to retain and refresh the memories of the incident and the victims, one of the most salient instances of which is a ‘social novel based on facts’, Piiya: Tombs for Requiem by Arata Osuga. This ‘novel’ tries to locate the colliery and the incident in a long history of Japan and the Korean Peninsula extending back to the fourth century. I would argue that this method of making sense of modernity by locating it in a long history, which is reminiscent of the same method in Raymond Williams’s People of the Black Mountains, has a certain degree of universality which connects coal-mine narratives of the East and the West.
About
Shintaro Kono is professor at Senshu University. He has written extensively on British literature and culture, global popular culture and cultural theory. His books in Japanese include Fighting Princesses and Working Girls (2017; paperback edition 2023), When We Hear New Voices (2022), This Free World and the Place We Return To (2023), Where Does Justice Go? (2023), Finding One’s Place in Solitude (2024) among others. He has edited and co-translated the collection of Welsh short stories, The Dark World (2020), which includes pieces by Rhys Davies, Gwyn Thomas, Rachel Trezise and others.
Abstract
In 1930-1, almost 800 workers who had been digging a tunnel to serve the coal industry in West Virginia died from acute silicosis soon after its completion, making the Hawks Nest Tunnel dig one of the worst industrial disasters in American history. Because most of the victims were African American, they were buried in unmarked graves on a nearby farm, only to be exhumed and moved decades later to a small memorial site on the side of a highway. By contrast, the nine miners saved from a 2002 cave-in at the Quecreek Mine in Somerset County, Pennsylvania received an elaborate memorial within a year of their rescue. The differing ways these victims and survivors of coal-industry disasters have been memorialized demonstrate the changing attitudes about the coal industry, race, workers, the role of government and private entities in creating monuments, and public memory that have occurred in the last hundred years.
About
Greg Barnhisel is Professor of English at Duquesne University. He is the author of James Laughlin, New Directions, and the Remaking of Ezra Pound (2005), Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy (2015), and Code Name Puritan: Norman Holmes Pearson at the Nexus of Poetry, Espionage, and American Power (2024), and editor of Pressing the Fight: Print, Propaganda, and the Cold War (2010) and The Bloomsbury Handbook to Cold War Literary Cultures (2022) as well as the scholarly journal Book History.
Abstract
‘These slashers, they never cleared a top hole, never filled a dram, couldn’t pack a gob wall, never cut up a rib face, they’d be smothered in yellow working a low seam with the top pouncing like bloody Guy Fawkes’ night. How can they think like us, ah?... All I’ve heard is jaw-jaw.’
As writers, ‘slashers’ and most of the world’s population become more and more distanced from the coal face and the physical work of mining described here by Ron Berry’s miner character Gabe Lloyd (in ‘That Old Black Pasture’), how are we going to remember and think like them, ah? A global and just transition away from fossil fuels is necessary for planetary survival, but how do we know we aren’t just writing more ‘jaw-jaw’ whilst more coal than ever before is extracted and burned? In an illuminated talk and creative response to the symposium, Nia will draw on disparate labyrinthine sources, personal and Avant Garde cultural histories of carbon extraction, to consider our imaginary and actual relationship to the miner and the coal face. We will see and hear some of the works of writers and artists (from Wales, the US and Japan) who have touched, remembered and forgotten coal and the dirty work that has long gone on below.
Nia Davies (Poet, Swansea University)
Steven Hitchins (Poet, Coleg y Cymoedd)