Giacomo Zanolin

University of Milan | UNIMI · Department of Language Mediation and Intercultural Communication

In the current political atmosphere of Western society there has been a desire to re-establish industrial and manufacturing entities within their countries (The Economist 2013). In the UK, the outcome of the Brexit referendum showed how successful had been the appeal to ‘take back control’ as a way to shelter against global change. The image of the closed-down mine or empty factory was displayed prominently within these discussions. Further representations of deindustrialisation in different media and contents have contributed to constructing and reproducing a discourse whose ideological undertones, far from confining it to the realm of symbolic nostalgia, are having profound and differentiated effects. Rationale Scholarly interest in processes of deindustrialization has, so far, been mainly concerned with specific sites like abandoned mines or former industrialized territories transformed into post-industrial spaces. Furthermore, many scholars (Mah 2012, High 2013, Strangleman 2013 ) criticise the processes and recent studies of deindustrialisation and its representation as ‘smokestack nostalgia’ missing insights into the continuing struggle over the meaning of industrial work and its loss, revealing unresolved social, cultural, and political tensions. This edited volume addresses this problem by suggesting to broaden the perspective on processes of deindustrialization by introducing the concept of landscape and the more-than representational theory (Thrift 2007) to the established discourse. Thus, the edited book proposes a twofold shift: The first, is away from the notion of specific sites of deindustrialisation and towards a more nuanced understanding of post-industrial landscapes as collections of emerging moments and nodes, where a landscape is a coming into being of multiple actors including humans, animals, ecologies and affects. Secondly, the introduction of the more-than representational approach, which opens up broader perspectives on practices of rhetorical exploitation, discursive representations and performative approaches of dealing with the industrial past, loss and regeneration. Therefore, this provides insights into processes of re-assessing/re-imagining the industrial past, which is essentially future related and the accompanied processes of historical knowledge production and meaning making. Editors: George S. Jaramillo (The Glasgow School of Art) at G.Jaramillo@gsa.ac.uk and Juliane Tomann (Imre Kertész Kolleg, Jena University) at juliane.tomann@uni-jena.de