Selected by the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment Library University of California, Berkeley

• Date: 01 January 2016
• Published date: 01 January 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irel.12130
• Author: Terence K. Huwe,Janice Kimball

Recent Publications

Selected by the Institute for Research on Labor and

Employment Library University of California, Berkeley

TERENCE K. HUWE, Director of Library & Information Resources

JANICE KIMBALL, Library Assistant

Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South.

By Talitha L. LeFlouria. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina

Press, 2015. 978-1-4696-2247-7. 280 pp. $39.95.

LeFlouria charts the long and complicated history of female convict labor in the state of

Georgia. In 1868 Georgia took what seemed to be an innovative step, and began to make

its prison population available for hire. The long-term result was a “convict leasing sys-

tem”that ensnared both African American men and women, who were forced to perform

work in camps and factories, which also produced profits for private investors. LeFlouria

draws from a number of primary sources to reconstruct the stories of these women, paying

close attention to the conditions they endured in Georgia’s prison system as well as the

fruits of their labor. The historical record suggests that African American women’s pres-

ence within this system of forced labor was instrumental in helping to modernize the

South, because women who faced such labor also accrued a new and dynamic set of

skills. At the same time, female inmates found that they had to resist physical and sexual

exploitation, which in turn attuned them to their need for essential human dignity, even in

the face of what can only be regarded as a climate of terror. LaFlouria locates this history

of travail as a central, if overlooked, element in laying the foundations of the modern

American South.

Class Work: Vocational Schools and China’s Urban Youth.ByT.E.

Woronov. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. 978-0804-

79541-8. 216 pp. $25.95.

The author assesses the conditions faced by the substantial percentage of Chinese teen-

agers who are not necessarily on a college preparatory path, but instead find themselves

INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS, Vol. 55, No. 1 (January 2016). ©2015 Regents of the University of California

Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc., 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington

Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK.

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