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Contemporary theorists, including Walter Benjamin, Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Nancy, have identified that an essential feature of capitalism is an uninterrupted or permanently wakeful continuity of production, exchange, consumption, communication and control. A form of enforced insomnia which keeps people subservient and compliant. This makes sleep a revolutionary act. Insomnia ranges from the history of philosophy to contemporary 'sleep science' and cutting edge theory to provide us with a powerful philosophical and aesthetic intervention – that charts not just the problems of sleep but its revolutionary potential as a new politics of sleep. This is urgent reading for anyone trying to sleep in contemporary capitalism.
The last ten years have seen a dramatic upsurge of interest in socialist theory and politics. As a recent Washington Post op-ed put it, “We are living in a new social democratic moment”. People are increasingly drawn to Marxist theory but find it difficult to imagine how it can be integrated practically into an everyday life pervaded by capitalist norms and social practices. Often intuitively, they agree with Marx's critique of capitalism, but don't know how to bridge the gap between their sense of dissatisfaction with the present and a revolutionary solution which can feel indefinitely postponed and remote. Living a Marxist Life responds to this disconnect by framing Marxism not as a me...
Since the decidedly bleak beginning of the twenty-first century, art practice has become increasingly politicized. Yet few have put forward a sustained defence of this development. Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde is the first book to look at the legacy of the avant-garde in relation to the deepening crisis of contemporary capitalism. An invigorating revitalization of the Frankfurt School legacy, Roberts's book defines and validates the avant-garde idea with an erudite acuity, providing a refined conceptual set of tools to engage critically with the most advanced art theorists of our day, such as Hal Foster, Andrew Benjamin, Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancire, Paolo Virno, Claire Bishop, Michael Hardt, and Toni Negri.
Since 2010 we have witnessed new ways of assembling, which have made the word »democracy« sound important again. These practices may not have led to the political changes we had hoped for. Nevertheless, we are convinced of their importance. This book wants to acknowledge them as a starting point for a new art of being many: The »many« invoke new concepts of collectivity by renegotiating their modes of participation and (self-)presentation and by rewriting rhetorical, choreographical, and material scripts of assembling. This volume is inspired and informed by the square-occupations and neighborhood assemblies of the »real democracy« movements as well as by recent explorations of the assembly form in performance art and participatory theatre.
This searing critique of participatory art—from its development to its political ambitions—is “an essential title for contemporary art history scholars and students as well as anyone who has . . . thought, ‘Now that’s art!’ or ‘That’s art?’” (Library Journal) Since the 1990s, critics and curators have broadly accepted the notion that participatory art is the ultimate political art: that by encouraging an audience to take part an artist can promote new emancipatory social relations. Around the world, the champions of this form of expression are numerous, ranging from art historians such as Grant Kester, curators such as Nicolas Bourriaud and Nato Thompson, to performance t...
Avant-Garde Post- follows seven Russophone poets as they reinvigorate leftist art in the wake of state socialism. Rejecting both the Putin regime--with its selective mobilizations of Soviet nostalgia--and Western discourses of liberal superiority, this circle is reviving class-based critique through experimental forms and global collaborations.
Introduces key terms, research traditions, debates, and histories for American Studies and Cultural Studies in an updated edition Since its initial publication, scholars and students alike have turned to Keywords for American Cultural Studies as an invaluable resource for understanding key terms and debates in the fields of American studies and cultural studies. As scholarship has continued to evolve, this revised and expanded third edition offers indispensable meditations on new and developing concepts used in American studies, cultural studies, and beyond. Designed as a uniquely print-digital hybrid publication, this Keywords volume collects 114 essays, each focused on a single term such a...
Horrifying Children examines weird and eerie children's television and literature via critical analysis, memoir and autoethnography. There has been an explosion of interest in the impact of children's television and literature of the late twentieth century. In particular, the 1970s, '80s and '90s are seen as decades that shaped a great deal of the contemporary cultural landscape. Television of this period dominated the world of childhood entertainment, drawing freely upon literature and popular culture, like the Garbage Pail Kids and Stranger Things, and much of it continues to resonate powerfully with the generation of cultural producers (fiction writers, screenwriters, directors, musicians...
How have the fall of the USSR and the long dominance of Putin reshaped Russian politics and culture? Ilya Budraitskis, one of the country's most prominent leftist political commentators, explores the strange fusion of free-market ideology and postmodern nationalism that now prevails in Russia, and describes the post-Soviet evolution of its left. He incisively describes the twists and contradictions of the Kremlin's geopolitical fantasies, which blend up-to-date references to "information wars" with nostalgic celebrations of the tsars of Muscovy. Despite the revival of aggressive Cold War rhetoric, he argues, the Putin regime takes its bearings not from any Soviet inheritance, but from reacti...
Explores the little art communities and their aesthetic products in the early twentieth centuryHistoricizes and theorizes the role and function of the little art community as a geo-social formationComparative, place-based study of three semiperipheral (non-metropolitan) sites New readings of major authors Jeffers, O'Neill, and LawrenceInterdisciplinary methodology based in primary source analysisChallenges a center-periphery model of modernist activity and literary-aesthetic production and instead emphasizes a network-based, collaborative modelThis book is first to historicise and theorise the significance of the early twentieth-century little art colony as a uniquely modern social formation...