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"A brilliant account of the politics of shit. It will leave you speechless." Written in Paris after the heady days of student revolt in May 1968 and before the devastation of the AIDS epidemic, History of Shit is emblematic of a wild and adventurous strain of 1970s' theoretical writing that attempted to marry theory, politics, sexuality, pleasure, experimentation, and humor. Radically redefining dialectical thought and post-Marxist politics, it takes an important—and irreverent—position alongside the works of such postmodern thinkers as Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, and Lyotard. Laporte's eccentric style and ironic sensibility combine in an inquiry that is provocative, humorous, and intel...
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Hobsbawm's classic account, revised in the light of recent political upheavals.
Victor J. Vitanza (author of Sexual Violence in Western Thought and Writing) continues to rethink the problem of sexual violence in cinema and how rape is often represented in "chaste" ways, in the form of a Chaste Cinematics. Vitanza continues to discuss Chaste Cinematics as participating in transdisciplinary-rhetorical traditions that establish the very foundations (groundings, points of stasis) for nation states and cultures. In this offering, however, the initial grounding for the discussions is "base materialism" (George Bataille): divine filth, the sacred and profane. It is this post-philosophical base materialism that destabilizes binaries, fixedness, and brings forth excluded thirds....
In a book whose insight and originality have already had a dazzling impact in France, Alain Corbin has put the sense of smell on the historical map. He conjures up the dominion that the combined forces of smells--from the seductress's civet to the ubiquitous excremental odors of city cesspools--exercised over the lives (and deaths) of the French in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Public toilets provide a unique opportunity for interrogating how conventional assumptions about the body, sexuality, privacy, and technology are formed in public spaces and inscribed through design across cultures. This collection of original essays from international scholars is the first to explore the cultural meanings, histories, and ideologies of public toilets as gendered spaces. Ladies and Gents consists of two sets of essays. The first, "Potty Politics: Toilets, Gender and Identity," establishes the importance of accessible, secure public toilets to the creation of inclusive cities, work, and learning environments. The second set of essays, "Toilet Art: Design and Cultural Represent...
This study examines the evolution of national and regional, cultural and political identities in that northern region of France which borders Belgium, over the two centuries which followed the French Revolution. During that time the region was transformed by the development of the industrial economy, population shifts, war and occupation, and numerous changes of political regime. Through an analysis of a wide range of issues, including language, regional and national political movements, educational policy, attitudes towards immigrants and the border, the press, trade unions, and the church - as well as the attitude of the French State - the author questions traditional interpretations of the process of national assimilation in France. At the same time he illustrates how the Franco-Belgian border, originally an arbitrary line through a culturally homogeneous region, became not only a significant marker for the identity of the French Flemish, but a real cultural division. TIMOTHY BAYCROFT is lecturer in French history, University of Sheffield.
The concepts of Ireland and 'Irishness' are in constant flux in the wake of an ever-increasing reappraisal of the notion of cultural and national specificity in a world assailed from all angles by the forces of globalisation and uniformity. Reimagining Ireland interrogates Ireland's past and present and suggests possibilities for the future by looking at Ireland's literature, culture and history and subjecting them to the most up-to-date critical appraisals associated with sociology, literary theory, historiography, political science and theology.
On Garbage is the first book to examine the detritus of Western culture in full range—not only material waste and ruin, but also residual or "broken" knowledge and the lingering remainders of cultural thought systems.
Although the city as a central entity did not simply disappear with the Fall of the Roman Empire, the development of urban space at least since the twelfth century played a major role in the history of medieval and early modern mentality within a social-economic and religious framework. Whereas some poets projected urban space as a new utopia, others simply reflected the new significance of the urban environment as a stage where their characters operate very successfully. As today, the premodern city was the locus where different social groups and classes got together, sometimes peacefully, sometimes in hostile terms. The historical development of the relationship between Christians and Jews...