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Leading artists, theorists, and writers exhume the dystopian and utopian futures contained within the present “I am the supercommunity, and you are only starting to recognize me. I grew out of something that used to be humanity. Some have compared me to angry crowds in public squares; others compare me to wind and atmosphere, or to software.” Invited to exhibit at the 56th Venice Biennale, e-flux journal produced a single issue over a four-month span, publishing an article a day both online and on site from Venice. In essays, poems, short stories, and plays, artists and theorists trace the negative collective that is the subject of contemporary life, in which art, the internet, and globalization have shed their utopian guises but persist as naked power, in the face of apocalyptic ecological disaster and against the claims of the social commons. “I convert care to cruelty, and cruelty back to care. I convert political desires to economic flows and data, and then I convert them back again. I convert revolutions to revelations. I don’t want security, I want to leave, and then disperse myself everywhere and all the time.”
Over five hundred years since it was named, utopia remains a vital concept for understanding and challenging the world(s) we inhabit, even in – or rather because of – the condition of ‘post-utopianism’ that supposedly permeates them. In Rethinking Utopia David M. Bell offers a diagnosis of the present through the lens of utopia and then, by rethinking the concept through engagement with utopian studies, a variety of ‘radical’ theories and the need for decolonizing praxis, shows how utopianism might work within, against and beyond that which exists in order to provide us with hope for a better future. He proposes paying a ‘subversive fidelity’ to utopia, in which its three con...
In “gorgeously wrought” essays, the New York Times-bestselling author of The God of Small Things takes a critical look at India’s political climate (Time Magazine). These “powerful” essays (Kirkus Reviews) examine the dark side of contemporary India, looking closely at how religious majoritarianism, cultural nationalism, and neo-fascism simmer just under the surface of a country that projects itself as the world’s largest democracy. Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy writes about how the combination of Hindu nationalism and India’s neo-liberal economic reforms, which began their journey together in the early 1990s, are turning India into a police state. She describes the systema...
A Companion to Contemporary Art in a Global Framework explores the ways specialists and institutions in the fine arts, curation, cultural studies, and art history have attempted to situate art in a more global framework since the 1980s. Offering analyses of the successes and setbacks of these efforts to globalize the art world, this innovative volume presents a new and exciting way of considering art in its global contexts. Essays by an international panel of leading scholars and practicing artists assert that what we talk about as ‘art’ is essentially a Western concept, thus any attempts at understanding art in a global framework require a revising of established conceptual definitions....
How the definition, production, and leveraging of information are shaped by caste, class, and gender, and the implications for development. Information, says Janaki Srinivasan, has fundamentally reshaped development discourse and practice. In this study, she examines the history of the idea of “information” and its political implications for poverty alleviation. She presents three cases in India—the circulation of price information in a fish market in Kerala, government information in information kiosks operated by a nonprofit in Puducherry, and a political campaign demanding a right to information in Rajasthan—to explore three uses of information to support goals of social change. C...
Focusing on the culture of piracy in the Indian capital, this book looks at what has happened to the city in the wake of the dissemination of the new media and the ways in which it has, and will, affect urban cultures in an age of globalization.
‘Delhi is the twin of pure paradise, a prototype of the heavenly throne on an earthlyscroll’—Amir Khusrau A city of contradictions, where ancient traditions and modern aspirations jostle for space, Delhi has often been compared to a phoenix rising from the ashes. Its three thousand years of eventful history have witnessed the rise and fall of several empires, a process that continues today. City Improbable brings together writings by immigrants, residents, refugees, travellers and invaders who have engaged with India’s capital over different epochs. Babur shares his earliest experience of the city and Amir Khusrau praises the fine lads of Delhi; Ibn Battuta and Niccolao Manucci recor...
The critically acclaimed author of "Tokyo Cancelled" returns with a new novel that paints a portrait of a century though the story of a 100-year-old blind Bulgarian man.
This edited collection brings together scholars who draw on phenomenological approaches to understand the experiences of young people growing up under contemporary conditions of globalization. Phenomenology is both a philosophical and pragmatic approach to social sciences research, that takes as central the meaning-making experiences of research participants. One of the central contentions of this book is that phenomenology has long informed critical empirical approaches to youth cultures, yet until recently its role has not been thusly named. This volume aims to resuscitate and recuperate phenomenology as a robust empirical, theoretical, and methodological approach to youth cultures. Chapters explore the lifeworlds of young people from countries around the world, revealing the tensions, risks and opportunities that organize youth experiences.
'What happens once democracy has been used up? When it has been hollowed out and emptied of meaning?' Combining brilliant political insight and razor-sharp prose, Listening to Grasshoppers is the essential new book from Arundhati Roy. In these essays, she takes a hard look at the underbelly of the world's largest democracy, and shows how the journey that Hindu nationalism and neo-liberal economic reforms began together in the early 1990s is unravelling in dangerous ways. Beginning with the state-backed killing of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, she writes about how 'progress' and genocide have historically gone hand in hand; about the murky investigations into the 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament; about the dangers of an increasingly powerful and entirely unaccountable judiciary; and about the collusion between large corporations, the government and the mainstream media. The collection ends with an account of the August 2008 uprising in Kashmir and an analysis of the November 2008 attacks on Mumbai. 'The Briefing', included as an appendix, is a fictional text that brings together many of the issues central to the collection.