Download or read book May 68 and Its Afterlives written by Kristin Ross and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-11-26 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During May 1968, students and workers in France united in the biggest strike and the largest mass movement in French history. Protesting capitalism, American imperialism, and Gaullism, 9 million people from all walks of life, from shipbuilders to department store clerks, stopped working. The nation was paralyzed—no sector of the workplace was untouched. Yet, just thirty years later, the mainstream image of May '68 in France has become that of a mellow youth revolt, a cultural transformation stripped of its violence and profound sociopolitical implications. Kristin Ross shows how the current official memory of May '68 came to serve a political agenda antithetical to the movement's aspirations. She examines the roles played by sociologists, repentant ex-student leaders, and the mainstream media in giving what was a political event a predominantly cultural and ethical meaning. Recovering the political language of May '68 through the tracts, pamphlets, and documentary film footage of the era, Ross reveals how the original movement, concerned above all with the question of equality, gained a new and counterfeit history, one that erased police violence and the deaths of participants, removed workers from the picture, and eliminated all traces of anti-Americanism, anti-imperialism, and the influences of Algeria and Vietnam. May '68 and Its Afterlives is especially timely given the rise of a new mass political movement opposing global capitalism, from labor strikes and anti-McDonald's protests in France to the demonstrations against the World Trade Organization in Seattle.
Download or read book The Imaginary Revolution written by Michael M. Seidman and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2004-08 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The events of 1968 have been seen as a decisive turning point in the Western world. The author takes a critical look at "May 1968" and questions whether the events were in fact as "revolutionary" as French and foreign commentators have indicated. He concludes the student movement changed little that had not already been challenged and altered in the late fifties and early sixties. The workers' strikes led to fewer working hours and higher wages, but these reforms reflected the secular demands of the French labor movement. "May 1968" was remarkable not because of the actual transformations it wrought but rather by virtue of the revolutionary power that much of the media and most scholars have attributed to it and which turned it into a symbol of a youthful, renewed, and freer society in France and beyond.
Download or read book May 1968 written by Philippe Tesson and published by Editions Didier Millet. This book was released on 2018-06-26 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: May 1968 brings together the contemporary eye of acclaimed photographer Bruno Barbey and the pen of Illustrious journalist Philippe Tesson to reflect upon the weeks of civil unrest that shook France to its core in 1968. Radio, television and newspapers...The media played a major role in the events, both for the government and the demonstrators. While the popular posters depicted the riot police manning the microphones at the broadcasting service, the newspapers and radio stations took up the defense of the student protesters. Barbey captured the daiy life of the protesters, students and factory workers, immortalising key moments and nights full of violence and confrontations. From the beginning, the entire press corps had seized upon the events, but only the magazine Combat was on the side of the youths. At least until the violence erupted. Tesson, then Editor-in-Chief, relates his memories of the events which reverberated to the very heart of State power in France.
Download or read book May Made Me written by Mitchell Abidor and published by AK Press. This book was released on 2018-04-10 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Q: “You threw paving stones at [the cops]?” A: “Oh yeah. I had no problem doing that. And I threw marbles as well that we stole from stores. And towards the end we even managed to steal tractors from construction sites and we knocked over trees with them.” The mass protests that shook France in May 1968 were exciting, dangerous, creative, and influential, changing European politics to this day. Students demonstrated, workers went on general strike, and factories and universities were occupied. Before it was all over, children, homemakers, and the elderly were swept up in the life-changing events that targeted bureaucratic capitalism and the staid Communist Party. The French state was on the ropes and feared civil war or revolution. Decades later, here are the eye-opening oral testimonies of those young rebels who demanded the impossible. Published on the 50th anniversary of those momentous events, May Made Me presents the legacy of the uprising: how those explosive experiences changed both the individual and history. “These powerful and moving testimonies create an eye-opening account of the inspiring events of May ’68, which are more relevant for today’s activists than ever before.” —Paul Mason, author of Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future
Download or read book Beauty is in the Street written by Johan Kugelberg and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In May 1968, demonstrations against the French government spread across Parisian universities, and then to factories and other workplaces, resulting in a general strike of eleven million workers that brought the country to a virtual standstill. Among the students were a group who called themselves the Atelier Populaire, who produced hundreds of posters to encourage the protestors and to report on police brutality. Beauty Is In The Street reproduces over 200 of these posters which have become landmarks in political art and graphic design. Also included are a wealth of photographs, many published for the first time, and translations of first-hand accounts of the clashes between the students and strikers and the police.
Download or read book When Poetry Ruled the Streets written by Andrew Feenberg and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2010-03-29 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than a history, this book is a passionate reliving of the French May Events of 1968. The authors, ardent participants in the movement in Paris, documented the unfolding events as they pelted the police and ran from the tear gas grenades. Their account is imbued with the impassioned efforts of the students to ignite political awareness throughout society. Feenberg and Freedman select documents, graffiti, brochures, and posters from the movement and use them as testaments to a very different and exciting time. Their commentary, informed by the subsequent development of French culture and politics, offers useful background information and historical context for what may be the last great revolutionary challenge to the capitalist system.
Download or read book Sum written by David Eagleman and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2009-02-10 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At once funny, wistful and unsettling, Sum is a dazzling exploration of unexpected afterlives—each presented as a vignette that offers a stunning lens through which to see ourselves in the here and now. In one afterlife, you may find that God is the size of a microbe and unaware of your existence. In another version, you work as a background character in other people’s dreams. Or you may find that God is a married couple, or that the universe is running backward, or that you are forced to live out your afterlife with annoying versions of who you could have been. With a probing imagination and deep understanding of the human condition, acclaimed neuroscientist David Eagleman offers wonderfully imagined tales that shine a brilliant light on the here and now.
Download or read book The Long 1968 written by Daniel J. Sherman and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-16 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Delving into a tumultuous year’s impact on art, culture, and politics, this book “illuminates the often-overlooked histories of 1968” (The Journal of American History). From the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, revolutions in theory, politics, and cultural experimentation swept around the world. These changes had as great a transformative impact on the right as on the left. A touchstone for activists, artists, and theorists of all stripes, the year 1968 has taken on new significance for the present moment, which bears certain uncanny resemblances to that time. The Long 1968 explores the wide-ranging impact of the year and its aftermath in politics, theory, the arts, and international relations—and its uses today.
Download or read book The Imaginary Revolution written by Michael M. Seidman and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2004 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The events of 1968 have been seen as a decisive turning point in the Western world. The author takes a critical look at "May 1968" and questions whether the events were in fact as "revolutionary" as French and foreign commentators have indicated. He concludes the student movement changed little that had not already been challenged and altered in the late fifties and early sixties. The workers' strikes led to fewer working hours and higher wages, but these reforms reflected the secular demands of the French labor movement. "May 1968" was remarkable not because of the actual transformations it wrought but rather by virtue of the revolutionary power that much of the media and most scholars have attributed to it and which turned it into a symbol of a youthful, renewed, and freer society in France and beyond.
Download or read book The Wretched of France written by Abdellali Hajjat and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2022-03 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1983—as France struggled with race-based crimes, police brutality, and public unrest—youths from Vénissieux (working-class suburbs of Lyon) led the March for Equality and Against Racism, the first national demonstration of its type in France. As Abdellali Hajjat reveals, the historic March for Equality and Against Racism symbolized for many the experience of the children of postcolonial immigrants. Inspired by the May '68 protests, these young immigrants stood against racist crimes, for equality before the law and the police, and for basic rights such as the right to work and housing. Hajjat also considers the divisions that arose from the march and offers fresh insight into the paradoxes and intricacies of movements pushing toward sweeping social change. Translated into English for the first time, The Wretched of France contemplates the protest's lasting significance in France as well as its impact within the context of larger and comparable movements for civil rights, particularly in the US.
Download or read book Making a World after Empire written by Christopher J. Lee and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2010-06-15 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In April 1955, twenty-nine countries from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East came together for a diplomatic conference in Bandung, Indonesia, intending to define the direction of the postcolonial world. Representing approximately two-thirds of the world’s population, the Bandung conference occurred during a key moment of transition in the mid-twentieth century—amid the global wave of decolonization that took place after the Second World War and the nascent establishment of a new cold war world order in its wake. Participants such as Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Zhou Enlai of China, and Ahmed Sukarno of Indonesia seized this occasion to attempt the creation of a political alternative to the dual threats of Western neocolonialism and the cold war interventionism of the United States and the Soviet Union. The essays in this volume explore the diverse repercussions of this event, tracing the diplomatic, intellectual, and sociocultural histories that have emanated from it. Making a World after Empire consequently addresses the complex intersection of postcolonial history and cold war history and speaks to contemporary discussions of Afro-Asianism, empire, and decolonization, thus reestablishing the conference’s importance in twentieth-century global history. Contributors: Michael Adas, Laura Bier, James R. Brennan, G. Thomas Burgess, Antoinette Burton, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Julian Go, Christopher J. Lee, Jamie Monson, Jeremy Prestholdt, Denis M. Tull
Download or read book Afterlives of Georges Perec written by Rowan Wilken and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-08 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines Perec's impact on architecture, art, design, media, electronic communications, computing and the everydayWhat do Perec's descriptions of the minutiae of everyday life reveal about our use of information and communications technologies?What happens if we read Life: A Users Manual as a toolbox of ideas for games studies? What light does the concept of the ainfra-ordinary shed on social media? What insights does algorithmic writing generate for the digital humanities? What lessons can architects, artists, game-designers and writers draw from Perec's fascination with creative constraints? Through an examination of such questions, this collection takes Perec scholarship beyond its existing limits to offer new ways of rethinking our present.ContributorsTom Apperley, Monash University, Australia.Caroline Bassett, University of Sussex, UK. David Bellos, Princeton, USA.Justin Clemens, University of Melbourne, Australia.Ben Highmore, University of Sussex, UK.Alison James, University of Chicago, USA.Sandra Kaji-OGrady, University of Sydney, Australia. Christian Licoppe, TA(c)lA(c)com ParisTech, France.Anthony McCosker, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia. Mireille RibiA*re, independent scholar, translator and author.Darren Tofts, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia.Rowan Wilken, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia.Mark Wolff, Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York, USA.
Download or read book Fast Cars Clean Bodies written by Kristin Ross and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1996-02-28 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fast Cars, Clean Bodies examines the crucial decade from Dien Bien Phu to the mid-1960s when France shifted rapidly from an agrarian, insular, and empire-oriented society to a decolonized, Americanized, and fully industrial one. In this analysis of a startling cultural transformation Kristin Ross finds the contradictions of the period embedded in its various commodities and cultural artifacts—automobiles, washing machines, women's magazines, film, popular fiction, even structuralism—as well as in the practices that shape, determine, and delimit their uses. In each of the book's four chapters, a central object of mythical image is refracted across a range of discursive and material spaces: social and private, textual and cinematic, national and international. The automobile, the new cult of cleanliness in the capital and the colonies, the waning of Sartre and de Beauvoir as the couple of national attention, and the emergence of reshaped, functionalist masculinities (revolutionary, corporate, and structural) become the key elements in this prehistory of postmodernism in France. Modernization ideology, Ross argues, offered the promise of limitless, even timeless, development. By situating the rise of "end of history" ideologies within the context of France's transition into mass culture and consumption, Ross returns the touted timelessness of modernization to history. She shows how the realist fiction and film of the period, as well as the work of social theorists such as Barthes, Lefebvre, and Morin who began at the time to conceptualize "everyday life," laid bare the disruptions and the social costs of events. And she argues that the logic of the racism prevalent in France today, focused on the figure of the immigrant worker, is itself the outcome of the French state's embrace of capitalist modernization ideology in the 1950s and 1960s.
Download or read book Communal Luxury written by Kristin Ross and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2016-11-22 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reclaiming the legacy of the Paris Commune for the twenty-first century Kristin Ross’s highly acclaimed work on the thought and culture of the Communard uprising of 1871 resonates with the motivations and actions of contemporary protest, which has found its most powerful expression in the reclamation of public space. Today’s concerns—internationalism, education, the future of labor, the status of art, and ecological theory and practice—frame and inform her carefully researched restaging of the words and actions of individual Communards. This original analysis of an event and its centrifugal effects brings to life the workers in Paris who became revolutionaries, the significance they attributed to their struggle, and the elaboration and continuation of their thought in the encounters that transpired between the insurrection’s survivors and supporters like Marx, Kropotkin, and William Morris. The Paris Commune was a laboratory of political invention, important simply and above all for, as Marx reminds us, its own “working existence.” Communal Luxury allows readers to revisit the intricate workings of an extraordinary experiment.
Download or read book History Play written by Rodney Bolt and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2008-12-10 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rodney Bolt's delightful life of Marlowe plays out a surprising solution to an enduring literary mystery, bringing the spirit of Shakespeare alive as we've never seen it before. Rodney Bolt's book is not an attempt to prove that, rather than dying at 29 in a tavern brawl, Christopher Marlowe staged his own death, fled to Europe, and went on to write the work attributed to Shakespeare. Instead, it takes that as the starting point for a playful and brilliantly written "fake biography" of Marlowe, which turns out to be a life of the Bard as well. Using real historical sources (as well as the occasional red herring) plus a generous dose of speculation, Bolt paints a rich and rollicking picture of Elizabethan life. As we accompany Marlowe into the halls of academia, the society of the popular English players traveling Europe, and the dangerous underworld of Elizabethan espionage, a fascinating and almost plausible life story emerges, along with a startlingly fresh look at the plays and poetry we know as Shakespeare's. Tapping into centuries of speculation about the man behind the work, about whom so few facts are known for sure, Rodney Bolt slyly winds the lives of two beloved playwrights into one.
Download or read book Masculine Singular written by Geneviève Sellier and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2008-03-25 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Masculine Singular is an original interpretation of French New Wave cinema by one of France’s leading feminist film scholars. While most criticism of the New Wave has concentrated on the filmmakers and their films, Geneviève Sellier focuses on the social and cultural turbulence of the cinema’s formative years, from 1957 to 1962. The New Wave filmmakers were members of a young generation emerging on the French cultural scene, eager to acquire sexual and economic freedom. Almost all of them were men, and they “wrote” in the masculine first-person singular, often using male protagonists as stand-ins for themselves. In their films, they explored relations between men and women, and they expressed ambivalence about the new liberated woman. Sellier argues that gender relations and the construction of sexual identities were the primary subject of New Wave cinema. Sellier draws on sociological surveys, box office data, and popular magazines of the period, as well as analyses of specific New Wave films. She examines the development of the New Wave movement, its sociocultural and economic context, and the popular and critical reception of such well-known films as Jules et Jim and Hiroshima mon amour. In light of the filmmakers’ focus on gender relations, Sellier reflects on the careers of New Wave’s iconic female stars, including Jeanne Moreau and Brigitte Bardot. Sellier’s thorough exploration of early New Wave cinema culminates in her contention that its principal legacy—the triumph of a certain kind of cinephilic discourse and of an “auteur theory” recognizing the director as artist—came at a steep price: creativity was reduced to a formalist game, and affirmation of New Wave cinema’s modernity was accompanied by an association of creativity with masculinity.
Download or read book The Emergence of Social Space written by Kristin Ross and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 1870s in France - Rimbaud's moment, and the subject of this book - is a decade virtually ignored in most standard histories in France. Yet it was the moment of two significant spatial events: France's expansion on a global scale, and, in the spring of 1871, the brief existence on the Paris Commune - the construction of the revolutionary urban space. Arguing that space, as a social fact, is always political and strategic, Kristin Ross has written a book that is at once a history and geography of the Commune's anarchist culture - its political language and social relations, its values, strategies, and stances. Central to her analysis of the Commune as a social space and oppositional culture is a close textual reading of Arthur Rimabaud's poetry. His poems - a common thread running through the book - are one set of documents among many in Ross's recreation of the Communard experience. Rimbaud, Paul Lafargue, and the social geographer lise Reclus serve as emblematic figures moving within and on the periphery of the Commune; in their resistance to the logic and economy of the capitalist conception of work, in their challenge to work itself as a term of identity, all three posed a threat to the existing order. Ross looks at these and other emancipatory notions as aspects of Communard life, each with an analogous strategy in Rimbaud's poetry. Applying contemporary theory, to a wealth of little-known archival material, she has written a fresh, persuasive, and original book.
