Browse

Lawrence Alloway (1926–1990) was one of the most influential and widely respected (as well as prolific) art writers of the post-war years. His many books, catalogue essays, and reviews manifest the changing paradigms of art away from the formal values of modernism towards the inclusiveness of the visual culture model in the 1950s, through the diversity and excesses of the 1960s, to the politicisation in the wake of 1968 and the Vietnam War, on to postmodern concerns in the 1970s. Alloway was in the right places at the right times. From his central involvement with the Independent Group and the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London in the 1950s, he moved to New York, the new world centre of art, at the beginning of the 1960s. In the early 1970s Alloway became deeply involved with the realist revival and the early feminist movement in art — Sylvia Sleigh, the painter, was his wife — and went on to write extensively about the gallery and art market as a system, examining the critic's role within this system. Positioning himself against the formalism and exclusivism associated with Clement Greenberg, Alloway was wholeheartedly committed to pluralism and diversity in both art and society. For him, art and criticism were always to be understood within a wider set of cultural, social and political concerns, with the emphasis on democracy, social inclusiveness and freedom of expression. This book provides a close critical reading of Alloway's writings.

Fifty years after Algerian independence, the legacy of France's Algerian past, and the ongoing complexities of the Franco-Algerian relationship, remain a key preoccupation in both countries. A central role in shaping understanding of their shared past and present is played by visual culture. This study investigates how relations between France and Algeria have been represented and contested through visual means since the outbreak of the Algerian War in 1954. It probes the contours of colonial and postcolonial visual culture in both countries, highlighting the important roles played by still and moving images when Franco-Algerian relations are imagined. Analysing a wide range of images made on both sides of the Mediterranean – from colonial picture postcards of French Algeria to contemporary representations of postcolonial Algiers – this book is the first to trace the circulation of, and connections between, a diverse range of images and media within this field of visual culture. It shows how the visual representation of Franco-Algerian links informs our understanding both of the lived experience of postcoloniality within Europe and the Maghreb, and of wider contemporary geopolitics.

What is the cultural identity of Europe? Are there specifically European values? Questions such as these are at the centre of a considerable number of political and scholarly debates in contemporary Europe. This book examines innovations and value traditions of Europe to produce an image of contemporary European self-understanding. It combines two possible approaches, examining both specific cultural traditions (‘Athens’ and ‘Jerusalem’) and specific values (‘freedom’ and ‘rationality’).

This book studies the emergence of collaborative and non-hierarchical cultures in the context of the Spanish economic crisis of 2008. It explains how peer-to-peer social networks that have arisen online and through social movements such as the Indignados have challenged a longstanding cultural tradition of intellectual elitism and capitalist technocracy in Spain. From the establishment of a technocratic and consumerist culture during the second part of the Franco dictatorship to the transition to neoliberalism that accompanied the ‘transition to democracy’, intellectuals and ‘experts’ have legitimized contemporary Spanish history as a series of unavoidable steps in a process of ‘modernization’. But when unemployment skyrocketed and a growing number of people began to feel that the consequences of this Spanish ‘modernization’ had increasingly led to precariousness, this paradigm collapsed. In the wake of Spain's financial meltdown of 2008, new ‘cultures of anyone’ have emerged around the idea that the people affected by or involved in a situation should be the ones to participate in changing it. Growing through grassroots social movements, digital networks, and spaces traditionally reserved for ‘high culture’ and institutional politics, these cultures promote processes of empowerment and collaborative learning that allow the development of the abilities and knowledge base of ‘anyone’, regardless of their economic status or institutional affiliations.

Dada formed in 1916 in a world of rational appearances that belied a raging confusion – in the middle of the First World War, in the neutral centre of a warring continent, at the core of Western art. This book sets out new coordinates in revision of a formation that art history routinely exhausts by its characterisation as a ‘revolutionary movement’ of anarchic cultural dissent, in order to contest perpetuated assumptions that underlie the popular myths of Dada. Dada is difficult, and the response to Dada is not easy. What emerge from the theoretical readings developed here are profoundly rational bases for the non-sense that was pitted against a self-proclaimed civilisation, critically and implicitly to propose that what coursed in 1916 continues as vitally today. Given as art-historically identifiable along a trajectory of sustained ruptures and seizures, this book proposes not a history of Dada in Zurich but theoretical engagements with the emergencies of 1916–19, from laughter to ‘lautgedichte’, masks to manifestos, chance to chiasmata, rounding on the permanent Dada that drives against the closure of culture.

The steady increase in joint programmes and qualifications offered by UK and French universities is a cause for celebration. But language constraints, financial pressures and political uncertainty present obstacles to continued expansion. How are these to be overcome? And how can higher education institutions on either side of the Channel help each other to realise the enormous potential of Franco-British partnerships? This book takes stock of intensifying bilateral cooperation in the higher education sector, and shares experience and best practice. Initiatives and areas for collaboration are identified.

This book aims to provide a balanced and detailed analytical survey of the complex leisure activity, sport, and industry that is cycling in France. Identifying key events, practices, stakeholders and institutions in the history of French cycling, it presents an interdisciplinary analysis of how cycling has been significant in French society and culture since the late nineteenth century. Cycling as leisure is considered through reference to the adoption of the bicycle as an instrument of tourism and emancipation by women in the 1880s, for example, or by study of the development in the 1990s of long-distance tourist cycle routes. Cycling as sport and its attendant dimensions of amateurism/professionalism, national identity, the body and doping, and other issues is investigated through study of the history of the Tour de France, the track-racing organised at the Vélodrome d'hiver in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, and other emblematic events. Cycling as industry and economic activity is considered through an assessment of how cycling firms have contributed to technological innovation at various junctures in France's economic development. Cycling and the media is investigated through analysis of how cyclesport has contributed to developments in the French press (in early decades) but also to new trends in television and radio coverage of sports events. Based on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, the book aims to present an explanation of the varied significance of cycling in France over the last hundred years.

As traditional notions of masculinity have been put into question, there have been representational reactions to and articulations of changing masculinities in post-modern culture. Certain contemporary cultural productions in France are illustrative of these changing masculinities and this book offers an examination of these manifestations. It uses analysis of AIDS narratives, mainstream films, popular novels, more mainstream novels, a graphic novel, and rightist polemics to explore the changing meaning of masculinity in French society.

This book draws together a range of scholars to examine the state of French Studies in the UK, taking account of the variety of factors that have made the discipline what it is. The book looks ahead to the place of French Studies in a world that is increasingly interdisciplinary, and where student demands, new technologies and transnational education are changing the ways in which we learn, teach, research and assess.

Garden Festivals are more than temporary horticultural expositions. Complex and phased, these projects have additional significance as planning stratagems, reclamation projects, public art venues, and precursors of new urban parks. Their scope extends well beyond that implied by the term ‘garden festival’. Typically exceeding 50 hectares, they stimulate development and steer site design through a unique merger of domestic garden culture with a large-scale urban project. A general discussion of the origins, formative elements, and chronology of the generic event followed by cross-cultural reviews and analyses of numerous recent festivals and their site legacies form the core of this comprehensive book on the subject. Recent installations have been responsive to the ascendance of open space as a critical planning element while forthcoming events now develop in the midst of a trend towards the holistic initiatives of urban landscape planning, giving them a renewed relevance for urban design. The author has explored over fifteen festival sites and documents this study using government reports, interview transcripts, thematic maps, master plans, and other primary source material.

Of late the term Iberian Studies has been gaining academic currency, but its semantic scope still fluctuates. For some it is a convenient way of combining the official cultures of two states, Portugal and Spain; yet for others the term opens up disciplinary space, altering established routines. A relational approach to Iberian Studies shatters the state's epistemological frame and complexifies the field through the emergence of lines of inquiry and bodies of knowledge hitherto written off as irrelevant. This book brings together contributions from leading international scholars who demonstrate the cultural and linguistic complexity of the field by reflecting on the institutional challenges to the practice of Iberian Studies.

By investigating the narratives of everyday life, Identity, Belonging and Migration provides some understanding of the many socio-political, historical, discursive and socio-cognitive processes involved in expressions of everyday racism in European countries. Consisting of three parts, the book provides a contextual understanding of European society past and present, foregrounding race and discrimination’s place within it. Part one of the text analyses the theoretical perspectives on belonging within a European context, part two addresses the exclusionary discourses and practices of states and their institutions, and part three concludes the book with four thematic discussions on violence, resistance, Islamophobia in the Netherlands, and racism in the education system.

The term ‘idiot’ is a damning put down, whether deployed on the playground or in the board room. People stigmatized as being ‘intellectually disabled’ today must confront variants of the fear and pity with which society has greeted them for centuries. This study explores how artistic, scientific, and sociological interpretations of idiocy work symbolically and ideologically in society. Drawing upon a broad spectrum of British, French and American resources including literary works (Wordsworth's ‘The Idiot Boy’, Dickens' Barnaby Rudge, Conrad's The Secret Agent), pedagogical works (Itard's The Wild Boy of Aveyron, Sequin's Traitement moral, hygiene et education des idiots, and Howe's On the Causes of Idiocy), medical and scientific papers (Philippe Pinel, Henry Maudsley, William Ireland, John Langdon Downs, Isaac Kerlin, Henry Goddard), and sociological writings (Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, Beames' The Rookeries of London, Dugdal's The Jukes), the book offers a study of the history and representation of mental disability.

French intellectuals have always defined themselves in political terms. They figure in common representation as oppositional figures set against State and government. But speaking truth to power is not the only way that intellectuals in France have brought their influence to bear upon political fields. This book explores a neglected dimension of French intellectuals' practice. What happens when, instead of denouncing from without the worlds of government and public policy, French intellectuals become voluntarily, at least for a while, entangled within those worlds? After a historical and theoretical overview, the heart of the book is constituted by a series of case studies exploring policy domains in which strategies for shaping the broad ‘culture’ of France have been debated and developed. These comprise issues of laicity and secularization, reform of the educational curriculum, programmes of cultural ‘democratization’ and ‘democracy’, and public television programming. The book explores the policy engagement of intellectuals such as Pierre Bourdieu, Michel de Certeau, André Malraux, Catherine Clément, Régis Debray, Francis Jeanson, Henri Wallon, Blandine Kriegel and Edgar Morin.

Engaging with the rich catalogue of cultural material relating to the London Underground, this cultural geography sets out to explore one of the strangest spaces of the modern world. The first to complete that slow process of estrangement from the natural topography initiated by the Industrial Revolution, London Underground is shown to be what French anthropologist Marc Augé has called non-lieu: non-places, like the motorway, supermarket or airport lounge, compelled to interpret their relation to the invisible landscapes they traverse through the media of signs and maps. The tube-network is revealed to be a transitional form, linking spaces of alienation in Victorian England, such as the railway, and the fully virtual spaces of our contemporary consumer-capitalism. This history of alienation, and of the bold struggle to overcome it, recounted in London Underground: a cultural geography, is nothing less than the history of how people have attempted to make a home in the psychopathological spaces of the modern world. London Underground: a cultural geography taps the current enthusiasm for cultural history, for psychogeography, for books on modern urban space, and for all things relating to London, providing an account of the system's representation and reshaping in fiction, film, art, music, graffiti, connecting the long history of the tube-network to wider theoretical concerns relating to the Victorian City, Cultural Geography, Modernism, Post-modernism and Situationist Theory.

A century ago, the golden age of magazine publishing coincided with the beginning of a golden age of travel. Images of speed and flight dominated the pages of the new mass-market periodicals. This book centres on Canada, where commercial magazines began to flourish in the 1920s alongside an expanding network of luxury railway hotels and transatlantic liner routes. The leading monthlies — among them Mayfair, Chatelaine, and La Revue Moderne — presented travel as both a mode of self-improvement and a way of negotiating national identity. This book announces a new cross-cultural approach to periodical studies, reading both French-and English-language magazines in relation to an emerging transatlantic middlebrow culture. Mainstream magazines, the text argues, forged a connection between upward mobility and geographical mobility. Fantasies of travel were circulated through fiction, articles, and advertisements, and used to sell fashions, foods, and domestic products as well as holidays.

There has been a revival of interest in Manx Gaelic of late, with the number of Manx speakers rising tenfold over the last twenty years. This book is a guide to the language, drawing on a wide range of written and recorded sources from the earliest times to the present. The book covers the grammar, spelling and pronunciation of Manx Gaelic in such a way as to render the language accessible to readers of all levels of competence.

Following the devastation of the war in Bosnia, the European Union formed the European Union Administration of Mostar (EUAM) and the author — a widely experienced architect, town planner, and project manager — worked as Director of Reconstruction for EUAM for the whole of the period of its mandate, from 1994 to 1996. On behalf of the international community, the EU formed a city administration in Mostar with the goal of reconciling the former warring parties; building security and creating a unified police force; establishing freedom of movement; holding democratic elections; and establishing a City Council. It also spent DM170 million on repairing six thousand houses, thirty public buildings, twenty-five schools, eighteen health buildings, seventy water projects, five bridges, a construction equipment pool and a technical training centre. Ninety buildings were de-mined and an urban planning system was established. This was a project of unique historical significance from many points of view. In a book extensively illustrated with photographs and plans, the author and his collaborators describe reconstruction from a general technical standpoint. The book shows what was done; explains how it was done; and considers the problems, issues, failures and successes. It analyses what lessons were learned and points out the relevance for similar future projects. The analysis is firmly grounded in the context of Bosnian and European politics.

‘The City’ has always been a strong focal point for critical social enquiry given its undisputed centrality for human life in the modern era. More recently, there has been a surge of interest in the postmodern city, the most popular subject being Los Angeles and the ‘global city’ — the New Yorks, Londons and Tokyos of the world — cities linked together through flows of finance. This book seeks to redress the balance using Liverpool, a city neither recognised as a ‘global’ or ‘postmodern’, as its focus. Although Liverpool is the central theme of the book, it gives a comparative overview of the city in a worldwide context. The introductory chapter sets the scene for the various contributions by re-examining the postmodern global city thesis, surveying various attempts at regenerating cities such as Liverpool and critically examining attempts and prospects for transforming the city. The following chapters examine in detail the cultural, social and economic legacy of the city. Particular emphasis is placed on the people of Liverpool young and old, and how they envisage the city developing.