Verso Books

Book SynopsisCollaborators for more than four decades, lawyer, author, filmmaker, and multimedia artist Alexander Kluge and social philosopher Oskar Negt are an exceptional duo in the history of Critical Theory precisely because their respective disciplines operate so differently. Dark Matter argues that what makes their contributions to the Frankfurt School so remarkable is how they think together in spite of these differences. Kluge and Negt's "gravitational thinking" balances not only the abstractions of theory with the concreteness of the aesthetic, but also their allegiances to Frankfurt School mentors with their fascination for other German, French, and Anglo-American thinkers distinctly outside the Frankfurt tradition.At the core of all their adventures in gravitational thinking is a profound sense that the catastrophic conditions of modern life are not humankind's unalterable fate. In opposition to modernity's disastrous state of affairs, Kluge and Negt regard the huge mass of dark matter throughout the universe as the lodestar for thinking together with others, for dark matter is that absolute guarantee that happier alternatives to our calamitous world are possible. As illustrated throughout Langston's study, dark matter's promise-its critical orientation out of catastrophic modernity-finds its expression, above all, in Kluge's multimedia aesthetic.Trade ReviewFor years I've built a bridge across the Atlantic Ocean with Richard Langston for my project on the poetic force of Critical Theory. Langston forges in Dark Matter substantial links between central themes from my nearly fifty-year theoretical collaboration with Oskar Negt and a selection of my stories and films over the many years. This book illustrates how the labor involved in thinking together with others over time is like the gravitational effects of dark matter that hold our universe's celestial bodies together. This gravitational thinking is the counterweight necessary for opposing today's world of disruptive algorithms. -- Alexander KlugeIn Dark Matter, Richard Langston examines the encounters between director, author, television producer, and lawyer Alexander Kluge and philosopher and social theoretician Oskar Negt, and sees them as an exceptional constellation. Full of tensions, gaps, intersections, synergies, controversies, and reciprocities, Kluge and Negt's remarkable collaborative project is in Langston's account one of the most exciting and brilliant movements of thought in German intellectual history since the seventies. With sensitivity, precision, and erudition, Dark Matter situates the extensive scope of their books and dialogues within the fields of Critical Theory, political philosophy, historical materialism, literature, art, avant-garde cinema, and the challenges of new media. By meticulously following the twists and turns in their collective thinking, Langston unveils their thought's gravitational centers rooted in capitalism's world of work, modern technologies, counter-public spheres, and aesthetic praxis. Dark Matter succeeds in an intelligent and exemplary fashion in reconstructing the radicality and actuality of Kluge and Negt's collaborations as a vital renewal of critical thinking beyond codified disciplines and schools of thought. In Langston's eyes, their work is an expedition into the unknown dark zones of historical and social experience, a historically speculative enterprise that turns, with its appeal to sociability, cooperative intelligence, and utopian fantasy, against the pessimistic tendencies of catastrophic modernity. More than just a commentary on the works of Kluge and Negt, Dark Matter presents readers a deep, investigative look into the intellectual, philosophical, and political spheres of our present moment. -- Joseph Vogl, Humboldt-Universität, BerlinPraise for Visions of Violence:"Richard Langston's brilliant book Visions of Violence is . had to be written to finally help us find a way out of the spell of the endless repetitions of the very same heroic fable of 1968." -- Rembert Hüser * German Quarterly *Praise for Visions of Violence:"Anyone with a serious interest in the politics and aesthetics of post-war German art will find that much of Langston's study has compelling implications for a theorised apprehension of the avant-garde project after fascism." -- Deborah Lewer * Oxford Art Journal *

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Book SynopsisThe remarkable advance of "Corbynism" did not emerge from nowhere. It is the product of developments in socialist and working-class politics over the past forty years and more. The Thatcher era witnessed a wholesale attack on the postwar consensus and welfare state, through a regime of deregulation, attacks on the unions, privatisations, and globalisation. However, at the same time, there existed a persistent resistance to the growing powers of neo-liberalism. This side of the story is rarely told as it was considered to be a history of defeat. Yet out of this struggle emerged a thoroughly modern socialism.This book is essential reading for those who want to know where Corbynism comes from: the policies, personalities and moments of resistance that have produced this new horizon. This includes the story of power struggles within the Labour Party, and the eventual defeat of New Labour. The movements outside it-unions, feminists groups, anti-fascists activists, anti-war protestors-that have driven the policies of the movement forward. And the powerful influence of international groups that have shaped the potential for a global progressive politics.Trade ReviewOf all the analyses of Labour's astonishing 2017 General Election performance, Andrew Murray's provides a detailed explanation of the road the British left has taken to reach touching distance of power. This is a brilliant book - a must read not just for academics but for every party activist. -- Len McCluskey, General Secretary of Unite the UnionAn in-depth examination of how a full-blooded version of socialism moved from the fringes to the centre of British political life. * Choice Magazine *This studious and succinct account of the politics of the left is essential reading for any socialist navigating the dangers of political life as progressive ideas are tested in the real world. * Morning Star *For insights into the Corbyn mindset [this] new book could be invaluable for those unfamiliar with Labour's enduring civil war. . . .The enduring theme is how the left was underestimated. -- Jim Packard * Financial Times *Uniquely insightful in its appraisal of both the prospects and limitations facing the Corbyn project . . .A rich and needed intervention into the mass movement currently pushing for a humane society in Britain.' -- Marcus Barnett * Jacobin *A lucid, perspicuous account of how Thatcherism - and its subsequent enablers under New Labour - broke the progressive left, and how the left returned from the margins of political life, the book is an honest reckoning with both the promises and limitations of socialism -- Gavin Jacobson * New Statesman *Excellent...you should read this book because it is not just charting the history of the recent past, but it also charts the likely course of events in the future * Counterfire *

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Book SynopsisAt the beginning of the decade renowned historian Sheila Rowbotham was a rebellious sixteen-year-old at a Methodist boarding school in the north-east of England, reading Sartre and dreaming of Paris. By the end of the sixties she was a seasoned political activist, planning Britain's first-ever women's liberation conference, and beginning to find her voice as a writer.Her story of the intervening years moves from coffee bars in Leeds to the Sorbonne and Oxford University, where she arrives wearing frayed Levis and clutching a volume of Rimbaud. A participant in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, she was also a member of the editorial board of the notorious revolutionary newspaper Black Dwarf.While faithful to the exhilaration and enthusiasm of the sixties, Rowbotham is also wryly amusing about her younger self. When Jean-Luc Godard wanted to film her in the nude, she dithered between principle and vanity. Wearing the shortest of mini skirts she argued passionately for women's liberation.Promise of a Dream is a moving, witty and poignant recollection of a time when young women were breaking all the rules about sex, politics and their place in the world. Sheila Rowbotham was, and remains, one of their most effective and endearing voices.Trade ReviewA record of an era, winding one girl's coming-of-age story through the drama of political evolution ... She has captured that amazing sense of possibility that grew with each year, the confidence that not only was the promised dream within reach, it was also upon us. -- Mary Maher * Irish Times *This is a document historians dream of ... it captures the spirit of the 1960s-its fun and crazy idealism-in the life of one spirited young woman. -- Joan Bakewell * Sunday Times *Unerringly perceptive and funny ... if you want to know what the sixties were like, read this book. -- Julie ChristieThe book works best in conveying the excitement generated by ideas, not just straightforwardly political ones but those about art and the wider definition of liberation ... I wasn't there, but I'm happy that Rowbotham was, and that she remembers it with such clarity. * Literary Review *A rich, painful picture emerges of women searching for both words and spaces to articulate the insights of feminism. * The Women's Review of Books *The accounts of the successes, failures, joys and pains of young adulthood have the qualities to be found in the best creative writing. It is a book to be read for the quality of its writing and the honesty and humor of its presentation, as much as for the history it reveals. -- Dorothy Thompson * Times Higher Education SUpplement *An honest account of radical activism, love affairs, studies, travels, teaching, agitation and other stuff of the sixties. -- Anna Aslanyan * Tribune *

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Book SynopsisThe ubiquitous nature and political attraction of the concept of order has to be understood in conjunction with the idea of police. Since its first publication, this book has been one of the most powerful and wide-ranging critiques of the police power. Neocleous argues for an expanded concept of police, able to account for the range of institutions through which policing takes place. These institutions are concerned not just with the maintenance and reproduction of order, but with its very fabrication, especially the fabrication of a social order founded on wage labour. By situating the police power in relation to both capital and the state and at the heart of the politics of security, the book opens up into an understanding of the ways in which the state administers civil society and fabricates order through law and the ideology of crime. The discretionary violence of the police on the street is thereby connected to the wider administrative powers of the state, and the thud of the truncheon to the dull compulsion of economic relations.Trade ReviewIn praise of War Power, Police Power:Challenges and exhorts the reader, and is bursting with ideas, connections and complex relations. But from the outset and without pretension, it is clear that the book begs to be taken on a different, altogether grander level. . It is not simply a book about war and police-order, but can be read as a paradigmatic book. -- Illan rua Wall * London Review of International Law *If you want to understand the origins and purpose of police powers, and their relation to law, to the state, and to bourgeois social order, there is no better author than Mark Neocleous and no better book than this -- David Correia, author of Police: A Field GuideMark Neocleous's modern classic has never been more timely. The substantial new Introduction takes this pioneering text into the present with a trenchant discussion of recent events and debates. In its coruscating critique of the failures of a liberal response to police power, it is, again, a provocative and urgent intervention. -- Stuart EldenNeocleous explodes the liberal myth that police exist to to keep us safe or to enforce the law. Instead, they constantly reproduce a social order rooted in race and class exploitation at the heart of racial capitalism. -- Alex Vitale

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Book SynopsisSince Britain's 2016 referendum on EU membership, the nation has been profoundly split: one side fantasizing that the referendum will never be acted upon, the other entrenched in questionable assumptions about reclaimed sovereignty and independence. Underlying the cleavage are primal myths, deeper histories, and political folk-legends. James Meek,'the George Orwell of our times', goes in search of the stories and consequences arising out of a nation's alienation from itself.In Dreams of Leaving and Remaining, Meek meets farmers and fishermen intent on exiting the EU despite the loss of protections they will incur. He reports on a Cadbury's factory shut down and moved to Poland in the name of free market economics, exploring the impact on the local community left behind. He charts how the NHS is coping with the twin burdens of austerity and an aging population.Dreams of Leaving and Remaining is urgent reporting from one of Britain's finest journalists. James Meek asks what we can recover from the debris of an old nation as we head towards new horizons, and what we must leave behind.There are no easy answers, and what he creates instead is a masterly portrait of an anxious, troubled nation.Trade ReviewSome of it will make you sad, some of it will make you furious, but you are guaranteed to be left feeling that you understand this country much better. * John Lanchester, author of Capital and Whoops! [For Private Island] *He crafts beautiful and vivid passages that turn what could be a dry subject into a highly readable study. -- Owen Jones * New Statesman [For Private Island] *A book that stands as one of the most powerful critiques of the mess that is Britain's economy. -- Aditya Chakrabortty * Guardian [For Private Island] *A devastating account of the privatisation dogma of the past 25 years... As demolition jobs go, this can hardly be bettered. -- John Kampfner * Observer [For Private Island] *An energetic and colourfully told polemic against privatisation. * Financial Times [for Private Island] *Meek listens hard . His reportage . demonstrate[s] a sensibility and empathy that are his wont. * Financial Times *Provocative and persuasive. * Herald Scotland *A beautiful collection by a renowned essayist. -- Stephen Bush * Guardian *Meek is brilliant at focusing on a particular case to tell a bigger story. * Labour Briefing *[Meek] explores the slow-moving processes behind the sudden shock of the Brexit vote by getting out and about in Britain, to look beyond London at the competing ideals that led to this culture clash - cosmopolitanism and urbane liberalism against a more traditional yearning for British sovereignty, its mythology and nostalgia. -- Dan Hancox * The National *Clear-headed...Meek has a canny ability to provide plausiable explanations for the motivations of many Leave voters * Peace News *

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Book SynopsisMarcus Garvey, Claude McKay, Claudia Jones, C.L.R. James, Stokely Carmichael, Louis Farakhan-the roster of immigrants from the Caribbean who have made a profound impact on the development of radical politics in the United States is extensive. In this magisterial and lavishly illustrated work, Winston James focuses on the twentieth century's first waves of immigrants from the Caribbean and their contribution to political dissidence in America.This diligently researched, wide-ranging and sophisticated book will be welcomed by all those interested in the Caribbean and its émigrés, the Afro-American current within America's radical tradition, and the history, politics, and culture of the African diaspora.Trade Review"Superbly written, full of well-digested and considered detail, it is a historic chronicle." - Edward Said "A brilliant, nuanced and sensitive re-examination of the history of Caribbean radicals and radicalism in the United States. James's book will survive for many years as the standard work on the subject and establishes the author as one of the premier scholars of the African Diaspora." - Colin Palmer, City University of New York "A major historical contribution to the 'hidden history' of the African diaspora ... richly detailed, powerful and compelling." - Stuart Hall, The Open University "Imaginatively written in addition to its solid scholarly base, this book breaks significant new ground in our understanding of modern black American radicalism." - Arnold Rampersad, Princeton University "In this thoroughly researched and tightly argued book Winston James has revealed and explained the prominent role of Afro-Caribbean immigrants in socialist, communist and nationalist struggles in the United States, whilst rescuing the topic from the stereotypes that have long surrounded it." - David Montgomery, Yale University "James elucidates, as no one has done before him, just how profound were the Caribbean contributions that enriched the soil of American radicalism ... A truly prodigious and imaginative reconstruction [which] heralds a genuine renascence of radical scholarship in the best Caribbean tradition." - Robert A. Hill, University of California, Los Angeles "Powerfully argued and provocative, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia literally reframes our understanding of the African-American experience." - Thomas C. Holt, University of Chicago

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Book SynopsisAlthough successive generations of the Frankfurt School have attempted to adapt Critical Theory to new circumstances, the work done by its founding members continues in the twenty-first century to unsettle conventional wisdom about culture, society and politics. Exploring unexamined episodes in the school's history and reading its work in unexpected ways, these essays provide ample evidence of the abiding relevance of Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse, Löwenthal, and Kracauer in our troubled times. Without forcing a unified argument, they range over a wide variety of topics, from the uncertain founding of the School to its mixed reception of psychoanalysis, from Benjamin's ruminations on stamp collecting to the ironies in the reception of Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man, from Löwenthal's role in Weimar's Jewish Renaissance to Horkheimer's involvement in the writing of the first history of the Frankfurt School. Of special note are their responses to visual issues such as the emancipation of colour in modern art, the Jewish prohibition on images, the relationship between cinema and the public sphere, and the implications of a celebrated Family of Man photographic exhibition. The collection ends with an essay tracing the still metastasising demonisation of the Frankfurt School by the so-called Alt Right as the source of "cultural Marxism" and "political correctness," which has gained alarming international resonance and led to violence by radical right-wing fanatics.Trade ReviewIn this sizzling collection of essays, Martin Jay demonstrates again that he is the unsurpassed reader of the group of thinkers known as the "Frankfurt School." In fact, he challenges the false unity and coherence of ideas and views often imposed upon them, including his own earlier writings on the subject. Practicing episodic and fragmentary historiography, he uncovers astonishingly novel angles of interpretation as well as demonstrating brilliant re-readings of known texts. An absolute pleasure to read -- Professor Seyla BenhabibWith this collection of brilliant and insightful essays Martin Jay has returned to the topic that defined his early career: Critical Theory, i.e. the lives and works of theorists such as Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Kracauer, and Marcuse. Based on deep historical knowledge and endowed with great sensitivity for theoretical nuances, Jay traces the unfolding of what is commonly called the Frankfurt School. He succeeds in this endeavor by his refusal to treat their thought as the expression of a unified school. For this difficult task one could not have found a more suitable critic than Martin Jay. This book is a precious gift to America in these troubled times. -- Peter Uwe HohendahlSplinters in Your Eye provides ample evidence of the abiding relevance of Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse, Löwenthal, and Kracauer in our troubled times. -- Ryan Tripp * New Books Network *In elegant essays on subjects ranging from Benjamin's stamp collecting to the [Frankfurt School's] engagement with emerging psychoanalytic thought, Jay shows that its writings are not only historical curios, but indispensable for understanding our own age. -- Stuart Jeffries * New Statesman *

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Book SynopsisIn this absorbing chronicle of the role of race in US history, David R. Roediger explores how the idea of race was created and recreated from the 1600s to the present day. From the late seventeenth century-the era in which Du Bois located the emergence of "whiteness"-through the American revolution and the emancipatory Civil War, to the civil rights movement and the emergence of the American empire, How Race Survived US History reveals how race did far more than persist as an exception in a progressive national history. Roediger examines how race intersected all that was dynamic and progressive in US history, from democracy and economic development to migration and globalisation.Trade ReviewA pithy little book ... Remind[s] us that whiteness was built over centuries on a foundation of deceit and confusion and disguised political imperatives. -- Kelefa Sanneh * The New Yorker *Starred Review. This rousing, thought-provoking history illuminates the enveloping 400-year-old history of race in America, and the issues [Roediger] raises are as relevant as ever. * Publishers Weekly *Scholars and activists will be able to rely upon this book for much needed historical perspective. Based heavily on an acute reading and insightful interpretation of a vast array of the secondary literature, this book is a worthy addition to Roediger's formidable oeuvre. * Journal of African American History *How Race Survived US History synthesizes a vast secondary literature ... into a simple yet elegant analysis. -- Kornel Chang * Journal of American History *An extremely timely argument about the enduring significance of 'race' in American society, as well as a sophisticated polemic against the complacent assumption that the Obama phenomenon spells the end of American racism. -- Richard Seymour

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Book SynopsisIf Greek tragedies are meant to be so tragic, why do they so often end so well? Here starts the story of a long and incredible misunderstanding. Out of the hundreds of tragedies that were performed, only 32 were preserved in full. Who chose them and why? Why are the lost ones never taken into account? This extremely unusual scholarly book tells us an Umberto Eco-like story about the lost tragedies. By arguing that they would have given a radically different picture, William Marx makes us think in completely new ways about one of the major achievements of Western culture. In this very readable, stimulating, lively, and even sometimes funny book, he explores parallels with Japanese theatre, resolves the enigma of catharsis, sheds a new light on psychoanalysis. In so doing, he tells also the story of the misreadings of our modernity, which disconnected art from the body, the place, and gods. Two centuries ago philosophers transformed Greek tragedies into an ideal archetype, now they want to read them as self-help handbooks, but all are equally wrong: Greek tragedy is definitely not what you think, and we may never understand it, but this makes it matter all the more to us.Trade ReviewWilliam Marx doesn't take anything for granted. Here, his thoughts take us to the most established concept in literature, "Greek tragedy", and then undermines it. His tools: the integration of in-depth historical analysis, detailed understanding of the antique plays, studying the traces of lost plays, and a rethinking of what always seemed obvious but is in fact anachronistic. He questions the very concept of the tragic, revises other basic concepts such as catharsis, and offers a fresh reading of those texts that re-become vital for the history of literature and our contemporary world. -- Mieke BalThis is an immensely enjoyable book on Athenian tragedy, written in lyrical prose and elegiac mode. -- Johanna Hanink * The Classical Review *Thus, from one book to the other, William Marx proposes a research path that will enjoy a bright future: "Catching literature by using what escapes literature." -- Jean-Louis Jeannelle * Le Monde *As a faraway, but irrevocable echo of Duras' "You saw nothing in Hiroshima", the reception of Greek tragedy makes with The Tomb of Oedipus its definite entrance into the postmodern era. -- Guillaume Navaud * Critique d’art *William Marx is one of the most original scholars of our time. The Tomb of Oedipus is a revolutionary rethinking of our relationship to the ancient world: its myths, its literature, its outlook. With this slim book, Oedipus's curse has been lifted at long last. -- Alberto Manguel, Director of Espaço Atlântida, The Centre for Research into the History of Reading, LisbonThis is an original and eye opening book. Its fundamental idea is quite simple. Only 32 Greek tragedies from the 5th century BCE have been preserved, which corresponds to less than 5% of the tragedies that had been put on stage. Can we consider this sample to be representative? The selection has been the product of a judgments about what constituted a good, a typical tragedy, a tragedy that should be read by children at school; but these were judgments from Roman imperial times, that are possibly and likely very different from the taste of the original Athenian audience. Has the tragedy of the 5th century really been tragic in the sense that Roman school teachers seem to imply? Marx's attempt to answer this question is intellectually sophisticated, wonderfully readable - and full of surprising insights. -- Luca GiulianiMarx, a comparative literature professor at the Collège de France, refreshes ancient literature and the concept of tragedy in this intelligent work of criticism....Elliott's translation is smooth and elegant, matching the sophistication of Marx's thought as he reinvigorates Greek tragedy. * Publishers Weekly *

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Book SynopsisOver recent decades China has experienced massive change and development. China is the world's fastest growing economy, and has become a global superpower once again. But this development has thrown up a number of seemingly intractable contradictions, both political and economic. In this panoramic study of Chinese history in the twentieth century and its place in the development of global capitalism, Lin Chun argues that the paradoxes of contemporary Chinese society are not simply the product of the development of capitalism or modernity in the country. They are instead the product of the contradictions of its long revolutionary history, as well as the social and political consequences of its post-socialist transition. Published to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, Revolution and Counterrevolution in China charts China's epic revolutionary trajectory in search of a socialist alternative to the global system, and asks whether market reform must repudiate and overturn the revolution and its legacy.Trade ReviewThis brilliant book makes a great contribution to the historical research, theoretical exploration, and political debates surrounding China. Lin Chun locates her reflections in a broad historical context, which ranges from classical questions posed by Adam Smith, Max Weber, and Karl Marx to the diverse new trends of historical interpretation. Her succinct and incisive analysis offers a much-needed perspective. -- Wang Hui, author of The End of the Revolution (Praise for China and Global Capitalism)While most people have already cast China as a capitalist country with a communist government, Lin Chun shows that there may be life in Chinese socialism yet. Combining erudition, passion, and an engaging writing style, Lin challenges a lot of conventional wisdom about China. This book should be on the shelf of everyone who has any interest in the course of the Chinese economy and society. -- Meghnad Desai (Praise for The Transformation of Chinese Socialism)Even in the increasingly crowded field of scholars analyzing how the CCP intends to govern China, Lin's voice is worth paying attention to, not just for her insight into many of the events that she describes, but also as a window into the thinking of a contemporary and critic of the generation currently in power in China. -- Xiaochen Su * The News Lens *

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Book SynopsisChina's emergence as a twenty-first-century global economic, cultural, and political power is often presented as a story of what Chinese leader Xi Jinping calls the nation's "great rejuvenation," a story narrated as the return of China to its "rightful" place at the center of the world.In China's Revolutions in the Modern World, historian Rebecca E. Karl argues that China's contemporary emergence is best seen not as a "return," but rather as the product of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary activity and imaginings. From the Taipings in the mid-nineteenth century through nationalist, anti-imperialist, cultural, and socialist revolutions to today's capitalist-inflected Communist State, modern China has been made in intellectual dissonance and class struggle, in mass democratic movements and global war, in socialism and anti-socialism, in repression and conflict by multiple generations of Chinese people mobilized to seize history and make the future in their own name. Through China's successive revolutions, the contours of our contemporary world have taken shape. This brief interpretive history shows how.Trade ReviewRebecca Karl brings to life in wonderful detail the successive revolutionary moments that constituted modern China, illuminating their importance even when they failed to achieve their goals. Although that modern world may now be behind us, Karl shows how the modern Chinese experiments provide an essential basis for thinking revolution in our future. -- Michael Hardt, co-author of AssemblyHow do we reckon with "state communism" and the twentieth-century revolutions now that they have passed? This is not an abstract question, but a pressing concern for all those who are committed to the long struggle against capitalism during the current interregnum. Rebecca Karl's China's Revolutions in the Modern World underscores the centrality of China's revolutionary experience to global modernity, and, through an analysis of China's one and a half centuries of revolution in its many permutations, offers readers a deepened understanding of revolution itself. -- Prof. Christopher Connery, University of California, Santa CruzKarl blows away the manufactured fog that has obscured our understanding of China's radical history. She allows us to see the patterns of serial revolution that have brought so much turmoil and innovation to modernity. Breathtaking and indispensable! * Andrew Ross, author of Fast Boat to China: Lessons from Shanghai and Stone Men *It is exceedingly rare for a book to provide both a synthetic, comprehensive overview of a complex historical period and new, original perspectives for our understanding of that period: Rebecca Karl achieves just that in this clearly written and insightful volume. By investigating seven revolutionary moments, from the Taiping to 1989, Karl shows us that China's revolutions were part and parcel of global struggles to define possible futures. Unabashedly anti-teleological, theoretically inspired, and politically engaged, China's Revolution in the Modern World is a perfect introduction to modern China for non-specialists, an excellent teaching tool, but also a revealing read for China specialists, who will find much to think with in this volume. -- Fabio Lanza, author of The End of Concern: Maoist China, Activism, and Asian StudiesChina's Revolutions in the Modern World is an insightful, sometimes provocative, and always readable survey of the most tumultuous events in China's history. Karl provides a convincing narrative of political, social, and intellectual change while offering a unique global perspective as well as nuanced discussions of gender and historiographical issues. This book would make an excellent introductory text in university undergraduate courses. -- Peter Zarrow, author of China in War and Revolution, After Empire: The Conceptual Transformation of the Chinese State, and Educating ChinaA tour de force re-narration of modern China's revolutionary moments. Written with uncommon grace and lucidity, Karl invites readers to rethink China's past as lived creations of the present and explorations of possible futures. A spectacular achievement! -- Ching Kwan Lee, author of The Specter of Global ChinaRebecca Karl's masterful study of revolution in modern China shows us how revolutionary movements became thinkable. -- Asad Haider, author of Mistaken IdentityA concise and thought-provoking overview of nearly two centuries of Chinese revolutionary movements by historian Rebecca Karl, starting with the Taiping Rebellion which broke out in 1850. -- Carlos Martinez * Morning Star *

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Book SynopsisThe Adventure of French Philosophy is essential reading for anyone interested in what Badiou calls the "French moment" in contemporary thought.Badiou explores the exceptionally rich and varied world of French philosophy in a number of groundbreaking essays, published here for the first time in English or in a revised translation. Included are the often-quoted review of Louis Althusser's canonical works For Marx and Reading Capital and the scathing critique of "potato fascism" in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus. There are also talks on Michel Foucault and Jean-Luc Nancy, and reviews of the work of Jean-François Lyotard and Barbara Cassin, notable points of interest on an expansive tour of modern French thought.Guided by a small set of fundamental questions concerning the nature of being, the event, the subject, and truth, Badiou pushes to an extreme the polemical force of his thinking. Against the formless continuum of life, he posits the need for radical discontinuity; against the false modesty of finitude, he pleads for the mathematical infinity of everyday situations; against the various returns to Kant, he argues for the persistence of the Hegelian dialectic; and against the lure of ultraleftism, his texts from the 1970s vindicate the role of Maoism as a driving force behind the communist Idea.Trade ReviewFrench philosophy still has a kick in it, and it can still turn heads. You have been warned. -- Jonathan Rée * Prospect *One of the most important philosophers writing today. -- Joan CopjecA figure like Plato or Hegel walks here among us! -- Slavoj ZizekAn heir to Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser. * New Statesman *Focused and illuminating, technical and deft. -- Shahidha Bari * Times Higher Education *A series of snapshots of how Badiou participates in and understands what ... we might call the post-1960s moment in French philosophy. * Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews *

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Book SynopsisComposed in 1790, Mary Wollstonecraft's seminal feminist tract A Vindication of the Rights of Woman broke new ground in its demand for women's education. A Vindication remains one of history's most important and elegant broadsides against sexual oppression. In her introduction, renowned socialist feminist Sheila Rowbotham casts Wollstonecraft's life and work in a new light.Trade Review"A fascinating, and entertaining, read."--Diva

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Book SynopsisThe World in a Grain of Sand offers a framework for reading literature from the global South that goes against the grain of dominant theories in cultural studies, especially, postcolonial theory. It critiques the valorization of the local in cultural theories typically accompanied by a rejection of universal categories - viewed as Eurocentric projections. But the privileging of the local usually amounts to an exercise in exoticization of the South. The book argues that the rejection of Eurocentric theories can be complemented by embracing another, richer and non-parochial form of universalism. Through readings of texts from India, Sri Lanka, Palestine and Egypt, the book shows that the fine grained engagement with culture, the mapping of ordinary lives not just as objects but subjects of their history, is embedded in much of postcolonial literature in a radical universalism - one that is rooted in local realities, but is able to unearth in them the needs, conflicts and desires that stretch across cultures and time. It is a universalism recognized by Marx and steeped in the spirit of anti-colonialism, but hostile to any whiff of exoticism.Trade ReviewPraise for The Other Side of Terror An Anthology of Writings on Terrorism in South Asia:"A brave attempt to locate political violence in a milieu that neocons are averse to. It succeeds in raising questions that the establishment seeks to drown in its shrill rhetoric and shattering sounds of carpet-bombing." * New Indian Express *Praise for The Other Side of Terror An Anthology of Writings on Terrorism in South Asia:"The anthology aims to give the subject of terror a genealogy other than the one ascribed to it by the Bush doctrine, to examine its impacts in places other than the United States of the 21st century, but most importantly to allow us to engage with the phenomenon in the most complex, situated, historicized, and empathetic way possible. The attempt to canvas literature to make these arguments is quite unique." -- Aparna Sundar * Against The Current *Praise for The Other Side of Terror An Anthology of Writings on Terrorism in South Asia:"It privileges literary texts as forms of media where imaginative and empathetic dialogues can be forged with the histories of occluded and supposedly silent others." -- Amit R Baishya * North East Review *Praise for The Other Side of Terror An Anthology of Writings on Terrorism in South Asia:"An attempt to represent a holistic view that is contrary to the new global understanding of terrorism with rich philosophical insights [and] an innovative way to counter the idea of methodological universalism in understanding social reality." -- Bhagat Oinam * South Asian Popular Culture *A bracing critique of postcolonial orthodoxy from a standpoint decisively to the left of it. Some books are enjoyable but not necessary; this one is both. -- Terry EagletonA bracing critique of postcolonial orthodoxy from a standpoint decisively to the left of it. Some books are enjoyable but not necessary; this one is both. -- Terry EagletonMore than three decades after its intellectual and institutional beginnings, postcolonial theory must still learn to read-and how not to read-postcolonial literature. So argues, convincingly, Nivedita Majumdar in this careful and militantly progressive new work of postcolonial literary criticism and interpretation. A theory launched by high poststructuralism and a then stylish postmodernism's cult of difference and allergy to universals trips over literary narratives that, on the contrary, have everything to do with the concrete universals inseparable from struggles against gender and class oppression. Whether, as Majumdar carefully demonstrates, these narratives (here mostly Anglo- and, refreshingly, non-Anglo-Indian) ultimately prove to be truthful reflections of such struggles and their underlying social realities or not, their genuinely critical reading presupposes a radical universalism at odds with many of the originating texts of postcolonial theory-a theory that Majumdar here goes a long way towards rectifying and redeeming. -- Neil LarsenIn crisp, honest, prose, Majumdar treats the academy's postcolonial royalty with remarkable candor in a series of sharp, often acerbic, close readings. We too often call dissent what are really acts of accommodation, she argues, and ignore the real-world fiction of the periphery - the work, say, of Sharatchandra Chattopadhyay, Mahasweta Devi, and A. Sivanandan - who take their stand not with a classless "difference" but with radical universalism. A compelling case that the darling texts of the Western awards industry (the novels of Ondaatje, Lahiri, and Neel Mukherjee) reflect troubling neo-Orientalist or neoliberal ideas. -- Timothy BrennanIn this vigorously discriminating and deeply engaged book, Professor Majumdar seeks to restore to Postcolonial Studies its pristine political purpose. Going beyond or behind the pervasive complicities of the Postcolonial with Cultural Studies, World Literature and the New Left, she argues for a more meaningful resistance based on the older certitudes of class struggle. She proposes an alternative Postcolonial canon in which the little-known Sharatchandra and Sivanandan are put forward as being more particular and therefore more universal than liberal global figures such as Tagore and Ondaatje. This return to the local, in her affirmation, is a more radical and universalist new turn. -- Harish Trivedi, University of Delhi

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Book SynopsisMakers of Worlds, Readers of Signs charts the aesthetic and political formation of neoliberalism and globalization in Israeli and Palestinian literature from the 1940s to the present. By tracking literature's move from making worlds to reading signs, Cohen Lustig proposes a new way to read theorize our global contemporary. Cohen Lustig argues that the period of Israeli statism and its counterpart of Palestinian statelessness produced works that sought to make and create whole worlds and social time - create the new state of Israel, preserve collective visions of Palestinian statehood. During the period of neoliberalism, the period after 1985 in Israel and the 1993 Oslo Accords in Palestine, literature became about the reading of signs, where politics and history are now rearticulated through the private lives of individual subjects. Here characters do not make social time but live within it and inquire after its missing origin. Cohen Lustig argues for new ways to track the subjectivities and aesthetics produced by larger shifts in production. In so doing, he proposes a new model to understand the historical development of Israeli and Palestinian literature as well as world literature in our contemporary moment. With a preface from Fredric Jameson.Trade ReviewIt is refreshing to read an analysis of Israeli and Palestinian literatures that centers not on identity - national, religious, ethnic, or gender - but rather on the effects of capitalism on politics and culture. -- Danielle Drori * Los Angeles Review of Books *Cohen Lustig has identified a historical trend, and he presents a solid analysis supporting his argument. The historical-theoretical undertaking in this book is both thorough and a joy to read. This work is a worthy and novel contribution to the library of Palestinian historical and literary studies. * Journal of Palestine Studies *

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Book SynopsisWhat are the origins of the hostile environment for immigrants in Britain? Drawing on new archival material from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Ian Sanjay Patel retells Britain's recent history in an often shocking account of state racism that still resonates today. In a series of post-war immigration laws, Britain's colonial and Commonwealth citizens from the Caribbean, Asia and Africa were renamed immigrants. In the late 1960s, British officials drew upon an imperial vision of the world to contain what it saw as a vast immigration 'crisis' involving British citizens, passing legislation to block their entry. As a result, British citizenship itself was redefined along racial lines, fatally compromising the Commonwealth and exposing the limits of Britain's influence in world politics. Combining voices of so-called immigrants trying to make a home in Britain and the politicians, diplomats and commentators who were rethinking the nation, Ian Sanjay Patel excavates the reasons why Britain failed to create a post-imperial national identity. The reactions of the British state to post-war immigration reflected the shift in world politics from empires to decolonization. Despite a new international recognition of racial equality, Britain's colonial and Commonwealth citizens were subject to a new regime of immigration control based on race. From the Windrush generation who came to Britain from the Caribbean to the South Asians who were forced to migrate from East Africa, Britain was caught between attempting both to restrict the rights of its non-white colonial and Commonwealth citizens and redefine its imperial role in the world. Despite Britain's desire to join Europe, which eventually occurred in 1973, its post-imperial moment never arrived, subject to endless deferral and reinvention.Trade ReviewThe contemporary politics of belonging and immigration - Ian Sanjay Patel shows in this stunning history - make no sense except against the backdrop of centuries of empire, and the decades at its messy end when British identity was refashioned. We're Here Because You Were There expertly revisits how the claim and incentive to move beyond empire followed only upon the erection of colonial hierarchy and racialized exclusion, factors which were strengthened in forgotten eras of imperial citizenship and Commonwealth unity. This book boldly and convincingly lays down a new starting point for debate today. -- Samuel Moyn, author of Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal WorldThis is an extraordinary and important book. It is powerful, principled and courageous, a necessary and vital disquisition on the continuing legacies of colonialism and the mindset of its making and perpetuation in the modern, brutish Britain we seem to inhabit. -- Philippe Sands, author of East West StreetCombining startling new research with a clear and convincing argument, this shows just how essential the history of migration and race is to understanding Britain today. -- Daniel Trilling, author of Lights in the DistanceMany studies of immigration suffer from two weaknesses. They discuss it in isolation from a discussion of national identity, and treat it as a domestic issue that can be analysed and explained in terms of domestic constraints and compulsions. Patel's new book is happily free from these, and offers a historically rich and conceptually rigorous study of post-1945 immigration to the U.K., especially that of East African Asians. He locates it in Britain's imperial context and traces with great skill the debate on Britain's self-understanding that it sprang from and influenced. This is a first-rate book and deserves to be widely read. -- Bhikhu Parekh, author of Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political TheoryPatel provides some much-needed context for one of the world's most contentious and vexed subjects of debate: immigration. From the legal architecture designed to make life impossible for foreigners both a century ago and today, to the hypocrisies of British officials bent on shutting out those forced from their homes, Patel succinctly and eloquently explains the long-lasting consequences of empire: how countless lives were irrevocably altered by mandarins in Whitehall offices, and the related suffering that continues into the present day. -- Dr Shashi Tharoor, author of Inglorious EmpirePatel provides an indispensable and urgently relevant account of immigration and the end of empire that reveals the mirage-like quality of the very concepts through which we typically understand postwar Britain. Situating the arrival of nonwhite people in Britain in an intra-imperial context, this bravely and innovatively wide-ranging account shows that neither were they immigrants, nor was Britain ending empire. Their arrival was a phenomenon of continuity rather than a dramatic break with the past. With a compassionate authorial voice, Patel captures the trauma of unbelonging and of racist gatekeeping of the planet against a backdrop of continuous, untrammeled British emigration. This carefully researched book is testimony to history's astonishing power to change how we understand the world we inhabit by dispelling the myths that obscure truth. -- Priya Satia, Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History at Stanford University and author of Time's MonsterDebates about immigration in the immediate post-war decades, argues Ian Sanjay Patel in his provocative and important new book, were really about Britain's relation to changes in the outside world and to itself. He tells a story rooted both in the experience of migrants and in the archives of officials and politicians, at home, in the UN, and in the new postcolonial states. An idea of empire rooted in white power and colonial subjection was rearticulated for global times. Both Conservative and Labour governments utilized the law to establish a race-based set of rights for contemporary Britain. -- Catherine Hall, author of Civilising SubjectsIan Sanjay Patel's meticulously researched book shows how vital it is to understand the effects of the legacies of empire on the history of migration, and our understanding of race and belonging in modern Britain. It is an essential book for our times. -- Kavita Puri, author of Partition VoicesA book of rare importance. Ian Sanjay Patel masterfully traces the long shadow cast by Empire over Britain's recent history, and its present. -- Amia Srinivasan, Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory, All Souls College, OxfordGroundbreaking . undoubtedly a landmark contribution. -- David Wearing * Tribune *Deeply impressed by this book. Expands upon many of the observations I make about multiculturalism in Empireland with real authority. Wish I'd been given it at school -- Sathnam Sanghera, author of Empireland[Patel] reminds us that the British Empire and imperial thinking lasted much longer than is generally understood ... insightful -- Rohan Venkataramakrishnan * Scroll *A book that leaves you with much food for thought, and confirms your darkest imaginings about the days of empire and the present world order it has evolved into. -- Peggy Mohan * The Wire *This [book's] broad but telling analytical framework, combined with impressive archival research, enables [Ian Sanjay Patel] to deliver what I take to be the most compelling account of the long history of Britain's immigration laws, from 1905 to the present. It's a book that leaves me full of wonder and admiration. -- Bill Schwarz * New West Indian Guide *Patel's book - with its wonderful title - has opened a new perspective on Britain's imperial past ... nobody has produced a more astute obituary of a progressive British idealism that believed itself uniquely gifted in world governance -- Neal Ascherson * London Review of Books *The best possible guide to an essential history. -- Sathnam Sanghera * BBC History Magazine *It is the signal achievement of We're Here Because You Were There to bring fresh and clear eyes to a subject many may think they know already ... scholarly, insightful and fluent -- David Feldman * Ethnic and Racial Studies *

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Book SynopsisWith marriage in decline, divorce on the rise and the demise of the nuclear family, it is clear that the structures of kinship in the modern West are in a state of flux.In The Metamorphoses of Kinship, the world-renowned anthropologist Maurice Godelier contextualises these developments, surveying the accumulated experience of humanity with regard to such phenomena as the organisation of lines of descent, sexuality and sexual prohibitions. In parallel, Godelier studies the evolution of Western conjugal and familial traditions from their roots in the nineteenth century to the present. The conclusion he draws is that it is never the case that a man and a woman are sufficient on their own to raise a child, and nowhere are relations of kinship or the family the keystone of society.Trade ReviewThis is a blockbuster of a book. Nothing like it has been written since Levi-Strauss's Structures e?le?mentaires de la parente? (1949) or Meyer Fortes's Kinship and the Social Order (1969). Yet in the sweep of its evidence and argument, Godelier's summa is more ambitious and far-reaching than either of these. It is at once a major intervention in the discipline of anthropology, and a work of the widest human interest ... The book is both a monument of scholarship and a gripping set of reflections on universal experience. It is certain to be read and discussed for years to come. -- Jack Goody * New Left Review *Godelier has reasserted the value of our rich tradition of discussions of kinship matters. He has also shown how the category has metamorphosed as it has drawn in new issues of pressing current importance in modern life and made his case that, far from being genuinely in decline, the study of kinship is central to our understanding of what it means to be human. -- Robert H. Barnes * Comparative Studies in Society and History *A truly monumental work -- Wendy James, University of Oxford * Times Higher Education Supplement *

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Book SynopsisPost-Modernity is the creative destruction that has shattered our present times into fragments. It dynamited modernism which had dominated the western world for most of the 20th century. Post-modernism stood for everything modernism rejected: fun, exuberance, irresponsibility. But beneath its glitzy surface, post-modernism had a dirty secret: it was the fig leaf for a rapacious new kind of capitalism. It was alsoseemsthe forcing ground of the 'post truth', by means of which western values got turned upside down. But where do these ideas come from and how have they impacted on the world? In his brilliant history of a dangerous idea, Stuart Jeffries tells a narrative that starts in the early 1970s and continue to today. He tells this history through a riotous gallery that includes, amongst others: David Bowie * the Ipod * Frederic Jameson * the demolition of Pruit-Igoe * Madonna * Post-Fordism * Jeff Koon's 'Rabbit' * Deleuze and Guattari * the Nixon Shock * The Bowery series * Judith Butler * Las Vegas * Margaret Thatcher * Grand Master Flash * I Love Dick * the RAND Corporation * the Sex Pistols *Princess Diana * the Musee D'Orsay * Grand Theft Auto* Perry Anderson * Netflix * 9/11We are today scarcely capable of conceiving politics as a communal activity because we have become habituated to being consumers rather than citizens. Politicians treat us as consumers to whom they must deliver. Can we do anything else than suffer from buyer's remorse?Trade ReviewMarvellously entertaining, exciting and informative. -- John Banville * Guardian Books of the Year [For Grand Hotel Abyss] *This seemingly daunting book turned out to be an exhilarating page-turner.Grand Hotel Abyss is an outstanding critical introduction to some of the most fertile, and still relevant, thinkers of the 20th century. -- Michael Dirda * Washington Post [For Grand Hotel Abyss] *Attempts something rather daring . An easily accessible, funny history of one of the more formidable intellectual movements of the 20th century . an easy, witty, pacy read -- Owen Hatherley * [for Grand Hotel Abyss] *Throughout the book, Jeffries demonstrates that he is comfortable and conversant with the often thorny philosophical ideas of his subjects. A rich, intellectually meaty history. * Kirkus [for Grand Hotel Abyss] *Stuart Jeffries has produced a compelling and politically pressing group portrait of the philosophers associated with the Frankfurt School. Their thinking has never seemed less forbidding and more inspiring -- Matthew Beaumont * [for Grand Hotel Abyss] *An engaging and accessible history of the lives and main ideas of the leading thinkers of the Frankfurt School * New York Review of Books [for Grand Hotel Abyss] *Erudite and entertaining ... Everything, All the Time, Everywhere is a detailed and convincing horror story of the amalgamation of the two most dominant intellectual paradigms of the past half century. -- Ryne Clos * Spectrum Culture *Jeffries is a rarity: a journalist with a serious interest in cultural theory ... who writes about it in a way that is both scholarly and welcoming to non-theorists ... entertaining and astute -- Joe Moran * Times Literary Supplement *In holding a mirror to a familiar world, Everything looks to reveal hidden complexities ... eminently readable, without eliding the difficulties that are so key to its intrigue -- Daniel Baksi * The Arts Desk *Splendidly readable ... Jeffries packs a remarkable knowledge of postmodern culture into these pages -- Terry Eagleton * Guardian *Intriguing -- William Davies * New Statesman *Everything, All the Time, Everywhere finds Stuart Jeffries examining simply and engagingly how a loss of values and critical thought has led to our 'post-truth', irrational world. * Choice Magazine *A lively, sparky book -- Michael Rosen * BBC Front Row *Not only instructive; [Everything, All the Time, Everywhere] is a pleasurable read ... brilliant and entertaining -- Lisa Downing * Financial Times *Engaging and richly detailed -- Christopher McMichael * New Frame *Astute -- D.L. Dusenbury * Spectator *Everything, All the Time, Everywhere is a book replete with philosophical, social, and political references and its range of material is truly impressive. -- Sean Sheehan * popmatters *Pertinent ... on class, and capital, [Jeffries] is good. -- Scotsman * Stuart Kelly *Stuart Jeffries' animated and witty approach in Everything, All the Time, Everywhere is an exhilarating and even intoxicating look at the shambles the relationship between postmodernism and neoliberal capitalism has created. -- Ron Jacobs * Counterpunch *

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Book SynopsisThe political ambitions of the movement behind Bernie Sanders have never been limited to winning the White House. Since Bernie first entered the presidential primaries in 2016, his supporters have worked to organize a revolution intended to encourage the active participation of millions of ordinary people in political life. That revolution is already underway, as evidenced by the massive growth of the Democratic Socialists of America, the teachers Bernie motivated to lead strikes across red and blue states, and the rising new generation of radicals in Congress-led by AOC and Ilhan Omar-inspired by his example.In Bigger than Bernie, activist writers Meagan Day and Micah Uetricht give us an intimate map of this emerging movement to remake American politics top to bottom, profiling the grassroots organizers who are building something bigger, and more ambitious, than the career of any one candidate. As participants themselves, Day and Uetricht provide a serious analysis of the prospects for long-term change, offering a strategy for making "political revolution" more than just a campaign slogan. They provide a road map for how to entrench democratic socialism in the halls of power and in our own lives.Bigger than Bernie offers unmatched insights into the people behind the most unique campaign in modern American history and a clear-eyed sense of how the movement can sustain itself for the long haul.Trade ReviewMeagan Day and Micah Uetricht are two of the most brilliant and courageous intellectuals organically grounded in the marvelous militancy of the Sanders Movement. This indispensable book is a powerful, pioneering analysis of these new radical times, and a compelling vision of where it all might be going. -- Cornel West, author of Races MattersHannah Arendt said we should 'think what we are doing.' And that is what Meagan Day and Micah Uetricht have done here. Their book not only examines all that democratic socialists have achieved in the past few years but also gives an exhilarating account of what we'll be doing in the coming years. Anyone who thinks, with dread or relief, that the work comes to an end after Election Day in 2020 will think again. As Day and Uetricht show, the fight for democratic socialism has only just begun, and I'm going to keep coming back to them and their book in order to understand where and how it goes in the future. -- Corey Robin, author of The Enigma of Clarence ThomasBigger Than Bernie is a comprehensive and necessary read for those longing for a more humane country, and as someone who has been up close in many of our current fights for justice, I can attest to the power of its analysis. The authors champion non-reformist reforms that arise from and propoel social movements, and provide an essential roadmap for achieving permanent change. An energizing and instructive account that brings socialism into the present tense. -- RoseAnn DeMoro, former head of National Nurses UnitedPart history lesson, part guide book; this is a love letter to the everyday people and movements who transformed this country and who continue to declare that our lives have meaning, and our future is worth fighting for. Bigger than Bernie, isn't about the man who's spent the majority of his political career on the fringes. It's about fighters. It's about thinkers. It's about love. It's about US. -- Phillip Agnew, Co-founder of the Dream DefendersAn indispensable guide to 21st century socialism from the view of clear eyed, sharp witted, smart, funny authors who lay bare the past failures of angry, narrow sectarianism, and offer a bold, dynamic vision for using the Sanders moment to build a stronger left. These authors, like the magazine they write for, give me hope! -- Jane McAlevey, author of A Collective BargainBigger Than Bernie offers an important contribution to the urgent debates about rebuilding the American Left. Leading members of the Democratic Socialists of America, Megan Day and Micah Uetricht link that process to the improbable emergence of Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign and his insistence on "Not me, Us." Day and Uetricht put flesh on Sanders's call for a "political revolution" which they see as not only critical to the success of Sanders' campaign, but the revitalization of class struggle politics and organizing in the U.S. Buy, read, discuss and debate this book! -- Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation

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Book SynopsisThe GND has the potential of becoming one of the largest global campaigns of our times, and it started in Ann Pettifor's flat. In 2008, the first Green New Deal was devised by Pettifor and a group of English economist and thinkers, but was ignored within the tumults of the financial crash. A decade later, the ideas was revived within the democratic socialists in the US, forefront by Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. The Green New Deal demands a radical and urgent reversal of the current state of the global economy: including total de-carbonisation and a commitment to fairness and social justice. Critics on all sides have been quick to observe that the GND is a pipe dream that could never be implemented, and would cost the earth. But, as Ann Pettifor shows, we need to rethink the function of money, and how it works within the global system. How can we bail out the banks but not the planet? We have to stop thinking about the imperative of economic growth-nothing grows for ever. The program will be a long term project but it needs to start immediately.Trade ReviewThe Case for the Green New Deal succinctly explains what the GND is, where the idea came from, why it's necessary, and how to make it happen. As an economist and expert in monetary theory, Pettifor is uniquely well placed to describe how the GND can be funded * Morning Star *Demanding drastic, even impossible change - as...Pettifor [does] - may just be a way to ensure that something is done. -- Jonathan Ford * Financial Times *Clear, concise, and well put...a crash course in the economics and history of the policy bundle, as well as a roadmap to implementing it. * Bright Green *Concise, erudite and thought-provoking * Quietus *This awareness-raising contribution to an important debate should expand our understanding of what's possible and encourage us to take action. * Labour Briefing *What still distinguishes Pettifor's thinking about the Green New Deal is the way that it tackles not only the climate crisis but also the financial system that helped create it. * Sierra Magazine *Pettifor has a rare approach, both radical and intricate -- Zoe Williams * Guardian *

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Book SynopsisThe political ambitions of the movement behind Bernie Sanders have never been limited to winning the White House. Since Bernie first entered the presidential primaries in 2016, his supporters have worked to organize a revolution intended to encourage the active participation of millions of ordinary people in political life. In Bigger than Bernie, activist writers Meagan Day and Micah Uetricht give us an intimate map of this movement to remake American politics top to bottom, profiling the grassroots organizers who are building something bigger, and more ambitious, than the career of any one candidate. As participants themselves, Day and Uetricht provide a serious analysis of the prospects for long-term change, offering a strategy for making "political revolution" more than just a campaign slogan. They provide a road map for how to entrench democratic socialism in the halls of power and in our own lives.This new edition offers unmatched insights into the people behind the most unique campaign in modern American history and explores how the political revolution has been re-tooled for a time of economic crisis and pandemic.Trade ReviewAn indispensable guide to twenty-first-century socialism from the viewpoint of clear-eyed,sharp-witted, smart, funny authors . They give me hope! -- Jane McAlevey, author of A Collective Bargain"Part history lesson, part guidebook; this is a love letter to the everyday people and movementswho transformed this country. Bigger than Bernie isn't just about the man who's spent themajority of his political career on the fringes. It's about fighters. It's about thinkers. It's aboutlove. It's about us." -- Phillip Agnew, Cofounder of the Dream DefendersAn exhilarating account of what we'll be doing in the coming years. Anyone who thinks, withdread or relief, that the work comes to an end after Election Day in 2020 will think again. I'mgoing to keep coming back to them and their book -- Corey Robin, author of The Enigma of Clarence ThomasBigger than Bernie is a comprehensive and necessary read . an essential roadmap forachieving permanent change, and an energizing account that brings socialism into the presenttense. -- RoseAnn DeMoro, former Executive Director of National Nurses UnitedUrgent and essential . no one could better capture the promise and perils of this once-in-a-generation moment. I try never to miss a word that they write, and you shouldn't either. -- Krystal Ball, cohost of Rising on HillTVDay and Uetricht are two of the most brilliant and courageous intellectuals of the Sandersmovement. This indispensable book is a powerful, pioneering analysis of these new radicaltimes and a compelling vision of where it all might be going -- Cornel West, author of Race Matters

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Book SynopsisIn late May 1918 in Valdosta, Georgia, ten black men and one black woman, Mary Turner, eight months pregnant at the time, were lynched and tortured by mobs of white citizens. Through hauntingly detailed full-color artwork and collage, Elegy for Mary Turner names those who were killed, identifies the killers, and evokes a landscape in which the NAACP investigated the crimes when the state would not, when white citizens baked pies and flocked to see black corpses, and when black people fought to make their lives-and their mourning-matter. With introductions from C. Tyrone Forehand, great grand-nephew of Mary and Hayes Turner, whose family has long campaigned for the deaths to be remembered; abolitionist activist and educator Mariame Kaba, reflecting on the violence visited on black women's bodies; and historian Julie Buckner Armstrong, who opens a window onto the broader scale of lynching's terror in American history.Trade ReviewIn this particular historical moment when young Black people are engaged in a renewed struggle against state violence, Mary Turner's story resonates. She insists that we #SayHerName too. -- Mariame Kaba, founder and director of Project NIA, from the prefaceHarrowing. ... This succinct work confronts readers with atrocity, in a necessary tribute. * Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) *[Elegy for Mary Turner] retells the story [of Mary Turner's murder] in a manner at once unflinching, and, at turns, delicate. The delicacy is owed to Williams' rendering. -- Rosalind Bentley * Atlanta Journal-Constitution *Essential ... Williams doesn't just deplore unspeakable evil or try to argue with it. She confronts it in its own realm - the realm of art. -- Etelka Lehoczky * NPR Books *Elegy for Mary Turner brings America's brutal history of 20th century lynching alive through Mary Turner. -- Bill Berkowitz * BuzzFlash *

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Book SynopsisA classic collection of essay by Jacques Ranciere, that focuses on the ways in which radical philosophers understand the people they profess to speak for. The Intellectual and His People engages in an incisive and original way with current political and cultural issues, including the "discovery" of totalitarianism by the "new philosophers," the relationship of Sartre and Foucault to popular struggles, nostalgia for the ebbing world of the factory, the slippage of the artistic avant-garde into defending corporate privilege, and the ambiguous sociological critique of Pierre Bourdieu. As ever, Rancière challenges all patterns of thought in which one-time radicalism has become empty convention.Trade ReviewIn the face of impossible attempts to proceed with progressive ideas within the terms of postmodernist discourse, Rancière shows a way out of the malaise. -- Liam GillickRancière's writings offer one of the few consistent conceptualizations of how we are to continue to resist. -- Slavoj Zizek

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Book SynopsisJeremy Corbyn's rapid ascent to the leadership of the Labour Party, driven by a groundswell of popular support particularly among the young, was met at the time by a baffled media. Just where did Jeremy Corbyn come from? In Searching for Socialism, Leo Panitch and Colin Leys argue that it is only by understanding Corbyn's roots in the Bennite Labour New Left's long struggle to transcend the limits of 'parliamentary socialism' and democratise the party, as a precondition for democratising the state, can you understand his surge to become leader of the party.Closely analyzing the forces inside the party aligned against Corbyn's leadership, Panitch and Leys explain what happened between the validation of the Corbyn project in the 2017 election, while advancing an ambitious programme of democratic socialist measures unmatched anywhere since the 1970s, and the electoral defeat amidst the Brexit conjuncture of 2019. They argue that while this defeat marked the farthest point to which the generation formed in the 1970s was able to carry the Labour new left project, it seems unlikely that the new generation of activists will quickly see any other way forward than continuing the struggle inside the Labour Party, so as to fundamentally change it. In the face of the contradictions being generated by twenty-first-century capitalism, and the need for discovering and developing new political forms adequate to addressing them, this book is required reading for democratic socialists, not just in Britain but everywhere.Trade ReviewSearching for Socialism will be extremely useful to socialists and Labour members for years to come. It will be required reading for those new to socialist politics. -- Elliot Dugdale * The World Transformed *Panitch and Leys have understood a lot of what happened and what went wrong - including the dysfunction at the very top, the full story of which has yet to be told. -- Mike Phipps * Labour Hub *Leo Panitch and Colin Leys ... confront the weaknesses of Corbynism against the background of the strengths which it shares with Bennism and which distinguish both from the previous experiences of more traditional Labour lefts. -- Stephen Marks * Labour Briefing *Throughout the book the authors emphasise the importance of extending democracy both within the Labour Party and in society, and in this they are to be applauded. -- David Lane * LSE Review of Books *Searching for Socialism is extremely articulate and well researched. It should be widely read by socialists both within the Labour Party and outside. -- Camilla Royle * Socialist Review *

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Book SynopsisIt is frequently said that we are living through the end of politics, the end of social upheavals, the end of utopian folly. Consensual realism is the order of the day. But political realists, remarks Jacques Ranciere, are always several steps behind reality, and the only thing which may come to an end with their dominance is democracy. In these subtle and perceptive essays, Ranciere argues that since Plato and Aristotle politics has always constructed itself as the art of ending politics, that realism is itself utopian, and that what has succeeded the polemical forms of class struggle is not the wisdom of a new millennium but the return of old fears, criminality and chaos. Whether he is discussing the confrontation between Mitterrand and Chirac, French working-class discourse after the 1830 revolution, or the ideology of recent student mobilizations, his aim is to restore philosophy to politics and give politics back its original and necessary meaning: the organization of dissent.Trade ReviewRancière's writings offer one of the few consistent conceptualizations of how we are to continue to resist. -- Slavoj Zizek

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Book SynopsisIn this authoritative text, Arno J. Mayer traces the thinkers, leaders and shifting geopolitical contexts that shaped the founding and onward development of the Israeli state. He recovers for posterity internal critics such as the philosopher Martin Buber who argued for peaceful coexistence with the Palestinian Arabs. 'A sense of limits is the better part of valour', Mayer insists. Plowshares into Swords explores Israeli's indefinite deferral of the 'Arab Question', the strategic thinking behind its settlement building and border walls, and the endurance of Palestinian resistance.Trade ReviewSweeping and often illuminating -- Geoffrey Wheatcroft * New Statesman *A seminal book - extremely challenging. The historical and political implications of the 'Mayer thesis' will be widely discussed in years to come - certainly not only by specialists -- Carlo Ginzburg * for The Persistence of the Old Regime *As fresh, challenging and thought-provoking in its conceptualization as it is thoroughly researched and brilliantly, stylishly and above all sensitively written. A masterly study -- The Nation * for Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? *Impressively measured, frank and thoughtful -- John Dunn * Times Literary Supplement [for The Furies] *In Plowshares Into Swords, Arno Mayer gives a sweeping and often illuminating overview of the story of Zionism. -- New Statesman * Geoffrey Wheatcroft *

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Book SynopsisIn 1973 a group of North Wales building workers were arrested for picketing-related offences during the first and only national building workers strike in Britain the year before. It was a turning point for halting the growth of trade unionism in the building industry, from which it has never recovered. A Very British Conspiracy is the first book to tell the full story of how the state prosecuted these workers and the campaign that was established to overturn this miscarriage of justice. Eileen Turnbull uncovers government and police documents that reveal the careful planning of the prosecution of the 24 men. She forensically reveals how the state used the criminal justice system to secure convictions. It analyses how, in the absence of hard evidence, the Police and prosecution went to extraordinary lengths to criminalise trade unionists.The premature death of the lead picket, Des Warren, was the catalyst for a group of North West trade unionists and several of the pickets to come together in 2006 to organise a campaign to achieve justice. In March 2021, the convictions were finally quashed by the Court of Appeal. The book describes how the pickets and their families felt after forty-eight years being ostracised and considered as criminals in their communities, as well as the response of the Campaign committee members who had brought this historic victory about.Trade ReviewThis is the moving and inspiring story of the determined search for justice for the modern day equivalent of the Tolpuddle martyrs against the full might of the establishment and the heroic role played by a very special woman. -- John McDonnell, MPIncisive, compelling and moving. Exposes in forensic detail how the Conservative government, police and judiciary interfered in legitimate trade union activity, colluding against building workers fighting for dignity, decency and safety. And charts how a 47-year struggle for the truth overturned one of the worst miscarriages of justice in British history. A magnificent book about working-class solidarity. -- Frances O'Grady, General Secretary, Trades Union CongressWhat a fantastically forensic account of one of the worst miscarriages of justice in our long trade union history. I want Eileen on my side on every occasion; her grit, tenacity, dedication and commitment for justice for the Shrewsbury pickets is phenomenal. She truly is an inspiration to all workers. Her message is simple: never, ever give in; never, ever give up. Fight on and meet the many challenges; tell truth to power. -- Ian Lavery, MPHighly recommended. Eileen Turnbull's account of the massive and meticulous conspiracy waged against the Shrewsbury Pickets is full of illuminating insights, wonderful anecdotes and stories. She exposes the British Establishment and reinforces my belief in the courage, tenacity and resilience of working class women and men. -- Jim Mowatt, Director, UNITE the unionThis powerful story tells of the incredible courage of Eileen and the many others who fought a long battle for justice against unimaginably powerful forces. With attacks on trade unions intensifying, this book serves as a timely reminder of the importance of the labour movement and the workers it represents. -- Mark Serwotka, General Secretary of PCS unionAn essential, meticulously researched account of government, employer and media collusion to manufacture fictitious information to demonise striking workers. It exposes the harsh reality of a system prepared to criminalise trade unionists for standing up to vindictive and abusive employers. The courageous determination of the Shrewsbury 24 Campaign and the inspirational persistence of Eileen has overturned this gross miscarriage of justice leaving us in no doubt that, when we never give up, we win! -- Kate Flannery, Secretary, Orgreave Truth & Justice CampaignEileen Turnbull is one of those extraordinary working-class heroes who should be honoured by their country but in our class-riven society rarely are. -- John Green * Morning Star *For the first time, Eileen reveals why the building strike was always personal to her - and why she dedicated years of her life to winning justice. -- Ros Wynne Jones * Daily Mirror *A history lesson with a real resonance for today. -- Keith Richmond * ASLEF Journal *Turnbull leaves no stone unturned ... Her tenacity and unwavering belief in workers' rights leads the way and would be a thought-provoking read for many ... An inspiring and dedicated piece of work -- Sian Collinson * National Education Union Magazine *Without Eileen Turnbull the pickets would never have won justice ... This magnificent book highlights the collusion, the deceit, the conspiracy, and the coming together of the politicians, the police, the construction employers and the judiciary. It casts a very dirty stain on the very people who profess to be the pillars of society. -- Barckley Sumner * buildingWORKER Magazine *Every now and then you read a book that you immediately want to tell other people about, that you believe is important and that what you have learned from reading it is essential for others to read. A Very British Conspiracy is such a book ... Turnbull has produced a must read for all trade unionists. -- Stephen Smellie * Scottish Left Review *A wonderful, and highly readable book ... a fascinating story, well-told, by a very generous individual. -- Richard Allday * Counterfire *

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Book SynopsisHistorian Laura Robson unveils the dark heart of our purportedly humanitarian international regime. Tracing the century-long history of attempts to remake refugees into disposable migrant labor, Robson elucidates global humanitarianism's deep-seated commitment to refugee exploitation and containment.Surveying more than a hundred years of policy across the globe, Robson captures the travails of Balkan refugees in the late Ottoman Empire, Roosevelt's secret plans to use German Jewish refugees as laborers in Latin America, and contemporary European efforts to deploy Syrians as low-wage workers in remote regions of Jordan.The advent of internationalist refugee aid has long been told as an inspirational story in which reformers fought tirelessly for a system that would recognize and guarantee the rights of displaced and dispossessed people. But as Robson demonstrates, the motives behind modern refugee policy can be mercenary. Refugees have become easy prey for global industrial capitalism.Trade ReviewLaura Robson reframes the history of international refugee policy, showing that security questions and labor needs have always been at its center. The story she tells is not only about the past but is vital for understanding responses to displacement today. -- ILANA FELDMAN, Professor of Anthropology, History, and International Affairs, George Washington UniversityIn this impassioned and important book, Laura Robson casts the modern system of international refugee relief - its origins, evolution, and current objectives - in a damning new light. A powerful, revelatory account of the strategies used by great powers to control and exploit refugees under the guise of humanitarian assistance. -- DANE KENNEDY, author of The Imperial History Wars: Debating the British EmpireTable of ContentsIntroduction: Refugees, Workers1. What's a Refugee Regime? The Origins of Mass Displacement Policy2. Turning a Profit: Refugee Policy at the League of Nations3. Colonial Workers: Expanding the Refugee Regime4. From Europe to America: Refugees and the Politics of "Overpopulation"5. Zionism Goes Global: Refugees and Roosevelt's M Project6. Workers of Another World: Soviet Resettlement Policy7. Refugees versus "Palestine Refugees": Race and the Postwar International Regime8. The Politics of Confinement: Refugee Aid in the Age of Decolonization9. Containing Labor: Refugees, Migrants, SEZsAfterword: Workers, RefugeesAcknowledgementsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisThe Panthay Rebellion of 1856-1873 held the armies of the Qing dynasty at bay for nearly two decades. This account by David Atwill offers a remarkable panorama of the cosmopolitan frontier society from which the rebellion sprang.The rebel leader, Du Wenxiu, took the name of Sultan Suleiman, established a Muslim court at the ancient city of Dali and sought to unite the population against Manchu rule, with considerable success at a time when the Qing faced threats in all parts of the empire. Atwill offers the first detailed account of Du's seventeen-year rule and upturns a historiography that filters the Panthay Rebellion through the political and military lenses of the Chinese centre. The insurrection was not rooted solely in Hui hatred of the Han Chinese, he argues, nor was it primarily Islamic in orientation. Atwill draws out the multitudinous complexities of Yunnan Province, China's most ethnically diverse region and a crossroads for Tibetan, Chinese and Southeast Asian culture.The Panthay Rebellion was the last of a series of mid-century Chinese revolts to be suppressed. Its downfall marked the beginning of a renewed offensive by the imperial government to control its border regions and influence the cultures of those who lived there.Trade ReviewValuable reading for persons interested in the economic and political history of minorities in China . and in particular the history of Muslims in China' -- Eva Goldschmidt * H-Net *A thought-provoking, sophisticated study * Journal of Asian Studies *Compelling, I would strongly recommend it -- Beth E. Notar * Pacific Affairs *A book that should be read * Journal of Chinese Studies *A major contribution to the historiography of nineteenth-century China and of Chinese Islam * American Historical Review *

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Book SynopsisThere are few writers about whom opinions diverge so widely as Anthony Powell, whose Dance to the Music of Time sequence is one of the most ambitious literary constructions in the English language. In Different Speeds, Same Furies, Perry Anderson measures Powell's achievement against Marcel Proust's celebrated In Search of Lost Time.The literature on Dance is a drop in the ocean compared to that on Proust. Yet in construction of plot and depiction of character, Anderson ranks Powell above him. How much do particular advantages of this kind matter, and why is Powell an odd man out in English letters? At once so similar and dissimilar, the intricate retrospectives of the two novelists on bohemia and Society, upbringing and mortality, relationships and personality, invite interrelated judgements. The closing chapters of Different Speeds, Same Furies reach beyond their handlings of time to chart the historical novel from Waverley to Underworld, and the breakthrough in epistolatory fiction of Montesquieu's Persian Letters, held together by what its author described as 'a secret chain which remains, as it were, invisible'.Trade ReviewIt is Perry Anderson's achievement that stimulated me to have another go at Proust, even while his original criticism of Anthony Powell was instrumental in provoking yet one more reading of A Dance to the Music of Time. -- William H. Pritchard * Wall Street Journal *

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Book SynopsisThis 600-page volume of Luxemburg's Complete Works contains her writings On Revolution from 1906 to 1909 - covering the 1905-06 Russian Revolution, an epoch-making event, and its aftermath. Over 80 per cent of writings on this volume have never before appeared in English. The volume contains numerous writings never before available in English, such as her pathbreaking essay "Lessons of the Three Dumas," which presents a unique perspective on the transition to socialism, her "Notes on the English Revolution" of the 1640s, and numerous writings on of the role of the mass strike in fomenting revolutionary transformation. All of the material in the volume consists of new translations, from German, Polish, and Russian originals.Trade Review“One of the most emotionally intelligent socialists in modern history, a radical of luminous dimensions whose intellect is informed by sensibility, and whose largeness of spirit places her in the company of the truly impressive.”—Vivian Gornick, Nation “Rosa goes on being our source of fresh water in thirsty times.”—Eduardo Galeano “Intrepid, incorruptible, passionate and gentle. Imagine as you read between the lines of what she wrote, the expression of her eyes. She loved workers and birds. She danced with a limp. Everything about her fascinates and rings true. One of the immortals.”—John Berger “One cannot read the writings of Rosa Luxemburg, even at this distance, without an acute yet mournful awareness of what Perry Anderson once termed ‘the history of possibility.’”—Christopher Hitchens, Atlantic

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Book SynopsisThough not without its rivals, Latin stood at the apex of Western culture from the Renaissance until relatively recently. Françoise Waquet offers an enthralling, original history of the language's uses, its detractors and defenders, and the social hierarchies its practitioners inscribed. Granted a new lease of life by the Humanists and the Catholic Church, Latin was the form in which generations of schoolchildren were taught to read, millions of people worshipped, and an international community of scholars communicated with one another. It conveyed sacredness, but also obscenity; learning, as well as pedantry; science, but also trickery and mumbo-jumbo. Few individuals even among the clergy or the most learned scholars have ever managed to speak it with any degree of correctness or fluency, let alone elegance. Why, despite rationalist criticisms that Latin was inaccessible to the great majority of people, and inconvenient and time-consuming for the rest, did it maintain such a strong presence - some would say a tyranny - for so long?Trade ReviewA splendid book: original in method, suggestive in argument, and a pleasure to read. -- Anthony Grafton * London Review of Books *... [a] fascinating and lively survey of the place of Latin western culture during the past 400 years. * Independent *... richly researched and delightful ... with scholars of Waquet's generosity and ability, the old language might yet have a future. * New Criterion *... detailed and wide-ranging ... * Los Angeles Times Book Review *... an eloquent obituary ... * Spectator *Fascinating. -- A.C. Grayling * Guardian, Summer Choice *Latin is dead and this book is its epitaph ... it is the merit and interest of Waquet's survey that she finds Latin not only deployed for the liturgy, but also to describe things carnal, pornographic, or otherwise shameful. * Daily Telegraph *A wonderful survey. -- A. N. Wilson

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Book Synopsis"When I say this book is a love story, I mean it is about things that cannot be gotten over-like this world, and some of the people in it."In 1819, the poet John Keats wrote six poems that would become known as the Great Odes. Some of them-"Ode to a Nightingale," "To Autumn"-are among the most celebrated poems in the English language. Anahid Nersessian here collects and elucidates each of the odes and offers a meditative, personal essay in response to each, revealing why these poems still have so much to say to us, especially in a time of ongoing political crisis. Her Keats is an unflinching antagonist of modern life-of capitalism, of the British Empire, of the destruction of the planet-as well as a passionate idealist for whom every poem is a love poem.The book emerges from Nersessian's lifelong attachment to Keats's poetry; but more, it "is a love story: between me and Keats, and not just Keats." Drawing on experiences from her own life, Nersessian celebrates Keats even as she grieves him and counts her own losses-and Nersessian, like Keats, has a passionate awareness of the reality of human suffering, but also a willingness to explore the possibility that the world, at least, could still be saved. Intimate and speculative, this brilliant mix of the poetic and the personal will find its home among the numerous fans of Keats's enduring work.Trade ReviewIn Anahid Nersessian's Keats's Odes: A Lover's Discourse, red life streams again through Keats's poems. It is a risky, passionate criticism that - in addition to yielding all sorts of insights into the man and his writing - tests what of her own life the poems might hold (and quicken). This is living in and through and with and against poetry. A brilliant and refreshingly unprofessional book -- Ben Lerner * Paris Review *Keats's Odes is brash, skeptical, and tender by turns, offering a fluctuating re-visioning of Keats which is firm in its convictions...Nersessian's prose is bold, irreverent, declarative, and feral. Hyperbole and slackness are deceptive: every phrase feels carefully pitched. * Times Literary Supplement *The book's intimacy, vulnerability and determination to provoke is true to Keats, and Nersessian's genuine feeling for his work is never in doubt. One can't help but be pleased that two centuries on, Keats's odes still inspire engagement and love. * Washington Post *This book claims to be 'about' Keats's odes. And it is. But it is also about beauty and sadness and love and revolution and how the odes can help us to better understand these things. It is nothing short of a perfect book, one that understands how poetry can transform one's life. Nersessian is on track to be the Harold Bloom of her generation, but a Bloom with politics. -- Juliana SpahrThis is an intense, often dazzling, original, illuminating, idiosyncratic, but also welcoming and welcome book. Offering trenchant, astute, often polemical and sometimes breathtaking readings of Keats's Odes - and simultaneously of love, politics, worldmaking, and self - Nersessian has written a propelled, impelled, impassioned work, truly in Keats's spirit. -- Maureen N. McLaneThe best book about John Keats published at the poet's bicentenary. * Jacobin *I've read Anahid Nersessian's KEATS ODES: A LOVER'S DISCOURSE a half dozen times now, and it just keeps getting better. Nobody's smarter than Nersessian, nobody's more humane, nobody's more searching, fearless, nobody's more provocative, nobody challenges and cherishes their subject this way. It is that thrilling sensation of meeting a new voice on the page you know you'll spend your entire life following. -- Kaveh AkbarAnahid Nersessian offers a radical and unforgettable reading of the British writer's odes-one that upends our sense of his poetic project. * The Nation *Intense emotion abounds in this literary blend of analysis and autobiography. . . . In six essays that examine each of Keats's Great Odes, Nersessian tells a 'kind of love story' between herself and the poems. * Publishers Weekly *Thinking through John Keats's six "Great Odes," Nersessian offers up six critical and autobiographical essays that work, in their own right, like odes. Keats's Odes is also a terse, stunning pastiche of Roland Barthes's "A Lover's Discourse". In imaginative, lucid prose, Nersessian proves that criticism can be loving, literary art. * Boston Globe, Best Books of 2021 *Keats's Odes is a discourse on love as interpretive practice. Demanding, generous, precise, utopian, and unfailingly brilliant, Nersessian reinvents reading itself as a form of critical intimacy for our broken times -- Srikanth ReddyThis book is a classic of a new genre, a love letter of literary theory, giving a desired political language to the left's long-quivering heart for the lyric and sensuous knowledge of Keats. We always knew he was the activist's Romantic, and now in articulate and radical analysis, we have an understanding of his poetic form that illuminates our unwavering passion for his Odes. -- Holly Pester

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Book SynopsisThe photograph is not just an image but an event, one in the longer sequence of a photographic moment. Challenging given definitions of photography and of the political, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay calls for us to use photographs of political violence, such as the colonial regime in Palestine, to envision the political relationships that made each photograph possible, and to be able to intervene in them. In this way, we can build our capacity for civil imagination: a way of seeing and imagining ourselves as part of the image rather than only as spectators.The new edition includes a discussion of the legal battles to reclaim the images of the enslaved Papa Renty, held by Harvard University, rejecting the regime of photographs as private property, established by institutions that claim ownership of images seized with violence.This trenchant, perennially contemporary book valorizes powerful intersubjective relations enabled by photography, relations that exceed the strictur

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Book SynopsisThe election in Chile of the Marxist leader of the Socialist Party, Salvador Allende, to the presidency in October 1970 inaugurated a political situation unique in Latin America and of world-wide significance. Allende's Popular Unity coalition embraced Socialists and Communists and campaigned on an election programme of unprecedented radicalism - nothing less than the abolition of monopoly capitalism and imperialism in Chile. In this book, Régis Debray, recently released from his Bolivian gaol, questioned President Allende about his strategy for socialism. These discussions ranged widely over the history of the workers' movement in Chile, the strength of imperialism in Latin America, the experience of the first months of the Allende government, the role of the Chilean armed forces, Allende's personal background and friendship with Che Guevara, the seizure of land by peasants since the Popular Unity victory, and the international outlook of the new Chile.In an introductory essay, Debray furnished an analysis of Chilean history and politics which situated Allende in the past and present of the country and explored the dynamics of the class struggle now unfolding there. For this new anniversary edition, leading Chilean leftist scholar Camila Vergara has written a new introduction which appraises the book in the light of recent political developments in Chile.

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Book SynopsisIn The World and Us, Roberto Mangabeira Unger sets out to reinvent philosophy. His central theme is our transcendence - everything in our existence points beyond itself - and its relation to our finitude: everything that surrounds us, and we ourselves, are flawed and ephemeral. He asks how we can live so that we die only once, instead of dying many small deaths; how we can breathe new life and new meaning into the revolutionary movement that has aroused humanity for the last three centuries, but that is now weakened and disoriented; and how we can make sense of ourselves without claiming for human beings a miraculous exception to the general regime of nature. For Unger, philosophy must be the mind on fire, insisting on our prerogative to speak to what matters most.From this perspective, he redefines each of the traditional parts of philosophy, from ontology and epistemology to ethics and politics. He turns moral philosophy into an exploration of the contest between the t

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Book SynopsisNo other art movement has so profoundly influenced radical politics as the Situationist International. But beyond the clichés about its purported leader Guy Debord, the "society of the spectacle," détournement and dérive, lies a more complex story about key historical shifts in the composition of capital, work, labor, art, and revolutionary theory during the 1950s and 60s.With and Against reframes the history of the Situationist International as a struggle to come to terms with the then-emerging ideologies of cybernetics and automation. Through each of the book's four chapters, Dominique Routhier dissects Situationist pamphlets, documents, artworks, and objects that refract elements of a "cybernetic hypothesis": the theoretically hyperbolic belief that technological progress, computers and automation make class struggle and the idea of revolution obsolete. With equal attention to aesthetic detail and to the broader contours of political economy, this book serves as a critical intervention in art history as well a call to reconsider, more broadly, the contemporary lessons of the most political of all artistic avantgardes.Trade ReviewEvincing a breathtaking command of the broader historical context that informed the rise of the Situationist International during the age of automation and the birth of cybernetics, Dominique Routhier's innovative analysis transcends the discipline of art history, allowing us to link early 20thcentury avant-garde struggles against the alienated separation of art and labour with all the nuances of the SI imperative. Given our anxieties today about the impact of Artificial Intelligence on labour and art, Routhier's study could not be more timely. -- Abigail Susik, Willamette University, author of Surrealist Sabotage and the War on WorkThe situationists once described themselves as racing against the police for control of the technologies of modern conditioning. In With and Against, Dominique Routhier provides us with a stunningly insightful commentary on that race's progress over the course of the 1950s and '60s, from the rooftop of Le Corbusier's apartment block in Marseille to the classrooms of Nanterre's university. Drawing our attention to the SI's previously neglected struggle over the postwar world's latest "science of control and communications," cybernetics, he argues persuasively that this last avant-garde of the 20th century was precociously engaged with a key technology of the 21st. With and Against is a vital contribution, not only to our understanding of the SI, but also of our own moment as it has been shaped by the "cybernetic hypothesis." -- Tom McDonough, Professor of Art History at Binghamton University, Author of "The Beautiful Language of My Century": Reinventing the Language of Contestation in Postwar France, 1945–1968Dominique Routhier has written a hugely important work of historical retrieval combining theoretical finesse with important archival findings supplying us with a new understanding of the Situationists' anti-artistic and anti-political endeavor. With and Against maps the emergence of the cybernetic paradigm and a whole new ensemble of forms of domination the Situationists fought fiercely against. These forms of domination have only been further augmented and we have unfinished revolutionary business to do. Routhier's book is both a pivotal contribution to the historical analysis of the Situationist project as well as a necessary tool in the coming struggles against an ever-refined architecture of separation. -- Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Professor of Political Aesthetics, University of CopenhagenRouthier's freshly researched account of the beginnings and elaboration of the SI across Europe offers detailed insight at amolecular level into the last and most radical iteration of the avant-garde, setting it into dialectical relation with the emergence of a technocratic society of control. Attending to the co emergence of automation and computing as forms of capitalist social subsumption, With and Against proposes a sense of what motivated the SI's specific gestures, tactics and language. This is no simple social context, but a historicist theory of forms of real resistance against the runaway autonomy and indifference of capital to social relations in a proto digitalized world hostile to human human freedom. -- Jaleh Mansoor, University of British Columbia, author of Marshall Plan Modernism: Italian Postwar Abstraction and the Beginnings of Autonomia, published by Duke University Press (September 2016)Table of ContentsIntroduction1 Refusal and Withdrawal: Histoire marseillaise2 Secret Fascination: Unitary Urbanism3 With and Against: Fin de Copenhague4 Rage Against the Machine: L'Opération robot and May '68Conclusion

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Book SynopsisIdeology has never before been so much in evidence as a fact, and so little understood as a concept, as it is today. In this now classic work, originally written for both students and for those already familiar with the debates around the concept, the celebrated literary theorist Terry Eagleton unravels its many definitions, exploring its tortuous history from the Enlightenment to the present.A limpid account of the thought of key Marxist thinkers, as well as that of philosophers from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to Freud and the post-structuralists, and a political reformulation of a vital set of ideas, Ideology: An Introduction is an essential text by one of our most important contemporary critics.

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Book SynopsisIn The Zone, Justinien Tribillon takes the reader on a tour of an eponymous Parisian hinterland. The site of dreams and nightmares, from Van Gogh’s paintings to the cinematic violence of La Haine, the Zone, so often misun- derstood, is the key to understanding today’s Paris, and even France itself.Originally the site of defensive walls, alongside which mushroomed makeshift housing, allotments, and dancehalls in the nineteenth century, the Zone has performed many functions and been a place of contention for two centuries. Dismantled in the 1920s, the fortifications were first replaced with gardens, stadia and homes. After the war came the Boulevard Périphérique, a ring road promising seamless travel in a futuristic car-centric Paris. With the ring road came new dreams of modernity in reinvented suburbs: new towns, high-rise architecture and social housing built at record speed. Yesterday’s Paris made way for tomorrow’s banlieue.

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Book SynopsisHow Michel Foucault, drugs, California and the rise of neoliberal politics in 1970s France are all connectedIn May 1975, Michel Foucault took LSD in the desert in southern California. He described it as the most important event of his life, one which would lead him to completely rework his History of Sexuality. His focus now would not be on power relations but on the experiments of subjectivity and the care of the self. Through this lens, he would reinterpret the social movements of May '68 and position himself politically in France in relation to the emergent anti- totalitarian and anti-welfare state currents. He would also come to appreciate the possibilities of autonomy offered by a new force on the French political scene that was neither of the Left nor the Right: neoliberalism.For this paperback edition, the authors have written an afterword responding to the debate occasioned by the book's first publication.Trade ReviewThe contribution of this important essay is to place Foucault's thought on neoliberalism in its political context of the time. This is the whole point of this essay, all the more fascinating since it offers an overview of the work on Foucault, in particular on its relation to neoliberalism. -- Olivier Doubre * Politis *In The Last Man Takes LSD, the sociologists Mitchell Dean and Daniel Zamora meticulously examine the turning point of the seventies to take a critical look at Foucault's political heritage, and to revive the debate on his relationship to the neoliberal school of thought. -- Mathieu Dejean * Les Inrocks *A volume that offers us an overview of the political field that gave rise to Foucault's ideas. The two authors enrich the debate by proposing to consider the alleged Foucaultian sympathy for neoliberalism as a moment where power seemed to criticize himself, making possible, on the one hand, a policy finally free from the conquest of the State and institutions, and on the other, the idea of an autonomous constitution of oneself - or, what would today be inexorably described as an entrepreneur of the self. -- Carlo Crosato * Il Manifesto *Michel Foucault saw neoliberalism as an opportunity to think about the revitalization of the left in civil society. The authors Daniel Zamora and Mitchell Dean explain why he lost sight of its authoritarian dimension. -- Pascal Jurt * Woz *Michel Foucault was among the most prescient analysts of neoliberalism but his own relation to it is now a topic of fierce intellectual dispute. In this brilliant and incisive book, Mitchell Dean and Daniel Zamora show that neoliberalism appeared to Foucault to offer a break with the normalization of the welfare state and a space for new political experiments and individual freedoms. Looking back from our context of generalised precarity, deep inequality and economic and environmental crises, they challenge us to break with this tattered utopia and move beyond Foucault's fascination with the aesthetics of the self to re-invent politics for our time. -- Jessica WhyteDean and Zamora use Foucault's thesis of the dissolution of the Author as the key to understanding his later shift to issues of governmentality, neoliberalism, and his turn to subjectivity. By so doing, they violate his own injunction of resorting to the author's life to comprehend any work, and consequently produce the best account of his work I have ever encountered. -- Philip Mirowski, University of Notre DameBy locating Foucault's later work in the social and political context of the 1970s and 80s, in France, California, and elsewhere, Dean and Zamora have performed a double service. We finish their study better understanding the roots of Foucault's ideas, and the motivation for his dalliance with a nascent neoliberalism. But we also perceive the limited shelf-life of his idiosyncratic notion of freedom; in our time, it would be folly to carry on revering him as - in Sartre's phrase - the 'unsurpassable horizon' of radical thought. -- Peter Dews, University of Essex"When I say something," Foucault claimed, "I am speaking to the present." How ironic that so little of the discussion around Foucault, particularly in the United States, has focused on his present. In their riveting study, Dean and Zamora do just that, putting Foucault in dialogue not only with the anti-Marxist New Philosophers of the 1970s but also with a neoliberalism emerging from within French socialist circles after 1968. The result is a completely unexpected Foucault, more rooted in the struggles of his own time, yet still speaking, as a cautionary tale, to our own. One would be hard pressed to find a better book on such a complex thinker or a more compulsively readable introduction to the contradictory politics of the left in our current moment. * Corey Robin *The Last Man Takes LSD is the best account of Foucault's engagement with neoliberalism. The book raises a number of intriguing questions, not the least of which is: What is left? -- John Foster * The Battleground *Dean and Zamora do an excellent job contextualizing Foucault's research and ideas in his final years. They methodically trace the nuances of the era's prickly political climate, creating a sympathetic portrait of Foucault's promotion of a damaging and - for a thinker who fruitfully explored power and exploitation - self-defeating philosophical turn. -- Jonathan Russell Clark * Los Angeles Times *Not just a brilliant and well-timed ­exploration of Foucault's intellectual ­trajectory ... it is also a necessary addition to the literature that has emerged over the past five years on the intellectual history of neoliberalism. -- Gavin Jacobson * New Statesman *The Last Man Takes LSD questions the lingering significance of Foucault's work today, highlighting a greater gap in Foucauldian thought: the absence of a well-developed theory of the state. -- Samuel Clowes Huneke * The Point *A fascinating study of Foucault's American years. -- Stuart Jeffries * Spectator *Compelling. -- Jasper Friedrich * Foucault Studies *Table of ContentsAcknowledgementsIntroduction: The Last Man Takes LSD1. The Birth of a ControversyFoucault and the liberal arts of governmentFoucault in his presentNeoliberalismThe intellectual2. Searching for a Left GovernmentalityFoucault against the post-war LeftNeoliberalism beyond Right and LeftTowards a 'new political culture'3. Beyond the Sovereign Subject: Against InterpretationAgainst the sovereignty of the authorTh e rise and fall of the modern subject4. Ordeals: Personal and PoliticalVeridiction and forms of truthExperimentation and knowledge through the ordealA 'political spirituality' against the sovereign5. The Revolution BeheadedTh e self as a battlefieldResistance as 'desubjectification'Proliferation against powerNeoliberalism: a framework for pluralismAn 'intelligent use' of neoliberalism6. Foucault's NormativitySexuality and moralityTh e revolutionInequality and neoliberal governmentalityThe California Foucault7. Rogue Neoliberalism and Liturgical PowerThe 1970s: coming downTowards a left governmentalityConfessional civil warEpilogueAfterwordIndex

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Book SynopsisDhirendra Jha's deeply researched history places Nathuram Godse's life as the juncture of the dangerous fault lines in contemporary India: the quest for independence and the rise of Hindu nationalism.On a wintry Delhi evening on 30 January 1948, Nathuram Godse shot Gandhi at point-blank range, forever silencing the man who had delivered independence to his nation. Godse's journey to this moment of international notoriety from small towns in western India is, by turns, both riveting and wrenching. Drawing from previously unpublished archival material, Jha challenges the standard account of Gandhi's assassination, and offers a stunning view on the making of independent India.Born to Brahmin parents, Godse started off as a child mystic. However, success eluded him. The caste system placed him at the top of society but the turbulent times meant that he soon became a disaffected youth, desperately seeking a position in the infant nation. In such confusing times, Godse was one of hundreds, and later thousands, of young Indian men to be steered into the sheltering fold of early Hindutva, Indian nationalism. His association with early formations of the RSS and far-right thinkers such as Sarvakar proves that he was not working alone. Today he is considered to be a patriotic hero by many for his act of bravery, despite being found guilty in court and executed in 1949.Trade ReviewDhirendra K. Jha has anatomized, with calm resourcefulness, the politics and psychology of a fanatic. He has also written a secret and sinister history of modern India-the one we need to understand our ruinous present -- Pankaj MishraThis book goes beyond the plot that resulted in Mahatma Gandhi's assassination, which the author meticulously analyses. It is indeed highly revealing of the omnipresence of the RSS on the Indian political scene in the 1940s. If the organization did not fight British colonialism and did not contest elections, it was intimately related to Savarkar's Hindu Mahasabha, the first Hindutva party, and, more importantly, organically linked to the Hindu Rashtra Dal, a militant body co-founded by Nathuram Godse - a man who, as Dhirendra K. Jha shows, never left the RSS -- Christophe Jaffrelot, author of Modi's IndiaNot just a very readable and credible account of the plot and the people behind Gandhi's murder, including a psychological analysis of his assassin, but a comprehensive study of the wider politics of the Hindu Mahasabha, the RSS and their leaders, including Savarkar, which makes it a must-read and highly relevant in today's context -- Mridula MukherjeeAlthough the biography of Godse is a biography of an assassin whose psychological profile might indicate his tendency towards extreme actions like political murder, it is also a story of a nation whose identity was forever mutated by the fact of British colonialism and the multiple atrocities that colonialism involved. -- Ron Jacobs * Counterpunch *

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Book SynopsisWhen the renowned social scientist Erik Olin Wright passed away in 2019 at the height of his intellectual powers, he left behind an unfinished project intended to forge a connection between class analysis and real utopias. In taking up this project, the essays in this volume pay tribute to his generative theory, crystalline thinking, inspirational teaching, and personal generosity.- 'Friends of the late Erik Olin Wright celebrate his life and work with essays about his lifelong preoccupations with analytical Marxism and the transformation of capitalist societies. The result is a beautiful book that glows with intelligence, optimism, and love.' FRANCES FOX PIVEN- 'Erik Wright succumbed to cancer while he was advancing a decades-long project of envisioning real utopias—designs for a workable socialism. The essays in this superb volume recount this monumental undertaking and also advance it in significant ways.' VIVEK CHIBBER- 'Erik Olin Wright devote

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