The Arts
June 2025
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Politics & governmentFebruary 2017The political aesthetics of the Armenian avant-garde
The journey of the ‘painterly real', 1987–2004
by Series edited by Amelia Jones, Marsha Meskimmon, Angela Harutyunyan
This book addresses late-Soviet and post-Soviet art in Armenia in the context of turbulent transformations from the late 1980s to 2004. It explores the emergence of 'contemporary art' in Armenia from within and in opposition to the practices, aesthetics and institutions of Socialist Realism and National Modernism. This historical study outlines the politics (liberal democracy), aesthetics (autonomous art secured by the gesture of the individual artist), and ethics (ideals of absolute freedom and radical individualism) of contemporary art in Armenia and points towards its limitations. Through the historical investigation, a theory of post-Soviet art historiography is developed, one that is based on a dialectic of rupture and continuity in relation to the Soviet past. As the first English-language study on contemporary art in Armenia, the book is of prime interest for artists, scholars, curators and critics interested in post-Soviet art and culture and in global art historiography.
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January 2021Life Aesthetics Pavilion: Vegetable Memories
by Jin Shiqiou
This book contains twenty-five essays devoted to carrots. Eat radish in winter and eat ginger in summer. This old saying illustrates the close relationship between radish and the Chinese people. Radishes are native to China, and Chinese radishes are the most delicious, and Chinese people love them most. This book shows the national sentiments of "My Chinese Stomach" through the description of the topic of radish. This book shows the nation and culture from a specific food variety. Some people say: A word is a history of culture. Then, a kind of food is also a cultural history. Radish is such a food.
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Literature & Literary StudiesAugust 2022Edmund Spenser and the romance of space
by Tamsin Badcoe
Edmund Spenser and the romance of space advances the exploration of literary space into new areas, firstly by taking advantage of recent interdisciplinary interests in the spatial qualities of early modern thought and culture, and secondly by reading literature concerning the art of cosmography and navigation alongside imaginative literature with the purpose of identifying shared modes and preoccupations. The book looks to the work of cultural and historical geographers in order to gauge the roles that aesthetic subjectivity and the imagination play in the development of geographical knowledge: contexts ultimately employed by the study to achieve a better understanding of the place of Ireland in Spenser's writing. The study also engages with recent ecocritical approaches to literary environments, such as coastlines, wetlands, and islands, thus framing fresh readings of Spenser's handling of mixed genres.
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The ArtsJune 2025Toronto New Wave cinema and the anarchist-apocalypse
by David Christopher
The Toronto New Wave (TNW) comprises a group of avant-garde filmmakers working in Canada from the 1980s and into the new millennium whose innovative film works share significant affinities with anarchist themes and aesthetics. Several of the TNW filmmakers openly identify as anarchists and/or acknowledge a debt to anarchism in their production of highly apocalyptic narratives as part of their cinematic political projects. However, recognition of anarchism's progressive apocalyptic theoretical relevance has yet to be substantially taken up by scholarship in cinema analysis. This analysis introduces an anarchist-inflected analytical methodology to understand the apocalyptic-revelatory political work these films attempt to accomplish in the perceptual space between the filmic texts and both their auteurs and potential viewers, and to re-locate the TNW within cinema history as an ongoing phenomenon with new significance in an apocalyptic era of digital distribution.
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FictionOctober 2009Library of Chinese Classics :The Selected Poems of Du Fu
by Hua Zisheng
Du Fu (712-770), China's great poet in the Tang Dynasty. After experiencing the decline of the Tang dynasty, he witnessed the changes of the current situation, created poems that reflect the difficult and livelihood problems of the people with his extraordinary artistic talents, and was later praised for his "history of poetry." Poetry also content of the works, such as singing natural scenery, reviews of ancient and modern personnel, laments his talent description skills, portrayals of birds and animals, all have celebrated the famous works. To more than 1,400 Du Fu, greatly enriched and developed the artistic techniques of ancient Chinese poetry. Du Fu's character and poem have an extremely far-reaching impact on future generations. He is one of the most outstanding representatives of Chinese traditional culture. The book includes 135 Du Fu poetry translated by the famous American house Burton Watson.
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Humanities & Social SciencesJune 2024Passages
On Geo-Analysis and the aesthetics of precarity
by Sam Okoth Opondo, Michael J. Shapiro
Passages: On geo-analysis and the aesthetics of precarity is a multi-genre and transdisciplinary text addressing themes such as colonialism, nuclear zones of abandonment, migration control regimes, transnational domestic work, the biocolonial hostilities of the hospitality industry, legal precarities behind the international criminal justice regime, the shadow-worlds of the African soccerscape, and immunity regimes related to the COVID-19 pandemic. This book invites inquiry into today's apocalyptic narratives, humanitarian reason, and international criminal justice regimes, as well as the precarity generated by citizen time and 'consulate time'. The aesthetic breaks emerging from the book's image-text montage draw attention to the ethics of encounter and passage that challenges colonial, domestic, and nation-statist sovereignty regimes of inattention.
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The ArtsJuly 2024Theatre, activism, subjectivity
Searching for the Left in a fragmented world
by Bishnupriya Dutt, Silvija Jestrovic
Through the lens of performance and politics, this collection zooms in on the context-specific dimensions, analogies, and micro-histories of the Left to better understand the larger picture. It proposes a search for the Left not from totalising Leftist ideological positions and partisan politics but from ethical dimensions through smaller-scale Left-leaning struggles; not from the political to the aesthetic, but from the potentiality of art to offer new political imagination and critique; not from the individual subordinated to the collective, but from the dialectics of subjectivity and collectivity. This is not an attempt at a sweeping global overview of Leftist cultures either, but a collection that brings together culture-specific and comparative perspectives. This book searches for fragments of and on the Left, past and present, through which to rethink and patch a fragmented world.
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The ArtsJanuary 2019Contemporary Spanish cinema and genre
by Jay Beck, Vicente Rodríguez Ortega
This volume is the first English-language collection exclusively dedicated to the study of genre in relation to Spanish cinema. Providing a variety of critical perspectives, the collection gives the reader a thorough account of the relationship between Spanish cinema and genre, drawing on case studies of several of the most remarkable Spanish films in recent years. The book analyses the significant changes in the aesthetics, production and reception of Spanish film from 1990 onwards. It brings together European and North American scholars to establish a critical dialogue on the topics under discussion, while providing multiple perspectives on the concepts of national cinemas and genre theory. In recent years film scholarship has attempted to negotiate the tension between the nationally specific and the internationally ubiquitous, discussing how globalisation has influenced film making and surrounding cultural practice. These broader social concerns have prompted scholars to emphasise a redefinition of national cinemas beyond strict national boundaries and to pay attention to the transnational character of any national site of film production and reception. This collection provides a thorough investigation of contemporary Spanish cinema within a transnational framework, by positing cinematic genres as the meeting spaces between a variety of diverse forces that necessarily operate within but also across territorial spaces. Paying close attention to the specifics of the Spanish cinematic and social panorama, the essays investigate the transnational economic, cultural and aesthetic forces at play in shaping Spanish film genres today.
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The ArtsJune 2021Contemporary Spanish cinema and genre
by Jay Beck, Vicente Rodríguez Ortega
This volume is the first English-language collection exclusively dedicated to the study of genre in relation to Spanish cinema. Providing a variety of critical perspectives, the collection gives the reader a thorough account of the relationship between Spanish cinema and genre, drawing on case studies of several of the most remarkable Spanish films in recent years. The book analyses the significant changes in the aesthetics, production and reception of Spanish film from 1990 onwards. It brings together European and North American scholars to establish a critical dialogue on the topics under discussion, while providing multiple perspectives on the concepts of national cinemas and genre theory. In recent years film scholarship has attempted to negotiate the tension between the nationally specific and the internationally ubiquitous, discussing how globalisation has influenced film making and surrounding cultural practice. These broader social concerns have prompted scholars to emphasise a redefinition of national cinemas beyond strict national boundaries and to pay attention to the transnational character of any national site of film production and reception. This collection provides a thorough investigation of contemporary Spanish cinema within a transnational framework, by positing cinematic genres as the meeting spaces between a variety of diverse forces that necessarily operate within but also across territorial spaces. Paying close attention to the specifics of the Spanish cinematic and social panorama, the essays investigate the transnational economic, cultural and aesthetic forces at play in shaping Spanish film genres today.
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The ArtsJanuary 2026Useful Art
How activist artists can change the world
by John Byrne
This smart, provocative book reveals how Useful Art is changing the world. Does art have to be beautiful? What if it can be useful instead? In this cutting-edge book, John Byrne shows how the concept of 'Useful Art' is helping artists and communities fight back against the neoliberal takeover of our spaces, services and lives. Byrne demonstrates that networks of artist-led activism and community-based direct action can provide a collaborative playbook of impactful and inclusive alternatives. From Turner Prize-winning urban regeneration projects to bakeries, vegetable gardens and multi-use arts spaces, Useful Art has enormous potential for bringing people together, recovering and preserving local skills and knowledge and reclaiming artistic endeavour for real-world good. Exploring an international selection of projects, exhibitions and activism, this important new work champions the shift from aesthetics to use value, challenging traditional ways of seeing the world symbolically through art. Reaching beyond the financial logic of the art world, Byrne shows how Useful Art can offer an artistic toolkit for implementing radical change.
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Humanities & Social SciencesJune 2023
Border images, border narratives
The political aesthetics of boundaries and crossings
by Johan Schimanski, Jopi Nyman
This interdisciplinary volume explores the role of images and narratives in different borderscapes. Written by experienced scholars in the field, Border images, border narratives provides fresh insight into how borders, borderscapes, and migration are imagined and narrated in public and private spheres. Offering new ways to approach the political aesthetics of the border and its ambiguities, this volume makes a valuable contribution to the methodological renewal of border studies and presents ways of discussing cultural representations of borders and related processes. Influenced by the thinking of philosopher Jacques Rancière, this timely volume argues that narrated and mediated images of borders and borderscapes are central to the political process, as they contribute to the public negotiation of borders and address issues such as the in/visiblity of migrants and the formation of alternative borderscapes. The contributions analyse narratives and images in literary texts, political and popular imagery, surveillance data, border art, and documentaries, as well as problems related to borderland identities, migration, and trauma. The case studies provide a highly comparative range of geographical contexts ranging from Northern Europe and Britain, via Mediterranean and Mexican-USA borderlands, to Chinese borderlands from the perspectives of critical theory, literary studies, social anthropology, media studies, and political geography.
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The ArtsSeptember 2025Art as worldmaking
Critical essays on realism and naturalism
by Malcolm Baker, Andrew Hemingway
Introduction : Realism and its others in the 21st century: Why Realism won't go away - Andrew Hemingway Part I: Theory 1. The figure as double agent: realism and abstraction in European post-war art - Briony Fer 2. Realism's Credibility Problem - Joshua Shannon 3. If only; only if ... - Adrian Rifkin Part II: Sculpture 4. Confronting the Veristic Sculptural Portrait - Malcolm Baker 5. Sculpture, Realism and the Neo-classical Ideal - Martina Droth 6. Elasticity and Victorian Sculptural Form - Caroline Arscott 7. Image of the People: Charles Ray's Recent Work - Anne M. Wagner Part III: Garden Design 8. Of Gardens and Persons: the English Engagement with China's Garden Design - Martin Powers 9. Traditional Views. Conservative Anti-Naturalism and Landscape Aesthetics in France around 1900 - Neil McWilliam Part IV: Painting and Photography 10. Willem Kalf on Reflexykonst and the Aesthetics of Transformation in Still Life - Celeste Brusati 11. Democratic light: phenomenology and the worldliness of painting - Brendan Prendeville 12. The Visibility of Labor - T.J. Clark 13. Body and Soul in the work of Thomas Eakins and F. Holland Day - Rebecca Zurier Part V: Photography and Conema 14. Photography as counter forensics - Steve Edwards 15. Woman, War and Social Documentary Photography in South Africa - Tamar Garb 16. Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966): photography and film - Lisa Tickner Part VI: Post-Media / Contemporary Practice 17. Peter Dreher's Everyday Realism - Alistair Rider 18. From grey and rainy Vermont - Thomas Crow 19. 'Every day, something happens to us': Realism at the crossroads - Gail Day Index
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