Author: Fredric Jameson Publisher: Verso Books ISBN: 1784784540 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 337
Book Description
Controversial manifesto by acclaimed cultural theorist debated by leading writers Fredric Jameson’s pathbreaking essay “An American Utopia” radically questions standard leftist notions of what constitutes an emancipated society. Advocated here are—among other things—universal conscription, the full acknowledgment of envy and resentment as a fundamental challenge to any communist society, and the acceptance that the division between work and leisure cannot be overcome. To create a new world, we must first change the way we envision the world. Jameson’s text is ideally placed to trigger a debate on the alternatives to global capitalism. In addition to Jameson’s essay, the volume includes responses from philosophers and political and cultural analysts, as well as an epilogue from Jameson himself. Many will be appalled at what they will encounter in these pages—there will be blood! But perhaps one has to spill such (ideological) blood to give the Left a chance. Contributing are Kim Stanley Robinson, Jodi Dean, Saroj Giri, Agon Hamza, Kojin Karatani, Frank Ruda, Alberto Toscano, Kathi Weeks, and Slavoj Žižek.
Author: David Byrne Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA ISBN: 1635576695 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 160
Book Description
From former Talking Heads frontman and multimedia visionary David Byrne and revered bestselling author, illustrator, and artist Maira Kalman--an inspiring celebration in words and art of the connections between us all. Don't miss the Spike Lee film of the Broadway hit American Utopia--on HBO. A Beat Most Anticipated Graphic Novel of Fall 2020 A joyful collaboration between old friends David Byrne and Maira Kalman, American Utopia offers readers an antidote to cynicism, bursting with pathos, humanism, and hope--featuring his words and lyrics brought to life with more than 150 of her colorful paintings. The text is drawn from David Byrne's American Utopia, which has become a hit Broadway show and is now a film from Spike Lee on HBO. The four-color artwork, by Maira Kalman, which she created for the Broadway show's curtain, is composed of small moments, expressions, gestures, and interactions that together offer a portrait of daily life and coexistence. With their creative talents combined, American Utopia is a salvo for kindness and a call for jubilation, a reminder to sing, dance, and waste not a moment. Beautifully designed and edited by Alex Kalman, American Utopia is a balm for the soul from two of the world's most extraordinary artists.
Author: Dolores Hayden Publisher: Mit Press ISBN: 9780262580373 Category : Architecture Languages : en Pages : 401
Book Description
From the time of its discovery, the new world was regarded by American settlers as a new Eden and a new Jerusalem. Although individual pioneers' visions of paradise were inevitably corrupted by reality, some determined ideatists carved out enclaves in order to develop collective models of what they believed to be more perfect societies. All such communitarian groups consciously attempted to express their social ideals in their buildings and landscapes; invariably, ideological predispositions can be inferred from a close study of the environments they created. The interplay between ideology and architecture, the social design and the physical design of American utopian communities, is the basis of this remarkable book by Dolores Hayden.At the heart of the book are studies of seven communitarian groups, collectively stretching over nearly two centuries and the full breadth of the American continent-the Shakers of Hancock, Massachusetts; the Mormons of Nauvoo, lllinois; the Fourierists of Phalanx, New Jersey; the Perfectionists of Oneida, New York; the Inspirationists of Amana, Iowa; the Union Colonists of Greeley, Colorado; and the Cooperative Colonists of Llano del Rio, California. Hayden examines each of these groups to see how they coped with three dilemmas that all socialist' societies face: conflicts betweeft authoritarian and participatory processes, between communal and private territory, and between unique and replicable community plans.The book contains over 260 historic and contemporary photographs and drawings which illustrate the communitarian processes of design and building. The drawings range in scale from regional plans showing land ownership, access to transportation, and availability of natural resources, through site plans of communal domains and building plans of dwellings and assembly halls, down to detailed diagrams of furniture configurations. To aid readers in making comparisons, a series of site and building plans drawn at constant scales has been provided for all seven case studies.
Author: Thomas Healy Publisher: Metropolitan Books ISBN: 1250811260 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
"A history of Floyd McKissick's 1969 plan to build a Black city in North Carolina, examining the story of the idealists who settled there, the obstacles that derailed the project, and what Soul City's saga says about Black opportunity, capitalism, and power then and now"--
Author: Christopher Clark Publisher: ISBN: 9781945473333 Category : Languages : en Pages :
Book Description
In 1842, a group of radical abolitionists and social reformers established the Northampton Association of Education and Industry, a utopian community in western Massachusetts organized around a collectively owned and operated silk mill. Members sought to challenge the prevailing social attitudes of their day by creating a society in which "the rights of all are equal without distinction of sex, color or condition, sect or religion." This volume brings together a remarkable set of seventy-five letters written by the members of the Stetson family, who belonged to the Association for almost four years. Discovered recently by a family descendant, the correspondence documents the thoughts and experiences of ordinary people struggling to uphold common ideals in challenging circumstances. The letters re-create an extended family conversation in which news was shared, stories were told, hopes and fears expressed, and ideas discussed. We meet James Stetson, an ambivalent family patriarch with a wry sense of humor. There is Almira, his eldest child, who strove earnestly to work for her family and wrote movingly of her dreams of a career in service to her principles. And there is Dolly Witter Stetson, James's wife and the central figure in this collection, whom we first meet as she was about to give birth for the ninth time and whose relish for community life was shaped by a lively intelligence, a commitment to exploring reform ideals, and a down-to-earth view of family duties and household burdens.
Author: Irving Lewis Horowitz Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 143910624X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 636
Book Description
A biography of legendary sociologist C. Wright Mills, author of The Power Elite and White Collar, among other works, by eminent sociologist Irving L. Horowitz. Charles Wright Mills (1916-1962) was a famed sociologist, social commentator and critic. Noted for his anti-authoritarian, flamboyant character and radical ideas, he has been described as an ‘American Utopian’ – committed to social change, angered by the oppression he saw around him, and critical of what he saw as evidence of U.S. imperialism. His legacy includes a series of classic books – including The Power Elite, White Collar, and The Sociological Imagination -- and he has made a distinctive contribution to American sociological theory, especially in the area of class, power and social structure.
Author: Glyn Daly Publisher: Northwestern University Press ISBN: 0810139375 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 320
Book Description
Speculation: Politics, Ideology, Event develops Hegel’s radical perspective of speculative thought as a way of reclaiming and revitalizing the sense of the future and its possibilities. Engaging with such figures as Alain Badiou, Quentin Meillassoux, Ernesto Laclau, Slavoj Žižek, and Fredric Jameson, Glyn Daly articulates the distinctness of speculative philosophy and draws its implications for new debates in areas of science, politics, capitalism, ideology, ethics, and the event. In a confrontation with today’s fatalistic milieu, principal emphasis is given to Hegel’s idea of infinity as the intrinsic dimension of negativity within all finitude. Against the modern era’s paradigmatic tendency to externalize social problems in the form of antagonism and Otherness, Daly argues for a renewal of utopian thought based on Hegelian reconciliation and the affirmation of excess as the essence of all being. On these grounds, he advances a new kind of political imagination that in speculative terms centers on uncompromising notions of truth and reason.
Author: Margaret Washington Publisher: University of Illinois Press ISBN: 0252093747 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 522
Book Description
This fascinating biography tells the story of nineteenth-century America through the life of one of its most charismatic and influential characters: Sojourner Truth. In an in-depth account of this amazing activist, Margaret Washington unravels Sojourner Truth's world within the broader panorama of African American slavery and the nation's most significant reform era. Born into bondage among the Hudson Valley Dutch in Ulster County, New York, Isabella was sold several times, married, and bore five children before fleeing in 1826 with her infant daughter one year before New York slavery was abolished. In 1829, she moved to New York City, where she worked as a domestic, preached, joined a religious commune, and then in 1843 had an epiphany. Changing her name to Sojourner Truth, she began traveling the country as a champion of the downtrodden and a spokeswoman for equality by promoting Christianity, abolitionism, and women's rights. Gifted in verbal eloquence, wit, and biblical knowledge, Sojourner Truth possessed an earthy, imaginative, homespun personality that won her many friends and admirers and made her one of the most popular and quoted reformers of her times. Washington's biography of this remarkable figure considers many facets of Sojourner Truth's life to explain how she became one of the greatest activists in American history, including her African and Dutch religious heritage; her experiences of slavery within contexts of labor, domesticity, and patriarchy; and her profoundly personal sense of justice and intuitive integrity. Organized chronologically into three distinct eras of Truth's life, Sojourner Truth's America examines the complex dynamics of her times, beginning with the transnational contours of her spirituality and early life as Isabella and her embroilments in legal controversy. Truth's awakening during nineteenth-century America's progressive surge then propelled her ascendancy as a rousing preacher and political orator despite her inability to read and write. Throughout the book, Washington explores Truth's passionate commitment to family and community, including her vision for a beloved community that extended beyond race, gender, and socioeconomic condition and embraced a common humanity. For Sojourner Truth, the significant model for such communalism was a primitive, prophetic Christianity. Illustrated with dozens of images of Truth and her contemporaries, Sojourner Truth's America draws a delicate and compelling balance between Sojourner Truth's personal motivations and the influences of her historical context. Washington provides important insights into the turbulent cultural and political climate of the age while also separating the many myths from the facts concerning this legendary American figure.
Author: Conrad Ostwalt Publisher: A&C Black ISBN: 1563383616 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 244
Book Description
Conrad Ostwalt explores the confluence of religion and popular cultural forms in the secular world, demonstrating that a secular religiosity has co-opted some of the functions previously reserved for religions institutions.
Author: Peter Swirski Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 0429628137 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 235
Book Description
From Black Tuesday to the White House, from Plato to Robert Nozick, from Eugene Debs to Richard Nixon, from Peter Cornelis Plockhoy to the hippie communes of the Sixties, from universal basic income to utopian basic income, from proverbial wisdom to multilevel selection, from Big Data to paleomorality, from Prisoner’s Dilemma to social-engineering Israeli kindergartens, from time travel to gene engineering, from the pretzel logic of meritocracy to deaggressing humanity, American Utopia maps the pitfalls and windfalls of social reform in the name of the human use of human beings. Interrogating the assumptions behind four outré utopias by Thomas M. Disch, Bernard Malamud, Kurt Vonnegut, and Margaret Atwood, the book interrogates the assumptions that have historically been central to the utopian project. Whence the seeds of social discontent? Whence our taste for egoism and altruism? For waging war and waging peace? Can we bioengineer human nature to specifications? Should we? Who makes better guardians: humans or machines? And who will guard the guardians?
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Author: Fredric Jameson
Author: David Byrne
Author: Dolores Hayden
Author: Thomas Healy
Author: Christopher Clark
Author: Irving Lewis Horowitz
Author: Glyn Daly
Author: Margaret Washington
Author: Conrad Ostwalt
Author: Peter Swirski