Cultural Resistance Reader
Edited by Stephen Duncombe
448 pages / June 2002 / 9781859843796
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An invaluable scholarly resource and a tool for political activists.
From the Diggers seizing St. George Hill in 1649 to Hacktivists staging virtual sit-ins in the 21st century, from the retributive fantasies of Robin Hoods to those of gangsta rappers, culture has long been used as a political weapon.
This expansive and carefully crafted reader brings together many of the classic texts that help to define culture as a tool of resistance. With illuminating introductions throughout, it presents a range of theoretical and historical writings that have influenced contemporary debate, providing tools for the reader's own interventions. In these pages can be found the work of Karl Marx, Matthew Arnold, Antonio Gramsci, C.L.R. James, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Virginia Woolf, Mikhail Bakhtin, Stuart Hall, Christopher Hill, Janice Radway, Eric Hobsbawm, Abbie Hoffman, Mahatma Gandhi, Dick Hebdige, Hakim Bey, Raymond Williams, Robin Kelley, Tom Frank and more than a dozen others, including a number of new activists/authors published here for the first time.
David Lau
Manual of War: on Bertolt Brecht's War Primer
Brecht considered War Primer part of "a satisfactory literary report on my years in exile," as he wrote in a 1944 journal entry. Since this first English language reception of War Primer on the centenary of Brecht's birth in 1998, what are we now to make of his poignant modernist epic of four-liner lyrics and scrapbook photos? Today, in our post-crash era, with its renewal of Marxism, Brecht the formalist can be freed from a series of postmodern qualifications. War Primer's historical intervention can be seen in a new way today. With the far right politically relevant again, Brecht's image-by-image analysis of social democracy, America, and fascism, which is the veritable heart of War Primer, possesses fresh relevance.
Bertolt Brecht: A Primer
40% off all our Brecht reading until June 11
"I am a city still, but soon I shan't be –
Where generations used to live and die
Before those deadly birds flew in to haunt me:
One thousand years to build. A fortnight to destroy."
Bertolt Brecht's War Primer is a terrifying series of short poems by one of the world's leading playwrights, set to images of World War II.
Resisting Left Melancholia
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