In the postcolonial world, the claim to an emancipated national culture was bound to its aesthetic correlate, the unfolding time and experiments of the twentieth-century novel. Today, the constructs of both novel and a progressivist national project function, in all their closures, within global scales of economic disparity and violent exclusion. What is the fate of a literary canon when it is no longer capable of delineating a future – or otherwise, is bound to reproduce the failures of the past within its own inscriptions? How do we experience our current "globalist" moment, when lived inequities of gender, labour and ethnicity emerge in a text’s inability to speak on time? When does artistic or literary failure become the measure of a work's accomplishment? And what sort of liberation is envisioned by works that refuse the imperatives of "progress" and "independence" – which embrace the appearance of obsolescence by rejecting values of artistic freedom, originality and innovation? These are some of the provocations that arise from T.W. Adorno's idea of late style for our own conjuncture – a properly postcolonial context, in which every conceptual or expressive engagement is articulated through an awareness of eroded national promise. Examining works by Rabindranath Tagore, Mulk Raj Anand, Vikram Seth and the photography of Dayanita Singh, Tania Roy examines the delayed claims of literary and artistic modernity in India through Adorno’s category of late-style. In striking readings of Adorno and his interlocuters, the book extends a poetics of lateness toward a speculative history of the twentieth-century novel in India. Comprised of critically neglected selections from the oeuvres of canonical writers, Adorno and the Architects of Late Style in India proposes that under conditions of advanced capitalism, logics of redundancy overtake the novel’s foundational reference point in the nation to produce altered frames of thought and sensibility – and therein, a reader who might encounter, anew, the figures of an unfulfilled twentieth century.

Artists and writers go beyond disciplinary boundaries and linear histories to address the fight for environmental justice, uniting the Asia-Pacific vantage point with international discourse. Modeling the curatorial as a method for uniting cultural production and science, Climates. Habitats. Environments. weaves together image and text to address the global climate crisis. Through exhibitions, artworks, and essays, artists and writers transcend disciplinary boundaries and linear histories to bring their knowledge and experience to bear on the fight for environmental justice. In doing so, they draw on the rich cultural heritage of the Asia-Pacific, in conversation with international discourse, to demonstrate transdisciplinary solution-seeking. Experimental in form as well as in method, Climates. Habitats. Environments. features an inventive book design by mono.studio that puts word and image on equal footing, offering a multiplicity of media, interpretations, and manifestations of interdisciplinary research. For example, botanist Matthew Hall draws on Ovid’s Metamorphoses to discuss human-plant interpenetration; curator and writer Venus Lau considers how spectrality consumes—and is consumed—in animation and film, literature, music, and cuisine; and critical theorist and filmmaker Elizabeth Povinelli proposes “Water Sense” as a geontological approach to “the question of our connected and differentiated existence,” informed by the “ancestral catastrophe of colonialism.” Artists excavate the natural and cultural DNA of indigo, lacquer, rattan, and mulberry; works at the intersection of art, design, and architecture explore “The Posthuman City”; an ongoing research project investigates the ecological urgencies of Pacific archipelagos. The works of art, the projects, and the majority of the texts featured in the book were commissioned by NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore. Copublished with NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore

The expedited globalised process of exchange and new forms of cultural production have transformed old established notions of identity, calling into question their conceptual foundations. This book explores the spatial and representational dimension of this phenomenon, by addressing how the reshaping of the key themes of place, architecture and memory are altering the nature, as well as, our understanding of identity. Cutting across boundaries, the book drives discussion of identity beyond the well-worn concern for its loss within a globalised context, and importantly provides links between identity, place, memory and representation in architecture. Examining a range of case studies from Australia, Germany, India, Japan, Mexico, Poland, Puerto Rico, Turkey and Singapore, as well as with contributions cutting across geographical and temporal boundaries, this volume addresses such issues as architecture technology, place and memory – critical issues in the monitoring and mapping of identity shift within a rapidly globalising context. With contributions from renowned authors in the field including Nicholas Temple, Patsy Hely, Robert Brown, Liane Lefaivre, John Hendrix, Ana Souto, Fiona MacLaren, Stephen Walker, Nezar AlSayyad, Andrzej Piotrowski, Catherine Ettinger, Luz Marie Rodríguez, and Raymond Quek this book presents fresh insights and diverse perspectives on the evolving question of identity and globalisation.

In A Fragile Inheritance Saloni Mathur investigates the work of two seminal figures from the global South: the New Delhi-based critic and curator Geeta Kapur and contemporary multimedia artist Vivan Sundaram. Examining their written and visual works over the past fifty years, Mathur illuminates how her protagonists’ political and aesthetic commitments intersect and foreground uncertainty, difficulty, conflict, and contradiction. This book presents new understandings of the culture and politics of decolonization and the role of non-Western aesthetic avant-gardes within the discourses of contemporary art. Through skillful interpretation of Sundaram's and Kapur’s practices, Mathur demonstrates how received notions of mainstream art history may be investigated and subjected to creative redefinition. Her scholarly methodology offers an impassioned model of critical aesthetics and advances a radical understanding of art and politics in our time.

Written at the intersection of culture, politics & the city, particularly in the context of corporate globalization, 'Utopia's Ghost' challenges dominant theoretical paradigms & opens new avenues for architectural scholarship & cultural analysis.

Kracauer. Film, medium of a disintegrating world. -- Curious Americanism. -- Benjamin. Actuality, antinomies. -- Aura: the appropriation of a concept. -- Mistaking the moon for a ball. -- Micky-maus. -- Room-for-play. -- Adorno. The question of film aesthetics. -- Kracauer in exile. Theory of film.

The Ideology of the Aesthetic presents a history and critique of the concept of the aesthetic throughout modern Western thought. As such, this is a critical survey of modern Western philosophy, focusing in particular on the complex relations between aesthetics, ethics and politics. Eagleton provides a brilliant and challenging introduction to these concerns, as characterized in the work of Kant, Schiller, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Lukacs, Adorno, Habermas, and others. Wide in span, as well as morally and politically committed, this is Terry Eagleton's major work to date. It forms both an original enquiry and an exemplary introduction.

Spengler's work describes how we have entered into a centuries-long "world-historical" phase comparable to late antiquity, and his controversial ideas spark debate over the meaning of historiography.

Twenty-one essays examining the relationship of surrealist thought to architectural theory and practice.