What role might art need to play in the transition beyond consumer capitalism? Can 'culture jamming' contribute to the necessary revolution in consciousness? And might art be able to provoke social change in ways that rational argument and scientific evidence cannot? In this stimulating new book, "Art Against Empire: Toward an Aesthetics of Degrowth," degrowth scholar Samuel Alexander explores these questions, both in theory and practice. He begins with a novel theoretical defence of art and aesthetic interventions as activity that is necessary to effective social and political activism, and concludes by presenting over one hundred 'culture jamming' artworks from a range of contributors that challenge the status quo and expand the horizons of what alternatives are possible.

Presented in conjunction with the September 2000 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, this volume presents the complex story of the proliferation of the arts in New York and the evolution of an increasingly discerning audience for those arts during the antebellum period. Thirteen essays by noted specialists bring new research and insights to bear on a broad range of subjects that offer both historical and cultural contexts and explore the city's development as a nexus for the marketing and display of art, as well as private collecting; landscape painting viewed against the background of tourism; new departures in sculpture, architecture, and printmaking; the birth of photography; New York as a fashion center; shopping for home decorations; changing styles in furniture; and the evolution of the ceramics, glass, and silver industries. The 300-plus works in the exhibition and comparative material are extensively illustrated in color and bandw. Oversize: 9.25x12.25". Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

The Fruits of Empire is a history of American expansion through the lens of art and food. In the decades after the Civil War, Americans consumed an unprecedented amount of fruit as it grew more accessible with advancements in refrigeration and transportation technologies. This excitement for fruit manifested in an explosion of fruit imagery within still life paintings, prints, trade cards, and more. Images of fruit labor and consumption by immigrants and people of color also gained visibility, merging alongside the efforts of expansionists to assimilate land and, in some cases, people into the national body. Divided into five chapters on visual images of the grape, orange, watermelon, banana, and pineapple, this book demonstrates how representations of fruit struck the nerve of the nation’s most heated debates over land, race, and citizenship in the age of high imperialism.

In the decades following the French Revolution, four artists - Girodet, Gros, Gericault, and Delacroix - painted works in their Parisian studios that vividly expressed violent events in faraway, colonial lands. This book examines six of these paintings and argues that their disturbing, erotic depictions of slavery, revolt, plague, decapitation, cannibalism, massacre, and abduction chart the history of France's empire and colonial politics. Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby shows that these paintings about occurrences in the West Indies, Syria, Egypt, Senegal, and Ottoman Empire Greece are preoccupied not with mastery and control but with loss, degradation, and failure, and she explains how such representations of crises in the colonies were able to answer the artists' longings as well as the needs of the government and the opposition parties at home. Empire made painters devoted to the representation of liberty and the new French nation confront liberty's antithesis: slavery. It also forced them to contend with cultural and racial difference. Young male artists responded, says Grigsby, by translating distant crises into images of challenges to the self, making history painting the site where geographic extremities and bodily extremities articulated one another.

An ambitious tale of magic, war, and parallel worlds that pushes the boundaries of epic fantasy—from a two-time Hugo Award winner On the eve of a recurring catastrophic event known to extinguish nations and reshape continents, a troubled orphan evades death and slavery to uncover her own bloody past . . . while a world goes to war with itself. In the frozen kingdom of Saiduan, invaders from another realm are decimating whole cities, leaving behind nothing but ash and ruin. At the heart of this war lie the pacifistic Dhai people, once enslaved by the Saiduan and now courted by their former masters to provide aid against the encroaching enemy. As the dark star of the cataclysm rises, an illegitimate ruler is tasked with holding together a country fractured by civil war; a precocious young fighter is asked to betray his family to save his skin; and a half-Dhai general must choose between the eradication of her father's people or loyalty to her alien Empress. Through tense alliances and devastating betrayal, the Dhai and their allies attempt to hold against a seemingly unstoppable force as enemy nations prepare for a coming together of worlds as old as the universe itself. In the end, one world will rise—and many will perish. Stretching from desolate tundras to steamy, semi-tropical climes seething with sentient plant life, this is an epic tale of blood mages and mercenaries, emperors and priestly assassins, who must unite to save a world on the brink of ruin. File Under: Fantasy [ Orphaned Child | World at War | Blood Magic | The Fluidity of Gender]

Colour, Art and Empire explores the entanglements of visual culture, enchanted technologies, waste, revolution, resistance and otherness. The materiality of colour offers a critical and timely force-field for approaching afresh debates on colonialism. This book analyses the formation of colour and politics as qualitative overspill. Colour can be viewed both as central and supplemental to early photography, the totem, alchemy, tantra and mysticism. From the eighteenth-century Austrian Empress Maria Theresa to Rabindranath Tagore and Gandhi, to 1970s Bollywood, colour makes us adjust our take on the politics of the human sensorium as defamiliarising and disorienting. The four chapters conjecture how European, Indian and Papua New Guinean artists, writers, scientists, activists, anthropologists or their subjects sought to negotiate the highly problematic stasis of colour in the repainting of modernity. Specifically, the thesis of this book traces Europeans' admiration and emulation of what they termed 'Indian colour' to its gradual denigration and the emergence of a 'space of exception'. This space of exception pitted industrial colours against the colonial desire for a massive workforce whose slave-like exploitation ignited riots against the production of pigments - most notably indigo. Feared or derided, the figure of the vernacular dyer constituted a force capable of dismantling the imperial machinations of colour. Colour thus wreaks havoc with Western expectations of biological determinism, objectivity and eugenics. Beyond the cracks of such discursive practice, colour becomes a sentient and nomadic retort to be pitted against a perceived colonial hegemony. The ideological reinvention of colour as a resource for independence struggles make it fundamental to multivalent genealogies of artistic and political action and their relevance to the present.

This timely special edition, published on the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party, features a new preface by the authors that places the Party in a contemporary political landscape, especially as it relates to Black Lives Matter and other struggles to fight police brutality against black communities. In Oakland, California, in 1966, community college students Bobby Seale and Huey Newton armed themselves, began patrolling the police, and promised to prevent police brutality. Unlike the Civil Rights Movement that called for full citizenship rights for blacks within the United States, the Black Panther Party rejected the legitimacy of the U.S. government and positioned itself as part of a global struggle against American imperialism. In the face of intense repression, the Party flourished, becoming the center of a revolutionary movement with offices in sixty-eight U.S. cities and powerful allies around the world. Black against Empire is the first comprehensive overview and analysis of the history and politics of the Black Panther Party. The authors analyze key political questions, such as why so many young black people across the country risked their lives for the revolution, why the Party grew most rapidly during the height of repression, and why allies abandoned the Party at its peak of influence. Bold, engrossing, and richly detailed, this book cuts through the mythology and obfuscation, revealing the political dynamics that drove the explosive growth of this revolutionary movement and its disastrous unraveling. Informed by twelve years of meticulous archival research, as well as familiarity with most of the former Party leadership and many rank-and-file members, this book is the definitive history of one of the greatest challenges ever posed to American state power.

Although Max Liebermann (1847–1935) began his career as a realist painter depicting scenes of rural labor, Dutch village life, and the countryside, by the turn of the century, his paintings had evolved into colorful images of bourgeois life and leisure that critics associated with French impressionism. During a time of increasing German nationalism, his paintings and cultural politics sparked numerous aesthetic and political controversies. His eminent career and his reputation intersected with the dramatic and violent events of modern German history from the Empire to the Third Reich. The Nazis’ persecution of modern and Jewish artists led to the obliteration of Liebermann from the narratives of modern art, but this volume contributes to the recent wave of scholarly literature that works to recover his role and his oeuvre from an international perspective.

In the late eighteenth century, an array of European political thinkers attacked the very foundations of imperialism, arguing passionately that empire-building was not only unworkable, costly, and dangerous, but manifestly unjust. Enlightenment against Empire is the first book devoted to the anti-imperialist political philosophies of an age often regarded as affirming imperial ambitions. Sankar Muthu argues that thinkers such as Denis Diderot, Immanuel Kant, and Johann Gottfried Herder developed an understanding of humans as inherently cultural agents and therefore necessarily diverse. These thinkers rejected the conception of a culture-free "natural man." They held that moral judgments of superiority or inferiority could be made neither about entire peoples nor about many distinctive cultural institutions and practices. Muthu shows how such arguments enabled the era's anti-imperialists to defend the freedom of non-European peoples to order their own societies. In contrast to those who praise "the Enlightenment" as the triumph of a universal morality and critics who view it as an imperializing ideology that denigrated cultural pluralism, Muthu argues instead that eighteenth-century political thought included multiple Enlightenments. He reveals a distinctive and underappreciated strand of Enlightenment thinking that interweaves commitments to universal moral principles and incommensurable ways of life, and that links the concept of a shared human nature with the idea that humans are fundamentally diverse. Such an intellectual temperament, Muthu contends, can broaden our own perspectives about international justice and the relationship between human unity and diversity.

Recommended by Jeff, City Lights Books Richly informed and written in an engaging style, Against Empire exposes the ruthless agenda and hidden costs of the U.S. empire today. Documenting the pretexts and lies used to justify violent intervention and maldevelopment abroad, Parenti shows how the conversion to a global economy is a victory of finance capital over democracy. As much of the world suffers unspeakable misery and the Third-Worldization of the United States accelerates, civil society is impoverished by policies that benefit rich and powerful transnational corporations and the national security state. Hard-won gains made by ordinary people are swept away.