This book is an attempt to remedy the neglect of the cultural and aesthetic aspects of English socialism in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. An outstanding symptom of this neglect is the way in which the Fabian Society, and its two leading lights, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, have usually been depicted as completely indifferent to art and to the artistic ramifications of socialism. Most commentators have painted Fabian socialism as a narrowly utilitarian programme of social and administrative reform, preoccupied with the mechanisms of politics and largely obvious of wider, more 'human' issues. One of the basic aims of the book is to question this bleakly philistine image, by showing the basis of the Fabians' beliefs in romancism as well as utilitarianism.

When George Bernard Shaw died in 1950, the world lost one of its most well-known authors, a revolutionary who was as renowned for his personality as he was for his humour, humanity, and rebellious thinking. He remains a compelling figure who deserves attention not only for how influential he was in his time, but for how relevant he is to ours. This collection sets Shaw's life and achievements in context, with forty-two scholarly essays devoted to subjects that interested him and defined his work. Contributors explore a wide range of themes, moving from factors that were formative in Shaw's life, to the artistic work that made him most famous and the institutions with which he worked, to the political and social issues that consumed much of his attention, and, finally, to his influence and reception. Presenting fresh material and arguments, this collection will point to new directions of research for future scholars.

Recent essays by prominent anthropologist on questions of time, memory, and ethnography.

Johannes Fabian was one of the first anthropologists to introduce the concept of popular culture into the study of contemporary Africa. Drawing on his research in the Shaba region of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), he has been writing for thirty years about the practices, beliefs, and objects that make up popular culture in an urban African setting: labor and language, religious movements, theater and storytelling, music and painting, grassroots literacy and historiography. In Moments of Freedom Fabian reflects on anthropological uses of the concept of popular culture. He retraces how his explorations of popular culture in this urban-industrial setting showed that classiclal culture theory did not account for large aspects of contemporary African life. Popular culture draws on various genres of representation and performance, and Fabian explores the notion of genre itself as it applies to Shaba religious discourse, painting, and the theater. He also addresses the element of time and how spatial thinking about culture, ethnicity, and globalization acts as an obstacle to appreciating the contemporaneity of African popular culture. The volume ends with a discussion of contestation in light of current calls for democratization. In Moments of Freedom, Johannes Fabian takes stock of decades of anthropological work on popular culture and examines the development of his own thought over time. Throughout the volume, he makes eloquent connections to other firelds such as history, folklore studies, and cultural studies, suggesting areas for further research in each.

Time and the Other is a classic work that critically reexamined the relationship between anthropologists and their subjects and reoriented the approach literary critics, philosophers, and historians took to the study of humankind. Johannes Fabian challenges the assumption that anthropologists live in the "here and now," that their subjects live in the "there and then," and that the "other" exists in a time not contemporary with our own. He also pinpoints the emergence, transformation, and differentiation of a variety of uses of time in the history of anthropology that set specific parameters between power and inequality. In this edition, a new postscript by the author revisits popular conceptions of the "other" and the attempt to produce and represent knowledge of other(s).

This collection of unique works by 150 Los Angeles graffiti and tattoo artists represents an unprecedented collaboration across the city’s diverse artistic landscape. Many graffiti artists carry sketchbooks, called black books, and they ask crew members and others whose work they admire to inscribe their books with lettering or drawings. A few years ago, the Getty Research Institute invited artists, including Angst, Axis, Big Sleeps, Chaz, Cre8, Defer, EyeOne, Fishe, Heaven, Hyde, Look, ManOne, and Prime, to consider the idea of a citywide graffiti black book. During visits to the Getty Center, the artists viewed rare books related to calligraphy and letterforms, including works by Albrecht Dürer and Leonardo da Vinci. The artists instantly recognized the connections to their own practices and were particularly drawn to a liber amicorum (book of friends), a form of autograph book popular in the seventeenth century. Passed from hand to hand, it was filled with signatures, poetry, and coats of arms, like a black book from another era. Inspired by this meeting of minds across centuries, these artists became both creators and curators, crafting their own pages and inviting others to contribute. Eventually 150 Los Angeles artists decorated 143 individual pages. These were bound together into an exquisite artists’ book that became known as the Getty Graffiti Black Book. This publication reproduces each page from the original artists’ book and recounts the story of an unprecedented collaboration across the diverse artistic landscape of Los Angeles.

In today's "post-truth" world, we are becoming inundated with fantasy fictions, "alternate news," and grossly oversimplified (and wildly exaggerated) conspiracy theories that identify cryptocratic power structures ruling our fates. But suppose the truth is both stranger than any fiction and more nuanced and disturbing than any theory? Suppose it is not conspiracy but complicity that creates our world? Beginning as an investigation into the author's childhood inside a closet aristocracy of "progressive" British entrepreneurs, Vice of Kings uncovers a history both disturbingly personal and shockingly universal. By juxtaposing disc jockey Jimmy Savile's secret cultural, criminal, and political affiliations in the second half of the 20th century with the life and teachings of Aleister Crowley in the first, it uncovers an alarming body of evidence that ritual child abuse is not only the dark side of occultism, but the shadowy secret at the heart of culture, both ancient and modern. In the process, Vice of Kings reveals an invisible culture behind the one we know, a secret hierarchy that impacts our lives, in ways both subtle and profound, from birth until death. It is a cryptocratic superculture that operates via traumagenesis (intentionally traumatic child-rearing practices), secret initiation/recruitment rituals (abusive social structures), and collective cultural "inception" via mass media and the arts. By shaping our world implicitly, from the inside out, it makes us complicit with it--like the sleeping subjects of hidden monarchs.