Nato Thompson (ed.), Living As Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991 – 2011
reviewed by Tom Snow
Socially engaged art may only operate along minor tangents of the art world. However, current interest in the interdisciplinary has rendered these sorts of works a focal point for many. As an impending biennial culture realises itself as a global phenomenon, Social Practice seems as in vogue as ever. Documenta, Manifesta and Istanbul, for instance, have all taken politically oriented contemporary art as their subjects in recent years, heightening visibility and rendering such practices crucial... [read more]
As the scion of a leading Palestinian family, Raja Shehadeh inherited both a distinguished name and an ample share of the national trauma. Born a refugee in Ramallah, his parents having fled the Israeli-Arab war of 1948, he was again struck by tragedy when his father was murdered in 1985. Those events shadow everything in this book, but its focus is on the miniature burdens of life under Israeli rule. Shehadeh, a human rights lawyer, peace activist and author of several books on the conflict,... [read more]
Dan Hancox, Utopia and the Valley of Tears: A Journey Through the Spanish Crisis
reviewed by Jamie Mackay
Emerging from a wasteland of empty satellite blocks and ghost allotments Marinaleda, a small town deep in the Andalucian countryside, harvests an optimistic challenge to the symbols of boom-time arrogance that have thrown Spain into a downward spiral of debt and unemployment. Wireless internet is free. Swimming in the public pool costs €3 a year. The public daycare centre costs €12 a month. Housing costs €15 a month and is owned by the collective. Family businesses are actively encouraged... [read more]
Tom Vickers, Refugees, Capitalism and the British State: Implications for Social Workers, Volunteers & Activists
reviewed by David Renton
For 20 years, refugees have been travelling to Britain in large numbers; for 20 years they have been refused employment while their cases are considered by the Home Office, a process which can take many years. While their applications are assessed they are forcibly dispersed around the country, disrupting the networks of communal solidarity which have sustained all previous generations of migrants to this country. Successive governments have reduced the benefits open to refugees, pushing many... [read more]
AM Homes’ oeuvre, like many other American authors, is ruptured by the events of 9/11. Pre-9/11 Homes was infamous for her dark and perverse imagination. Her fiction meditated on violence and sexual taboo in modern America, most notoriously in The End of Alice (Anchor, 1997) – a sinister story about an exchange of ‘love letters’ between two paedophiles which makes Nabokov’s Lolita look like child’s play. Homes’ post-9/11 fiction is ostensibly a world away from the work that... [read more]
In an essay about adapting Midnight’s Children (Jonathan Cape, 1981) for film, Salman Rushdie wrote: ‘Interestingly, on the novel’s first publication, Western critics tended to focus on its more fantastic elements, while Indian reviewers treated it like a history book. “I could have written your book,” a reader flatteringly told me in Bombay. “I know all that stuff.”’
There is much in Joseph Anton – Rushdie’s memoir of his life under the fatwa declared by Iran in... [read more]
Maurice Coakley, Ireland in the World Order: A History of Uneven Development
reviewed by David Convery
I grew up in Celtic Tiger Ireland. In school we were told we could do anything. Unlike our parents’ and teachers’ generation we would never have to worry about jobs, money or opportunity. We were lucky. Sure, there were still problems, political corruption being the most heralded, yet for many living through those times, certainly for most commentators, it seemed that Ireland had finally broken with its underdeveloped past and could confidently look forward to a bright, consumerist future.... [read more]
Peter Sloterdijk, The Art of Philosophy: Wisdom as a Practice
reviewed by David Winters
Philosophy, as Pierre Hadot once put it, is perhaps less a body of knowledge than a ‘way of life.’ If this is so, it follows that philosophers shouldn’t be overly idealistic about their ideas. Such ideas are embedded not only in broad social contexts, but in philosophers’ own self-understandings; in their acts of self-fashioning. And to the extent that this existential dimension remains largely repressed or unthematised, the discipline stands in a state of reflexive deficit. In this... [read more]
Eyal Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza
reviewed by Rebecca Close
The two films selected to open the 2012 Human Rights Film Festival, held in Barcelona, New York and Paris in May, seem to suggest there are no moral grey areas in the fight for humanitarian justice. Whistleblower (2010), directed by Larysa Kondracki, narrates the true story of how UN peace-keeping officers in post-war Bosnia were found to be co-ordinating human trafficking across the Ukrainian border; in Ruaridh Arrow’s documentary How to Start a Revolution (2011) some of the 20th and 21st... [read more]
Robert Rosen, Beaver Street: A History of Modern Pornography
reviewed by Kate Gould
Robert Rosen's Beaver Street is an account of his time spent working in the world of men's pornographic magazines. It's a meandering tale through the day-to-day running of various publications for which Rosen wrote, edited and, on one greatly aggrandised occasion, posed as a disembodied penis being given a blow job. The book is a mix of his personal experiences and some of the goings-on in the sex industry at large that seeks to pit anyone taking a critical stance towards pornography - the... [read more]
