Eugene Holland, Nomad Citizenship: Free-Market Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike
reviewed by Benjamin Noys
The provocation of Eugene W. Holland’s book is most immediately obvious in its use of the oxymoron in its title, but more shocking is the sub-title’s invocation of ‘free-market communism’. What on earth could the free-market, beloved of the doyens of capitalism, have to do with communism? Holland aims to provide the answer. Of course, recently we have become used to communism being back on the theoretical agenda, with the rolling road-show of the ‘Idea of Communism’ conferences... [read more]
Jonathan Grossman, Charles Dickens’s Networks: Public Transport and the Novel
reviewed by Gee Williams
There’s a wonderful fantasy engraving run across this book’s front and back covers entitled ‘Train of Coaches’. Depicted is a series of coach bodies, their horses uncoupled but complete with coachmen and buglers, trunks piled on roofs, Regency bucks and women of fashion gazing out beneath elegant blinds: each is set upon a primitive goods wagon, the whole lot being drawn by a steam locomotive. The illustration is from 1823 (only six years after the death of Jane Austen, fiction’s... [read more]
Carl Freedman, The Age of Nixon: A Study in Cultural Power
reviewed by Phil Jourdan
We might be forgiven for assuming that the title of Carl Freedman's new book sounds rather ambitious for a work of just over 280 pages. However, The Age of Nixon is by no means a political biography in the normal sense. In part, this is an examination of Nixon the man, certainly, but it is also a study of the man as a player in American culture: how, for instance, he used cultural prejudices to his advantage at various points in his career. More broadly, The Age of Nixon explores the idea of... [read more]
Sarah Edwards & Jonathan Charley (eds.), Writing the Modern City: Literature, Architecture, Modernity
reviewed by Rosa Ainley
Watching Steve McQueen’s Shame recently I was struck by the role Manhattan played in the film: far more than a set for the action, the spaces of the city are shot in such a way to make possible the narrative of extreme disassociation. Emerging from the clinical anonymity of his apartment where human contact comes via webcam porn subscriptions, the protagonist watches a couple having sex in a glass-sided skyscraper, the woman flattened against the window/wall, facing outwards to the... [read more]
Martin Gayford, A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney
reviewed by Jeremy Spencer
The art critic Martin Gayford’s book about David Hockney is a record of their conversations over ten years that expose Hockney’s obsessions and preoccupations as an artist. The text isn’t simply a straight transcription of their talks, whether in person or by telephone or email, and their exchanges, which reveal Hockney’s thoughts on art and aesthetics, are not ordered chronologically; the text is an ‘arrangement’ of different ‘layers’ and Gayford contextualises their... [read more]
Ashwin Desai, Reading Revolution: Shakespeare on Robben Island
reviewed by John Green
There have been literally hundreds of books written about the apartheid period in South Africa, both by outsiders and those who fought and suffered under the system. Reading Revolution provides a unique perspective on the anti-apartheid struggle and a fascinating insight into how literature can sustain resistance and keep hope alive, as well as fundamentally changing lives. Ashwin Desai has interviewed many of those who were incarcerated on Robben Island for their opposition to the apartheid... [read more]
Joseph McCartin , Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, The Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike that Changed America
reviewed by Richard Sharpe
On 3 August 1981, approximately 13,000 US air traffic controllers struck for higher wages and shorter working hours. That day Ronald Reagan, in his first year as president, gave them 48 hours to return to work or be fired; Federal employees were prohibited by law from going on strike. The vast majority did not return to work but parts of the leadership of their union, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO), already knew that the strike was doomed. The striking... [read more]
Stephen Graham, Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism
reviewed by Jeff Heydon
Living in downtown Toronto during the G20 summit in the summer of 2010 was instructive. Myriad CCTV cameras were erected, additional police were imported from multiple municipalities close to the city, and a barrier was established around the Convention Centre that would protect the leaders of nations from the Great Unwashed. A new Toronto was produced – a city where the condition of living became a process of negotiation and where attempts were made to avoid any act that would qualify as... [read more]
In After the Future, the Italian autonomist philosopher Franco Berardi presents us with the present. The long haul towards progress is shown to have groaned to an exhausted halt. We see ourselves climbing out of the steel contraption hurled forth by the Futurists and peering out at the sprawling landscape of the fractalised cells that we have become. Berardi’s latest work offers us a bold invitation. He invites us to acknowledge that the conception of the future that we believed in for the... [read more]
Julieta Aranda et al. (eds.), Are You Working Too Much? Post-Fordism, Precarity, and the Labor of Art
reviewed by Nina Power
The notes at the back of this latest e-flux collection state that one group of contributors, the Precarious Workers Brigade, ‘have a policy of including information on the context in which their work appears.’ To this end, they detail the dates when the piece was written (March - April 2011), the number of people involved in writing it (nine), that their text is also available online for free and is licenced under a Creative Commons licence, how they spent the $750 they were paid for the... [read more]
