Attention is given to American culture. Not the culture of WalMart and the cineplex but culture as it is lived closer to the ground like local culture and neighbourhood culture. The focus is on the choices that individuals make about how to shape the fabric of their lives, and about the mechanisms that make those choices available. The perpetual and symbiotic relationships linking the cultural with the political and economic spheres are a recurrent theme.
When the Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic György Lukács returned to Hungary from Moscow after World War II, he engaged in a highly active phase of writing and speaking about the democratic culture needed to exorcise the remnants of fascism and to create the conditions for the advance of socialism in Central Europe. His essays of the period, including the influential volume Literature and Democracy, appear here for the first time in English translation. Engaged with questions of realist and modernist world-views in art, the relations of literary history to politics and social history, and the role of cultural intellectuals in public life, these essays offer a new look at one of the most influential Marxist thinkers of the twentieth century.
Following the work of a range of public intellectuals like Stanley Aronowitz, Henry Giroux, bell hooks, Chantal Mouffe, and Cornel West, Cultural Democracy argues for a "radical democracy" capable of subverting traditional divisions of "left" and "right". In so doing, Trend suggests that solutions to contemporary cultural and political problems are not so far away as one might think. Their roots lie in the very democratic principles upon which the U.S.was founded, although many such principles need to be brought up to date and radicalized.
Follows the work of a range of public intellectuals like Aronowitz, Giroux, hooks, Mouffe, and West, and argues for a 'radical democracy' capable of subverting traditional divisions of 'left' and'right.'
This book discusses how public cultural policies can relate to the principle political issue of democracy. Here, democratic cultural policies include ideas and ideologies, institutional structures, agents and interests, power, access and participation and distribution of economic resources. Contributors focus on analysing the relationship between a political system and culture and the arts as an empirical field. They critically consider questions such as: How do different democratic forms affect cultural policy consequences? Can cultural autonomy be combined with cultural democracy? How is cultural policy-making used as a political process and which interests are involved? What position does popular culture have in cultural policies? How does a former Soviet state like Lithuania handle the question of culture and democracy? What does it mean when UNESCO talks about cultural diversity? How did intellectuals act in cultural policy debates in France in the late 19th century? The volume also looks at whether the democratisation of culture is actually possible. This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Cultural Policy.
Based on the words and experiences of the people involved, this book tells the story of the community arts movement in the UK, and, through a series of essays, assesses its influence on present day participatory arts practices. Part I offers the first comprehensive account of the movement, its history, rationale and modes of working in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales; Part II brings the work up to the present, through a scholarly assessment of its influence on contemporary practice that considers the role of technologies and networks, training, funding, commissioning and curating socially engaged art today. The community arts movement was a well-known but little understood and largely undocumented creative revolution that began as part of the counter-cultural scene in the late 1960s. A wide range of art forms were developed, including large processions with floats and giant puppets, shadow puppet shows, murals and public art, events on adventure playgrounds and play schemes, outdoor events and fireshows. By the middle of the 1980s community arts had changed and diversified to the point where its fragmentation meant that it could no longer be seen as a coherent movement. Interviews with the early pioneers provide a unique insight into the arts practices of the time. Culture, Democracy and the Right to Make Art is not simply a history because the legacy and influence of the community arts movement can be seen in a huge range of diverse locations today. Anyone who has ever encountered a community festival or educational project in a gallery or museum or visited a local arts centre could be said to be part of the on-going story of the community arts. This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com . It is funded by the University of Manchester.
This volume addresses the key question of the intersection of sociology and politics, and asks what a non-Marxist cultural perspective can offer the Left. Written by leading scholars, it develops new conceptions of social critique, new techniques of interpretive analysis, and new concepts for the sociology of democratic practice. It is a volume for the twenty-first-century, where global and local meet, when critical theory must examine its most fundamental presuppositions.
Focusing on portrayals of Mussolini's Italy, Hitler's Germany, and Stalin's Russia in U.S. films, magazine and newspaper articles, books, plays, speeches, and other texts, Benjamin Alpers traces changing American understandings of dictatorship from the la
