After the Future explores a century-long obsession with the concept of the "future," starting with Marinetti's "Futurist Manifesto," tracing it through the punk movement of the early 70s, and into the media revolution of the 90s. The future, Bifo argues, has come and gone, the concept has lost its usefulness. Now it's our responsibility to decide what comes next.
Written from a non-Western point of view, this work offers a fresh perspective on the postcommunist literary scene. The four sections of the book - literature, ideology, culture and methodology - reflect the range of postmodernism in contemporary Russia.
Much has been written about the profound impact the post-World War II baby boomers had on American religion. But the lifestyles and beliefs of the generation that has followed--and the influence these younger Americans in their twenties and thirties are having on the face of religion--are not so well understood. It is this next wave of post-boomers that Robert Wuthnow examines in this illuminating book. What are their churchgoing habits and spiritual interests and needs? How does their faith affect their families, their communities, and their politics? Interpreting new evidence from scores of in-depth interviews and surveys, Wuthnow reveals a generation of younger adults who, unlike the baby boomers that preceded them, are taking their time establishing themselves in careers, getting married, starting families of their own, and settling down--resulting in an estimated six million fewer regular churchgoers. He shows how the recent growth in evangelicalism is tapering off, and traces how biblical literalism, while still popular, is becoming less dogmatic and more preoccupied with practical guidance. At the same time, Wuthnow explains how conflicts between religious liberals and conservatives continue--including among new immigrant groups such as Hispanics and Asians--and how in the absence of institutional support many post-boomers have taken a more individualistic, improvised approach to spirituality. Wuthnow's fascinating analysis also explores the impacts of the Internet and so-called virtual churches, and the appeal of megachurches. After the Baby Boomers offers us a tantalizing look at the future of American religion for decades to come.
Since the end of the cold war, Africa has seen a dramatic rise in new political and religious phenomena, including an eviscerated privatized state, neoliberal NGOs, Pentecostalism, a resurgence in accusations of witchcraft, a culture of scamming and fraud, and, in some countries, a nearly universal wish to emigrate. Drawing on fieldwork in Togo, Charles Piot suggests that a new biopolitics after state sovereignty is remaking the face of one of the world’s poorest regions. In a country where playing the U.S. Department of State’s green card lottery is a national pastime and the preponderance of cybercafés and Western Union branches signals a widespread desire to connect to the rest of the world, Nostalgia for the Future makes clear that the cultural and political terrain that underlies postcolonial theory has shifted. In order to map out this new terrain, Piot enters into critical dialogue with a host of important theorists, including Agamben, Hardt and Negri, Deleuze, and Mbembe. The result is a deft interweaving of rich observations of Togolese life with profound insights into the new, globalized world in which that life takes place.
Distinguished left theorists, analysts, and social critics (including Eric Hobsbawm, Jurgen Habermas, Eduardo Galeano, Ralph Miliband, Giovanni Arrighi, Fredric Jameson, Fred Halliday, Edward Thompson, and Alexander Cockburn) explain the meaning of Communism's meteoric trajectory and explore the grounds for continued socialist endeavor and commitment. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
In this book, Michael Keith argues that both racial divisions and intercultural dialogue can only be understood in the context of the urban cities that gave them birth, and considers how race is played out in the worlds most eminent cities.
A handbook of information for parents as they plan for their child's life after their own deaths. Easy to understand, describes step-by-step all of the elements that parents must consider to provide a happy and fulfilling life for their child with a disability--Cover.
In After the Post–Cold War eminent Chinese cultural critic Dai Jinhua interrogates history, memory, and the future of China as a global economic power in relation to its socialist past, profoundly shaped by the Cold War. Drawing on Marxism, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, and feminist theory, Dai examines recent Chinese films that erase the country’s socialist history to show how such erasure resignifies socialism’s past as failure and thus forecloses the imagining of a future beyond that of globalized capitalism. She outlines the tension between China’s embrace of the free market and a regime dependent on a socialist imprimatur. She also offers a genealogy of China’s transformation from a source of revolutionary power into a fountainhead of globalized modernity. This narrative, Dai contends, leaves little hope of moving from the capitalist degradation of the present into a radical future that might offer a more socially just world.
This major new manifesto offers a “clear and compelling vision of a postcapitalist society” and shows how left-wing politics can be rebuilt for the 21st century (Mark Fisher, author of Capitalist Realism) Neoliberalism isn’t working. Austerity is forcing millions into poverty and many more into precarious work, while the left remains trapped in stagnant political practices that offer no respite. Inventing the Future is a bold new manifesto for life after capitalism. Against the confused understanding of our high-tech world by both the right and the left, this book claims that the emancipatory and future-oriented possibilities of our society can be reclaimed. Instead of running from a complex future, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams demand a postcapitalist economy capable of advancing standards, liberating humanity from work and developing technologies that expand our freedoms. This new edition includes a new chapter where they respond to their various critics.
Cyberfiction: After the Future explores a world where cybernetics sets the terms for life and culture - our world of ubiquitous info-tech, instantaneous capital flows, and immanent catastrophe. Economics fuses with technology to create a new kind of speculative fiction: cyberfiction. Paul Youngquist reveals the ways in which J. G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, and William Gibson, among others, map a territory where information reigns supreme and the future is becoming a thing of the past.
