mlx-community/zer0-books huggingface dataset:
On a Common Culture
by Brian Russell Graham

What common culture is, what it offers, and how to generate it.

In the United Kingdom, the notion of a common culture has always been suggestive of a national culture which is accessible to all and provides various kinds of benefits to all, including participation in national cultural life. Brian Russell Graham's exploration of the theme aims to clarify how we might define common culture in the twenty-first century, and offers a perspective on specific benefits of such a shared culture. Common culture can generate a sense of inclusive national identity, he argues. Additionally, it can even out differences in our so-called ‘cultural capital’ – it can make people more equal in terms of their cultural lives.

Reviews:
"On A Common Culture acutely manages to produce something distinctive and relevant here today, whilst also providing absorbing, and at all times, sophisticated contributions to cultural studies." ~ Anne Carlini, Exclusive Magazine
“A really useful contribution to the left-conservative tradition that absorbs the best from left and right and produces something distinctive and increasingly relevant.” ~ David Goodhart, Head of Demography, Immigration & Integration Unit, Policy Exchange;
"An elegant and significant contribution to cultural studies, informed by a much more pluralistic and wider field of theory, which includes Richard Hoggart, George Orwell and Matthew Arnold. The argument here has the authority and importance of Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy: it’s an intelligent and enlightening exploration of the uses of culture." ~ Tim Crook, Emeritus Professor in Media, Communications and Cultural Studies. Goldsmiths, University of London
Other Paradises
by Jessica Sequeira

A collection of essays exploring imaginative responses to science and technology.

Why do people choose to play with ideas considered antiquated? Why do they elect to act in non-productive ways? Perhaps the question can be asked in reverse: What comes to mind when we think of technology? That which is practical, efficient, invisible, fast, optimistic, constantly updated. So how can one explain the search for the opposite, that which is useless, inefficient, physically present, slow, dystopian, obsolete and governed by chance? The matter of what motivates the search for ‘antiquated’ forms strikes deep into the heart of value. Are people simply following trends? Are they idiots? Are they sentimental? Are they artists? Are they interested in kitsch? Are they uninformed? Are they poets?

Other Paradises is a collection of essays exploring imaginative responses to science and technology, and is about people who choose to build ‘other paradises’, fully conscious of the alternative they offer to the dominant paradigm of technological progress.

Reviews:
In Other Paradises, Jessica Sequeira brings fresh insights to our new machine age and those that have led us here. Technology is at the center of her inquiry, but to call it simply a book about technology would do a disservice to its variety, joy and playfulness. I finished it with the best sort of feeling: the desire to read more. Madeleine Schwartz, reporter and former editor at the New York Review of Books, Robert Bosch Stiftung fellow. ~ Madeleine Schwartz
A rich, testing and pleasing book... I'm still thinking about its discussion of our relationship with technology: its endless variety, the surprise of how playful it can be, and the joyous inventiveness of the human mind capable of writing like this. ~ Jon Lindsay Miles, translator of Haroldo Conti's Southeaster, publisher at Immigrant Press
In Other Paradises, Jessica Sequeira reads generously, cleverly, with clarity and elan. She is spot on about how technology is recreating literature IRL, but even better, Sequeira’s essays recreate criticism, imaginative response by imaginative response. Reading this book one imagines yet another paradise, one where we don’t read any critic who can’t match Sequeira for energy and acuity. ~ Daniel Bosch, poet and translator, lecturer in English literature at Emory University, senior editor of Berfrois
Outside the Revolution; Everything
by Tom Astley

Through the reclamation of a left-wing identity, disparate groups of Cuban musicians seek a collective Cubanness ‘outside of the Revolution’.

Outside the Revolution; Everything is aimed at an audience of those interested in the music and culture of Cuba, but who wish to expand their understanding beyond the often narrow portrait presented in world music circuits. Ultimately, this is a book that attempts to reconnect Cuba socially, culturally, historically and politically into a global narrative, and as such may be of interest to people working in any of those fields, particularly within Caribbean or Latin American studies.

Reviews:
Porno Para Ricardo... are among the artists highlighted by author Tom Astley... who are not only challenging the notion of what Cuban music can be, but are also seeking to advance discourses pertaining to what being "left wing" in Cuba really means today... Astley succinctly details a recalcitrant music scene in this fascinating book which examines their quest for a new alternative. ~ The Crack Magazine
"An astute and well grounded book that captures the musical landscape of contemporary Cuba in its richness and complexity." ~ Sujatha Fernandes, Associate Professor of Sociology, CUNY, email
Outside the Revolution; Everything: A Redefinition of Left-Wing Identity in Contemporary Cuban Music Making by Thomas Astley revisits and redefines the quest for a left-wing Cuban identity through a thoughtful and provocative analysis of the incorporation of musics not traditionally defined as “Cuban” —punk, rap, and, to some extent, certain singer-songwriter styles. It is bound to raise some eyebrows at various points along the political spectrum (as such works always do), but it is well researched and documented and, building upon previous work with original research and interpretation, adds significantly to the body of knowledge addressing this topic. The historical moments that provide the focal points for analysis — the Revolution, the Special Period, and the present — are well chosen to illustrate Astley’s themes. And the particular artists he profiles — punk rockers Porno Para Ricardo, rapper Escuadron Patriota, and singer-songwriter Pedro Luis Ferrer — demonstrate the diversity of styles that incorporate outside influences and a more global cosmopolitanism in the construction of contemporary Cuban identity.

~ Professor Reebee Garofalo
http://www.journallive.co.uk/culture-newcastle/book-reviews/2012/08/25/heaton-author-tom-astley-on-his-new-cuban-music-book-61634-31692153/

~ Kate Proctor, The Journal
Pandemic: A Test of the News
by Alan O'Connor

This is exactly the kind of news analysis that we need - Mike Davis, Author of The Monster Enters (2020).

This book argues against the rapidly expanding literature about misinformation during the Covid-19 pandemic - and that the real issues are much broader.

Mainstream news media, except Fox News, has generally done a good job in educating people about the basic facts and precautions to be taken. Pandemic: A Test of the News identifies the mainframes used to tell the media story. With some exceptions such as long reads in The New Yorker and the Guardian, the media has not included the fundamental factors that caused the pandemic, the seriousness of a medical crisis that will last for several years - and the same factors that will cause the next pandemic.

Reviews:
This is exactly the kind of news analysis that we need. ~ Mike Davis, Author of The Monster Enters (2020).
Pantomime Terror
by John Hutnyk

The war on terror thrives on pantomime demons, created and maintained by political opportunism, convenient stereotype and uncritical celebrity scholarship.

Pantomime is a theatrical form that has come to rule our everyday lives as terror. In the early years of the 21st century, a dissembling political demonology has sometimes placed otherwise merely lyrical musicians in a volatile predicament. The discussion here is of Fun-da-Mental's Aki Nawaz portrayed as a 'suicide rapper', Asian Dub Foundation striking poses from the street in support of youth in Paris and Algiers, and M.I.A., born free fighting immigration crackdown with atrocity video.

Along the way, bus bombs, comedy circuits, critical theory, Arabian Nights, Bradley Wiggins, Dinarzade, Karl Marx, Paris boulevards, Molotov, Mao, the Eiffel Tower, reserve armies, lists, Richard Wagner, Samina Malik, Slavoj Žižek, Freudian slips, red-heads, Guantanamo. The book offers some sharp critiques of our contemporary complacency, and the failures of theory as more than ten years of war on terror turns anxiety at home and drone-strike assassinations abroad into a normal everyday. This pantomime is a terror story told over and over to distract from the workings of a despotic power. The need for an adequate (winning) counter-narrative was never more clear.

Reviews:
If you’re of the opinion that music and politics should generally keep the fuck out

of each other’s way, then Pantomime Terror will be a tough sell. But author John Hutnyk’s polemic is rational, convincing and supported by relentless, tirelessly researched cross-referencing, so consider us sold. ~ Record Collector UK
This book starts with the countless provocations that surround us in the ambient war on terror. However, rather than retreating into either loathsome self-pity or indignant self-righteousness, Hutnyk responds with the thumping provocation to think and get real! ~ Nikos Papastergiadis, University of Melbourne
For two decades, Hutnyk's research on diasporic music and politics has been at the political and scholarly cutting edge. Moving from ADF and Fun-Da-Mental, to MIA and Wagner, his work is always contextualised with relevance and an unstinting anti-racist, anti-imperialist commitment. Here in the not-so-great British tradition of pantomime parody with its Molotov cocktail caricatures of hero(in)es, villains and sidekicks, Hutnyk urges us to look at how horror is accompanied by the ludic, and how the culture industry is reined into the post 9/11 war on terror: ‘the pantomime of politics, the theatre of power, the double-plays of deception’. War peculates through every cell and membrane in our numbed bodies, only to be resigned to the waste basket of disposable culture. With its cogent attack on what have become cultural icons, Pantomime Terror updates Adorno for this terror-saturated age - masterful in its sweep, engaging in its style and thought-provoking in its analysis. ~ Raminder Kaur, University of Sussex
People v. Tony Blair, The
by Chris Nineham

The People v. Tony Blair argues that even a hostile media can be neutralised when a mass movement becomes powerful enough.

Some people dismiss mass protest. The People v. Tony Blair shows the huge demonstrations against the Iraq War in 2003 nearly brought down Blair and almost forced Britain out of the war. Based on interviews and insider accounts, it describes panic in Downing Street and despair in Whitehall. A controversial intervention into the debates about power, media and popular protest, The People v. Tony Blair argues that even a hostile media can be neutralised when a mass movement becomes powerful enough.

Reviews:
The People v Tony Blair is an interesting argument about how the power of protest is represented, and more often misrepresented, by the media . The book provides vital insights into how to construct present and future resistance to austerity and much else. ~ Mark Perryman, Philosophy Football reviews
Politactics
by EDA Collective

The everyday of politics is the politics of the everyday.

Technology, politics and entertainment have merged to the point of confusion. Politactics, the third book from the Everyday Analysis collective, is a set of conversations about how to sift through this organized but disordered mess and create a framework which could enact change against political and corporate hegemony. An internationalist collection of essays, articles, responses and letters, the book argues that we need a ‘politactical’ mindset in order to develop tactical and practical responses to the situations in which we are finding ourselves politically.

Reviews:
Even if you thought you knew the truth, you wouldn't be close. Get/read a copy of Politactics. ~ Mark McGowan (The Artist Taxi Driver)
Politics by Other Means
by Alison Hugill, Houman Barekat

A collection of the site's very best reviews on art, culture & theory.

Launched in October 2011, the online literary journal Review 31 - www.review31.co.uk - enjoys a growing reputation as one of the most intelligent and thoughtful literary resources on the web. Publishing accessible and informed reviews of the most interesting new titles, Review 31 covers non-fiction books on politics, history, art & culture, as well as literary fiction.

This volume is a collection of the site’s very best reviews on art, culture & theory. Contributors include Nina Power, Benjamin Noys, Ian Birchall, Gee Williams, Robert Barry and Sebastian Truskolaski. The volume covers an expansive array of topics from hipsterism and digital technology to the rise of what Neal Curtis calls ‘idiotism’ in contemporary culture, through literary theory, architecture and continental philosophy. The title - a nod, of course, to Clausewitz’s famous dictum that war is ‘politics by other means’ - is an acknowledgement of the radical political current that informs much of the criticism in these pages.

Reviews:
Politics of Debt, The
by Sjoerd van Tuinen, Arjen Kleinherenbrink

In this collection of essays and interviews philosophers, political scientists and economists reflect on the political role played by debt.

The Politics of Debt brings together philosophers, political scientists, and economists and sets them the task of reflecting on the political role played by debt. Focusing on the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis, particularly in the United States and Europe, the book is split into groups. It contains six essays and five interviews that aim to fully comprehend the political consequences of the economic crisis and specifically of debt.

Reviews:
Porn Panic!
by Jerry Barnett

The Rise of the New British Anti-Sex Movement.

First they came for the pornography, and then strip clubs, lads' mags and music videos. Then they came for hate speech, and then speech that was merely offensive. They eroded free speech online and on university campuses. They sought to divide people by gender and by race.

Porn Panic! charts the rise of a new social conservatism for the new millennium, coinciding with the collapse of liberalism as a political force. A new fascism is here, and it’s nothing like anyone expected...

Reviews:
What an informative read! It gives a very comprehensive summary of the evolution of porn from print to online, and how (British) society has reacted to the changes. I especially enjoyed the author's personal insights and quips. Him having gone through the "porn revolution" first hand gives it an air of credibility and it is peppered with personal anecdotes, which makes for a fun read. Of course, the author is absolutely biased towards porn. (In fact, the whole point of the book is to convince us that there is too much fuss being made about porn, and that the fuss has been far more detrimental than porn itself.) However, one can't help but nod along and agree as the points made are valid, and the author presents the facts as they are (with solid references too), without resorting to overly obtuse language or complex reasoning meant to befuddle the reader.

Pick up this book if you are

1. confused about feminism, or if you identify as a feminist

2. curious about why anyone would write a book defending porn

3. interested in politics and censorship

4. intrigued by the eye-catching cover on this book (as I was!) ~ J. Lee, GoodReads
Great window into the society of GB in the last decades, it is well written and with a lot of humor combined, it makes for an interesting read and yes lets face it...we humans all enjoy a little voyeurism too....after all it is an x-rated subject and god knows the general human reaction to the word porn always makes for so many memorable hilarious moments!

I learned some....laughed a lot and will be recommending this one to friends for sure! (at least to some of my friends...lol...).

~ Philippa Song, NetGalley
Porn Panic! documents new and rising threats to free expression, and mounts a fierce and entertaining defence. ~ Nadine Strossen, Professor of Law, New York Law School and former ACLU President
Pornography Feminism: As Powerful as She Wants to Be
by Rich Moreland

Pornography feminists unshackle their desires and celebrate their sexuality in the patriarchal world of filmed sex.

During the sex wars of the 1980s, sex-positive feminism entered the adult film industry with a performer support group known as Club 90. Over the next three decades feminism found a home among an influential group of women in pornography.

Pornography Feminism: As Powerful as She Wants to Be is a popular history of this unfolding saga told largely through personal interviews along with scholarly works, previous popular histories, and film reviews.

Reviews:
Rich Moreland has created a rich and comprehensive study of “pornography feminism” in a style that is accessible to students, academics and laypersons alike. I’m impressed with the depth of material Moreland covers and his willingness not only to take on a subject steeped in controversy and challenge both his own long-held views as well as those of the community at large; but having done so, to come out on the side of the less-popular stance – and have the courage to say so! Bravo Professor Moreland! ~ Candida Royalle, D.H.S., Author, Erotic Filmmaker & Entrepreneur
Positive Realism
by Maurizio Ferraris

Things exist, and therefore undoubtedly resist us, but in doing so they offer affordances, resources, opportunities.

Positive Realism could be seen as the "sequel" to Maurizio Ferraris' Manifesto of New Realism and Introduction to New Realism. The focus here is the other side of unamendability: a notion, described in his previous books, according to which reality is "unamendable", it cannot be corrected at will. This "resistance" of the real is what ultimately tells us that, in opposition to the claims of post-Kantian philosophy, the world is not a result of our conceptual work: if it were so, our power over reality would be much greater. Now, the often disappointing limits that the real sets against our expectations are also a resource: and this is the key point of the present book. Things exist, and therefore undoubtedly resist us, but in doing so they offer affordances, resources, opportunities. And that the greatest opportunity, which underlies all the other ones, is the fact that we share a world that is far from liquid: on the contrary, it provides the solid ground on which everything rests, starting from our happiness or unhappiness.

Reviews:
Ferraris showed great courage in the brutally anti-realist continental philosophy of the early 1990s. He argues rigorously, and is also an erudite and cultured person with an unusually good sense of humor. The combination of Ferraris and his students (in Italy) and Gabriel and his students (in Germany) helps add much-needed geographic diversity to a so far mostly Anglo-Francophone continental realist surge, which will help bring continental realism one step closer to a global philosophical movement. ~ Graham Harman
Post Cinematic Affect
by Steven Shaviro

This book ponders the fate of the movies in a world of digital media, globalization, and massive financial flows.

Post-Cinematic Affect is about what it feels like to live in the affluent West in the early 21st century. Specifically, it explores the structure of feeling that is emerging today in tandem with new digital technologies, together with economic globalization and the financialization of more and more human activities. The 20th century was the age of film and television; these dominant media shaped and reflected our cultural sensibilities. In the 21st century, new digital media help to shape and reflect new forms of sensibility. Movies (moving image and sound works) continue to be made, but they have adopted new formal strategies, they are viewed under massively changed conditions, and they address their spectators in different ways than was the case in the 20th century. The book traces these changes, focusing on four recent moving-image works: Nick Hooker's music video for Grace Jones' song Corporate Cannibal; Olivier Assayas' movie Boarding Gate, starring Asia Argento; Richard Kelly's movie Southland Tales, featuring Justin Timberlake, Dwayne Johnson, and other pop culture celebrities; and Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor's Gamer.

Reviews:
A nimble and incisive explication of contemporary social shifts, and it makes concrete some dense and tricky theoretical terrain. For these reasons, it would be a useful addition to a graduate or advanced undergraduate course. ~ Greg Goldberg, Viral Book Review, Women's Quarterly Journal
Post-Cinematic Affect offers an important commentary on the condition of contemporary cinema overtaken by digitization. Zero books aims at inspiring new paths of critical thought, and Post-Cinematic Affect succeeds in this.

~ Varpu Rantala, Aferimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Critism
Shaviro touches on multiple sources for his post-Marxist critique, including Spinoza , Fredric Jameson and Deleuze . His analysis identifies markers for our evolving relationship with new media, but no definite outcome. This book presents an excellent overview of the changing shape of cinema and our engagement with film.

~ Emmet O'Cuana, http://abookadaytillicanstay.wordpress.com
Post-Continental Voices: Selected Interviews
by Paul J. Ennis

This collection brings together seven emerging post-continental philosophers offering a rare insight into the closeted world of academic philosophy.

This collection of interviews brings together seven post-continental thinkers to discuss their own personal academic development, their experiences of graduate school and their hopes for post-continental philosophy. Each thinker has been chosen for their importance, popularity and potential. Opening with a short introduction this book offers a rare insight into the world of academic philosophy from the inside. Acting as a handbook to post-continental philosophy this book will prepare students for the unique challenges facing academic philosophy in the coming years. The following thinkers appear in the book: Graham Harman, Jeffrey Malpas, Lee Braver, Stuart Elden, Ian Bogost, Levi R. Byrant, and Adrian Ivakhiv.

Reviews:
Ennis is an expert guide to survey the coming landscape of Continental philosophy. The interviews here offer a fascinating glimpse of a Continental geography in which the analytic/Continental split is rendered meaningless and new methods are being offered to rethink classical philosophical questions. Ennis is a great surrogate for the reader, asking questions that you have in mind as the interviews develop, and the dialogue themselves are approachable to both the lay reader and expert alike. Pick up this book and grab a front seat to those whose work will be in short order the landmarks of our post-Continental futures. ~ Peter Gratton, Assistant Professor, University of San Diego