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Lawrence Alloway (1926–1990) was one of the most influential and widely respected (as well as prolific) art writers of the post-war years. His many books, catalogue essays, and reviews manifest the changing paradigms of art away from the formal values of modernism towards the inclusiveness of the visual culture model in the 1950s, through the diversity and excesses of the 1960s, to the politicisation in the wake of 1968 and the Vietnam War, on to postmodern concerns in the 1970s. Alloway was in the right places at the right times. From his central involvement with the Independent Group and the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London in the 1950s, he moved to New York, the new world centre of art, at the beginning of the 1960s. In the early 1970s Alloway became deeply involved with the realist revival and the early feminist movement in art — Sylvia Sleigh, the painter, was his wife — and went on to write extensively about the gallery and art market as a system, examining the critic's role within this system. Positioning himself against the formalism and exclusivism associated with Clement Greenberg, Alloway was wholeheartedly committed to pluralism and diversity in both art and society. For him, art and criticism were always to be understood within a wider set of cultural, social and political concerns, with the emphasis on democracy, social inclusiveness and freedom of expression. This book provides a close critical reading of Alloway's writings.

This unique edited collection of scholarly articles brings together the work of a diverse range of literary and cultural critics, creative writers, and environmental and social activists. It marks an important contribution to the fields of Caribbean Studies, postcolonial studies, and ecocriticism. Through its deployment of the concept of world-ecology, the volume intervenes in two of the most vital areas of investigation in current literary studies. On the one hand, it represents an engagement with the field of world literature, around which there has been an upsurge in debate over the past decade or so. On the other, it responds to new developments in the field of environmental humanities, which derive their urgency from concerns over the planetary ecosystem. The collection provides an original and comprehensive perspective on the imbrication of the history of environmental transformations, political struggles, and literary production in the Caribbean. The book responds to the need for an engaged, pan-Caribbean-oriented investigation into the relationship between aesthetics and ecology, one capable of situating the analysis of cultural production within the specific contexts of local environmental concerns and struggles. The essays in this collection provide an unparalleled insight into how particular ecological processes and pressure-points in the Caribbean region – from ‘natural’ disasters such as hurricanes to the impact of neoliberal structural adjustment policies – have imprinted themselves on literary form.

Fifty years after Algerian independence, the legacy of France's Algerian past, and the ongoing complexities of the Franco-Algerian relationship, remain a key preoccupation in both countries. A central role in shaping understanding of their shared past and present is played by visual culture. This study investigates how relations between France and Algeria have been represented and contested through visual means since the outbreak of the Algerian War in 1954. It probes the contours of colonial and postcolonial visual culture in both countries, highlighting the important roles played by still and moving images when Franco-Algerian relations are imagined. Analysing a wide range of images made on both sides of the Mediterranean – from colonial picture postcards of French Algeria to contemporary representations of postcolonial Algiers – this book is the first to trace the circulation of, and connections between, a diverse range of images and media within this field of visual culture. It shows how the visual representation of Franco-Algerian links informs our understanding both of the lived experience of postcoloniality within Europe and the Maghreb, and of wider contemporary geopolitics.

What is the cultural identity of Europe? Are there specifically European values? Questions such as these are at the centre of a considerable number of political and scholarly debates in contemporary Europe. This book examines innovations and value traditions of Europe to produce an image of contemporary European self-understanding. It combines two possible approaches, examining both specific cultural traditions (‘Athens’ and ‘Jerusalem’) and specific values (‘freedom’ and ‘rationality’).

This book studies the emergence of collaborative and non-hierarchical cultures in the context of the Spanish economic crisis of 2008. It explains how peer-to-peer social networks that have arisen online and through social movements such as the Indignados have challenged a longstanding cultural tradition of intellectual elitism and capitalist technocracy in Spain. From the establishment of a technocratic and consumerist culture during the second part of the Franco dictatorship to the transition to neoliberalism that accompanied the ‘transition to democracy’, intellectuals and ‘experts’ have legitimized contemporary Spanish history as a series of unavoidable steps in a process of ‘modernization’. But when unemployment skyrocketed and a growing number of people began to feel that the consequences of this Spanish ‘modernization’ had increasingly led to precariousness, this paradigm collapsed. In the wake of Spain's financial meltdown of 2008, new ‘cultures of anyone’ have emerged around the idea that the people affected by or involved in a situation should be the ones to participate in changing it. Growing through grassroots social movements, digital networks, and spaces traditionally reserved for ‘high culture’ and institutional politics, these cultures promote processes of empowerment and collaborative learning that allow the development of the abilities and knowledge base of ‘anyone’, regardless of their economic status or institutional affiliations.

Dada formed in 1916 in a world of rational appearances that belied a raging confusion – in the middle of the First World War, in the neutral centre of a warring continent, at the core of Western art. This book sets out new coordinates in revision of a formation that art history routinely exhausts by its characterisation as a ‘revolutionary movement’ of anarchic cultural dissent, in order to contest perpetuated assumptions that underlie the popular myths of Dada. Dada is difficult, and the response to Dada is not easy. What emerge from the theoretical readings developed here are profoundly rational bases for the non-sense that was pitted against a self-proclaimed civilisation, critically and implicitly to propose that what coursed in 1916 continues as vitally today. Given as art-historically identifiable along a trajectory of sustained ruptures and seizures, this book proposes not a history of Dada in Zurich but theoretical engagements with the emergencies of 1916–19, from laughter to ‘lautgedichte’, masks to manifestos, chance to chiasmata, rounding on the permanent Dada that drives against the closure of culture.

This is the first book to use a Disability Studies approach to understanding cultural production in Spain. The author takes on a range of cultural products—from film to literature to the comic/sequential art and, in the brief epigraph, the public exhibition of paintings. Benjamin Fraser is just as familiar with the work of key disability studies theorists (Lennard J. Davis, Licia Carlson, Eva Feder Kittay, David T. Mitchell, Sharon L. Snyder) as he is with Spanish culture and the discourse of art. While researchers and students of cinema will be particularly interested in the book's detailed analyses of the formal aspects of the films, comics, and novels discussed, readers from backgrounds in history, political science and sociology will all be able to appreciate discussions of contemporary legislation, advocacy groups, cultural perceptions, models of social integration and more. Although physical disabilities are discussed infrequently in the book, its real focus is on intellectual disabilities. Chapters address Down syndrome, autism, childhood disability and alexia/agnosia. The cultural products analyzed in depth are the films Yo también (2009), León y Olvido (2004), María y yo (2010), ¿Qué tienes debajo del sombrero± (2006), and Más allá del espejo (2007); the novels Angelicomio (1981) and Quieto (2008), the comics María y yo (2007) and ‘Supergestor’ (2011) as well as the ‘Trazos Singulares’ exhibit in Madrid (2011).

This book is an examination of the South Atlantic island of St Helena’s involvement in the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. In the decades after 1807, British anti-slavery revolved around Sierra Leone, but following the establishment of a British Vice-Admiralty court at St Helena in 1840, this dynamic radically changed. The island became a new hub of naval activity in the region, acting as a base for the West Africa Squadron and a principal receiving depot for captured slave ships and their human cargo. During the middle decades of the nineteenth century over 25,000 ‘recaptive’ or liberated Africans were landed at St Helena. This book provides an account and evaluation of this episode. It begins by considering the geo-political events that brought St Helena into the fray of abolition, and the manner in which colonial policy set in London meshed with practical reality in the distant South Atlantic. The greater part of the book focuses closely on St Helena. It examines the relationship between the Royal Navy and the island during this period of slave-tradesuppression, the operation of the ‘depots’ that were set up to receive the liberated Africans, and the medical treatment that was afforded to them. The lives of the survivors, both in the immediate and longer-term, is also considered, from the limited settlement that occurred on St Helena, to their wider diaspora across the Atlantic world.