Böcker utgivna av Verso Books

A comprehensive guide to the core recordings of some of the most visionary and inspiring, subversive and radical musicians on the planet. It surveys the musical universe of a particular artist, group or genre by way of a contextualizing introduction and a thumbnail guide to the most essential recordings.

Analyzing the context in which thirty years of war and revolution wracked the European continent, this title emphasizes the backwardness of the European economies and their political subjugation by aristocratic elites and their allies.

The emergence of the book was an event of world historical importance, and heralded the dawning of modernity. This title presents the history of that process, combining technological history, sociology and anthropology, with the study of modes of consciousness to root the development of printing in the ideological struggles of Western Europe.

In September 1910, the human rights activist and anti-imperialist Roger Casement uncovered an appalling catalogue of abuse: nearly 30,000 Indians had died to produce 4,000 tonnes of rubber. This title presents the story of colonial exploitation and corporate greed with contemporary resonance.

Explores the historical experiences and needs out of which the new radicalism arose. Focussing on eighteenth-century Paris, a time and place in which a modern form of society was just coming into its own, this book shows how the ideal of authenticity - of a self that could organize the individual's energy and direct it toward his own happiness.

NATO’s war on Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999 was unleashed in the name of democracy and human rights. This view was challenged by the world’s three largest countries, India, China and Russia, who saw the bombing of Serbia and Kosovo as a naked attempt to assert US dominance in an unstable world.In the West, media networks were joined by substantial sectors of left/liberal opinion in supporting the war. Nonetheless, a wide variety of figures emerged to challenge the prevailing consensus. Their work, gathered here for the first time, forms a collection of key statements and anti-war writings from some of democracy’s most eloquent dissidents—Noam Chomsky, Harold Pinter, Edward Said and many others—who provide carefully researched examinations of the real motives for the US action, dissections and critiques of the ideology of ‘humanitarian warfare’, and chartings of the unnecessary tragedy of a region laid to waste in the pursuance of Great Power politics.This reader presents some of the most important texts on NATO’s Balkan crusade and forms a major intervention in the debate on global geo-political strategy after the Cold War.

Questioning the common belief that Russia is in transition to capitalism, this book looks behind the political and ideological debates to focus on the development of the real lives of the workers. It includes an analysis of the role of trade unions in the former Soviet system.

Argues that the subversive core of the Christian legacy is much too precious to be left to the fundamentalists. This book also argues that the foundation of a politics of universal emancipation can be found in St Paul, finding an unlikely ally in the reinvention of a twenty first century Marxism.

Explores the relations between fantasy and ideology and the antagonism between the ever greater abstraction of our lives - whether through digitalization or the market - and the deluge of pseudo-concrete images which surround us.

Intends to recover the notion of culture as a collective, hybrid and plural experience, in light of the political imperative that rules us. In bringing together some of the figures most closely associated with Said and his scholarship, this volume looks at Said, the literary critic and public intellectual, Palestine and Said's intellectual legacy.

The Venezuelan revolutionary Simon Bolivar, also known as El Libertador, sought to lead Latin America to independence from the Spanish in the early nineteenth century. This book presents an introduction to Bolivar's writings and legacy, explaining why Bolivar continues to inspire.

Presents an examination of Thomas Paine's thought and legacy.

Presents a radical assessment of Hegel. This title reveals the problems and limitations of sociological method.

Part of "Radical Thinkers" series, this work presents key texts by philosophers and thinkers. It features an autobiography by the founding figure of the Situationist International.

Part of "Radical Thinkers" series, this work presents key texts by philosophers and thinkers. It offers an account of Leninism.

Offers a source of literary modernism in the twentieth century.

Offers an analysis of how the West created the global food crisis. This book charts the evolution of the crisis and offers a way forward: the principle of food sovereignty, allowing the developing world to protect and sustain a diverse range of crops.

Ascetic renunciation freed holy women of traditional womanly roles. Saints such as Mary of Egypt provoked the Church Fathers to introduce legislation to bring holy women under control. Salisbury traces these debates and legislation and contrasts them with the real lives of seven women saints.

Shows how the popular music of the Americas is an act of devotion to an African religious worldview that survived the ravages of slavery and found its way into the rituals of everyday listening. This book explores the challenge posed by Afro-Latin music to a world music system dominated by a few wealthy countries.

This is a collection of in-depth and reflective pieces by activists and other key figures in "DIY culture", who tell their own stories and histories. The book argues that popular protest of the 1990s is characterized by a culture of immediacy and direct action.

An illustrated history of Hong Kong cinema, covering all genres of films.

This study descends into the modern cynical consciousness and emerges with a critical assessment of the preoccupations of contemporary society. It charts the development of a culture of cynicism in forms, such as an obsession with finality and integrity.

This is a comprehensive account of the largely unrecorded countercultures living outside mainstream society today. The book examines the roots of the modern youth cultures, from the 1960s' hippies to the 1970s' punks, and answers questions posed by these underground movements.

Portrays in microcosm a history made of great human tides of invasion, colonization, emigration, nomadism and tourism. Enriched by cross-cultural comparisons with the history of the American West, this title carves a route through Ireland's history, literature and landscape.

In the centuries following the Reformation, Antichrist—the biblical Beast, whose coming was to precede the end of the world and the coming of Christ’s kingdom—was an intensely real figure. The debate raged as to who this Antichrist, whose downfall was now at hand, might be. Was he the Pope? Bishops? A state church? The monarchy? Or was it just a term of abuse to be hurled at anybody one disliked?Christopher Hill, one of Britain’s most distinguished historians, here reconstructs the significance of Antichrist during the revolutionary crises of the early seventeenth century. Radical Protestant sects applied the term—a name synonymous with repression and persecution—to those Establishment institutions of which they disapproved; in particular, the Pope. Then, with that revolution in thought which resulted in the separation of religion from politics, the figure of Antichrist lost its significance.

Recent international interest in the painters of the Mexican mural movement, such as Rivera and Orozco, has brought Latin American art to a wider audience than ever before but has often failed to confront its continuing marginalization within art criticism.Drawing the Line is an exploration of the areas occupied by Latin American art and culture between the ongoing traditions of its indigenous inhabitants, its colonial heritage and its contemporary relationship to the cultural politics of North America and Europe. It looks at the way cultural identity has been constructed by artists from the 1940s to the present day and challenges the way art criticism has hitherto dealt with Latin American art.Established stereotypes of Latin American culture are discussed in terms of their relevance to contemporary artists. The book looks at the frequent subversion of dominant images and conventions of European art—such as the political significance of landscape painted as an attempt to define a specifically Latin American reality, or the constant reworking of familiar icons of European art—and explores the importance of Latin America to the European surrealist movement. The authors examine the significance of popular art—such as the Chilean arpilleras which commemorate the ¿disappeared¿ of Pinochet’s regime—and relate it to the traditional ¿high art/low art¿ dichotomy.Including new perspectives on race and gender, Drawing the Line is the most comprehensive account of contemporary Latin American art ever to appear in English.

Isaac Deutscher is widely recognized as one of the foremost political biographers of the twentieth century, and his full-scale studies of Trotsky and Stalin, translated into many world languages, have played a major role in elucidating the character and fate of the Russian Revolution.This collection of essays, hitherto unpublished or out of print, provides a clear idea of the range and force of Deutscher’s literary activity over a period of more than thirty years. It also demonstrates his essential consistency of purpose: from his sharp denunciation of the first Moscow Trial in 1936, through his resistance to the Cold War tides of the fifties, to his sober analysis of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in 1966. His fidelity to the Marxist method and firm grasp of socialist history allowed him to penetrate to the core of events without ever falling into the blind apologetics or feverish disavowals that blighted so many left-wing intellectuals of his generation.Deutscher’s own origins in the Polish communist movement are here reflected in his famous interview on the tragedy of the Polish CP, while his major essay on bureaucracy is one of the few sustained attempts to grapple with this key theoretical and practical problem of the socialist movement.This volume is designed both as a lasting collection of some of Deutscher’s best-known and most powerful texts, and as an introduction for readers approaching his work for the first time. A specially written preface by Perry Anderson assesses this selection in relation to Deutscher’s overall achievement, and Tamara Deutscher’s introduction passes on to the reader the often fascinating personal background to certain of the essays.

Ibn Khaldun, the most celebrated thinker of the Muslim Middle Ages, is the subject of this intriguing study. Lacoste opens with a general description of the Maghreb in the later Middle Ages, focusing primarily on mercantile trade, especially in gold, and the social and economic structures of tribal life. He unravels Khaldun’s fascinating biography—born of an aristocratic family in Tunis in 1332, he had an extraordinary diplomatic and military career in the turbulent wars and politics of Western Islam in the fourteenth century; withdrew to a desert retreat in 1375, and finally emigrated to Egypt.Lacoste then turns his attention to Ibn Khaldun’s majestic Universal History, arguably the greatest single synthesis produced by medieval thought anywhere. His account of Ibn Khaldun’s thought is a remarkable, sympathetic work of recovery, not only uncovering its basic categories but exploring its contemporary relevance to an understanding of the Arab world.Thinkers as diverse as Ernest Gellner and Arnold Toynbee have paid tribute to the lasting fertility of Ibn Khaldun’s work. English-speaking readers now have an opportunity to appreciate some of the richness and diversity of the Arab intellectual heritage.

The films of Hitchcock, Welles and Godard; the aesthetics of photography and the technology of cinema; art and revolution in Russia and in Mexico; the avant-gardes in film and in painting—these are among the many topics of Peter Wollen’s essays. Interwoven with fictional treatments of such themes as memory, dream, sexuality and writing, they compose a remarkable, perhaps unique, volume.These "readings and writings" are informed by Marxism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, and the history of art itself. Their concern is with signification: with the ways in which meanings are produced in dominant art forms and with the counter-strategies by which these meanings may be questioned or dislodged, in the practice of politically and aesthetically radical alternatives. A concluding retrospect reviews the political, intellectual and aesthetic avant-garde currents of the fifteen years over which these texts were written, outlining some perspectives for oppositional art today.