Böcker utgivna av Verso Books

The forms of liberal democracy developed in the 19th century seem increasingly ill-suited to the problems we face in the 21st. This dilemma has given rise to a deliberative democracy, and this text explores four contemporary cases in which the principles have been at least partially instituted.

Dai Jinhua is one of contemporary China's most influential cultural critics. In these pages she examines the Orientalism that made Zhang Yimou the darling of international film festivals, and speculates on the value of Mao Zedong as an icon of post-revolutionary consumerism, for example.

Providing an analysis of Israel-Palestine coverage in the US media, this work reveals the persistent ways the "New York Times" has ignored principles of international law in order to shield its readers from Israel's lawlessness.

¿To some a book on the origins of sexual inequality is absurd. Male dominance seems to them a universal, if not inevitable, phenomenon that has been with us since the dawn of our species. The essays in this volume offer differing perspectives on the development of sex-role differentiation and sexual inequality, but share a belief that these phenomena did have social origins, origins that must be sought in sociohistorical events and processes.¿In this way Stephanie Coontz and Peta Henderson introduce a book which fills a yawning gap in Marxist and feminist theory of recent years.Women’s Work, Men’s Property brings together specialist historical and anthropological skills of a group of American and French feminists to examine the origins of the sexual division of labor, the nature of pre-state kinship societies, the position of women in slave-based societies, and the specific forms taken by the oppression of women in archaic Greece.Men’s Work, Women’s Property will be welcomed by teachers and students of women’s studies and anyone with an interest in the biological, psychological and historical roots of sexual inequality.

A collection of essays and interviews in which filmmakers, critics and scholars reflect on Palestinian cinema.

Traces the evolution of Indonesia from its anti-colonial stirrings in the early twentieth century to the lengthy, and eventually victorious, struggle against the dictatorship of President Suharto. This title describes how small resistance groups inside the country directed massive political transformation.

Pierre Bourdieu is best known as one of the world's leading sociologists. Containing his famous addresses to the assembled media masses, this work addresses both social movement activists and the establishment itself.

Richard Evans was the key expert witness in the David Irving trial in which the judge branded Irving a racist and anti-Semite. Evans explains here how he revealed Irving's methods of historical falsification and demonstrates Irving's connections with far-right Holocaust deniers in the United States

Terry Eagleton's witty and acerbic attacks on contemporary culture and society are read and enjoyed by many, and his studies of literature are regarded as classics of contemporary criticism. Here, Eagleton seeks to develop a sophisticated relationship between Marxism and literary criticism.

This collection includes key texts from one of France's most famous philosophers, which intervene in the debate between "the humanist" and the structuralists.

This reader brings together many classic texts that help define culture as a tool of resistance. With concise introductions, this reader contains the work of Marx, Benjamin, Hall and Bey (amongst others) as well as a number of new activists/authors published here for the first time.

These essays set out to show how police, psychiatrists and welfare services help to channel black people into residential and occupational ghettos. They also show how within and against such oppressive conditions, black people in Britain have forged a new identity.

Based on analysis of information in the mainstream Israeli media, this book argues that the road map has brought no real progress and that, under cover of diplomatic successes, Israel is using the road map to strengthen its grip on the remaining occupied territories. This book examines the gap between myth and bitter reality.

After opening with an account of the author's awakening to Marxism, this book goes on to review its central principles as a social science, paying particular heed to feminist concepts and the meaning of inequality. It concludes by exploring possible futures under capitalism and socialism.

The stories of the hard-rock miners' shooting wars, young Elizabeth Gurly Flynn (the "Rebel Girl" of contemporary sheet music), the first sit-down strikes and Free Speech fights, Emma Goldman and the struggle for birth control access, the Pageant for Paterson orchestrated in Madison Square Garden, bohemian radicals John Reed.

This text is a multi-level study which moves between an analysis of those global forces, through national politics, to the changes occuring in two fields of public life that are both fundamentally important and familiar to everyone - television and health care.

This is a comprehensive reconstruction and analysis of all of Schmidtt's major works. It reveals the complex ways in which his ideas took shape in the intertwining timelines of civil and world wars.

Samba and carnival, radio soaps and telenovelas, oral poetry, popular drama, Amerindian art. This illustrated overview of Latin America’s popular culture considers the broad spectrum of cultural forms in the various countries of the subcontinent.Exploring the ways in which daily life and ritual have resisted and been influenced by Western mass culture, Memory and Modernity traces the main anthropological, sociological and political debates about the nature of popular culture. Rowe and Schelling use their analysis of the development of a culture industry in Latin America to engage with wider debates about modernity, drawing out the contrast between Latin America’s cultural wealth and its widespread material poverty.In challenging the assumptions of much Western cultural criticism, this book will be essential reading for students of Latin American society, while offering the general reader a concise and accessible overview of an exciting and varied popular culture.

These essays study key post-war and contemporary artists, taking a critical look at the construction of recent modern art history in both its traditional and radical forms. The artists discussed include Francis Picabia, Ad Reinhardt, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, Jasper Johns and Anselm Keifer.

A combination of narrative theory and social history, this new edition includes an additional final chapter on the collapse of the Bildungsroman in the years around World War I (a crisis which opened the way for Modernist experimentation).

That same inconsistency characterized the justification for the US-led invasion of Iraq is argued in this study.

The experience of the Yugoslav war and the rise of ¿irrational¿ violence in contemporary societies provides the theoretical and political context of this book, which uses Lacanian psychoanalysis as the basis for a renewal of the Marxist theory of ideology. The author’s analysis leads into a study of the figure of woman in modern art and ideology, including studies of The Crying Game and the films of David Lynch, and the links between violence and power/gender relations.

This wide-ranging book argues that criticism emerged in early bourgeois society as a central feature of a ¿public sphere¿ in which political, ethical, and literary judgements could mingle under the benign rule of reason. The disintegration of this fragile culture brought on a crisis in criticism, whose history since the 18th century has been fraught with ambivalence and anxiety.Eagleton’s account embraces Addison and Steele, Johnson and the 19-century reviewers, such critics as Arnold and Stephen, the heyday of Scrutiny and New Criticism, and finally the proliferation of avant-garde literary theories such as deconstructionism. The Function of Criticism is nothing less than a history and critique of the ¿critical institution¿ itself. Eagleton’s judgements on individual critics are sharp and illuminating, which his general argument raises crucial questions about the relations between language, literature and politics.

Antonio Gramsci was born in Sardinia in 1891, became the leader of the Italian Communist Party in his early thirties, was arrested by Mussolini’s police in 1927, and remained imprisoned until shortly before his death ten years later. The posthumous publication of his Prison Notebooks established him as a major thinker whose influence continues to increase.Fiori’s biography enlarges upon the facts of Gramsci’s life through personal accounts, and through Gramsci’s own writings to relatives and friends. In relating Gramsci’s growth as a political leader and theorist to his private experience, it offers acute insights into his involvement in the factory councils movement. It examines his relationship with political opponents, including Mussolini, and with his comrades within the Communist Party before and during Gramsci’s imprisonment. It is an approach which seeks to explicate, as well as underscore, the substantial achievement of one of the most important figures in western Marxism.

Populism raises awkward question about modern forms of democracy. It often represents the ugly face of the people. It is neither the highest form of democracy nor its enemy. It is, rather, a mirror in which democracy may contemplate itself, warts and all, in a discovery of itself and what it lacks.

Debates the future of Europe in the light of the influence of the US and proposes new political understandings of the transatlantic alliance. This volume is intended to provide readers in the Anglophone world with the opportunity to gain access to the debate.

A critique of Afrocentrism that suggests an alternative historical understanding of Africa and its diaspora.