Radical Decadence

Radical Decadence PDF Author: Julia Skelly
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472569423
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 155

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Book Description
This pioneering book explores the notion of 'radical decadence' as concept, aesthetic and lived experience, and as an analytical framework for the study of contemporary feminist textile art. Gendered discourses of decadence that perpetuate anxieties about women's power, consumption and pleasure are deconstructed through images of drug use, female sexuality and 'excessive' living, in artworks by several contemporary textile artists including Orly Cogan, Tracey Emin, Allyson Mitchell, and Rozanne Hawksley. Perceptions of decadence are invariably bound to the negative connotations of decay and degradation, particularly with regard to the transgression of social norms related to femininity and the female body. Excessive consumption by women has historically been represented as grotesque, and until now, women's pleasure in relation to drug and alcohol use has largely gone unexamined in feminist art history and craft studies. Here, representations of female consumption, from cupcakes to alcohol and cocaine, are opened up for critical discussion. Drawing on feminist and queer theories, Julia Skelly considers portrayals of 'bad girls' in artworks that explore female sexuality - performative pieces designed to subvert and exceed feminine roles. In this provocative book, decadence is understood not as a destructive force but as a liberating aesthetic.

Radical Decadence

Radical Decadence PDF Author: Julia Skelly
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472569423
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 155

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Book Description
This pioneering book explores the notion of 'radical decadence' as concept, aesthetic and lived experience, and as an analytical framework for the study of contemporary feminist textile art. Gendered discourses of decadence that perpetuate anxieties about women's power, consumption and pleasure are deconstructed through images of drug use, female sexuality and 'excessive' living, in artworks by several contemporary textile artists including Orly Cogan, Tracey Emin, Allyson Mitchell, and Rozanne Hawksley. Perceptions of decadence are invariably bound to the negative connotations of decay and degradation, particularly with regard to the transgression of social norms related to femininity and the female body. Excessive consumption by women has historically been represented as grotesque, and until now, women's pleasure in relation to drug and alcohol use has largely gone unexamined in feminist art history and craft studies. Here, representations of female consumption, from cupcakes to alcohol and cocaine, are opened up for critical discussion. Drawing on feminist and queer theories, Julia Skelly considers portrayals of 'bad girls' in artworks that explore female sexuality - performative pieces designed to subvert and exceed feminine roles. In this provocative book, decadence is understood not as a destructive force but as a liberating aesthetic.

Decadence

Decadence PDF Author: Jim Hougan
Publisher: William Morrow
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description


The Decadent Society

The Decadent Society PDF Author: Ross Douthat
Publisher: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
ISBN: 1476785252
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
From the New York Times columnist and bestselling author of Bad Religion, a “clever and stimulating” (The New York Times Book Review) portrait of how our turbulent age is defined by dark forces seemingly beyond our control. The era of the coronavirus has tested America, and our leaders and institutions have conspicuously failed. That failure shouldn’t be surprising: Beneath social-media frenzy and reality-television politics, our era’s deep truths are elite incompetence, cultural exhaustion, and the flight from reality into fantasy. Casting a cold eye on these trends, The Decadent Society explains what happens when a powerful society ceases advancing—how the combination of wealth and technological proficiency with economic stagnation, political stalemate, and demographic decline creates a unique civilizational crisis. Ranging from the futility of our ideological debates to the repetitions of our pop culture, from the decline of sex and childbearing to the escapism of drug use, Ross Douthat argues that our age is defined by disappointment—by the feeling that all the frontiers are closed, that the paths forward lead only to the grave. Correcting both optimism and despair, Douthat provides an enlightening explanation of how we got here, how long our frustrations might last, and how, in renaissance or catastrophe, our decadence might ultimately end.

Disciplinary Decadence

Disciplinary Decadence PDF Author: Lewis R. Gordon
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317261208
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
In this book, philosopher and social critic Lewis Gordon explores the ossification of disciplines, which he calls disciplinary decadence. In response, he offers a theory of what he calls a teleological suspension of disciplinarity, in which he encourages scholars and lay intellectuals to pay attention to the openness of ideas and purposes on which their disciplines were born. Gordon builds his case through discussions of philosophy of education, problems of secularization in religious thought, obligations across generations, notions of invention in the study of ideas, decadence in development, colonial epistemologies, and the quest for a genuine postcolonial language. These topics are examined with the underlying diagnosis of the present political and academic environment as one in which it is indecent to think.

Staging Decadence

Staging Decadence PDF Author: Adam Alston
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 135023706X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
How is decadence being staged today – as a practice, issue, pejorative, and as a site of pleasure? Where might we find it, why might we look for it, and who is decadence for? This book is the first monographic study of decadence in theatre and performance. Adam Alston makes a passionate case for the contemporary relevance of decadence in the thick of a resurgent culture war by focusing on its antithetical relationship to capitalist-led growth, progress, and intensified productivity. He argues that the qualities used to disparage the study and practice of theatre and performance are the very things we should embrace in celebrating their value – namely, their spectacular uselessness, wastefulness, outmodedness, and abundant potential for producing forms of creativity that flow away from the ends and excesses of capitalism. Alston covers an eclectic range of examples by Julia Bardsley (UK), Hasard Le Sin (Finland), jaamil olawale kosoko (USA), Toco Nikaido (Japan), Martin O'Brien (UK), Toshiki Okada (Japan), Marcel·lí Antúnez Roca (Spain), Normandy Sherwood (USA), The Uhuruverse (USA), Nia O. Witherspoon (USA), and Wunderbaum (Netherlands). Expect ruminations on monstrous scenographies, catatonic choreographies, turbo-charged freneticism, visions of the apocalypse – and what might lie in its wake.

The Century

The Century PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 1010

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The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine

The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 990

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Book Description


Decadent Orientalisms

Decadent Orientalisms PDF Author: David Fieni
Publisher: Fordham University Press
ISBN: 0823286428
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Decadent Orientalisms presents a sustained critique of the ways Orientalism and decadence have formed a joint discursive mode of the imperial imagination. Attentive to historical and literary configurations of language, race, religion, and power, Fieni shows the importance of understanding Western discourses of Eastern decline and obsolescence together with Arab and Islamic responses in which the language of decadence returns as a characteristic of the West. Taking seriously Edward Said’s claim that Orientalism is a “style of having power,” Fieni works historically through the aesthetic and ideological effects of Orientalist style, showing how it is at once comparative, descriptive, and performative. Orientalism, the book argues, relies upon decadence as the figure through which its positivist scientific claims become redistributed as speech acts—“truths” that establish dominance. Rather than attending to Orientalism as a repertoire of clichés and stereotypes, Decadent Orientalisms considers the systemic epistemological consequences of the diffuse, yet coherent network of institutions that have constituted Orientalism’s power.

Imagining Each Other

Imagining Each Other PDF Author: Ethan Goffman
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791492079
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Imagining Each Other explores Black-Jewish relations by examining the complex ways they have portrayed each other in recent American literature. It illuminates their dramatic alliances and conflicts and their dilemmas of identity and assimilation, and addresses the persistent questions of ethnic division and economic inequality that have so encompassed the Black-Jewish narrative in America. Focusing primarily on the 1960s and its aftermath, the book reveals how Jewish and African Americans view each other through a complex dialectic of identification and difference, channeled by ever-shifting positions within American society. Through the works of Richard Wright, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Amiri Baraka, Paule Marshall, Grace Paley, and others, Goffman unfolds a story of two peoples with powerful biblical and mythic connections that replay themselves in contemporary circumstances. In doing so, he uncovers layers of meaning in works that dramatize this turbulent, paradoxical relationship, and reveals how this relationship is paradigmatic of multicultural American self-invention.

Cedric Robinson

Cedric Robinson PDF Author: Joshua Myers
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509537937
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Cedric Robinson – political theorist, historian, and activist – was one of the greatest black radical thinkers of the twentieth century. In this powerful work, the first major book to tell his story, Joshua Myers shows how Robinson’s work interrogated the foundations of western political thought, modern capitalism, and changing meanings of race. Tracing the course of Robinson’s journey from his early days as an agitator in the 1960s to his publication of such seminal works as Black Marxism, Myers frames Robinson’s mission as aiming to understand and practice opposition to “the terms of order.” In so doing, Robinson excavated the Black Radical tradition as a form of resistance that imagined that life on wholly different terms was possible. In the era of Black Lives Matter, that resistance is as necessary as ever, and Robinson’s contribution only gains in importance. This book is essential reading for anyone wanting to learn more about it.