Fast Cars, Clean Bodies

Fast Cars, Clean Bodies PDF Author: Kristin Ross
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262680912
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Fast Cars, Clean Bodies examines the crucial decade from Dien Bien Phu to the mid-1960s when France shifted rapidly from an agrarian, insular, and empire-oriented society to a decolonized, Americanized, and fully industrial one. In this analysis of a startling cultural transformation Kristin Ross finds the contradictions of the period embedded in its various commodities and cultural artifacts—automobiles, washing machines, women's magazines, film, popular fiction, even structuralism—as well as in the practices that shape, determine, and delimit their uses. In each of the book's four chapters, a central object of mythical image is refracted across a range of discursive and material spaces: social and private, textual and cinematic, national and international. The automobile, the new cult of cleanliness in the capital and the colonies, the waning of Sartre and de Beauvoir as the couple of national attention, and the emergence of reshaped, functionalist masculinities (revolutionary, corporate, and structural) become the key elements in this prehistory of postmodernism in France. Modernization ideology, Ross argues, offered the promise of limitless, even timeless, development. By situating the rise of "end of history" ideologies within the context of France's transition into mass culture and consumption, Ross returns the touted timelessness of modernization to history. She shows how the realist fiction and film of the period, as well as the work of social theorists such as Barthes, Lefebvre, and Morin who began at the time to conceptualize "everyday life," laid bare the disruptions and the social costs of events. And she argues that the logic of the racism prevalent in France today, focused on the figure of the immigrant worker, is itself the outcome of the French state's embrace of capitalist modernization ideology in the 1950s and 1960s.

Fast Cars, Clean Bodies

Fast Cars, Clean Bodies PDF Author: Kristin Ross
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262680912
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

Get Book Here

Book Description
Fast Cars, Clean Bodies examines the crucial decade from Dien Bien Phu to the mid-1960s when France shifted rapidly from an agrarian, insular, and empire-oriented society to a decolonized, Americanized, and fully industrial one. In this analysis of a startling cultural transformation Kristin Ross finds the contradictions of the period embedded in its various commodities and cultural artifacts—automobiles, washing machines, women's magazines, film, popular fiction, even structuralism—as well as in the practices that shape, determine, and delimit their uses. In each of the book's four chapters, a central object of mythical image is refracted across a range of discursive and material spaces: social and private, textual and cinematic, national and international. The automobile, the new cult of cleanliness in the capital and the colonies, the waning of Sartre and de Beauvoir as the couple of national attention, and the emergence of reshaped, functionalist masculinities (revolutionary, corporate, and structural) become the key elements in this prehistory of postmodernism in France. Modernization ideology, Ross argues, offered the promise of limitless, even timeless, development. By situating the rise of "end of history" ideologies within the context of France's transition into mass culture and consumption, Ross returns the touted timelessness of modernization to history. She shows how the realist fiction and film of the period, as well as the work of social theorists such as Barthes, Lefebvre, and Morin who began at the time to conceptualize "everyday life," laid bare the disruptions and the social costs of events. And she argues that the logic of the racism prevalent in France today, focused on the figure of the immigrant worker, is itself the outcome of the French state's embrace of capitalist modernization ideology in the 1950s and 1960s.

Fast Cars, Clean Bodies. Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture

Fast Cars, Clean Bodies. Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture PDF Author: Kristin Ross
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


May '68 and Its Afterlives

May '68 and Its Afterlives PDF Author: Kristin Ross
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226728005
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
During May 1968, students and workers in France united in the biggest strike and the largest mass movement in French history. Protesting capitalism, American imperialism, and Gaullism, 9 million people from all walks of life, from shipbuilders to department store clerks, stopped working. The nation was paralyzed—no sector of the workplace was untouched. Yet, just thirty years later, the mainstream image of May '68 in France has become that of a mellow youth revolt, a cultural transformation stripped of its violence and profound sociopolitical implications. Kristin Ross shows how the current official memory of May '68 came to serve a political agenda antithetical to the movement's aspirations. She examines the roles played by sociologists, repentant ex-student leaders, and the mainstream media in giving what was a political event a predominantly cultural and ethical meaning. Recovering the political language of May '68 through the tracts, pamphlets, and documentary film footage of the era, Ross reveals how the original movement, concerned above all with the question of equality, gained a new and counterfeit history, one that erased police violence and the deaths of participants, removed workers from the picture, and eliminated all traces of anti-Americanism, anti-imperialism, and the influences of Algeria and Vietnam. May '68 and Its Afterlives is especially timely given the rise of a new mass political movement opposing global capitalism, from labor strikes and anti-McDonald's protests in France to the demonstrations against the World Trade Organization in Seattle.

Masculine Singular

Masculine Singular PDF Author: Geneviève Sellier
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822388979
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Masculine Singular is an original interpretation of French New Wave cinema by one of France’s leading feminist film scholars. While most criticism of the New Wave has concentrated on the filmmakers and their films, Geneviève Sellier focuses on the social and cultural turbulence of the cinema’s formative years, from 1957 to 1962. The New Wave filmmakers were members of a young generation emerging on the French cultural scene, eager to acquire sexual and economic freedom. Almost all of them were men, and they “wrote” in the masculine first-person singular, often using male protagonists as stand-ins for themselves. In their films, they explored relations between men and women, and they expressed ambivalence about the new liberated woman. Sellier argues that gender relations and the construction of sexual identities were the primary subject of New Wave cinema. Sellier draws on sociological surveys, box office data, and popular magazines of the period, as well as analyses of specific New Wave films. She examines the development of the New Wave movement, its sociocultural and economic context, and the popular and critical reception of such well-known films as Jules et Jim and Hiroshima mon amour. In light of the filmmakers’ focus on gender relations, Sellier reflects on the careers of New Wave’s iconic female stars, including Jeanne Moreau and Brigitte Bardot. Sellier’s thorough exploration of early New Wave cinema culminates in her contention that its principal legacy—the triumph of a certain kind of cinephilic discourse and of an “auteur theory” recognizing the director as artist—came at a steep price: creativity was reduced to a formalist game, and affirmation of New Wave cinema’s modernity was accompanied by an association of creativity with masculinity.

The Emergence of Social Space

The Emergence of Social Space PDF Author: Kristin Ross
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1789603714
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
The 1870s in France - Rimbaud's moment, and the subject of this book - is a decade virtually ignored in most standard histories in France. Yet it was the moment of two significant spatial events: France's expansion on a global scale, and, in the spring of 1871, the brief existence on the Paris Commune - the construction of the revolutionary urban space. Arguing that space, as a social fact, is always political and strategic, Kristin Ross has written a book that is at once a history and geography of the Commune's anarchist culture - its political language and social relations, its values, strategies, and stances. Central to her analysis of the Commune as a social space and oppositional culture is a close textual reading of Arthur Rimabaud's poetry. His poems - a common thread running through the book - are one set of documents among many in Ross's recreation of the Communard experience. Rimbaud, Paul Lafargue, and the social geographer lise Reclus serve as emblematic figures moving within and on the periphery of the Commune; in their resistance to the logic and economy of the capitalist conception of work, in their challenge to work itself as a term of identity, all three posed a threat to the existing order. Ross looks at these and other emancipatory notions as aspects of Communard life, each with an analogous strategy in Rimbaud's poetry. Applying contemporary theory, to a wealth of little-known archival material, she has written a fresh, persuasive, and original book.

Communal Luxury

Communal Luxury PDF Author: Kristin Ross
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1784780545
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
Reclaiming the legacy of the Paris Commune for the twenty-first century Kristin Ross’s highly acclaimed work on the thought and culture of the Communard uprising of 1871 resonates with the motivations and actions of contemporary protest, which has found its most powerful expression in the reclamation of public space. Today’s concerns—internationalism, education, the future of labor, the status of art, and ecological theory and practice—frame and inform her carefully researched restaging of the words and actions of individual Communards. This original analysis of an event and its centrifugal effects brings to life the workers in Paris who became revolutionaries, the significance they attributed to their struggle, and the elaboration and continuation of their thought in the encounters that transpired between the insurrection’s survivors and supporters like Marx, Kropotkin, and William Morris. The Paris Commune was a laboratory of political invention, important simply and above all for, as Marx reminds us, its own “working existence.” Communal Luxury allows readers to revisit the intricate workings of an extraordinary experiment.

Anti-Americanism

Anti-Americanism PDF Author: Andrew Ross
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814775667
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
Ever since George Washington warned against "foreign entanglements" in his 1796 farewell speech, the United States has wrestled with how to act toward other countries. Consequently, the history of anti-Americanism is as long and varied as the history of the United States. In this multidisciplinary collection, seventeen leading thinkers provide substance and depth to the recent outburst of fast talk on the topic of anti-Americanism by analyzing its history and currency in five key global regions: the Middle East, Latin America, Europe, East Asia, and the United States. The commentary draws from social science as well as the humanities for an in-depth study of anti-American opinion and sentiment in different cultures. The questions raised by these essays force us to explore the new ways America must interact with the world after 9/11 and the war against Iraq. Contributors: Greg Grandin, Mary Louise Pratt, Ana Maria Dopico, George Yudice, Timothy Mitchell, Ella Shohat, Mary Nolan, Patrick Deer, Vangelis Calotychos, Harry Harootunian, Hyun Ok Park, Rebecca E. Karl, Moss Roberts, Linda Gordon, and John Kuo Wei Tchen.

Toxin Toxout

Toxin Toxout PDF Author: Bruce Lourie
Publisher: Univ. of Queensland Press
ISBN: 0702252530
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 355

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Book Description
From the authors of the bestselling Slow Death by Rubber Duck comes Toxin Toxout: Getting Harmful Chemicals Out of Our Bodies and Our World. Yes, the Rubber Duck boys are back and, after showing us all the ways that toxins get in our bodies, now they give us a guide for scrubbing those toxins out.Following the runaway success of their first book, two of the world's leading environmental activists give practical and often surprising advice for removing toxic chemicals from our bodies and homes. There are over 80,000 synthetic chemicals in commerce today, including hormone-disrupting phthalates and parabens, cancer-causing pesticides, heavy metals and air pollutants. Rick Smith and Bruce Lourie use their outrageous experiments (on themselves and their brave volunteers) to prove how easily our bodies absorb these chemicals from the foods we eat, the air we breathe, and the products we smear on our skin &– day after day. Then they give us the good news about what is in our control and the steps we can take for reducing our toxic burden. They investigate the truth behind organic foods, which detox methods actually work, if indoor air quality is improving, and how we dispose of waste (where do those chemicals go?). The result is nothing short of a must-read prescription for a healthier life.

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers PDF Author: Mary Roach
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393324826
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
A look inside the world of forensics examines the use of human cadavers in a wide range of endeavors, including research into new surgical procedures, space exploration, and a Tennessee human decay research facility.

Motion Performance

Motion Performance PDF Author: Martyn L. Schorr
Publisher: Motorbooks
ISBN: 9780760355602
Category : Transportation
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Motion Performance is the fully illustrated, inside story of the 60's shop that turned off the assembly line muscle cars into fire breathing performance monsters. Motion Performance tells the inside story of how American muscle cars came to dominate every element of the open road. Brilliantly illustrated with period pictures and modern color photos, the book takes you along for the ride as Cobras, Chevrolets, Oldsmobiles, even Volkswagen Beetles roll into the shop to get torn down and rebuilt into cars unbeatable on the streets and drag strips. Marty Schorr gives a first-hand account of seven years of high-performance life--and of how it all came to a screeching halt at the hands of the U.S. Department of Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency. A once-in-a-lifetime tale of power and speed, told by one of the principals who put that performance within reach, Motion Performance makes the story of a briefly and thrillingly lived dream available to everyone.