Frank Webster (ed.): Culture and Politics in the Information Age: A New Politics? (2001)

This volume addresses these key issues through an analysis of important theoretical debates on issues such as digital democracy, cultural politics and transnational communities. Featuring contributors from both sides of the Atlantic, the book contains a series of case studies on new social movements including campaigns on the environment, gender, animal rights and human rights. It combines cutting edge research with theoretical material and makes an important contribution to this highly topical and rapidly growing area.

Publisher Routledge, 2001
ISBN 0415246369, 9780415246361
Length 231 pages

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Jane F. Fulcher: French Cultural Politics and Music: From the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War (1999)

This book draws upon both musicology and cultural history to argue that French musical meanings and values from 1898 to 1914 are best explained not in terms of contemporary artistic movements but of the political culture.

During these years, France was undergoing many subtle yet profound political changes. Nationalist leagues forged new modes of political activity, as Jane F. Fulcher details in this important study, and thus the whole playing field of political action was enlarged. Investigating this transitional period in light of several recent insights in the areas of French history, sociology, political anthropology, and literary theory, Fulcher shows how the new departures in cultural politics affected not only literature and the visual arts but also music. Having lost the battle of the Dreyfus affair (legally, at least), the nationalists set their sights on the art world, for they considered France’s artistic achievements the ideal means for furthering their conception of “French identity.” French Cultural Politics and Music: From the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War illustrates the ways in which the nationalists effectively targeted the music world for this purpose, employing critics, educational institutions, concert series, and lectures to disseminate their values by way of public and private discourses on French music. Fulcher then demonstrates how both the Republic and far Left responded to this challenge, using programs and institutions of their own to launch counterdiscourses on contemporary musical values.

Perhaps most importantly, this book fully explores the widespread influence of this politicized musical culture on such composers as d’Indy, Charpentier, Magnard, Debussy, and Satie. By viewing this fertile cultural milieu of clashing sociopolitical convictions against the broader background of aesthetic rivalry and opposition, this work addresses the changing notions of “tradition” in music–and of modernism itself. As Fulcher points out, it was the traditionalist faction, not the Impressionist one, that eventually triumphed in the French musical realm, as witnessed by their “defeat” of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.

Publisher Oxford University Press US, 1999
ISBN 0195120213, 9780195120219
291 pages

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Michel de Certeau: The Practice of Everyday Life, 2 vols. (1980–) [EN, PT, ES, CR]

Michel de Certeau considers the uses to which social representation and modes of social behavior are put by individuals and groups, describing the tactics available to the common man for reclaiming his own autonomy from the all-pervasive forces of commerce, politics, and culture. In exploring the public meaning of ingeniously defended private meanings, de Certeau draws brilliantly on an immense theoretical literature in analytic philosophy, linguistics, sociology, semiology, and anthropology–to speak of an apposite use of imaginative literature.

This social history of “making do” is based on microhistories that move from the private sphere (of dwelling, cooking, and homemaking) to the public (the experience of living in a neighborhood). The second volume of this magnum opus delves even deeper than did the first into the subtle tactics of resistance and private practices that make living a subversive art.

French edition
L’invention du quotidien, I, arts de faire, Gallimard, 1980
L’invention du quotidien, II, habiter, cuisiner, Gallimard, 1994

English edition
Translated by Steven Rendall
Publisher University of California Press, 1984
ISBN 0520236998, 9780520236998
229 pages

English edition, Volume 2: Living & Cooking
With Luce Giard and Pierre Mayol
Translated by Timothy J. Tomasik
University of Minnesota Press, 1998
ISBN 0816628777, 9780816628773
292 pages

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The Practice of Everyday Life (English, trans. Steven Rendall, 1984, updated on 2013-9-28)
The Practice of Everyday Life, Vol. 2: Living and Cooking (English, trans. Timothy J. Tomasik, 1998, added on 2013-9-28)
A invenção do cotidiano (Portuguese, trans. Ephraim Ferreira Alves, Third edition, 1998, added on 2013-9-28)
La invención de lo cotidiano. 1 Artes de hacer (Spanish, trans. Alejandro Pescador, 2000, added on 2013-9-28)
La invención de lo cotidiano. 2 Habitar, cocinar (Spanish, trans. Alejandro Pescador, 1999, added on 2013-9-28)
Invencija svakodnevnice (Croatian, trans. Gordana Popovic, 2002, added on 2013-9-28)