Stephen Duncombe: Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture (1997)
Filed under book | Tags: · alternative culture, alternative media, anarchism, counterculture, diy, magazine, publishing, zine culture
“In this comprehensive study of zine publishing, Stephen Duncombe explores the history and theory of subterranean cultural production. From their origins in early 20th century science fiction fandom, their more proximate roots in ‘60s counter-culture and their rapid proliferation in the wake of punk rock, Notes from Underground pays full due to the political importance of zines as a vital network of participatory culture, and analyzes how zines measure up to their utopian outlook in achieving fundamental social change. Packed with extracts and illustrations, Duncombe provides a critical overview of the contemporary underground in all its love and rage.”
Publisher Verso, London, 1997
Reprinted by Microcosm Publishing, Bloomington, IN, 2008
ISBN 9781934620373, 1934620378
256 pages
Reviews: Susan Larson (Arizona J Hispanic Cult Stud, 1998), Jason Kuscma (Other Voices, 1998), st (Social Anarchism, 1998).
Publisher (2017 edition)
WorldCat
Nicholas Thoburn: Anti-Book: On the Art and Politics of Radical Publishing (2014–) [EN, SC]
Filed under book | Tags: · alternative media, artists book, literary criticism, magazine, mass media, politics, print, publishing
“No, Anti-Book is not a book about books. Not exactly. And yet it is a must for anyone interested in the future of the book. Presenting what he terms “a communism of textual matter,” Nicholas Thoburn explores the encounter between political thought and experimental writing and publishing, shifting the politics of text from an exclusive concern with content and meaning to the media forms and social relations by which text is produced and consumed. Taking a “post-digital” approach in considering a wide array of textual media forms, Thoburn invites us to challenge the commodity form of books—to stop imagining books as transcendent intellectual, moral, and aesthetic goods unsullied by commerce. His critique is, instead, one immersed in the many materialities of text.
Anti-Book engages with an array of writing and publishing projects, including Antonin Artaud’s paper gris-gris, Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto, Guy Debord’s sandpaper-bound Mémoires, the collective novelist Wu Ming, and the digital/print hybrid of Mute magazine. Empirically grounded, it is also a major achievement in expressing a political philosophy of writing and publishing, where the materiality of text is interlaced with conceptual production. Each chapter investigates a different form of textual media in concert with a particular concept: the small-press pamphlet as “communist object,” the magazine as “diagrammatic publishing,” political books in the modes of “root” and “rhizome,” the “multiple single” of anonymous authorship, and myth as “unidentified narrative object.””
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2016
Cultural Critique Books series
ISBN 9780816621965, 0816621969
xvi+372 pages
Interview with author: Ron Hanson (White Fungus, 2020).
Reviews: Filipe Carreira da Silva (Contemporary Political Theory, 2017), Anthony Iles (Mute, 2018), Samuel A. Moore (Cultural Studies, 2018), Ola Ståhl (Parallax, 2018), Nick Thurston (Comparative Critical Studies, 2019), Martin Paul Eve (American Literature, 2019), Terrine M. Friday (Canadian Journal of Communication, 2019), Simone Murray (Left History, 2019).
Publisher (EN)
Publisher (SC)
WorldCat (EN)
Anti-knjiga: Materijalni tekst i političko izdavaštvo (Serbo-Croatian, 2014, 1 MB, added on 2017-5-2)
Anti-Book: On the Art and Politics of Radical Publishing (English, 2016, HTML; PDF, updated on 2019-7-2)
The 1980s: Today’s Beginnings? An Alternative View on the 80s (2016) [Dutch/English]
Filed under catalogue | Tags: · 1980s, activism, alternative culture, alternative media, art history
“The 1980s. Today’s Beginnings? explores the long 1980s from six European perspectives, examining the relevance of this trans- formative decade for today. Placing different contexts alongside one another, the exhibition aims to offer alternative views on the recent past by allowing multiple social and cultural voices to speak to one another. The project comprises a diverse mix of artworks, music,TV, graphic and archival material, exploring a wide set of socio-political themes through the lens of culture.”
Edited by Nick Aikens, Charles Esche, Diana Franssen
Publisher Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, and L’Internationale Online, 2016
15 pages
See also Osemdesata / The Eighties (2017).
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