Lisa Lowe: The Intimacies of Four Continents (2015)

“In this uniquely interdisciplinary work, Lisa Lowe examines the relationships between Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- centuries, exploring the links between colonialism, slavery, imperial trades and Western liberalism. Reading across archives, canons, and continents, Lowe connects the liberal narrative of freedom overcoming slavery to the expansion of Anglo-American empire, observing that abstract promises of freedom often obscure their embeddedness within colonial conditions. Race and social difference, Lowe contends, are enduring remainders of colonial processes through which “the human” is universalized and “freed” by liberal forms, while the peoples who create the conditions of possibility for that freedom are assimilated or forgotten. Analyzing the archive of liberalism alongside the colonial state archives from which it has been separated, Lowe offers new methods for interpreting the past, examining events well documented in archives, and those matters absent, whether actively suppressed or merely deemed insignificant. Lowe invents a mode of reading intimately, which defies accepted national boundaries and disrupts given chronologies, complicating our conceptions of history, politics, economics, and culture, and ultimately, knowledge itself.”

Publisher Duke University Press, Durham, NC, June 2015
ISBN 9780822358633, 0822358638
319 pages

Discussion: Gayatri Gopinath, Alyosha Goldstein, Moon-Ho Jung, Stephanie Smallwood (book roundtable at ASA Conference, Toronto, 2015, video).
Reviews: John Holmwood (Theory, Culture & Society, 2016), Betty Joseph (American Historical Review, 2016), Hossein Ayazi (Qui Parle, 2016), Michael Gaffney (Journal of American Studies, 2016), Adam Nemmers (Women’s Studies, 2016), Marion C. Rohrleitner (Pacific Historical Review, 2016), Lance Bertelsen (Modern Philology, 2017), Harrod J Suarez (Melus: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S., 2017), Jesse van Amelsvoort (Nexus Instituut, n.d.), Hadley Howes (Antipode, 2020).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF

Greil Marcus: Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (1989–) [EN, ES, TR]

“Greil Marcus began work on this book out of a fascination with the Sex Pistols: that scandalous antimusical group, invented in London in 1975 and dead within two years, which sparked the emergence of the culture called punk. “I am an antichrist!” shouted singer Johnny Rotten—where in the world of pop music did that come from? Looking for an answer, with a high sense of the drama of the journey, Marcus takes us down the dark paths of counterhistory, a route of blasphemy, adventure, and surprise.

This is no mere search for cultural antecedents. Instead, what Marcus so brilliantly shows is that various kinds of angry, absolute demands—demands on society, art, and all the governing structures of everyday life—seem to be coded in phrases, images, and actions passed on invisibly, but inevitably, by people quite unaware of each other. Marcus lets us hear strange yet familiar voices: of such heretics as the Brethren of the Free Spirit in medieval Europe and the Ranters in seventeenth-century England; the dadaists in Zurich in 1916 and Berlin in 1918, wearing death masks, chanting glossolalia; one Michel Mourre, who in 1950 took over Easter Mass at Notre-Dame to proclaim the death of God; the Lettrist International and the Situationist International, small groups of Paris—based artists and writers surrounding Guy Debord, who produced blank-screen films, prophetic graffiti, and perhaps the most provocative social criticism of the 1950s and ’60s; the rioting students and workers of May ’68, scrawling cryptic slogans on city walls and bringing France to a halt; the Sex Pistols in London, recording the savage “Anarchy in the U.K.” and “God Save the Queen.”

Although the Sex Pistols shape the beginning and the end of the story, Lipstick Traces is not a book about music; it is about a common voice, discovered and transmitted in many forms. Working from scores of previously unexamined and untranslated essays, manifestos, and filmscripts, from old photographs, dada sound poetry, punk songs, collages, and classic texts from Marx to Henri Lefebvre, Marcus takes us deep behind the acknowledged events of our era, into a hidden tradition of moments that would seem imaginary except for the fact that they are real: a tradition of shared utopias, solitary refusals, impossible demands, and unexplained disappearances. Written with grace and force, humor and an insistent sense of tragedy and danger, Lipstick Traces tells a story as disruptive and compelling as the century itself.”

Publisher The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge/MA, 1989
Twentieth Anniversary Edition, 2009
ISBN 0674034805, 9780674034808
496 pages
via missionsamurai

Radio interview with author (30 min, KCRW, 1989)
Interview with author (Simon Reynolds, Los Angeles Review of Books, 2012)

Reviews: Simon Reynolds (Melody Maker, 1989), Jerome McGann (London Review of Books, 1989), Jon Erickson (Discourse, 1989-1990), Steve Redhead (Popular Music, 1990), Libero Andreotti (J Architectural Education, 1996).

Wikipedia
Publisher
WorldCat

Lipstick Traces (English, 1989/2009, EPUB, 5 MB)
Rastros de carmín. Una historia secreta del siglo XX (Spanish, trans. Damián Alou, 1993, 13 MB)
Ruj Lekesi: Yirminci Yüzyılın Gizli Tarihi (Turkish, trans. Gürol Koca, 1999, 29 MB)

J. P. Nettl: Rosa Luxemburg, Vol. 1 (1966)

The first of 2 volumes of the leading biography of the Marxist theorist, philosopher, economist and revolutionary socialist. Covers the period until 1911.

Publisher Oxford University Press, 1966
450 pages
via Hyeonwoo Kim

Review (Hannah Arendt, The New York Review of Books, 1966)
Review (Robert H. McNeal, The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, 1966)

PDF (17 MB, no OCR)
For a chronology of her life see the exhibition brochure produced by Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung (DE, EN, FR, TR, ES, VN).