Free Download Yvon Grenier, "Culture and the Cuban State: Participation, Recognition, and Dissonance under Communism"
English | ISBN: 1498522238 | 2017 | 320 pages | PDF | 2 MB
Culture and the Cuban State examines the politics of culture in communist Cuba. It focuses on cultural policy, censorship, and the political participation of artists, writers and academics such as Tania Bruguera, Jesús Díaz, Rafael Hernández, Kcho, Reynier Leyva Novo, Leonardo Padura, and José Toirac. The cultural field is important for the reproduction of the regime in place, given its pretense and ambition to be eternally "revolutionary" and to lead a genuine "cultural revolution". Cultural actors must be mobilized and handled with care, given their presumed disposition to speak their mind and to cherish their autonomy. This book argues that cultural actors also seek recognition by the main (for a long time the only) sponsor and patron of the art in Cuba: the "curator state". The "curator state" is also a "gatekeeper state," arbitrarily and selectively opening and closing the space for public expression and for access to foreign currencies and the global market. The time when everything was either mandatory or forbidden is over in Cuba. The regime seems to have learned from egregious mistakes that led to a massive exodus of artists, writers and academics. In a country where things change so everything could stay the same, the controlled opening in the cultural field, playing on the actors' ambition and fear, illuminates a broader phenomenon: the evolving rules of the political game in the longest standing dictatorship of the hemisphere.

Free Download Howard L. Goodman, "Ts'ao P'i Transcendent: Political Culture and Dynasty-Founding in China at the End of the Han "
English | ISBN: 0966630009 | | 264 pages | EPUB | 1457 KB
Analyses the foundation of the San-kuo Wei Dynasty by Ts'ao P'I in 220 CE, using the main historical accounts, a wide range of religious and philosophical writings, epigraphical records, and above all, the records contained in the commentaries to Ch'en Shou's San-kuo chih by the fifth century writer P'ei Sung-chih.

Free Download Gabriel R. Ricci, "Travel, Tourism, and Identity: Culture & Civilization "
English | ISBN: 1412856760 | 2015 | 308 pages | EPUB | 2 MB
Travel, Tourism and Identity addresses the psychological and social adjustments that occur when people make contact with others outside their social, cultural, or linguistic groups. Whether such contact is the result of tourism, seeking exile, or relocating abroad, the volume's contributors demonstrate how one's identity, cultural assumptions, and worldview can be brought into question.

Free Download The Windmills of Humanity: On Culture and Surrealism in the Manipulated World By Ivan Sviták
2014 | 148 Pages | ISBN: 0882861271 | PDF | 4 MB
"The surrealists postulated that art should cease to be art, and they insisted that they were not artists and were not interested in art. According to their theory, the present phase of civilization (the phase of class societies) created the fundamental division between the human creator and the human user of art. Their great vision that "art will be made by all" was not (and is not) only a romantic illusion inherited from Hegel and the utopians. It is still a magnificent chal- lenge to the social conditions-both then and now-which led to the separation of art and life..." - Ivan Sviták, "Surrealism and Art"Philosopher and critic Ivan Sviták was among the leading Czech intellectuals during the lead-up to the "Prague Spring" of 1968, when tentative reforms by Communist Party leaders in Czechoslovakia sparked a mass movement for democratic socialism. By the time a Soviet-led invasion put an end to this movement and forced Sviták into exile, Sviták had influenced a generation of politicized youth with his works of Marxist humanist philosophy, social commentary, cultural critique, unconventional poetry, and satirical prose.This book's editor, Joseph Grim Feinberg, is a social theorist at the Philosophy Institute of the Czech Republic's Academy of Sciences and-like Sviták-has collaborated closely with surrealist groups in Chicago and Prague. Taking up Sviták's own, largely-unrealized proposals for publication, Grim Feinberg has collected Sviták's most provocative writing on aesthetic theory, interspersing it with a selection of Sviták's poetry and creative prose. In the resulting volume, Sviták explores the possibility of a world in which art will be "made by all," and he defends humanity's quixotic right to fight against old illusions so that new illusions might be born.

Free Download Privatising Culture: Corporate Art Intervention Since the 1980s By Chin-Tao Wu
2002 | 392 Pages | ISBN: 1859844723 | PDF | 20 MB
Chin-tao Wu offers a provocative contribution to the debate on public culture in Britain and America as she details the various ways in which business values and the free-market ethos have come to permeate the sphere of the visual arts since the 1980s. From Absolut Vodka's sponsorship of student art shows to BMW's logo on the banners advertising major art exhibitions, corporate sponsorship and business involvement in the visual arts have become increasingly common features of our cultural lives. Chin-tao Wu's book is the first concerted attempt to detail the various ways in which business values and the free-market ethos have come to permeate the sphere of the visual arts since the 1980s.It analyzes the role of government in injecting the principles of the free market into public arts agenciesin particular the Arts Council in Great Britain and the National Endowment for the Arts in the USA. It looks at the corporate take-over of art museums, highlighting the ways in which cultural capital can thereby be garnered by business elites; and it considers the ways in which corporations have succeeded in integrating themselves into the infrastructure of the art world itself by showcasing contemporary art in their own corporate premises.

Free Download Photofascism: Photography, Film, and Exhibition Culture in 1930s Germany and Italy (Visual Cultures and German Contexts) by Vanessa Rocco
English | December 24, 2020 | ISBN: 1501347063, 1350284246 | True PDF | 210 pages | 18.3 MB
Photography and fascism in interwar Europe developed into a highly toxic and combustible formula. Particularly in concert with aggressive display techniques, the European fascists were utterly convinced of their ability to use the medium of photography to manufacture consent among their publics. Unfortunately, as we know in hindsight, they succeeded. Other dictatorial regimes in the 1930s harnessed this powerful combination of photography and exhibitions for their own odious purposes. But this book, for the first time, focuses on the particularly consequential dialectic between Germany and Italy in the early-to-mid 1930s, and within each of those countries vis-à-vis display culture.

Free Download Learning Habits
by Nicholl, Sarah;
English | 2023 | ISBN: 1398609145 | 273 pages | True PDF EPUB | 17.2 MB

Free Download Simone Murray, "Introduction to Contemporary Print Culture"
English | ISBN: 0367338998 | 2020 | 246 pages | PDF | 10 MB
Introduction to Contemporary Print Culture examines the role of the book in the modern world. It considers the book's deeply intertwined relationships with other media through ownership structures, copyright and adaptation, the constantly shifting roles of authors, publishers and readers in the digital ecosystem and the merging of print and digital technologies in contemporary understandings of the book object.

Free Download Cracking the Culture Code: Leading Successful Culture Change by Kevin Brownsey
English | December 5, 2022 | ISBN: N/A | ASIN: B0BNQJ2J87 | 242 pages | EPUB | 2.00 Mb
Bringing about lasting culture change is the most powerful work you can do as a leader - but do you have the skills and commitment?

Free Download Contested Ecologies: Reimagining the Nature-Culture Divide in the Global South By Lesley Green (editor)
2013 | 277 Pages | ISBN: 0796924287 | PDF | 5 MB
Contested Ecologies: Reimagining the Nature-Culture Divide in the Global South offers an intervention in the conversations on ecology and on coloniality, and on the ways in which modern thinking, with its bifurcation of nature and culture, constitutes 'ecology' within a very particular politics of the cosmos. The chapters in this collection contest the framework of knowledge that has deadlocked nature and culture, tradition and modernity, scientific and indigenous and in doing so makes a case for the value of rethinking knowledge beyond the nature-culture divide.