books

London From Punk to Blair

REVISED SECOND EDITION

London from Punk to Blair is a rich portrait of Europe’s foremost capital. An array of contributors, including poets, journalists, teachers, historians, wanderers, drinkers, photographers, and foodies, offer a selection of personal and subjective readings of the city since the late ’70s. These essays chart a variety of literal and metaphorical explorations through modern and postmodern London, showing how it works, and how it fails to work; what makes it vibrant, and what makes it seedy. 

Harlem

In Harlem, Spivak engages with thirty-four photographs by photographer Alice Attie as she attempts teleopoiesis, a reaching toward the distant other through the empathetic power of the imagination. In the hands of Spivak,teleopoiesis is a kind of identity politics in which one disrupts identity as a result of migration or exile. For the last two decades, Spivak notes, Harlem has been the focus of major economic development. As the old Harlem disappears into a present that simultaneously demands and rejects a cultural essence, Spivak dwells in Attie’s images, trying to navigate some middle ground between the rock of social history and the hard place of a seamless culture.

Radio in Small Nations

Whether at a local, national, or international level, radio has played and continues to play a key role in nurturing or denying—even destroying—people’s sense of collective identity. The essays in this volume provide a historical and contemporary overview of radio in small nations. A number of representative small nations are featured: some grappling with new postcolonial identities and others still operating under repressive regimes; some struggling to find a new common purpose in the postindustrial age and others unifying previously ignored ethnic or language groups. As a whole, the collection strives to present diverse voices commenting on the influential and essential place of radio within these countries.