Gary Indiana is one of America's leading cultural critics -- a public intellectual who has written key essays on every aspect of American culture. Utopia's Debris comprises selections of his very best work, revealing him to be an enormously acute, frequently scabrous, and always brilliant observer of the best and worst America has to offer. His writings range from popular culture -- trash novels, architectural wonders and horrors -- to appreciations of the best of modern literature, art, and cinema. They include his convincing (and highly entertaining) debunking of fashionable conspiracy theories, a spirited and contrarian defense of Bill Clinton's autobiography, a Mencken-like examination of the rise of Arnold Schwarzenegger and the politics of celebrity in what Indiana calls the Age of Contempt. A postmodern Emerson, Indiana wields scalpel-sharp wit and a fealty to logic on issues in which, all too often, irrationalism and emotionalism hold sway. At times rigorously serious, at other times whimsical, Indiana's most conspicuous feature is skepticism -- his wildly satirical contempt for conventional wisdom.

When the best of intentions take us down that well-known road, how can we survive the law of unintended consequences? An alien physicist, a lonely old woman, a space-faring maintenance worker, and others answer that question in these stories.

This compact, incisive study by a senior scholar explores two sources of violent conflict in India: religion and nationalism. Showing how the political aspects of religion and the ideological character of nationalism have led inexorably to struggle, Ainslie T. Embree argues that the tension between competing visions of the just society has determined the social and political life of India. In India, as elsewhere in the world at the end of the twentieth century, religions legitimized violence as people struggled for what they regarded as their legitimate claims upon the future. As examples of the tension between religious and nationalist visions of the good society, Embree examines two explosive cases—one involving Muslim-Hindu communal encounters, the other, the separatist movement of the Sikhs. Thought-provoking and searching, Utopias in Conflict should interest anyone concerned about fundamentalism, the problems of national integration, and politics and religion in the Third World. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1990.

Forges a new understanding of how these two Lusophone nations are connected. The closely entwined histories of Portugal and Brazil remain key references for understanding developments--past and present--in either country. Accordingly, Fernando Arenas considers Portugal and Brazil in relation to one another in this exploration of changing definitions of nationhood, subjectivity, and utopias in both cultures. Examining the two nations' shared language and histories as well as their cultural, social, and political points of divergence, Arenas pursues these definitive changes through the realms of literature, intellectual thought, popular culture, and political discourse. Both Brazil and Portugal are subject to the economic, political, and cultural forces of postmodern globalization. Arenas analyzes responses to these trends in contemporary writers including Jose Saramago, Caio Fernando Abreu, Maria Isabel Barreno, Vergilio Ferreira, Clarice Lispector, and Maria Gabriela Llansol. Ultimately, Utopias of Otherness shows how these writers have redefined the concept of nationhood, not only through their investment in utopian or emancipatory causes such as Marxist revolution, women's liberation, or sexual revolution but also by shifting their attention to alternative modes of conceiving the ethical and political realms.

The utopian visions of three of urban planning’s greatest visionaries. Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, hated the cities of their time with an overwhelming passion. The metropolis was the counter-image of their ideal cities, the hell that inspired their heavens. In this book Robert Fishman examines the utopian visions of three of urban planning’s greatest visionaries. Howard created the concept of the “garden city” where shops and cottages formed the center of a geometric pattern with farmland surrounding; Wright conceived of “Broadacre City,” the ultimate suburb, where the automobile was king; and Le Corbusier imagined “Ville Radieuse,” the city of cruciform skyscrapers set down in open parkland.

In the twentieth century, avant-garde artists from Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean created extraordinary and highly innovative paintings, sculptures, assemblages, mixed-media works, and installations. This innovative book presents more than 250 works by some seventy of these artists (including Gego, Joaquin Torres-Garcia, Xul Solar, and Jose Clemente Orozco) and artists' groups, along with interpretive essays by leading authorities and newly translated manifestoes and other theoretical documents written by the artists. Together the images and texts showcase the astonishing artistic achievements of the Latin American avant-garde. The book focuses on two decisive periods: the return from Europe in the 1920s of Latin American avant-garde pioneers; and the expansion of avant-garde activities throughout Latin America after World War II as artists expressed their independence from developments in Europe and the United States. As the authors explain, during these periods Latin American art was fueled by the belief that artistic creations could present a form of utopia - an inversion of the original premise that drove the European avant-garde - and serve as a model for

Revised and restructured, this second edition of Modern Art traces the historical and contemporary contexts for understanding modern art movements, and the theories that influenced and attempted to explain them. Its radical approach foregoes the chronological approach to art movements in favour of looking at the ways in which art has been understood. The editors investigate the main developments in art interpretation and draw examples from a wide range of genres including painting, sculpture, photography, installation and performance art. This second edition has been fully updated to include many more examples of recent art practice, as well as an expanded glossary and comprehensive marginal notes providing definitions of key terms. Extensively illustrated with a wide range of visual examples, Modern Art is the essential textbook for students of art history.

This textbook provides a comprehensive guide to modern and post-modern art. The authors bring together history, theory and the art works themselves to help students understand how and why art has developed during the 20th century.

Utopias is a megacity and the capital of the United Americas Continent. The year is 2199. The effects of climate change have brought human beings to the point of extinction. With the help of sentient androids created to fix the environment, humans, called Primes, have been sleeping in cryonic sleep chambers for 100 years waiting to wake up. That time has finally arrived with unexpected consequences. Utopias is the name of the great megacity that stretches from St. Louis to Chicago to Milwaukee and is the Capital of the United Americas Continent (UAC). There are only nineteen of these large megalopolises left in the UAC, which is comprised of the former countries of Canada, United States, Central America, South America and the Caribbean. Outside these megacities lie the Wilderness Areas where nature has finally been restored from global environmental disaster that nearly caused human extinction. It was not easy and it took thousands of sentient androids like Citizen Steven and Citizen Kendra to accomplish it. The year is 2199. It has been one hundred years since the remaining billion or so humans in the world have seen the light of day. They survived near extinction from the effects of climate change with the help of androids they created. The humans, called Primes, are still sleeping in millions of cryonic sleep chambers hidden in deep underground bunkers around the world waiting for the time when the world is healed enough to let them wake up. That time has arrived. During this time, the androids have become more human-like than even their creators had imagined. The androids live and work peacefully in the megacities and things are running smoothly until the militant humans that survived the Dark Years and live in the Wilderness Areas decide it’s time to take back control of the megacities and the country for themselves. Soon, the fighting with human militants in the Wilderness Areas escalates out of control and the whole country is at War. What looked so promising to the Primes upon waking up after one hundred years of cryosleep becomes a near nightmare as President Carlos tries to stop the war with the androids in the megacities and prepare for even bigger problems with the Primes now waking up across the seas in Eurasia. It seems creating the androids to fix the world’s environment to prevent human extinction is now the least of the Primes’ new problems.