Andreas Huyssen

This book analyzes the relation of public memory to history, forgetting, and selective memory in three late-twentieth-century cities that have confronted major social or political traumas—Berlin, Buenos Aires, and New York.

Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory

Present Pasts

Nancy Princenthal

Carlos Basualdo

Doris Salcedo

A contemplation of the renowned Colombian artist's uncanny sculptural works.

William Kentridge

Nalini Malani

Presents a catalog of an exhibition offering a comparison of the works of William Kentridge and Nalini Malani and their use of shadow play.

The Shadow Play as Medium of Memory

William Kentridge, Nalini Malani

As we are approaching our fin de siecle, issues of time and memory haunt contemporary culture. Museums and memorials are being constructed rapidly, as if there were no tomorrow. Contemporary art and literature focuses on memory and the past, rather than claiming radical breakthroughs into some unknown future. With the recent resurgence of nationalism and issues of national identity, the political future, too, seems to fold itself back into the past rather than offering a bold vision of the 21st century. The great paradox of our fin de siecle culture is that novelity is even more associated with memory and the past rather than future expectation. But if the obsession with memory is one salient symptom in this age of a modernity grown old, then cultural and political amnesia is undoubtedly its counterpoint. Rather than blaming amnesia on television or the school, Twilight Memories argues that the danger of amnesia is inherent in the information revolution. Our obsessions withcultural memory can be read as re-representing a powerful reaction against the electronic archive and they mark a shift in the way we live structures of temporality. In this book, the media are the hidden veil through which the author looks at the problem of cultural memory and an emerging new sensibility of temporality in literature, art, politics, media theory and the museum.

Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia

Twilight Memories

David Bathrick

Revisions of German Modernism

Modernity and the Text

Andreas Huyssen explores the history and theory of metropolitan miniatures—short prose pieces about urban life written for European newspapers. His fine-grained readings open vistas into German critical theory and the visual arts, revealing the miniature to be one of the few genuinely innovative modes of spatialized writing created by modernism.

Miniature Metropolis

Arjun Appadurai

Payal Kapadia

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev

Johan Pijnappel

One of India's most influential contemporary artists, Nalini Malani (born 1946) creates paintings, wall drawings, theatrical works, video and shadow plays. Inherited iconographies and cherished cultural stereotypes are challenged from a contemporary urban, internationalist point of view. This catalogue accompanies her show at Documenta 13.

In Search of Vanished Blood

As we are approaching our fin de sielce, issues of time and memory haunt contemporary culture. Musuems and memorials are being constructed rapidly, as if there were no tomorrow. Contemporary art and literature focuses on memory and the past, rather than claiming radical breakthroughs into some unknown future. With the recent resurgence of nationalism and issues of national identity, the political future, too, seems to fold itself back into the past rather than offering a bold vision of the 21st century. The great paradox of our fin de siecle culture is that novelity is even more associated with memory and the past rather than future expectation. But if the obsession with memory is one salient symptom in this age of a modernity grown old, then cultural and political amnesia is undoubtedly its counterpoint. Rather than blaming amnesia on television or the school, Twilight Memories argues that the danger of amnesia is inherent in the information revolution. Our obsessions withcultural memory can be read as re-representing a powerful reaction against the electronic archive and they mark a shift in the way we live structures of temporality. In this book, the media are the hidden veil through which the author looks at the problem of cultural memory and an emerging new sensibility of temporality in literature, art, politics, media theory and the museum.

Douglas Kahn

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Whitney Museum of American Art

Elizabeth Armstrong

Owen F. Smith

Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago, Ill.)

Walker Art Center

Kristine Stiles

Simon Anderson

Bruce Jenkins

Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus, Ohio)

Fundació Antoni Tàpies (Barcelona)

Published on the Occasion of the Exhibition ...

In the Spirit of Fluxus

The study of Austrian and German modernist literature has a long and venerable history in this country. There have been no attempts yet, however, to reassess German and Austrian literary modernism in light of current discussion of modernity and postmodernity. Addressing a set of historical and theoretical questions central to current reevaluations of modernism, this volume presents American readers with a state-of-the-art account of German modernism studies in the eighties. Essays by Jochen Schulte-Sasse, Russell A. Berman, Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Judith Ryan, Mark Anderson, Klaus R. Scherpe, Biddy Martin, Klaus L. Berghahn and Acbar Abbas, center around German and Austrian literary and philosophical prose of the early twentieth century. texts by well-known authors -Kafka, Rilke, Musil, Doblin, Benjamin, Benn, and Junger - and less well-known ones -Franz Jung, Carl Einstein, Ernst Bloch, Lou Andreas-Salome, are examined. Particular attention is paid to the processes and strategies by which certain experiences of "modern life" are translated into modern aesthetic forms. The unique contribution of this volume is that it combines theory with an attempt to reintroduce an historical and contextual dimension. The authors believe that their revisions of Ausrian and German modernism will themselves be informed by a new set of questions pertinent to the modernist debate.

Other Cities, Other Worlds brings together leading scholars of cultural theory, urban studies, art, anthropology, literature, film, architecture, and history to look at non-Western global cities. The contributors focus on urban imaginaries, the ways that city dwellers perceive or imagine their own cities. Paying particular attention to the historical and cultural dimensions of urban life, they bring to their essays deep knowledge of the cities they are bound to in their lives and their work. Taken together, these essays allow us to compare metropolises from the so-called periphery and gauge processes of cultural globalization, illuminating the complexities at stake as we try to imagine other cities and other worlds under the spell of globalization. The effects of global processes such as the growth of transnational corporations and investment, the weakening of state sovereignty, increasing poverty, and the privatization of previously public services are described and analyzed in essays by Teresa P. R. Caldeira (São Paulo), Beatriz Sarlo (Buenos Aires), Néstor García Canclini (Mexico City), Farha Ghannam (Cairo), Gyan Prakash (Mumbai), and Yingjin Zhang (Beijing). Considering Johannesburg, the architect Hilton Judin takes on themes addressed by other contributors as well: the relation between the country and the city, and between racial imaginaries and the fear of urban violence. Rahul Mehrotra writes of the transitory, improvisational nature of the Indian bazaar city, while AbdouMaliq Simone sees a new urbanism of fragmentation and risk emerging in Douala, Cameroon. In a broader comparative frame, Okwui Enwezor reflects on the proliferation of biennales of contemporary art in African, Asian, and Latin American cities, and Ackbar Abbas considers the rise of fake commodity production in China. The volume closes with the novelist Orhan Pamuk’s meditation on his native city of Istanbul. Contributors: Ackbar Abbas, Teresa P. R. Caldeira, Néstor García Canclini, Okwui Enwezor, Farha Ghannam, Andreas Huyssen, Hilton Judin, Rahul Mehrotra, Orhan Pamuk, Gyan Prakash, Beatriz Sarlo, AbdouMaliq Simone, Yingjin Zhang

Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing Age

Other Cities, Other Worlds

"One of the most comprehensive and intelligent postmodern critics of art and literature, Huyssen collects here a series of his essays on pomo . . . " --Village Voice Literary Supplement " . . . his work remains alert to the problematic relationship obtaining between marxisms and poststructuralisms." --American Literary History " . . . challenging and astute." --World Literature Today "Huyssen's level-headed account of this controversial constellation of critical voices brings welcome clarification to today's murky haze of cultural discussion and proves definitively that commentary from the tradition of the German Left has an indispensable role to play in contemporary criticism." --The German Quarterly " . . . we will certainly have, after reading this book, a deeper understanding of the forces that have led up to the present and of the possibilities still open to us." --Critical Texts " . . . a rich, multifaceted study." --The Year's Work in English Studies Huyssen argues that postmodernism cannot be regarded as a radical break with the past, as it is deeply indebted to that other trend within the culture of modernity--the historical avant-garde.

Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism

After the Great Divide

In this new collection of essays on memory and amnesia in the postmodern world, cultural critic Andreas Huyssen considers how nationalism, literature, art, politics, and the media are obsessed with the past. The great paradox of our fin-de-siecle culture is that novelty is even more associated with memory than with future expectation. Drawing heavily on the dilemmas of contemporary Germany, Huyssen's discussion of cultural memory illustrates the nature of contemporary nationalism, the work of such artists and thinkers as Anselm Kiefer, Alexander Kluge, and Jean Baudrillard, and many others. The book includes illustrations from contemporary Germany.

Andreas Huyssen

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