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4 Communes, hostels and barracks H ousing cooperatives could function as a first step in communal living, but they did not necessarily require their members to live communally. This was not the case with communes, hostels and barracks. Whether or not they wanted to live communally, their residents had little choice in the matter. In this chapter we will explore the various forms of communal housing which existed in Soviet cities in the 1920s, looking both at how they were portrayed in the literature and, as far as we can determine, how they were actually
Charles Robert Maturin's first novel, Fatal revenge, fundamentally pivots on the return of the dead. For Maturin's readers, Fatal revenge's insistent emphasis on the incestuousness of genders and genres may well have appeared particularly striking in the context of the contemporary Irish social and political scene. Maturin's The Milesian chief is identified as the transition point between the national tale and the historical novel as well as that between the national tale and the Gothic novel of the later nineteenth century. Fatal revenge acts as a primary literary juncture. In fact, it might be analysed usefully as a medium between Gothic novel and national tale, possessing elements of both. Fatal revenge vitally mixes the two, and, in so doing, stresses the fundamental importance of a Gothic sense of the past in the national tale.
William Burroughs’ texts provide us with one of the most self-conscious of guides through an addicted world which is violently dislocated from linear time, while at the same time undermining the reliability of such a guide. In this Gothicised world we cannot trust the account of the addict; but this also implies that we cannot trust ourselves in the moment of addiction to reading. While we are secretly communing with the texts, we are also liable to ‘forget’, or to ignore, the outer parameters which comprise the moral universe; we are freed but, paradoxically, we find difficulty in reporting the content of this freedom. Here we find an essential link, which can also be found across Gothic fiction, to the notion of ‘psychotic rapture’, and a dislocation between the force of the messages ‘broadcast’; to us from the outside and the alignment of these messages with the counterforce of the world of experience.
, such as military and government officials, while the research team established an office in Butare as a base for conducting local-level research. The team, which I joined in late 1995, focused on case studies of three local communities – the university town and regional capital Butare; Nyakizu, a commune south of Butare, along the Burundi border; and Musebeya, a commune in the neighbouring region of Gikongoro. We interviewed a range of individuals from each of the communities, including some in prison on genocide charges and many survivors of the genocide. We also
a battlefield – and hence the distinction between combatants and non-combatants, between front and rear – had disappeared. And though Henry Dunant, an admirer of Napoleon III, was in Paris when the regular French army crushed the Paris Commune during Semaine Sanglante (21–28 May 1871), he barely mentioned it in his writings – the man who had been shocked by the carnage in Solferino. Selective indignation has a long history! The final third of the
This book explores contemporary urban experiences connected to practices of sharing and collaboration. Part of a growing discussion on the cultural meaning and the politics of urban commons, it uses examples from Europe and Latin America to support the view that a world of mutual support and urban solidarity is emerging today in, against, and beyond existing societies of inequality. In such a world, people experience the potentialities of emancipation activated by concrete forms of space commoning. By focusing on concrete collective experiences of urban space appropriation and participatory design experiments this book traces differing, but potentially compatible, trajectories through which common space (or space-as-commons) becomes an important factor in social change. In the everydayness of self-organized neighborhoods, in the struggles for justice in occupied public spaces, in the emergence of “territories in resistance,” and in dissident artistic practices of collaborative creation, collective inventiveness produces fragments of an emancipated society.
opposite sides of a major republican divide: Delescluze became a leader of the revolutionary Paris Commune that challenged the Government of National Defence and he died on the barricades. Laurent-Pichat, despite his criticisms of that government, could not accept insurrection. Remarkably, the two friends’ respect and sympathy for each other survived the breakdown of their political alliance
called the government of the Commune’, whilst Trochu and his cabinet bristled indignantly under lock and key in the adjoining chamber. This evocation of the mystical ‘Commune’ – another call-back to the French Revolution – was the first sign, as the Rothschild’s spy put it, that Blanqui’s group ‘of some 12,000 vagabonds, capable of anything’ was not a rabble that had dragged itself wine-sodden from the bowels of the red clubs. Rather, they were an organised and armed force ‘that will become dangerous if not checked
From commune to signoria , from independence to subjection The Italian communes of the thirteenth century have been celebrated for their recreation of the institutions and methods of ancient democracy. Political participation was widened beyond the families of a narrow élite. Appointment to executive boards and committees was based