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this endeavour she built on the legacy of the underground press, which had sprung up in London during the 1960s, to document and contribute to the emerging counterculture. For the pioneers of the 1960s, creating underground publications had entailed an active choice to foster culture in opposition or as an alternative to dominant society. However, despite the sense of egalitarianism that accompanied the cultural expansion of the time, the underground press was also notably elite; produced by a host of well-connected (often Oxbridge) graduates and successful
Best known for her work with punk provocateurs Crass, Gee Vaucher (b. 1945) is widely acknowledged for the idiosyncratic and powerful images that have played a decisive role in shaping alternative culture over the last fifty years. This is the first book to critically assess an extensive range of her work, situating it in a lineage from early twentieth-century avant-garde art movements through the counterculture and punk and on to contemporary street art. It provides a fascinating insight into social and cultural history from a vital but hitherto marginalised perspective. While Vaucher rejects all ‘isms’, her work offers a unique perspective within the history of feminist art. The book explores how her experience has shaped this perspective, with particular focus on the anarchistic, open house collective at Dial House.
ideas of The Situationist International (SI), 1957–72, also permeated various libertarian movements during this period, and they were widely accredited with providing the spur for action during Paris ‘68. It is worth noting that their ideas were not well known in British society at the time, and were only translated into English during the 1970s. 17 However, their outlook permeated the counterculture in Britain to some extent via word of mouth and underground press publications such as International Times (1966), Oz
, such as slowdowns and work-to-rule tactics pioneered at the turn of the twentieth century by the IWW and other worker groups. Instead, along with agitational activities, including numerous protests during the second half of the 1960s – in particular at the Democratic National Convention in central Chicago in August 1968 – the group deployed a combination of creative resistance tactics to effect cultural sabotage on a day-to-day basis. 13 These included the use of new and affordable technologies in the underground press and
people of Smolensk are Slavic and Indo-European; whereas all the others, Muscovites and Cossacks, are Turanians with an admixture of Kirgizian blood. 26 The January Uprising was both a military and a discursive phenomenon. Underground press publications were widely available in Polish towns while the National Government, the supreme underground authority during the uprising, invested money and
subversion (as expressed via the underground press), and attacking bastions of societal control, was seen again in punk. Rather than a complete repudiation of the 1960s, punk can in many ways be seen as a reconnection with its radicalism. Punk also provided a space in which women could make a decisive impact. The rock music world of the 1960s overwhelmingly saw women as sex objects and/or foils for its male stars. Punk women often refused to passively subscribe to such roles. Female writers, including Jane Suck ( Sounds ), Julie Burchill ( NME ) and
Ripped, torn and cut offers a collection of original essays exploring the motivations behind – and the politics within – the multitude of fanzines that emerged in the wake of British punk from 1976. Sniffin’ Glue (1976–77), Mark Perry’s iconic punk fanzine, was but the first of many, paving the way for hundreds of home-made magazines to be cut and pasted in bedrooms across the UK. From these, glimpses into provincial cultures, teenage style wars and formative political ideas may be gleaned. An alternative history, away from the often-condescending glare of London’s media and music industry, can be formulated, drawn from such titles as Ripped & Torn, Brass Lip, City Fun, Vague, Kill Your Pet Puppy, Toxic Grafity, Hungry Beat and Hard as Nails. Here, in a pre-internet world, we see the development of networks and the dissemination of punk’s cultural impact as it fractured into myriad sub-scenes: industrial, post-punk, anarcho, Oi!, indie, goth. Ripped, torn and cut brings together academic analysis with practitioner accounts to forge a collaborative history ‘from below’. The first book of its kind, this collection reveals the contested nature of punk’s cultural politics by turning the pages of a vibrant underground press.
In the early 2000s, the Internet, the blogosphere and new online medias were said to have recreated and expanded the countercultural political uprisings of the late 1960s. The radicalism of the underground press, equality, anti-war and anti-colonial movements never quite managed the translate their counter-hegemonic activism into a dynamic restructuring of politics in the West. However, academics and activists saw potential in the Internet to offer a space with which to counter the narratives of political elites, capitalism, globalisation and the domination of western corporations. In Ireland, a group of writers, led by former republican prisoners, developed an activist media space that was critical of Sinn Féin, dissidents and the dominant narratives of the Peace Process. The print magazine Fourthwrite and the online magazine The Blanket, harnessed old and new technology to provide a sustained countercultural critique of their times. That they sustained themselves for much of the 2000s without a specific political vehicle or purpose while producing some of the most compelling and inclusive writing about the times is testament to the opportunities that technology provides for committed modern activists.
This work demonstrates that resistance to occupation by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy during the Second World War has to be seen through a transnational, not a national, lens. It explores how people often resisted outside their country of origin because they were migrants, refugees or exiles who were already on the move. It traces their trajectories and encounters with other resisters and explores their experiences, including changes of beliefs, practices and identities. The book is a powerful, subtle and thought-provoking alternative to works on the Second World War that focus on single countries or on grand strategy. It is a ‘bottom up’ story of extraordinary individuals and groups who resisted oppression from Spain to the Soviet Union and the Balkans. It challenges the standard chronology of the war, beginning with the formation of the International Brigades in Spain and following through to the onset of the Cold War and the foundation of the state of Israel. This is a collective project by a team of international historians led by Robert Gildea, author of Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of the French Resistance (Faber & Faber, 2015). These have explored archives across Europe, the USA, Russia and Israel in order to unearth scores of fascinating individual stories which are woven together into themed chapters and a powerful new interpretation. The book is aimed at undergraduates and graduates working on twentieth-century Europe and the Second World War or interested in the possibilities of transnational history.
A woman gives birth to a monster. An army of mice invades a rural area. Three suns are seen in the sky. Today, such phenomena epitomize the intellectually marginal, relegated to the journalism of the supermarket checkout line. There have been, however, many societies where these events were not marginal, but important clues to understanding the nature of the cosmos and the destiny of human society. The transformation of this attitude to one resembling ours in a particular society, that of late Stuart England, is the subject of this book. One term that the people of seventeenth-century England used to refer to such bizarre natural phenomena was 'prodigy'. The word had many uses, but its core meaning was that of a strange and aberrant event, the occurrence of which appeared to be outside the usual order of nature. The most important status a prodigy could have was that of a providential sign from God. Prodigies had been interpreted as divine messages since ancient times. Prodigies were a particularly important site for competing discourses concerning God, nature, and politics because England lacked an official body or profession charged with the investigation and interpretation of alleged wonder. Prodigies were involved in the major political crises of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in England, from the Restoration itself to the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Crises, to the revolution of 1688 and the accession of the House of Hanover.