Publisher's Synopsis
"New Formations" is a journal of cultural debate, history and theory. It brings new and challenging perspectives to bear on the categories that frame cultural analysis and political action. The journal has covered issues ranging from the seduction of perversity to questions of nationalism and post-colonialism. Contributors open up new zones of enquiry whilst drawing new charts of understanding to explain new formations in contemporary life.;"New Formations" brings together in one volume both established and new writers from many walks of critical life. Past contributors have included: Parveen Adams, Nomi Bhabha, Slavoj Zizek, Susan Buck-Morss, Gillian Rose, Jacqueline Rose, Zygmunt Bauman and Christopher Norris.;Once social and political historians characterized history as a relentlessly forward process. Recent discussions on the subject have, however, marked a virtual U-turn in this thinking. At the end of the millennium we are in a postmodern world where everything has finished - we are at the end of history and ideology. The huge inequalities within nations contradict the notion of an ongoing, unified cultural progress, and the modernization undertaken by Margaret Thatcher in Britain was fundamentally of a regressive nature. So has the very notion of "modernity" become obsolete?;Different nations and cultures are looking more and more to the past for their resources, and modernity seems to be increasingly experienced through its limits and limitations rather than through imainged possibilities. Modernity today is crossed with paradox: "conservative modernity", "regressive modernization" and "reactionary modernism".;The contributors to this collection explore the resonances of this perplexing shift, drawing on a wealth of examples from past and present, including the cultural politics of the Weimar Republic, black revolutionary conservatism and the political history of British Conservatism.;Contributors to this volume include: Paul Gilroy, Peter Osborne, Lynne Segal, Bill Schwarz and Janet Wolff.
