An exploration by the artist and scholar Zoe Beloff of Sergei Eisenstein and Bertolt Brecht's experiences in Hollywood in the Thirties and Forties with a focus on the unrealized films "Glass House" by Eisenstein and "A Model Family in a Model Home" by Brecht. The book reproduces many important and little-known documents from the period including a large selection of previously unpublished drawings by Eisenstein discovered by Beloff in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art in Moscow. Also included is documentation of three films by Zoe Beloff inspired by "Glass House," "A Model Family in a Model Home" and the writings of Eisenstein and Brecht as they contemplate the politics and culture of Hollywood. Two essays scholarly essays have been commissioned for this project: an essay by Hannah Frank on the affinities of American and Soviet animation during this period and a meditation on the role of laughter in the work of Bertolt Brecht by the Walter Benjamin scholar Esther Leslie.

In a perfect storm, the environment, the global economic system and geopolitics are all undergoing rapid, uncontrolled change. In the same way that the climate is in a state of flux, exhibiting erratic behavior before settling into a new norm, in the wake of the global economic crisis, many of the assumptions about the Western economic system have been destroyed, which leads to some troubling questions: How aggressive will water-hungry China become in order to secure a sufficient supply of it? What will happen when climate-triggered conflicts like the one in Sudan spread throughout the continent? As India takes its proper place at the high table of nations and begins large-scale importing of food, what will happen to already shrinking supplies? Global Warring takes a hard look at these questions. Journalist and analyst Cleo Paskal identifies problem areas that are most likely to start wars, destroy economies and create failed states. Examining the most likely environmental change scenarios, she illuminates the ways in which they could radically alter human existence. A fascinating tour through our uncertain future, Global Warring also offers a controversial new way forward for the global economy and the worldwide environmental crisis.

From the Afghan-Pakistan borderlands to the Sahara, images of danger depict a new world disorder on the global margins. With vivid detail, Ruben Andersson traverses this terrain to provide a startling new understanding of what is happening in remote "danger zones." Andersson takes aim at how Western states and international organizations conduct military, aid, and border interventions in a dangerously myopic fashion, further disconnecting the world's rich and poor. Risk-obsessed powers are helping to remap the world into zones of insecurity and danger, resulting in a vision of chaos crashing into fortified borders. Andersson contends that we must reconnect and snap out of this dangerous spiral, which affects us no matter where we are. Only by developing a new cartography of hope can we move beyond the political geography of fear that haunts us. From back cover.

Slavery transformed Africa, Europe and the Americas and hugely-enhanced the well-being of the West but the subject of slavery can be hard to understand because of its huge geographic and chronological span. This book uses a unique atlas format to present the story of slavery, explaining its historical importance and making this complex story and its geographical setting easy to understand.

An Imaginary Cinema is the first systematic study of Sergei Eisenstein's unrealized films as well as a deeply informed historical and theoretical inquiry into the role and meaning of the unmade in his oeuvre. Eisenstein directed some of the twentieth century's most important films, from the early classic of montage, Battleship Potemkin, to his late masterpiece, Ivan the Terrible. Alongside these, however, the Soviet filmmaker also toiled over a compelling array of unrealized projects, from ideas that never grew beyond complex, passionate notebook scrawls and sketches to productions that were mounted and shot to some degree of completion without ever being finished. Working from the archival remnants of several of the director's most fascinating unrealized projects—from his bold vision to film Marx's Das Kapital to his time in Hollywood struggling to adapt Dreiser's An American Tragedy—Dustin Condren's book reveals new aspects of Eisenstein's genius, showing the filmmaker in a constant state of process, open to working toward impossible and sometimes utopian ends, and committed to the pursuit of creative and theoretical discovery. Condren's analysis of these unrealized projects in An Imaginary Cinema reveals Eisenstein at crucial moments of his personal and artistic biography, and it also tells the wider story of a canonical artist negotiating the political labyrinths of Stalinist Russia, the economic pitfalls of Hollywood, and the technological shifts of early cinema.

Ventriloquism, Performance, and Contemporary Art volume calls attention to the unexpected prevalence of ventriloqual motifs and strategies within contemporary art. Engaging with issues of voice, embodiment, power, and projection, the case studies assembled in this volume span a range of media from painting, sculpture, and photography to installation, performance, architecture, and video. Importantly, they both examine and enact ventriloqual practices, and do so as a means of interrogating and performatively bearing out contemporary conceptions of authorship, subjectivity, and performance. Put otherwise, the chapters in this book oscillate seamlessly between art history, theory, and criticism through both analytical and performative means. Across twelve essays on ventriloquism in contemporary art, the authors, who are curators, historians, and artists, shine light on this outdated practice, repositioning it as a conspicuous and meaningful trend within a range of artistic practices today. This book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, contemporary art, media studies, performance, museum/curatorial studies, and theater.