What transformative effects does a multimillion-dollar industry have on those who work within it? The Industrial Ephemeral presents the untold stories of the people, politics, and production chains behind architecture, real estate, and construction in areas surrounding New Delhi, India. The personal histories of those in India's large laboring classes are brought to life as Namita Vijay Dharia discusses the aggressive environmental and ecological metamorphosis of the region in the twenty-first century. Urban planning and architecture are messy processes that intertwine migratory pathways, corruption politics, labor struggle, ecological transformations, and technological development. Rampant construction activity produces an atmosphere of ephemerality in urban regions, creating an aesthetic condition that supports industrial political economy. Dharia's brilliant analysis of the sensibilities and experiences of work lends visibility to the struggle of workers in an era of growing urban inequality.

In The Aesthetics of the Ephemeral, Jennifer Duprey examines five contemporary plays from Barcelona: Olors and Testament by Josep Maria Benet i Jornet, Antígona by Jordi Coca, Forasters by Sergi Belbel, and Temptació by Carles Batlle. She argues that in both the theatrical text and its performance an aesthetics of the ephemeral materializes that is related to specific manifestations of cultural and historical memory in Spain and Catalonia. These manifestations of memory include historical concerns such as the possibility of another form of justice in predicaments of violence after the Civil War, and they also include contemporary issues such as the production of ruins by the processes of gentrification in Barcelona, the complexity of immigration in Spain, and the destruction or preservation of Catalan cultural legacies. In her analysis of these topics, Duprey engages and expands on theories related to questions of subjectivity and identity in late modernity. This book will be of interest to those concerned with Iberian cultural studies and with how theater reflects on and contributes to contemporary political dialogue.

Restoring proto-modernist little magazines—known as ephemeral bibelots—to the scholarly canon. Emanating from the cabarets of modernist Paris, a short-lived vogue spread around the world for avant-garde journals known in English as "ephemeral bibelots." For a time, it seemed that all the young bohemians passing through Paris started their own bibelots modeled on Le Chat Noir, the esoteric magazine of the famed Montmartre cabaret. These journals were recognizable for their decadence, campy queerness, astounding art nouveau illustrations, fin-de-siècle color schemes, innovative typefaces, and practiced bohemianism. In Ephemeral Bibelots, Brad Evans relays the untold story of this late-nineteenth-century craze for bibelots, dusting off a trove of periodicals largely untouched by digitization. In excavating this forgotten archive, Evans calls into question the prehistory of modernist little magazines as well as the history of American art and literature at the turn of the twentieth century. Considering how artistic movements take shape, move, and disappear, the book is organized around three major themes—"vogue," "ephemera," and "obscurity"—with authors and artists to match. A full-color insert reveals a glorious array of bibelot covers. This revisionary history of print culture incorporates discussions of pragmatist philosophy and relational aesthetics; women writers like Juliet Wilbor Tompkins and Carolyn Wells; the graphic artists Will Bradley, Louis Rhead, and John Sloan; the dancer Loie Fuller; and twentieth-century figures like H. L. Mencken, Amy Lowell, and Anita Loos. Bringing nineteenth-century American literature and culture into conversation with modern art movements from around the world, Ephemeral Bibelots provides new ways of thinking about the centrality of various media cultures to the attribution of aesthetic innovation and its staying power.

All organisms and species are transitory, yet life endures. The origin, extinction, and evolution of species—interconnected in the web of life as "eternal ephemera"—are the concern of evolutionary biology. In this riveting work, renowned paleontologist Niles Eldredge follows leading thinkers as they have wrestled for more than two hundred years with the eternal skein of life composed of ephemeral beings, revitalizing evolutionary science with their own, more resilient findings. Eldredge begins in France with the naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who in 1801 first framed the overarching question about the emergence of new species. The Italian geologist Giambattista Brocchi followed, bringing in geology and paleontology to expand the question. In 1825, at the University of Edinburgh, Robert Grant and Robert Jameson introduced the astounding ideas formulated by Lamarck and Brocchi to a young medical student named Charles Darwin. Who can doubt that Darwin left for his voyage on the Beagle in 1831 filled with thoughts about these daring new explanations for the "transmutation" of species. Eldredge revisits Darwin's early insights into evolution in South America and his later synthesis of knowledge into a theory of the origin of species. He then considers the ideas of more recent evolutionary thinkers, such as George Gaylord Simpson, Ernst Mayr, and Theodosius Dobzhansky, as well as the young and brash Niles Eldredge and Steven Jay Gould, who set science afire with their concept of punctuated equilibria. Filled with insights into evolutionary biology and told with a rich affection for the scientific arena, this book celebrates the organic, vital relationship between scientific thinking and its subjects.

The critical history of wax is fraught with gaps and controversies. These eight essays explore wax reproductions of the body or body parts throughout history, and assess their conceptual ambiguity, material impermanence, and implications for the history of western art.

Ephemeral Earth is a journey, through glades, vales and valleys, Into decrepit, dark alleys. Across stormy seas and barren deserts, Through my subconscious, As my pen bleeds ink, With me, You too shall sink.

Politics under Salvador Allende was a battle fought in the streets. Everyday attempts to Òganar la calleÓ allowed a wide range of urban residents to voice potent political opinions. SantiaguinosÊmarched through the streets chanting slogans, seized public squares, and plastered city walls with graffiti, posters, and murals. Urban art might only last a few hours or a day before being torn down or painted over, but such activism allowed a wide range of city dwellers to participate in the national political arena. These popular political strategies were developed under democracy, only to be reimagined under the Pinochet dictatorship. Ephemeral Histories places urban conflict at the heart of Chilean history, exploring how marches and protests, posters and murals, documentary film and street photography, became the basis of a new form of political change in Latin America in the late twentieth century.