On the southern end of the Grand Rue, a major thoroughfare that runs through the center of Port-au-Prince, waits the Haitian capital's automobile repair district. This veritable junkyard of steel and rubber, recycled parts, old tires, and scrap metal might seem an unlikely foundry for art. Yet, on the street's opposite end thrives the Grand Rue Galerie, a working studio of assembled art and sculptures wrought from the refuse. Established by artists Andre Eugene and Celeur in the late 1990s, the Grand Rue's urban environmental aesthetics-defined by motifs of machinic urbanism, Vodou bricolage, the postprimitivist altermodern, and performative politics-radically challenge ideas about consumption, waste, and environmental hazards, as well as consider innovative solutions to these problems in the midst of poverty, insufficient social welfare, lack of access to arts, education, and basic needs. In Riding with Death, Jana Braziel explores the urban environmental aesthetics of the Grand Rue Sculptors and the beautifully constructed sculptures they have designed from salvaged automobile parts, rubber tires, carved wood, and other recycled materials.Through first-person accounts and fieldwork, Braziel constructs an urban ecological framework for understanding these sculptures amid environmental degradation and grinding poverty. Influenced by urban geographers, art historians, and political theorists, the book regards the underdeveloped cities of the Global South as alternate spaces for challenging the profit-driven machinations of global capitalism. Above all, Braziel presents Haitian artists who live on the most challenged Caribbean island, yet who thrive as creators reinventing refuse as art and resisting the abjection of their circumstances.

The Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series, previously known as SVEC (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century), has published over 500 peer-reviewed scholarly volumes since 1955 as part of the Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford. International in focus, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment volumes cover wide-ranging aspects of the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment, from gender studies to political theory, and from economics to visual arts and music, and are published in English or French.

A fully illustrated examination of the relationship between money, power, resistance, and dissent. Money's ubiquity makes it a powerful vehicle for disseminating the messages of the state to the public, but the symbolic and nationalistic iconography of currency can also be subverted in powerful acts of defiance, rebellion, and propaganda. Accompanying major exhibitions at The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, this volume explores the political and social tensions communicated through the production or defacement of money over the past two hundred years. Beginning in Britain in the wake of the American and French Revolutions, it contrasts the use of money by the radicals of the nineteenth and early twentieth century with the money produced by European empires as they scrambled for world domination. The currency histories of the two world wars highlight the role of money as a tool of occupation, imprisonment, resistance, and remembrance. The coins countermarked during the Troubles in Northern Ireland hint at the polarized nature of political discourse and sectarian violence. The work culminates with the work of contemporary artists and activists who use money to highlight the challenges of the modern world, both locally and globally--as a canvas, a raw material, or a powerful means of communication. From a unique coin commemorating the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 to a Syrian banknote refashioned to raise awareness of the refugee crisis, each object constitutes a witness statement to its time and its conflict, and each section has its own story to tell.

Signs of Power in Habsburg Spain and the New World explores the representation of political, economic, military, religious, and juridical power in texts and artifacts from early modern Spain and her American viceroyalties. In addition to analyzing the dynamics of power in written texts, chapters also examine pieces of material culture including coats of arms, coins, paintings and engravings. As the essays demonstrate, many of these objects work to transform the amorphous concept of power into a material reality with considerable symbolic dimensions subject to, and dependent on, interpretation. With its broad approach to the discourses of power, Signs of Power brings together studies of both canonical literary works as well as more obscure texts and objects. The position of the works studied with respect to the official center of power also varies. Whereas certain essays focus on the ways in which portrayals of power champion the aspirations of the Spanish Crown, other essays attend to voices of dissent that effectively call into question that authority.