A provocative contribution to the current debate on museums, this collection of essays contains contributions from France, Britain, Australia, the USA and Canada.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203358821

This book examines the transformation of the Italian city from the 1950s to the present with particular attention to questions of identity, migration and changes in urban culture. It focuses on two phases of that transformation: the years of accelerated industrialisation in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the period of de-industrialisation and postmodernity beginning in the 1980s. It shows how major demographic movements and cultural shifts threw into relief new conceptions of the city in which old boundaries had become problematic. Design, fine art, literature, youth culture, film and social history all provide focal points. The contributions bring specialist expertise to each area while the extensive illustrations give a vivid picture of the contemporary visual culture for which Italian cities are famed. This is a genuinely interdisciplinary approach by Italian and English-speaking historians and scholars of urban studies, literature, architecture and design which introduces new debates and research to an English-speaking audience for the first time. Extensive illustrations provide a vivid picture of contemporary Italian visual culture.

The student protests of 1968, followed by the Hot Autumn factory strikes of 1969, shook the foundations of the Italian Republic. They also prepared the way for a whole decade of intense and widespread social conflict--a decade in which militant social movements arose with new aspirations, centered on protagonists such as women, young people and the unemployed. "States of Emergency" provides a vivid reconstruction of the events and movements of that period--from the students of 1968 to the Autonomists of 1977.
The book's title evokes both the emergence of new social subjects and the crises they provoked in the social order. But Lumley also looks at the paradoxes and contradictions of the movements, their creative potential and ultimate failure. The political debates which they initiated soon became part of the agenda of the Left internationally.
Drawing on the work of theorists such as Umberto Eco, Alberto Melucci, Norberto Bobbio and Antonio Negri, "States of Emergency" is a vital contribution not only to Italy's social history but to contemporary political discussion.

This collection of essays brings together the work of a new generation of revisionist historians who argue that the true history of Southern Italy has been reduced to that of a 'Southern problem' viewed through a Northern prism. These scholars suggest that the South was not a 'backward' region, but a combination of regions in which different social and economic patterns had evolved in response to the prevailing conditions within the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The book employs an interdisciplinary approach to examine not only the concrete history of the South, but also the discourses and images in which it has been framed. It is the first publication in English devoted to the new history of Southern Italy, and brings together many of the leading figures in the revisionist movement, as well as some of their critics.