Chapter 4 recounts the emergence of the theory and practice of a “Defeatured Landscape,” the name given in 1970 to a new urban semiotic that would constitute photo-conceptual artists self-defined counter tradition to those cultural practices deemed uncritical, expressionist, and mythical that were explored in Chapter 3. NETCO’s Ruins (1968) and Portfolio of Piles (1968) are examined as important precursors to the defeatured landscape. Dennis Wheeler, Jeff Wall, Ian Wallace and Christos Dikeakos’ art and writing are discussed as examples of defeatured landscapes in relation to their influences: American conceptual artist peers like Dan Graham; Concrete Poetry; awareness of the vehicular landscape; and Surrealism and its legacy in the psycho-geography and dérives of the Situationist International. This history is set against two contrasting examples: the real political conflicts of land development and associated financial speculation going on at the same time in the city; and an accounting of the erotic female bodies who often populate the otherwise defeatured landscapes of the photo-conceptualists. These examples show how the social politics of public space in Vancouver are left out of avant-garde representations of the city through the discursive framing of a landscape not so defeatured after-all.

For the vast majority of men and women who joined co-operative societies and used their services, co-operation was ultimately about goods - especially daily staples such as tea, coffee, bread, flour, sugar. The co-operative movement inherited the liberal internationalist belief that trade between nations was the best means to guarantee peace and after 1918 many in the movement continued to defend the principle of free trade, while also arguing however for a new vision of international trade organised on co-operative, rather than competitive principles. The challenge for co-operators was to put this vision into practice. Attempts to establish an International Co-operative Wholesale Society (ICWS) under the auspices of the ICA proved difficult, but there was one conspicuous success in international co-operative trading, namely the Nordic Co-operative Wholesale (NAF), founded in 1918. The NAF was often cited in the ICA as a model, but attempts to emulate it were largely unsuccessful. The chapter considers why this was the case and what it can tell us about relations between different co-operative organisations.

This chapter traces out the substance of Brahman domination and Sudratisudra slavery, especially by way of the analogies Jotirao Govindrao Phule draws to American slavery. It analyses the influence of Thomas Paine's writings on Phule's diagnosis of Brahman oppression by conquest and priestcraft as well as Phule's representation of Sudratisudras as the once and future constituent power of Maharashtra. The chapter explores the politics of supplication and sentimentality in Phule's writing, and especially how these come together by way of his naive monarchist critique of intermediary authorities in the appeal to Queen Victoria. As a nameable phenomenon, naive monarchism is a product of twentieth century radical historiography. The chapter argues that the simultaneously real and surreal character of Slavery's political intervention, whose agency could only have arisen under British imperialism even as it points beyond it, derives from Phule's position between critique and catachresis.

This chapter interrogates the relationship between medievalist cultural memory and nationalism in Britain and Europe. Exploring work by the English poet Thomas Gray, the Welsh poet and critic Evan Evans, the Hungarian poet Janos Arany, the Icelandic scholar Grímur Jonsson Thorkelín and the Danish poet, historian and educator Nikolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig, this chapter explores how ideas of the medieval past are used to generate ideas of community and exclude some people, ideas and traditions from the future.

Academic and popular representations have coalesced to present a celebratory and romanticised overview of Italians in Scotland which serves to obscure historical incidences of racism and hostility. This chapter offers a brief overview of the migration patterns of the Italian diaspora. It explores the ways in which Italians and other immigrant groups in Scotland were racialised from the earliest days of settlement. The chapter also explores how long-enduring perceptions of racial difference shaped reactions to Italians at the outbreak of the Second World War. It provides an analysis of childhood narratives of 'difference', based on ethnicity, religion, language and appearance. The chapter shows how the wartime configuration of Italians as the 'enemy within' served to dramatically reinforce a sense of 'otherness' and not 'belonging' already prevalent amongst the children of Italian immigrants.

This first chapter introduces the issues of Humanitarianism and conflict in Afghanistan. Five commonly held assumptions are presented and Afghanistan and its wider relevance are discussed. As a foundation, a number of key concepts are outlined and the book’s structure is presented.

The Beer family made stained glass from the earliest days of the Victorian Gothic Revival and did not cease until the last years of the nineteenth century. This chapter concentrates on the extant corpus of glass produced by Robert and Alfred Beer and the network of patrons that they served. Running a glass-painting business in a city like Exeter gave the Beers several potential advantages over a glass-painter like John Toms, who worked from a small market town. Toms's relationship with the Exeter Diocesan Architectural Society (EDAS) was probably distant at best; he did not enjoy the connections with architects and ecclesiologists that the Beers profited from. Many of Robert's early windows bear a strong resemblance to John Loveband Fulford's tracings of medieval glass. In 1850, when Alfred started doing the bulk of the figure work for the Beer studio, he was only twenty years old.