Communards and Other Cultural Histories

This collection of some 32 articles and essays by Adrian Rifkin is written over a period of forty years. It contains innovative scholarly and historical studies of the political and social archives of art, urbanism, music, and popular life in France and Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Included are studies of the Paris Commune, the figure of Edith Piaf in French culture, histories of art education and opera as well as analytical accounts of the commodity and cultural theory in Adorno and Benjamin; also included are short polemical essays on queer theory. An extended introduction by Steve Edwards works over the important questions of time in Marxist cultural theory and the critique of disciplinary formation that underpin many of Rifkin's essays.