UNESCO and the Global Information System

UNESCO and the Book in the Developing World

by Sarah Brouillette
Brouillette’s article, in Representations 127, establishes the importance of UNESCO’s role within the global history of the book. Its focus is the research on the book in the developing world that UNESCO sponsored in the 1960s and 1970s, and how that research supported claims that government should intervene in book and media industries in order to shift the disastrous imbalance in the global media system. It shows how these claims were undermined by the interests of the developed world and sidelined by the emerging discipline of book history.

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SARAH BROUILLETTE is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Carleton University. She is the author of Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (Palgrave, 2007) and of Literature and the Creative Economy (Stanford, 2014).

New Special Issue

Financialization and the Culture Industry

Edited by C. D. Blanton, Colleen Lye, and Kent Puckett

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Financialization and the culture industry. The essays that make up this special issue of Representations turn on the relation between those two terms. How, they ask, should we understand the formal and cultural effects of a world economy ever more dependent on finance’s increasingly abstract calculations of value? In one respect, the metaphor of a “culture industry” might now appear anachronistic, swept aside by the postindustrial speed, scale, and global reach of contemporary finance. But what then remains of notions—inherited from the Frankfurt School and elsewhere—of high and low culture, art and reification, commitment and commodity, class struggle and rationalization in an economy now conceived as immaterial or disembodied, frictionless or flat? (Continue reading…)

C. D. Blanton, Colleen Lye, and Kent Puckett
Introduction (free download)
Joshua Clover
Retcon: Value and Temporality in Poetics
Annie McClanahan
Bad Credit: The Character of Credit Scoring
Bishnupriya Ghosh
The Security Aesthetic in Bollywood’s High-Rise Horror
Joseph Jonghyun Jeon
Neoliberal Forms: CGI, Algorithm, and Hegemony in Korea’s IMF Cinema
Michael Szalay
HBO’s Flexible Gold
Peter Hitchcock
Accumulating Fictions