Henri Lefebvre has considerable claims to be the greatest living philosopher. His work spans some sixty years and includes original work on a diverse range of subjects, from dialectical materialism to architecture, urbanism and the experience of everyday life. The Production of Space is his major philosophical work and its translation has been long awaited by scholars in many different fields. The book is a search for a reconciliation between mental space and real space. In the course of his exploration, (...) Henri Lefebvre moves from metaphysical and ideological considerations of the meaning of space to its experience in the everyday life of home and city. He seeks, in other words, to bridge the gap between the realms of theory and practice, between the mental and the social, and between philosophy and reality. In doing so, he ranges through art, literature, architecture and economics, and further provides a powerful antidote to the sterile and obfuscatory methods and theories characteristic of much recent continental philosophy. This is a work of great vision and incisiveness. It is also characterized by its author's wit and by anecdote, as well as by a deftness of style which Donald Nicholson-Smith's sensitive translation precisely captures. (shrink)

Rooted in Gloria Anzaldúa's experience as a Chicana, a lesbian, an activist, and a writer, the essays and poems in this volume profoundly challenged, and continue to challenge, how we think about identity.Borderlands / La Frontera remaps our understanding of what a "border" is, presenting it not as a simple divide between here and there, us and them, but as a psychic, social, and cultural terrain that we inhabit, and that inhabits all of us. This twenty-fifth anniversary edition features a (...) new introduction by scholars Norma Cantú and Aída Hurtado as well as a revised critical bibliography. Gloria Anzaldúa was a Chicana-tejana-lesbian-feminist poet, theorist, and fiction writer from south Texas. She was the editor of the critical anthologyMaking Face/Making Soul: Haciendo Caras, co-editor ofThis Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, and winner of the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award. She taught creative writing, Chicano studies, and feminist studies at University of Texas, San Francisco State University, Vermont College of Norwich University, and University of California Santa Cruz. Anzaldúa passed away in 2004 and was honored around the world for shedding visionary light on the Chicana experience by receiving the National Association for Chicano Studies Scholar Award in 2005. Gloria was also posthumously awarded her doctoral degree in literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz. A number of scholarships and book awards, including the Anzaldúa Scholar Activist Award and the Gloria E. Anzaldúa Award for Independent Scholars, are awarded in her name every year. (shrink)

Geographies of Exclusion identifies forms of social and spatial exclusion and subsequently examines the fate of knowledge of space and society which has been produced by members of excluded groups. Evaluating writing on urban society by women and black writers, David Sibley asks why such work is neglected by the academic establishment, suggesting that both the practices which result in the exclusion of minorities and those which result in the exclusion of knowledge have important implications for theory and method in (...) human geography. Drawing on a range of ideas from social anthropology, feminist theory, sociology, human geography and psychoanalysis, this book presents a fresh approach to geographical theory, highlighting the tendency of powerful groups to "purify" space and to view minorites as defiled and polluting, and exploring the nature of "difference" and the production of knowledge. (shrink)

Lefebvre, Love and Struggle provides the only comprehensive guide to Lefebvre's work. It is an accessible introduction to one of the most significant European thinkers of the twentieth century. Rob Shields draws on the full range of Lefebvre's writings, including many previously untranslated and unpublished works and correspondence. Topics covered include Lefebvre's early relationship with Marxism, his critique of the rise of fascism, as well as his Critique of Everyday Life and the significant work on urban space for which he (...) is best known today. (shrink)