In his second round-up, EWAN CAMERON picks excellent solo shows that deal with Scottishness, Englishness and race as highlights
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The neoliberal jackboot stamping on a human face
GAVIN O’TOOLE applauds an analysis of culture that explains why political conflicts today are focused more on values and identity than the economy and social questions
SHORT-LIVED AUTONOMY: Thousands of hippies gather on ‘Hippy Hill’ in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, April 2010
[Dan Schooling/SanctusAbMortis/CC] 
Fiery words from the Bard in Blackpool and Edinburgh, and Evidence Based Punk Rock from The Protest Family
MATTHEW HAWKINS is mesmerised by a performance that dissolves the line between audience and performer
MATTHEW SHARPE recommends the essays of a Renaissance politician that instruct and unnerve after 400 years
GAVIN O’TOOLE welcomes the reissue of a seminal work of revolutionary theory that have genuine relevance in the current context
RON JACOBS rides shotgun with a member of Black Bloc on the wave of anti-capitalist protests of the 1990s and early 2000s
The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms
Olivier Roy, translated by Cynthia Schoch and Trista Selous
Hurst, £20
IN 1992 when the New Right’s neoliberal revolution was still in full flood, the Marxist thinker Terry Eagleton wrote an essay in which, with great prescience, he foretold a crisis of contemporary culture.
Taking the English literary canon as an example, he argued that right-wing intellectuals were turning literary theory — and by extension the canons of high culture — into an arena of intensive political contestation.
Eagleton wrote: “It is no doubt for this reason that the infighting over something as apparently abstruse as literary theory has been so symptomatically virulent; for what we are really speaking of here is the death of civilisation as we know it.
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GAVIN O’TOOLE welcomes the reissue of a seminal work of revolutionary theory that have genuine relevance in the current context
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