During the week before Labor Day every year, 35,000 people gather in Nevada's Black Rock Desert and build Black Rock City. At the center of Black Rock City is a 40-foot wooden effigy of a man, an icon around which art, performance, and community revo...

In "Carnival and Cannibal", distinguished French philosopher Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) reflects on many of his most significant ideas concerning the significance of language and the relationship between the technological and the social. In this,...

Nikolai Bukharin (1888-1938), an original Bolshevik leader and a founder of the Soviet state, spent the last year of his life imprisoned by Stalin, awaiting a trial and eventual execution. Remarkably during that time, from March 1937 to March 1938, B...

"Of Matters Modern" analyses the experience of modernity in South Asia. Arguing that South Asia's experience of modernity has to be understood in a global context, the book explores a wide range of topics: the emergence of "Assam Fever" in colonial d...

In the autumn of 1924, just before Andre Breton published the "Manifeste du surrealisme", two young men met in Paris for the first time. Georges Bataille, 27, starting work at the Bibliotheque Nationale; Michel Leiris, 23, beginning his studies in et...

Despite Western culture's roots and much touted pride in its classical Greek and Roman legacy, the sexual freedoms of the ancient world have had no place in the official cultures of Western societies. As late as the 19th Century, homosexuality was th...

A culture as ancient as India's, as layered and as plural, inevitably rejoices in a fascinatingly rich history of food, feeding and eating. The most ancient scriptures prescribe and proscribe on the subject, life cycle rituals are intricately bound u...

Bukharin's "Prison Manuscripts" were written in Moscow's Lubyanka prison during 1937-1938 while awaiting his inevitable liquidation. Like Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, Bukharin's Manuscripts too have their central emphasis on issues such as cul...

Satyajit Ray's very first film, "Pather Panchali", established him as a leading presence in Indian cinema, and fifty years later he is still a major icon for filmmakers, viewers and scholars. This collection takes a fresh look at the major films of R...

As the pungent fragrance of spices transports the author back into memories of childhood, we too are plunged headlong into the rich tastes, textures and colours of food in her native Bengal. Here, food is a ritualised and intrinsic part of the cultur...