Product details
- ISBN 9781942173571
- Dimensions: 152 x 228mm
- Publication Date: 07 Jul 2022
- Publisher: Common Notions
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
The manifesto that launched the Situationist International (SI) into the public eye and sparked an uprising is back—with the story of its creation and the histories of its publication told. When the Situationist International was a little-known revolutionary art group, before Guy Debord’s philosophical masterpiece The Society of the Spectacle was published, and before Paris’ universities were occupied in May ’68, a pamphlet titled On the Poverty of Student Life spurred a scandal that would turn into a global revolt. On the Poverty of Student Life was a match that recognised and described student and youth alienation, and the way it was printed and distributed spread that fire. For the first edition, supporters of the SI (mis)appropriated school funds to create and distribute 10,000 copies of the pamphlet. From there, dozens of editions were produced by worker- and student-run printing presses around the world, from Paris to East London, from Tokyo to Detroit. This new edition highlights this global underground circulation and brings attention to the common conditions of students, workers, and internationalist resistance in the world of the sixties—bringing that historic reckoning to the present.
Mustapha Khayati was a member of the Situationist International in the 1960s.Though collaborating with other Situationists, he was the chief author of On the Poverty of Student LIfe.
Guy Debord was a French Marxists theorist, philosopher, filmmaker, member of the Letterist International, and founding member of the Situationist International. He is the author of The Society of the Spectacle.
The Situationist International was an international organization of social revolutionaries made up of avant-garde artists, intellectuals, and political theorists. It was prominent in Europe from its formation in 1957 to its dissolution in 1972.
Donald Nicholson-Smith was a member of the SI and has translated a number of their texts (and much more) into English.
Anna O’Meara’s research investigates Middle Eastern art and activism between the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, particularly the work of Mustapha Khayati. Her translations have been published by Verso, Three Rooms Press, Annex Press, and BauerVerlag.
Mehdi El Hajoui, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University, has been researching and collecting the Situationist International for over a decade. Items from his archive have been exhibited at Princeton University, Indiana University, the Chicago Architecture Biennial, the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain of Geneva, and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, among others. He frequently writes and lectures, and as a board member of Booklyn and ProArts Commons supports marginalized artists working at the intersection of art and social change.
