By Alison Shonkwiler
Marie-Hélène Huet, The Culture of Disaster. University of Chicago Press, 2012. 256 pp.
“Our culture thinks through disasters” (2), writes Marie-Helene Huet in The Culture of Disaster. Building an argument that catastrophes have shaped the imagination of modernity, Huet’s book examines new modes of conceptualizing disaster and human power in the late 18th century and 19th centuries.
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By Michael Truscello
The Invisible Committee. The Coming Insurrection. Semiotext(e), 2009.
In their astute history of the anarchist tradition, Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt suggest that anarchists generally practice one of two broad strategies: insurrectionist anarchism or mass anarchism. The insurrectionist tradition "argues that reforms are illusory and organized mass movements are incompatible with anarchism, and emphasizes armed action—propaganda by the deed—against the ruling class and its institutions as the primary means of evoking a spontaneous revolutionary upsurge" (123).
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