Dirk Van Laak's Books

Lifelines of Our Society

A Global History of Infrastructure

By: Dirk Van Laak

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Lifelines of Our Society

A Global History of Infrastructure

By: Dirk Van Laak

A comprehensive history and examination of global infrastructures and the outsized role they play in our lives. Infrastructure is essential to defining how the public functions, yet there is little public knowledge regarding why and how it became today’s strongest global force over government and individual lives. Who should build and maintain infrastructures? How are they to be protected? And why are they all in such bad shape? In Lifelines of Our Society, Dirk van Laak offers broad audiences a history of global infrastructures—focused on Western societies, over the past two hundred years—that considers all their many paradoxes. He illustrates three aspects of infrastructure: their development, their influence on nation building and colonialism, and finally, how individuals internalize infrastructure and increasingly become not only its user but regulator. Beginning with public works, infrastructure in the nineteenth century carried the hope that it would facilitate world peace. Van Laak shows how, instead, it transformed to promote consumerism’s individual freedoms and our notions of work, leisure, and fulfillment. Lifelines of Our Society reveals how today’s infrastructure is both a source and a reflection of concentrated power and economic growth, which takes the form of cities under permanent construction. Symbols of power, van Laak describes, come with vulnerability, and this book illustrates the dual nature of infrastructure’s potential to hold nostalgia and inspire fear, to ease movement and govern ideas, and to bring independence to the nuclear family and control governments of the Global South.

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Page Count

333

Publisher

MIT Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0262375966

ISBN 13

9780262375962

Posthistoire

Has History Come to an End?

By: Lutz Niethammer,Dirk van Laak

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Posthistoire

Has History Come to an End?

By: Lutz Niethammer,Dirk van Laak

Whether its ultimate resting-place is deemed to be Fukuyama’s liberal democracy or Baudrillard’s hyperreality, history, according to a number of pundits, has reached the end of the line. In the inflated debates that have ensued, it is precisely history which has been ignored, for the conception of posthistoire is far from new. Here, Lutz Niethammer, Germany’s leading practitioner of ‘history from below’, explores in fascinating detail the forms the conception has taken in the twentieth century and assembles what amounts to an intellectual history of disillusion and resignation. In his survey of thinkers as diverse as Kojeve, Heidegger and Junger, he finds adherents to the idea of the end of history on the Right and Left. But whether they pinned all their hopes on the nation or the proletariat, in different ways they have all conflated the apparent collapse of a particular historical project with the collapse of history itself.

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Page Count

182

Publisher

Verso

Published Date

ISBN 10

0860916979

ISBN 13

9780860916970

Remembering Africa

The Rediscovery of Colonialism in Contemporary German Literature

By: Dirk Göttsche

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Remembering Africa

The Rediscovery of Colonialism in Contemporary German Literature

By: Dirk Göttsche

This is the first comprehensive study of contemporary German literature's intense engagement with German colonialism and with Germany's wider involvement in European colonialism. Building on the author's decade of research and publication in the field, the book discusses some fifty novels by German, Swiss, and Austrian writers, among them Hans Christoph Buch, Alex Capus, Christof Hamann, Lukas Hartmann, Ilona Maria Hilliges, Giselher W. Hoffmann, Dieter Kühn, Hermann Schulz, Gerhard Seyfried, Thomas von Steinaecker, Uwe Timm, Ilija Trojanow, and Stephan Wackwitz. Drawing on international postcolonial theory, the German tradition of cross-cultural literary studies, and on memory studies, the book brings the hitherto neglected German case to the international debate in postcolonial literary studies"--Publisher website, July 5, 2013.

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Page Count

496

Publisher

Camden House

Published Date

ISBN 10

1571135464

ISBN 13

9781571135469

Lifelines of Our Society

A Global History of Infrastructure

By: Dirk Van Laak

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Lifelines of Our Society

A Global History of Infrastructure

By: Dirk Van Laak

Average ratings

N/A

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

333

Publisher

MIT Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0262375966

ISBN 13

9780262375962

Book's by Dirk Van Laak

Lifelines of Our Society

Lifelines of Our Society

Posthistoire

Posthistoire

Remembering Africa

Remembering Africa

Lifelines of Our Society

Lifelines of Our Society

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