News from the Collective

Sous la direction d’Isaac Bazié et Salaka Sanou

Comment lire et comprendre les pratiques culturelles africaines? Comment mobiliser les savoirs sur l’Afrique, ses arts et ses cultures sans verser dans la réification ou le folklorisme? Profondément novateur, cet ouvrage collectif mobilise les outils théoriques des cultural studies pour proposer un généreux panorama de l’étude de la culture en Afrique. Il rassemble des textes d’auteurs et d’autrices d’Afrique de l’Ouest, théoriques ou descriptifs, qui mettent en lumière la réévaluation passionnante des modes d’appréhension des pratiques et objets en contexte africain que proposent les études culturelles africaines. L’épilogue qui clôt le livre n’est donc point fermeture, mais plutôt ouverture sur les enjeux relatifs à ce nouveau champ d’études, plein de promesses pour rendre compte de l’extraordinaire créativité des cultures africaines.

ISBN ePub : 978-2-924661-82-6
ISBN pour l’impression : 978-2-924661-81-9
231 pages
Date de publication : juin 2019

DOI : 10.5281/zenodo.3470395

Utilisez le bouton Paypal ci-dessous pour commander le livre imprimé au Canada ou en Europe ou l’obtenir en format ePub (prêtable).  Le livre est disponible dans nos librairies dépositaires : la Librairie du Quartier à Québec, Zone libre à Montréal, à venir pour Paris, Genève et l’Afrique.

Table des matières

Auteurs : Collectif d’écriture sous la direction de Vijonet Demero et Samuel Regulus

Date de parution : 27 octobre 2017

• Prix de vente de la version imprimée : 20 $ CAD
• Prix de vente du ePub : 10 $ CAD
• Cliquez ici pour lire en ligne gratuitement la version html (permet de partager et commenter, chapitre par chapitre)
• Cliquez sur ce lien pour obtenir le PDF téléchargeable gratuitement : Deux-siècles-de-protestantisme-en-Haïti-1816-2016-1511919290._print

En cas de problème d’accès, écrire à info@editionscienceetbiencommun.org.

Résumé :

Comment le protestantisme s’est-il développé en Haïti? Quelle est la contribution du protestantisme à l’histoire et à la société haïtienne? Comment se situent les églises réformées face aux enjeux de la sécularisation et de la mondialisation? Aborder ces questions sans complaisance est essentiel pour l’avenir du protestantisme en Haïti et c’est ce que propose ce livre issu du colloque du Bicentenaire du protestantisme organisé par l’Institut universitaire de Formation des Cadres (INUFOCAD) du 15 au 17 août 2016 à Port-au-Prince, sous les auspices de la Fédération protestante d’Haïti.

Illustration de couverture : design de Djossè Roméo Tessy, photographie d’Anderson Pierre

• ISBN ePub : 978-2-924661-32-1
• ISBN du livre imprimé : 978-2-924661-31-4

Pour acheter le livre au Canada, par chèque ou virement bancaire : écrire à inf0@editionscienceetbiencommun.org.

Le livre est aussi disponible à la Librairie du Quartier, 1120, avenue Cartier, Québec G1R 2S5  (418) 990-0330 et à la librairie ZONE de l’Université Laval (https://www.zone.coop/) (418) 656-2600.

Pour le commander en ligne (des frais de port de 9 $ s’ajouteront) :

Version papier ou ePub

Format livre papier $20,00 CADFormat ePub $1,00 CAD

In December, we announced our intention to reduce our carbon footprint in 2020. This post includes more detail about our plans and an update about what we’ve achieved thus far.

We have looked at a number of carbon calculators, not yet with the purpose of producing a number to describe our carbon footprint (since the accuracy and reliability of these calculators appears to vary) but to understand the categories we need to be considering, and the various energy-consuming elements within these. The three key categories we have identified are: our office activities, our travel, and the printing and delivery of the physical editions of our books.

Office

Heating and cooling homes and offices account for a significant proportion of overall carbon emissions. We have negotiated with King’s College (where we have our office space) to install more energy-efficient radiators, which have significantly improved our ability to control the temperature—thus preventing overheating (and making us all more comfortable!) and reducing wasted energy.

We have also spoken with King’s about installing LED lights, which use considerably less electricity—but this is something the college is already doing across all of its buildings over a period of time, and we are not able to accelerate the process in our office. This is one of the challenges of making changes in a space we don’t own: we don’t have complete autonomy and we therefore have to do what we can within certain constraints. With that in mind we are making smaller changes, such as being mindful of switching lights off in rarely-used areas.

Travel

We have made the decision not to fly at all this year, and we have been exploring remote participation at events to cut down on this and other types of travel. For example, in January at the kickoff meeting for the COPIM project, one of us stayed in the office rather than travelling to Coventry and participated remotely via Skype. The success of this attempt (after hurdling a couple of technological obstacles) demonstrated to us that such participation is workable, and it will now be a viable option as the project progresses—which is particularly significant given that the COPIM partners are located in America and in continental Europe, as well as in the UK.

We are also giving more webinars and remote presentations at universities and university libraries rather than travelling to speak, where this is appropriate. So far, this has met with mixed success—sometimes it has worked well, but on other occasions the opportunity for discussion has been limited by patchy audio or by other technical issues inhibiting interaction. Success has depended to a large degree on the technical infrastructure of the ‘host’ institution, and the extent to which they are practiced in facilitating remote participation.

How our members of staff get to work is also worth mentioning when discussing travel. The mode of transport each individual uses is, of course, a personal choice, but we are fortunate that Cambridge is a very friendly city for cyclists and the majority of our staff already commute by bicycle, with the remainder using public transport. Had this not been the case, we might have had conversations about car-pooling or other ways OBP could facilitate a greener commute for any staff members who might have wanted to try this.

Next Steps

We have thus had some success with our initial steps in attempting to reduce our carbon footprint, concentrating on our office environment and our work-related travel. The next post in this series will examine the environmental impact of the production and shipping of the printed editions of our books, and the trade-offs involved when making choices about this aspect of our business.

Many libraries in the UK and around the world use COUNTER statistics to measure the usage of their digital resources (including databases, online journals, ebooks and Open Access books) by members of their university. Because we know that libraries value COUNTER statistics, we offer our Library Members COUNTER-consistent metrics to measure their usage of our books, as one of several benefits of membership (which also include free ebooks available to all patrons to be kept permanently, discounts on printed copies for all patrons, MARC records, resources to discuss Open Access with students and staff, and more).^[1]

But we are concerned about COUNTER statistics as a measure of the usage of Open Access digital resources by members of a specific university—and particularly when they are compared with similar statistics for ‘closed access’ and paywalled content.

COUNTER statistics are a reasonable measure of the use of commercial content, because the paywall acts as a ‘funnel’ guiding users to the publisher’s site to access the content (where, because the library has already paid for institutional access, it is toll-free to the individual user). Even when patrons are off campus they have an incentive to log in and access the digital resources via their remote-access credentials—or indeed, to delay accessing the content until they are within a university’s IP domain. The COUNTER metrics can therefore track the actual usage of commercial content with a relatively high degree of accuracy.

But there are problems with using COUNTER metrics to measure the usage of OA books by library patrons. Precisely because the books are Open Access, users are able to access the OA editions (PDF and, often, HTML and XML too) from any number of places, including Google Books, JSTOR, OAPEN, an author’s university repository—in fact, from anywhere they are shared online. That is the beauty of Open Access! But the lack of a paywall also means that the users are not ‘funnelled’ to access the content via one route that is easy to measure.

We are not currently able to provide university-specific usage data from any sites other than our own. So the COUNTER-consistent statistics we provide are only for actions recorded on the OBP website from an IP address registered to the university—necessarily a much lower number than the actual usage of our books by Library Members.

From conversations with some of our Library Members, we know that the library catalogues themselves often send people to other platforms, for example OAPEN, rather than to our website. We are not currently able to provide COUNTER-consistent metrics for usage of our books on these platforms—and more importantly, readers will not be able to access all of the benefits of the Library Membership there, some of which can only be accessed from our website. Other platforms typically offer only the PDF edition of our books—which is free to everyone—while our own site offers an array of different formats, including the ebook editions (free to Library Member users), the Open Access HTML and XML editions, and the paperback and hardback editions (discounted for Library Member users).

To get the most out of Library Membership, as well as to obtain a more accurate measurement of the usage of our books, libraries should therefore direct patrons to our website wherever possible. We aim to assist in this by providing MARC records as one of the benefits of Library Membership, in which the only URL included is the DOI—which directs to the book’s page on our website.

If readers were directed to our website, the COUNTER-consistent metrics would be more reflective of actual use—but they will still not be a complete measurement. The COUNTER data libraries get for OA content and the COUNTER data they get for closed-access content are not directly comparable, and there is a risk that the OA resources are seen as less popular with users simply because those users are not being efficiently funnelled by a paywall. We hope that librarians will bear this in mind when considering the usage patterns for the resources they support.

If you’re interested to find out more about metrics and OA books:

• This post (written for the general reader) is a deep dive into what book usage data really tells us.
• And this webpage explains the work we have done on book usage data with the HIRMEOS project, creating open source software and databases to collectively collect and host usage data from alternative platforms for multiple publishers. This work has significantly contributed to the development of the OPERAS Metrics Portal.
• Finally, keep an eye on the activities of COPIM and particularly the ‘Building an Open Dissemination System’ project. OBP is taking a leading role in this project, which will develop technical protocols and infrastructure to better integrate OA books into institutional library, digital learning and repository systems. Everything COPIM creates will be openly available and community-governed for libraries, publishers and anybody else to adopt as they see fit. Follow the COPIM Twitter feed for updates!

[1] COUNTER-consistent metrics are collected using COUNTER’s specifications. The reason our data is not officially COUNTER compliant (meaning that COUNTER has officially recognised that our metrics are collected using their specifications) is because COUNTER charges a substantial fee to become COUNTER compliant, which, for a non-profit organisation like ours, is a significant barrier.

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Last month INC proudly published Sepp Eckenhaussen’s Scenes of Independence: Cultural Ruptures in Zagreb (1991-2019) as the third edition of the Deep Pockets series. It tells the story of ‘independent culture’ in Zagreb in a way that is both theoretical, practical, and personal. Below you can read an excerpt. To get a free download or order a print-on-demand copy of the full book, please visit the publication page.

Zagreb, Rebecca West says, ‘has the endearing characteristic, noticeable in many French towns, of remaining a small town when it is in fact quite large’. She wrote these words in the late 1930s, when Zagreb had just over two hundred thousand inhabitants. By 2019, this number has almost quadrupled. Yet a similar feeling captures me while roaming the city today. It seems like Zagreb is a capital and a village at the same time. It is almost impossible to get lost in the streets, squares and parks squeezed between Mount Medvenica and the Sava River.

According to West, Zagreb’s village-like character is ‘a lovely spiritual victory over urbanization’. A dubious compliment. Within a few years after West’s visit, two hundred thousand refugees of World War II settled in the city, affirming that in Zagreb, too, the force of urbanization is more than capable of bending the laws of spiritual life. It could hardly be said that West was naïve, though. Her Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia is widely regarded as one of the greatest – some say the most foreseeing – books ever written about Yugoslavia. It describes with great finesse and pointy humor the life of the Balkan peoples during centuries of hardships and the constant political quarrels amongst Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Bosniaks, Albanians, and Macedonians. If anything, West’s spiritualist interpretation of life in Zagreb hints to the understanding that this city is not so easily readable.

Zagreb is a fragmented city; its many neighborhoods seem to be different worlds. Even the city center, which is not very vast, is split up into three parts: one for politics, one for religion, and one for life. The old city, located on a hill and called Gornji Grad (upper town), is the seat of the Croatian government. From here, the county’s rulers have a wide view over the rest of the city and the Pannonian Basin beyond it. Over the past decades, Gornji Grad’s old age and altitude have also made it into a well-visited tourist attraction. As a result, a visitor of Gornji Grad will encounter the strange mix of formal power and touristic entertainment usually reserved for royal palaces. On the slope of the hill stands Zagreb’s magnificent cathedral with its towers in eternal scaffolds, surrounded by the clerical complexes. This is Kaptol. Together Gornji Grad and Kaptol are the epicenter of Croatian political and clerical power, which are deeply intertwined.

At the foot of the hill, Donji Grad (lower town) begins. This part of the city, built in the nineteenth century, is surrounded by Gornji Grad on the north and the Green Horseshoe on all other sides. The Green Horseshoe consists of three boulevards modeled after the Ringstraße in Vienna. Its main elements are leafy parks, botanical gardens, and neo-renaissance pavilions designed to simultaneously impress and relax flaneurs and other passers-by. In Donji Grad, one can find the main shopping street Ilica, restaurants, hotels, a handful of one-room cinemas, the botanical gardens, the train station, and the main square Trg Ban Jelačić – usually simply called Trg. It is here that public everyday life takes place. The fact that Zagreb’s urban life is this concentrated is quite joyful. Hardly a day passes without a random encounter with a friend or colleague.

A few kilometres to the East of the city centre, one finds the green pearl of Zagreb: Maksimir Park. The huge park contains five basins full of turtles, a small zoo, a restaurant pavilion overlooking the tops of the trees, and enough lush green and small pathways to wander around for a full day. No wonder young families, dog-walkers, sunbathers and tourists flock the park whenever the sun comes out. It was built by Zagreb’s bishops in the late 18th century and was the first large public park in South-Eastern Europe. A statement of civilization. The famous Yugoslavian writer Miroslav Krleža wrote about Maksimir in his 1926 Journey to Russia:

Where does Europe begin and Asia end? That is far from easy to define: while the Zagreb cardinals’ and bishops’ Maksimir Park is definitely a piece of Biedermeier Europe, the village of Čulinec below Maksimir Park still slumbers in an old Slavic, archaic condition, with wooden architecture from ages prehistorical, and Čulinec and Banova Jaruga to the southeast are the immediate transition to China and India, snoring all the way to Bombay and distant Port Arthur.

So, this wonderful place of leisure, so progressive at the time of its construction, shows the particular of position Zagreb in cultural discourse; an explosive position on ‘the fault line between civilizations’, as Samuel P. Huntington called it in The Clash of Civilizations?. This strange place on the brink of East and West has for centuries played an important role in the identification of Croatian culture, both from inside and out, and contributed to the Balkan’s reputation as the Powder Keg of Europe. For is it not inevitable that, when cultures so different from one another meet in one place, clashes ensue? Croatia is, in other words, on the frontier of the Culture Wars.*

Around the old city of Zagreb, beyond the comfort of the Viennese boulevards of the lower town and the picturesque alleys of the upper town, socialist-era architecture arises. Walking through the maze of streets and courtyards just south of the city center, a visitor might run into the impressive sight of the Rakete: a complex of three rocket-shaped towers designed by Centar 51 in 1968, which will soon be discovered by photographers with a brutalist fetish. And even further south, cut off from the rest of the city by the river Sava, is Novi Zagreb (New Zagreb). This part of town was built by the order of Marshal Tito to accommodate for a new, socialist urban life. Between the typical socialist high rises, a huge horse racing track was built, a new national library, and, more recently, the Museum of Contemporary Art. But despite these grand public works, social life in Novi Zagreb takes place mainly in the cafés of its malls and on the gigantic flea market Hrelić.

In this fragmented city with its many testimonies of a rich and turbulent history lives a unique culture. There is the culture embodied by the stately Viennese-style buildings of the Museum of Modern Art, the Archaeological Museum, the Art Pavilion, and the National Theatre, which take up unmistakably symbolic spaces along the promenades of the Green Horseshoe. But then there is also another, more interesting culture in Zagreb. This other culture emerged after Yugoslavia disintegrated in 1991 and Croatia became an independent state for the first time since the Middle Ages. Insiders refer to it as ‘independent culture’ or ‘non-institutional culture’.

Independent culture is just as present in the city center as the grand institutions, yet not immediately recognizable to the outsider. A stone’s throw away from the Archaeological Museum, hidden away in the arcade of a courtyard there is the small Galerija Nova. Galerija Nova is the only exhibition space in Zagreb structurally presenting art exhibitions which carry solidarity with migrants – a highly sensitive topic in this country on the border of the European Union. One block further still, in the back of another courtyard, Multimedia Institute and Hacklab MAMA is located, the base for Croatian media art and digital culture since the early 2000s. It also happens to be the best library in the fields of new media and commons in Croatia. A few minutes eastward by bike, in the poche Martićeva Street, there is a café which at first glance looks like any other. Once inside, however, it turns out that this place, which is called Booksa, is a hotspot of cultural life, where cultural workers come to drink coffee, meet, work, and read. A few tram stops from Booksa, in the fold line between the railroads and The Westin Zagreb, there is an old pharmaceutical factory. Today, it is a former squat called Medika. Instead of medicines, it now produces punk concerts and glitch art exhibitions.

I could go like this on for a while. Because with every visit to one of these places, one meets people and finds out about other places like it: the experimental dance company BADco., curatorial collective BLOK, news outlet Kulturpunkt, youth culture hub Pogon, anarchist bookshop Što Čitaš?, the old socialist Student Centre, platform organizations Clubture and Right to the city, and Documenta – Centre for Dealing with the Past. Like a distributed web, these organizations permeate the urban tissue of Zagreb. They make up a kind of village-like social system in which most people know each other personally and have often worked together at some point. Independent culture is a scene.

Now, if I’m raising the impression independent culture is either a subculture or a purely local phenomenon, I should correct myself immediately. Independent culture includes well-known, (internationally) established organizations. MAMA’s programs include many Croatian contributors, but also Catherine Malabou, Geert Lovink and Pussy Riot. The institute published the latest book by the French philosopher Jacques Rancière, one of my personal favorites amongst contemporary thinkers. WHW, the curatorial collective which directs Galerija Nova, works with internationally renowned artists like Mladen Stilinović, Sanja Iveković, and David Maljković. They have, moreover, been appointed as director of Kunsthalle Wien in the summer of 2019. These are just some examples to show that, while certainly embedded locally, independent culture is an internationally oriented scene.

It is hard to pinpoint exactly what type of culture is created in independent culture, while the practices of the various organizations in it differ so much. It includes but is not limited to dance, performance art, theatre, visual arts, new and old media, experimental cinema, festivals, education, community work, research, discursive programs, networking, and advocacy. It is clear that independent culture transgresses the boundaries of traditional cultural disciplines. The only general characteristic is that while all of these organizations work with culture, none work within the strict confinements of the art world or artistic production – a characteristic so common that it cannot define a scene. So, what is it that connects the scene, apart from personal relations, a shared urban environment, and the fact everyone in it does ‘something with culture’?

If anything, the organizations within independent culture are united by common political outlook (not to be confused with a political agenda). Their programming embodies a conglomeration of activist discourses leaning to the left of the political spectrum. Amongst other things, they focus on anti-fascism, pacifism, commons activism, feminism and queer activism, decoloniality, and ecological activism. Some would say that Yugonostalgia is rather common in independent culture, others would say that they’re Yugofuturist. In order to be able to have this political agency in the context of Croatia, which is predominantly ruled by right-wing and nationalist forces, the scene is organized separately from the state-funded cultural infrastructure. This shows by approximation what the independence is that ties together Zagreb’s independent cultural scene. Being rooted in grassroots activisms rather than large institutions governed by state and local governments, independent culture claims to work, indeed, independently from the dominant power of the state.

But contradictions abound. From the moment of its emergence in the 1990s, the independent cultural infrastructure depended largely on international philanthropist organizations such as the George Soros Foundation, the Rosa Luxembourg Foundation, and the European Cultural Foundation, as well as for-profit organizations such as the Viennese Erste Bank. Then, since the mid-2000s, international funds have retreated from Croatia, making independent cultural organizations more reliant on state funding, effectively incentivizing them to engage in advocacy, self-institutionalization, and cultural policy-making. It is questionable, then, how independent or non-institutional the independent cultural scene really is at this point. Is it a product of local urgency and grassroots engagement, or neoliberal and neo-imperial phenomena like globalization and cultural entrepreneurship? Is it possible that it is both? And if so, what is the interrelation between these forces?

In its analysis of independent cultures, Scenes of Indepencence is at times sharp and critical. The struggles it speaks of are real, and addressing them can, as I have learned, be sensitive at times. Yet, in the end, my account is always informed by solidarity. I deeply appreciate the existence of the organizations gathered under the umbrella of independent cultures. Sensing the political subjectivity and collectivity of the scene, however fragile, is a relieving and inspiring experience, especially when coming from Amsterdam, a place where neoliberal hegemony is by now so complete that elements of collective resistance are nearly completely absent from the circuits of cultural production.

My goal in writing the book has been to instrumentalize my semi-outside perspective and to create an analysis that makes sense to and is useful for the reader in the local context. At the same time, I reckon that the question of independence (in- and outside of culture) is a globally relevant one. My book, therefore, discusses two different (although not separate) questions: What does independent culture in Zagreb look like to an outsider? And what insights do the struggles in Zagreb’s independent culture provide into the regimes of global neoliberalisms?

Find the whole book here:

PDF

ePub

Print

*The Balkans have been the battleground of military power struggles between West and East for centuries. The expansion of the Ottoman Empire was put to a halt by Western-European forces in the Balkans in the 16th and 17th century. In the early 20th century, the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of nation-states solidified the border between the liberal, Christian West and the Islamic East. Forced mass migrations and assimilations of ethnic and religious minorities took place, displacing Ottoman Christians West and Balkan-inhabiting Muslims East of the Bosporus. The friction caused between the ethnically and religiously diverse populations that had inhabited the Balkans for centuries, led to two Balkan Wars in 1912 and 1913. In 1914, by firing the mere couple of gun shots that killed Archduke Franz-Ferdinand of Austria, the Bosnian Gavrilo Princip triggered what was briefly considered the Third Balkan War, but is now known as the First World War. This series of events gained the Balkans their reputation as the ‘Powder Keg of Europe’, a reputation that was reinforced once again in reactions to the Yugoslav Wars in the 1990s. Moreover, the idea of the Balkans as a ‘Powder Keg’ was deepened by the rise of global identity politics heralded by the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989. In The Clash of Civilizations? (1993), the American historian Samuel S. Huntington argued that after what Francis Fukuyama famously called the ‘end of history’, the ‘great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflicts will be cultural. […] The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be battle lines of the future.’ This theory was utilized, if not designed, to justify the US in upholding the aggressive foreign policy rhetoric it has used throughout the Cold War up to the present day. The argument that the Balkans are on the fault line of civilizations served in this agenda as a justification to keep regarding this area as the place where the West fights off the East.