The Ruin Dwellers - by Jake P Smith (Paperback)

About the Book

"The Ruin Dwellers takes us into the urban spaces of youth revolts during the 1970s and 1980s in West Germany and elsewhere in western and central Europe. These activists have been seen as striving for a utopian future, but as historian Jake Smith shows, this view is inaccurate. Rather, the author argues, they were committed to a much more unique sensibility: one that sought to subvert progressive temporal frameworks and, instead, dwell in the ruins of the past. Examining a rich corpus of radical texts and practices, Smith shows that squatters and their leftist allies in this period engaged in countercultural aesthetic experiments with modes of autonomous living. Smith brings to life the real and imagined landscapes conjured in abandoned, run-down buildings and in reinvented city spaces; through the off-modern punk style in art, dress, music, graffiti, and film; and in philosophical, poetic, and political writing. In so doing, he offers an eye-opening look at anarchic world-making practices that found new ways of imagining an emancipated future through inhabiting the fractured past"--

Book Synopsis

Traces the shifting dynamics within leftist activism in 1970s and '80s Europe and its experiments in art, life, and politics.

The Ruin Dwellers takes readers into the urban spaces of youth revolts during the 1970s and '80s in West Germany and elsewhere in western and central Europe. Whereas earlier generations of leftist activists were primarily oriented toward the utopian future, participants in the youth movements of the 1970s and '80s developed a more complex set of temporal practices that sought to scramble the borders between the past, present, and future.

Examining a rich corpus of radical texts and practices, historian Jake P. Smith shows that squatters and their leftist allies in this period engaged in social, cultural, and aesthetic experiments with modes of autonomous living. Smith brings to life the real and imagined landscapes conjured in squatted houses and street protests; in art, dress, music, graffiti, and film; and in philosophical, poetic, and political texts. In so doing, he offers an eye-opening look at anarchic world-making practices that found new ways of imagining an emancipated future through inhabiting the fractured past.

Review Quotes

"This excellent, important book revises the conventional wisdom that the postrevolutionary loss of a future perspective, coupled with the 'information overload' brought about by technology's immediacy, has been the left's undoing. As Smith carefully shows, by discovering new spaces in the postwar landscape, leftists of the 1970s and '80s used the past--its literal ruins--to remake and open the world."-- "Monica Black, University of Tennessee, Knoxville"

About the Author

Jake Smith is assistant professor of history at Colorado College.