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Excursions into Everyday Life
David Alvarez
Grand Valley State University
alvarezd@gvsu.edu
(c) 2004 David Alvarez.
All rights reserved.
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Review of:
Ben Highmore, ed., The Everyday Life Reader. London: Routledge,
2002.
1. Perhaps it is one of the symptoms of our theory-saturated,
post-everything moment that everyday life has recently become not
just an object of cultural analysis, but a crucial interpretive
category in its own right. Actually existing theory (by which I
mean those forms of theorizing that reduce reality to textuality)
is now adjudged by some commentators to be languishing not merely
in a state of crisis, but of impending extinction. In a recent
tract, one such critic, Terry Eagleton, advocates abandoning
hitherto hegemonic theoretical excavations in favor of grounding
cultural analysis in the deep soils of morality and metaphysics,
among others. For his part, in a posthumously published polemic,
the late Edward Said attempts to reclaim a beachhead of
neo-humanistic terra firma from the murkily indeterminate waters
of post-humanist theory, as well as from the slough of stagnant
humanisms of the Samuel Huntington persuasion.
2. This search for socially relevant significance in theory's
aftermath is one of the contexts in which Ben Highmore--Senior
Lecturer in Cultural and Media Studies at the University of the
West of England--situates the revival of academic interest in
everyday life that his Reader both heralds and enhances. Toward
the end of the engaging essay that introduces his tome, Highmore
notes that the emergence of what he dubs "everyday life studies"
can be regarded as a response to the remorseless textualization of
lived experience by apolitical strains of poststructuralism, as
well as to the depthless exaltation of the present that
characterizes the giddier celebrations of postmodernism (31). As
Highmore has it, theory's frequently self-enclosed spurning of
sensuous life seems to have led to a reassertion of the bracingly
real. What better way, perhaps, to dispel the mustiness of the
House of Theory's rooms than by opening up its windows and letting
the limpid light of everyday life illuminate the dust motes?
3. But what is it precisely that the study of everyday life can shed
light on? Whose everyday life are we talking about? Where can
everyday life be located? How can it be accessed? Indeed, what
exactly is meant by the terms "everyday life," "the everyday,"
"the daily," and their many cognates? Before broaching these
matters, it is well to point out that in the Anglophone academy,
signs of the arrival of "everyday life studies" abound: among
them, special issues of sundry learned journals devoted to the
quotidian as problematic, numerous studies foregrounding a focus
on the everyday in contexts as seemingly unrelated as Stalin's
Russia or London's supermarkets, and the long-overdue translation
into English of pioneering disquisitions on daily experience by
the French polymath Henri Lefebvre. Further, the publication of a
reader on the subject also marks its official academic acceptance,
as Highmore himself almost ruefully observes (xiii).
4. But as the contributions by conceptual artists, avant-garde
filmmakers, and amateur ethnographers collected here make clear,
"everyday life studies" is not purely the purview of academics and
scholars. Moreover, as befits an arena of study as vast as daily
life, the Reader covers a correspondingly wide-ranging array of
orientations and preoccupations. Thus, in addition to such
talismanic meditations on the quotidian as Raymond Williams's
"Culture is Ordinary" and Erving Goffman's discussion of "front
and back regions" in the performance of daily self-representation,
we find here newer material on topics such as the significance of
everyday objects and practices like bags or cooking, as well as
older but lesser known work on daily life, such as the
auto-ethnographic reports of the Mass Observation project that
briefly bloomed in 1930s and '40s Britain. Despite the anxiety of
representativity that Highmore confesses to have felt in
assembling the book, he has succeeded in bringing together between
its covers an intertextually suggestive sample of extracts (xii).
More importantly, the Reader announces the discovery of a
connected cluster of cognitive energies whose reach and density
betoken the existence of a hitherto concealed sector of the
intellectual cosmos. Like a constellation of distant stars, the
elements of this newly sighted portion of the heavens have been
emitting photons for a long time, but their collective light-rays
are only now reaching our retinas.
5. Pursuing this cosmological metaphor, we can say that the general
introduction to the Reader serves as a kind of Hubble telescope
with which to acquire a sense of the dense diachronic and
synchronic dimensions of this universe of discourse, while the
terse introductions to the book's five sections and its
thirty-eight chapters serve as precision prisms with which to scan
the many bodies that constitute it, as well as the spaces that lie
between them. In explaining the realities that these lenses espy,
Highmore often avails himself of a neutral-sounding verb, "to
register," and its cognates. This move often makes it seem as if
the approximations to the study of everyday life that Highmore
proffers perform in a manner akin to that of a primitive camera.
That is, Highmore's use of "to register" may seem to suggest that
the diverse approaches on display in the Reader passively record
the assorted phenomena that make up the stuff of daily life, and
that his own commentary on these approaches fulfills a similar
function.
6. But just as a photograph is more than the impression of light
particles on contact paper, so of course is every act of
registration an interpretative performance, whether consciously or
no. Thus, Highmore does more than merely "register" the different
approaches to everyday life that he makes available in the Reader.
For one thing, through the five categories into which he organizes
the various modalities of attending to the daily and through which
he frames the field ("Situating the everyday," "Everyday life and
'national' culture," "Ethnography near and far," "Reclamation
work," and "Everyday things"), Highmore implicitly foregrounds a
certain set of emphases while eclipsing others, such as, for
instance, the relationship between everyday life and political
revolution. For another, in his own commentary Highmore also
explicitly interprets the diverse origins and trajectories of
these approaches, as well as their nature, usefulness, and
potential. For instance, he is careful to note that portrayals of
daily life do not provide a direct, unmediated, transparent
picture of reality. In part this is so because day-to-day life is
almost impossibly heterogeneous and heteroglossic. What is more,
our methods of accessing the everyday are provisional and awkward,
when not inadequate and opaque. Highmore repeatedly dwells on the
diverse ways in which meditations on everydayness are couched, and
he rightly notes that a focus on finding appropriate
representational forms underlies the wide assortment of attempts
to depict the quiddity of the quotidian.
7. I now wish to enter a caveat: a brief review of a book as
wide-ranging as The Everyday Life Reader can in no wise do justice
to the smorgasbord of ideas, styles, and subjects that the book
summons. Thus, instead of engaging in a Sisyphean struggle to
describe the book's entire contents, in what follows I stress the
significance of one tendency within everyday life studies that is
represented in it: belief in the left-oppositional political value
of focusing on day-to-day experience. In emphasizing this
tendency, I am going against the grain of Highmore's endorsement
of Michel de Certeau's view that any declaration of a politics of
the everyday is as yet "simply premature" (13). At the same time,
however, the remainder of my review takes advantage of the
politically pluralist spirit that animates Highmore's editorial
endeavor.
8. Having said that, I should note another point of slippage between
my review and one feature of its object. In a crucial sense, the
cosmological figure with which I have represented the Reader as
intellectual construct is not altogether apt. One of the
understandings that underlie such disparate delvings into the
daily as George Simmel's scrutiny of the fragment and Dorothy
Smith's feminist sociology of subject-hood (see Chapters 29 and 27
respectively) is that the study of everyday life remits us not to
the starry heavens, but to the teeming terrain of the social.
Indeed, one way in which critical analysis of everyday life
differs markedly from the more socially detached strains of sundry
post-isms is in its rather old-fashioned faith that however
culturally constructed or codified it may be, "the real" really
exists and is neither a ragbag of mystifications nor a
never-endingly deferred relay of textual effects. However, to
accept this understanding of everyday life does not entail a
reversion either to militant pre- or anti-theoretical
fundamentalism, or to a naïvely reflectionist faith in one or
another convention of realism. Rather, among other things, it
entails an eye for the traces of social meaning in everyday
phenomena and their forms, as well as an ear for the harmony that
underpins the din of daily life and its representations. An
awareness of poststructuralism's lessons about the ways in which
regimes of representation operate can clearly be of assistance in
this enterprise, as can a Marxist-inflected appreciation of
contradiction. In this volume, Stuart Hall's essay on photographic
representations of West Indian immigrants to Britain evinces a
particularly telling instance of how the study of everyday life
can effectively integrate textual and materialist analyses of
people and their representations.
9. Hall's merger of analytic modes is echoed in another text
reproduced here, the introduction to a Yale French Studies special
issue on everyday life. Editors Alice Kaplan and Kristin Ross aver
that everyday life analysis can offer an alternative to the
subject/object opposition that lies at the core of much European
thought and is exemplified by such contrasting intellectual
currents as phenomenology on one side of the divide and
structuralism on the other. They further assert that, as against
the subjectivist ascription of pure intentionality to social
agents on the one hand and the dour designation of discursive
determinism to structures and systems on the other, everyday life
insists on the centrality of in-betweenness, on the irreducible
liminality of lived experience, and on the mediational and
strange-making mettle of many attempts at representing its
character. Furthermore, they suggest that to read everyday life is
as much an act of poeisis (understood as creative or
transformational act), as it is of the realist representations of
mimesis: "everyday life harbors the texture of social change; to
perceive it at all is to recognize the necessity of its conscious
transformation" (79).
10. Questions of consciousness, creativity, and perception loom large
in the work of one of the twentieth century's most influential and
productive advocates of attending to the everyday, Sigmund Freud.
Indeed, as Highmore notes, the notion of Everyday Life is
analogous to the core Freudian concept of the Unconscious (6).
Both are often understood in spatial terms, inasmuch as they
designate a reality that hovers behind or below or above or aslant
the seeming self-evidence of the senses, and both are only partly
accessible to rational inquiry. As with the Unconscious, there is
something at once searchingly intimate and stubbornly ungraspable
about everyday life (and as Highmore suggests, about "every-night"
life as well). Yet just as Freud ascribed preternatural powers to
the Unconscious in his explanations of the well-springs of human
action and emotion, so too do some of everyday life's most
distinguished students accord the latter an originary primacy, in
intellectual life as well as in our daily, non-specialized
being-in-the-world. Indeed, for figures such as Agnes Heller (who
is not featured here), everyday life is the ultimate source and
horizon of knowledge, critique, and action. Moreover, the meanings
of the real may reside not only at the official addresses to which
its study has traditionally referred us, but also in such
unsuspected locations as those zones of experience we habitually
designate as being drearily devoid of significance--among them,
anomie, ennui, and reverie. Furthermore, according to a prominent
strain of everyday life studies to which I have already alluded,
it is also in the realm of the seemingly superficial that indirect
forms of resistance to dominant and oppressive socio-political and
economic structures may be found. Thus, for instance, in certain
contexts critical readings of clothing styles may yield as much
politically relevant meaning as sober analyses of state-forms.
11. At this point in my exposition of the Reader, it is perhaps
pertinent to question the extent to which its content brings us
genuine news. After all, to insist nowadays on the political
significance of scrutinizing soap operas or on the celebration of
style as subversion is to court a languid yawn of unsurprised
assent in response. However, Highmore is quite alert to the fact
that the everyday has been the object of scrutiny for decades
across a range of disciplines and departments in the Humanities
and Social Sciences, as well as in cultural practices such as
literary writing and photography. In literature, Joyce's Ulysses
stands as an early example of the critical privileging of the
quotidian, even earlier instances of which may be found in
Baudelaire's poems about Paris or in the photographs of daily
Parisian scenes taken by his contemporary, Charles Negre. As for
theoretical reflections on everyday life, the Reader reproduces
work from the 1920s by Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Krackauer on
topics as stolidly quotidian as repetitive labor and boredom.
Thus, the insistence on the significance of the everyday is hardly
novel. What /is/ new, by contrast, is that hitherto disparate and
diverse disciplinary and interdisciplinary approximations to the
quotidian have within the past two decades begun to coalesce into
a more or less coherent academic-artistic-intellectual formation,
one that has established itself "in contradistinction to other
tendencies within the human sciences" (31).
12. In the English-speaking academy, this formation's most immediate
institutional precursor was cultural studies. Highmore is
particularly cognizant of the parallels between the work of
cultural studies and the labor of bestowing significance upon
quotidian life, and he notes the many points at which the modus
operandi of both projects intersect. Indeed, Highmore's announced
agenda is to develop a cultural studies approach to everyday life.
What might such an approach entail? Highmore advances several
methods as being particularly apposite in attacking the tangled
underbrush of the everyday, among them, thick description in the
ethnographic and sociological mode, and defamiliarization in the
writing of history and literary criticism. In making the ordinary
extraordinary, and the familiar unfamiliar, Highmore observes,
artists and others can detach the dull veneer of everydayness that
clings to daily life and masks the latter's manifold meanings (25).
13. Again, at this juncture one might reasonably ask whether we have
not been here before. Yes and no, Highmore seems to be saying.
Yes, inasmuch as anthropological and sociological ethnographies,
for instance, have been querying the quotidian for many a decade.
No, insofar as they have not done so from the standpoint of the
self-aware and pluralistic ingathering of intersecting
perspectives that Highmore convenes under the rubrics of "everyday
life theory" or "everyday life studies," both of which stand
athwart conventional circumscriptions of knowledge production.
Apropos this point, Highmore notes that academic engagement with
the everyday constitutes itself not so much into a field /tout
court/, as into a "para-" or "meta-" field, one that is often
interstitial in aim and idiom. Furthermore, the sometimes surplus
or supplementary status of everyday theorizing, he ventures, is
consonant (or as he puts it, "contiguous") with the vague and vast
nature of its problematic referent, which is by definition
abundant in content and amorphous in shape.
14. But neither the blurredness of everyday life's boundaries or its
holdings, nor the imprecise ways in which we register its
meanings, ought to result in resignation or self-recrimination,
Highmore insists. Rather, to acknowledge the messiness of
construction-work at the site of the everyday is to breathe the
heady air that animates the building of a new conceptual edifice.
Furthermore, this work is, or can be, at once the turf of skilled
builder and /bricoleur/ alike. What, then, is the purview of
everyday life studies? How do its transdisciplinary modes of
knowing clash or coalesce? In addressing the second of these
questions, Highmore sketches out a vector of tendencies that
typify the study of everyday life. In his view, such tendencies
can be provisionally grouped into a series of dyads:
particular/general, agency/structure, experiences/institutions,
feelings/discourses, and resistance/power. In turn, these dyads
are linked to the methodological operations of micro- and
macro-analysis (5). Those aspects of daily life that are often
approached through these conceptual and methodological rubrics
also seem to lend themselves to binary enumeration: the street and
the home, the private and the public, prescribed rites and
spontaneous moments, among others. But these pairs are by no means
to be regarded as fixed. Rather, to return to a point made
earlier, they are to be understood relationally: it is in the
state of flux between--or sparked by--such pairs that many
everyday-life theories seek to find meaning.
15. There is of course a tension between the desire to wrest concrete
sense out of a phenomenon as enormous as everyday life and the
shape shifting and hard-to-apprehend quality of its character.
Highmore poses the question as to whether rigor and systemic
analysis--an orientation and a practice beloved of social
scientists in general and Marxists in particular--can be adequate
to the task of reckoning with everyday life. Can the filigreed and
fugitive meanings often associated with the realm of quotidian
experience be properly captured by the freeze-framing operations
of rigorous analysis? Conversely, how can the study of social
minutiae transcend the mere cataloguing of heterogeneous data? In
his own commentary, Highmore leaves these questions open, and
collectively the texts assembled in the Reader provide us with no
hard and fast answers either. Jacques Rancière--historian of
proletarian dreams and desires--captures the tentative and
exploratory nature of much everyday life theorizing: "those who
venture into this labyrinth must be honestly forewarned that no
answers will be supplied" (250).
16. A need for cut-and-dried answers can sometimes give evidence of
anxiety. Among leftists (such as this reviewer), such anxiety may
derive from deep-rooted doubts about the political efficacy or
desirability of researching or representing everyday life. If, as
a Communist commentator whose work is presented here once
observed, "life is conservative," and if, as he also noted, "art,
by nature, is conservative; it is removed from life," then what
for left-wingers would be the point of studying the one or
practicing the other (86, 87)? The identity of that commentator
supplies us with one possible answer. Leon Trotsky,
Commander-in-Chief of the Red Army and theorist of permanent
revolution, strongly advocated the study of everyday life,
precisely because he thought that therein lay both the seeds of
Russia's revolutionary transformation and the obstacles to the
latter's realization. In fact, the Marxist canon provides
contemporary leftist approaches to the study of quotidian
experience with an ample archive of usable ideas and attitudes.
After all, Das Kapital famously begins with an
empirico-philosophical discussion of the ubiquitous presence and
power of the commodity form in modern capitalist life.
Commodities, as Marx taught us, lead a peculiar dual existence,
and do so in at least two ways: first, by virtue of their
Janus-faced identity as use- and exchange-values; second, by
presenting a pristine face to consumers that often occludes their
sullied origins at the point of production. As Highmore suggests,
this classic Marxian insight is being rediscovered by a new
generation of radicals who are denouncing the extensive structures
of everyday neo-imperial exploitation that are typically obscured
by the branding of such ostensibly banal objects as sneakers and
bananas (18).
17. Such commodities are often produced or assembled by young women
who constitute a large component of the new supra-national
proletariat that has emerged in the so-called Free-Trade Zones
implanted by Northern financial institutions, governments, and
corporations in Southern nations, in collusion with local
/comprador/ capital and neo-liberal regimes. Subjected to harsh
working conditions and paid a pittance for their arduously
repetitive labor, such women have also been at the forefront of
efforts to organize against these and other forms of everyday
exploitation. Kaplan and Ross note that everyday life "has always
lain heavily on the shoulders of women" (78). It is no accident,
therefore, that much of the most productive work on daily
experience has been undertaken by women engaged in struggles for
their emancipation from patriarchal paradigms and practices, such
as the British feminist social historian Carolyn Steedman, whose
writings on gendered narration and remembering are excerpted in
Chapter 26. Often, such work has frowned upon the social
remoteness of much theoretical discourse, even that of an avowedly
feminist stripe. In "Notes toward a Politics of Location," the
poet Adrienne Rich articulated an emblematic questioning of the
priorities and protocols of certain strains within critical theory:
theory--the seeing of patterns, showing the forest as well as
the trees--theory can be a dew that rises from the earth and
collects in the rain cloud and returns to earth over and over.
But if it doesn't smell of the earth, it isn't good for the
earth. (213-14)
In her essay, Rich also laments the distorting effects of
material, "racial," and national privilege on the outlook of white
North American feminists such as herself. Responding to stories
about, and reflections by, working women the world over, she asks
why their ideas and inclinations are rarely allowed admittance to
the rather rarefied regions of First World theorizing.
18. In 2004, twenty years after the first publication of Rich's essay,
thousands of students at U.S. universities are involved in
extracurricular efforts to reclaim the Commons by making common
cause with workers in the archipelago of apparel-producing
sweatshops scattered across the global South.[1>] By so
doing, these students are puncturing the bubble of their insulated
privilege and effectively heeding Rich's appeal for the
de-centering of Euro-American critical theories. Moreover, in
supporting the struggles for justice waged by the producers of
such everyday student garb as collegiate caps, anti-sweatshop
activists take as their point of departure what their
international allies themselves regard as just wages and working
conditions. Simultaneously, they seek to educate university
administrators, fellow students, and brand-shoppers about the
troubled trajectory of the commodities that they purchase and
endorse. Recently, the movement has moved a step further by paying
attention to exploitative everyday economic relations on their own
campuses. In its multi-pronged and knowledge-rich activism, the
U.S. student-labor solidarity movement--and its counterparts
abroad--evinces a profound practical and theoretical understanding
of several motifs that mark the landscape of everyday life
studies, among them the idea that alienated everyday life contains
the seeds of its own de-alienation and the notion that
heterogeneous regional and national responses to everyday
modernity make manifest both the discontinuity of global
capitalism's reach and the unitary nature of its expansion.
19. How global in origin or identity is the study of everyday life?
Highmore notes that, thus far, everyday life studies seems to be a
resolutely Euro-American enterprise, and he worries that this
might result in an unwelcome if unwitting ethnocentrism (xiii). A
cursory scan of the table of contents indeed confirms that most of
the excerpted texts are by British, French, German, and North
American authors, and that those contributors whose national
origins lie outside the Euro-American belt either labor within it
or have their books published there. Nonetheless, perhaps Highmore
is worrying unduly. For one thing, in these interconnected times,
clear-cut divisions between North and South are as dated as
unblurred genres. (Rural revolutionaries ensconced in the remote
highlands of Mexico's Southeast have made this point evident by
networking via border-crossing email with Northern urban
/internautas/.) For another, the critical study of everyday life
and its representation in cultural artifacts is already quite
global in scope and has been for some time. In support of this
claim, one could cite texts such as the short stories of the
Argentinean writer, Julio Cortázar, with their quixotic
explorations of the infra-ordinary world of quotidian existence,
or the work by critical South African anthropologists on everyday
forms of resistance to apartheid. Moreover, a new generation of
anti-neo-liberal activists in the South--from Buenos Aires to
Cochabamba to Delhi and beyond--is engaged in crafting novel
political practices that are based on the need to satisfy with
dignity the multiple daily demands of social reproduction. One
such group, Johannesburg's Electricity Crisis Committee--whose
"struggle electricians" illegally (and freely) reconnect to the
grid indigent consumers who have been disconnected by newly
privatized utility companies--exemplifies the everyday-focused
ruses and strategies that have emerged in the counter-capitals of
modernity. Thus while the fear that the study of everyday life can
degenerate into self-regarding ethnocentric superficiality is not
entirely baseless, an awareness of the daily work of
border-crossing social movements makes it clear that things need
not be so.
20. Nonetheless, it remains the case that the study of everyday life
does not in itself necessarily entail either an internationalist
or a progressive outlook. The contrasting attitudes to everyday
modernity evidenced by George Simmel (Chapter 29) and his student
Walter Benjamin (Chapter 2) make this clear. In scrutinizing
sundry signs and objects for their social significance, Benjamin
was motivated by the stubborn optimism of one who believed that
modernity's edifice could be rebuilt from the bricks strewn amid
its rubble. Benjamin's onetime teacher Simmel also rummaged amid
modernity's debris, but where his famous pupil espied evidence of
salvation, Simmel drew repeated attention to the sharp shocks
sustained by the human sensorium in the hurly burly of modern
life. Still others, such as Guy Debord (Chapter 23), have spoken
starkly about the all-embracing alienation that enervates daily
experience while counterintuitively celebrating the utopian
undercurrents that inhere in dailiness. Yet all three
thinkers--along with myriad others--insist doggedly upon the
importance of understanding the everydayness of everyday life.
Moreover, while thus reiterating the significance of registering
the quotidian, many such figures have resisted or rejected the
will to conceptual coherence that often accompanies the
championing of a paradigm. Whatever the reasons for this dual
doggedness and demureness may be, and they are surely multiple, it
is at least clear that any attempt to capture the totality of
everyday life studies must perforce fall short of its aim. It is
perhaps for this reason that many of those who attend to the
everyday frequently express themselves metaphorically. Debord, for
instance, denounced everyday life as "a sort of reservation for
good natives who keep modern society running without understanding
it" (240). But not all is opaque in the study of /la vie
quotidienne/. Debord, after all, could also declare with lapidary
limpidity that "everyday life is the measure of all things: of the
fulfillment or rather the nonfulfillment of human relations; of
the use of lived time; of artistic experimentation; of
revolutionary politics" (239). Doubtless, the steering of a
passage from social unreadability to readability (or from
invisibility to visibility) is one of the governing tropes and
operations among the panoply of perspectives represented in the
Reader.
21. At any rate, the Reader provides proof, if proof were still
needed, of why everyday matters matter a great deal. (Newcomers to
everyday life studies can complement their exploration of the
Reader with a perusal of its companion volume, Highmore's Everyday
Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction.) Located at the
fountainhead of some of the most influential paradigms and
procedures of knowledge production of the twentieth century--and
now newly re-emergent in the first decade of the twenty-first--the
concept of everyday life is enormously consequential for the study
of human thought and action. That much, surely, is by now beyond
doubt. What is still up for grabs, is how best to approach and
assess its protean personality. With its wide-ranging selections
and its thought-provoking framings, Highmore's Everyday Life
Reader provides us with multiple points of entry into the study of
that complex congeries of times, spaces, technologies, practices,
institutions, ideologies, material conditions, emotional states,
thoughts, sensations, signs, and symbols in the midst of whose
force-field we all live.
Department of English
Grand Valley State University
alvarezd@gvsu.edu
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Notes
1. For an overview of the movement's origins, activities,
and goals, see Featherstone.
Works Cited
Eagleton, Terry. After Theory. New York: Basic, 2003.
Featherstone, Liza, and United Students against Sweatshops: The
Making of a Movement. Students against Sweatshops. New York:
Verso, 2002.
Highmore, Ben. Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction.
London: Routledge, 2002.
Said, Edward W. Humanism and Democratic Criticism. New York:
Columbia UP, 2004.
Rich, Adrienne. "Notes Toward a Politics of Location." Blood,
Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979-1985. New York: Norton, 1986.