The Ministry of Nostalgia: Consuming Austerity

Resumen del libro

Why should we have to Keep Calm and Carry On ?

In this brilliant polemical rampage, Owen Hatherley shows how our past is being resold in order to defend the indefensible. From the marketing of a make do and mend aesthetic to the growing nostalgia for a utopian past that never existed, a cultural distraction scam prevents people grasping the truth of their condition.

The Ministry of Nostalgia explodes the creation of a false history: a rewriting of the austerity of the 1940s and 1950s, which saw the development of a welfare state while the nation crawled out of the devastations of war. This period has been recast to explain and offer consolation for the violence of neoliberalism, an ideology dedicated to the privatisation of our common wealth.

In coruscating prose with subjects ranging from Ken Loach's documentaries, Turner Prize shortlisted video art, London vernacular architecture, and Jamie Oliver's cooking Hatherley issues a passionate challenge to the injunction to keep calm and carry on.

Biografía del autor

Escritor y periodista británico. Escribe principalmente sobre arquitectura, política y cultura. Se doctoró con una tesis sobre el constructivismo y el americanismo. En enero de 2019, Hatherley se incorporó a la revista Tribune como editor de su nueva sección de Cultura. Ha publicado los libros 'Militant modernismo', 'A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain', 'Trans-Europe Express' y 'The Adventures of Owen Hatherley in the Post-Soviet Space'. Ha mantenido tres blogs, Sit down man, you're a bloody tragedy, The Measures Taken y Kino Fist. Publica en diversos medios.