The United States of Belgium - Jane C. Judge - ebook

New and comprehensive insights into the seminal events that shaped Belgian identity In 1790, between the birth of America (1776) and the creation of the French National Assembly (1789), nine provinces nestled between the French and Dutch borders declared themselves a new free and independent country: the United States of Belgium. Before then, the provinces had been part of the vast Austrian Habsburg Empire ruled by Joseph II. In 1789 revolutionaries from Brussels to Ghent to Namur recruited a grass-roots army that, to the surprise of many, successfully chased imperial forces from the majority of the territories. The exhilaration of military triumph and political independence quickly faded as revolutionary factions fought each other and the European monarchies became more nervous in the face of French radicalization. Yet, the course of events had fostered the solidification of a new identity among the provinces' inhabitants: Belgianness. This is the story of the emergence of Belgianness…

As LGBTQ movements in Western Europe and North America are becoming increasingly successful at awarding LGBTQ people rights, especially institutional recognition for same-sex couples and their families, what becomes of the deeper social transformation that these movements initially aimed to achieve? The United States is in many ways a paradigmatic model for LGBTQ movements in other countries. This book focuses on the transformations of the United States' LGBTQ movement since the 1980s, highlighting the relationship between its institutionalization and the disappearance of sexuality from its most visible claims, so that its growing visibility and legitimation since the 1990s have not led to an increase in militancy. The book examines the issue from the bottom up, identifying the links between the varying importance of sexuality as a movement theme and actors' mobilization, and enhances the import of subjectivity in militancy. It draws attention to cultural, sometimes infrapolitical, for…

Eind jaren tachtig stond heel België te dansen op de New Beat, een surreëel elektronisch muziekgenre dat al gauw onze buurlanden veroverde. Het megasucces van deze eclectische voorloper van housemuziek leek uit het niets te komen. Maar niets is minder waar, komt regisseur Jozef Devillé te weten in deze even prettige als nostalgische documentaire. The Sound of Belgium biedt een alternatieve kroniek van onze vaderlandse muziekgeschiedenis met een soundtrack vol pompende beats.

It is out of the question that nowadays the European competence to defend rule of law and human rights against Member States is one of the core issues of the ‘European project’. In the last decade, the EU institutions have made several, benevolent but feeble, attempts to enforce rule of law and human rights requirements. Though EU law’s approach, at least at first glance, might appear to be idiosyncratic, it is far from unprecedented and, as far as multilevel constitutionalism is concerned, EU law may draw on the experiences of various regimes where centralized human rights protection and national (state) constitutional identities coexist. Comparative federalism provides an array of experiences, solutions and techniques, which help the European integration to grasp and address the diagonal enforcement of human rights and to take stock of its solutions. This volume addresses the EU’s human rights problem from a comparative perspective and explores the constitutional and jurisprudential …

This alternative study of archive and photography sits firmly against the backdrop of the traditional archive. Although many types of image assemblages feature-public and private, formal and informal, physical and digital-they are all considered in relation to the highly regulated systems that operate within the institutional milieu. Cataloguing is presented as a radical form of knowledge production, and the catalogue as a critical tool for mapping image time. The unfamiliar and overlooked language of image description is considered as having a life, a worth and an aesthetic value of its own. Functioning at the intersection of text and image, this book combines media culture and techniques of the archive, as well as contemporary discourse on art and conceptual writing. There is a media-archaeological debate throughout as to how physical archive systems and material technologies connect with different archival models, including social media spaces and other image networks.