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Robert Assaye
Robert Assaye is a writer and critic living in London.

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Issy Wood, When You I Feel

Art Review

December 2017

Robert Assaye

Art Review

December 2017

At the centre of Issy Wood’s solo exhibition at Carlos/Ishikawa is a room-within-a room. The division of the gallery into two viewing spaces –...

Art

April 2017

'Learning from Athens'

Robert Assaye

Art

April 2017

The history of Documenta, a quinquennial contemporary art exhibition founded in the German city of Kassel in 1955, is...

A few years ago, I read Revolution at Point Zero (2012), Silvia Federici’s career-spanning collection of essays on reproductive work and domestic labour The essays articulate, in anger and clarity, what I and other women of my generation have begun, stutteringly, to understand: that the mass introduction of women into the waged workforce has not changed the fact that domestic chores outside of paid work continue to be conducted by women, nor the fact that this work remains invisible, or if seen at all, utterly devalued   Federici, who was born in Parma, Italy, in 1942, has been writing about these issues for almost 50 years She was a founding member of the 1970s Wages for Housework campaign, an international effort to draw attention to the unpaid labour of women in the home; after she moved to Brooklyn to teach at Hofstra University on Long Island, she became centrally involved in the New York Wages for Housework Committee She detailed that organisation’s history in Wages for Housework: The New York Committee 1972-1977: History, Theory, Documents (2017), which also reproduced her 1975 pamphlet, Wages Against Housework, famous for its provocative opening lines, ‘They say it is love We say it is unwaged work’   I came late to Federici’s theorising, but once I found her, I engaged with as much of her writing as I could The collection of essays in Revolution at Point Zero encompasses Federici’s early writings on feminism and housework alongside later pieces on the impact of globalisation on social reproduction – that is, the reproduction of everyday life – on the redistribution of housework onto the shoulders of immigrant women, and on the role of the commons in contemporary society   Federici’s work on capitalism’s war on women’s bodies is encapsulated by two books on witch-hunts, Caliban and the Witch (2004), which argued that the exploitation of women was a central element in the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and Witches, Witch-Hunting and Women (2018), which revisited the subject matter following the return of witch-hunting in many parts of the world   Her recent research on the commons, collected in Re-Enchanting the World: Feminism

Contributor

August 2014

Robert Assaye

Contributor

August 2014

Robert Assaye is a writer and critic living in London.

New Communities

Art

January 2017

Robert Assaye

Art

January 2017

DeviantArt is the world’s ‘largest online community of artists and art-lovers’ and its thirteenth largest social network. Its forty million members contribute to a...
The Land Art of Julie Brook

Art

Issue No. 4

Robert Assaye

Art

Issue No. 4

Julie Brook works with the land. Over the past twenty years she has lived and worked in a succession of inhospitable locations, creating sculptures...

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feature

Issue No. 7

On a Decline in British Fiction

Jennifer Hodgson

Patricia Waugh

feature

Issue No. 7

‘The special fate of the novel,’ Frank Kermode has written, ‘is always to be dying.’ In Britain, the terminal...

poetry

August 2016

Three New Poems

Sarah V. Schweig

poetry

August 2016

‘The Audit’ and ‘Red Bank’ are excerpts from Schweig’s forthcoming book, Take Nothing With You (University of Iowa Press, 2016).  ...

fiction

November 2015

Wolves

Jeon Sungtae

TR. Sora Kim-Russell

fiction

November 2015

The Chief   The sound of the bell for the closing of the temple gate reaches my ears. I...

 

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