Wednesday, December 21, 2005

Mute
A new issue of Mute: Culture & Politics After the Net is available - a special issue entitled "Underneath the Knowledge Commons" raising a number of relevant topics, including "Freedom's Standard Advanced?" (about the Creative Commons License) and "Charters of Liberty in Black Face and White Face: Race, Slavery and the Commons", which examines "The Charter of the Forest".

From the introduction: "The Magna Carta is renowned as the 'Charter of Liberty' which inspired modern constitutional safeguards against the power of the State. But its smaller companion, the Charter of the Forest, enshrining the customary rights of the commoners to land and resources, has been overlooked. Cutting between the political struggles of the early 1970s and the 1720s, Peter Linebaugh shows how the struggle against enclosures in the woods of England is inextricably linked with the struggle against slavery in the Atlantic."

www.metamute.com/look/section.tpl?IdLanguage=1&IdPublication=1&NrIssue=30&NrSection=10