Books published by Manchester University Press

Threads of globalization is the first collection to examine the interplay of gender, textiles, fashion, labour, and heritage across Asia. It features chapters on India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, the Philippines, China, Taiwan, Japan, and the Asian diaspora throughout the long twentieth century. This richly illustrated interdisciplinary volume situates fashion, including specific garments, motifs, materials, and methods of production, at the nexus of modernity, tradition, and identity, bringing these factors into Pan-Asian dialogue. Exploring the impact of textiles and garments on both national and local cultural identity, as well as gender identity and personal expression, Threads of globalization also investigates how garment and textile production has influenced women's creative agency. The final section of the book examines examples of 'artivism' (art+activism) that critique the often-gendered structural violence and environmental impacts of the global fashion industry. Threads of globalization's uniquely interdisciplinary contributors - scholars of art history, history, fashion, anthropology, and curators working across Asia - provide a fresh and timely inquiry into these intersectional topics from the late nineteenth century to today.

This book combines the approaches of historians and archaeologists to explore past individuals as embodied subjects by examining the material and experiencing body in England, 1700-1850. It explores precisely how the biological, physical, environmental, cultural and social interacted in the production of the embodied experiences.

This volume demonstrates how the Hundred Years War (1337-1453) provides a necessary context for late-medieval literature. It shows how war impacted the lives and works of major writers like Geoffrey Chaucer, Christine de Pizan, and Catherine of Siena, while also arguing for a transnational approach that moves beyond the Anglo-French core.

Royals on Tour explores visits by European monarchs and princes to colonies, and by indigenous royals to Europe in the 1800s and early 1900s with case studies of travel by royals from Britain, France, Portugal, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Japan, the Dutch East Indies and French Indochina. Such tours projected imperial dominion and asserted the status of non-European dynasties. The celebrity of royals, the increased facility of travel, and the interest of public and press made tours key encounters between Europeans and non-Europeans. The reception visitors received illustrate the dynamics of empire and international relations. Ceremonies, speeches and meetings formed part of the popular culture of empire and monarchy. Mixed in with pageantry and protocol were profound questions about the role of monarchs, imperial governance, relationships between metropolitan and overseas elites, and evolving expressions of nationalism.

This ground-breaking book analyses premodern whiteness as operations of fragility, precarity and racialicity across bodily and nonsomatic figurations. It examines works such as The Book of the Duchess, Pearl, The King of Tars and others, arguing that while whiteness participates crucially in the history of racialisation in the late medieval West, it does not denote or connote skin tone alone. Deploying diverse methodologies, the book asks how premodern whiteness as a representational trope both produces and delimits a range of medieval ideological regimes: courtly love and beauty, masculine subjectivity, Christian salvation, chivalric prowess, labour and consumption, social ethics or racialised European identity. The 'before' of whiteness, presupposing essence and teleology, is less a retro-futuristic temporisation - one that simultaneously looks backward and faces forward - than a discursive figuration of how white becomes whiteness. Fragility delineates the limits of ruling ideologies in performances of mourning as self-defence against perceived threats to subjectivity and desire; precarity registers the ruptures within normative values by foregrounding the unmarked vulnerability of the body politic and the violence of cultural aestheticisation; and racialicity attends to the politics of recognition and the technologies of enfleshment at the systemic edge of life and nonlife, of periodisation and of racial embodiment. If whiteness has hardened into an identity politics defined by skin tone alone, this book argues that it has not always been so. Operations of whiteness may genereate differences that fabricate, structure and connect the social world, but these operative differences of whiteness are never transparent, stable or permanent.

This book describes how human rights have given rise to a vision of benevolent governance that, if fully realised, would be antithetical to individual freedom. It describes human rights' evolution into a grand but nebulous project, rooted in compassion, with the overarching aim of improving universal welfare by defining the conditions of human well-being and imposing obligations on the state and other actors to realise them. This gives rise to a form of managerialism, preoccupied with measuring and improving the 'human rights performance' of the state, businesses and so on. The ultimate result is the 'governmentalisation' of a pastoral form of global human rights governance, in which power is exercised for the general good, moulded by a complex regulatory sphere which shapes the field of action for the individual at every turn. This, unsurprisingly, does not appeal to rights-holders themselves.

This book brings together a range of Indigenous perspectives, forming a global network of writers, thinkers, and scholars connected by common investments in Indigenous futures.

The first monographic study of the painter Agostino Brunias, this book offers a compelling, original analysis of his representation of race in the British colonial West Indies, reconsidering the way in which the artist's oeuvre has previously been understood. -- .

The research of pandemics, epidemics, and pathogens like COVID-19 reaches far beyond the scope of biomedicine. It is not only an objective for the health, political and social sciences, but epidemics and pandemics are a matter of geography: foci and vectors of communicable diseases continue to test the efficacy of medical control at state borders. This volume illuminates these issues from various disciplinary viewpoints. It starts by exploring historical models of quarantine, spatial isolation and detention as precautionary means against the dissemination of disease and contagion by border crossers, migrants and refugees. Besides the patterns of prejudice with which these groups are confronted, the book also deals with various kinds of fear of contamination from outside of the nation state. The contributors address the implementation of medical techniques at state borders in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, as well as the presently practiced measures of medical and biometric screening of migrants and refugees. Uniquely, this volume shows that the current border security regimes of Western states exhibit a high share of medicalised techniques of power, which originate both in European modernity and in the medical and biological disciplines developed during the last quarter of the millennium. Drawing on the collective expertise of a network of international researchers, this interdisciplinary volume is essential reading for those wishing to understand the medicalisation of borders across the globe, from the early eighteenth century up to the present day.

Drawing on the recent ontological turn in critical theory, Spectral Dickens explores an aspect of literary character that is neither real nor fictional, but spectral. This work thus provides an in-depth study of the inimitable characters populating Dickens' illustrated novels using three hauntological concepts: the Freudian uncanny, Derridean spectrality, and the Lacanian real. Thus, while the current discourse on character studies, which revolves around values like realism, depth, and lifelikeness, tends to see characters as mimetic of persons, this book invents new critical concepts to account for non-mimetic forms of characterization. These spectral forms bring to light the important influence of developments in C19th visual culture, such as the lithography and caricature of Daumier and J.J. Grandville. The spectrality of novelistic characters developed here paves the way for a new understanding of fictional characters in general.

Performing the testimonial offers a new critical engagement with verbatim and testimonial theatre that draws on an analysis of a number of international contemporary verbatim and testimonial plays. Moving beyond discourses of the real, the book argues that testimonial theatre engages in acts of truth telling, performing new modes of witnessing. -- .

Turning the conventional Break-Up of Britain narrative inside-out, this book scans the horizon of overseas projections of British identities that unravelled during the decades of global decolonisation

In a world of deep political divisions and rising inequality, many of us feel the need for some form of collective resistance and transformative joint action. Calls for solidarity are heard everywhere. This book presents a critical proposal to guide our reflection on what solidarity is and why it matters. How is solidarity distinct from related ideas such as altruism, justice and fellow-feeling? What value does acting in solidarity with others have? In his lead essay, Andrea Sangiovanni offers compelling answers to these questions, arguing that solidarity is not just a fuzzy stand-in for feelings of togetherness but a distinctive social practice for an anxious age. His ideas are then put to the test in a series of responses from some of the world's foremost philosophers and political theorists.

Decorators and designers have long experimented with materials, objects and technologies to enhance sensory awareness and wellbeing. But existing histories of interior design rarely feature any discussion of the senses. This volume offers a corrective, exploring how sight, touch, smell, hearing and taste have been mobilized within various forms of interior. Grouped into three thematic clusters, exploring sensory politics, aesthetic entanglements and sensual economies, the chapters in this volume shed light on sensory expressions and experiences of interior design throughout history. They examine domestic and public interiors from the late-sixteenth century to the present day, giving back the body its central role in the understanding and use of interiors. Drawing from fields including design history, design studies and sensory studies, The senses in interior design explores fundamental questions about identities, social structures and politics that reveal the significance of the senses in all aspects of interior design and decoration.

This edited volume asks how the city, with its spatial and temporal configuration and its rhythms, produces and shapes violence, both in terms of the built environment, and through particular 'urban' social relations. The book builds on the insight that violence itself is a spatiotemporal practice with generative as well as destructive capacities, which create and transform urban space and time. By looking at the different ways in which the spatial and temporal configuration of cities produce and shape violence, the authors contextualise the dynamics of urban violence and show how violence affects everyday urban spatial practices and rhythms. Violence may reconfigure spatialities and temporalities in cities in the long term, changing the physical and social space as well the rhythms of a city. Memories and imaginations of violence are also inscribed in city-space, often in several temporal layers, and can lead to new violence through politicised practices of commemoration. In The spatiality and temporality of urban violence, authors from a range of disciplines apply this spatiotemporal perspective to nine diverse case studies, based on original material collected during ethnographic and archival research. The chapters cover cities in different world regions and historical phases, offering translocal and transregional perspectives. This fresh new perspective challenges assumed binaries of cities in the global North and South, and contests the alleged difference between violence in the past and in the present.

This is the first scholarly collection to focus on the special importance of British cinema to folk horror. The chapters consider the artistic styles, historical contexts, cultural tensions and cinematic fears that distinguish folk horror from other forms of horror and from traditional ways of viewing the folk.

By the late 1960s cartographic formats and spatial information were a recurring feature in conceptualist artworks. Charting space offers a rich study of conceptualisms' mapping practices that includes more expanded forms of spatial representations. Departing from the perspective that artists were merely recording and communicating information, this book explores the philosophical and political imperatives within their artistic practices. The volume brings together twelve in-depth case studies that address artists' deep engagement with space at a time when concepts of space were garnering new significance in art, theory and culture. It covers a diverse range of subjects, such as London's socio-spatial sphere in the 1970s, geopolitics and decoloniality in Brazil, the global networking strategies of the Psychophysiology Research Institute in Japan, the subjective body in relation to cosmological space from the Great Basin Desert in the United States and notions of identity and race in the urban itinerant practices of transnational artists. The chapters shed light on an evident 'spatial turn' from the postwar period into the contemporary and the influence of larger historical, social and cultural contexts on it. The contributors illustrate how conceptualism's cartographies were critical sites to formulate artists' politics, graph heterogenous spaces and upset prevailing systems. It is a resourceful tool for scholars, students, curators and readers interested in postwar and contemporary art.

Situating religion and medicine in Asia illuminates how Asian practices for health, healing and spiritual cultivation were mobilised in their originary times and places. Although many such practices have survived today, they circulate in new forms - within a burgeoning global marketplace, in the imaginaries of national health bureaus, as the focus of major scholarly grant initiatives and as subjects of neurological study. Labels such as 'alternative', 'complementary' and 'wellness'- privilege medical authority and a detachment from religion writ large, implying a distance between 'medicine' and 'religion' that is not reflective of the originary contexts of these practices. This volume makes a critical intervention in the scholarship on medical and religious practices in East, South and Southeast Asia and the Himalayas, inviting a new comparative frame outside the history of science and religion in Europe. It illustrates how practices from divination and demonography to anatomy, massage, plant medicine and homeopathy were situated within the contours of the medicine and religion of their time, in contrast to modern formations of 'medicine' and 'religion'. The book assembles empirical data about the construction of medicine and religion as social categories of practice, and enables comparison across the geographic, temporal and conceptual range, providing readers with a set of methodological approaches for future study.

This book offers essential reading on a wide array of theatre and film productions of Shakespeare's play The Merchant of Venice. Richly contextualised analyses of individual productions by major directors help produce a nuanced picture of the performance history of the play, guiding the reader from the 1930s through the early twenty-first century. -- .