Books published by Manchester University Press

This book articulates an analytical framework for understanding how race, nature, and capitalism are co-constituted on a planetary scale. The framework of the 'political ecology of colonial capitalism' elucidates how the co-production of race and the society/nature distinction operates as a foundational structure of capitalism. In order to express the relationship between global inequality and planetary ecological crises, the book applies this framework to a theoretical and historical analysis of the 'global land grab', which refers to the intensification, beginning in the 2010s and continuing into the 2020s, of large scale transnational agricultural land acquisitions in the global South. It orients analytical attention towards how capitalist development has proceeded, over its long history, through a succession of accumulation cycles that rise and fall in correspondence with the racialized construction, and ultimate exhaustion, of frontiers of "unused" natures. At one level, the book foregrounds how colonialism materially opens, through violent dispossession of colonized peoples, frontiers provisioning the necessary cheap inputs for capitalist development. It then proceeds, on a second level, to reveal how the accompanying conceptualization of the frontier as an 'unused' nature distinct from human society is contingent upon a technology of race which re-presents Indigenous sovereign earth-worlds as unused and wasted virgin natures. The book thus demonstrates how the global land grab is driven by a systemic colonial-capitalist logic of racialized frontier re-generation attempting to overcome the crisis context marking the exhaustion of the neoliberal epoch of capitalism.

Between 1850 and 1900, Ratcliffe Highway was the pulse of maritime London. Sailors from every corner of the globe found solace, and sometimes trouble, within its bustling bars, brothels, lodging houses and streets. However, for social investigators, it was perceived as a place of fascination and fear as it harboured 'exotic' and 'heathen' communities. Sailortowns featured in most international ports in the nineteenth century and were situated at the interface between urban and maritime communities. Sailortowns were transient, cosmopolitan and working class in character and they provide us with an insight into class, race and gendered relations within subaltern communities. This book goes beyond conceptualising sailortown as a global economic hub that entangled sailors into vice and exploitation. It will examine how, by the mid-nineteenth century, anxieties relating to urban modernity encouraged Victorians to re-imagine Ratcliffe Highway as a chaotic and dangerous urban abyss. Certainly, the sailortown population was varied and engaged in numerous working-class trades connected with the marine and leisure industries such as dockers, stevedores, sailmakers, sex workers and, international seafarers. Sailortowns were contact zones of heightened interaction where multi-ethnic subaltern cultures met, sometimes negotiated and at other times clashed with one another. However, the book argues that despite these challenges sailortown was a distinctive and functional working-class community that was self-regulating and self-moderating. The book uncovers a robust sailortown community in which an urban-maritime culture shaped a sense of themselves and the traditions and conventions that governed subaltern behaviour in the district.

This book examines human disappearances anthropologically in various contexts, ranging from enforced disappearances under oppressive governments and during armed conflicts to disappearing undocumented migrants and, finally, to people who go missing under more everyday circumstances. It has two focuses that run through the book: the relationship between the state and disappearances, and the consequences of disappearances for the families and communities of missing persons. The book analyses both the circumstances that make some people disappear and the variety of responses that disappearances give rise to; the latter include projects focused on searching for the missing and identifying human remains, as well as political projects that call for accountability for disappearances. The book argues that the disappeared tend to reappear in one form or another - if they do not return alive or as mortal identified remains, they reappear in other forms, such as photographs, artwork, memorials, ghosts and restless spirits. The book provides empirical examples from a variety of places, with Bosnia-Herzegovina, Argentina and the Mediterranean as they key sites, and by expanding from these the book develops an analytic grip on the slippery category of the 'disappeared'. It argues that 'disappearance' is an anthropologically productive concept that brings us face to face with profound questions about human life and death, but also about rituals and mourning, violence and care, liminality and structures, and oppression and power. The book argues for an anthropological approach to human disappearances that is ethnographically sensitive to local idiosyncrasies, and theoretically attuned to similarities across diversity.

Even the leader of the WHO-led global smallpox programme acknowledged the exceptionalism of Nepal's success. Implementing a global health programme: smallpox and Nepal is about why when faced with overwhelming environmental and infrastructural challenges the smallpox programme succeeded in Nepal. Such problems are usually offered as explanations for failure. Why something worked is unusual.The Himalayan region is a novel area for exploration of a global programme. Project leaders in Nepal decentralised the programme's structure, not just on paper but in practice to achieve timely and effective response. The WHO worked with governments of nation states. Nowhere else in the official history in the conclusions drawn from different national programmes is such a decentralised strategy referred to as a reason for success. It is also absent from the wider literature. The book tells multiple and different stories from the local to the global and involves individual, community, state, extra-state, and foreign actors. The devastating disease of smallpox was common in Nepal in the 1960s and the book places people's experiences at the forefront. These influenced ideas and behaviour, including vaccination. Mass vaccination remained important throughout Nepal's smallpox programme but after 1971 was a time-limited annual campaign administered in line with Nepali people's longstanding preference for it being given in winter.Although success with smallpox was more than forty years ago, implementing communicable disease health programmes with their many challenges remains highly topical and relevant today.

In Restoration Ireland the law primarily served the interests of the English state and the Anglo-Protestant community and oppressed the majority Catholic population. Catholics and the law in Restoration Ireland examines how Catholics engaged with and experienced English common law primarily through the accounts of Catholic clerics and Gaelic poets. Analysing the letters of Oliver Plunkett and John Brenan, this book demonstrates the initial success and ultimate failure of their non-confrontational approach to legal and political processes. In contrast, the challenging stances of clerics like Nicholas French and John Lynch offer a new perspective on the wide variety of clerical engagement with the law. Drawing on the considerable corpus of primary sources, the book examines the often overlooked Irish-language literary material and considers the work of Dáibhí Ó Bruadair and his contemporaries to show how Gaelic Ireland deeply resented a hostile legal environment. It also explores Catholic landed families who recovered their estates in the 1663 Court of Claims and evidences the different approaches they adopted despite Protestant hostility, as well as illustrating how Catholic lawyers could survive, and even thrive, for a period. Catholics and the law in Restoration Ireland examines the many ways in which Irish Catholics experienced a legal system that proved fundamentally inimical to their interests.

Women and madness in the early Romantic novel returns madness to a central role in feminist literary criticism by offering a close look at the novels of five early Romantic-period women authors. In an updated exploration of hysteria, melancholia, and love-madness, Weiss maintains that Mary Wollstonecraft, Eliza Fenwick, and Mary Hays created novels that exposed how medical models for mental disease and the popular sentimental figure of the love-mad maid (the woman who loses her mind when she loses her man) made it possible for men to hide their culpability for injuring women. Weiss demonstrates that in their novels, patriarchal structures of control are responsible for the protagonists' bouts of hysteria and their dangerous melancholia. Making careful and important distinctions between authors, Weiss shows how the popular and more mainstream authors such as Maria Edgeworth and Amelia Opie explored less gendered and less victimised models of causality, such as the shock of traumatic experience on the human psyche, misplaced passions, erroneous associations, and remorse. Taken as a whole, the book demonstrates that these authors' treatment of female madness played a key role in the development of the psychologically complex female heroine of the nineteenth-century novel. In so doing, Weiss makes a powerful case for focusing on women's mental health in eighteenth- and nineteenth- century literary criticism.

Critical Theory and Independent Living explores intersections between contemporary critical theory and disabled people's struggle for self-determination. The book sheds new light on the Independent Living movement - an influential yet undertheorised and misrepresented new social movement. The analysis highlights the affinities between the insights of Independent Living advocates and prominent studies of epistemic injustice, biopower, and psychopower. This helps uncover the contributions of Independent Living activism to contemporary critical theorising. Specifically, the book explores the engagement of Independent Living thinking and practice with critiques of welfare-state paternalism, neoliberal marketisation, and familialism. Thus, it develops a comprehensive assessment of the three organising principles of social welfare - the state, the market, and the family - in view of their impact on disabled people's self-determination. On this basis, the analysis highlights the successes and failures of the Independent Living movement in various welfare regimes - liberal, social-democratic, conservative, and post/socialist. The result is a pioneering cross-regime comparison grounded in Independent Living activism. Critical Theory and Independent Living substantiates its analyses by drawing on the work of the European Network on Independent Living (ENIL) - a Europe-wide advocacy organisation led and controlled by disabled people since its founding in 1989. Case studies of ENIL's struggles for epistemic justice, campaigning for deinstitutionalisation, and advocacy for personal assistance evidence the critical-theoretical contributions of Independent Living. It is argued that these efforts help rethink independence as a form of interdependence - a reframing that is pivotal for critical theorising in contemporary society.

Circuses and their grand arenas shaped the entertainment industry between the wars and excited both small-town and big-city audiences. Worlds of the Ring makes an original and significant contribution to the history of popular culture by highlighting the correlation between the modern circus's evolution and modes of imperialism and nationalism. Through the cases of the German Sarrasani and the British Bertram W. Mills' circuses this study examines how these enterprises animated both the nation and its others for popular audiences. Circuses and performers constructed different worlds for their audiences and for themselves and the book looks at this cultural history of European circuses between 1918 and 1945 from a transnational perspective. The interwar era's interrelated international and national forces shaped the modern circus, which the book recovers through the lives of different people involved in this industry. Through the concept of Orientalism, it probes the mechanisms at play in depicting foreign and exotic worlds in the circus. It is based on a variety of sources including newspapers, legal documents, advertisements, economic correspondence, photographs, and performers' archives. Worlds of the Ring offers a new understanding of circus as a form of interwar popular culture, its globalisation, and anchoring in European imperialism at the beginning of the twentieth century.

This is the first book to portray what it's like to live next to a British Army base. England's military heartland investigates the sprawling military presence on Salisbury Plain, listening to a wide range of voices from both sides of the divide. Targeted for expansion under government plans to reorganise the UK's global defence estate, this 'super garrison' offers unexplored opportunities to explore the impact of the military footprint in a particular place. But this is no ordinary environment. In addition to the world-famous site of Stonehenge, the grasslands of Salisbury Plain are also home to rare plants and wildlife. How does the army share responsibility for conserving this unique landscape as it trains young men and women to use lethal weapons? Meanwhile the material traces of the colonial past inscribed on historic roads and buildings are a reminder of the legacy of perpetual war.

The book offers a novel lens to situate Europeanisation as violence from the cracks of triumphant narratives of progress. The collection pushes the established "toolkit" of postcolonial and postsocialist critique and their multifaceted "afterlives". It does so by relating historical processes and genealogies of Europeanisation around questions of labour, race, gender, infrastructure, heritage, memory, settler expansion, among others. The contributions stitch together a wide range of seemingly unrelated geo-histories of violence producing territories relationally, including postwar "Recovered Territories" of Western Poland and Madagascar, Ukraine and Dutch East Indies, Andalusia and Transylvania, Western Balkans and EuroAfrica, Yemen, Mediterranean and Saharo-Sahel, Chad and Central African Republic, Finland among others. The volume is an invitation for building theory across peripheries, between and against empires and state borders, what is called Souths and Easts as Method.

Anthony Burgess and America is a biographical and critical analysis of Burgess's decades long commentary on and relationship with the United States of America between the 1950s-1990s.Utilizing Burgess's entire oeuvre and hundreds of newly discovered archived materials, this book also evaluates the American inspirations in five Burgess novels: M/F (1971), The Clockwork Testament (1974), Earthly Powers (1980), The End of the World News (1982), and Enderby's Dark Lady (1984). In doing so, this essential new contribution to Burgess scholarship and discourse opens a nearly unexplored area of Burgess's life for investigation and evaluation. Using a wide range of new primary sources, frequently discussed topics by Burgess, such as culture, politics, race, education, obscenity, language, and literature in an American context, are discussed at length to understand how his entanglement with these commentaries influenced his fiction. Because of Burgess's enthusiastic immersion into mass media from the 1960s onward, Anthony Burgess and America also draws on the surviving record of the public persona that Burgess cultivated (the author, the journalist, the scholar, the teacher, the musician, and the popular chat-show entertainer) to assess the significance of his different forms of utterances.What emerges from such an approach is not just a complex personal and public history about one of Britain's greatest twentieth century authors, but also a story of his immersion into and interaction with American culture in the 1960s, 70s, 80s, and early 90s. The overall effect is an original, new, and diverse cultural and biographical analysis of Burgess's American-inspired work.

Political economy of Turkey's integration to Europe: Uneven development and hegemony analyses trajectory of Turkey's integration with Europe from a critical political economy perspective. It embarks on historical materialism and considers position of social forces in Turkey with the help of two analytical categories, uneven development and hegemony. Critical approaches have been so long sidelined within European Studies. Turkish enlargement is not an exemption. Turkey's EU membership perspective has not yet been analysed as a book in English from a critical political economy perspective. The data is generated through 109 interviews conducted at two historical junctures with five categories of actors: representatives of capital and labour, political parties, state officials, and struggles around ecology, patriarchy and migration. Was the pro-membership hegemonic in the 2000s? Was there any alternative project opposing membership? How do pro-membership social forces sustain membership perspective in the 2010s in a conjuncture of crises of liberalism? How do critical social forces re-consider their position? The book argues that pro-membership was indeed hegemonic in the 2000s, which was contested by two rival class-strategies, Ha-vet (No to Capital's Europe, but yes to Social Europe) and neo-mercantilism. In the 2010s, pro-membership is no longer hegemonic with its social forces encountering difficulties to provide moral and intellectual leadership while critical tone of opposing social forces increase.The future trajectory is uncertain. Yet, pre-eminence of transactional cooperation provides hints that unevenness will be further consolidated through market integration and management of migration for the labour market between Turkey and the EU.

Passage Works explores the works of contemporary Austrian filmmaker, artist, and writer Ruth Beckermann (b. Vienna, 1952). Across her work in multiple media, Beckermann interrogates and critiques identity and geography as complex, shifting formations produced by multiple intersections between the past and the contemporary. Spanning over four decades, Beckermann's abiding thematic concern focuses on Austria's central role in an expanding Europe, its complex history and politics, her own identity and sense of 'unbelonging' as a post-war Jewish woman, and the contemporary global issues of migration and displacement. Her work extends these themes into wider meditations in film, art, and writing on the persistence of European memory and the meanings of Europe itself - on borders, migrations, and identities, and on memories, traumas, and traditions. She examines the image as a marker of presence and absence and a repository of historical violence, using the passage as metaphor for a range of physical, psychological, and ideological movements that define the complexities of contemporary cosmopolitan identities. Reading Beckermann's oeuvre within historical and theoretical contexts, this book elaborates on an expanded notion of passage that represents persistent transhistorical and transnational experience of movement between places, times, contexts, and conditions - above all, the post-memorial condition of being Austrian and Jewish in the aftermath of trauma.

Assemblages of cancer offers a comparative, in-depth analysis of breast cancer in the UK, France and Italy, linking patients' experiences with the biomedical, political and cultural context of the disease. The book is based on ten years of ethnographic research with patients with breast cancer and medical professionals across the three countries. It shows how breast cancer experiences can be best understood as provisional assemblages involving transformed bodies, uncertainties linked to a possible relapse, and tinkering with standardised protocols and pathways to make treatments work for each patient. The analysis highlights the shared specificities and internal variations of breast cancer in the three countries. It explores how universal healthcare systems impacted by processes of privatisation, local variations in the workings of biomedicine, and local changes to the North-American pink ribbon discourses and advocacy, transform the experiences of breast cancer. The book presents an in-depth analysis of how breast cancer and its treatments alter not only women's bodies but also their personal and professional lives. It further analyses patients' strategies to attempt build new meaning and values around the uncertainties brought by cancer and counter its consequences. Assemblages of cancer is an essential contribution to the social studies of medicine that, by redefining the relations between illness, biomedicine, and society, develops a new understanding of breast cancer in contemporary Europe.

Is there a 'tradition' of British anti-racism? This volume brings together new, original scholarship to demonstrate that, if there is a meaningful tradition of 'British' anti-racism, it was created by citizens and subjects and it has been shaped by shifting imperial and transnational politics as well as national and local contexts. The volume traces how the history of anti-racism in Britain has been characterised at one end of the spectrum by paternalism and at the other end by solidarity, identifying this paternalistic-solidaristic spectrum as a major axis within British political culture. It examines the anti-racist and anti-imperialist alliances forged during the late nineteenth century, explores how anti-racist action shifted to decolonial state resistance and organising in the embers of empire, and analyses how histories and memories of racism and anti-racism were reframed and expressed at the turn of the millennium. Contributors identify moments of multi-ethnic solidarity between a range of communities and organisations, from trade unions to community 'self-help'. Chapters in this volume also pay attention to how cultural forms play a role in racial formation and anti-racist activism and alliances. Crucially, this volume explores anti-racism as a shifting and ongoing project of resistance with multiple points of geographic, intellectual and political origin and highlights a number of key continuities and fractures in the history of anti-racism in Britain.

Beyond nationalism presents a comprehensive theory of the common good of the European Union (EU) and proposes concrete policies and institutional reforms to improve its achievement. It commences with a discussion of the public values jointly endorsed by EU member states, which are seen to provide a basis for identifying a transnational common good. Labareda discusses the distinctive nature of the EU common good, which he associates with three main conditions: maintaining liberal democracy, enabling decent standards of social welfare, and ensuring a high level of environmental protection. Relying on a constructivist understanding of national interests, the author proposes a set of reforms that would allow the EU common good to be more strongly represented in the process of national interest formation in domestic politics. At the same time, he proposes significant changes in the Brussels institutional apparatus aimed at democratising the pursuit of the common good, including the creation of an EU Citizens' Assembly and the election of the presidents of the European Commission and the European Council. The book takes on board the idea that a willingness by EU citizens to recurrently sacrifice their interests for the sake of an EU common good would require stronger bonds of civic friendship among them. It proposes several policies to achieve this goal, including reducing socioeconomic inequalities in the EU, curtailing barriers against freedom of movement, and creating a transnational curriculum on EU citizenship.

Advertised in its Prologue as a prequel to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra, John Fletcher and Philip Massinger's The False One is the first literary work completely to revolve around the affair between Caesar and Cleopatra in Egypt. By frankly portraying the weakness and pettiness of such great historical personalities alongside their strength and nobility, the play brilliantly exposes Caesar and Cleopatra as flawed individuals who eventually turn out to be capable of transcending their own limits. Witty, fast-paced and laced with irony, The False One is informed by early modern discussions of issues connected with the role of courtiers, King James I's pacifist policy and the dangers of colonialism. In its deployment of the liaison between Caesar and Cleopatra as a venue for the exploration and criticism of contemporary political manoeuvring and its high-spirited and pungent appropriation of Roman history, The False One proves to be one of the most compelling Jacobean dramatizations of the classical past. This Revels Plays edition offers the first fully annotated, single-volume critical edition of The False One, with a thorough introduction that provides new insights on the date and the theatre of the play's first performance, examines the playwrights' imaginative reworking of their classical and contemporary sources, and explores the considerable theatrical potential of a play that has hitherto regrettably been lost to the dramatic repertory. With its modernized spelling and detailed on-page commentary, this edition makes the play newly accessible to readers, students and theatre practitioners.

Russian Orientalism in a global context examines the various ways in which Russia's artistic praxis was affected by encounters - both real and imagined - with the cultures and representational and material traditions of the so-called East or Vostok. Following the Napoleonic wars, the Russian Empire's expansionist campaigns led to the annexation of new lands in the Caucasus and Central Asia, resulting in the assimilation of religiously and ethnically diverse groups of people. However, given the country's perpetually conflicted self-identification as neither fully European nor Asian, the demarcations between "self" and "other" remained ambiguous and elusive, resulting in an Orientalist mode that was prone to hybridity, syncretism, and even self-Orientalization. This volume reconsiders the relationship between Russia and its non-Western neighbors, looking at how artists, architects, and designers engaged with this relationship from the mid-eighteenth century until the 1930s. It interrogates how Russia's perception of its position on the periphery of the West and its simultaneous self-consciousness as a colonial power shaped its artistic and cultural identity. The volume also explores the extent to which cultural practitioners participated in both the advancement and the critique of Russia's colonial machinery, especially in territories that were on the fault lines between the East and the West.

Tattoos in crime and detective narratives: Marking and remarking examines representations of the tattoo and tattooing in literature, television and film from two periods of tattoo renaissance (1851-1914, and c. 1955 to present). The book aids our understanding of the crime and detective genre and the ways in which tattoos act as a mimetic device that marks and remarks these narratives in complex ways. Tattooing is focused on as a bodily narrative, incorporating the critical perspectives of posthumanism, spatiality, postcolonialism, embodiment and gender studies. The importance of the tattoo is explored through analysis of the writings of early genre exponents of detective fiction including Louisa May Alcott, Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the contemporary rebirth of the tattoo through the writings of Stieg Larsson, Sarah Hall, Alan Kent, Caryl Férey, Jeffery Deaver, Peter Robinson and China Miéville, amongst others. The volume includes a separate section on children's literature, examining the work of J. K. Rowling and Lemony Snicket in particular. Sections on film and television focus on Christopher Nolan's Memento, adaptations of the Bounty mutiny, and the television series Supernatural, Dark angel, Criminal minds, CSI: NY, and Law and order. The collection will have a broad appeal, and will be of interest to all literature and media scholars, but in particular those with an interest in crime and detective narratives, and skin studies.

In 1615, clergyman Jeremiah Dyke exclaimed 'surely wee never beginne to know Divinitie or Religion, till wee come to know our selves.' His clarion call, along with the 'devotional turn' in early modern historiography, urges us to look again at how ordinary men and women lived out their faith during extraordinary times. People and piety is an interdisciplinary collection that investigates Protestant devotional identities in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Divided into two sections, it examines the 'sites' where these identities were forged (the academy, printing house, household, theatre and prison) and the 'types' of texts that expressed them (spiritual autobiographies, religious poetry and writings tied to the ars moriendi). The picture of 'lived religion' that emerges takes in such familiar figures of England's Long Reformation as George Herbert, Richard Baxter, Oliver Heywood and Katherine Sutton, while also shedding light on some of their lesser-known contemporaries, including Isaac Archer, Mary Franklin and Katherine Gell. Through cutting-edge and archival research, the book shows that piety did not define people - it was people who defined their piety. Featuring a mixture of established and emerging scholars from both sides of the Atlantic, People and piety will be of interest to those studying and teaching religion and identity in early modern England, and anyone concerned with the history of religious self-expression.

This extensive edited collection is devoted to the work of the 2017 Nobel Literature Laureate, Sir Kazuo Ishiguro, featuring contributions from the most established Ishiguro scholars. It contains major new essays on each of his novels, including the first published essay on Klara and the Sun, as well as his short story collection Nocturnes, and his screenplays. Situating Ishiguro's work within current debates regarding modernism, postmodernism and postcolonialism, the essays examine his engagement with the defining concerns of the contemporary novel, including national identity, Britishness, cosmopolitanism, memory, biotechnology, terrorism, Brexit, immigration and populist politics. Discussing Ishiguro both as a British and global author, this book contributes to debates regarding the politics of publishing of ethnic writers, examining how Ishiguro has managed to shape a career in resistance to narrow labelling where many other writers have struggled to achieve long-term recognition. The Introduction examines Ishiguro's body of work as a whole and Ishiguro's evolving literary reputation in light of his recent personal and commercial success. The book then offers individual essays on each of Ishiguro's novels, his short story collection, his television and film work, as well as his recent journalistic interventions. Each essay extends and updates existing criticism on Ishiguro via engagement with the most up-to-date critical frameworks, while at the same time staying true to each text's most prominent thematic concerns. With prominent contributors and comprehensive coverage, this will be the definitive volume of Ishiguro scholarship for years to come.

Following the UK's 2016 decision to leave the European Union, discussions surrounding the entangled histories of empire, colonialism, racial justice and decolonisation have become topics of national interest and fierce public debate in Britain. This book brings into view the historical and cultural background to these contemporary debates by exploring the local histories, texts and institutions of empire which have shaped Britain since 1945. In doing so, the diversity of Britain's 'postcolonial' history and society is emphasised and the depth and breadth of the Empire's legacies are revealed. Bringing together intersecting inquiries in history, literary studies, cultural studies, anthropology and more, this collection explores how the cultural legacies of empire shaped everyday British life, from the postwar era to the present day. Featuring chapters on gig venues, beauty salons, bestselling memoirs and more, this journey across post-imperial Britain investigates how the colonial past is firmly embedded in local and national cultures alike. To do so, the book uses a wide range of methodologies, from close textual analysis of literary and historical sources, to archival research and spatial analysis. When viewed in concert with one another, these offer a view of Britain after the end of the Empire which connects the steps of the British Museum to community-based theatre spaces in West Yorkshire.

This book analyses how three artists - Adrian Piper, Nancy Spero and Mary Kelly - worked with the visual dimensions of language in the 1960s and 1970s.