Books published by Manchester University Press

'In the growing literature on the far right and the environment, too few works centre the visual politics that are so integral to extremist appeals. Forchtner and his collaborators work to address this lacuna. Novel in its focus, global in its scope and rigorous in its analysis, Visualising far-right environments makes a necessary and compelling contribution to our understanding of the far right today.' >'A welcome, timely and original contribution. This set of diverse global case studies richly analyses the evergreen appeal of environmental and ecological claims - and their visual representations - to burgeoning far-right movements around the world. An essential read.' >From smiling faces in the nation's scenic landscape to the ridiculing of environmental activists and beyond, images play a crucial role in the far right's politics of nature. This book examines representations of natural environments and environmentalism by the far right around the world, scrutinising its implications for humans and nature. Visualising far-right environments approaches the visual as a key means of (re)producing identities and 'doing politics'. Images are not simply pervasive in our increasingly visual culture, but particularly persuasive in proposing worlds to viewers. In response, this book makes a first, concerted effort to put visuality centre-stage in the analysis of environmental communication by the far right. From the countryside to climate change, covering political parties and non-party actors from around the world, the volume demonstrates various ways in which the far right articulates natural environments and the rampant environmental crises of the twenty-first century. It provides a crucial insight into the multifaceted politics of nature.

This volume explores the scale and meaning of humanitarianism during the era of the Great War (1914-24). Bringing together a diverse range of scholars, it offers a fresh perspective on how and why humanitarian engagement shaped the arc of violence unleashed during these years, and analyses the extent to which the events influenced the development of humanitarian concepts and practices. Building on a decade of scholarship that has predominantly focused on the work of non-governmental humanitarian actors, the collection foregrounds the role of governmental agencies in humanitarian affairs and examines both the motivations and transnational networks of donor publics and the views of the beneficiaries of humanitarian aid. It explores how the connection between humanitarian engagement and international politics gave rise to a range of diverse humanitarian agendas, which were tied to and driven by larger questions of war and peace and conceptions of social and political order. The chapters address the debate over the emergence of 'modern' humanitarianism. Instead of seeing it as either the beginning of 'modern' humanitarianism or the end of its nineteenth century variant, the volume depicts the era as an important conjuncture in the history of humanitarianism. This was a transitional period, in which humanitarianism took on a myriad of different forms and resulted in a picture that was more complex and less triumphalist than many contemporary protagonists, and historians, have tended to admit.

This book offers a new interpretation of global migration from c. 1815-1920 by examining the elite German migrants who moved to India especially missionaries, scholars and scientists, businessmen, and travelers. -- .

This book analyses representations of death and dying in modern Western theatre from the late nineteenth century onward, examining how and why historically informed conceptions of mortality are dramatized and staged. -- .

Folk horror has become a true contemporary cultural phenomenon. But what is this peculiar genre, and what makes it so horrific? This collection considers the special importance that British cinema has to folk horror, and vice versa. It explores such staples of the genre as Witchfinder General (1968), Blood on Satan's Claw (1971) and The Wicker Man (1973), but also looks beyond them, presenting studies of the sci-fi horror Doomwatch (1972), the documentary Requiem for a Village (1975) and the works of Ken Russell and Ben Wheatley, alongside many other folk horror films. The collection provides new ways of understanding the uncanny settings and recurring themes that make folk horror so scary and so culturally resonant. Across various chapters on different topics, folk horror appears as a cinematic vision of the remnants of history, unearthed amid the destabilising uncertainties of a de-industrialising, post-imperial Britain. Folk horror on film: Return of the British repressed provides a compelling account of the genre and a provocative perspective on what makes folk horror unique: its monsters are neither the ghouls of folklore nor the psycho-killers of the slasher; they are the British themselves and their own national past.

Globalisation is often depicted as a threat to ordinary citizens and a destroyer of cities. This volume challenges such a simplistic view, exploring a wealth of cinematic depictions in order to offer a nuanced picture of life in global London. Analysing the city's cosmopolitan high points, as well as its more troubling migratory histories, exclusionist enclaves and brushes with crime, the book takes in various iconic and less-seen neighbourhoods and cultures. The films covered here present a number of tropes and periods. There are noir films by émigré directors and art films documenting the 1960s and 1970s. There are radical Black British visions of the 1980s and grungy Scandinavian takes from the 1990s. Representing the 2000s and beyond are a new cross-cultural, multi-ethnic set of films from East and South Asia, Africa and Latin America, alongside Hollywood blockbusters that make dramatic use of this iconic mega-city. Showcasing a remarkable array of filmmakers, Global London on screen reveals how they destabilise conceptions of English or British non-global London, challenging universalist preconceptions about the world's most famous city.

A city burns, and a queen burns for love: Dido, Queen of Carthage re-imagines one of the great legendary stories. The encounter between a wandering hero and an African queen engenders love and loss, eroticism and absurdity, childish simplicity and compelling eloquence. This Revels Plays volume is the first single-text scholarly edition of Dido in English. It is an indispensable resource for scholars, students, and theatre practitioners. Dido's time has come, with accelerating interest, critical and theatrical, in the play. The edition features an accessible text, lightly punctuated for ease in reading and speaking, with spelling more consistently modernised. The introduction gives the first comprehensive account of the play since M.E. Smith's 1977 monograph, locating Dido within its theatrical, pedagogical, literary, political, and cultural contexts. Dido is here considered on its own terms, as a 1580s play intended for children to perform, but also as a play of multiple possibilities that speaks to the present. The edition incorporates new research into authorship (which indicates that Marlowe wrote the play), as well as a detailed analysis of Dido's sources. It includes a survey of criticism and considers the implications of writing for performance; it assesses the evidence for early performances and provides extensive information about modern productions. Dido is a remarkable play. In its own time, it was revolutionary, featuring a dominant female role, experimental blank verse, and a refusal to moralise. And soon thereafter, as Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith propose, Dido became 'the play Shakespeare could not forget'.

This book reinterprets early seventeenth-century texts by situating them within the context of Jacobean writing on Britain and Britishness. Central to its argument are ideas about nationhood, identity and community that were occasioned by the accession of a Scottish king to England's throne, contested during the Anglo-Scottish Union debates. -- .

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.

Let's spend the night together explores how sex and sexuality provided essential elements of British youth culture in the 1950s through to the 1980s. It posits that the underlying sexual charge of rock 'n'roll - and pop music more generally - was integral to the broader challenge embodied in the youth cultures that developed after World War Two. As teenage hormones rushed to move to the music and take advantage of the spaces opening up through consumption, education and employment, so the boundaries of British morality and cultural propriety were tested and often transgressed. Be it the assertive masculinity of the teds or the lustful longings of the teeny-bopper, the gender-bending of glam or the subterranean allure of an underground club/disco, the free love of the 1960s or the punk provocations in the 1970s, sex was forever to the fore and, more often than not, underpinned the moral panics that fitfully followed any cultural shift in youthful style and behaviour. Drawing from scholarship across a range of disciplines, the Subcultures Network explore how sex and sexuality were experienced, presented, conferred, responded to and understood within the context of youth culture, popular music and social change in the period between World War Two and the advent of AIDS. The chapters locate sex, music and youth culture in the context of post-war Britain: that is, in the context of a widening and ever-more prevalent media; amidst the loosening bonds of censorship; in a society that aspired to (and for some time offered) full-employment as it reconfigured and rebuilt after the war; that was shaped by changing patterns of consumption and the emergence of the 'teenager'; that saw conventions challenged by new ideas, new demographics and new behaviours; that existed, as Jeff Nuttall famously argued, under the shadow of the (nuclear) bomb.

'This fascinating collection offers systematic analysis of partition in India and Palestine as processes connected through supranational politics, international law, and transnational networks. Thought provoking, often harrowing and always original, the essays collected here make essential reading for anyone interested in where partitions fit within global decolonisation.' Martin Thomas, University of Exeter 'This is an original book on the momentous years of 1947 and 1948 in the Indian subcontinent and Palestine. By showing how partition failed to resolve the nationality "problems" it was designed to solve, the multi-scalar analyses demonstrate how the seeds were sown for the illiberal majoritarian democracies in these places today.' A. Dirk Moses, City College of New York The breakup of India and Palestine is the first study of political and legal thinking about the partitions of India and Palestine in 1947. It explains how these two formative moments collectively contributed to the disintegration of the European colonial empires, and unleashed political forces whose legacies continue to shape the modern politics of the Middle East and South Asia. With contributions from leading scholars of partition, the volume draws attention to the pathways of peoples, geographic spaces, colonial policies, laws and institutions from the vantage point of those most engaged in the process: political actors, party activists, jurists, diplomats, writers and international representatives from the Middle East, South Asia and beyond. The book investigates some of the underlying causes of partition in both places, such as the hardening of religious fault-lines, majoritarian politics and the failure to construct viable forms of government in deeply divided societies. It analyses why, even 75 years after partition, the two regions have not been able to address some of the pertinent historical, political and social debates of the colonial years. The volume moves the debate about partition away from the imperial centre, by focusing on ground-level arguments about the future of post-colonial India and Palestine and the still unfolding repercussions of those debates.

In the 1980s, Britain actively engaged with China in order to promote globalisation and manage Hong Kong's decolonisation. Influenced by neoliberalism, Margaret Thatcher saw Britain as a global trading nation, which was well placed to serve China's economic reform. With her conviction in free-market capitalism, Thatcher was eager to extend British rule in Hong Kong beyond 1997. During the 1982-84 negotiations, British diplomats aimed to 'educate' China about how capitalist Hong Kong worked. Nevertheless, Deng Xiaoping held an alternative vision of globalisation, one that privileged sovereignty and socialism over market liberalism and democracy. Drawing extensively upon the declassified British archives and Chinese sources, the book recounts how Britain and China negotiated for Hong Kong's future, culminating in the signing of the Joint Declaration on its retrocession in 1997. It explores how Anglo-Chinese relations flourished after the Hong Kong agreement but suffered a setback as a result of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. This original and comprehensive study argues that Thatcher was a pragmatic neoliberal, and the British diplomacy of 'educating' China in global free trade and democracy yielded mixed results. By examining Britain-China-Hong Kong relations from multiple perspectives, this book will be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of diplomatic, imperial, and global history.

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.

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.

[Not final] Intimate afterlives of empire is the first comprehensive study of post-imperial autobiography as an important genre of cultural memory. investigate the relationship between individual and cultural memory at the end of empire as voiced through the practice of autobiographical writing. Through close readings of more than a dozen autobiographies and memoirs/Through close readings of almost twenty autobiographies written after the break-up of the British Empire, it examines how individuals engage with the changing narrative landscape brought about by decolonisation/ it examines how changes to cultural narratives about the imperial past manifest themselves in personal life stories. . It argues that individuals navigate the changing narrative landscape of decolonisation by way of personal memory work, repositioning themselves in relation to a contemporary audience. The book conceives of decolonisation as a narrative shift, though not a total break, from the logics of the colonial era. /The narrative changes brought about by decolonisation has previously been studied at the level of collective or national memory. Intimate afterlives of empire is the first book to examine how individuals have responded to this changing narrative landscape. It argues that authors are at once affected by and seek to affect cultural memories of the colonial past. /It argues that authors respond dialogically to shifts in the cultural memories of empire, inserting themselves in a wider narrative. As decolonisation brought changes to the narrative landscape, individual writers ... Studying the dialogues between individual and cultural memory, the book argues that autobiographers are at once influenced by and seek to influence the cultural memory of empire and its legacies (and the authors' own position in both)/ trace the responses to the moment of decolonisation as a narrative eventEach chapter focuses on one trope and one autobiographical sub-genre so that the result is an anatomy of the genre of the end of empire autobiography as a whole.

Victorian Legs studies the science (sometimes spurious) and sexuality (often frivolous) of legs during the Victorian period. Legs occupy a particularly vexed position in Victorian culture. While legs formed the foundation (or the columns) of the civilized subject, only certain legs embodied this model. The social rules of who could show their legs remained gendered, at least for the higher classes. For the most part, men exhibited and admired, while women concealed and demurred. The stage became the generally accepted site for the display of women's legs, witnessing the merger of the athletic and the erotic. Armed with the support of dubious science, white men identified the particular physiology of their legs as evidence of their evolutionary superiority, categorizing non-European legs as degenerative, while concealing women's legs in varying layers of restrictive clothing. In addition to examining the science, sexuality, and even technology of legs during the Victorian period, this book offers close readings of popular novels by Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Anthony Trollope, among others. The Victorians obsessed over legs as designators of the hierarchal levels of humanity and as erotic sites with specific rules for concealment and exposure. This book shows that while legs made us human, they could also dehumanize.