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      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2021

        The Pan-African Pantheon

        by Adekeye Adebajo

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        October 2017

        4 saints in 3 acts

        A snapshot of the American avant-garde in the 1930s

        by Patricia Allmer, John Sears

        Four Saints in Three Acts by Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson was a major avant-garde phenomenon of the 1930s, an experimental opera that nonetheless achieved remarkable popular success. Photography was a key element of that success, but its complex roles in the construction, representation and dissemination of the opera have hitherto received little critical attention. The photographic recording of the all-African American cast in particular affords a unique insight into the complexities of Four Saints in relation to the Harlem Renaissance and the New York avant-gardes of the time. This book, published in collaboration with The Photographers' Gallery, London, presents a wide selection of photographs of the cast, performances, and other material - many images reproduced for the first time - alongside essays by an international range of scholars exploring different aspects of the opera, including dance, fashion, music, and avant-garde writing, as well as photography.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        January 2019

        Postcolonial African cinema

        Ten directors

        by David Murphy, Patrick Williams

        This is the first introduction of its kind to an important cross-section of postcolonial African filmmakers from the 1950s to the present. Building on previous critical work in the field, this volume will bring together ideas from a range of disciplines - film studies, African cultural studies, and, in particular, postcolonial studies - in order to combine the in-depth analysis of individual films and bodies of work by individual directors with a sustained interrogation of these films in relation to important theoretical concepts. Structurally, the book is straightforward, though the aim is to incorporate diversity and complexity of approach within the overall simplicity of format. Chapters provide both an overview of the director's output to date, and the necessary background - personal or national, cultural or political - to enable readers to achieve a better understanding of the director's choice of subject matter, aesthetic or formal strategies, or ideological stance. They also offer a particular reading of one or more films, in which the authors aim to situate African cinema in relation to important critical and theoretical debates. This book thus constitutes a new departure in African film studies, recognising the maturity of the field, and the need for complex yet accessible approaches to it, which move beyond the purely descriptive while refusing to get bogged down in theoretical jargon. Consequently, the volume should be of interest not only to specialists but also to the general reader.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        November 2023

        South African London

        by Andrea Thorpe

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        May 2010

        Black families in Britain as the site of struggle

        None

        by Bertha Ochieng, Carl Hylton

        This edited book provides a valuable, unique and scholarly contribution to the study of Black families (African and African Caribbean) in the UK. It combines a systematic yet clear-headed approach with up-to-date and well-researched data to support its many stimulating assertions. All fifteen contributors (including academics, arts practitioners and community activists) are of African or African Caribbean descent and approach their subject matter with a dedicated 'hands-on' feel. Their committed approach is supported by empirical research and comprehensive review of the literature. With chapters on social policy, education, music, sports, social exclusion, racism, religion and spirituality, this book will become the essential text about UK families of African/Caribbean descent for higher education students, professionals, practitioners and the general reader. It will also appeal to professional organisations working with Black individuals and families. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2024

        A savage song

        Racist violence and armed resistance in the early twentieth-century U.S.–Mexico Borderlands

        by Margarita Aragon

        This book examines key moments in which collective and state violence invigorated racialized social boundaries around Mexican and African Americans in the United States, and in which they violently contested them. Bringing anti-Mexican violence into a common analytical framework with anti-black violence, A savage song examines several focal points in this oft-ignored history, including the 1915 rebellion of ethnic Mexicans in South Texas, and its brutal repression by the Texas Rangers and the 1917 mutiny of black soldiers of the 24th Infantry Regiment in Houston, Texas, in response to police brutality. Aragon considers both the continuities and stark contrasts across these different moments: how were racialized constructions of masculinity differently employed? How did African and Mexican American men, including those in uniform, respond to the violence of racism? And how was their resistance, including their claims to manhood and nation, understood by law enforcement, politicians, and the press? Building on extensive archival research, the book examines how African and Mexican American men have been constructed as 'racial problems', investigating, in particular, their relationship with law enforcement and ideas about black and Mexican criminality.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2021

        African cities and collaborative futures

        Urban platforms and metropolitan logistics

        by Michael Keith, Andreza Aruska de Souza Santos, Susan Parnell

        This groundbreaking volume brings together scholars from across the globe to discuss the infrastructure, energy, housing, safety and sustainability of African cities, as seen through local narratives of residents. Drawing on a variety of fields and extensive first-hand research, the contributions offer a fresh perspective on some of the most pressing issues confronting urban Africa in the twenty-first century. At a time when the future of the region as a whole will be determined in large part by its cities, the implications of these developments are profound. With case studies from cities in Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Niger, Nigeria, South Africa and Tanzania, this volume explores how the rapid growth of African cities is reconfiguring the relationship between urban social life and its built forms. While the most visible transformations in cities today can be seen as infrastructural, these manifestations are cultural as well as material, reflecting the different ways in which the city is rationalised, economised and governed. How can we 'see like a city' in twenty-first-century Africa, understanding the urban present to shape its future? This is the central question posed throughout this volume, with a practical focus on how academics, local decision makers and international practitioners can collaborate to meet the challenge of rapid growth, environmental pressures and resource gaps.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        January 2024

        Gothic dreams and nightmares

        by Carol Davison

        Gothic dreams and nightmares is an edited collection on the compelling yet under-theorised subject of Gothic dreams and nightmares ranging across more than two centuries of literature, the visual arts, and twentieth- and twenty-first century visual media. Written by an international group of experts, including leading and lesser-known scholars, it considers its subject in various national, cultural, and socio-historical contexts, engaging with questions of philosophy, morality, rationality, consciousness, and creativity.

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      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        March 2017

        Asia in Western fiction

        by Robin Winks

        Any reader who has ever visited Asia knows that the great bulk of Western-language fiction about Asian cultures turns on stereotypes. This book, a collection of essays, explores the problem of entering Asian societies through Western fiction, since this is the major port of entry for most school children, university students and most adults. In the thirteenth century, serious attempts were made to understand Asian literature for its own sake. Hau Kioou Choaan, a typical Chinese novel, was quite different from the wild and magical pseudo-Oriental tales. European perceptions of the Muslim world are centuries old, originating in medieval Christendom's encounter with Islam in the age of the Crusades. There is explicit and sustained criticism of medieval mores and values in Scott's novels set in the Middle Ages, and this is to be true of much English-language historical fiction of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Even mediocre novels take on momentary importance because of the pervasive power of India. The awesome, remote and inaccessible Himalayas inevitably became for Western writers an idealised setting for novels of magic, romance and high adventure, and for travellers' tales that read like fiction. Chinese fictions flourish in many guises. Most contemporary Hong Kong fiction reinforced corrupt mandarins, barbaric punishments and heathens. Of the novels about Japan published after 1945, two may serve to frame a discussion of Japanese behaviour as it could be observed (or imagined) by prisoners of war: Black Fountains and Three Bamboos.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        June 2023

        Cormac McCarthy

        A complexity theory of literature

        by Lydia R. Cooper

        Combining the fields of evolutionary economics and the humanities, this book examines McCarthy's literary works as a significant case study demonstrating our need to recognise the interrelated complexities of economic policies, environmental crises, and how public policy and rhetoric shapes our value systems. In a world recovering from global economic crisis and poised on the brink of another, studying the methods by which literature interrogates narratives of inevitability around global economic inequality and eco-disaster is ever more relevant.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        May 2023

        Suicide and the Gothic

        by William Hughes, Andrew Smith

        Suicide and the Gothic is the first protracted study of how the act of self-destruction recurs and functions within one of the most enduring and popular forms of fiction. Comprising eleven original essays and an authoritative introduction, this collection explores how the act of suicide has been portrayed, interrogated and pathologised from the eighteenth century to the present. The featured fictions embrace both canonical and the less-studied texts and examine the crisis of suicide - a crisis that has personal, familial, religious, legal and medical implications - in European, American and Asian contexts. Featuring detailed interventions into the understanding of texts as temporally distant as Thomas Percy's Reliques and Patricia Highsmith's crime fictions, and movements as diverse as Wertherism, Romanticism and fin-de-siècle decadence, Suicide and the Gothic provides a comprehensive and compelling overview of this recurrent crisis in fiction and culture.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        June 2021

        Passing into the present

        Contemporary American fiction of racial and gender passing

        by Sinead Moynihan

        This book is the first full-length study of contemporary American fiction of passing. Its takes as its point of departure the return of racial and gender passing in the 1990s in order to make claims about wider trends in contemporary American fiction. The book accounts for the return of tropes of passing in fiction by Phillip Roth, Percival Everett, Louise Erdrich, Danzy Senna, Jeffrey Eugenides and Paul Beatty, by arguing meta-critical and meta-fictional tool. These writers are attracted to the trope of passing because passing narratives have always foregrounded the notion of textuality in relation to the (il)legibility of "black" subjects passing as white. The central argument of this book, then, is that contemporary narratives of passing are concerned with articulating and unpacking an analogy between passing and authorship. The title promises to inaugurate dialogue on the relationships between passing, postmodernism and authorship in contemporary American fiction.

      • Trusted Partner
        March 2020

        Maya Angelou

        Little People, Big Dreams. Deutsche Ausgabe | Kinderbuch ab 4 Jahre

        by Lisbeth Kaiser, Leire Salaberria, Svenja Becker

        Maya Angelou erlebte als Kind etwas Schlimmes und hörte auf zu sprechen. In dieser schweren Zeit gaben Bücher ihr Halt und die Kraft, ihre Stimme wiederzufinden. Als Erwachsene schrieb sie selbst und wurde zu einer der großen Autorinnen und Aktivistinnen der afroamerikanischen Bürgerrechtsbewegung. Durch ihre wunderbaren Worte gab sie vielen Menschen Hoffnung. Little People, Big Dreams erzählt von den beeindruckenden Lebensgeschichten großer Menschen: Jede dieser Persönlichkeiten, ob Sängerin, Menschenrechtskämpfer oder Modedesignerin, hat Unvorstellbares erreicht. Dabei begann alles, als sie noch klein waren: mit großen Träumen. Für welches Alter sind diese Bücher gedacht? Für Babys das perfekte Geschenk zur Begrüßung in eine Welt voller Träume! Und Eltern werden in schlaflosen Nächten von diesen Büchern dazu ermutigt, das Vorlesen zu einem selbstverständlichen Teil des Lebens zu machen. Kleinkinder werden von den Illustrationen verzaubert sein – sie werden zahlreiche Dinge entdecken. Auch sind die Bücher großartige „Vokabeltrainer“! 3- bis 5-Jährige werden alles, Illustrationen und Texte, geradezu in sich aufsaugen! 6-, 8- und 10-Jährige haben ein ausgeprägteres Verständnis für die Illustrationen und die Bedeutung der Geschichte – es geht nicht nur darum, sich selbst zu akzeptieren und die eigenen Zukunftsträume zu verwirklichen, sondern auch darum, andere so zu akzeptieren, wie sie sind. Später: Die Bücher sind gute Geschenke zu jedem Anlass, denn die Träume der Kindheit können das ganze Leben lang Wirklichkeit werden.

      • Trusted Partner
        August 2022

        Maya Angelou

        Little People, Big Dreams. Mini | Pappbilderbuch mit abgerundeten Ecken für Kinder von 1 bis 3 Jahren

        by Lisbeth Kaiser, Leire Salaberria, Silke Kleemann

        Die große Autorin und Aktivistin der afroamerikanischen Bürgerrechtsbewegung, deren wunderbare Worte den Menschen Hoffnung und Kraft geben. Die Erfolgsserie Little People, Big Dreams jetzt im Miniformat für die ganz Kleinen. Kurze Einführungen in das Leben berühmter Persönlichkeiten, in einfachen Sätzen erzählt und perfekt zum Vorlesen für Kleinkinder.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        June 2017

        Terry Gilliam

        by Peter Marks

        Terry Gilliam presents a sustained examination of one of cinema's most challenging and lauded auteurs, proposing fresh ways of seeing Gilliam that go beyond reductive readings of him as a gifted but manic fantasist. Analysing Gilliam's work over nearly four decades, from the brilliant anarchy of his Monty Python animations through the nightmarish masterpiece Brazil to the provocative Gothic horror of Tideland, it critically examines the variety and richness of Gilliam's sometimes troubled but always provocative output. The book situates Gilliam within the competing cultural contexts of the British, European and American film industries, examining his regular struggles against aesthetic and commercial pressures. He emerges as a passionate, immensely creative director, whose work encompasses a dizzying array of material: anarchic satire, childhood and adult fantasy, dystopia, romantic comedy, surrealism, road movie, fairy tale and the Gothic. The book charts how Gilliam interweaves these genres and forms to create magical interfaces between reality and the illuminating, frightening but liberating worlds of the imagination. Scrutinising the neglected importance of literature and adaptation in Gilliam's career, this study also observes him through the lenses of auteurism, genre, performance, design and national culture, explaining how someone born in Minnesota and raised in California came to be one of British television and film's most compelling figures.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        March 2023

        Sleep and its spaces in Middle English literature

        Emotions, ethics, dreams

        by Megan Leitch

        Middle English literature is intimately concerned with sleep and the spaces in which it takes place. In the medieval English imagination, sleep is an embodied and culturally determined act. It is both performed and interpreted by characters and contemporaries, subject to a particular habitus and understood through particular hermeneutic lenses. While illuminating the intersecting medical and moral discourses by which it is shaped, sleep also sheds light on subjects in favour of which it has hitherto been overlooked: what sleep can enable (dreams and dream poetry) or what it can stand in for or supersede (desire and sex). This book argues that sleep mediates thematic concerns and questions in ways that have ethical, affective and oneiric implications. At the same time, it offers important contributions to understanding different Middle English genres: romance, dream vision, drama and fabliau.

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