Balans is an independent publisher of quality non-fiction in the areas of history, politics, economy, biography, science, nature writing, memoirs, current affairs, religion and psychology. With our dedicated team, we publish approximately 40 new titles per year.
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Over fifty years after Jamaican and Trinidadian independence, Imagining Caribbean womanhood examines the links between beauty and politics in the Anglophone Caribbean, providing a first cultural history of Caribbean beauty competitions, spanning from Kingston to London. It traces the origins and transformation of female beauty contests in the British Caribbean from 1929 to 1970, through the development of cultural nationalism, race-conscious politics and decolonisation. The beauty contest, a seemingly marginal phenomenon, is used to illuminate the persistence of racial supremacy, the advance of consumer culture and the negotiation of race and nation through the idealised performance of cultured, modern beauty. Modern Caribbean femininity was intended to be politically functional but also commercially viable and subtly eroticised.
This edited volume reframes the Caribbean as a paradigm of ecological resilience and creativity by bringing together the voices of contemporary artists and scholars who are at the forefront of environmental activism in the region and across its diasporas. While dominant narratives percolating from the environmental sciences to the mainstream press present the Caribbean as a frontier of planetary disaster, the contributors to this volume show how the region offers radical models for overcoming the environmental challenges of the present. At the heart of this argument lies the history of the Caribbean as a centre for grassroots forms of anti-colonial and anti-capitalist resistance founded upon nature-centred cosmologies and practices. Caribbean Eco-Aesthetics shows how contemporary artists are mobilising this radical heritage in a bid to unlock alternative planetary futures.
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The Secret Life of Animals - Ocean: Minik's Departure Into the Wide Sea (Vol. 1) „THE SECRET LIFE OF ANIMALS” comes up as the first series of realistic children's books for readers ages 8 and up, divided into several subseries sorted by the Earth's habitats. Each book can be read independently.What happens in OCEAN, Vol. 1:Driven by his curiosity, the seal Minik embarks on a journey out into the vast ocean. He wants to know everything, understand everything. But the Baltic Sea holds many things: unknown and threatening. When the whale Lottatwo gets stranded on a sandbank, the two friends leave the shallow waters and make their way up north. This is just the beginning of Minik's journey - something new and great is about to begin in the strange ocean. • Realistic animal adventures for children ages 8 and up and the whole family• ‘Popular Entertaining Storytelling’ meets Animal Documentaries, the successful non-fiction trend translated into narrative – for the first time!• Semi-annual publication sequence of sub-series in different habitats: Forest, Ocean, Savannah• Renowned duo of author and illustrator: wonderfully beautiful narrative voices meet touching black-and-white illustrations
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Colouring the Caribbean offers the first comprehensive study of Agostino Brunias's intriguing pictures of colonial West Indians of colour - so called 'Red' and 'Black' Caribs, dark-skinned Africans and Afro-Creoles, and people of mixed race - made for colonial officials and plantocratic elites during the late-eighteenth century. Although Brunias's paintings have often been understood as straightforward documents of visual ethnography that functioned as field guides for reading race, this book investigates how the images both reflected and refracted ideas about race commonly held by eighteenth-century Britons, helping to construct racial categories while simultaneously exposing their constructedness and underscoring their contradictions. The book offers provocative new insights about Brunias's work gleaned from a broad survey of his paintings, many of which are reproduced here for the first time.
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Because maritime questions are often admixed with territorial sovereignty questions, parties sometimes seek to settle them together. Jurisdiction under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea-UNCLOS-according to the received view does not encompass disputes concerning territorial sovereignty. In this book, international law scholar and practitioner Thomas D. Grant argues that the received view overstates the exclusion of sovereignty disputes. In Coastal State Rights, UNCLOS Annex VII arbitrators overstated the scope of the term 'sovereignty dispute' as well, an error of definition compounded when they ignored evidence probative as to whether a sovereignty dispute exists. Examining UNCLOS, its drafting history, and decades of decided cases, Sovereignty Disputes and the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea relates an important problem of international dispute settlement to the public order of which UNCLOS forms part.
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Jack Tar to Union Jack examines the intersection between empire, navy, and manhood in British society from 1870 to 1918. Through analysis of sources that include courts-martial cases, sailors' own writings, and the HMS Pinafore, Conley charts new depictions of naval manhood during the Age of Empire, a period which witnessed the radical transformation of the navy, the intensification of imperial competition, the democratisation of British society, and the advent of mass culture. Jack Tar to Union Jack argues that popular representations of naval men increasingly reflected and informed imperial masculine ideals in Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Conley shows how the British Bluejacket as both patriotic defender and dutiful husband and father stood in sharp contrast to the stereotypic image of the brave but bawdy tar of the Georgian navy. This book will be essential reading for students of British imperial history, naval and military history, and gender studies.
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Ireland, slavery and the Caribbean is a complex and ground-breaking collection of essays. Grounded in history, it integrates perspectives from art historians, architectural and landscape historians, and literary scholars to produce a genuinely interdisciplinary collection that spans from 1620-1830: the high point of European colonialism. By exploring imperial, national and familial relationships from their building blocks of plantation, migration, property and trade, it finds new ways to re-create and question how slavery made the Atlantic world.
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In François Truffaut's opinion The Innocents was 'the best English film after Hitchcock goes to America'. Tennessee Williams said of The Great Gatsby: 'a film whose artistry even surpassed the original novel'. The maker of both films was Jack Clayton, one of the finest English directors of the post-war era and perhaps best remembered for the trail-blazing Room at the Top which brought a new sexual frankness and social realism to the British screen. This is the first full-length critical study of Clayton's work. The author has been able to consult and quote from the director's own private papers which illuminate Clayton's creative practices and artistic intentions. In addition to fresh analyses of the individual films, the book contains new material on Clayton's many unrealised projects and valuably includes his previously unpublished short story 'The Enchantment' - as poignant and revealing as the films themselves. This is a personal and fascinating account of the career and achievement of an important, much-loved director that should appeal to students and film enthusiasts.
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In the Middle Ages, hell was useful because it was vaguely defined. Canonical scriptures scarcely mention hell, leaving much to the imaginations of early Christians, who used it to sort out who belonged within the faith. This book explores how hell became a place for literary experiments with local challenges in theology and identity. Following the reception and transformations of two popular hell apocrypha, it argues that they served as this role because of their liminal textual authority. As noncanonical scriptures, apocrypha afforded medieval writers space to revise their hells (since they were not actually scripture), while also encouraging readers to revere those experiments as valid (since they seemed like scripture). The book brings together adaptations from early medieval England, Iceland, Ireland, and Wales, placing the early vernacular theologies of the North Sea in comparative conversation.
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Kyd is arguably Shakespeare's most important tragic predecessor. Brilliantly fusing the drama of the academic and popular traditions, Thomas Kyd's plays are of central importance for understanding how the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries came about. Called 'an extraordinary dramatic . genius' by T.S. Eliot, Thomas Kyd invented the revenge tragedy genre that culminated in Shakespeare's Hamlet some twelve years later. In this study, The Spanish Tragedy - the most popular of all plays on the English Renaissance stage - receives the extensive scholarly and critical treatment it deserves, including a full reception and modern stage history. Yet as Erne shows, Thomas Kyd is much more than the author of a single masterpiece. Don Horatio (partly extant in The First Part of Hieronimo), the lost early Hamlet, Soliman and Perseda, and Cornelia all belong to what emerges in this work as a coherent dramatic oeuvre. This groundbreaking study is now in paperback. ;
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This book provides scholars and students alike with a set of texts that can deepen their understanding of the culture and society of the twelfth-century German kingdom. The sources translated here bring to life the activities of five noblemen and noblewomen from Rome to the Baltic coast and from the Rhine River to the Alpine valleys of Austria. To read these five sources together is to appreciate how interconnected political, military, economic, religious and spiritual interests could be for some of the leading members of medieval German society-and for the authors who wrote about them. Whether fighting for the emperor in Italy, bringing Christianity to pagans in what is today northern Poland, or founding, reforming and governing monastic communities in the heartland of the German kingdom, the subjects of these texts call attention to some of the many ways that noble life shaped the world of central medieval Europe.
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Consumers stand perplexed at the fish counter. Cod or salmon; mackerel or sea bass? Or perhaps rather carp and trout? How about flounder and dab? Dab what? A terrific flatfish, but sadly hardly anyone has heard of it. And what was it again about organic, aquaculture, wild-caught, and that little blue sustainability certificate? Is catching your own a way out? Before you start thinking it’s time to opt for a chop and fried potatoes instead, read this book. It provides readers with deep blue facts from the world’s waters and analyses the global and local habitat of the finned creature.
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"Der vorliegende Band enthält eine Reihe von Fallstudien, die die Nutzung der Literalität in traditionalen Gesellschaften illustrieren; es werden nicht nur Gesellschaften untersucht, in denen es seit langem eine partielle Literalität gibt, die Untersuchung bezieht sich auch auf den Einfluß der Schrift in nicht-literalen Gesellschaften. Zusätzlich zu den Fallstudien enthält der Band die inzwischen berühmt gewordene Studie von Jack Goody und lan Watt über »Konsequenzen der Literalität«."
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Objects of affection recovers the emotional attraction of the medieval book through an engagement with a fifteenth-century literary collection known as Oxford, Bodleian Library Manuscript Ashmole 61. Exploring how the inhabitants of the book's pages - human and nonhuman, tangible and intangible - collaborate with its readers then and now, this book addresses the manuscript's material appeal in the ways it binds itself to different cultural, historical and material environments. In doing so it traces the affective literacy training that the manuscript provided its late-medieval English household, whose diverse inhabitants are incorporated into the ecology of the book itself as it fashions spiritually generous and socially mindful household members.
