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      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2026

        The cultural politics of food in South Africa

        Media, nourishment, inequality

        by Mehita Iqani, Sarah Gibson

        Food is both a material system of nourishment, necessary for human survival, and a communicative system that signifies multiple meanings across human cultures. This book explores the cultural politics of food in the South African context, bringing together a range of disciplinary perspectives on the links between media, nourishment, and inequality. The chapters all highlight the multiplicity of meanings that food has in South African society. These include historical perspectives on the impact of colonialism, migration and apartheid had on food and foodways in South Africa; sociological interventions on food and society; aesthetic practices in relation to food; and mediated food cultures in South Africa. Taken together, the book critically explores the multiple ways in which food is never just food, and always linked to complex and shifting modalities of meaning and knowledge in the South African context.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        September 2012

        Performing heritage

        Research, practice and innovation in museum theatre and live interpretation

        by Anthony Jackson, Jenny Kidd

        Performing Heritage is the first book to bring together the range of voices, debates and practices that constitute the fields of museum theatre and live interpretation. Inspiring and challenging in its scope and level of debate, Performing Heritage crosses the disciplines of performance and museum/heritage studies and offers remarkable and timely insights into the processes, outcomes and potential of this rich and rapidly developing practice - and in a variety of international contexts. The book productively brings together academic research and professional practice, and will be essential reading for all those interested in, and concerned with the future of, 'heritage' and its interpretation. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Art treatments & subjects
        January 2010

        Understanding heritage in practice

        by Susie West

        Written by an interdisciplinary team of scholars, this authoritative text explores how heritage is delivered and consumed in a global world, and the ever-increasing ways in which heritage is actively valued. New international case studies see heritage as social action, as performance, and as a vehicle for innovations in tourism, challenging the notion that only official heritage practices can successfully select and interpret our links with the past. Aimed primarily at students in heritage studies and professionals in heritage industries, this book is one of three in the Understanding Global Heritage series.

      • Trusted Partner
        Art treatments & subjects
        August 2009

        Understanding the politics of heritage

        by Rodney Harrison

        Written by an interdisciplinary team of scholars, this authoritative text presents an engaging narrative of the way politics features in heritage conservation and management. New international case studies illustrate how notions of identity, social class and nationhood may be woven into the provision of official heritage, and how heritage may be seen to be less about upholding truth or authenticity and more about delivering political objectives. Aimed primarily at students in heritage studies and professionals in heritage industries, this book is one of three in the Understanding Global Heritage series.

      • Trusted Partner
        Art treatments & subjects
        January 2010

        Understanding heritage and memory

        by Tim Benton

        Written by an interdisciplinary team of scholars, this authoritative text explores the emotive issues surrounding the commemoration of war and atrocity, and the profound challenges for conservators posed by 'virtual', 'intangible' and 'multicultural' heritage. New international case studies demonstrate that while interest in the memorialisation of the great national upheavals of the last century has never been more acute, many of the problems of conserving the past in diverse and disparate societies remain to be resolved. Aimed primarily at students in heritage studies and professionals in heritage industries, this book is one of three in the Understanding Global Heritage series.

      • 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
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        June 2026

        Heritage and healing in Syria and Iraq

        by Zena Kamash

      • Trusted Partner
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      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        August 2012

        Understanding Chinese politics

        An introduction to government in the People's Republic of China

        by Neil Collins, Andrew Cottey

        The Chinese political system is the subject of much media and popular comment in part because China supports an economy with an apparently inexorable dynamic and impressive record of achievement. This book provides a comprehensive introduction to China's political system, outlining the major features of the Chinese model and highlighting its claims and challenges. It explores the central role of the Communist Party in the country's politics and the way in which the Party controls most elements of the political system. The book also draws parallels with previous historical periods in China's history. Finally, it addresses the question of what kind of role the People's Republic of China will play in global politics as a whole, the implications for the West and the rebalancing of relations between China and its neighbours. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        June 2026

        Confessions of monuments

        Commemorating and representing the Turkish nation-state in the early twentieth century

        by Emin Artun Ozguner

        Following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in the early 1920s, an emerging nation state built a particular relationship with the Ottoman past. In its simultaneous disavowal and inheritance of it, this was the new Republic of Turkey, founded in 1923. Nation-states are areas of ideological contestation. However, they are equally visible and tangible. This is thanks to the making of a new world of artefacts in build or print that represent and commemorate them in many, often contradicting ways through design practices. This book offers a thorough account of this new Turkish material world through the trajectories of commemoration; from public monuments, print media, and festive illumination to temporary and permanent architecture from the onset of the 1908 Young Turk revolution to the demise of Turkey's founding single-party regime in the late 1950s. If objects are silent actors of history, their confessions await.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        April 2026

        Connoisseurs and conmen

        The contest for cultural authority in early twentieth-century Britain

        by Lewis Ryder

        This book examines John Hilditch (1872-1930), a notorious collector of Chinese art who lied, hoaxed and manipulated in his struggle against museum experts to become a cultural authority. Previously overlooked as a pest with a dubious collection, this book uses Hilditch to interrogate how far the monumental social, cultural and political changes of the early twentieth century unsettled social and cultural hierarchies and how these hierarchies were remade. It shows how the cultural elites were forced to engage with the public and re-draw the boundaries of citizenship, expertise and high and low culture in response to unprecedented social mobility, the democratisation of culture and politics, as well as the effects of British imperialism which brought ordinary Britons access to antiquities as well as confidence to claim expertise over foreign cultures. The book will interest social and cultural historians of Modern Britain, museum scholars and art historians.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        January 2026

        Stiliagi and Soviet masculinities, 1945–2010

        Fashion as dissent

        by Alla Myzelev

        This book provides an in-depth analysis of the Stiliagi, the Soviet Union's pioneering youth subculture from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. Characterized by their distinctive Western-influenced fashion, affinity for jazz, and resistance to Soviet ideological conformity, the Stiliagi represented a significant cultural shift in post-war Soviet society. The book examines how this subculture, through its embrace of alternative masculinities and nonconformist behaviours, challenged prevailing social norms and influenced Soviet cinema, theatre, and broader cultural discourse. Drawing on rigorous research, the book situates the Stiliagi within the broader context of Soviet and Post-Soviet history, arguing that their legacy persisted well beyond their absorption into mainstream culture. Essential reading for scholars of Soviet history, cultural studies, and subcultural movements, this work offers a nuanced understanding of the Stiliagi's enduring impact on Soviet identity and cultural resistance.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        November 2022

        Chinese dreams in Romantic England

        by Edward Weech

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        September 2025

        Industrial memory in North East England

        Negotiating northernness

        by Victoria Allen

        Industrial memory in North East England examines how the region's industrial myth and memory have been articulated in the renegotiation of northernness. The book offers a critical contextualisation of the concept of northernness and the English North, and an introduction to the concept of the PopCultural Portfolio, a mixed-methods approach to conjunctural analysis in cultural and memory studies. The book provides six richly illustrated case studies to demonstrate the practical application of cultural studies' expansive and inclusive understanding of texts, bringing together materials from North East football, folk, indie and exhibition culture to establish how the North East's industrial past continues to be remembered and functionalised as industrial memory. In turn, the conjunctural analysis demonstrates how industrial memory is articulated and mythologised as north(east)ernes in contemporary popular culture.

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        Colonialism & imperialism
        May 2017

        Hong Kong and British culture, 1945–97

        by Mark Hampton. Series edited by Andrew S. Thompson, John Mackenzie

        This book examines the British cultural engagement with Hong Kong in the second half of the twentieth century. It shows how the territory fit unusually within Britain's decolonisation narratives and served as an occasional foil for examining Britain's own culture during a period of perceived stagnation and decline. Drawing on a wide range of archival and published primary sources, Hong Kong and British culture, 1945-97 investigates such themes as Hong Kong as a site of unrestrained capitalism, modernisation, and good government, as well as an arena of male social and sexual opportunity. It also examines the ways in which Hong Kong Chinese embraced British culture, and the competing predictions that British observers made concerning the colony's return to Chinese sovereignty. An epilogue considers the enduring legacy of British colonialism.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2017

        Britain in China

        by Robert Bickers

        This is a study of Britain's presence in China both at its peak, and during its inter-war dissolution in the face of assertive Chinese nationalism and declining British diplomatic support. Using archival materials from China and records in Britain and the United States, the author paints a portrait of the traders, missionaries, businessmen, diplomats and settlers who constituted "Britain-in-China", challenging our understanding of British imperialism there. Bickers argues that the British presence in China was dominated by urban settlers whose primary allegiance lay not with any grand imperial design, but with their own communities and precarious livelihoods. This brought them into conflict not only with the Chinese population, but with the British imperial government. The book also analyzes the formation and maintenance of settler identities, and then investigates how the British state and its allies brought an end to the reign of freelance, settler imperialism on the China coast. At the same time, other British sectors, missionary and business, renegotiated their own relationship with their Chinese markets and the Chinese state and distanced themselves from the settler British.

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