Suryastra
Founded in 2006, Suryastra is an integral media company, representing classic, mythical, enlightening works to be expressed globally across media.
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Humanities & Social SciencesNovember 2025Humanitarian mobilisation in Central and Eastern Europe
Local, national, and international perspectives
by Doina Anca Cretu, Michal Frankl
By focusing on aid Central and Eastern Europe, the volume adds to the existent scholarly explorations of modern humanitarianism, its actors and practices. In the twentieth century, aid workers assisted victims of war and earthquakes, delivered food, supported health care, provided childcare, or sheltered refugees. The contributors not only reconstruct these diverse histories and their protagonists, but also bring international, national, and local actors together: from grassroots activists to private associations to state-driven "socialist humanitarians" to large Western aid organizations. In doing so, they challenge the often unidirectional, from West-to-East, and asymmetrical perspective on donor-recipient relationships in humanitarian processes.
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Business, Economics & LawMarch 2026Humanitarianism in Civil War
The Biafra crisis, 1967-1970
by Marie-Luce Desgrandchamps
May 1967, in Nigeria, the Republic of Biafra declared its independence. Soon, civil war and famine ravaged the region and gradually entered the European and American media. Photographs of the conflict arouse considerable emotion in the West. The secessionist enclave and the areas taken over by the Nigerian army then became the scene of major relief operations, developed and financed by multiple organizations and governments. Part of a historiography of humanitarianism in full renewal, this book tells the story of the war, its metamorphosis into an international crisis and the responses that were provided. Based on a large body of sources from French, British, Swiss, Nigerian and American archives, it offers an insight into the world of humanitarian work at the end of the 1960s. It shows the reconfigurations taking place there. in the postcolonial era by proposing complementary scales of observation - international, national and local. The work also revisits some of the controversies which developed around the conflict regarding the instrumentalization of aid, its links with politics, the reception of relief operations on the ground or even the birth of borderlessness and testimony. It thus returns to the place occupied by the Biafran crisis in the history of humanitarian aid.
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Humanities & Social SciencesJanuary 2022Reconstructing lives
Victims of war in the Middle East and Médecins Sans Frontières
by Vanja Kovacic, Bertrand Taithe
This book attempts to establish a more holistic approach to the rehabilitation of war-injured civilians, one that adjusts to the patients' long-term needs. Kovacic not only offers an insight into the daily realities of patients during and after rehabilitation, but seeks to develop a new way to perceive, respect and involve them in health care. Based on comprehensive interviews with patients and MSF staff, as well as extended field observations, Reconstructing lives follows Syrian and Iraqi war-injured civilians in their journey to recovery. From their improvised medical treatment in their home countries, to the MSF-run hospital in Amman Jordan, to their return home, Kovacic explores how individuals attempt to pick up the pieces of their previous lives, add new elements from their treatment and travel experiences, and finally establish a new reconstructed reality. The book explores how the interaction between MSF staff and their patients contributes to the immense task of healing that awaits victims of war. The reader visits the intimate medical and domestic spaces that usually remain closed to the outside observer, spaces rich with human contact, perceptions, emotions, conflicts and reconciliations.
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Humanities & Social SciencesSeptember 2025Humanitarian handicraft
History, materiality and trade, c. 1840–1980
by Rebecca Gill, Claire Barber, Helen Dampier, Bertrand Taithe
This book uncovers the overlooked history of artisanal textiles in projects aimed at social uplift and moral reform. The contributors ask what the implications of this form of gendered craft production are for our understanding of the humanitarian imagination, relations of humanitarian production and the generation of meaning and social and artistic value. It also opens a dialogue with contemporary socially-engaged textile artists to engender critical reflection on the socially-situated meaning of textile craft in past and present humanitarian contexts.
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Biography & True StoriesNovember 2024Walking in the dark
James Baldwin, my father and I
by Douglas Field
A moving exploration of the life and work of the celebrated American writer, blending biography and memoir with literary criticism. Since James Baldwin's death in 1987, his writing - including The Fire Next Time, one of the manifestoes of the Civil Rights Movement, and Giovanni's Room, a pioneering work of gay fiction - has only grown in relevance. Douglas Field was introduced to Baldwin's essays and novels by his father, who witnessed the writer's debate with William F. Buckley at Cambridge University in 1965. In Walking in the dark, he embarks on a journey to unravel his life-long fascination and to understand why Baldwin continues to enthral us decades after his death. Tracing Baldwin's footsteps in France, the US and Switzerland, and digging into archives, Field paints an intimate portrait of the writer's life and influence. At the same time, he offers a poignant account of coming to terms with his father's Alzheimer's disease. Interweaving Baldwin's writings on family, illness, memory and place, Walking in the dark is an eloquent testament to the enduring power of great literature to illuminate our paths.
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Humanities & Social SciencesOctober 2022France, humanitarian intervention and the responsibility to protect
by Eglantine Staunton
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Humanities & Social SciencesDecember 2022Class, work and whiteness
Race and settler colonialism in Southern Rhodesia, 1919–79
by Nicola Ginsburgh
This book offers the first comprehensive history of white workers from the end of the First World War to Zimbabwean independence in 1980. It reveals how white worker identity was constituted, examines the white labouring class as an ethnically and nationally heterogeneous formation comprised of both men and women, and emphasises the active participation of white workers in the ongoing and contested production of race. White wage labourers' experiences, both as exploited workers and as part of the privileged white minority, offer insight into how race and class co-produced one another and how boundaries fundamental to settler colonialism were regulated and policed. Based on original research conducted in Zimbabwe, South Africa and the UK, this book offers a unique theoretical synthesis of work on gender, whiteness studies, labour histories, settler colonialism, Marxism, emotions and the New African Economic History.
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Business, Economics & LawJune 2025Southern interregnum
Remaking hegemony in Brazil, India, China, and South Africa
by Alf Gunvald Nilsen, Karl von Holdt, Ruy Braga, Ching Kwan Lee, Fabio Luis Barbosa dos Santos
How do governing elites in the global South attempt to remake hegemony in a conjuncture of durable crisis? This is the question at the core of Southern interregnum, a comparative conjunctural analysis of hegemonic projects in Brazil, India, China, and South Africa. Working with a Gramscian notion of crisis, centred on the interregnum as an enduring period of instability and uncertainty, in which hegemonic authority erodes and competing projects for crisis resolution emerge, the book proposes a novel critical reading of the convulsions that are currently reshaping the political economy of the global South and the world-system. Mapping the variegated trajectories of elite projects to reconcile accumulation and legitimation - and probing the limits of these projects - the book breaks new ground in the study of the contemporary global South.
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The ArtsSeptember 2020Science in performance
Theatre and the politics of engagement
by Simon Parry
This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. This book is about science in theatre and performance. It explores how theatre and performance engage with emerging scientific themes from artificial intelligence to genetics and climate change. The book covers a wide range of performance forms from Broadway musicals to educational theatre, from Somali drama to grime videos. It features work by pioneering companies including Gob Squad, Headlong Theatre and Theatre of Debate as well as offering fresh analysis of global blockbusters such as Wicked and Urinetown. The book offers detailed description and analysis of theatre and performance practices as well as broader commentary on the politics of theatre as public engagement with science. Science in performance is essential reading for researchers, students and practitioners working between science and the arts within fields such as theatre and performance studies, science communication, interdisciplinary arts and health humanities.
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Humanities & Social SciencesJune 2021Acts of supremacy
by J. Bratton, Richard Cave, Brendan Gregory, Michael Pickering
Imperialist discourse interacted with regional and class discourses. Imperialism's incorporation of Welsh, Scots and Irish identities, was both necessary to its own success and one of its most powerful functions in terms of the control of British society. Most cultures have a place for the concept of heroism, and for the heroic figure in narrative fiction; stage heroes are part of the drama's definition of self, the exploration and understanding of personal identity. Theatrical and quasi-theatrical presentations, whether in music hall, clubroom, Shakespeare Memorial Theatre or the streets and ceremonial spaces of the capital, contributed to that much-discussed national mood. This book examines the theatre as the locus for nineteenth century discourses of power and the use of stereotype in productions of the Shakespearean history canon. It discusses the development of the working class and naval hero myth of Jack Tar, the portrayal of Ireland and the Irish, and the portrayal of British India on the spectacular exhibition stage. The racial implications of the ubiquitous black-face minstrelsy are focused upon. The ideology cluster which made up the imperial mindset had the capacity to re-arrange and re-interpret history and to influence the portrayal of the tragic or comic potential of personal dilemmas. Though the British may have prided themselves on having preceded America in the abolition of slavery and thus outpacing Brother Jonathan in humanitarian philanthropy, abnegation of hierarchisation and the acceptance of equality of status between black and white ethnic groups was not part of that achievement.
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The ArtsJuly 2025An idea for a theatre ecology
Methods, theories, histories and practices
by Carl Lavery
An Idea for a Theatre Ecology is the first book in the discipline of Theatre and Performance Studies to provide a rigorous and coherent theory of the ecology that is immanent to the theatrical medium. Over six clearly written chapters, the book provides a genealogy, outlines a method, provides a lexicon and demonstrates an alternative practice of ecoperformance analysis grounded in the figure of the archipelago. Focusing on Antonin Artaud's theatre of cruelty, the book argues that theatre has no need to provide ecological messages nor to transform itself into a platform for the narration of ecological stories. Instead, more is to be gained, environmentally and politically, by concentrating on the power of images, gestures and voices to create corporeal affects and sensations that implicate the spectators in a terrestrial event.
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The ArtsMarch 2026Acting and performance in Hitchcock
by Adrian Garvey, Victoria Lowe
Hitchcock's professed disdain for actors is belied by the extraordinary range and depth of performances featured in his films. It might even be argued that many stars gave their richest and most complex performances in his work. Hitchcock's films are also imbued with the theme of performance, as when his fugitive men and errant women assume fragile new identities and move between roles. Actors and other performers also often feature as characters. However, the exhaustive academic literature on Hitchcock has to date produced surprisingly little work about acting and performance in his films. The collection includes contributions from a range of leading scholars on Hitchcock, performance, stardom, and British Cinema, including Charles Barr, David Greven, Mark Glancy, Lucy Bolton, Lawrence Napper and Michael Williams, and an interview with leading composers/accompanists Neil Brand and Stephen Horne on scoring performance in Silent Hitchcock.
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The ArtsJune 2025
Death in modern theatre
Stages of mortality
by Adrian Curtin
Death in modern theatre offers a unique account of modern Western theatre, focusing on the ways in which dramatists and theatre-makers have explored historically informed ideas about death and dying in their work. It investigates the opportunities theatre affords to reflect on the end of life in a compelling and socially meaningful fashion. In a series of interrelated, mostly chronological, micronarratives beginning in the late nineteenth century and ending in the early twenty-first century, this book considers how and why death and dying are represented at certain historical moments using dramaturgy and aesthetics that challenge audiences' conceptions, sensibilities, and sense-making faculties. It includes a mix of well-known and lesser-known plays from an international range of dramatists and theatre-makers, and offers original interpretations through close reading and performance analysis.
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The ArtsMay 2026Ecology and feminism in performance
Composting histories 1962–2020
by Cara Berger
This book provides a vital new history of feminist performance through an ecological lens. It argues that from the 1960s to the present, artists have used performance to challenge the linked oppression of women and nature. Proposing 'composting' as a new method for writing feminist history, the study moves beyond linear narratives to trace regenerative connections between generations of practitioners. It provides sustained analysis of genres from land art to postdramatic theatre, re-evaluating the work of canonical figures while examining how contemporary artists continue to address these urgent themes. By placing ecofeminism in dialogue with feminist new materialism, queer ecology, and transecological thought, this study demonstrates how performance has been a crucial site for imagining more just and sustainable futures in an age of environmental crisis.
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Humanities & Social SciencesSeptember 2020Class, work and whiteness
by Nicola Ginsburgh, Alan Lester
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Humanities & Social SciencesJune 2025
Humanitarianism and the Greater War, 1914–24
by Elisabeth Piller, Neville Wylie
