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During the early days of the professional English theatre, dramatists including Dekker, Greene, Heywood, Jonson, Marlowe, Middleton, and Shakespeare wrote for playhouses that, though enclosed by surrounding walls, remained open to the ambient air and the sky above. The drama written for performance at these open-air venues drew attention to and reflected on its own relationship to the space of the air. At a time when theories of the imagination emphasized dramatic performance's reliance upon and implication in the air from and through which its staged fictions were presented and received, plays written for performance at open-air venues frequently draw attention to the nature and significanc...
Atmospheric Violence grapples with the afterlife of environmental disasters and armed conflict and examines how people attempt to flourish despite and alongside continuing violence. Departing from conventional approaches to the study of disaster and conflict that have dominated academic studies of Kashmir, Omer Aijazi’s ethnography of life in the borderlands instead explores possibilities for imagining life otherwise, in an environment where violence is everywhere, or atmospheric. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in the portion of Kashmir under Pakistan’s control and its surrounding mountainscapes, the book takes us to two remote mountainous valleys that have been shaped by recurring envir...
In The Aesthetics of Qiyun and Genius: Spirit Consonance in Chinese Landscape Painting and Some Kantian Echoes, Xiaoyan Hu provides an interpretation of the notion of qiyun, or spirit consonance, in Chinese painting, and considers why creating a painting—especially a landscape painting—replete with qiyun is regarded as an art of genius, where genius is an innate mental talent. Through a comparison of the role of this innate mental disposition in the aesthetics of qiyun and Kant’s account of artistic genius, the book addresses an important feature of the Chinese aesthetic tradition, one that evades the aesthetic universality assumed by a Kantian lens. Drawing on the views of influential...
Every cohort of voters may dream of being 'the people' under the sway of serial visions of sovereignty; or understand itself, more modestly, as co-author of a constitutional project in a cross-generational sequence rooted in the past and extending into the future. Sovereignty Across Generations offers a theory of democratic sovereignty and constituent power grounded in John Rawls's political liberalism. Neither exegetic nor abstractly analytic, this book assumes that 'political liberalism' is broader than Political Liberalism. In answering the question 'How is it possible for there to exist over time a just and stable society of free and equal citizens, who remain profoundly divided by reaso...
Interdisciplinary in approach, this book employs the key concepts of fragmentation and reconfiguration to consider the ways in which human experience and artistic practice can engage with and respond to the disintegration that characterises modern cities. Asking how we might unsettle and decrypt the homogeneous images of cities created by processes linked to capitalism and globalisation, it invites us to consider the possibility of reimagining and rethinking the urban spaces we inhabit. An exploration of the complex relationship between aesthetics, the arts and the city, Rethinking the City: Reconfiguration and Fragmentation will appeal to scholars across various disciplines, including philosophy, urban sociology and geography, anthropology, political theory and visual and media studies.
Works for Works, Book 1: Useless Beauty tackles "legacy" issues of intellectual property rights (IPR) in artistic production and academic scholarship and proposes a category or class of works that has no relation to IPR nor to proprietary regimes of copyright and academic privilege. Keeney's book is a structuralist argument for establishing new forms of artistic scholarship that operate in direct opposition to established norms in both the art world and neoliberal academia, and is also rigorously contextualized within past and present-day arguments for and against patrimonial and paternalistic, avant-garde and normative, forms of censure and conformity across cultural production. Works for W...
This book offers a deep exploration of architectural and urban heritage, using interdisciplinary and intercultural approaches to assess how historical, social, economic and political factors have impacted heritage development and its sustainability. It sheds light on the stakes of heritage conservation, management and maintenance in today’s globalised world. Through detailed studies of historic cities, the book explores both the tangible aspects of their built heritage (urban fabric, housing design, construction methods and materials for thermal comfort) and the intangible components of local communities (including identities, cultures, religions, values and ways of life) in diverse case studies in Egypt, France, India, Iran, Jordan, Morocco, Syria and Tunisia. By addressing not only urban and architectural heritage but also socio-cultural, environmental and political issues—including economic challenges and climatic concerns—this book is an essential resource for scholars and researchers across fields, including architecture, civil engineering, urban planning, sociology and philosophical anthropology.
Catholics and Political Violence in the Twentieth Century presents a historical reconstruction of the ways in which Catholics have justified the recourse to political violence during the twentieth century, a period marked by major wars, nationalisms, decolonization, ideological clashes, and episodes of genocide. Legitimation processes are particularly complex when this violence is not endorsed by the state, and perhaps used against it. Depending on perspective, the protagonists of this radical form of collective action may be seen as ‘terrorists’ or ‘freedom fighters’. Written by a leading historian of contemporary Catholicism, this book examines a series of case studies from differe...
Atmosphere, Cinema, Architecture: Thematic Reflections on Ambiance and Place explores cinema and architecture as ambient and affective settings or circumstances that can enable the emergence of atmosphere. This book is an interdisciplinary reading of cinematographic practice which develops useful implications for spatial composition in art and architectural design. The way a film is set up, directed, composed, framed, and technically constructed can provide parallels, analogies and metaphors for the spatial organisation of cities, landscapes and buildings. Likewise, the way a built setting is conceived and devised can inform approaches to framing and spatial organisation in cinematography. T...
The notion of everydayness is currently gaining momentum in scientific discourses, in both philosophical and applied aesthetics. This volume aims to shed light on some of the key issues that are involved in discussions about the aesthetics and the philosophy of everyday life, taking into account the field’s methodological background and intersections with cognate research areas, and providing examples of its contemporary application to specific case studies. The collection brings together twenty essays organised around four main thematic areas in the field of everyday aesthetics: (1) Environment, (2) The Body, (3) Art and Cultural Practices, and (4) Methodology. The covered topics include, but are not limited to, somaesthetics, aesthetic engagement, the performing arts, aesthetics of fashion and adornments, architecture, environmental and urban aesthetics. DOI: 10.13134/978-80-555-2778-9