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Racing the Street traces the history of how race was used as a technology for gathering, assembling, and networking the early cosmopolitan city. Drawing on an archive that ranges from engineering blueprints and parliamentary committee reports to sensationalistic pamphlets and periodical press accounts, Robert J. Topinka conducts an original genealogy of the nineteenth-century London street, demonstrating how race as a technology gathers, sorts, and assembles the teeming particularities of the street into a manageable network. This interdisciplinary study offers a novel approach to the intersections of race, rhetoric, media, technology, and urban government.
The first study to demonstrate how English literature continued to engage with crusading from medieval romances right through to Shakespeare.
These essays reexamine European forts in West Africa as hubs where different peoples interacted, negotiated and transformed each other socially, politically, culturally, and economically. This collection brings together scholars of history, archaeology, cultural studies, and others to present a nuanced image of fortifications, showing that over time the functions and impacts of the buildings changed as the motives, missions, allegiances, and power dynamics in the region also changed. Focusing on the fortifications of Ghana, the authors discuss how these structures may be interpreted as connecting Ghanaian and West African histories to a multitude of global histories. They also enable greater understanding of the fortifications’ contemporary use as heritage sites, where the Afro-European experience is narrated through guided tours and museums.
This study traces key developments in theatre’s engagement with mental health since the 1970s. It introduces and applies the concept of the ‘mental health play’ as accurate and timely in addressing the way mental distress and mental illness have been brought to the stage. The study argues that the theatre is a central calibrator for reflecting developments and tensions in, as well as attitudes towards, mental health care, and thus opens up a domain that still has stereotypes and myths attached to it. Theatre’s representations of mental distress inform and shape cultural production and vice versa. Mental health plays are central in encouraging and fostering conversations about mental health, and they thus intervene in ongoing debates. Due to its interdisciplinary approach, this study contributes to and extends existing research in multiple fields, including theatre and science, performance studies, and the medical humanities.
The all-new essays in this book respond to the question, How do spaces in science fiction, both built and unbuilt, help shape the relationships among humans, other animals and their shared environments? Spaces, as well as a sense of place or belonging, play major roles in many science fiction works. This book focuses especially on depictions of the future that include, but move beyond, dystopias and offer us ways to imagine reinventing ourselves and our perspectives; especially our links to and views of new environments. There are ecocritical texts that deal with space/place and science fiction criticism that deals with dystopias but there is no other collection that focuses on the intersection of the two.
Illustrates the ways that the “war on crime” became conjoined—aesthetically, politically, and rhetorically—with the emergence of gangsta rap as a lucrative and deeply controversial subgenre of hip-hop In The Mark of Criminality: Rhetoric, Race, and Gangsta Rap in the War-on-Crime Era, Bryan J. McCann argues that gangsta rap should be viewed as more than a damaging reinforcement of an era’s worst racial stereotypes. Rather, he positions the works of key gangsta rap artists, as well as the controversies their work produced, squarely within the law-and-order politics and popular culture of the 1980s and 1990s to reveal a profoundly complex period in American history when the meanings ...
This book examines the creative impact of licensing on the entertainment industry, how licensing practitioners’ occupational disposition is formed, and the role licensing professionals play in managing the circulation of intellectual property. Offering a study of the spatial logics and fantasies employed by the licensing field via its annual trade show, the Licensing Expo, this volume investigates how space and place are instrumental in both fortifying and exposing the political-economic, infrastructural, as well as ideological structures that constrain and enable participation in the licensing field. Further supplemented by participant observation and interviews with 23 industry professio...
This book centres on a philosophical analysis of creative acts in the Burning Man Festival and their roles in wider social change. With particular focus on the Ten Principles of Burning Man, Linda Noveroske posits a re-interpretation of common notions of “self” and “other” as they apply to identity, difference, and the ways that these personal impulses ripple outward from changing individuals into changing societies. Such radical re-imagination of ideology can be most powerful when it occurs in spaces of otherness, of heterotopia. This study casts Burning Man as a heterotopia to not only destabilizes what we think we know about visual art, performance, and creative encounters, but also bring these acts into an attitude of immediacy that facilitates previously unimagined behaviour and opens out artistic drive into the unknown. This book would be of value for scholars and practitioners in Performance Studies, Theatre and Dance, Art History, Psychology, Phenomenology, Architecture and Urban Studies.
Vulnerability is at the core of the political drama of our time. Countering conventional approaches, this book presents human vulnerability as a source of political community and a potential for political agency in precarity. Analyzing Christian celebrations of Christmas and Easter in contexts of struggle, it shows how religious resources inspire precarious politics. Combining critical political theory, liberation theology, and lived religion, Sturla J. Stålsett sees in such celebrations a ‘political sacralization’ of vulnerability and a ‘dispossession of divinity.’
LOLCats. Grumpy cat. Dog rating Twitter. Pet Instagram accounts. It's generally understood the internet is for pictures of cute cats (and dogs, and otters, and pandas), but how did this come to be, and how are images of pets and animals unique online social practices? In this important and engaging book, The Internet is for Cats, Jessica Maddox provides a social framework for thinking about an outrageously popular cultural phenomenon: pets and animals online. She examines how these images help make digital spaces lighthearted and fun, as well as how these images function as relieving distractions from other aspects of life. However, we cannot speak of relief or distractions without also discussing what we need relief and distractions from. Combining insights from cultural studies and Internet studies, as well as interviews, textual work, and observation, Maddox offers an entirely new approach to pets and animals on the Internet, arguing the Internet may be for cats, but the cats are also for social practices.