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Vanessa Kisuule is a big Michael Jackson fan. This fixation once gave her great joy, but now it keeps her up at night. In her bracingly honest, energetic and lively book she explores the fall-out from that fandom and how, or if, we can hold people to account whilst loving them at the same time. Why do famous musicians mean so much to us? How does the pop culture machine both mirror and magnify the worst aspects of human nature? Why is it so hard to accept that the people we love, famous or not, are capable of doing terrible things? As debates rage on about abusive public figures, Kisuule asks not just if we should separate the art from the artist, but how this moral conundrum informs the way we shape our relationships, families and notions of social justice. Witty, poetic and with references to R. Kelly, Britney Spears and a host of other famous faces, Neverland is both an ardent love letter to the music we love and an unflinching look at the costs of hero worship.
Vanessa Kisuule's second release is a poetry collection with a difference. It is a recipe book for personhood that changes with the whim of the seasons and the political climate. It is a cathartic explosion, an unspooling of long-harboured resentment and a delving into ugly truths. It is a feverish fistful of musings, a comedy of errors, an instruction manual, a broken compass and an overheard conversation in the ladies' loo. It is at once a celebration of things to come and a mourning of things lost. It is a redefinition of what it is to be magical and otherworldly.
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The poems in this book pay tribute to the women who've changed our lives, globally or personally. The fighters, survivors, rebels, queens, bosses, mentors, mothers, lovers and friends. Poetry by Gale Acuff, Polly Atkin, Erdem Avsar, Honey Baxter, Chloe Bettles, K. Blair, Laurie Bolger, Helen Bowie, Helen Bowell, Troy Cabida, Jemima Foxtrot, Jasmine Gray, Fee Griffin, Marguerite Harrold, Julie Irigaray, Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa, Cecilia Knapp, Jill Michelle, Jenny Mitchell, Charlotte Newbury, Madeleine Pulman-Jones, Ellora Sutton, Ojo Taiye, Claudine Toutoungi and Christian Yeo.
Jam is for Girls is Shagufta K Iqbal's fiercely honest debut collection. Her work lays witness to the immigrant experience and gives voice to the women who made journeys into unknown lands through the eyes of their daughters. This is not a collection that struggles between two conflicting cultures, but is an unashamed and unapologetic confirmation of the third generation identity carving itself a space in an increasingly Islamaphobic world. She deftly balances passion and tenderness in her poems, exploring the personal and the political through themes that address gender inequality, racism and the injustice that is present in our world. Leaving audiences with thought provoking poems that are rich and vivid in imagery.
This collection asks questions about society. How have the ill gotten gains of colonialism shaped our society today? What does it mean to appreciate and enjoy spaces that were never meant for you?
Why is it easy to hate and difficult to love? When societies fracture into warring tribes, we demonise those who oppose us. We tear down our statues, forgetting that what begins with the destruction of statues, often leads to the killing of people. Blending history, philosophy and psychology, A History of Love and Hate in 21 Statues is a compelling exploration of identity and power. This remarkable book spans every continent, religion and era, through the creation and destruction of 21 statues from Hatshepsut and the Buddhas of Bamiyan to Mendelssohn, Edward Colston and Frederick Douglass.
Collective Movements and Emerging Political Spaces addresses the politics of new forms of collective movements, ranging from anti‐austerity protests to migrant struggles and anticolonial demonstrations. Drawing on examples from various countries, as well as struggles taking place across borders, this book traces the emergence of new practices of being political, described as ‘collective movements’. These represent something looser than a common identity – long held as necessary for a political struggle to cohere. They also suggest a different understanding of emancipation to the promise of transformation in time. By addressing various examples of ‘collective movements’, the chapt...
Fallen Monuments and Contested Memorials examines how the modification, destruction, or absence of monuments and memorials can be viewed as performative acts that challenge prescribed, embodied narratives in the public realm. Bringing together international, multidisciplinary approaches, the chapters in this volume interrogate the ways in which memorial constructions disclose implicitly and explicitly the proxy battle for public memory and identity, particularly since 2015. Acknowledging the ways in which the past — which is given agency through monuments and memorials — intrudes into daily life, this volume offers perspectives from researchers that answer questions about the roles of mo...
Despite what politicians, philosophers and the press have long told us, every peaceful crowd is not a violent mob in waiting. Dan Hancox argues it is time to rethink long-held assumptions about crowd behaviour and psychology, as well as the part crowds play in our lives. The story of the modern world is the story of multitudes in action. Crowds are the ultimate force for change: the bringer of conviviality, euphoria, mass culture and democracy. Behind the establishment's long war against crowds is the work of eccentric proto-fascist Gustave Le Bon. Having witnessed the revolutionary Paris Commune, he declared the crowd barbaric, the enemy of all that was civilized. In the twentieth century, ...