Browse Books
Scream for Me, Africa!
Scream for Me Africa! examines the hard rock and metal scenes in five African countries: Botswana Togo South Africa Kenya and Ghana. Banchs spent significant time in each country interviewing musicians producers and fans to create vivid pictures of each of these rarely discussed scenes. These scenes are 'a disruption of the norm a disruption of what we have come to expect from Africa and rock and metal music'. He has chosen to shed light on these particular scenes now because of their difference and because they are reflections of their countries.
This exciting new book considers how heavy metal's subculture is viewed in Africa and how musicians in the continent have stepped forward to make this genre their own. It looks at the continent's blossoming scenes through various themes including hybridity othering and how scenes have collided with their difficult political systems.
Scream For Me Africa! Is the first book of its kind and an engaging look at the various metal scenes across the African continent and how they are constructing an identity as metal fans in their modern nation states under the shadow of post-colonialism. Written in a clear approachable manner it is accessible to academic and non-academic readers.
Edward Banchs is a freelance writer and independent scholar – and a metal fan – based in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania USA whose writing has appeared in The Guardian Afropop Metal Hammer Metal Music Studies and The Pittsburgh City Paper. He is also author of Heavy Metal Africa (2016).
This new book fills a gap in the market for an academic text on metal in Africa expanding published scholarship on metal in the global south. It book has potential use as a resource on courses in several disciplines including sociology cultural studies musicology ethnomusicology sociology and Africa studies. It will also be of interest to the more general readers with an interest in the musical genre.
Will appeal to anyone who is interested in metal African culture anthropology and sociology and history. Particularly musicologists and ethnomusicologists and those with an interest in metal in the global south.
Design and the Digital Humanities
This is an essential practical guide for academics researchers and professionals involved in the digital humanities as well as designers working with them. It prepares readers from both fields for working together outlining disciplinary perspectives and lessons learned from more than twenty years of experience with over two dozen practical exercises.
The central premise of the book is a timely one – that the twin disciplines of visual communication design and digital humanities (DH) are natural allies with much to be gained for researchers students and practitioners from both areas who are able to form alliances with those from the other side. The disciplines share a common fundamental belief in the extraordinary value of interdisciplinarity which in this case means that the training experience and inclinations from both fields naturally tend to coincide. The fields also share an interest in research that focuses on humanities questions and approaches where the goal is to improve understanding through repeated observation and discussion. Both disciplines tend to be generative in nature with the ultimate end in many cases of designing and creating the next generation of systems and tools whether those be intended for dealing with information or communication.
The interdisciplinary nature of this book is both a strength and a challenge. For those academics and practitioners who have worked with the other discipline this will be a much-welcomed handbook of terminology methods and activities. It will also be of interest to those who have read about seen presented and used the outcomes of successful design and DH collaborations and who might be interested in forming similar partnerships.
However for all they have in common design and digital humanities also have significant differences. This book discusses these issues in the context of a variety of research projects as well as classroom activities that have been tried and tested. This book will provide both design and the digital humanities with a better mutual understanding with the practical intention of working effectively together in ways that are productive and satisfying for everyone involved.
Design education has a long history a presence in many post-secondary institutions and a robust market for educational and practice-based literature. The Digital Humanities community in contrast is much younger but rising rapidly both academically and within industry. Both design and DH are collaborative disciplines with much in common in terms of vision but with confusing overlap in terminology and ways-to-practice.
The book describes and demonstrates foundational concepts from both fields with numerous examples as well as projects activities and further readings at the end of each chapter. It provides complete coverage of core design and DH principles complete with illustrated case studies from cutting-edge interdisciplinary research projects. Design and the Digital Humanities offers a unique approach to mastering the fundamental processes concepts and techniques critical to both disciplines.
It will be of interest to those who have been following previous work by bestselling authors in the fields of visual communication design and the digital humanities such as Ellen Lupton Steven Heller Julianne Nyhan Claire Warwick and Melissa Terras.
This guide is suitable for use as an undergraduate or masters-level text or as an in-the-field reference guide. Throughout the book terms or concepts that may not be familiar to all readers are carefully spelled out with examples so that the text is as accessible as possible to non-technical readers from a range of disciplines.
Fashion, Women and Power
This book addresses the relationships between fashion women and power. One of the constants within the book is to question the enduring relationship between women and dress and how these inform and articulate the ways in which women remain represented as either suitable or not for public office and their behaviour is informed through dress when they are in power. The book critiques the interplays between politics power class race and expectation in relation to the everyday practice of getting dress and the more performative and symbolic function of dress as embodiment.
As never before women are in positions of political power and find themselves facing the maelstroms of mass media regarding their fashion their deportment and their right to govern. The contributors offer a wide set of perspectives on women and their roles and their fashions when taking up powerful positions in Australia New Zealand United Kingdom and the United States.
From the United Kingdom the historical issues surrounding the movement towards ‘rational dress’ for women seeking their rights to vote and exercise are interrogated. The volume also explores viewpoints from East Asia such as the constricting role for ‘common’ women upon entering the Imperial family in Japan. From the United States come the troublesome media stories engulfing two significant American Democratic First Ladies Hillary Rodham Clinton and Michelle Obama.
From New Zealand the media reports on Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern upon her motherhood while serving in the office and on her clothing during the 2019 Christchurch massacre comprise a much-needed contribution to the literature on women politics and dress.
Further the role of dress in politics broadly as a form of resistance will be examined in Australia from recent skirmishes over ‘appropriate dress’ with ex-prime minister Julia Gillard and other Australian female politicians. The role of women and what their fashion selections mean continues via considerable debate during worldwide events. Finally the theme of resistance and social media continues with an examination of protest dressing in the recent street battles in Hong Kong to how young Asian women have been influenced by the social media campaigns to encourage wearing the veil in Indonesia to Asian women negotiating femininity in political dress.
Primary readership will be among researchers scholars educators and students in the fields of fashion dress studies women and gender studies and media and history. It will be of particular value as at graduate level and as a supplementary resource. There may be some general appeal to those with an interest in the women or cultures at the centre of the discussions.
T-Squared
An interdisciplinary collection with its origins in the 2018 National Conference on the Beginning Design Student hosted by the College of Design Architecture Art and Planning at the University of Cincinnati the overarching focus of which was on 'TIME'. The book includes contributions from some scholars who were not involved in the conference but whose voices are important to the conversation.
T-Squared: Theories and Tactics in Architecture and Design has three primary aims. First it reveals and illuminates the extensive and explicit relationship between the research that shapes art architecture and design practices and the studio prompts and assignments that are developed by faculty for students engaging the creative disciplines. Second it demonstrates that pedagogical inquiry and invention can be a (radical) research endeavour that can also become an evolutionary agent for faculty students institutions and communities. Third it makes available to a larger audience a set of innovative ideas and exercises that have until now been known to limited numbers of students and faculty hidden behind the walls of studio courses and institutions.
This book will appeal to anyone interested in design thinking and design process as well as to architects architectural educators and architecture students who may particularly identify in it stirrings of a new world order and a call to arms.
Each chapter of T-Squared is separated into two parts: THEORY (T1) and TACTICS (T2). In T1 the authors offer mini-manifestos about topics that relate to their professional interests and efforts. In T2 the authors delineate exercises that reflect the ideascapes and methodologies presented in T1. The exercises in T2 are adapted for the reader from assignments given to students enrolled in design studios at a variety of universities. In their current incarnation they offer anyone with tenacity imagination and an adventurous attitude towards architecture and design access to distinct sets of provocative questions procedures and modes. The T2 offerings require the reader’s engagement and imagination and the rolling up of sleeves – while there may be steps to follow many of the exercises read like Fluxus scores and require investment rather than obedience. A suspension of disbelief is required – but all seriously creative folk (like you reader) understand that already.
Primary readership will be among design educators and students looking for a window through which to view the ways design is being introduced taught and positioned across disciplines and institutions and to architects architectural educators and architecture students.
Dance Studies in China
Dance Studies in China is a collection of articles selected from issues of the Journal of Beijing Dance Academy translated for an English-speaking audience. Beijing Dance Academy is a full-time institution of higher learning with commitment to developing excellent professional dancers choreographers and dance researchers. This collection includes an interview with Shen Wei the Chinese-American choreographer painter and director living in New York City USA.
Founded in 1954 the former Beijing Dance School was the first professional dance school ever established since the founding of People’s Republic of China. Beijing Dance Academy (BDA) officially established in 1978 it provides BA and MA degrees and has become the only institution of higher learning for professional dance education in China as well as the largest prestigious dance school with comprehensive concentrations in the world.
In recent years BDA has committed to develop its research profile specialising in dance the Journal of Beijing Dance Academy is one of such outcomes. The Academy is also actively engaging with international collaboration.
The Intellect China Library is a series of new English translations of the latest scholarship in Chinese that have not previously been available. Subjects covered include visual arts performing arts popular culture media and the broader creative industries. The series aims to foster intellectual debate and to promote closer cross-cultural knowledge exchange by introducing unique Chinese scholarship and ideas to our readers.
Experimental Dining
Experimental Dining examines the work of four of the world’s leading creative restaurants: Noma elBulli The Fat Duck and Alinea.
Using ideas from performance studies cultural studies philosophy and economics the book explores the creation of the dining experience as a form of multisensory performance.
It examines the construction of the world of the restaurants and their creative methods the experience of dining and the broader ideological frames within which the work takes place. Experimental Dining brings together ideas around food philosophy performance and cultural politics to offer an interdisciplinary understanding of the practice and experience of creative restaurants.
The author contends that the work of the experimental restaurant while operating explicitly within an economy of experiences is not absolutely determined by that political or economic context. Its practice has the potential to appeal to more than idle curiosity for novelty. It can be unsettling and revealing provocative and evocative personal and political experimental and considered thoughtful and sensual. Or in other words that the food event can be art.
Primary readership will be academics researchers and scholars in the fields of food studies performance studies and those with interests in the philosophy of everyday life cognitive science and sensory studies. It will be a useful resource as supplementary reading on courses on Food and Performance. It may also have interest for chefs gastronomes restaurateurs and artists
Living Metal
This is the first study of its kind focusing exclusively on scenes throughout the world; it makes an important contribution to metal studies.
Metal Scenes around the World is a collection of thirteen chapters that examine metal scenes from smaller communities like Dayton Ohio in the USA to entire countries such as Estonia. The goal of the book is to expand the research on metal scenes.
This is the only book produced on metal scenes to date and it will lead the way to more research in this new area of metal studies. The strongest element of the book is its international focus with chapters from such diverse settings as post-apartheid South Africa Graz Nantes Brazil and Turkey. The chapters are detailed richly embedded in local histories and contexts and provide important analyses of their respective scenes.
Foreword from Henkka Seppälä former bassist with the Finnish metal band Children Of Bodom.
Primary readership will be composed of fans and scholars of metal music and those in the fields of anthropology musicology and history. The diversity of the chapters connects metal to other disciplines in the music field and the book is likely to have appeal more widely to anyone who likes music.
Worlds Unbound
In this lavishly illustrated volume Laura Lee introduces the art of Tokyo-based digital art collective teamLab which has soared to global fame with its electrifying immersive and interactive installations. The first of its kind Worlds Unbound: The Art of teamLab provides a comprehensive overview of teamLab’s artistic vision and achievements from its beginnings to its twentieth anniversary in 2021 and illuminates the remarkable scope of teamLab’s groundbreaking art and its fundamental contribution to the pivotal field of new media art.
This original new book the first scholarly monograph on this popular group unpacks the popularity and success of the digital immersive environments created worldwide by the Tokyo-based collective teamLab from multiple perspectives and addresses the lack of critical appreciation of their work. The book includes an extensive interview with teamLab.
teamLab launched in January 2001 with five members and now comprises more than 600 individuals in a multidisciplinary collaboration of engineers computer graphics animators mathematicians graphic designers architects artists and computer programmers.
The digital art collective has attained international celebrity for its electrifying installations that transcend boundaries between gallery public space and popular entertainment and judging from press coverage ticket sales and prolific production it seems clear teamLab’s success is only on the rise. In 2018 the collective opened the MORI Building DIGITAL ART MUSEUM: teamLab Borderless a massive technological environment in Tokyo that recorded 2.3 million visitors in its first year of operation – the world’s largest annual number of visitors of any single-artist museum. The same year saw numerous other high-profile immersive exhibitions including teamLab: Massless in Helsinki Au-delà des limites in Paris and teamLab Planets TOKYO a second exhibition in Tokyo.
These were quickly followed by two new museums teamLab Borderless Shanghai in 2019 and in 2020 teamLab SuperNature in Macao. The vast sea of selfies that have emerged from these venues index the collective’s soaring global popularity.
At the same time teamLab’s works have found art market success and have been exhibited in major museums worldwide including the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC and Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and they are part of the permanent collection of The Art Gallery of New South Wales the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco and Amos Rex in Helsinki among numerous others. This canonization of teamLab’s art belies the fact that the group did not have a traditional gallery start and in fact teamLab has always engaged in software development and corporate work in addition to creating artworks. The collective thus boasts an enigmatic status spanning conventional categories and defying traditional art world pedigree. In so doing it has produced a tremendously rich body of work that speaks to several overlapping issues pertinent to contemporary art while advancing a unique artistic vision.
Primary readership will include artists art historians and visual studies scholars who are particularly interested in the most recent media art and Japanese contemporary art. It will be an essential resource for students and scholars working in Japanese art global contemporary art digital art augmented reality expanded cinema and installation art and related fields.
It will also be of more general interest to those who have visited or hope to visit teamLab environments worldwide.
Bombay Cinema's Islamicate Histories
Bombay Cinema's Islamicate Histories comprises fourteen essays on the history and influence of cultural Islam on Bombay cinema. These essays are written by major scholars of both South Asian cultural history and Indian cinema working across several continents. Following Marshal Hodgson the term ‘Islamicate’ is used to describe Muslim cultures in order to distinguish the cultural forms associated with Islam from the religion itself. Such a distinction is especially important to observe in South Asia where over a thousand-year history Muslim cultures have commingled with other local religious and cultural traditions to form a rich vein of syncretic aesthetic expression. This volume argues that the influence of Muslim cultures on Bombay cinema can only be grasped against the backdrop of this long history an argument that informs the shape of the whole.
The book is divided into two sections. The first ‘Islamicate Histories’ charts the historical roots of South Asian Muslim cultures and the precursors of Bombay cinema’s Islamicate idioms in the Urdu Parsi Theatre the Courtesan cultures of Lucknow the traditions of miniature painting poetry song and their performance and the various modes of story-telling that derive from Perso-Arabic traditions. The second section ‘Cinematic Forms’ discusses the way in which these Islamicate histories are partially constitutive of the traditions of representation performance and story-telling that give Bombay cinema its distinctive character traditions that have continued into Bollywood. It explores ‘Islamicate’ genres like the ‘Oriental’ film and the ‘Muslim Social’ as well as forms of poetry and performance like the ‘ghazal’ and ‘the qawwali’.
Bombay Cinema’s Islamicate Histories is published at a time of acute crisis in the perception and understanding of Islam where Islamophobia stereotypes Muslims as incipient fifth column and Hindu fundamentalism is ascendant. It demonstrates that Muslim and Hindu cultures in India are inextricably entwined and shows how the syncretic idioms of Islamicate cultural history inform the very identity of Bombay cinema even as that cinema has also instrumentalized Islamicate idioms to stereotype and even demonise the Muslim especially in contemporary Bollywood.
This book argues that many of the idioms of Bombay cinema that we love are derived from the historical influence of Muslim cultures as they interacted with other traditions in the Indian subcontinent. It traces the emergence of cultures of poetry dance song performance and story-telling out of the thousand-year history of Islam on Indian soil and describes the ways in which they underlie and inform the expressive forms of Bombay cinema. It is timely to be reminded of the contribution of Muslim cultures to the distinctive and widely recognized popular cinema of India at a historical moment when the cultural influence of Islam on India is being denied by forces which seek to turn the country away from cultural pluralism towards Hindu fundamentalism. Bombay Cinema’s Islamicate Histories features contributions by major scholars of both South Asian cultural history and Indian cinema working across several continents.
The audience for this book will be primarily graduate and advanced undergraduate students of film studies. The writing is accessible and lively and individual chapters will be suitable for classroom use.
It will be of value in disciplines outside film studies where the Islamicate tradition in general and its impact on film in particular is taught. It will find an audience in disciplines such as history cultural studies women's studies visual studies and South Asian area studies. It will also be of interest to anyone who wants to know how cinema negotiates the parameters of Muslim identity in response to historical and contemporary events in India.
Distillation of Sound
Distillation of Sound focuses on the original music of Jamaica and how through dub reggae Jamaican culture was expanded and shifted. It will further the discussion on dub music its importance to Jamaican culture and its influence on the rest of the world.
Dub music in Jamaica started in the early 1970s and by the end of the decade had influenced an entire population. The music began to use the rhythm track of a song as a song itself and spread quickly throughout the sound systems of the island. The importance of dub music and its influence on the music world frames the discussions in this new book. How dub travelled and distilled to three places in the world is covered in chapters focussing on the rise and spread of dub in New York City in England and in Japan.
Abbey discusses the separation between dub as a product and dub as an act of the engineer. Codifying these two elements and tracing them will allow for a more definitive approach to the culture and music of dub. To define it and its surrounding elements five of the first albums produced in the genre are discussed in three parameters that help to define and set up the culture of dub music.
The albums discussed are Java Java Java Java (Impact All Stars) Aquarius Dub (Herman Chin Loy) Blackboard Jungle Dub (Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry) The Message Dubwise (Prince Buster) King Tubbys Meets Rockers Uptown (Augustus Pablo).
From the Preface:
‘Jamaican music has always been about creating with what is at hand. Taking what is around you and making it into something great is the key to dub and Jamaican culture. This attitude is what this project is about. There is not enough written on the music that has inspired and influenced so many people around the world and this is an addition to the conversation. Dub music fixates on the engineer as a musician and in doing so allows for the creator to interact with echnology. Through this the mixing board and other electronic elements become musical instruments. Now these technologies are dominant in contemporary music and allow for people to easily create in their own homes. Without the engineers and musicians in the following work these changes and shifts in technology and music would not have occurred.
Dub is also a refiguring of already existing music. What this demonstrates is that music is ever evolving and can be shifted through technology. It also suggests that recorded music can always be modified and expanded upon. In our contemporary world this modification is seen every day online and in people’s daily lives. Dub created a way to view these changes through music. The influence of technology in the development of culture is the key to this work and to our development in society. How technology can be modified changed and evolved through the interaction of the engineer is the focus of this project.
This work will further the importance of dub music and culture in our society. The definition and distinction between version and dub is also an important element in the following work. Jamaican music needs to be discussed more for its influence and creative force in the entirety of the music world.
The author is a professional musician with the groups J. Navarro & the Traitors Detroit Riddim Crew and 1592 and a producer of dub reggae and ska and a professor of English and literature at Oakland Community College in Michigan USA.
Genuine popular and academic appeal. Will appeal to students and scholars of music and Jamaican culture – and to academic libraries. Has genuine popular appeal to those with an interest in Jamaican culture and music.
Storytellers of Art Histories
This anthology Storytellers of Art Histories gives voice to those who are reshaping art histories: not only art historians and curators but also archivists and artists.
There is a special focus on gender race (including Whiteness) class sexuality and transnationality – all of which are often marginalized in dominant art histories. Each of the contributors in this book has provided short often very personal contributions describing how they began to become passionate about their practice. A particular feature of the collection is that there are twice as many contributions by women than by men.
The contributors respond in a multitude of surprising ways appealing equally to people enmeshed in the field through their work and to those simply interested in the field. The stories you will read take various forms – a letter written to a friend a revisioned grant application the pastiche of image and text children’s fables interviews co-authored narrative memoir manifesto apology. A number of the essays perform through a combination of recollected early memory alongside scholarly research the roots of the theories they explore through publishing curating and archival work.
Many of the contributors embody overlapping cultural diasporas that suggest the porousness of borders challenging the field to understand itself as a product of regional art histories. Collecting this range of narratives born from different workplaces and disciplines speaks to our belief in the potential boundlessness of the art histories that shape the stories we consume.
Storytellers of Art Histories brings together the first-person narratives of an international group of art historians curators artists and archivists. This much-needed book book fills a significant gap in the literature showing how these practitioners’ works come together productively in the teaching and writing of art history. The anthology also illuminates the relationship between curatorial studies and art history.
Primary readership will include artists art historians archivists curators and educators. It will be a useful resource for educators and students connected with undergraduate courses in art history contemporary art history and curatorial and museum studies.
Remembering Paris in Text and Film
This new book explores aspects of Paris from the time of Baudelaire within the context of nostalgia and modernity. It seeks to see Paris through written texts and movies from the outside and as both concrete reality and a collection of myths associated with it.
This collection of essays contains original research on the intersections of several disciplinary approaches to Paris and modernity. It is designed to make these complex concepts speak to an academic audience but also to an undergraduate readership. It will therefore create intersections and problematize what are otherwise considered the remit of single disciplines.
The book springs from two interdisciplinary courses on Paris and modernity – Paris at Dawn which looks at modernity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and Paris at Midnight which looks at left-bank culture following the Second World War – coordinated by Associate Professor Alistair Rolls (French studies) and Professor Marguerite Johnson (classics and classical reception) at the University of Newcastle Australia.
While it is driven by original research notably by examining the intersections of any number of disciplinary lenses and positions on Paris and modernity it is also designed to make these complex concepts understandable for a wider readership including undergraduates. It will therefore create intersections and problematize what are otherwise considered the remit of single disciplines (with their monoliths and taxonomies); at the same time it will also provide clarity and importantly make logical links between for example the past and present myth and reality poetry and history and various schools and movements including psychology poetics poststructuralism and critical theory classical reception feminism and existentialism. All contributors are academics working in the School of Humanities and Social Science who have contributed to the development and delivery of these twinned courses.
Remembering Paris investigates Paris as an urban and poetic site of remembrance. For Charles Baudelaire the streets of Paris conjured visions of the past even as he contemplated the present. This book investigates this and other cases of double vision tracing back from Baudelaire into antiquity but also following Baudelaire forwards as his poetry is translated received and referenced in texts and films in the twentieth century and beyond.
Primary readership will be academics educators scholars and students – both undergraduate and postgraduate. The chapter structure and the relatively classic choice of authors and filmmakers is well suited to course use.
Many universities are now turning to interdisciplinary courses which combine historical cultural literary and artistic approaches to thematic studies. This book therefore will also be of interest to academics teaching courses on French language literature and culture; literary studies; film studies; cultural studies; women studies gender studies; LGBTQ+ studies; even human geography.
Design in the Age of Change
Change is inevitable. This is the only constant in our lives. Yet change is also something that we fear. We seek comfort in the familiar in routines and in conventions. We are afraid of things that we don't know or we don’t understand. We fear change because we don’t know how change will affect us. Change however is necessary for progress. Sometimes change happens naturally due to circumstances beyond our control and sometimes we initiate change because we can or because we must.
In 2020 we experienced the biggest change of our lifetimes. For a brief moment in history the world came to a halt. Then everything changed. Many things that we used to take for granted no longer applied. We experienced major disruptions to our daily lives. As if in some kind of perfect storm so many things happened all at once – global pandemic social inequalities climate change racial injustices riots and unrests gender struggles and rapid advances of new technologies. This book started to take shape in the midst of it all and in a way it is a time capsule of how we experienced the birth of what became known as the 'new normal'.
Designers are the kind of people who thrive in times of change. In fact it is their job to create change. The nature of their job is such that they have to take an existing situation and change it into a better or a more preferred situation. Some do this by relying on their imagination and personal experiences and some use evidence-based research to inform their work. Regardless of this many share the belief that they can somehow make the world a better place – on a micro or a macro level.
During this period of massive change Gjoko Muratovski invited ten highly influential design figures – including iconic design leaders such as Carole Bilson Karim Rashid Bruce Mau Steven Heller and Don Norman – to reflect on the state of things today. In return each one of them shares a highly personal account on why change is good. The book also features a foreword written by the president of the World Design Organisation (WDO) Srini Srinisavan and a conclusion by one of the greatest design philosophers of our time Ken Friedman.
By looking to the past and reflecting on the present these designers project very personal images of the future that they would like to see. The conversations are very broad and they cover highly diverse topics. From the effects of the pandemic to issues of race and gender notions of beauty technology and industry to global and local economies politics power privilege and the importance of community.
A 'must-read' for anyone interested in how designers and design can change the world.
Gjoko Muratovski is a university executive award-winning designer and innovation consultant working with leading organisations Fortune 500 companies and governments from around the world and a fellow of the Design Research Society.
PUNK! Las Américas Edition
What does a hemispheric Americas look like when done through the lens of punk music visuals and literature? That is the core premise of this book presented through a collage of analytical aesthetic and experiential takes on punk across the continent.
This book challenges the dominant vision of punk – particularly its white masculine protagonists and deep Anglocentrism – by analysing punk as a critical lens into the disputed territories of 'America' a term that hides the heterogeneous struggles global histories hopes and despairs of late twentieth and early twenty-first century experience. Compiling academic essays and punk paraphernalia (interviews zines poetry and visual segments) into a single volume the book seeks to explore punk life through its multiple registers through vivid musical dialogues excessive visual displays and underground literary expression.
The kaleidoscopic accounts include everything from sustained academic inquiry and photo portraits to anarchist manifestos and interview excerpts with notable punk figures. The result is a radically heterogenous mixture that seeks to reposition punk and las Américas as intrinsically bound up in each other’s history: for better and for worse. Out of critical pasts within an urgent present and toward many different possible futures.
This volume critically refashions punk to suggest it emerges from within the long-term historical experience of las Américas in all their plurality and is useful as a mode of critique towards the hegemonic dimensions of America in its imperial singularity. The book is rooted in a theory of 'radical heterogeneity' and thus represents a collage-like juxtaposition of punk perspectives from across the entire hemisphere and via divergent contributions: academic experiential and aesthetic.
Readership for this collection will include both academic and general readers.
Primary readership will be academic. It will appeal to researchers scholars educators and students in the following fields: American studies Latin American studies media and communication cultural studies sociology history music ethnomusicology anthropology art literature.
General readership will be among those interested in the following areas - anarchism music subculture literature independent publishing photography.
Interpreting and Experiencing Disney
Ever since the premiere for the first Mickey Mouse cartoon in 1928 Disney has played a central role in American popular culture which has progressively expanded to include a global market. The company positioned itself to be a central role in family entertainment and many of its offerings – from films to consumable products – have deeply embedded themselves into not only the imaginations of children and adults but also into the threads of one’s life experience. It is difficult to go through life without encountering one Disney product. Because of this fans of Disney build connections with their favourite characters and franchises some of which are fuelled further by Disney’s own marketing practices.
Similarly Disney responds to the cultural values of the era through its films and other media offerings. In this volume scholars from varying backgrounds take a close look at facets of the Disney canon as more than agents of entertainment or consumption and into underlying messages at the very heart of the Disney phenomenon: the cultural response that drives the corporation’s massive production and marketing machine. The relationship between Disney and its fans is one of loyalty and love shaping cultural behaviours and values through the brand and its products. Disney responds in kind with a synergistic approach that makes it possible to experience Disney in any format at any given time.
Primary readership will be academics researchers educators scholars and students working in the fields of media and cultural studies especially those interested in marketing and branding and in the Disney Company in general. The accessible writing style and the range of topics covered make it suitable for postgraduate students and academics working in these fields as well as third-year undergraduate students.
The book will also appeal to academics working in the related fields of tourism studies film and television studies and given the focus of some of the chapters in gender studies.
Although academic in focus the accessible writing style does mean that it may also have appeal to the non-academic reader and fans of Disney.
Creative Infrastructures
Creative Infrastructures is a new collection of connected essays that examines the relationships between art innovation entrepreneurship and money. Essig uses her extensive knowledge of the field of arts entrepreneurship and puts it to broader practical use and greater impact by offering a theory for arts entrepreneurship that places more emphasis on means over ends. Essig uses illustrative case studies to show how her theoretical framework explains a number of innovative efforts in culturally and racially diverse communities.
The Ouroboros the serpent eating its own tail is a visual metaphor deployed by Essig in the opening essay to shift commonly held perspectives on especially the relationship between art and money. Art is the head; money is the tail feeding and nourishing the head in a cycle that enables the organism to not only survive but also thrive.
Between the art and the money is the body: innovation and entrepreneurship. Innovation is understood to be a novel idea that is implemented and has impact on a domain. For that is what the artist does: create something new and unique that has impact. Entrepreneurship is conceived of as the discovery or creation of a mediating structure that can convert the artistic innovation into capital (financial and other types) that can be re-invested in the artist and the making of more art. This book endeavours to untie the knotty relationships between artists and entrepreneurship in order to answer the question 'How can artists make work and thrive in our late-capitalist society?'
Other essays in the collection consider a range of topics including how aesthetic and cultural value are transmitted from the artist to the audience; the complexity of the tension between what art fundamentally is and the reproduction of that work and the recent foregrounding of the idea that art can produce positive social change – through current and late-twentieth-century trends in 'social impact art' or 'art for change'.
As in sports business and other sectors the star artists the top 1 per cent have disproportionately influenced the public expectations for what 'a successful artist' means. It isn’t necessary to retell the stories of the one per cent of arts entrepreneurs; instead Essig looks instead at the quotidian artist at what they do and why not what they make. All too often artists who are attentive to the 'business' of their creative practice are accused of 'selling out'. But for many working artists that attention to business is what enables an artist to not just survive but to thrive. When artists follow their mission Essig contends that they don’t sell out they spiral up by keeping mission at the forefront.
The closing essay is a work of speculative fiction based in all that comes before both in the preceding essays and in Essig’s work as an artist arts advocate and scholar of cultural policy. Returning to the symbol of the Ouroboros it connects the head (art) to the tail (not money specifically but resources) and back again. It is a 'future imaginary' in which she profiles three fictional artists in the year 2050.
The field of arts entrepreneurship is growing – thanks in large part to the work of Linda Essig. The case studies in the book are US-based but the issues addressed are universal.
This book is ideal for use in training programmes for arts administrators and advocates; policy analysts and business schools that are looking to add in arts programmes. It will be of great interest and significance to people working in the cultural industries in the United Kingdom and Europe especially Germany where there has also been some recent research interest on similar topics.
It is also relevant to the many artists who participate in training and professional development programmes in their community as well as those who are just starting out.
Insights in Applied Theatre
Much more than an archive these are the vivid still pertinent voices and messages of the pioneers worldwide.
The nineteen articles chosen by the editors of Applied Theatre Research represent key themes and elements from the early days of applied theatre that are still – and indeed now more than ever – relevant. They are all high-quality articles some of which were highly influential in their own time. All of them still have plenty to say to today’s applied theatre both in their own terms and sometimes in terms of how their publication influenced the development at the time of this still-expanding field or refracted it in ways that give us new insights with hindsight.
They have been arranged in sections according to some of the key themes – and problematic issues – that were discovered thought out and sometimes stumbled across by the pioneer writers in the collection. Each section is preceded by a critical editorial commentary on those themes besides thorough introductions to all the articles and in some cases re-evaluations. The editors have added substantial additional new material to the collection and in doing so bring their own applied theatre experience to bear on these themes as they raise general questions that are wide-ranging contemporary and urgent: from the vital and contested issues of power partnerships and the giving of voice through theatre to applied theatre’s proactive response to COVID-19 to the need to identify take account of and address the needs of all stakeholders in any applied theatre project.
The articles are grouped in six sections covering areas such as diversity of geography community contexts forms of applied theatre and organizational factors that characterize applied theatre; the definition and nature of applied theatre; how the best intentioned projects could be compromised by any of the many opportunities for applied theatre to go wrong; opportunities for change it can offer and the incorporation of new media technologies and ethnographic performance two factors that have now become major preoccupations for our field particularly in the years since the articles were written. The final section recognizes that applied theatre has been around not for 30 years but for thousands and in countless cultures.
The editorial chapters have strong connections with the rest of the book but are written with the editors’ deep insights into the field and are sharp in their focus and context. The book offers useful insights into the start of applied theatre and its development as an area of practice and research. The chapter collection is relevant and includes influential names in the field who have contributed significantly to the development of applied theatre over time.
The primary market will be academics and advanced practitioners in applied theatre drama education and theatre studies – including the expanding fields of drama therapy theatre and health etc. It will also be useful for educators exploring creative pedagogy and drama in education strategies across the curriculum.
It will be valuable introductory background reading for advanced undergraduate and post-graduate students in drama theatre studies and theatre arts performance studies and community theatre.
The Music Diva Spectacle
This original new book has a unique focus on diva camp as popular music praxis. The author analyses case studies of diva concert tour shows in order to present a performance studies reading of camp the culture-sharing process of production and audience reception. Detailed case studies include contemporary stars Madonna Kylie Beyoncé Lady Gaga and a look at audience drag.
The book contains detailed descriptions of artists’ performances along with the analysis of exciting and popular contemporary performers. The emphasis on camp is particularly interesting as thinking about queerness has pushed camp into the background in recent years. This is an interesting and exciting revival of the question of camp in contemporary queer performance.
The book considers and investigates the relationship between camp theory as an academic subject and the figure of the diva as one that utilizes and expresses camp in various ways. It seeks to establish how camp is appropriated or owned by the diva and how this impacts on and is in turn appropriated and owned by the audience.
Primary readership will be among researchers and educators working in the fields of cultural studies performance studies theatre studies music studies LGBTQ+ studies critical race studies as well as undergraduate students interested in these topics. It will be a useful classroom resource and addition to recommended reading lists.
The Music Diva Spectacle may have interest for more general readers with an interest in the subjects of the case studies but the main focus is on the academic market.
Visual Futures
The overall subject of the book is visual culture. What sets it apart and gives it such an original emphasis is its multi-disciplinarity and the range of critical voices ranging through film studies architecture creative practice biology pedagogy and media theory which are brought to bear upon the question of visuality and its relationship to futurity.
In our everyday lives we navigate across a vast sea of visual imagery. Yet we rarely pause to question how or why we derive meaning from this sea. Nor do we typically contemplate the impact that it has on our motivations our assumptions about science and about other people and our actions as individuals and collectives. This book is a collection of interdisciplinary perspectives from science to film from graffiti and virtual environments to architecture and education that examines the ways in which we interact and engage with the visual elements of our environments.
Visual Futures provides an interdisciplinary examination of how we visualize and use visuals to make meaning within our environment. A diverse range of contributions and perspectives from biology film virtual reality urban graffiti architecture critical pedagogy and education challenge our current attitudes norms and practices of looking and seeing opening up questions about the future. The future is a concept with significant political stakes and the work of rethinking and reimagining possible worlds requires a host of practices which include the work of seeing of image-making and of representation – all of which is political work taken up by the book contributors.
Primary readership will be among scholars and students of visual culture media studies digital cultures fine art architecture education science communication and sociology. Clearly aimed at an academic readership it will also appeal to practising artists architects software developers and educators.
Equality in the City
This collection considers the city of the future and its relationship to its citizens. It responds to the foregrounding of digital technologies in the management of urban spaces and addresses some of the ways in which technologies are changing the places in which we live and the way we live in them.
A broad range of interdisciplinary contributors reflect on the global agenda of smart cities the ruptures in smart discourse and the spaces where we might envisage a more user-friendly and bottom-up version of the smart future. The authors adopt an equality studies lens to assess how we might conceive of a future smart city and what fissures need to be addressed to ensure the smart future is equitable. In the project of envisaging this they consider various approaches and arguments for equality in the imagined future city putting people at the forefront of our discussions rather than technologies.
In the smart discourse hard data technological solutions global and national policy and macro issues tend to dominate. Here the authors include ethnographic evidence rather than rely on the perspective of the smart technologies’ experts so that the arena for meaningful social development of the smart future can develop.
The international contributors respond purposefully to the smart imperative to the disruptive potential of smart technologies in our cities: issues of change design austerity ownership citizenship and equality. The collection examines the pull between equality and engagement in smart futures. To date the topic of smart cities has been approached from the perspective of digital media human geography and information communications technology. This collection however presents a different angle. It seeks to open new discussions about what a smart future could do to bridge divides to look at governmentality in the context of (in)equality in the city. The collection is an approachable discussion of the issues that surround smart digital futures and the imagined digital cities of the future. It is aspirational in that it seeks to imagine a truly egalitarian city of the future and to ponder how that might come about.
Primary readership will be academics and students in social science architecture urban planning government employees and those working or studying in social justice and equality studies