Cultural studies

A World You Do Not Know explores the wilful ignorance demonstrated by North America’s settlers in establishing their societies on lands already occupied by indigenous nations. Using the Innu of Labrador-Quebec as one powerful contemporary example, Colin Samson shows how the processes of displacement and assimilation today resemble those of the 19th century as the state and corporations scramble for Innu lands. While nation building, capitalism and industrialisation are shown to have undermined indigenous peoples’ wellbeing, the values that guide societies like the Innu are very...

Cinema-going was the most popular commercial leisure activity in the first half of the twentieth century, peaking in 1946 with 1.6 billion recorded admissions. Though ‘going to the pictures’ remained a popular pastime, the transition to peacetime altered citizens’ leisure habits. During the 1950s increased affluence, the growth of television ownership and the diversification of leisure led to rapid declines in attendance. Cinema attendances fell in all regions, but the speed, nature and extent of decline varied widely across the United Kingdom.

By linking national developments to...

Creative Spaces: Urban Culture and Marginality is an interdisciplinary exploration of the different ways in which marginal urban spaces have become privileged locations for creativity in Latin America. The essays within the collection reassess dominant theoretical notions of ‘marginality’ in the region and argue that, in contemporary society, it invariably allows for (if not leads to) the production of the new.

While Latin American cities have, since their foundation, always included marginal spaces (due, for example, to the segregation of indigenous groups), the massive...

The Jesuits’ colonial legacy in Latin America is well-known. They pioneered an interest in indigenous languages and cultures, compiling dictionaries and writing some of the earliest ethnographies of the region. They also explored the region’s natural history and made significant contributions to the development of science and medicine. On their estates and in the missions they introduced new plants, livestock, and agricultural techniques, such as irrigation. In addition, they left a lasting legacy on the region’s architecture, art and music.

The volume demonstrates the diversity...

Latin America’s long history of showing how racism can co-exist with racial mixture and conviviality offers useful ammunition for strengthening anti-racist stances. This volume asks whether cultural production has a particular role to play within discourses and practices of anti-racism in Latin America and the Caribbean. The contributors analyse music, performance, education, language, film and art in diverse national contexts across the region.

The book also places Latin American and Caribbean racial formations within a broader global context. It shows that the region provides...

Envisioning Global LGBT Human Rights: (Neo)colonialism, Neoliberalism, Resistance and Hope is an outcome of a five-year international collaboration among partners that share a common legacy of British colonial laws that criminalise same-sex intimacy and gender identity/expression. The project sought to facilitate learning from each other and to create outcomes that would advance knowledge and social justice. The project was unique, combining research and writing with participatory documentary filmmaking. This visionary politics infuses the pages of the anthology.

Arising out of a conference on ‘Erôs in Ancient Greece’, the articles in this volume share a historicizing approach to the conventions and expectations of erôs in the context of the polis, in the Archaic and Classical periods of ancient Greece.

The articles focus on (post-Homeric) Archaic and Classical poetic genres – namely lyric poetry, tragedy, and comedy – and some philosophical texts by Plato, Xenophon, and Aristotle.

They pursue a variety of issues,...

Freedom Seekers: Escaping from Slavery in Restoration London reveals the hidden stories of enslaved and bound people who attempted to escape from captivity in England’s capital.

In 1655 White Londoners began advertising in the English-speaking world’s first newspapers for enslaved people who had escaped. Based on the advertisements placed in these newspapers by masters and enslavers offering rewards for so-called runaways, this book brings to light for the first time the history of slavery in England as revealed in the stories of resistance by enslaved workers....

Human rights in relation to sexual orientation and gender identity are at last reaching the heart of global debates. Yet 78 states worldwide continue to criminalise same-sex sexual behaviour, and due to the legal legacies of the British Empire, 42 of these – more than half – are in the Commonwealth of Nations. In recent years many states have seen the emergence of new sexual nationalisms, leading to increased enforcement of colonial sodomy laws against men, new criminalisations of sex between women and discrimination against transgender people.

Human Rights, Sexual...

In recent years, academics, policy makers and media outlets have increasingly recognised the importance of Caribbean migrations and migrants to the histories and cultures of countries across the Northern Atlantic.

Memory, Migration and (De)Colonisation furthers our understanding of the lives of many of these migrants, and the contexts through which they lived and continue to live. In particular, it focuses on the relationship between Caribbean migrants and processes of...

Contemporary development debates in Latin America are marked by the pursuit of economic growth, technological improvement and poverty reduction, and are overshadowed by growing concerns about the preservation of the environment and human rights. This collection’s multidisciplinary perspective links local, national, regional and transnational levels of inquiry into the interaction of state and non-state actors involved in promoting or opposing natural resource development. Taking this approach allows the book to contemplate the complex panorama of competing visions, concepts and interests...

Queer Between the Covers presents a history of radical queer publishing and literature from 1880 to the modern day. Chronicling the gay struggle for acceptance and liberation, this book demonstrates how the fight for representation was often waged secretly between the covers of books at a time when public spaces for queer identities were limited. The chapters provide an array of voices and histories – from the famous, Derek Jarman and Oscar Wilde, to the lesser-known and underappreciated John Wieners and Valerie Taylor. It includes first-hand accounts of seminal moments in queer...

In July 1994, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) set out to stabilise and secure Rwanda, a country decimated by genocide. This mandate was later extended to include the herculean task of promoting unity and reconciliation to a population torn apart by violence. More than two decades later, these goals appear to have been achieved. Beneath the veneer of reconciliation lies myriad programmes and legislation that do more than seek to unite the population - they keep the RPF in power. In Reconciling Rwanda: Unity, Nationality and State Control, Jennifer Melvin analyses the highly...

This edited volume brings together several scholars who have produced outstanding ethnographies of Andean communities, mostly in Peru but also in neighbouring countries. These ethnographies were published between the 1970s and 2000s, following different theoretical and thematic approaches, and they often transcended the boundaries of case studies to become important reference works on key aspects of Andean culture: for example, the symbolism and ritual uses of coca in the case of Catherine J. Allen;...

Acompañada de una nueva introducción, esta traducción al español del clásico libro, Indian Survival in Colonial Nicaragua, ofrece una descripción detallada de los cambios demográficos y culturales que la conquista española y el dominio colonial trajeron a las sociedades indígenas de Nicaragua. Muestra cómo la naturaleza de las propias sociedades indígenas y la forma en que los españoles buscaron controlarlas y explotarlas se reflejaron en diferentes niveles de disminución y supervivencia de la población.

 Se basa en una extensa...

Television Drama in Spain and Latin America addresses two major topics within current cultural, media, and television studies: the question of fictional genres and that of transnational circulation. While much research has been carried out on both TV formats and remakes in the English-speaking world, almost nothing has been published on the huge and dynamic Spanish-speaking sector. This book discusses and analyses series since 2000 from Spain (in both Spanish and Catalan), Mexico, Venezuela,...

Apuleius’ literary and philosophical fortune has been considerable since antiquity, mostly through the reception of The Golden Ass. The aim of this collection of essays is to highlight a few major aspects of this afterlife, from the High Middle Ages to early Romanticism, in the fields of literature, linguistics and philology, within a wide geographical scope.

The volume gathers the proceedings of an international conference held in March 2016 at the Warburg Institute in London, in association with the Institute of Classical Studies. It includes both diachronic...

From houses to roads, infrastructures offer a unique lens through which to explore social and political change. Serving as an important conduit between states and citizens, infrastructures provide governments with a powerful tool to mould subjects and control populations. Yet, at the same time they also give individuals, communities, and movements a platform to challenge the state and forge alternative forms of citizenship and politics. Infrastructures therefore shape social and political relations in unexpected ways and never dutifully follow the scripts of politicians, bureaucrats, and...

Based on extensive fieldwork and oral history, The Terms of Our Surrender is a powerful critical appraisal of unceded indigenous land ownership in eastern Canada. Set against an ethnographic, historical and legal framework, the book traces the myriad ways the Canadian state has successfully evaded the 1763 Royal Proclamation that guaranteed First Nations people a right to their land and way of life.

Focusing on the Innu of Quebec and Labrador, whose land has been taken for resource...

Following a decade-long research project, this devastating book examines colonial state imperatives to sideline indigenous peoples and history from mainstream national narratives. Through the study of his community, the Essipiunnuat or, ‘People of the Brook Shells River’, the author hopes to combat the erasure of First Nations people from colonial history-books by shedding a light on historical and current systematic and territorial oppression. From land grabs, to genocide and irreversible ecological warfare, the book demonstrates the impact of psychological colonialism on...