Böcker utgivna av Amsterdam University Press

From a semio-pragmatic perspective and drawing on an interdisciplinary and intermedial approach, this book analyses how the audiovisual thinking process manifests itself in essay films. It explores how issues of subjectivity and identity, whether individual, social, political or cultural, prompt thought through the medium of cinema. The volume discusses the European Francophone essay film from its first appearance in cinematic modernity to the present. The study is developed in three stages. The first analyses the intermedial forms that are used: the letter, the (self-)portrait, the dialogue, the diptych, etc. The second examines the audiovisual materials that are mobilised. The third addresses the audiovisual procedures that are generated. In its analysis of works by Marker, Godard, Akerman, Varda and others, this book offers a new and detailed understanding of the production, evolution and achievements of the essay film in Francophone Europe.

This book explores early modern Italian women as agents of doubt. While women were often considered prone to doubt as a result of their natural "weakness," the essays gathered here reverse this view, demonstrating how women were able to embrace doubt as a means to expand their agency. Using doubt to contest both official narratives as well as religious and civil practices, women were able to carve out a space of their own in contemporary culture and society. The volume covers a period from the late fifteenth to the mid seventeenth centuries, offering critical insight into early modern doubt and investigating how doubt, like other categories of thought, could be gendered. Contributors address the topics of doubt and the Querelle des Femmes, religion, writing, and social networks. The volume offers a multidisciplinary approach to early modern doubt, combining gender studies with religious history, the history of literature, social history, and the history of science.

Digital technologies have rapidly become integral to communities and societies, bringing both significant benefits and serious concerns. Issues such as misinformation, disinformation, online polarization, discrimination, and widening inequalities have prompted a critical and urgent debate: Can digital societies still be effectively governed? This book brings together insights from various disciplines to address the pressing question: "How can we develop and apply principles of (good) governance in digital societies that are organized democracies?" Governing the Digital Societypresents a range of governance approaches, focusing on online platforms, artificial intelligence, and the public values that underpin these technologies. The authors position themselves at the forefront of their disciplines, offering perspectives from law, critical data studies, urban studies, science and technology studies, computational linguistics, and the political economy of media. Expert interviews provide additional insights into ongoing efforts to tackle the challenges of governing digital societies. The book demonstrates that governance is not just a technical or legal process but a complex societal one, embedding norms, values, and morality into our institutions and daily lives.

This volume examines the emerging exhibition complex on Chinese art in early twentieth-century China, and from the mid-1950s onwards, the cultural politics involved in Asia with the exhibitions of traditional and modern Chinese art in Taiwan, Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore. It also scrutinizes the curatorial practices that have influenced the interpretation and display of Chinese art amidst the advance of media technology and heritage engagement in the twenty-first century. Situated within ongoing debates on global art history, the volume is inclusive of multiple geo-cultural perspectives, and the dynamic practices that relate art tradition or heritage to more universal spatiotemporal art experience and engagement. It extends the understanding of exhibitions of Chinese art not only as multiple historical processes culturally and politically negotiated and contested by contending forces and diverse actors in the region, but also as creative interventions to engage people around the globe in the present.

This volume significantly expands current understandings of both disability and sanctity in the Middle Ages. Across the collection, heterogeneous constructions, and experiences, of disability and holiness are excavated. Analyses span the tenth to the fourteenth century, with discussion of holy men and holy women, Western Christian and Buddhist traditions, hagiographic texts, images, and artefacts. Each chapter underscores that disability and sanctity co-exist with a vast array of connotations, not just fully positive or fully negative, but also every inflection in between. The collection is a powerful rebuttal to the notion of the integral relationship of disability-medieval and otherwise-with sin, stigma, and shame. So doing, it recentres medieval disability history as a lived history that merits exploration and celebration. In this way, the volume serves to reclaim sanctity in disability histories as a means to affirm the possibility of radical disability futures.

The identification of ceramic imports within prehistoric and historic assemblages has long been the primary indicator for identifying connections between different sites and regions. Yet this has fostered a presence/absence diagnosis for contact between different communities. Approaches such as post-colonial perspectives and network analysis, which focus on the nature of the connections, are now beginning to offer more meaningful ways of considering past interactions. These approaches can bridge the traditional divide between "prehistoric" and "historic" and offer a valuable contribution to the wider study of past interactions in the ancient Mediterranean. The geographical or topographical setting of an archaeological site is often acknowledged as an important factor in their significance or how well connected the community was within the cultural landscape. But to what extent do geographical categories such as "island," "coast," "mainland" or "hinterland" influence modern ideas on the dynamics of these ancient communities? This volume uses ceramic studies across multiple spatial and diachronic scales to provide new insights into the connectivity of ancient Mediterranean communities.

Human beings have always been concerned with fundamental questions about their selves, including the deeply personal nature of human experience, the persistence of the self over time, the relation between mind and body, and the interdependence between self and community. The goal of this volume is to rethink these questions against the backdrop of Chinese philosophical traditions, covering the ideas of major thinkers from Classical to late imperial China, with a particular focus on the fact that human experience is necessarily characterized by the first-person perspective. The contributors to this volume employ different methods (historical, comparative, phenomenological), but they all aim at bringing the rich resources of Chinese philosophy to life in our global present.

In the context of modern global exchanges, an imagined and essentialised notion of 'East Asia' has served as both a source of inspiration and a catalyst for new connections, extending beyond the geographic boundaries of China, Japan, and Korea. This volume explores the global circulation of practices, technologies, and ideas identified as 'East Asian' in alternative therapies and spiritual practices since the 1970s. Case studies range from the incorporation of traditional Chinese medicine into Brazilian naturopathy to self-development seminars promoting Korean national identity. Rather than focusing on questions of authenticity, the book uniquely interrogates how and why the cultures of China, Japan, and Korea have been invoked over the last fifty years to promote specific therapeutic, spiritual, and political agendas worldwide.

With the birth of the cult of the saints, their relics became valuables whose possession would guarantee prestige, protection, and spiritual benefits to a town, church, or monastery. For this reason--at first with the aim of preserving the bodies of newly-executed martyrs from destruction and later of increasing the power of a particular faction or community--, the relics began to be stolen, with numerous cases documented throughout Europe. At the same time, a rich hagiographic literature flourished to describe the contexts in which the thefts occurred and to demonstrate their authenticity. Justifications, legitimations, ordeals, and supernatural interventions are dotted throughout the stories of hagiographers over the centuries. This book seeks to reconstruct the cultural history of the theft of relics in the specific context of Italy, from Late Antiquity to the Central Middle Ages, availing itself of an interdisciplinary perspective.

Independent cinema in China is not only made outside the commercial system but also without being submitted for censorship. We know that for several decades it has been the crucible out of which China's most exciting new films have flowed. The essays in this volume interrogate what else we think we know. Did it really start with Wu Wenguang and Bumming in Beijing in 1990, or can its roots be traced back much earlier? What are its aesthetics? And its ethics, including of gender and class? Where do audiences watch these films in China and how do they circulate? And, since the 2017 Film Law defined uncensored films as illegal, is independent Chinese cinema still alive? What does it mean today? And does it have a future? The essays in this anthology-many by exciting new scholars-explore these urgent questions.

Gentrification is extensively discussed in the media, where coverage can describe changing neighbourhoods and analyse the causes and consequences of such change. The media are also arenas in which the voices of those who advocate or resist gentrification can be heard. How can this profusion of content be examined? What methods can be used to critically address the role of the media in constructing and propagating discourses on gentrification? Central to this book is the idea that new research should engage with the theoretical and methodological issues that emerge when media products are used as a corpus to study gentrification. This edited volume considers a range of means that are used to shape and publicize representations: contributions investigate printed and online newspapers, websites, blogs, television programmes and social media. It also aims to highlight the diversity of players who produce and disseminate media discourses on gentrification.

This book charts the broad cultural impact of the medieval and early modern female performer: how she engages with her historical origins in classical drama, works within contemporary cultural and professional networks, and sets the terms for female performance in subsequent historical periods. Moving beyond the archival evidence that establishes that medieval and early modern women and girls performed, it explores how their performances resonated across national boundaries and historical periods, revealing wide patterns of influence and inspiration. This collection of original essays brings together well-established authorities with new and emerging scholars, offering innovative and ground-breaking discussions of medieval dramatic cultures, the Shakespearean stage, professional actresses in Spain and Italy, the performance of music and dance, artistic representations of the female performer, and twentieth- and twenty-first-century adaptations. Ranging from tenth-century Germany to twenty-first-century London, the chapters in this volume offer a new set of paradigms for understanding and interpreting women and girls on stage.

In China, every phase of modernization had its particular poetic forms and lyrical articulations. The 1919 May Fourth movement was the breeding ground for poetical experiments by authors inspired by new world literary trends. Under Mao Zedong, folk songs accompanied political campaigns such as the Great Leap Forward. Misty Poetry of the 1980s contributed to the humanistic discourse of the post-Mao reform era. The most recent stage in Chinese poetry resonates with entangled local and global concerns, such as technological innovation, environmental anxieties, socio-political transformations, and the return of nationalist sentiments and Cold War divisions. In search for creative responses to the crisis, poets frequently revisit the past while holding on to their poetic language of self-reflection and social critique. This volume identifies three foci in contemporary poetry discourses: formal crossovers, multiple realities, and liquid boundaries. These three themes are anything but mutually disjunctive and often intersect within texts from mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan discussed in the book.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the Jirim League witnessed a linguistic wrestle between Manchu, Mongol, Chinese, Japanese, and Russian powers. The Qing Empire envisioned a trilingual educational system, with the aim of improving the Jirim Mongols' ability to read Chinese, Manchu, and Mongolian. Through this policy, the Qing sought to transform loyal imperial subjects into modern patriotic nationals and incorporate them into an integrated and united China under a Manchu constitutional monarchy. The late Qing's linguistic practice for ruling the Mongols of Manchuria was an attempt to cope with the enduring legacies in Qing administration and people's everyday life, growing local ethnic tensions, cross-boundary connections, imperial rivalries, and the rise of new ideas concerning nation, modern state, and international relations in East Asia. This book challenges the notion of Chinese language reform as a story of linear progress towards national monolingualism, unfolds the power of multilingualism in Chinese nationalist discourse from a peripheral, non-Han Chinese perspective, and questions the extent to which national languages dominate the writing of history.

This book provides a thorough revision of the image of the public church under the Dutch Republic after the Peace of Westphalia and before the onset of the 'high Enlightenment'. Traditional church history considers the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a period of decline. Yet this was the high tide of Dutch expansion when Dutch society was extremely rich. In its five universities and its highly literate population internationally acknowledged scholarship, arts and sciences flowered. Did really nothing of all this vitality rub off on the public religion? Rather than the traditional static image of a rather joyless and ossified orthodoxy, an exploration of the interface between the Reformed church and Dutch society at large reveals a religious culture that had much to offer to various audiences, in the sphere of knowledge production as well as in the form of spiritual solace and everything in between.

Marin Mersenne and the Study of Harmony delves into the central role of music among the early modern sciences by focusing on the work of the French polymath Marin Mersenne (1588-1648). Although now considered more an art than a science, music was for many early modern scholars a universal science for studying the harmonies present in all beings. Music's ability to be quantified while being experienced aesthetically meant that, for Mersenne, it was the central science to approximate the sounding and inaudible harmonies present in the world and universe at large. Bringing together Mersenne's interests in the physics of sound and hearing, combinatorics, musical instruments, curiosities, and music from outside of Europe, this book shows why so many early modern scholars were drawn to music and how the discipline of music was transformed in the seventeenth century.

Tadeas Hajek of Hajek (1526-1600), Latinized as Thaddaeus Hagecius ab Hagek/Hayek, was a key figure in early scientific debates not only in his native Bohemia. A versatile scholar and polymath, he was prolific in medicine, botany, mathematics and astronomy. Modern interpreters tended to point out his astronomical interpretations to emphasize his greatest achievements and his "modernity." However, Hajek also drew extensively on traditional arts such as alchemy, astrology and metoposcopy. In this volume, the contributors study various aspects of Hayek's thought to present a less tendentious intellectual portrait of him in the context of his times. Even from this more adequate perspective, he remains an important figure in the dialectical process of transmitting ideas whose influence extended far beyond the Czech lands.

When he returned to the Netherlands in 2009, decades after World War II, Jefferson Wiggins realized that no one he met knew about the segregated US Army during the war, nor did they know about the contribution of Black American soldiers to the liberation of the Netherlands. They were not mentioned anywhere in Dutch history books or in archives. Together with oral historian Mieke Kirkels, Wiggins sat down to record his memories. Wiggins passed away in 2013, and his widow, Janice Wiggins-Paterson, continued the project in his memory. With newly discovered archival material, and richly illustrated, this book gives a lively account of an undocumented story of WWII, Black American, and Dutch military history.

This volume is a collective attempt on the part of a community of academics, film festival curators, and archivists to come to terms with practical and intellectual challenges of the pandemic and post-pandemic realities affecting cultures of film festivals. The collection draws contours of critical inquiry orienting current film festival research and practice to explore new directions in archiving and decolonizing practices and big data analysis in the post-Covid-19 context and beyond. The four-part study gathers the voices of academics and practitioners who engage in a dialogue to articulate critical areas for both study and practice of film festivals, and identifies conceptual tools to address them: "Archival Turn," "Decolonizing Film Festival Studies," "Post-Covid-19 and Film Festival Studies" and "Data Visualization and Film Festival Research and Practice."

This book provides a timely discussion of the creative practices in fandom and media culture. Within their participatory cultures, fans produce a wealth of content, data and materials. They write fan fiction, curate wikis and design costumes. This international collection offers a diverse exploration of contemporary fan practices through different cases, such as Yuri!!! On ICE, Harry Potter and Mass Effect. This book reveals how expression, emotion and agency are central to fan activity. Fans are highly adept at transmedia, as well as the critical use of different media and platforms. Fandom can apply to wider concepts within new media, the humanities and design, as the authors in this collection show. They also rely on different approaches, ranging from textual analysis to different forms of ethnography. Overall, Affect in Fandom offers a deliberately diverse exploration of exactly what contemporary fans create and curate, and how.

No Japanese leader has dominated Japan's recent political landscape more than the late Abe Shinz.. With the this as the basic premise, the main objective of this compiled volume is to examine and assess Japan's foreign and domestic polices during the 2010s, a decade which largely overlaps with Abe's tenure as prime minister. This book is much more than a mere study of Abe's leadership, however, as it ventures far beyond the traditional scope of diplomatic and political history by incorporating a multidisciplinary approach. As such, the contributors comprise not only historians and political scientists, but also sociologists, economists, legal experts, journalists, and practitioners of diplomacy. This diversity in backgrounds makes it possible to examine a much wider range of topics and themes that clearly illuminate the multitude of challenges that Japan faced in the decade as well as how it responded to those challenges, leading to a more thorough understanding of the path that Japan took in the 2010s.

Civil society in Japan is a large and multifaceted sphere with a diversity of actors pursuing various social, political, and economic objectives. The sphere has experienced major waves of transformation in the post-1945 era, especially in the 1990s when volunteering and nonprofit activities came to the forefront of political and popular attention. This handbook brings together twenty-one leading experts to provide comprehensive and up-to-date analyses of civil society in Japan. What is the history of Japanese civil society and how has it evolved in recent decades? Who have been the key participants and what are their objectives? How have international actors and conditions influenced civil society in Japan? More broadly, what do recent developments in Japanese civil society tell us about the condition of democracy, state-society relations, and the public sphere in the country? And how might Japanese civil society develop into the future? The contributions to the handbook offer innovative perspectives based on the most-recent fieldwork and data available. The handbook is divided into three sections: Institutions, Justice and Transnationalism. Topics include nonprofit organizations, volunteering, philanthropy, new media, gender, pacifism, nuclear power, territorial politics, international cooperation and transnational solidarity. The volume will be valuable for scholars in both research and teaching as well as essential reading for anyone wanting to understand the diversity and vibrancy of Japanese civil society today.

In this book, I discuss the mishu (.., staff member, secretary) system and the operation of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) between 1921 and 2022. In particular, I focus on the system's impact on high-level politics and decision making during four periods: the Revolutionary War (1921-1945), the founding of the People's Republic of China to the beginning of the Cultural Revolution (1950-1966), the Cultural Revolution period (1966-1976), and the period of reform and opening up to the present (1976-2022). This is, I believe, the first systematic analysis of the mishusystem, and as such will fill a gap in the literature on the CCP.