Böcker utgivna av Amsterdam University Press

This volume analyzes forms of collective resilience through manifestations of strength-in-fragility in selected communities in Asia (Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand). Persistent resistance to communal erasure taking place through repressive policies and commercialized, multinational urban development insensitive to local communities and values often presents an uphill battle. Some of these collective efforts to survive through everyday actions, encounters, and constant struggles have successful outcomes, while others are ephemeral at best. The authors argue that persisting vernacular spaces located between resistance and co-optation are themselves a form of local cultural heritage in the rapidly urbanizing region. Recognizing these nonconformist forms of resilience as heritage acknowledges the creativity involved in challenging social and political inequalities. Supporting the cultural autonomy of local communities by acknowledging resilience as heritage contributes to social justice in the region.

This book examines the impact of space on the perception of art and visual culture in early nineteenth-century Paris. It turns its attention to the way in which space determines the understanding and the development of visual culture. The abundance of images, their status, and their employment alike offer a means to grasp the extent of the development of an approach to art which further involved the spectator. Space is here conceived of as a multifaceted entity, spanning architectural, scholarly, artistic, and visual dimensions. These various aspects offer means to consider the way in which images work and are consumed, and the individual experience they represent. Space works as a link and a connecting tool between different intellectual and visual categories, and this study examines how this interaction applies to works of art as well as everyday objects.

The chapters in this volume explore the major cultural markers, by which an ethnic community defines its cultural identity and cultural affiliation. These markers can differ when perceived as coming from within or from outside of a group and can be re-defined according to inner or outer circumstances. Their importance can increase when a community feels endangered in their cultural existence, or diminish when perceived cultural identity of a group and its members is not questioned. This collective monograph thus not only applies the term "cultural security" exclusively to state- or institution-implemented processes, but also considers the indigenous, bottom-up, and inside-out mechanisms of establishing and maintaining communal cultural security of an ethnic group. The dynamics shaping cultural security are illustrated in examples of ethnic communities in the People's Republic of China and in Mongolia.

In the beginning of the 20th century, inspired by the Sherlock Holmes novels of Arthur Conan Doyle, scientists began to make their appearance at the crime scene. It was quickly discovered that studying the 'silent witnesses', crime-related physical evidence and traces, could provide a wealth of information. In many countries pioneers started to shape this new science area by formulating key principles and introducing novel methods and instrumentation. In the Netherlands, Co van Ledden Hulsebosch emerged as the first dedicated forensic scientist, and he quickly became a well-known figure. In 1945 he published his memoirs Forty Years of Detective Work, where he describes his most memorable cases and provides the reader with entertaining insights in how he was able to solve so many crimes through sound reasoning and the use of science. Almost eighty years later, a forensic academic network in the Netherlands is celebrating its 10-year anniversary. This network, consisting of forensic scientists from Dutch universities, academic medical centers, the Dutch Police, and the Netherlands Forensic Institute, is named after this Dutch forensic legend: the Co van Ledden Hulsebosch Center (clhc). For this special occasion, clhc-affiliated scientists and experts translated the memoirs of Co van Ledden Hulsebosch with the use of modern AI tools while also providing contemporary views and insights. Be amazed how relevant the work of Co van Ledden Hulsebosch still is for criminal investigations in the 21st century!

The book addresses the role of particular monstrous figures and apocalyptic scenarios in contemporary cinema and television and evaluates the political potential of horror and sci-fi narratives in our age of never-ending crises. Purpose of the book is to demonstrate how witches, zombies, and cyborgs (among other figures) present the spectre of new people to come, of new possibilities to inhabit the Earth against the apocalyptic fates of Capitalism. Written in an 'acid communist' spirit, the book shows how it is possible to politicise contemporary popular culture tropes and figures, mapping the anxieties they express and also their undisclosed potential and resources. Balancing personal commentary and academic analyses, the book expresses Deleuzian trust in the power of moving images as instruments that allow us to inhabit the present and believe in this world notwithstanding alleged ends of all worlds.

Fueled by Nigeria's momentary emergence as Africa's largest economy, Nollywood's increasingly global reach raises important questions about the industry's relationship to resource extraction. This book looks at Nollywood's literal and metaphorical access to the global while also examining Hollywood's longstanding promotion and participation in extractivism on the African continent. The awesome power of Hollywood derives, in part, from the industry's entwinement with "foreign" cultures and economies, including those of Nigeria. Yet if Hollywood has long mined African cultures and exploited African economies, Nollywood, arguably the continent's leading media industry, has exhibited similar tendencies, creatively appropriating everything from Latin American telenovelas to American-style science fiction in order to furnish a distinct impression of cosmopolitan modernity. Nollywood's far-flung geographies are both literal and conceptual, material and ideological. They contribute to, and comprise, "globalizing vernaculars" as much as they reflect and constitute national cultures. African Media in an Age of Extraction shows how a range of national cinemas intersect at various mining sites, shedding new light on political economies of oil, tin, lumber, telecommunications, and more.

A sparkling, informative account of what makes the Netherlands Dutch, perfect for anyone interested in its history or present and written by the country's foremost scholars

Andrzej Zulawski (1940-2016) was born in Lwów, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine) and educated in Paris. From 1971 to 2015 he directed thirteen feature films. Andrzej Zulawski: Abject Cinema interprets the director's oeuvre through the methodological lens of Julia Kristeva's notions of the abject and the semiotic chora, with the narratives in Zulawski's filmography amounting to an experience of the abject -being not merely the state of affairs among the films' subjects but also of their collective regression to a semiotic non-verbal state divorced from the symbolic verbal-visual language employed by cinema as a whole. It further contextualizes this interpretation with the sociopolitical circumstances from which Zulawski emerged, specifically his Polish homeland occupied by various foreign powers, his emigre status in France, and the influence of the Polish Romantic movement.

This book investigates some of the biggest challenges facing society in the twenty-first century. Research conducted in Asia and the West highlights the struggle for rights and recognition by indigenous peoples, women, migrants, and the young, as well as the dampening effects some government responses to Covid-19 have had on artistic freedoms and citizen participation. Digitisation is shown to be a double-edged sword, with ill effects on citizenship being countered by positive ones from grass-roots activities. The biggest challenge facing the world today is climate change. Issues of sustainability can also be a double-edged sword depending on how they are addressed by governments and those they govern. What unites all of the papers in this book is their people-centred approach, with Michel Foucault's concept of the 'Care of the Self' as a connecting theme uniting their different research endeavours.

After WWII, cinema was everywhere: in movie theatres, public squares, factories, schools, trial courts, trains, museums, and political meetings. Seen today, documentaries and newsreels, as well as the amateur production, show the kaleidoscopic portrait of a changing Europe. How did these cinematic images contribute to shaping the new societies emerging from the ashes of war, both in the Western and in the Eastern bloc? Why were they so crucial in framing and regulating new places and practices, political systems, economic dynamics, educational frameworks, and memory communities? This edited volume explores the multiple ways nonfiction cinema reconfigured public spaces, collective participation, democratisation, and governmentality between 1944 and 1956. Looking back at it through a transnational perspective and the critical category of spatiality, nonfiction cinema appears in a new light: simultaneously as a specifically situated and as a highly mobile medium, it was a fundamental agent in reshaping Europe's shared identity and culture in a defining decade.

How do the social, material, and spatial processes underlying the making of early modern missionary grammars, vocabularies, and devotional translations deepen our understanding of their contents? The handwritten and printed missionary books produced in the Spanish viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru were key instruments designed to help study Indigenous languages in order to efficiently teach religious doctrine to local communities unfamiliar with European culture and religion. This volume considers these missionary books as physical and social objects and illuminates how a variety of factors determines their physical appearance, structure, and form, which in turn shape and guide the interpretation of their contents: people involved in its making; geographical and social circumstances and conditions of production; technologies, materials, and tools; genre and function(s) of the books; and intended readership, modes of distribution, and readerly responses.

Reproductive injustice is an urgent global problem. We are faced with the increased criminalization of abortion, higher maternal and neonatal mortality rates for people of color, and more and more research addressing the structural nature of obstetric violence. In this collection of essays, the cause of reproductive injustice is understood as the institutionalized isolation of (potentially) pregnant people, making them vulnerable for bio- and necropolitical disciplination and control. The central thesis of this book is that reproductive justice must be achieved through a radical reappropriation of relationality in reproductive care to safeguard the access to knowledge and care needed for safe bodily self-determination. Through empirical research as well as decolonial, feminist, midwifery, and Black theory, reproductive justice is reimagined as abolitionist care, grounded in the abolition of authoritative obstetric institutions, state control of reproduction, and restrictive abortion laws in favor of community practices that are truly relational.

Creation imagery in manuscripts made in the Middle Ages becomes a locus for visual experimentation as well as the expression of ideas about creativity in artistic endeavors. It links medieval ideas about creation, and the characteristic of the Divine Creator and the act of creation with themes in medieval thought about the work of medieval artists, by examining representations of divine creation and illustrations of the creation stories in Genesis. Case studies from manuscripts illuminating the creation dating from the eleventh to the fourteenth century (Junius 11/The Cædmon Manuscript, Roda Bible & Ripoll Bible, Bible moralisées, Hamburg Bible, Holkhalm Bible) reveal self-reflective moments of medieval artists relating artistic invention and theological debates about creation. The author identifies traces of the artists' thinking in their own work and then contextualizes those visual cues within the context of philosophical arguments about the creation of the world. The author considers how Western medieval artists, in inventing original illuminations and experimenting with new representational modes, suggest potential analogies between their own work, God's acts of creation, and nature's generative force.

This book focuses on alternative definitions of landscape in archaeology, particularly those that explicitly address landscapes' political aspects. In doing so, this volume emphasizes the non-static, dialogic nature of landscape within a community and acknowledges how a community's composition and its relationship with the landscape can lead to tensions and even violent conflicts with other groups. It highlights the relevance of considering movement, borders, and conflict as sources for understanding how people create their own landscapes and how they reshape them in times of political conflict. For example, in contexts of colonization and war, people are forced to adapt to new politics and hierarchies as they see their personal and communal understanding of the world deeply transformed, something visible even today as political tensions constantly reshape local and global landscapes. Understanding how landscapes were created and contested in the past is essential for understanding their political, economic, and cultural manifestations in the present in order to better organize ourselves for a truly integrative future.

This study explores how Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Andrew Marvell, and Milton among many others appropriated Spenser's long and shorter poems for creating comedy, parody, and satire. Their appropriations, which were widely influential on communities of readers, writers, and intertextual networks from 1590-1660, left an abiding impression of Spenser as a biting satirist. Spenser's Afterlife from Shakespeare to Milton: The Faerie Queene as Intertextual Environment is the first study to combine the reception history of The Faerie Queene with ecocriticism, animal studies, and posthumanist tenets of vital materialism and the power of things. This poem functions as a powerful, nonhuman agent that transforms how readers respond to their environments. The Faerie Queene and its afterlives move readers to perceive flaws in political, social, and religious figureheads and institutions to envision better ones.

The Chinese played a vital part in the Dutch colonial economy, and their economic role has remained important throughout the centuries. Starting in the early 1900s, China also influenced their socio-political life. After the Chinese in the Dutch East Indies managed to shed most discriminatory regulations in the first decades of the twentieth century, they again had to strive for their rights in the new Republic of Indonesia. This proved to be a difficult process filled with tension surrounding the issues of culture, ethnicity and nationality. In this book, Patricia Tjiook-Liem puts Chinese Indonesians at the centre of Dutch colonial and Indonesian history, and takes you through the most important periods in this often underexposed history.

This handbook offers an exposition of the contemporary status of Japan's environmental law, policy, and politics. The compass of ecological quandaries explored within this tome is expansive, encompassing issues pertinent to both natural and synthetic ecosystems, natural resources, and inorganic materials. Each chapter's temporal framework corresponds to the postwar period, following the enactment of environmental statutes and the initiation of administrative institutionalization, situated approximately in the early 1970s. The central inquiry addressed in this compendium pertains to the extent to which prevailing environmental statutes and policies have contributed to the enhancement or conservation of Japan's natural and synthetic ecosystems, as well as the resilience of its natural resources. The authors within this volume undertake an analysis to discern the causal factors behind the quandaries by ascribing them to the existence or absence of enforceable regulations, public involvement in policy formulation processes, bureaucratic fragmentation, pioneering regulatory measures, institutional obstacles, regulatory co-optation, rational cost-effective methodologies, scientific understanding, scientific communities, ecological commerce, environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and holistic ecological plans and programs. Moreover, pertinent sections raise an inquiry concerning Japan's ecological diplomacy, inquiring whether Japan serves as a leader, bystander, or obstructionist.

Late Shakespeare and the English Baroque focuses mainly on Shakespeare's late (or later) works, those written from around 1607. It sets both poetry and plays within the emerging culture of the baroque, the term defined not merely by stylistic features but by the underlying ideological 'structure of feeling' of baroque culture in early modern England. The book extends the mode of analysis of The Female Baroque (Amsterdam University Press, 2020) and draws on theoretical work by José Antonio Maravall, Raymond Williams, and Julia Kristeva. It analyzes recurring Baroque characteristics - hyperbole and melancholy, theatricality, gender, and 'plateauing'. Attention is given to the sonnets and other poems, as well as the tragedies from Hamlet on, and argues that increasingly, tragi-comedy emerges as a distinctively baroque Shakespearean characteristic. In the final chapter, primarily on The Tempest, the late Shakespeare is shown to have philosophical insights parallel to Montaigne or Bruno, and to provide anticipatory connections with later baroque artists like Vermeer.

The category of species has remained largely understudied in mainstream gender scholarship. This edition of the Yearbook of Women's History attempts to show how gender history can be enriched through the study of animals. It highlights that the inclusion of nonhuman animals in historical work has the potential to revolutionize the ways we think about gender history. This volume is expansive in more than one way. First, it is global and transhistorical in its outlook, bringing together perspectives from the Global North and the Global South, and moving from the Middle Ages to the contemporary world. Even more importantly for its purposes, a range of animals appear in the contributions: from the smallest insects to great apes, and from 'cute' kittens to riot dogs and lions. The articles collected here reflect the variety of the animal kingdom and of the creative approaches enabled by animal history.

The formal diplomatic relations between Japan and Western nations dawned when the first American consul-general Townsend Harris was received by the thirteenth Tokugawa shogun Iesada at Edo castle in 1857. This work unveils the seventeen castle audiences for Western envoys carried out by the Tokugawa shogunate (1603-1867) during its last decade of reign. Through that process, the shogunate completed a ceremonial form based on its own tradition, as well as consistent with the Western practice. The endeavours of Tokugawa retainers on the frontline of external affairs at the time, prior to the Meiji Restoration (1868), was the true first step of Japan's entry into the international community. The formation of diplomatic ceremonial, progressed as a different layer from more political negotiations, provides an alternative history of bakumatsu (late years of the shogunate) foreign relations that has been overlooked in previous studies.

This volume draws the outlines of a new field of scholarship at the crossroads of the social histories of punishment and labour. It poses key questions: What is "punishment" and how is it legitimized? In particular, how do punitive practices contribute to shape the processes of labour extraction and workers' mobility? Based on empirically grounded research on a wide range of geographical and temporal contexts, this volume provides important insights on these questions and on the ways through which they can be studied. It highlights the need to pluralize both punishment and labour, moving beyond the standard focus on incarceration and wage labour. It invites to produce contextualized studies of the processes of coercion and the relations between multiple actors, rather than starting from predefined categories of labour and punishment. And it foregrounds the importance of the simultaneous analysis of processes of mobilization and immobilization of the workforce.

The book provides an account of Mongolian information society from the perspective of critical media studies. Mongolians once saddled their horses to take advantage of mobility, speed, and spatiality, as they now do with the Internet and social media. They enjoy online cultural expressions, civil liberty, and private property rights guaranteed in the Constitution of 1992 using the Internet and social media platforms. The converged media sphere in modern Mongolia mirrors and shapes political communication, economic outlook, institutional norms, and Mongolian identity. The arguments in the book juxtapose the information society tenets and structural constraints like the small market, communist past, and mining-dependent economy when placing Mongolia on the global information society map. Informational acceleration paradoxically also brings as decline in trust in the media, which is increasingly instrumentalized by the elite.

This book offers a discussion of the screens, installations, and media architecture that populate contemporary urban public spaces. It proposes a methodological approach and conceptual toolset for the critical examination, not only of what these screens do, but also of what we can do with them. The book contains a collection of theoretical concepts, developed through an in-depth examination of the material, relational, and performative aspects of a range of urban screens and screen practices. Its situational and practice-oriented approach focuses on the space between their material surfaces, the spectatorial situations they create, and how such screens situate us in relation to the surrounding social and cultural environment of the city. Offering concepts for a critical understanding of the wide variety of contemporary urban screen practices, the book's methodological proposal integrates close situational analyses and a historical-comparative approach for individual screens and screening situations in their role as part of a wider global contemporary screen culture.

Monuments of Diverse Heritage in Early America: Placemaking and Preservation by Black, Indigenous, and Jewish Peoples explores a more inclusive history of the preservation of public historic sites. At a time when some Americans have embraced white nationalism in response to unfolding demographic changes and others celebrate individual identities over all else, an inclusive, tolerant, and unifying historical vision is sorely needed. While past preservation efforts often sought to provide exclusionary forms of historical inspiration, that need not be the case going forward. Bringing greater attention to the diverse heritage of the United States will not only help dismantle the lingering remnants of exclusionary and elitist narratives but also celebrate a pluralistic and diverse past and present. An inclusive, empowering history can provide social cohesion while also allowing room for individual groups to have authority over their pasts and their representation in public, side-by-side with one another.

Language teaching and learning were crucial to Europeans' colonial, national, and individual enterprises in the Levant, and in these processes, "Oriental language teachers" - as they were termed prior to the Second World War - were fundamental. European state nationalisms influenced and increasingly competed with each other by promoting their languages and cultures abroad, by means of both private and governmental actors. At the same time, learning Arabic became more prominent around the Mediterranean. The first half of the twentieth century corresponded with the emergence of new media; language was thought of as a cultural product to be exported into new cultural spaces. However, many blind spots remain in the history of linguistic thought and practices, including the forgotten and neglected voices of those involved in learning and teaching Arabic. This volume aims to revisit aspects of this linguistic encounter, including its vision, profile, priorities, trajectories, and practices.

Across the humanities and the social sciences, "cultural analysis" is a vibrant research practice. Since the introduction of the approach in the 1990s, the main principles of cultural analysis have remained largely the same: interdisciplinarity, social and political urgency, a heuristic use of theoretical concepts, the detailed analysis of objects of culture, and a sharp awareness of the situatedness of the scholar in the present. But is the practice still suited to the spiraling of social, political, economic, and environmental crises that mark our time? Drawing on experiences in research, teaching, administration, institutional politics, activism, and the creative arts, contributors explore what cultural analysis was back then, what it is right now, and what it may be by 2034. In a shifting conjuncture, these contributors strike notes of concern, discomfort, defiance, self-criticism, complicity, and irony-as well as a renewed sense of urgency and care.

The seven articles in this edited volume address the complex meanings that visual representations of plants and animals gained in early modern China and Japan. They aim to understand animals and plants in the new contexts of empirical and epistemological concerns, political and social agendas, and cultural interests. In particular, they examine the ways in which scholars, professional painters, and publishers engendered the sociohistorical meanings of the images.

represents state-of-the-art feminist scholarship in the field of eighteenth-century French and British art and visual culture. Topics range from women and their activities in art and science, to gendered representations of childhood and animals to fashion, femininity and temporality. Some chapters center on individual genres like hunting portraits, or on specific paintings, such as David Martin's Portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle and Lady Elizabeth Murray (ca. 1780) or Marie Guillemine Benoist's Portrait of a Young Black Woman (Madeleine) (1800). Others make contributions on the work of familiar actors like Jean-Siméon Chardin or Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun. The volume also brings to the fore lesser-known figures including Marie-Thérèse Reboul, Madeleine Basseporte, Marguerite Le Comte, and Gabrielle Capet. Written by eleven distinguished (art) historians, the assembled essays engage with and honor the work of the late Mary D. Sheriff, whose unpublished chapter on women artists' self-portraiture opens the book.