Böcker utgivna av Amsterdam University Press

Portrayals of Women in Early Twentieth-Century China explores the role played by woman, and their visual representations, in introducing modern design and modern ways of living to China. It investigates this through an analysis of how women and modern design were represented in the advertisements, photographs, and films of Republican-era China. This study explores the intersection of modernity and the Chinese woman, as they negotiated their changing identities through, and with, new designs that proliferated in Chinese households in the first half of the twentieth century. The advertisements, mass media, photographs and films took on the function of social conditioning, conveying to the viewers ideas of modern social standards, behavior and appearances. With women both instrumentalised within these images, and addressed through them, their visual representations became metaphors that fashioned a new portrait of China, while concurrently impacting on the identity, agency and subjectivity of women themselves.

Capitalism has gone astray. Today we face ecological exhaustion, persistent inequality, financialization, stress on communities, short-termism, and new power concentrations. An avalanche of new economic thinking and a reorientation of European values show the way toward a different economy. A new perspective is necessary if we want to implement the Sustainable Development Goals and if we consider our planet as 'Our Common Home,' for present and future generations. This book argues that European economies should be the initiators of a global transition toward a sustainable and inclusive world economy. Together, amid severe geopolitical and geoeconomic challenges, they need to develop their own perspective on what a good economy really is, in distinction to Chinese state capitalism and American big business capitalism. Crucially, this requires the rediscovery of key European values, a coherent view on responsible capitalism, and a new self-awareness as a global player for the Common Good in today's and tomorrow's world.

In the first half of the sixteenth century, the Low Countries saw the rise of a lively market for practical and instructive books that targeted non-specialist readers. This study shows how woodcuts in vernacular books on medicine and astrology fulfilled important rhetorical functions in knowledge communication. These images guided readersâEUR(TM) perceptions of the organisation, visualisation, and reliability of knowledge. Andrea van Leerdam uncovers the assumptions and intentions of book producers to which images testify, and shows how actual readers engaged with these illustrated books. Drawing on insights from the field of information design studies, she scrutinises the booksâEUR(TM) material characteristics, including their lay-outs and traces of use, to shed light on the habits and interests of early modern readers. She situates these works in a culture where medicine and astrology were closely interwoven in daily life and where both book producers and readers were exploring the potential of images.

Extensive in scope and drawing on newly available evidence from multinational archives, this book reconsiders Sino-Indian border issues during the middle Cold War using multiple established analytical frameworks. It demonstrates how key countries perceived and engaged with the border conflict by aiding the two main participants morally and materially. Before, during, and after the 1962 Sino-Indian border war, multinational political actors pursued their foreign policy goals (e.g., trade, security, and prestige) concerning the frontier, and often tried to destabilize spheres of influence and bolster alliances. Therefore, this contest signified a variation of the Anglo-Russian Great Game in Asia during the nineteenth century, and the theater of operations encompassed not only the border itself, but also the Himalayan kingdoms, Tibet, and Burma. A reevaluation of the border conflict between India and China is necessary given current, ongoing clashes at their still unresolved border as well as the fact that these two countries now possess enhanced technology and weapons.

This volume reflects on the significance of nostalgia in the construction of traumatic pasts, both on an individual and a collective level. By employing an interdisciplinary approach, the volume enhances our understanding of how the entanglements of trauma and nostalgia influence the construction and development of identity. Scholars from a range of academic disciplines and contexts explore the integration of nostalgic memories in discussions of trauma, attending to their interactions in public spaces, patriotic symbolism and rituals, popular culture, cinema, religion, museums, and memorials. The contributors emphasize the role of media and other mass-cultural technologies in disseminating images and narratives related to traumatic and nostalgic experiences. These essays ultimately bring to light the frequently overlooked role of nostalgic longing in shaping the discursive, visual, and material aspects of collective trauma.

From the mid-nineteenth-century Hui rebellions, which challenged centralised state control, to the early-twentieth-century revolutions, which led to Yunnan's decades-long independence, local actors shaped the history of Yunnan through their extensive cross-border networks and contradictory roles in the attempted state consolidation of this contested area. Among the local elites, the state agents, both Han and non-Han, acted on behalf of the state in the borderlands' affairs while seeking the balance between the interests of the state and their own communities. The state agents competed with each other while utilising and wrestling with the state authorities. The dynamic relationship between the state and local actors created another contested facet of modern Yunnan's transformation. Competing narratives emerged when local actors negotiated and reconstructed their status within the contemporary Chinese nation-state. Bandits became heroes; separatists became patriots; a vibrant regional center became an isolated, exotic, and marginal province of the People's Republic of China.

The lifetime of Johan Huizinga (1872âEUR"1945) was marked by dramatic transformations in Europe. Cityscapes, aesthetic codes, social orders, political cultures, international travel and means of warfare developed beyond recognition; entire catalogues of hopes and fears were torn asunder and replaced by new ones during not one but two wars. Amidst all these changes, Huizinga grew to become one of the most famous historians of his time. To this day, his works are treated as monuments in the cultural historical field. This book examines how these transformations and âEUR¿experiences of lossâEUR(TM) affected and informed HuizingaâEUR(TM)s historical perspectives. Most centrally, this book contends that HuizingaâEUR(TM)s historical works helped to accommodate and give meaning to his own experiences of uncertainty and rupture, thus offering him a way of life in turbulent times. This project offers an original and comprehensive analysis of an iconic historian writing in the age of collapse

In several European countries, the United States, and the Soviet Union, remarkable industrial novels based on empirical observations were written between 1900 and 1970. With two successive world wars and the rise of communism and fascism, this was an exceptionally turbulent time in the history of industrial capitalism as Taylorism and Fordism sought to increase production and consumption. This social landscape shaped modernist industrial novels. Key themes in these novels were class conflict, bad working conditions, worker alienation, changing workmen and employee cultures, urbanization, and worker migration. The primary goal was to document and publicize the real developments of working conditions in factories and offices, often aiming to influence both company welfare work and state social policies. This book focuses on the modernist industrial novel as written in five large industrial nations: the United States before WWII, the Stalinist Soviet Union, Weimar Germany, post-WWII Italy, and France.

This volume analyses cultural perceptions of safety and security that have shaped modern European societies. The articles present a wide range of topics, from feelings of unsafety generated by early modern fake news to safety issues related to twentieth-century drug use in public space. The volume demonstrates how 'safety' is not just a social or biological condition to pursue but also a historical and cultural construct. In philosophical terms, safety can be interpreted in different ways, referring to security, certainty or trust. What does feeling safe and thinking about a safe society mean to various groups of people over time? The articles in this volume are bound by their joint effort to take a constructionist approach to emotional expressions, artistic representations, literary narratives and political discourses of (un)safety and their impact on modern European society.

Manoeuvring around mainland ChinaâEUR(TM)s censors and pushing back against threats of lawsuits, online harassment, and physical violence, #MeToo activists shed a particularly harsh light on the treatment of women in the cinema and entertainment industries. Focusing on films from the PeopleâEUR(TM)s Republic of China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Chinese diaspora, this book considers how female directors shape Chinese visual politics through the depiction of the look, the stare, the leer, the glare, the glimpse, the glance, the queer and the oppositional gaze in fiction and documentary filmmaking. In the years leading up to and following in the wake of #MeToo, these cosmopolitan women filmmakers offer innovative angles on body image, reproduction, romance, family relations, gender identity, generational differences, female sexuality, sexual violence, sex work, labor migration, career options, minority experiences, media access, feminist activism and political rights within the rapidly changing Chinese cultural orbit.

Archival Film Curatorship is the first book-length study that investigates film archives at the intersection of institutional histories, early and silent film historiography, and archival curatorship. It examines three institutions at the forefront of experimentation with film exhibition and curatorship. The Eye Film Museum in Amsterdam, the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, NY, and the National Fairground and Circus Archive in Sheffield, UK serve as exemplary sites of historical mediation between early and silent cinema and the digital age. A range of elements, from preservation protocols to technologies of display and from museum architectures to curatorial discourses in blogs, catalogs, and interviews, shape what the author innovatively theorizes as the archiveâEUR(TM)s hermeneutic dispositif. Archival Film Curatorship offers film and preservation scholars a unique take on the shifting definitions, histories, and uses of the medium of film by those tasked with preserving and presenting it to new digital-age audiences.

At once collector, botanist, reader, artist, and patron, Agnes Block is best described as a cultural producer. A member of an influential network in her lifetime, today she remains a largely obscure figure. The socioeconomic and political barriers faced by early modern women, together with a male-dominated tradition in art history, have meant that too few stories of women's roles in the creation, production, and consumption of art have reached us. This book seeks to write Block and her contributions into the art and cultural history of the seventeenth-century Netherlands, highlighting the need for and advantages of a multifaceted approach to research on early modern women. Examining Block's achievements, relationships, and objects reveals a woman who was independent, knowledgeable, self-aware, and not above self-promotion. Though her gender brought few opportunities and many barriers, Agnes Block succeeded in fashioning herself as Flora Batava, a liefhebber at the intersection of art and science.

At court, flowers coloured, scented, adorned, sustained, nourished, and enthralled. These interdisciplinary essays engage with flowers as real, artificial, and represented objects across the Tudor and Stuart courts in gardens, literature, painting, interior furnishing, garments, and as jewels, medicine, and food. Situating this burgeoning floral culture within a European floral revolution of science, natural history, global trade, and colonial expansion, they reveal the courtâEUR(TM)s distinctive floral identity and history. If the rose operated as a particularly English lingua franca of royal power across two dynasties, this volume sheds light on an array of wild and garden flowers to offer an immersive picture of how the Tudor and Stuart courts lived and functioned, styled and displayed themselves through flowers. It contributes to a revival of interest in the early modern green world and provides a focused view of a court and court culture that used and revelled in blooms.

Film Festivals, Ideology and Italian Art Cinema is the first systematic study of the role ideology plays in film festivalsâEUR(TM) construction of dominant ideas about art cinema. Film festivals are considered the driving force of the film industry outside Hollywood, disseminating ideals of cinematic art and humanist politics. However, the question of what drives them remains highly contentious. In a rare consideration of the European competitive film festival circuit as a whole, this book analyses the shared economic, geopolitical and cultural histories that characterise âEUR¿European A festivalsâEUR(TM). It offers, too, the first extensive analysis of such festivalsâEUR(TM) role in the canonisation of select Italian films, from Rome, Open City to The Great Beauty and Gomorrah. The book proposes a new approach to ideology critique, one that enables detailed examination of how film festivals construct ideas about not only contemporary art cinema, but assumptions about gender, race, colonialism and capitalism.

The history of official relations between Russia and Japan encompasses a period of a little more than one hundred and fifty years, but stretch back unofficially for at least double that amount of time. But for both Russia and Japan, these relations have never been a key element of foreign policy, indispensable or intrinsically important for their diplomatic strategy. It is also noteworthy that for most of this time Russia and Japan were enemies, rivals, competitors. For both parties the significance of bilateral relations to a large extent was determined by their geographical proximity. This geographically predestined relationship can be characterized as âEURœdistant neighbors.âEUR? At the same time, at certain historical stages, this neighborhood was not so "distant." The countries managed to establish relations in the economic sphere, while tourism, cultural, scientific and educational ties were actively developing. The complexity of the relations which developed for just over three centuries is worthy of study. This book analyzes these three centuries of Japan-Russia relations so as not to miss out any essential factors of the relationship.

The Handbook of Sport and Japan presents a fascinating collection of established and new scholarship, a valuable text for readers who want to use sport as lens to look more closely into a nation. The handbook draws on a diversity of perspectives, disciplines and experiences all of which respond to the challenge of including sport in the study of Japan. The chapters in the handbook convey what taking part in sport feels and looks like, highlighting the sporting accomplishments of Japanese athletes and teams, while also reflecting how the sporting experience interacts with economics, diplomacy, media, culture, demographics, gender, ethnicity and identity. Contributions pose key questions about what conclusions can be made when sport is placed in the foreground of key events in Japanese history, including pre-war industrialisation and empire building, to the post-war economic boom, the 2011 Tohoku Disaster and the recent COVID-19 pandemic.

This collection brings together themes in East Asian history, diplomacy, culture and politics written by J.E. Hoare since the early 1970s. His writings derive from his training as a historian, from his time as a Research Analyst in the British Foreign Office from 1969-2003, and from his experiences as a diplomat in the Republic of Korea (South Korea), the PeopleâEUR(TM)s Republic of China, and the Democratic PeopleâEUR(TM)s Republic of Korea (North Korea). The writings selected for this volume include academic papers, book reviews and some quasi-journalistic articles which reflect both historical research and analysis of current events and issues. The wide-ranging content speaks to the authorâEUR(TM)s specialist fields of interest including diplomacy, biography, extraterritoriality and architecture on which he has published extensively.

This volume takes a fresh look at the various aesthetics emerging globally in the early sound film era, with a focus on the filmsâEUR(TM) fundamentally experimental and inventive character. By considering films and production contexts often neglected in film studies, it strives to counter the still dominant view of the transitional period as a time of yet-to-be-perfected forerunners of âEUR¿classicalâEUR(TM) sound film. Instead, authors highlight the sense of âEUR¿fruitful uncertaintyâEUR(TM) in this period of media change and transformation. Subjects covered include visual and auditory style; the uses of speech, music, and noises; aesthetic conceptions in sound film theory; and intermedial aesthetics. The volumeâEUR(TM)s scope is decidedly international, covering production and reception contexts in the Soviet Union, Japan, the USA, Germany, France, Italy, the UK, and Switzerland.

This book is the first ever systematic attempt to study film sound in the Indian subcontinent by artistic research. The book aims to fill the scholarly void on the issues of sound and listening in the Global SouthsâEUR(TM) cultures. It develops a comprehensive understanding of the unique sound world of Indian film and audiovisual media through the examination of historical developments of sound from early optical recordings to contemporary digital audio technologies. The book is enriched with a practice-based methodology informed by the authorâEUR(TM)s own practice and based on extensive conversations with leading sound practitioners in the Indian subcontinent. The book locates an emerging social and spatial awareness in Indian film and media production aided by a creative practice of sound, occurring alongside the traditionally transcendental, oral, and pluriversal approach to listening. By tracing this confluence of tradition and modernity, the book makes valuable contributions to the fields of film history, sound, and media studies.

Japan is widely regarded as having a unique culture and a strong national identity. Paradoxically, however, many basic elements of Japanese culture are not originally Japanese. Since the beginning of its history, Japan has been one of the world's major importers of foreign cultures. Its culture was thoroughly "hybrid" long before that word became fashionable in contemporary global studies. But this does not mean that Japan's culture lacks originality. The Japanese have always made strikingly original contributions, even improvements, to whatever they imported. Even more significantly, the "hybridity" of their culture produced ongoing tensions that served as a kind of creative dynamo for Japanese writers, artists, and intellectuals. This book explores the fundamental creative tension between the native and the foreign in many areas of Japanese culture, from politics and religion to art and literature - a tension also often interpreted as between tradition and modernity.

From the social uprisings in Santiago de Chile to the radical municipalism experiments in Naples, this volume takes the reader on an intellectual journey at the frontlines across global South and global North where climate breakdown meets social innovations. While the effects of the climate crisis are becoming more extreme and tangible across the globe with every passing day, urban social movements and their radical strategies to resist climate injustice often remain concealed from sight. Contributors to this volume ask how would it be to look at the politics of urban loss-and-damage not from the highly securitized zones of climate summits, but from favelas in Rio de Janeiro, flood-prone communities in São Paulo, urban gardens in Naples, or neighborhoods resisting climate gentrification in New York City? This book explores diverse worlds and praxis of urban social movements resisting the rising tides of climate crisis and social injustice.

How did men cope with sexual health issues in early modern England? This vivid history investigates how sexual, reproductive, and genitourinary conditions were understood between 1580 and 1740. Drawing on medical sources and personal testimonies, it reveals how men responded to bouts of ill health and their relationships with the medical practitioners tasked with curing them. In doing so, this study restores men's health to medical histories of reproduction, demonstrating how men's sexual self-identity was tied to their health. Charting genitourinary conditions across the life cycle, the book illustrates how fertility and potency were key to medical understandings of men's health. Men utilized networks of care to help them with ostensibly embarrassing and shameful conditions like hernias, venereal disease, bladder stones, and testicular injuries. The book thus offers a historical voice to modern calls for men to be alert to, and open about, their own bodily health.

This book argues that the fundamental foundation of Hobbes's political philosophy in Leviathan is wise, generous, loving, sincere, just, and valiant--in sum, magnanimous--statecraft, whereby sovereigns aim to realize natural justice, manifest as eminent and other-regarding virtue. It proposes that concerns over the virtues of the natural person bearing the office of the sovereign suffuse Hobbes's political philosophy, defining both his theory of new foundations and his critiques of law and obligation. These aspects of Hobbes's thought are new to Leviathan, as they respond to limitations in his early works in political theory, Elements and De Cive--limitations made apparent by the civil wars and the regicide of Charles I. Though new, this book argues that they tap into ancient political and philosophical ideas, foremostly the variously celebrated, mystified, and maligned figure of the orator founder.

Performative Images draws upon the work of video artists and activists in France between the 1970s and the early 2020s and focuses on significant practices with technology. Video art and video activism are analysed together in the book to revaluate key concepts in media studies and foreground a performative approach to the theory of image technology. The book engages works in visual culture, performance studies, digital studies, critical race theory, and feminist methodologies to account for the changes brought about by video technology in social and psychic life. Performative Images is about art and activists' engagement in video technology--an engagement that unsettles the hegemonic narrative of dominant media, as well as the apparently politically neutral dimension of communication technology. In this book, the author explores how video-image technology shapes our psychic and social environments from an art historiographical perspective. We know media technology is dramatically shaping our political and epistemological landscape: this book foregrounds the emergence of performative video images as a key factor in the revaluation of culture and politics.

With the climate crisis and its repercussions becoming more and more tangible, games are increasingly participating in the production, circulation, and interrogation of environmental assumptions, using both explicit and implicit ways of framing the crisis. Whether they are providing new spaces to imagine and practice alternative forms of living, or reproducing ecomodernist fantasies, games as well as player cultures are increasingly tuned in to the most pressing environmental concerns. This book brings together chapters by a diverse group of established and emerging authors to develop a growing body of scholarship that explores the shape, impact, and cultural context of ecogames. The book comprises four thematic sections, Today's Challenges: Games for Change, Future Worlds: New Imaginaries, The Nonhuman Turn, and Critical Metagaming Practices. Each section explores different aspects of ecocritical engagement in and through games. As a result, the book's comprehensive scope covers a variety of angles, methodologies, and case studies, significantly expanding the field of green media studies.

Even in adversity, Catholics exercised considerable agency in post-Reformation Utrecht. Through the political practices of repression and toleration, Utrecht's magistrates, under constant pressure from the Reformed Church, attempted to exclude Catholics from the urban public sphere. However, by mobilizing their social status and networks, Catholic Utrechters created room to live as pious Catholics and honourable citizens, claiming more rights in the public sphere through their spatial practices and in discourses of self-representation. This book explores how Catholic priests and laypeople cooperated and managed to survive the Reformed regime by participating in a communal process of delimiting the public, continuing to rely on the medieval legacy and adapting to early modern religious diversity. Deploying their own understandings of publicness, Catholic Utrechters not only enabled their survival in the city and the Catholic revival in the Dutch Republic but also contributed to shaping a multi-religious society in the Northern Netherlands.

The motif of the woman and the dragon has been prevalent in Western art since antiquity, yet has hitherto remained understudied, and artworks featuring this motif in Western Mediterranean cultures have been examined primarily in relation to the topos of the male dragon-slayer. This book analyzes artistic images of women and dragons over an extensive period, from Classical Greece and Rome (with forays to Egypt and Mesopotamia) to the early modern period in Western Europe. The unique methodology employed in the study of this motif reveals its sacred core, as well as its relationship to rituals of fertility and oracular knowledge, to the liminal realm between life and death, and to the symbolism of Great Mother goddesses. At the same time, the images explored throughout expose stereotypes and biases against women in unusual positions of power, which were embedded in the motif and persisted in Western European art.

Urban histories tend to be dominated by large, global cities. But what does the history of the modern, colonial era look like from the perspective of smaller cities? By shifting the focus from the metropolis to the secondary city of Chiang Mai, this study provides an alternative narrative of the formation of the modern Thai state that highlights the overlap between European, American, and Siamese interests. Through a detailed analysis of Chiang Mai's urban space, the power dynamics that shaped the city come into focus as an urban-scale manifestation of colonial forces--albeit an incomplete one that allowed sacred space to become a source of conflict that was only resolved in the years before WWII. Today, as the city confronts the challenge of overdevelopment, the legacy of the colonial era, and the opportunity of heritage preservation, this deep, multi-layered history of the power of (and over) urban space is vital.

Through an examination of Dutch Reformed church records and theological texts, Kyle Dieleman explores the local dynamics of religious life in the early modern Dutch Republic. The book argues that within the religiously plural setting of the Dutch Republic church officials used a variety of means to establish a Reformed identity in their communities. As such, the book explores the topics of church orders, elders and deacons, intra-confessional and inter-confessional conflicts, and Sabbath observance as local means by which small, rural communities negotiated and experienced their religious lives. In exploring rural Dutch Reformed congregations, the book examines the complicated relationships between theology and practice and 'lay' and 'elite' religion and highlights challenges rural churches faced. As they faced these issues, Dieleman demonstrates that local congregations exercised agency within their lived religious experiences as they sought unique ways to navigate their own Reformed identity within their small, rural communities.