Böcker utgivna av Manchester University Press

This book describes how human rights have given rise to a vision of benevolent governance that, if fully realised, would be antithetical to individual freedom. It describes human rights' evolution into a grand but nebulous project, rooted in compassion, with the overarching aim of improving universal welfare by defining the conditions of human well-being and imposing obligations on the state and other actors to realise them. This gives rise to a form of managerialism, preoccupied with measuring and improving the 'human rights performance' of the state, businesses and so on. The ultimate result is the 'governmentalisation' of a pastoral form of global human rights governance, in which power is exercised for the general good, moulded by a complex regulatory sphere which shapes the field of action for the individual at every turn. This, unsurprisingly, does not appeal to rights-holders themselves.

This book brings together a range of Indigenous perspectives, forming a global network of writers, thinkers, and scholars connected by common investments in Indigenous futures.

The first monographic study of the painter Agostino Brunias, this book offers a compelling, original analysis of his representation of race in the British colonial West Indies, reconsidering the way in which the artist's oeuvre has previously been understood. -- .

The research of pandemics, epidemics, and pathogens like COVID-19 reaches far beyond the scope of biomedicine. It is not only an objective for the health, political and social sciences, but epidemics and pandemics are a matter of geography: foci and vectors of communicable diseases continue to test the efficacy of medical control at state borders. This volume illuminates these issues from various disciplinary viewpoints. It starts by exploring historical models of quarantine, spatial isolation and detention as precautionary means against the dissemination of disease and contagion by border crossers, migrants and refugees. Besides the patterns of prejudice with which these groups are confronted, the book also deals with various kinds of fear of contamination from outside of the nation state. The contributors address the implementation of medical techniques at state borders in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, as well as the presently practiced measures of medical and biometric screening of migrants and refugees. Uniquely, this volume shows that the current border security regimes of Western states exhibit a high share of medicalised techniques of power, which originate both in European modernity and in the medical and biological disciplines developed during the last quarter of the millennium. Drawing on the collective expertise of a network of international researchers, this interdisciplinary volume is essential reading for those wishing to understand the medicalisation of borders across the globe, from the early eighteenth century up to the present day.

Drawing on the recent ontological turn in critical theory, Spectral Dickens explores an aspect of literary character that is neither real nor fictional, but spectral. This work thus provides an in-depth study of the inimitable characters populating Dickens' illustrated novels using three hauntological concepts: the Freudian uncanny, Derridean spectrality, and the Lacanian real. Thus, while the current discourse on character studies, which revolves around values like realism, depth, and lifelikeness, tends to see characters as mimetic of persons, this book invents new critical concepts to account for non-mimetic forms of characterization. These spectral forms bring to light the important influence of developments in C19th visual culture, such as the lithography and caricature of Daumier and J.J. Grandville. The spectrality of novelistic characters developed here paves the way for a new understanding of fictional characters in general.

Performing the testimonial offers a new critical engagement with verbatim and testimonial theatre that draws on an analysis of a number of international contemporary verbatim and testimonial plays. Moving beyond discourses of the real, the book argues that testimonial theatre engages in acts of truth telling, performing new modes of witnessing. -- .

Turning the conventional Break-Up of Britain narrative inside-out, this book scans the horizon of overseas projections of British identities that unravelled during the decades of global decolonisation

In a world of deep political divisions and rising inequality, many of us feel the need for some form of collective resistance and transformative joint action. Calls for solidarity are heard everywhere. This book presents a critical proposal to guide our reflection on what solidarity is and why it matters. How is solidarity distinct from related ideas such as altruism, justice and fellow-feeling? What value does acting in solidarity with others have? In his lead essay, Andrea Sangiovanni offers compelling answers to these questions, arguing that solidarity is not just a fuzzy stand-in for feelings of togetherness but a distinctive social practice for an anxious age. His ideas are then put to the test in a series of responses from some of the world's foremost philosophers and political theorists.

Decorators and designers have long experimented with materials, objects and technologies to enhance sensory awareness and wellbeing. But existing histories of interior design rarely feature any discussion of the senses. This volume offers a corrective, exploring how sight, touch, smell, hearing and taste have been mobilized within various forms of interior. Grouped into three thematic clusters, exploring sensory politics, aesthetic entanglements and sensual economies, the chapters in this volume shed light on sensory expressions and experiences of interior design throughout history. They examine domestic and public interiors from the late-sixteenth century to the present day, giving back the body its central role in the understanding and use of interiors. Drawing from fields including design history, design studies and sensory studies, The senses in interior design explores fundamental questions about identities, social structures and politics that reveal the significance of the senses in all aspects of interior design and decoration.

This edited volume asks how the city, with its spatial and temporal configuration and its rhythms, produces and shapes violence, both in terms of the built environment, and through particular 'urban' social relations. The book builds on the insight that violence itself is a spatiotemporal practice with generative as well as destructive capacities, which create and transform urban space and time. By looking at the different ways in which the spatial and temporal configuration of cities produce and shape violence, the authors contextualise the dynamics of urban violence and show how violence affects everyday urban spatial practices and rhythms. Violence may reconfigure spatialities and temporalities in cities in the long term, changing the physical and social space as well the rhythms of a city. Memories and imaginations of violence are also inscribed in city-space, often in several temporal layers, and can lead to new violence through politicised practices of commemoration. In The spatiality and temporality of urban violence, authors from a range of disciplines apply this spatiotemporal perspective to nine diverse case studies, based on original material collected during ethnographic and archival research. The chapters cover cities in different world regions and historical phases, offering translocal and transregional perspectives. This fresh new perspective challenges assumed binaries of cities in the global North and South, and contests the alleged difference between violence in the past and in the present.

This is the first scholarly collection to focus on the special importance of British cinema to folk horror. The chapters consider the artistic styles, historical contexts, cultural tensions and cinematic fears that distinguish folk horror from other forms of horror and from traditional ways of viewing the folk.

Situating religion and medicine in Asia illuminates how Asian practices for health, healing and spiritual cultivation were mobilised in their originary times and places. Although many such practices have survived today, they circulate in new forms - within a burgeoning global marketplace, in the imaginaries of national health bureaus, as the focus of major scholarly grant initiatives and as subjects of neurological study. Labels such as 'alternative', 'complementary' and 'wellness'- privilege medical authority and a detachment from religion writ large, implying a distance between 'medicine' and 'religion' that is not reflective of the originary contexts of these practices. This volume makes a critical intervention in the scholarship on medical and religious practices in East, South and Southeast Asia and the Himalayas, inviting a new comparative frame outside the history of science and religion in Europe. It illustrates how practices from divination and demonography to anatomy, massage, plant medicine and homeopathy were situated within the contours of the medicine and religion of their time, in contrast to modern formations of 'medicine' and 'religion'. The book assembles empirical data about the construction of medicine and religion as social categories of practice, and enables comparison across the geographic, temporal and conceptual range, providing readers with a set of methodological approaches for future study.

This book provides an innovative methodology for investigating how China has been conceptualised historically, tracing the development of four key concepts (filial piety, face, fengshui, and guanxi) in English and Chinese. It explores how specific ideas about what constitutes the uniqueness of Chinese culture influence the ways we think about China. -- .

'Parasram lays out a thought-provoking argument, exploring an ontological collision between modernist-liberal accounts of sovereignty and the sovereign traditions of the colonised. When sovereignty is subjected to a modernist revaluation, the consequences are devastating.' >This book documents the political and cosmological processes through which the idea of 'total territorial rule' came into being in the context of early- to mid-nineteenth-century Ceylon (Sri Lanka). Analysing ideas at the core of the modern international system, Pluriversal sovereignty and the state develops a decolonial theoretical framework informed by a 'pluriverse' of multiple ontologies of sovereignty to argue that the territorial state itself is an outcome of imperial globalisation. Anti-colonialism up to the middle of the nineteenth century was grounded in genealogies and practices of sovereignty that developed in many localities. By the second half of the century, however, the global state system and the states within it were forming through colonising and anti-colonising vectors. By focusing on the ontological conflicts that shaped the state and empire, we can rethink the birth of the British Raj and locate it in Ceylon some 50 years earlier than in India. In this way, the book makes a theoretical contribution to postcolonial and decolonial studies in globalisation and international relations by considering the ontological significance of 'total territorial rule' as it emerged historically in Ceylon. Through emphasising one important manifestation of modernity and coloniality -- the territorial state -- the book contributes to studies in the politics of ontological pluralism in sovereignty, postcolonial and decolonial international studies, and globalisation through colonial encounters.

This book offers essential reading on a wide array of theatre and film productions of Shakespeare's play The Merchant of Venice. Richly contextualised analyses of individual productions by major directors help produce a nuanced picture of the performance history of the play, guiding the reader from the 1930s through the early twenty-first century. -- .

As the pursuit of profit becomes increasingly surreal, virtual, and exotic by the day, the symbiosis between libidinal and financial flows demands to be reframed and rethought. Clickbait capitalism offers a stimulating and game-changing introduction to how the current confluence of economy and desire pre-empts our behaviour, structures our identity, influences our decisions, and tugs at our wallets.>Lie back on the couch with this book and let it analyse your triggers and traumas about student debt and intergenerational inequity. Ramble down the royal road of the unconscious, interpreting the collective delirium from Cryptokitties to cryogenics, Squid Game to GameStop. These bracing chapters, invoking theorists from Adorno to Zizek, fuse psychology and economics to diagnose the neuroses of our moment. The results are electric!>Desire plays a crucial yet poorly understood role within economic life. This is increasingly untenable as potent new cultures of desire take shape around the intersection of digital technology and finance. Clickbait capitalism stages an encounter between psychoanalysis, political economy, and the calling cards of twenty-first-century capitalism. Drawing on a theoretical tradition known as 'libidinal economy', the book engages digital-economic life as a site of ongoing psychological capture and release. The result is a unique survey of the moods and structures of feeling that underwrite capitalism today, from online paranoia and the ecstatic mania of the crypto-boom to the escape and revenge fantasies of the indebted young. Adopting a pluralistic approach, the book offers a range of new perspectives on the psychological foundations and ongoing viability of capitalism as a social formation and economic system.