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Manliness in Britain offers a new account of masculinity in the long nineteenth century: more corporeal and material, more emotional, more cross-class, and less heteronormative than other studies. Using diverse textual, visual, and material culture sources, it shows that masculinities were produced and disseminated through men’s bodies, very often working-class ones, and the emotions and material culture associated with them. It analyses idealised men who stimulated desire and admiration, including virile boxers, soldiers, sailors, and blacksmiths, brave firemen, and noble industrial workers. Also investigated are unmanly men, like drunkards, wife-beaters, and masturbators who elicited disgust and aversion. The book disrupts the chronology of nineteenth-century masculinities, since it stretches from the ages of feeling, revolution, and reform, to those of militarism, imperialism, representative democracy, and mass media. It also queers these histories, by recognising that male and female desire for idealised male bodies and the gender attributes they embodied was integral to the success of manliness. Imagined working-class men and their materiality was central to broader ideas of manliness and unmanliness. They not only offered didactic lessons for the working classes and made the labouring ranks appear less threatening, they provide insights into the production of middle-class men’s identities. Overall, it is shown that this melding of bodies, emotions, and material culture created emotionalised bodies and objects, which facilitated the conveying, reproducing, and fixing of manliness in society. As such, the book will be vital for students and academics in the history of bodies, emotions, gender, and material culture. (248 words)

What were the distinctive cultures of decolonisation that emerged in the years between 1945 and 1970, and what can they uncover about the complexities of the ‘end of empire’ as a process? Cultures of Decolonisation brings together visual, literary and material cultures within one volume in order to explore this question. The volume reveals the diverse ways in which cultures were active in wider political, economic and social change, working as crucial gauges, microcosms, and agents of decolonisation. Individual chapters focus on architecture, theatre, museums, heritage sites, fine art, and interior design alongside institutions such as artists’ groups, language agencies and the Royal Mint in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Europe. Drawing on a range of disciplinary perspectives, these contributions offer revealing case studies for those researching decolonisation at all levels across the humanities and social sciences. The collection demonstrates the transnational character of cultures of decolonisation (and of decolonisation itself), and illustrates the value of comparison – between different sorts of cultural forms and different places – in understanding the nature of this dramatic and wide-reaching geopolitical change. Cultures of Decolonisation illustrates the value of engaging with the complexities of decolonisation as enacted and experienced by a broad range of actors beyond ‘flag independence’ and the realm of high politics. In the process it makes an important contribution to the theoretical, methodological and empirical diversification of the historiography of the end of empire.

The Practice of Misuse examines the oppositional emergence and eventual ideological containment of “rugged consumers” in late twentieth-century American literature, who creatively misuse, reuse, and repurpose the objects within their environments to suit their idiosyncratic needs and desires. The book shows how authors such as Sam Shepard, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Chuck Pahlaniuk, Cormac McCarthy, and Margaret Atwood position their rugged consumers within the intertwined American myths of primal nature and rugged individualism, creating left- and right-libertarian maker communities that are skeptical of both traditional political institutions and (in its pre-neoliberal state) globalized corporate capitalism. Through their unorthodox encounters with the material world, rugged consumers can temporarily suspend the various networks of power that dictate the proper use of a given commodity and reveal those networks to be contingent strategies that must be perpetually renewed and reinforced rather than naturalized processes that persist untroubled through time and space. At the same time, this Utopian ideal is rarely met: most examples of rugged consumerism conceal rather than foreground the ideological problems to which they respond and thus support or ignore rather than challenge the conditions of late capitalist consumerism. By analyzing both the rare convergences and common divergences between individual material practices and collectivist politics, this study shows how rugged consumerism both recodes and reflects the dynamic social history of objects in American material and literary cultures from the 1960s to the present.

Economic liberalization and globalization in India in the early 1990s resulted in a whirlwind of consumerist activities. New material and visual temptations swept markets, infiltrated consumer minds through media, and aroused inhibited desires. This has engendered a fast-paced and relentless relationship with things and images that permeate our everyday lives. Consumerist Encounters elucidates how our all-consuming relationship with objects and their representations have transformed rapidly over the last few decades in contemporary urban India. It argues that ephemerality, frivolousness, and multiplicity of choice regulate our flirtatious encounters with commodities and their images as we restlessly use, exhaust, dispose, and move on. Such a trend is illustrated by examining a plethora of commodity-centric phenomena such as exclusion through apparel, eroticization of body images, population of the T-shirt surface with graphics and text, rise of business process outsourcing, instantaneous seeing and sharing of images, and rejection of material goods in junkyards and ruins. These explorations collectively shed light on the constant negotiation of our identities, statuses, and mobilities in the image-saturated commodity landscape.

Istwa across the Water draws on the historian and poet Kamau Brathwaite’s concept of tidalectics as cultural exchange that is patterned after the back and forth movement of the ocean’s waves, to explore Haitian cultural production through the lenses of history and memory by way of the Vodou concept of the Marasa or twinned entities. Istwa across the Water takes on Haiti’s complementary or twinned sites of cultural production in the West African area of Dahomey/Benin Republic and the Central West African Kôngo region from which many Haitians originate. It discusses oral and visual art traditions from both sides of the Atlantic divide as a means to explore the dynamic and constantly evolving exchange of physical and spiritual energies between Haiti and its “motherlands” (sites of origin) as Spirit seeks to restore the balance that was lost during the transatlantic trade and slave era.

The 22 newly commissioned essays in this volume re-examine some of the key concepts taken to define the British fin se siècle while also introducing hitherto overlooked cultural phenomena, such as humanitarianism. The impact of research into material culture is explored; specifically, how the history of the book and of performance culture is changing our understanding of this period. A wide range of activities is discussed, from participation in avant-garde theatre to interior decoration, and from the publishing of poetry to forms of political and religious activism. Attention is also given to how the meaning of the fin de siècle is impacted by place, including the significance of cultural exchanges between Britain and countries such as Russia and Italy; the distinctiveness of the Irish and Scottish fin de siècles; as well as activities within different regions of England, such as in the Midlands cities of Birmingham and Nottingham. In contrast to recent research exploring the global or transnational dimensions of the fin de siècle, this volume focuses on micro- rather than macro-cultural issues, the research underpinning these essays highlighting a diversity of practices that developed along different timelines and in different geographical locations, and which do not cohere into any simple pattern. Nor is there any obvious point of their intersection which might be said to mark a cultural turning point. A question the volume as a whole thus aims to pose is whether there is anything to be gained by distinguishing all, of any, of these practices as ‘fin-de-siècle’?

Making Music Indigenous focuses on indigenous chimaycha music from the Peru’s highland region. It explores the transformation of this Quechua-language song genre over the last half-century, in relation to three central themes: nature, mass mediation, and social politics. The first part of the book explores an era past, when chimaycha was linked to seasonal cycles of animal husbandry and climactic variation, on one hand, and on the other to the human life cycle, particularly via its role in youthful courtship. In this period the genre was an aesthetic means of mediating relations between human actors and their ecological circumstances, and the book shows how such relations became embedded in such musical elements as song lyrics and timbral preferences. The second part explores the genre’s conversion into a self-conscious symbol of cultural identity, first under the influence of development organizations and educators between the 1970s and 1990s, and then under the direction of popular cultural entrepreneurs after 2000. It focuses especially on activities of folkloric promotion associated with the local state university, and the later interventions of indigenous radio broadcasters, whose work was made possible by those folkloric activities. The final part of the book explores the genre from the perspective of an instrument maker and performer whose expertise has been central to its development since the late 1980s. It focuses especially on the relationship between natural knowledge, the manual skills germane to the maker’s trade, and the objects that makers produce, which shape contemporary performers’ relation to the sonorous past.

This edited collection explores how knowledge was preserved and reinvented in the Middle Ages. Unlike previous publications, which are predominantly focused either on a specific historical period or on precise cultural and historical events, this volume, which includes essays spanning from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries, is intended to eschew traditional categorisations of periodisation and disciplines and to enable the establishment of connections and cross-sections between different departments of knowledge, including the history of science (computus, prognostication), the history of art, literature, theology (homilies, prayers, hagiography, contemplative texts), music, historiography and geography. As suggested by its title, the collection does not pretend to aim at inclusiveness or comprehensiveness but is intended to highlight suggestive strands of what is a very wide topic. The chapters in this volume are grouped into four sections: I, Anthologies of Knowledge; II Transmission of Christian Traditions; III, Past and Present; and IV, Knowledge and Materiality, which are intended to provide the reader with a further thematic framework for approaching aspects of knowledge. Aspects of knowledge is mainly aimed to an academic readership, including advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students, and specialists of medieval literature, history of science, history of knowledge, history, geography, theology, music, philosophy, intellectual history, history of the language and material culture.

Manliness in Britain offers a new account of masculinity in the long nineteenth century: more corporeal and material, more emotional, more cross-class, and less heteronormative than other studies. Using diverse textual, visual, and material culture sources, it shows that masculinities were produced and disseminated through men’s bodies, very often working-class ones, and the emotions and material culture associated with them. It analyses idealised men who stimulated desire and admiration, including virile boxers, soldiers, sailors, and blacksmiths, brave firemen, and noble industrial workers. Also investigated are unmanly men, like drunkards, wife-beaters, and masturbators who elicited disgust and aversion. The book disrupts the chronology of nineteenth-century masculinities, since it stretches from the ages of feeling, revolution, and reform, to those of militarism, imperialism, representative democracy, and mass media. It also queers these histories, by recognising that male and female desire for idealised male bodies and the gender attributes they embodied was integral to the success of manliness. Imagined working-class men and their materiality was central to broader ideas of manliness and unmanliness. They not only offered didactic lessons for the working classes and made the labouring ranks appear less threatening, they provide insights into the production of middle-class men’s identities. Overall, it is shown that this melding of bodies, emotions, and material culture created emotionalised bodies and objects, which facilitated the conveying, reproducing, and fixing of manliness in society. As such, the book will be vital for students and academics in the history of bodies, emotions, gender, and material culture. (248 words)