Bøger udgivet af Amsterdam University Press

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.

This book is an ethnographic account of education and migration from the perspective of three groups of South Koreans in contemporary China: migrant parents, children/students, and educational agents. The book reveals how these temporary migrants make choices, plan their trajectories and engage with the authorities, both in China and South Korea. Migrant subjectivities among these groups are driven by and respond to the education-migration regimes of both the sending and receiving countries. As 'people in between', they occupy flexible and multiple positionalities that are transnationally distributed. However, paradoxically, they experience a juxtaposition of privilege, integration and separation, which is indicative of the Chinese style of internationalisation. The book adds weight to the argument that China is a temporary destination for foreigners and not one for long-term settlement.

The figure of the witch is familiar from the work of early modern German, Dutch, and Flemish artists, but much less so in the work of their Italian counterparts. Art and Witchcraft in Early Modern Italy seeks to explore the ways in which representations of witchcraft emerged from and coincided with the main cultural currents and artistic climate of an epoch chiefly celebrated for its humanistic and rational approaches. Through an in-depth examination of a panoply of arresting paintings, engravings, and drawings--variously portraying a hag-ridden colossal phallus, a horror-stricken necromancer dodging the devil's scrabbling claws, and a nocturnal procession presided over by an infanticidal crone--Guy Tal offers new ways of reading witchcraft images through and beyond conventional iconography. Artists such as Parmigianino, Alessandro Allori, Leonello Spada, and Angelo Caroselli effected visual commentaries on demonological notions that engaged their audience in a tantalizing experience of interpretation.

This book situates Alfred the Great in his hagiographic context. For 150 years, the fables told in the ninth century about Alfred's childhood have posed interlocking disciplinary challenges to historians committed to evicting romance from history. Blending current Hagiography Studies with historical, literary, and biblical hermeneutics can help us forgo the anti-hagiographic commitments which motivated the scholars who purified the Victorian cult of Alfred by expunging his legends and salvaging his historicity. The book focusses on the typological functions of three Alfredian fables from the Old English Chronicle, the Old English Boethius, and Asser's Vita Ælfredi, analyses the plot common to all three, critiques the psychological conjecture that Alfred's childhood memory was their common source, and shows that synoptically they can help us see how Alfred shaped the curve of his own life's destiny and how he engaged in the formation of his own cult to last a thousand years.

The Barrandov Studios are one of the largest and oldest film studios in Europe. For more than 80 years so far, the studios have been the location of choice for over 2,500 Czech and International films. Barrandov's founding fathers, the Havel brothers Vàclav and Milo. (the grandfather and uncle of later president Vàclav Havel), built the 'Hollywood of Eastern Europe' in the 1930s. A legendary studio like this - and its story - has so far not been told to an English-speaking readership. This collection aims to correct this, presenting the studio's rich history, its esteemed directors, and their most important films.

After war defeat in 1945, Japan underwent historic political, economic and social transformations resulting in the country's rebirth as an economic powerhouse and exemplar of liberal democracy in East Asia. This handbook expands and enriches our understanding of this tumultuous contemporary era in Japan's modern history. Chapters in the volume ask novel theoretical questions and present fresh empirical perspectives on the era. How, for example, has the postwar era been chronologized to date and how might we rethink or enhance such interpretations? What can we learn by rethinking established moments and phases like the Allied Occupation, the period of high-speed economic growth, the 1970s, the Bubble Economy, and the "lost decades" of Heisei Japan (1989-2019)? What new issues might we introduce to subvert accepted understandings of the postwar era and its various sub-eras? Moreover, how might Japan's internal postwar be expanded by rethinking the era through novel historical frameworks and regional imaginaries such as East Asian history, Cold War history, environmental history and transnational history? Contributors attempt to transcend temporal, geographical, intellectual and other boundaries inherent in our current understandings of Japan's postwar experience to provide a compelling compilation of perspectives. Showcasing the work of historians and leading scholars from other disciplines, chapters cover thematic areas including the origins of the postwar era, postwar politics, society and popular culture, transnational and international interactions, and historical memory. The volume's extensive chronological coverage, combined with the innovative perspectives of the contributors, make it essential reading for both researchers and learners interested in the multifaceted dynamics of Japan's fascinating contemporary era.

Women Filmmakers in Sinophone World Cinema portrays a group of important contemporary women filmmakers working across the Sinophone world including Taiwan, Hong Kong, mainland China, and beyond. The book delineates and conceptualizes their cinematic and trans-media practices within an evolving, multifaceted feminist intimate-public commons. The films by these experienced and emerging filmmakers, including Huang Yu-shan, Yau Ching, Ai Xiaoming, Wen Hui, Huang Ji and others, represent some of the most innovative and socially engaged work in both fictional and non-fictional modes in Chinese-language cinema as well as global women's cinema. Their narrative, documentary, and experimental film practices from the 1980s to the present, along with their work in sister media such as dance, theater, literature, and contemporary art, their activities as scholars, educators, activists, and film festival organizers or jurors, have significantly reshaped the landscape of Sinophone film culture and expanded the borders of world cinema.

Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography presents an interdisciplinary examination of trans and genderqueer subjects in medieval hagiography. Scholarship has productively combined analysis of medieval literary texts with modern queer theory - yet, too often, questions of gender are explored almost exclusively through a prism of sexuality, rather than gender identity. This volume moves beyond such limitations, foregrounding the richness of hagiography as a genre integrally resistant to limiting binaristic categories, including rigid gender binaries. The collection showcases scholarship by emerging trans and genderqueer authors, as well as the work of established researchers. Working at the vanguard of historical trans studies, these scholars demonstrate the vital and vitally political nature of their work as medievalists. Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography enables the re-creation of a lineage linking modern trans and genderqueer individuals to their medieval ancestors, providing models of queer identity where much scholarship has insisted there were none, and re-establishing the place of non-normative gender in history.

This book deals with the 1980s - the "golden decade" of Hong Kong pop culture - in which a cosmopolitan lifestyle of pop and chic emerged in the city. Bookended by two major historical incidents, the 1980s will probably enter the annals of Hong Kong history as the decade that defined its future after reversion to Mainland China. Having witnessed and experienced the rise of Hong Kong pop culture to unprecedented heights in this decade, the author enhances its context through a story about his own personal belongings. Examining popular genres including television, film, music, fashion, disco and city magazine, this book teases out the distinctive aspects of Hong Kong pop culture that defined (his) Hong Kong. As Hong Kong has been undergoing drastic changes in recent years, it is necessary to point toward new imaginaries by re-examining its development. Toward this end, this book will shed light on an important research area of Hong Kong Studies as an academic discipline.

This study of ludic literary society in sixteenth-century France addresses Italianate practices of philosophical and literary sociability as they took root there. It asserts that entertainment activities of women-led circles illustrate the richly complex precursors of the seventeenth-century salons. Notions from the philosophy of play, such as those developed by Johan Huizinga, Eugen Fink, and Roger Caillois, who argue that play is critically intertwined with the development of society, provide a theoretical path across these periods of women's engagement in literary culture. The barrister Estienne Pasquier, whose voluminous network of literary and legal connections permitted him entry into the society of such women, acts as an eyewitness to sixteenth-century circles. Ultimately, we see that the ludic activities in such society produced powerful influences that extended beyond the confines of the groups in question to shape ideas, attitudes, and activities--such as those of the salon cultural norms to come.

The uprising which shook France in May 1968 also had a revolutionary effect on the country's most prominent film journal. Under editors Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, Cahiers du cinéma embarked on a militant turn that would govern the journal's work over the next five years. With a Marxist orientation inspired by the thinking of Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes, the "red years" of Cahiers du cinéma produced a theoretical outpouring that was formative for the establishment of film studies as an academic discipline in the 1970s, and is still of vital relevance for the contemporary audiovisual landscape. It was also the seminal experience for a generation of critics who have dedicated the following half-century to the task of critically responding to the cinema. The Red Years of Cahiers du Cinéma (1968-1973) gives a historical overview of this period in the journal's history, combining biographical accounts of the critics who were involved with Cahiers in the post-1968 and theoretical explorations of the text they wrote. Volume I focuses on the relationship of film with the spheres of ideology and politics.

The prehistoric site of Ban Chiang in northeast Thailand challenges the narrative of Thai origins, while at the same time appealing to the public's vision of Thailand as an early centre of civilization. Ban Chiang demonstrates the complexity of constructing national heritage in modern Thailand, where the Thai national narrative begins and ends with Buddhism and the monarchy. Designs on Pots. Ban Chiang and the Politics of Heritage in Thailand contributes to the literature on cultural preservation, repatriation, fake antiquities as souvenirs, and the ethics of collecting, and demonstrates how heritage tourism intersects with the antiquities market in Asia. Ban Chiang itself is important for rethinking the model of indigenous development in Southeast Asian prehistory and provides informed speculation about the borders between prehistory, proto-history, and history in the region, challenging current and past models of Indianization that shape the Thai state's heritage narrative.

In the ongoing aftermath of the nuclear accident in 2011, filmmakers have continued to issue warnings about the state of Japanese society and politics, which remain mired in refusal to change. Nearly a decade in the making, Japanese Filmmakers in the Wake of Fukushima is based on in-person interviews with countless filmmakers, as well as continuous dialogue with them and their work. Author Wada-Marciano has expanded these dialogues to include students, audiences at screenings, critics, and researchers, and her observations are based on down-to-earth-exchange of ideas engaged in over a long period of time. Filmmakers and artists are in the vanguard of those who grapple with what should be done regarding the struggle against fear of the invisible blight--radiation exposure. Rather than blindly following the mass media and public opinion, they have chosen to think and act independently. While repeatedly viewing and reviewing the film works from the post-Fukushima period, Wada-Marciano felt the unwavering message that emanates from them: "There must be no more nuclear weapons." "There must be no more nuclear power generation." The book is dedicated to convincing readers of the clarity of their message.

This volume assembles texts dedicated to the linguistic and educational aspects of missionary and colonial enterprises, taking into account all continents and with an extended diachronic perspective (15th-20th centuries). Strictly speaking, this "linguistics" is contemporary to the colonial era, so it is primarily the work of missionaries of Catholic orders and Protestant societies. It can also belong to a retrospective outlook, following decolonization. In the first category, one mostly finds transcription, translation, and grammatization practices (typically, the production of dictionaries and grammar books). In the second category, one finds in addition descriptions of language use, of situations of diglossia, and of contact between languages. Within this framework, the volume focuses on educational and linguistic policies, language teaching and learning, and the didactics that were associated with them.

What is literature? Can we measure 'literariness' in texts themselves? The innovative Computational Humanities project The Riddle of Literary Quality asked thousands of Dutch readers for their opinion about contemporary Dutch and translated novels. The public shared which novels they had read, what they really thought of them, and how they judged their quality. Their judgments of the same novels were compared with the results of computational analysis of the books. Using evidence from almost 14,000 readers and building on more textual data than ever before, Van Dalen-Oskam and her team uncovered unconscious biases that shed new light on prejudices many people assumed no longer existed. This monograph explains in an accessible way how the project unfolded, which methods were used, and how the results may change the future of Literary Studies.

This book presents a previously unpublished historical translation of a Naxi manuscript by a Dutch missionary translator, alongside an ambitious new annotated translation providing near-unprecedented detail and information about the world's last surviving "pictographic" script: Naxi dongba.

Film Authorship in Contemporary Transmedia Culture: The Paratextual Lives of Asian Auteurs examines film authorship in the transmedia era whereby film directors have become public figures through a wide range of textual, material, and performative practices. The book draws on the notion of paratext and its related term - palimpsest - to bring forth the idea of self-reflexive authorship as a method of examining the mediated past, present, and afterlife of East Asian filmmakers. The first part of the book pays attention to materials surrounding film festivals, multi-platform distribution, and cinephile/fan creative practices, which have been created, rewritten, and shared to foster and problematize the reputations of selected filmmakers. The second part examines alternative modes of self-projections and creative productions that address the filmmakers' sense of selves and relations with the industry and the public. Across different chapters, discourses surrrounding film authorship and East Asian cinema are revisited and expanded to highlight its multiple histories and possible futures.

The volume presents a wide-ranging investigation of the ways in which Petrarch's legacy informed the relationship between visual and literary portraits in sixteenth-century Italy. Petrarch's vast literary production influenced the intellectual framework in which new models of representation and self-representation developed during the Renaissance. His two sonnets on Laura's portrait by Simone Martini and his ambivalent fascination with the illusionary power of portraiture in his Latin texts -- such as the Secretum, the Familiares and De remediis utriusque fortune -- constituted the theoretical reference for artists and writers alike. In a century dominated by the rhetorical comparison between art and literature (ut pictura poësis) and by the paragone debate, the interplay between Petrarch's oeuvre, Petrarchism and portraiture shaped the discourse on the relationship between the sitters' physical image and their inner life. The volume brings together diverse interdisciplinary contributions that explore the subject through a rich body of literary and visual sources.

Most people know little more than fragments of Dutch Jewish history: the Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam; Jewish socialism; the devastating years of the Second World War. So where is the storyline? What happened to the Jews in the Netherlands from the moment they first settled there permanently? This book answers that question. It presents the central points of 700 years of Jewish history in the Netherlands briefly and succinctly. One hundred elements of the story have been chosen that taken as a whole create a balanced and representative picture. Each relates to a central event, place, person or object that helps to illuminate one important aspect of the history of the Jews in the Netherlands, and each is linked to a striking, iconic image. They are grouped by century around unifying themes that make them part of an ongoing story.

What unleashed the forces of global capitalism which continue to shape the world that we live in? Economists and economic historians variously point to innovations in logistics and trade, the emergence of a new set of business-friendly values and the emergence of new forms of applied knowledge in early modernity to solve this riddle. This book focuses on the moving image as a factor of economic development. In a series of in-depth cases studies at the intersection of film and media studies, science and technology studies and economic and social history, Films That Work Harder: The Circulations of Industrial Film presents an in-depth, global perspective on the dynamic relationship between film, industrial organization and economic development. Bringing together new research from leading scholars from Europe, Asia, Australia and North America, this book combines the state of the art in the field with an agenda for a future research.

Monstrous Beings and Media Cultures examines the monsters and sinister creatures that spawn from folk horror, Gothic fiction, and from various sectors of media cultures. The collection illuminates how folk monsters form across different art and media traditions, and interrogates the 21C revitalization of "folk" as both a cultural formation and aesthetic mode. The essays explore how combinations of vernacular and institutional creative processes shape the folkloric and/or folkoresque attributes of monstrous beings, their popularity, and the contexts in which they are received. While it focuses on 21C permutations of folk monstrosity, the collection is transhistorical in approach, featuring chapters that focus on contemporary folk monsters, historical antecedents, and the pre-C21st art and media traditions that shaped enduring monstrous beings. The collection also illuminates how folk monsters and folk "horror" travel across cultures, media, and time periods, and how iconic monsters are tethered to yet repeatedly become unanchored from material and regional contexts.

In the twenty-first century horror television has spread across the digital TV landscape, garnering mainstream appeal. Located within a transmedia matrix, Transmedia Terrors in Post-TV Horror triangulates this boom across screen content, industry practices, and online participatory cultures. Understanding the genre within a post-TV paradigm, the book readdresses what is horror television, analysing not only broadcast TV and streaming platforms but also portals such as YouTube, Twitch.TV, and apps. The book also investigates complex digital media ecologies, blurring distinctions between niche and general audience viewing practices, and fostering new circulation pathways for horror television from around the world. Undertaking netnography, the book further offers an innovative model - abject spectrums - to empirically explore myriad audience responses to TV horror, manifesting in various participatory practices including writing, imagery, and crafts. As such, the book greatly expands what is considered horror television, its formatting and circulation, and the transmedia materiality of audience engagement.

Travel Writing in Mongolia and Northern China, 1860-2020 invites readers to explore Mongolia as an important cultural space for Western travelers and their audiences over three historical eras. Travelers have framed their experiences and observations through imaginative geographies and Orientalizing discourses, fixing Mongolia as a peripheral, timeless, primitive, and parochial place. Readers can examine the travelers' literary and rhetorical strategies as they make themselves more credible and authoritative and as they identify themselves with Mongolians and Mongolian culture or, conversely, distance themselves. In this book, readers can also approach travel writing from the perspective of women travelers, Mongolian socialist intellectuals, twenty-first-century travelers, and a Han Chinese writer, Jiang Rong, who promotes cultural harmony yet anticipates the disappearance of Mongolian culture in China.

Non-elite or marginalized early modern women--among them the poor, migrants, members of religious or ethnic minorities, abused or abandoned wives, servants, and sex workers--have seldom left records of their experiences. Drawing on a variety of sources, including trial records, administrative paperwork, letters, pamphlets, hagiography, and picaresque literature, this volume explores how, as social agents, these doubly invisible women built and used networks and informal alliances to supplement the usual structures of family and community that often let them down. Ten essays, ranging widely in geography from the eastern Mediterranean to colonial Spanish America and in time from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, show how flexible, sometimes ad hoc relationships could provide crucial practical and emotional support for women who faced problems of livelihood, reputation, displacement, and violence.

What do we do when we listen? The act of engagement with music in everyday life may seem simple on the surface but participation, interpretation, circulation and cultural production in the digital age are more complex and entangled than ever before. It is especially so in Japan, with its vast multimedia idol and vocaloid industries. This unique ethnographic work at the intersection of cultural, media and music studies covers a wide spectrum of music-related activities embedded in the daily lives of two Japanese cohorts. The varied case studies, including teen idol groups and virtual idols, aid the detailed examination of the relation between music, generation, and society.

This book is specifically dedicated to film history's own history: It provides insights into the fabrication of film histories and the discourses on their materials and methods in the past in order to better understand and reconsider film history today. The interventions unpack unspoken assumptions and hidden agendas that determine film historiography until today, also with the aim to act as a critical reflection on the potential future orientation of the field. The edited volume proposes a transnational, entangled and culturally diverse approach towards an archaeology of film history, while paying specific attention to persons, objects, infrastructures, regions, institutional fields and events hitherto overlooked. It explores past and ongoing processes of doing, undoing and redoing film history. Thereby, in a self-reflective gesture, it also draws attention to our own work as film historians.

Tradition, translation, and transcription in Henrician verse functioned together in systems of communally created, coded position-taking. Understanding this system as an extensive network of production and reception in which women took on many roles allows for new readings of Henrician verse that emphasize the interpretive range available to contemporary reading and writing communities. This restoration demasculinizes our approach to Henrician verse not only through a more equitable consideration of gender's functions in that social world, but also in de-emphasizing individualized self-fashioning or authorial intent in favor of an engagement with communal production and shared sociopolitical engagement. The creation in this system is not of a code, but of systems for coding and recognizing position-taking. These communal systems offer a site for the intersection of reader and writer, of transcriber and composer, and of King and courtier in a space that questions, creates, and troubles power in the Henrician court.

In the late 1960s, the cinema was pronounced dead. Television, like a Biblical Cain had slain his brother Abel. Some thirty years later, a remarkable reversal: rarely has the cinema been more popular. And yet, rarely has the cinema's future seemed more uncertain. Cinema Futures: Cain, Abel or Cable? presents a careful and forceful argument about predictions that tend to be made when new technologies appear. Examining the complex dynamics of convergence and divergence among the audio-visual media, the authors are realistic in their estimate of the future of the cinema's distinctive aesthetic identity, and robustly optimistic that the different social needs audiences bring to the public and domestic media will ensure their distinctiveness, as well as the necessary openness of cultural meaning and creative imput. The chief contributors include producers, historians, critics and journalists from several countries, creating a lively volume, rich in information and case studies, useful to media students and film scholars, as well as to anyone interested in better understanding the momentous changes transforming our worlds of sound and image.

Is it possible to be religiously exclusive and socially inclusive? How do we deal with those outside of our own religious community who have completely different and sometimes conflicting views on what should be considered true and right behaviour? What if a religious tradition orders the expulsion or killing of those who leave the faith community and adopt another worldview? This book focuses on biblical texts concerning exclusivity and apostasy, studying different interpretations of such texts. It starts with the Jewish and Christian tradition of the Hebrew Bible, continues with texts from the New Testament, and explores diverse social studies to find ways of understanding the relationship between exclusion and inclusion today. Part of this exploration is the interaction with Jewish and Islamic voices. The collection ends with a systematic and missiological reflection on the issues Christian churches and other religious communities must address today.