Browse Books

Beijing Film Academy 2022
The annual Beijing Film Academy Yearbook highlights the best academic debates discussions and research from the previous year as previously published in the highly prestigious Journal of Beijing Film Academy. This volume brings together specially selected articles appearing for the first time in English to bridge the gap in cross-cultural research in cinema and media studies.
The book is the latest in the Intellect China Library series to produce work by Chinese scholars that have not previously been available to English language academia. Covering the subjects of film studies visual arts performing arts media and cultural studies the series aims to foster intellectual debate and to promote closer cross-cultural intellectual exchanges by introducing important works of Chinese scholarship to readers.

The Being of Relation
How does whiteness sediment worlds? How does it format individuality in the name of a neurotypicality that polices how one bodies and how one comes to know? And how does a poetics of relation shift the very logic of this sedimentation?
Edouard Glissant’s poetics of relation are bold in their call to “consent not to be a single being.” This transindividual consent born in the process of worlds crafting themselves in what he would call an “aesthetics of the earth” are felt in Fernand Deligny’s errant lines. These errant lines traced to move with the complex gestures of autistics over a period of several years in Monoblet France (1965-1970) offer an alternative to pathology and individual psychological assessment.
The Being of Relation brings these two projects into encounter exploring what else blackness can be at this non-pathological juncture where what is foregrounded is the very being of relation. On the way trails of whiteness are excavated and interrogated. The aim: to move toward parapedagogies of resistance in a logic of a poetics of relation a logic of neurodiversity minor sociality and the kind of difference without separability that refuses the binary that holds neurotypicality – as whiteness – in place.

Beijing Film Academy 2021
The annual Beijing Film Academy Yearbook highlights the best academic debates discussions and research from the previous year as previously published in the highly prestigious Journal of Beijing Film Academy. This volume brings together specially selected articles appearing for the first time in English to bridge the gap in cross-cultural research in cinema and media studies.
The book is the latest in the Intellect China Library series to produce work by Chinese scholars that have not previously been available to English language academia. Covering the subjects of film studies visual arts performing arts media and cultural studies the series aims to foster intellectual debate and to promote closer cross-cultural intellectual exchanges by introducing important works of Chinese scholarship to readers.

Becoming a Visually Reflective Practitioner
An Integrated Self-Study Model for Professional Practice
Professional practice is increasingly becoming more complex demanding dynamic and diverse. This important and original new book considers how self-study using arts-based methods can enable purposeful reflection toward understanding and envisioning professional practice. Ideally for visual arts practitioners on all levels this book presents a self-study model grounded in compelling research that highlights arts-based methods for examining four areas of professional practice: professional identities work cultures change and transitions and envisioning new pathways.
Chapters address the components of the self-study model artistic methods and materials and strategies for interpreting self-study written and visual outcomes with the aim of goal setting. Each chapter includes visuals references and end-of-chapter prompts to engage readers in critical and visual reflection. Appendices offer resources and guidelines for creating and assessing self-study outcomes.
The fluctuating nature of professional practice necessitates the pursuit of discernment and clarity that can be achieved through an ongoing reflective practice. Self-study is a systematic and flexible methodology for purposeful reflection on professional practice that embraces dialogic interpretive rhizomatic and visual inquiry. Self-study can occur at any level of practice and in the context of work-related professional development formal study or as a self-initiated inquiry. An arts-based self-study model for visual arts practitioners is explored and focuses on four intersectional components shaping professional practice: professional identities work cultures and communities transition and change within professional practice and envisioning new pathways for professional practice.
The self-study model is grounded in contemporary theory practice and compelling research and embraces robust strategies for understanding the complexities of professional practice that can include dual multiple overlapping hybrid and conflicting professional identities tensions within work cultures and unexpected changes within professional practice. Each chapter focuses on a component of the self-study model and an area of professional practice concluding with references and end-of-chapter prompts that are aimed to facilitate critical reflection-on-practice and the creation of written and visual responses.
With visual arts practitioners in mind various arts-based methods for self-study are discussed that highlight visual journaling as a key method for engaging in self-study. Interpretive research methods are discussed to guide readers in understanding the phases and processes for interpreting written and visual self-study outcomes. Processes are outlined to help readers determine key insights themes issues and questions from their self-study outcomes how to use them in formulating new questions and articulating new professional goals. Several levels for interpretation are presented to offer readers options relative to their professional needs and aims.
Throughout the text charts and visuals serve to summarize and visualize key chapter points. Images by visual arts practitioners appear throughout the text and represent a wide range of artistic media methods and approaches appropriate for self-study. The appendices provide additional resources for enhanced understanding of chapter concepts and key terms guidelines and rubrics for writing reflections creating visual responses and using a visual journal in the self-study process.
Primary readership will be visual arts practitioners at all levels. Ideal for university level graduate courses or as a guide for individuals and small groups of practitioners who seek to engage in arts-based self-study as professional development.

Being Human Today
Art, Education and Mental Health in Conversation
Education mental health and the arts all share a concern for human beings and for how they live their lives. Living one’s life and living it well has always been a challenge – life never simply happens. But what the particular challenges are differs from time to time from location to location and even from individual to individual.
In both education and mental health there is a strong pressure to think of being human as a technical problem that in some way can be ‘fixed’ by powerful research-based interventions. Also arts are quickly turned into an instrument for fixing problems. While such fixing may be possible and may appear to be quite successful from one perspective it clearly runs the risk of turning students and clients into objects – things to be acted upon rather than human beings to encounter and act with.
This book stages conversations between art education and mental health around the question of what it means to be human today. Moving beyond the suggestion that this requires ‘strong’ educational or therapeutic interventions or can be resolved by means of individual expression the chapters explore new possibilities for 'the arrival of I’.

Building Community Choirs in the Twenty-First Century
Re-imagining Identity through Singing in Northern Ireland
This book explores how five community choirs construct and imagine collective identity formations in Northern Ireland. Original insight is provided through ethnographic research conducted between 2013-2018. Working with five choirs in disparate locations with different repertoires and demographics resulted in the creation of an integrated comparison that drew out both diversity and commonalities of approach revealing the malleability of choral practice.
The research is framed through communities of practice a theory of learning through engaging with other people in a common endeavour. Research findings demonstrate how choirs re-imagine identity through the manner in which they organise rehearse and perform. Choirs develop a distinct choral identity and ethos highlighting both the musical and social importance of the community of practice. Research suggests that choirs re-imagine multiple conceptions of identities within their groups including gender later age religious faith inclusivity and ethnic diversity that can both influence broader structures of community in the region and be influenced by them.
Community choral practice in Northern Ireland is under-researched. As such this book provides unique insight into how members of community choirs are attempting to transcend sectarian boundaries through their practice developing academic understandings of identity formation community music-making and choral practice.

Bernhard Lang
Critical Guides to Contemporary Composers
Bernhard Lang: Critical Guides to Contemporary Composers offers a critical guide and introduction to the work of Austrian composer Bernhard Lang (b. 1957). It identifies the phenomenon of repetition as a central concern in Lang’s thinking and making. The composer’s artistic practice is identified as one of ‘loop aesthetics’: a creative poetics in which repetition serves not only as methodology but also as material language and subject matter.
The book is structured around the four central thematic nodes of philosophy music theatre and politics. After introducing Lang as a composer whose work is thoroughly influenced by philosophical thought the book develops a typology of musical repetition as it is explored and activated in Lang’s oeuvre.
Pointing towards the several repetitions within the performance of Lang’s works the book explores the heavily trans-medial nature of the repeat across domains such as literature dance and theatre. Finally the book investigates Lang’s use of textual quotation and musical borrowing.
Christine Dysers is a musicologist specialising in contemporary music aesthetics. Her research centres around repetition politics absence the liminal and the uncanny. This is the first full-length study of the works of Bernhard Lang and is a new volume in the Critical Guides to Contemporary Composers series from Intellect.

Beijing Film Academy 2020
The annual Beijing Film Academy Yearbook highlights the best academic debates discussions and research from the previous year as previously published in the highly prestigious Journal of Beijing Film Academy. This volume brings together specially selected articles appearing for the first time in English to bridge the gap in cross-cultural research in cinema and media studies.
The book is the latest in the Intellect China Library series to produce work by Chinese scholars that have not previously been available to English language academia. Covering the subjects of film studies visual arts performing arts media and cultural studies the series aims to foster intellectual debate and to promote closer cross-cultural intellectual exchanges by introducing important works of Chinese scholarship to readers.

Blank Canvas
Art School Creativity From Punk to New Wave
Art school Britain in the 1960s and 1970s – a hotbed of experimental DIY creativity blurring the lines between art and music. In Blank Canvas multi-genre musician turned university lecturer Simon Strange paints a picture of the diverse range of people who broke down the barriers between art life and the creative self.
Tracing lines from the Bauhaus 'blank slate' through the white heat of the Velvet Underground and the cutting edge of the Slits Blank Canvas draws on interviews with giants of the genre across music gender and race spectrums from Brian Eno to Pauline Black Cabaret Voltaire to Gaye Advert. Illustrated is a picture of two decades erupting in a devastatingly diverse flow of outspoken originality as an eclectic range of musical styles and cultures fused.
Does modern day music education suffocate the soul and inhibit the impact of the bohemian artist?
This book asks questions of today's artists musicians and educators looking for the essence of creativity and suggests how lessons learnt in and around art school education show a path for the cultural evolution of both musicians and artists hoping to create the future.
Audience will include university students at all levels in popular music popular culture and creative arts education. Academics educators and researchers working in popular culture and creativity. May also appeal to a more general reader interested in popular culture and creativity.
With a Blank Canvas anything is possible…

Bergson and Durational Performance
(Re)Ma(r)king Time
Humans have always marked time whether by using the earth's natural rhythms or with the clock. Unlike pre- industrial people living in an age of social acceleration is dominated by clock-time and network time presenting many more options than can possibly be achieved in a human lifespan.
This book explores the possibility of an alternative experience of time one that is closer to the pure duration described by philosopher Henri Bergson. The discussions in this book contribute to contemporary performance analysis philosophy and Bergson studies as well as exploring aspects of immersive and participatory performance walking practices ritual and online performance.
Using durational performances as case studies the author demonstrates new insights into Bergson’s philosophy alongside key theorists in psychology and anthropology. Through a series of performance analyses Bergson's philosophy of duration is coupled with ideas from Maslow Csikszentmihalyi and Victor Turner to speculate on the possibilities available in challenging an experience of the world in which time is short but the possibility of experience is abundant.
The main audience is an academic and student market. Undergraduate and postgraduate students of theatre studies performance and the performing arts doctoral researchers researchers interested in time and performance the relationship between performance and philosophy those with an interest in philosophy sociology anthropology and psychology will all find much of interest.
Potential wider readership in those who are interested in the phenomenon of social acceleration in performance philosophy as well in Bergson’s philosophy.

Beijing Film Academy 2019
The annual Beijing Film Academy Yearbook highlights the best academic debates discussions and research from the previous year as previously published in the highly prestigious Journal of Beijing Film Academy. This volume brings together specially selected articles appearing for the first time in English to bridge the gap in cross-cultural research in cinema and media studies.
The book is the latest in the Intellect China Library series to produce work by Chinese scholars that have not previously been available to English language academia. Covering the subjects of film studies visual arts performing arts media and cultural studies the series aims to foster intellectual debate and to promote closer cross-cultural intellectual exchanges by introducing important works of Chinese scholarship to readers.

Bombay Cinema's Islamicate Histories
Bombay Cinema's Islamicate Histories comprises fourteen essays on the history and influence of cultural Islam on Bombay cinema. These essays are written by major scholars of both South Asian cultural history and Indian cinema working across several continents. Following Marshal Hodgson the term ‘Islamicate’ is used to describe Muslim cultures in order to distinguish the cultural forms associated with Islam from the religion itself. Such a distinction is especially important to observe in South Asia where over a thousand-year history Muslim cultures have commingled with other local religious and cultural traditions to form a rich vein of syncretic aesthetic expression. This volume argues that the influence of Muslim cultures on Bombay cinema can only be grasped against the backdrop of this long history an argument that informs the shape of the whole.
The book is divided into two sections. The first ‘Islamicate Histories’ charts the historical roots of South Asian Muslim cultures and the precursors of Bombay cinema’s Islamicate idioms in the Urdu Parsi Theatre the Courtesan cultures of Lucknow the traditions of miniature painting poetry song and their performance and the various modes of story-telling that derive from Perso-Arabic traditions. The second section ‘Cinematic Forms’ discusses the way in which these Islamicate histories are partially constitutive of the traditions of representation performance and story-telling that give Bombay cinema its distinctive character traditions that have continued into Bollywood. It explores ‘Islamicate’ genres like the ‘Oriental’ film and the ‘Muslim Social’ as well as forms of poetry and performance like the ‘ghazal’ and ‘the qawwali’.
Bombay Cinema’s Islamicate Histories is published at a time of acute crisis in the perception and understanding of Islam where Islamophobia stereotypes Muslims as incipient fifth column and Hindu fundamentalism is ascendant. It demonstrates that Muslim and Hindu cultures in India are inextricably entwined and shows how the syncretic idioms of Islamicate cultural history inform the very identity of Bombay cinema even as that cinema has also instrumentalized Islamicate idioms to stereotype and even demonise the Muslim especially in contemporary Bollywood.
This book argues that many of the idioms of Bombay cinema that we love are derived from the historical influence of Muslim cultures as they interacted with other traditions in the Indian subcontinent. It traces the emergence of cultures of poetry dance song performance and story-telling out of the thousand-year history of Islam on Indian soil and describes the ways in which they underlie and inform the expressive forms of Bombay cinema. It is timely to be reminded of the contribution of Muslim cultures to the distinctive and widely recognized popular cinema of India at a historical moment when the cultural influence of Islam on India is being denied by forces which seek to turn the country away from cultural pluralism towards Hindu fundamentalism. Bombay Cinema’s Islamicate Histories features contributions by major scholars of both South Asian cultural history and Indian cinema working across several continents.
The audience for this book will be primarily graduate and advanced undergraduate students of film studies. The writing is accessible and lively and individual chapters will be suitable for classroom use.
It will be of value in disciplines outside film studies where the Islamicate tradition in general and its impact on film in particular is taught. It will find an audience in disciplines such as history cultural studies women's studies visual studies and South Asian area studies. It will also be of interest to anyone who wants to know how cinema negotiates the parameters of Muslim identity in response to historical and contemporary events in India.

Becoming a Visually Reflective Practitioner
An Integrated Self-Study Model for Professional Practice
Professional practice is increasingly becoming more complex demanding dynamic and diverse. This important and original new book considers how self-study using arts-based methods can enable purposeful reflection toward understanding and envisioning professional practice. Ideally for visual arts practitioners on all levels this book presents a self-study model grounded in compelling research that highlights arts-based methods for examining four areas of professional practice: professional identities work cultures change and transitions and envisioning new pathways.
Chapters address the components of the self-study model artistic methods and materials and strategies for interpreting self-study written and visual outcomes with the aim of goal setting. Each chapter includes visuals references and end-of-chapter prompts to engage readers in critical and visual reflection. Appendices offer resources and guidelines for creating and assessing self-study outcomes.
The fluctuating nature of professional practice necessitates the pursuit of discernment and clarity that can be achieved through an ongoing reflective practice. Self-study is a systematic and flexible methodology for purposeful reflection on professional practice that embraces dialogic interpretive rhizomatic and visual inquiry. Self-study can occur at any level of practice and in the context of work-related professional development formal study or as a self-initiated inquiry. An arts-based self-study model for visual arts practitioners is explored and focuses on four intersectional components shaping professional practice: professional identities work cultures and communities transition and change within professional practice and envisioning new pathways for professional practice.
The self-study model is grounded in contemporary theory practice and compelling research and embraces robust strategies for understanding the complexities of professional practice that can include dual multiple overlapping hybrid and conflicting professional identities tensions within work cultures and unexpected changes within professional practice. Each chapter focuses on a component of the self-study model and an area of professional practice concluding with references and end-of-chapter prompts that are aimed to facilitate critical reflection-on-practice and the creation of written and visual responses.
With visual arts practitioners in mind various arts-based methods for self-study are discussed that highlight visual journaling as a key method for engaging in self-study. Interpretive research methods are discussed to guide readers in understanding the phases and processes for interpreting written and visual self-study outcomes. Processes are outlined to help readers determine key insights themes issues and questions from their self-study outcomes how to use them in formulating new questions and articulating new professional goals. Several levels for interpretation are presented to offer readers options relative to their professional needs and aims.
Throughout the text charts and visuals serve to summarize and visualize key chapter points. Images by visual arts practitioners appear throughout the text and represent a wide range of artistic media methods and approaches appropriate for self-study. The appendices provide additional resources for enhanced understanding of chapter concepts and key terms guidelines and rubrics for writing reflections creating visual responses and using a visual journal in the self-study process.
Primary readership will be visual arts practitioners at all levels. Ideal for university level graduate courses or as a guide for individuals and small groups of practitioners who seek to engage in arts-based self-study as professional development.

Beyond Text
Learning through Arts-Based Research
This original new book represents a variety of art forms across different professional contexts. Its focus is on the ways that educational practitioners and leaders from a range of cultures disciplines professions and organizations practice arts-based research and it explores how these can enable innovative means of learning and enhance professional and organizational development.
This vibrant project allowed for long term systematic conversations between a large and unusually diverse group of twenty-nine people from eight organisations in six countries. It was unusually diverse in many senses: for some the word ‘data’ meant little for others it was central to their daily work; for some artistic practice was core while for others the arts were a means to an end; while some were social entrepreneurs running their own companies others were researching in universities and a number were doing both; some were working within the STEM disciplines of business management engineering science technology sustainability and the built environment others were in the social sciences of social and health care education and youth work while others were engaged in rapid or long term social and cultural action as a means of resisting state violence and military occupation; some worked in one of the safest countries on the planet others in one of the most tear-gassed refugee camps in the world.
Within these professional groups there were also ranges of experience for example senior researchers early career researchers PhD students seasoned professional artists and newcomers to arts forms. Whilst the main communication of this group was English six other major languages were spoken Estonian Finish Catalan Spanish Arabic and key stakeholders bought Swedish and Japanese into the space. This meant that while the conversations in and about arts-based practice were transnational interdisciplinary and systematic they had all the messy troubled-ness that the intercultural on all of the above levels brings with it.
This unique and exciting collection discusses how creative arts practices can have a significant impact on research across a range of international contexts drawing on their own field of research and educational experience. For instance drama music dance and visual arts can be used to understand how learners internalise concepts reflect on how decisions are made in the midst of action in leadership education or investigate the use of the intuitive alongside the rational and analytical in their educational experience. Non-textual arts-based forms of research can also provide modes of investigation into pedagogical and professional practices when applied to fields that normally lie outside of the arts.
Its greatest strengths are its focus on arts-based research as a way of learning in a variety of contexts and often in collaboration. Its consistent theoretical artistic and professional engagements make it a very readable and engaging read.
The representation of a variety of art forms across different professional contexts means that this book will have appeal to several readerships in higher education including the following groups.
Academics and practitioners using arts-based methods in organisation and business settings. Researchers in the arts and researchers generically in the social sciences humanities and arts. University students of the arts education and professional studies especially those interested in the wider international and intercultural diversity of research methodologies.
Those working in international research teams using any form of qualitative research will also find this collection very interesting. It also has potential interest for groups outside higher education with an interest in arts-based research – for example community groups looking to explore collaborative projects.

Beijing Film Academy 2018
The annual Beijing Film Academy Yearbook showcases the best academic debates discussions and research from the previous year as previously published in the highly prestigious Journal of Beijing Film Academy. This volume brings together specially selected articles appearing for the first time in English in order to bridge the gap in cross-cultural research in cinema and media studies.
The book is the latest in the Intellect China Library series to produce work by Chinese scholars that have not previously been available to English language academia. Covering the subjects of film studies visual arts performing arts media and cultural studies the series aims to foster intellectual debate and to promote closer cross-cultural intellectual exchanges by introducing important works of Chinese scholarship to readers.

The Baroque Technotext
Literature in a Digital Mediascape
To date most criticism of print and digital technotexts – literary objects that foreground the role of their media of inscription – has emphasized the avant-garde contexts of a text’s production. The Baroque Technotext opens new perspectives on this important and innovative literary canon analysing the role of baroque and neo-baroque aesthetics in the emergence and possible futures of technotexts. Combining the insights of poststructuralist theory of the baroque postcolonial theory of the neobaroque and insightful critique of the prevailing modernist approaches to technotexts The Baroque Technotext reframes critical debate of contemporary experiments in literary practice in the late age of print. Analyses of works from authors including Jonathan Safran Foer Chris Ware and David Clark are matched with reflections on other media texts – film visual art and interface design – that have adopted baroque aesthetic tropes.

Britpop Cinema
From trainspotting to this Is England
The Britpop movement of the mid-1990s defined a generation and the films were just as exciting as the music. Beginning with Shallow Grave hitting its stride with Trainspotting and going global with The Full Monty Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels Human Traffic Sexy Beast Shaun of the Dead and This Is England Britpop cinema pushed boundaries paid Hollywood no heed and placed the United Kingdom all too briefly at the centre of the movie universe.
Featuring exclusive interviews with key players such as Simon Pegg Irvine Welsh Michael Winterbottom and Edgar Wright Britpop Cinema combines eyewitness accounts close analysis and social history to celebrate a golden age for UK film.

Beijing Film Academy Yearbook 2017
The annual Beijing Film Academy Yearbook showcases the best academic debates discussions and research from the previous year as previously published in the highly prestigious Journal of Beijing Film Academy. This volume brings together specially selected articles appearing for the first time in English in order to bridge the gap in cross-cultural research in cinema and media studies.
The book is the latest in the Intellect China Library series to produce work by Chinese scholars that have not previously been available to English language academia. Covering the subjects of film studies visual arts performing arts media and cultural studies the series aims to foster intellectual debate and to promote closer cross-cultural intellectual exchanges by introducing important works of Chinese scholarship to readers.

Black and White Bioscope
Making Movies in Africa 1899 to 1925
At the same time as Hollywood was starting a film industry in Southern Africa was surging ahead in integrating production distribution and exhibition. African Film Productions Limited made silent movies using technical and acting talent from Britain the United States and Australia as well as from Africa. These included not only the original 'long trek movie' and the prototype for the movies Zulu and Zulu Dawn but also the first King Solomon's Mines and the original Blue Lagoon featuring African actors such as Goba Tom Zulu and Msoga Mwana who starred as the black revolutionary in Prester John.
In this lavishly illustrated book fifty movies are reconstructed with graphic photographs and plot synopses – plus quotations from reviews – so that readers can rediscover this long-lost treasure trove of silent cinema.
