Browse Books

Hip-Hop Archives
The Politics and Poetics of Knowledge Production
This book focuses on the culture and politics involved in building hip-hop archives. It addresses practical aspects including methods of accumulation curation preservation and digitization and critically analyzes institutional power community engagement urban economics public access and the ideological implications associated with hip-hop culture’s enduring tensions with dominant social values.
The collection of essays are divided into four sections; Doing the Knowledge Challenging Archival Forms Beyond the Nation and Institutional Alignments: Interviews and Reflections. The book covers a range of official unofficial DIY and community archives and collections and features chapters by scholar practitioners educators and curators.
A wide swath of hip-hop culture is featured in the book including a focus on dance graffiti clothing and battle rap. The range of authors and their topics span countries in Asia Europe the Caribbean and North America.

The Human Shutter
Photographs, Stereoscopic Depth, and Moving Images
This transdisciplinary study offers a fresh perspective on the intersections of photography cinema and visual perception making it an essential addition to collections in art history film studies and photography.
Robert L. Bowen delves into the complex relationship between art binocular vision space and time across both early and modern histories of photography. Central to Bowen’s analysis is the concept of "the human shutter" a metaphor for binocular rivalry which he interprets as a form of proto-cinema—linking early photographic processes with the evolution of cinematic temporality.
The book provides a rich examination of the near-simultaneous emergence of still moving and stereoscopic depth media while challenging the gradualist view of visual technologies. Through a preliminary taxonomy of rare stereoviews Bowen draws connections between experimental film painting philosophy and perception theory opening new avenues for understanding the history of visual media.
Additionally Bowen traces the fascinating journey of early pioneers like Antoine Claudet and Giorgio Sommer whose work in motion and binocular vision plays a pivotal role in rethinking the origins of photographic cinema. Bowen bridges this history with contemporary innovations including the dissolution of time in photography with the advent of generative AI.
The volume also highlights the work of modern and contemporary artists and filmmakers such as Marcel Duchamp Robert Smithson Lucy Raven Ken Jacobs and OpenEndedGroup who have explored stereoscopic spaces and perceptions in innovative ways.
Key for undergraduate and postgraduate students studying art art history film photography and new media. It is also relevant to photographers photo historians experimental filmmakers video artists digital media artists painters and sculptors seeking fresh insights into their respective fields. Will resonate with readers interested in the history of 19th-century photography and the development of stereoscopic media.

Heavy Metal and Disability
Crips, Crowds, and Cacophonies
The relationship between metal and disability is distinctive. Persisting across metal’s sub-genres is a preoccupation with exploring and questioning the boundary that divides the body that has agency from the body that has none. This boundary is one that is familiar to those for whom the agency of the body is an everyday matter of survival.
Metal’s preoccupation with unleashing and controlling sensorial overload acts both as an analogue of neurodiversity and as a space in which those who are neurodivergent find ways to understand and leverage their sensory capacities. Metal offers potent resources for the self-understanding of people with disabilities. It does not necessarily mean that this potential is always explored or that metal scenes are hospitable to those with disabilities. This collection is disability-positive validating people with disabilities as different but not damaged.
While metal scholars who contribute to this collection see metal as a space of possibility in which dis/ability and other intersectional identities can be validated and understood the collection does not imply that the possibilities that metal affords are always actualised. This collection situates itself in a wider struggle to open up metal challenging its power structures; a struggle in which metal studies has played a significant part.

Hip-Hop Archives
The Politics and Poetics of Knowledge Production
This book focuses on the culture and politics involved in building hip-hop archives. It addresses practical aspects including methods of accumulation curation preservation and digitization and critically analyzes institutional power community engagement urban economics public access and the ideological implications associated with hip-hop culture’s enduring tensions with dominant social values.
The collection of essays are divided into four sections; Doing the Knowledge Challenging Archival Forms Beyond the Nation and Institutional Alignments: Interviews and Reflections. The book covers a range of official unofficial DIY and community archives and collections and features chapters by scholar practitioners educators and curators.
A wide swath of hip-hop culture is featured in the book including a focus on dance graffiti clothing and battle rap. The range of authors and their topics span countries in Asia Europe the Caribbean and North America.

A Holocaust Cabaret
Re-making Theatre from a Jewish Ghetto
Two scripts were created in 2017 from the same source materials: preserved song lyrics from a performance created in 1943 in the Terezin Ghetto called Prince Bettliegend (the Bedridden Prince) the popular 1930s jazz melodies to which those lyrics were set and fragments of testimony by survivors who performed in or witnessed that production.
The development processes took place under the auspices of the £1.8 million AHRC-funded project Performing the Jewish Archive. PtJA co-investigator Lisa Peschel has spent the past two decades researching theatrical performance in Terezin and the project’s planned performance festivals in Australia and South African in the summer of 2017 afforded a unique opportunity to allow Prince Bettliegend to speak to our present. Peschel synthesized the existing materials into a rough plot outline then collaborated with local production teams at the University of Sydney (produced by Joseph Toltz directed by Ian Maxwell) and Stellenbosch University (directed by Amelda Brand) to reconstruct/recreate/re-imagine the play.
Both teams were extraordinarily sensitive to questions of trauma and pleasure in the original performance and those questions manifested themselves in different underlying themes that emerged with each production. During the first month-long development process at the University of Sydney (July 2017) Peschel Maxwell and Toltz worked together to refine the plot outline Toltz and musical director Kevin Hunt explored the 1930s music with the entire production team then the actors recruited from Sydney’s alternative theatre scene developed the performance through improvisation. Due to fortuitous accidents of casting a theme soon emerged that dovetailed with the historical reality of the ghetto: the desire of the older prisoners to protect the youth.
While the Australian production was still in development the South African team at Stellenbosch University led by Amelda Brand began creating their own version. Their performance was based on the same plot outline and to some extent the same text developed by the Sydney performers but their production diverged radically due to their interest in addressing issues of more immediate interest to the multi-racial student case: race and power. Their musical approach also diverged: music director Leonore Bredekamp created a hybrid of 1930s jazz and klezmer music.
Part I of the book is composed of a series of essays about the original material and about each production. The essays written by Peschel and key collaborators on each development team explore the Terezin production and both reconstructions. Part II comprises the scripts. Although the texts themselves are similar detailed stage directions and illustrations make clear how each manifested its own themes.
Part of Intellect's Playtext series.

Heavy Metal Armour: A Visual Study of Battle Jackets
The first of its kind – original unique and beautifully illustrated by the author. Engagingly written it will appeal to fans and academics alike.
A lavishly illustrated study of the heavy metal battle jacket in a historical and cultural context with a unique approach to analysis and interrogation of form and style through painting practice and theory.
Since the 1970s customized denim 'battle jackets' have been worn by heavy metal fans to signify their devotion to the music and subcultures of metal. Embellished by the wearers with patches badges and studs these jackets are works of art that communicate the values of metal to the world at large. This book features a series of detailed paintings that visually document examples of jackets alongside photographic portraits of the fans that wear them.
The accompanying chapters describe the significance of battle jackets in metal scenes and trace a lineage of customized clothing starting in the Middle Ages. Connections are made with a wide range of historic and contemporary artworks suggesting a broad context within which to more fully appreciate the significance of the jackets. The methodology spans a range of disciplines from art theory to ethnography and subcultural studies and the discussion is informed by responses from a series of interviews conducted over the years with metal fans.
The book has a highly original focus and the author’s approach to the subject is unique. It reaches across a range of fields: the history and cultural context of heavy metal music style and dress; art history and practice particularly painting; subcultural studies; fashion and dress; music graphics branding and marketing.
Tom Cardwell is an artist and researcher specialising in contemporary painting customized clothing and heavy metal subcultures. He is senior lecturer in painting at Camberwell University of the Arts London.
It will appeal to readers with an interest in metal subcultures; fashion style and dress; music branding and identity; contemporary art theory and practice. The writing style and content is relaxed engaging and will be of interest to a wider casual readership with an interest in popular culture and the arts.
A useful resource for academics and students interested in heavy metal customized clothing/DIY subcultures painting and visual arts. Could appeal to undergraduate as well as postgraduates and scholars in these fields and a broader interest in visual culture.

House of Cards
Monsters in Politics
Although by all appearances House of Cards is a television series about politics it in fact explores some of the most subversive questions raised by Machiavelli’s writings: what if the Prince were a ferocious animal? What would happen if our political world were overtaken by vampires? Would they be capable of mastering their bloodthirsty instincts or would they remain true to their fundamental nature?
In their relentless quest for power Frank Underwood his wife Claire and his chief of staff Doug Stamper are so ruthlessly ambitious that they demolish all boundaries between good and evil. According to a Machiavellian logic taken to its extreme the specific necessity of a given situation always wins out over common morality. In the struggle for survival these people are the predators determined to come out on top whatever the cost.
This book examines how the producers of the series take monstrous characters – who would not be out of place in a crime series or a horror film – and set them in the world of politics which offers little resistance to violence and turns into a laboratory for systematic destruction. In this variation on the conflict between brutalization and civilization at the heart of power the political sphere therefore becomes the scene of crime par excellence.
Although the book contains concepts and theories in political science it is accessibly written. It is also didactic: many examples are taken from the series and from the novels so the reader always understands what is at stake in the analysis. It will find both an academic and a more general audience.
Primary academic readership will be scholars and students in law political science film studies media studies and cultural studies. The wider readership will include fans of the show and of course people interested in politics political thrillers political philosophy corruption and democracy as well as the nature of political leadership.

How Belfast Got the Blues
A Cultural History of Popular Music in the 1960s
This is not just an important music book; it is an important history book. It captures the moment before Belfast and Northern Ireland became synonymous with the Troubles. It places one of the best-known figures in global popular music Van Morrison in his historical and sociocultural context. It also reinstates Ottilie Patterson into her rightful role as a central figure in Ireland’s music. It addresses a significant gap in Ireland’s popular music studies by appraising the contribution of a politically and musically significant female figure.
It makes a major original contribution to the understanding of popular music culture in Northern Ireland and to the broader popular music culture in Britain in the 1960s. It will remain for many years the definitive study of the subject and a point of reference for further research and controversy.
In light of the re-emergence of Northern Ireland in contemporary British political debate this book presents a nicely timed intervention placing Northern Ireland at the forefront of a key moment in British and Irish cultural history and presenting highly innovative readings of key popular cultural figures. Integrating its account of the popular music culture and local ‘scene’ in Northern Ireland with the broader and highly complex context of the sociopolitical milieu it offers original and insightful readings of key 1960s figures including film director Peter Whitehead The Rolling Stones Them Ottilie Patterson and Van Morrison. It includes much new material obtained in interviews and through meticulous archival research to challenge the mainstream narrative of the mid-1960s music scene in Belfast.
It is extremely well researched making use of newspaper and film archives and existing publications but also an impressive set of personal interviews with veteran musicians and others from that time. The authors challenge much of the received wisdom about the period – for instance about the decline of the showband – and present their arguments carefully and thoughtfully. While meticulously researched and thoroughly analytic the writing is uniquely accessible and engaging.
The chapter on the neglected Belfast blue singer Ottilie Patterson represents a paradigm shift in Irish popular music studies and sets her story and considerable achievements centre stage. This alone makes the book very noteworthy. The chapters on Van Morrison and his band Them place his early career in the context of the local and global music industry. The story of The Rolling Stones film made by Peter Whitehead is discussed in the context of the international fervour of the times. The knitting of the music scene with the distinctive social cultural political and religious factors is deftly done.
Primary readership will be academic – scholars researchers and students across a range of areas. Fields of interest include popular music studies Irish studies political history cultural studies film studies jazz/blues history women’s studies civil rights.
It will also appeal more broadly to fans writers journalists and musicians interested in Belfast Northern Ireland the Blues rock and roll jazz and the 1960s as well as to fans of the individual musicians.

Heavy Metal Music in Argentina
In Black We Are Seen
An in-depth regional discussion of heavy metal music Heavy Metal Music in Argentina explores metal music as a catalyst for social change and site for engaging political reflection. Originally published in Spanish and sold locally in Argentina this is the first time the work has been available in English.
Edited by leading researchers this collection addresses the music’s rituals circulations cultural products lyrics and allows readers to rethink the place of heavy metal within Argentinean politics and economics. Exclusively written by members of the Group for Interdisciplinary Research on Argentinian Heavy Metal (GIIHMA) in a communal approach to scholarship the book echoes the working-class voices that marked early post-dictatorship metal music in Argentina.
This is the first collection of essays on Argentine metal music. It has opened up research channels between different universities in the country while also engaging a non-academic audience and widening the potential market for the book.
The book makes an interdisciplinary examination of a complex and fascinating object: it allows for the examination discussion and analysis of its nationalist postulates relationship with the Creole culture (for example with nineteenth-century ‘gauchesca’ literature) indigenism and with the political processes of contemporary Argentina.
Metal Music Studies as an academic area of inquiry has focused mostly on the music’s cultural components in Europe and the United States. The few books that have addressed metal music as a global phenomenon have severely neglected the inclusion of Latin American countries. Argentina with the largest and oldest metal scene in the region has also been neglected in the existing literature. There is a growing interest in this area as demonstrated by the emergence of documentary film on metal music in Latin America.
The book has potential use as a resource on courses in several disciplines including sociology cultural studies musicology ethnomusicology sociology and Latin American studies. It will also be of interest to the more general readers with an interest in the musical genre.

The Howff Project
The Howff Project is an exploration of artist Tim Knowles’s landscape project by the same name. For more than two years Knowles built a network of hidden site-specific shelters across the Scottish landscape. Inspired by the Scottish word ‘howff’ which describes an abode tavern familiar haunt or shelter Knowles utilized existing structures and features in the landscape and then adapted modified and reconfigured their characteristics to create a series of unique hidden shelters providing refuge in remote areas.
The Howff Project takes readers behind the scenes of the making of each structure from conception to finished product. Visually rich the book captures the landscape through more than one hundred stunning photographs and drawings while personal anecdotes detail Knowles’s experience traveling through the Scottish Lowlands and the mountains of Aberdeenshire and the Cairngorms.

The Hour of All Things and Other Plays
This book presents four plays by Caridad Svich that explore the rough waters of citizenship under the pressure of globalization and the threads of human connection – often tested but never wholly severed – across multiple geographic landscapes. Featuring an introduction by Welsh playwright and director Ian Rowlands and essays by practitioners Zac Kline Blair Baker Neil Scharnick Carla Melo and Sherrine Azab this wide-ranging daring collection of plays refuses to pretend that the complex and thorny questions of existence are easily settled.

Havana Street Style
When it comes to fashion few metropolitan areas are more synonymous with style than New York London Paris and Milan. But the couture capitals of tomorrow may be located in less likely locales. Addressing the interplay between the development of fashion centres across the world and their relationship to consumption and street style in both local and global contexts the books in the Street Style series aim to record emerging fashion capitals and their relationship to the physical landscapes of the street. By examining how particular ecologies of fashion are connected to the formation of gender class and generational identities this series establishes a new methodology for recording and understanding identity and its connection to style.
Havana Street Style is the first book that explores and reveals the relationship between culture city and street fashion in Cuba’s capital. Matching visual ethnography with critical analysis the book documents a unique street style few in the United States have yet experienced.

Honolulu Street Style
Hawai’i is one of the most ethnically and racially diverse places in the world due to its central location in the Pacific. Situated at the crossroads of different cultures Honolulu has a style all of its own. Honolulu Street Style captures this unique approach as it demonstrates how global trends are transformed by stylish Honolulu denizens to give them a unique local look. Divided into chapters on hair hats accessories and beachwear the book features the styles of people encountered on the street in many different neighbourhoods with an essay on the history and clothing of Hawai’i as a whole. The neighbourhood fashion explored includes that of iconic Waikiki which conjures images most people associate with Hawai’i yet the mass-produced tourist clothing belies a deeper fashion culture hidden in local enclaves and local boutiques that foster an upscale casual style. Chinatown is a neighbourhood of dramatic colour and exotic touches and it hosts 'First Friday' events that transform the neighbourhood into a crowded hub of artistic musical and retail activity. As the photos show the Kaka’ako neighbourhood draws a crowd that is hip travelled and not afraid to venture off the beaten path. In contrast the Manoa valley home to the flagship campus of the University of Hawai’i presents itself as an eclectic mix of students and professionals dressed in everything from boho chic to surfer skater avant-garde and casual professional style. A highly visual book with full-colour street style photography Honolulu Street Style will be a landmark publication in the study of place and style.

Habitus of the Hood
Since the 1990s popular culture the world over has frequently looked to the ’hood for inspiration whether in music film or television. Habitus of the Hood explores the myriad ways in which the hood has been conceived—both within the lived experiences of its residents and in the many mediated representations found in popular culture. Using a variety of methodologies including autoethnography textual studies and critical discourse analysis contributors analyze and connect these various conceptions.

Holistic Shakespeare
An Experiential Learning Approach
The standard analytical approach to teaching Shakespeare does not tend to help students understand the theatricality of the Bard’s plays and can leave them with an overly dry disconnected view of Shakespeare.
Designed to address this problem Holistic Shakespeare combines analysis with creative learning methods. Holistic Shakespeare acts as a guide for teachers as well as enabling students to feel as if they are in the stands of the Globe Theatre actually watching the play. This book is designed to explain the methodologies and values of the holistic educational model which is directed toward whole-brain integrated and experiential learning that motivates students to think deeply about the interlinks between what they learn in the classroom and the significant moral and ethical questions that impact their everyday lives. Further in the holistic Shakespeare classroom application of these foundational concepts opens up a fertile pathway that leads students toward a more intimate understanding of how Shakespeare thought – about himself his relationships and his environment. In holistic education WHOLENESS (or holism) describes an integrated curricular approach that places value on the complete learner and cultivates every student’s unique potential to become active thinking and caring contributors to the larger world.
Holistic Shakespeare embraces the text’s definitive status as a theatrical script making performance-based activities an indispensable instructional tool. Like the exciting creative buzz that pervades the rehearsal room the holistic learning environment is active process-oriented cooperative and exploratory which restores true ownership of the educational journey to the place where it belongs – in the hands of the student. Performance-based teaching has reinvigorated the Shakespeare classroom in recent decades.

Howard Barker Interviews 1980–2010
Conversations in Catastrophe

Historical Comedy on Screen
Subverting History with Humour
In 1893 Friedrich Engels branded history “the cruelest goddess of all.” This sorrowful vision of the past is deeply rooted in the Western imagination and history is thus presented as a joyless playground of inevitability rather than a droll world of possibilities. There are few places this is more evident than in historical cinema which tends to portray the past in a somber manner.
Historical Comedy on Screen examines this tendency paying particular attention to the themes most difficult to laugh at and exploring the place where comical and historical storytelling intersect. The book emphasizes the many oft-overlooked comical renderings of history and asks what they have to tell us if we begin to take them seriously.

Harm and Offence in Media Content
A Review of the Evidence, Second Edition
Children and teenagers are often the first to adopt new media technologies and parents and policy makers continue to be concerned about the widespread use of diverse media and its potential effects on young people. Harm and Offence in Media Content presents a significant and comprehensive analysis of the benefits and dangers posed by both established and emergent technologies. Newly updated this balanced critical account examines all media including interactive games social networking and mobile phones. Many examples specifically focus on the United States noting the ways in which young people are using new technologies and the partnerships this has given rise to between state governments media regulators and Internet service providers. This informative guide to a controversial field of study will be a useful resource for scholars in media communication psychology sociology and education.

Hong Kong New Wave Cinema (1978–2000)
Drawing on the auteur and genre theories Pak Tong Cheuk here examines the cinematic style and aesthetics of New Wave directors most of whom were educated at British and U.S. film schools. In addition to investigating the narrative content structure and mise-en-scène of individual films this volume traces the overall development of the film and television industries in Hong Kong in the 1960s and 1970s. Cheuk’s intriguing study of the rise and fall of Hong Kong’s golden age of film establishes the New Wave as an era of great historical significance for scholars of cinema popular culture and the arts. “An interesting and detailed look at one of the most vital movements in the film industry during the latter part of the twentieth century. Pak’s work not only gives an informative overview of the origins of the movement but goes into detail about the works of some of the most notable New Wave directors including Tsui Hark Ann Hui and Patrick Tam and the effects their pictures had on film-makers from all over the world.”—Neil Koch HKfilm.net