Material culture Books

Book SynopsisHistory through material culture is a unique, step-by-step guide for students and researchers who wish to use objects as historical sources.Responding to the significant, scholarly interest in historical material culture studies, this book makes clear how students and researchers ready to use these rich material sources can make important, valuable and original contributions to history.Written by two experienced museum practitioners and historians, the book recognises the theoretical and practical challenges of this approach and offers clear advice on methods to get the best out of material culture research. With a focus on the early modern and modern periods, this volume draws on examples from across the world and demonstrates how to use material culture to answer a range of enquiries, including social, economic, gender, cultural and global history.Table of ContentsIntroduction 1 Approaches to the material world 2 Planning a research project 3 Developing a methodology 4 Locating sources: understanding museum collections and other repositories 5 Analysing sources 6 Writing up findings Afterword Index

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Book SynopsisExploring ideas around minimalism, simplicity and how to live comfortably with less. The modern world can be a complicated, frenzied and noisy place, filled with too many options, products, ideas and opinions. That explains why what many of us long for is simplicity: a life that can be more pared down, peaceful and focused on the essentials. But finding simplicity is not always easy; it isn’t just a case of emptying out our closets or trimming back commitments in our diaries. True simplicity requires that we understand the roots of our distractions – and develop a canny respect for the stubborn reasons why things can grow complex and overwhelming. This book is a guide to the simpler lives we crave and deserve. It considers how we might achieve simplicity across a range of areas: our relationships, social lives, work routines and our approaches to possessions and media. Along the way, we learn about Zen Buddhism, modernist architecture, monasteries, psychoanalysis, and why we probably don’t need more than three good friends or a few treasured belongings. It isn’t enough that our lives should look simple; they need to be simple from the inside. This book takes a psychological approach, guiding us towards less contorted hearts and minds. It suggests that once we truly know who we are and what we want, we will be able to live with far less than we currently believe we need. We have for too long been drowning in excess and clutter from a confusion about our aspirations; A Simpler Life helps us tune out the static and focus on what properly matters to us.

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Book SynopsisThe international literary icon opens his eclectic closet and shares photos of his extensive unique personal T-shirt collection. Haruki Murakami's books have galvanized millions around the world. Many of his fans know about his 10,000-vinyl-record collection, and his obsession with running, but few have heard about a more intimate, and perhaps more unique, passion: his T-shirt-collecting habit.In Murakami T, the famously reclusive novelist shows us his T-shirts - including gems found in bookshops, charity shops and record stores - from those featuring whisky, animals, cars and superheroes, to souvenirs of marathons and a Beach Boys concert in Honolulu, to the shirt that inspired the beloved short story 'Tony Takitani'. Accompanied by short, frank essays that have been translated into English for the first time, these photographs reveal much about Murakami's multifaceted and wonderfully eccentric persona.'The world's most popular cult novelist' GuardianTrade ReviewFascinating...part ode, part exhibit that reads with restrained affection for his accidental accumulations....these tees excavate an intimate history. The choices we make about what we find and keep point to our interior worlds...Murakami's understated love letters to his tees also convey how we give life to our things and vice versa. * Atlantic *It's safe to say there is no one like Murakami * Literary Review *Murakami is one of the best writers around * Time Out, on Norwegian Wood *Everything he chooses to describe trembles with symbolic possibility * Guardian, on Norwegian Wood *Mesmerising, surreal, this really is the work of a true original * The Times, on The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle *Undeniably a somewhat eccentric book. But it's also a very likeable one... The overall effect is not unlike sharing a conversation with a genial bloke in a bar * Reader's Digest *One of the most influential novelists of his generation. * Observer *An incredibly readable and charming tour through Murakami's life through the T-shirts he has collected along the way... [the reader] feels a personal connection with him, as if we are reading his secret diary -- Adam Davidson * Northern Echo *

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Book SynopsisAn examination of the uses, meanings, and social impact of Viking Age textiles. This volume offers the first full study of archaeological fabrics and their decoration found in the North Atlantic region and dating broadly from the Viking or Norse period. With contributions from both academic scholars and practitioners, it shows how approaching early medieval textiles from archaeological, historical and literary contexts, and through the processes of learning and employing the traditional skills of making them, brings about a more nuanced understanding of early medieval cloths: their creation, use and meanings within their respective societies. The book is divided into two parts. The first, "Textiles and their Interpretation", takes the reader on a journey from how wool was processed in the Viking Age, and the conservator's role in preserving and interpreting archaeological textiles, to different types of analyses that researchers use to understand and explain textiles from across the wide area of the Viking-influenced North Atlantic region. The second, "Understanding through Replicating", investigates the results of practical experiments in the reconstruction of surviving medieval fabrics and the resulting empirical conclusions that can be made about their manufacture and wider cultural implications.

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Book SynopsisAlison Bancroft is a writer and cultural critic. She specialises in interdisciplinary approaches to modern and contemporary art and visual culture, and is committed to working across all media and contexts. Her research interests include visual culture and theory, psychoanalytic thought, and sexualities. She was awarded her PhD by the University of London in 2010. This is her first book.Table of ContentsIntroduction One: Fashion Photography and the Myth of the Unified Subject Two: Inspiring Desire: The Case for Haute Couture Three: Queering Fashion, Dressing Transgression Four: Fashion, Text, Symptom Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Tree explores the forms, uses, and alliances of this living object's entanglement with humanity, from antiquity to the present. Trees tower over us and yet fade into background. Their lifespan outstrips ours, and yet their wisdom remains inscrutable, treasured up in the heartwood. They serve us in many ways—as keel, lodgepole, and execution site—and yet to become human, we had to come down from their limbs. In this book Matthew Battles follows the tree's branches across art, poetry, and landscape, marking the edges of imagination with wildness and shadow. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewWhat astonishingly good writing! What a joy of a book. What a mind, this Matthew Battles. As he writes about trees, Battles could as well be describing his own wild mind: 'uncanny, possessed of depths and mystery, and feral in ways beyond my ken, . . . overspilling with dark abundance, . . . richly disruptive to one’s daily commute.' * Kathleen Dean Moore, author of Great Tide Rising: Toward Clarity and Moral Courage in a Time of Planetary Change (2016) and Piano Tide: A Novel (2016) *Battles … shows how trees--and perhaps more importantly our relationships with trees--are incredibly complicated. Even dappling--that wonderful light that comes through a tree’s leaves--is not as simple as it seems … He makes clear that trees and their data have important stories to tell. That is if we let them. * PopMatters *Table of ContentsPart One: Feral Trees The Tree of Heaven In a Dappled World A branching Heuristic Part Two: Garden and Forest In the Tree Museum From Ailanthus to Apple The Charter of the Forests Part Three: A Dark Abundance The Tree and/in History With and Without Us Notes Index

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Though we try to imagine otherwise, waste is every object, plus time. Whatever else an object is, it’s also waste—or was, or will be. All that is needed is time or a change of sentiment or circumstance. Waste is not merely the field of discarded objects, but the name we give to our troubled relationship with the decaying world outside ourselves. Waste focuses on those waste objects that most fundamentally shape our lives and also attempts to understand our complicated emotional and intellectual relationships to our own refuse: nuclear waste, climate debris, pop-culture rubbish, digital detritus, and more. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewFascinating, thought-provoking, and necessary, Brian Thill’s Waste is about not just our present but our future. You can’t read it and come out of the experience unchanged. * Jeff VanderMeer, New York Times-Bestselling Author of The Southern Reach trilogy *If 'waste,' as Brian Thill points out, is any object plus time, then Waste is waste plus spirited curiosity and tremendous intelligence. With a gaze full of vigor and heart, Thill looks at the fate of what we discard—from space junk to horse corpses to bird bellies split open from plastic—and illuminates invisible margins we’d often rather forget. I read the whole book in one sitting, spellbound. * Leslie Jamison, New York Times-Bestselling Author of The Empathy Exams *Waste is the finest filth around—or really the finest mediation of it I can think of: Thill looks deeply into how what we waste controls us at the level of the personal and the public—our discards become our fate and home both—and finds treasure. * Alexander Chee, author of Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night *Waste pluralizes, names a condition into which objects fall, takes us beachcombing, dumpster diving. ‘Waste is every object, plus time’… The true aim of Brian Thill’s book, however, is… that non-place to which waste is sent. We cannot afford… to believe in such a zone any longer. Of course, we never really could or did — out of sight was simply out of mind. Waste always kept coming back. -- Julian Yates * Los Angeles Review of Books *Table of ContentsThe beach that speaks Trash familiars/Tabflab Pigs in space Million-year panic Ruinism Splinter, shard, and stone Where the hoard is Lake Carbamazepine Acknowledgements Illustrations Bibliography Index

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Book Synopsis‘A wonderful gallery of period items related to the Titanic and Olympic, presented and shared by some of the top researchers and collectors in the field. Many of these items are quite rare or unique, and are not often seen by the general public.’ – Bill Wormstedt, co-author of Recreating the TitanicThe basic facts of the Titanic’s story are well known: in April 1912 the largest ship in the world, described as ‘practically unsinkable’, set off on her maiden trip to New York. She would never make it there. Instead she would strike an iceberg just days into her journey and sink to the depths of the North Atlantic Ocean, taking nearly 1,500 people with her. She would remain there undisturbed for seventy-three years.Titanic Collections: Fragments of History is a two-part series showcasing rare and important artefacts relating to the history of RMS Titanic. Many collectors prefer to hide their treasures away, but the items presented in these beautiful books have been gathered by six well-known and respected researchers, authors, historians and collectors who want to share their acquisitions with the world.The Ship focuses on artefacts relating to the Titanic herself, ranging from carpet squares and floor tiles to crockery and bath tickets. Each beautifully photographed item brings the story of the Titanic to life, and all come together as a museum for your bookshelf.Trade ReviewA wonderful gallery of period items related to the Titanic and Olympic, presented and shared by some of the top researchers and collectors in the field. Many of these items are quite rare or unique, and are not often seen by the general public. -- Bill Wormstedt * co-author of Recreating the Titanic *In Titanic Collections: Fragments of History, the authors have shared generously from their extensive collections. We see rare objects which bring to life Titanic’s story – her brief life and its disastrous end. Highly recommended! -- Mark Chirnside * author of Olympic, Titanic, Britannic: An Illustrated History of the Olympic Class Ships *In an era where so many items disappear into private collections, never to be seen again, it is a pleasure to be able to experience the story of the brief life of Titanic in such an engaging and unique way … The esteemed group of authors behind Titanic Collections: Fragments of History has done a great service. -- Tad Fitch * co-author of On a Sea of Glass: The Life and Loss of the RMS Titanic *

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Book SynopsisThe verb declutter has not yet made it into the Oxford English Dictionary, but its ever-increasing usage suggests that it's only a matter of time. The author finds that both the idea of organization and the role of the clutterologist are deeply ingrained in our culture, and that there is a fine line between clutter and deviance in America.Trade Review"My high expectations were fulfilled and indeed exceeded by Herring's brilliant, groundbreaking, fascinating, and lucid book. In traversing his rich and well-researched archive in the series of case studies that make up the book, Herring examines how and why hoarders have been stigmatized in a number of different contexts through the twentieth century. In doing so, he mounts a sustained and significant challenge to the pathologizing discourses about hoarding." (Jonathan Flatley, Wayne State University)"

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Book SynopsisNeil MacGregor''s A History of the World in 100 Objects takes a bold, original approach to human history, exploring past civilizations through the objects that defined them. Encompassing a grand sweep of human history, A History of the World in 100 Objects begins with one of the earliest surviving objects made by human hands, a chopping tool from the Olduvai gorge in Africa, and ends with objects which characterise the world we live in today. Seen through MacGregor''s eyes, history is a kaleidoscope - shifting, interconnected, constantly surprising, and shaping our world today in ways that most of us have never imagined. A stone pillar tells us about a great Indian emperor preaching tolerance to his people; Spanish pieces of eight tell us about the beginning of a global currency; and an early Victorian tea-set speaks to us about the impact of empire. An intellectual and visual feast, this is one of the most engrossing and unusual history books published in years. ''Brilliant, engagingly written, deeply researched'' Mary Beard, Guardian ''A triumph: hugely popular, and rightly lauded as one of the most effective and intellectually ambitious initiatives in the making of ''public history'' for many decades'' Sunday Telegraph ''Highly intelligent, delightfully written and utterly absorbing '' Timothy Clifford, Spectator ''This is a story book, vivid and witty, shining with insights, connections, shocks and delights'' Gillian Reynolds Daily Telegraph

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Book SynopsisThis illustrated survey of 600 years of fashion investigates its cultural and social meanings from medieval Europe to 20th-century America. It provides a guide to the changes in style and taste, showing that clothes have always played a pivotal role in defining a sense of identity and society.Table of ContentsMedieval period - fashioning the body; Renaissance - the rhetoric of power; 17th century - clothing and crisis; 18th century - clothing and commerce; 19th century - fashion and modernity; early 20th century - clothing the masses; late 20th century - catwalk and street style.

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Book SynopsisA vivid exploration of the evolution of reading as an essential social and domestic activity during the eighteenth century Two centuries before the advent of radio, television, and motion pictures, books were a cherished form of popular entertainment and an integral component of domestic social life. In this fascinating and vivid history, Abigail Williams explores the ways in which shared reading shaped the lives and literary culture of the time, offering new perspectives on how books have been used by their readers, and the part they have played in middle-class homes and families. Drawing on marginalia, letters and diaries, library catalogues, elocution manuals, subscription lists, and more, Williams offers fresh and fascinating insights into reading, performance, and the history of middle-class home life.Trade Review“A lively survey. . . . Williams’s book is welcome because her research and insights make us conscious of how we, today, use books.”—John Sutherland, New York Times Book Review“Williams’s charming pageant of anecdotes, as revealed in diaries, letters and marginalia, conjures a world strikingly different from our own but surprisingly similar in many ways, a time when reading was on the rise and whole worlds sprang up around it.”—Washington Post“The inestimable value of Williams’s book is that it offers us, beyond the shrewd and apt commentary, new things to understand and to feel among the sheer diversity and number of its eloquent lives.”—Min Wild, Times Literary Supplement“This lively and original study, richly documented and happily free of jargon… has brought to life the story of how print worked on people in the past.”—Toby Barnard, Dublin Review of Books“The Social Life of Books ranges confidently and with fascinating detail over a great number of types of reading venues, reading materials, and readers.” —James Raven, American Historical Review“This book confidently explores a fascinating topic. Its strength lies in its sheer wealth of examples, especially the many cases recovered from provincial archives that freshly illustrate the habits and eccentricities of eighteenth-century readers. This is a book that any reader with an interest in the eighteenth century will enjoy and value.”—John Mullan, University College London"A comprehensive account, impressively documented and vividly illustrated, of the social history of reading, by an author whose own reading skills are matched by her brilliantly mastered erudition."—Claude Rawson, Maynard Mack Professor of English Emeritus, Yale University“The Social Life of Books is a magnificent, genuinely innovative achievement that will appeal not only to scholars of literature and book history, not only to historians, but to all lovers of books and reading.”—Markman Ellis, Queen Mary University of London “This is a magnificent achievement. Williams approaches the history of reading from a wide purview, offering research into the price of books, on literacy, and on circulating libraries, book shops, book clubs and other forms of book sharing, including book theft. It makes a very compelling case for the cultures of sociable reading in eighteenth-century Britain.”—Markman Ellis, Queen Mary University of London

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. While we all use remote controls, we understand little about their history or their impact on our daily lives. Caetlin Benson-Allot looks back on the remote control’s material and cultural history to explain how such an innocuous media accessory has changed the way we occupy our houses, interact with our families, and experience the world. From the first wired radio remotes of the 1920s to infrared universal remotes, from the homemade TV controllers to the Apple Remote, remote controls shape our media devices and how we live with them. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewThe remote control encourages us to take it for granted. It's ubiquitous but easy to misplace. An essential convenience but still an overly complicated nuisance. But in this compelling history, Caetlin Benson-Allott places remote controls at the center of our media universe, demonstrating how profoundly these devices shape contemporary media practices and our everyday lives. You'll never surf the same way again. * Jason Mittell, Professor of Film & Media Culture, Middlebury College, USA, and author of Television and American Culture *While promising control, the remote often fails to recognize commands or deliver our desires. Caetlin Benson-Allott shows how the history of the remote, including its affordances and burdensome proliferations, can help us better understand contemporary media technologies. * Michele White, Associate Professor of Communication, Tulane University, USA, and author of Buy It Now: Lessons from eBay *Caetlin Benson-Allott offers an analysis of ‘remote control’ as a ‘technology and a cultural fantasy.’ …What was once a fantasy, a thing of the imagination, becomes instead an instrument, but by that instantiation it scrambles and reduces the myriad imaginative uses it once anchored — realizes some, sends others packing, or separates them out. -- Julian Yates * Los Angeles Review of Books *Object Lessons’ describes themselves as ‘short, beautiful books,’ and to that, I'll say, amen. … [I]t is in this simplicity that we find insight and even beauty. … Remote Control by Caetlin Benson-Allott is another pleasure, walking us through the history of one of my favorite objects, with a history dating to the 1920s. In the middle to late 1970s, I was actually employed as a remote control, as my father would say, "John, change the channel to 7," or "Put it on 9," and my job would be to get up and change the channel to 7 or 9. I was relieved to be replaced by an infrared model in the 1980s. … If you read enough ‘Object Lessons’ books, you'll fill your head with plenty of trivia to amaze and annoy your friends and loved ones — caution recommended on pontificating on the objects surrounding you. More importantly, though, in the tradition of McPhee's Oranges, they inspire us to take a second look at parts of the everyday that we've taken for granted. These are not so much lessons about the objects themselves, but opportunities for self-reflection and storytelling. They remind us that we are surrounded by a wondrous world, as long as we care to look. * Chicago Tribune *Table of ContentsIntroduction: What a Mess! Chapter 1: Changing Volume Chapter 2: Switching Channels Chapter 3: Comprehensive Control Conclusion: Material Literacy Index

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Book SynopsisThis book introduces the critical concepts and debates that are shaping the emerging field of game studies. Exploring games in the context of cultural studies and media studies, it analyses computer games as the most popular contemporary form of new media production and consumption. The book: Argues for the centrality of play in redefining reading, consuming and creating culture Offers detailed research into the political economy of games to generate a model of new media production Examines the dynamics of power in relation to both the production and consumption of computer games This is key reading for students, academics and industry practitioners in the fields of cultural studies, new media, media studies and game studies, as well as human-computer interaction and cyberculture.Table of ContentsIntroduction: Computer Games as New MediaThe Ludological Turn: What Play Theory Brings to the Analysis of New Media Why We Get the Games We Get: The Political Economy of GamesNetworks Of TechnicityUnderstanding Games as ‘Texts’Cyborg Spectatorship: Untying the Knots of GameplayInterventions and Recuperations

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Book SynopsisThe second half of the seventh millennium BC saw the demise of the previously affluent and dynamic Neolithic way of life. The period is marked by significant social and economic transformations of local communities, as manifested in a new spatial organization, patterns of architecture, burial practices, and in chipped stone and pottery manufacture. This volume has three foci. The first concerns the character of these changes in different parts of the Near East with a view to placing them in a broader comparative perspective. The second concerns the social and ideological changes that took place at the end of Neolithic and the beginning of the Chalcolithic that help to explain the disintegration of constitutive principles binding the large centers, the emergence of a new social system, as well as the consequences of this process for the development of full-fledged farming communities in the region and beyond. The third concerns changes in lifeways: subsistence strategies, exploitation of the environment, and, in particular, modes of procurement, consumption, and distribution of different resources.

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Book SynopsisIn a volume that brings together a wide range of disciplines - art history, sociology, architecture, cultural anthropology, and environmental psychology - Irene Cieraad presents a collection of articles that focuses on the practices and symbolism of domestic space in Western society.Trade ReviewThis volume on domestic space brings together research traditions that have never mingled before: art history, social history, women's studies, design history, architectural history, cultural anthropology, ethnology, sociology, housing sociology, environmental psychology, material cultural studies and consumer studies.... The book displays the varied approaches that can be taken when studying domestic space and is a very interesting read. - Area ""Amsterdam anthropologist Irene Cieraad edits this interdisciplinary collection of articles looking inward at Western urban living and examining what our homes reveal about our cultures and societies." - Today's Books

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Book SynopsisWINNER of the 2022 Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction!WINNER of the 2022 CLMP Firecracker Award in Creative Nonfiction!“Plastic is powerful and moving, a deep, personal exploration of the modern world.”—Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize recipient for The Making of the Atomic Bomb In Plastic: An Autobiography, Cobb’s obsession with a large plastic car part leads her to explore the violence of our consume-and-dispose culture, including her own life as a child of Los Alamos, where the first atomic bombs were made. The journey exposes the interconnections among plastic waste, climate change, nuclear technologies, and racism. Using a series of interwoven narratives―from ancient Phoenicia to Alabama―the book bears witness to our deepest entanglements and asks how humans continue on this planet.Trade Review"Plastic: An Autobiography is an ambitious braid of industrial history, material culture, environmental racism, and memoir. With its formal ambition and intelligence, yoking the movement between self and world, the book demonstrates that in the micro we can hold onto the macro, and in the macro the micro accrues meaning. Plastic is wildly impressive, a thoughtful meditation on plastic but also all of life."—CLMP Firecracker Award Judges Citation"Cobb is acutely aware that systemic change is the planet’s only hope. Tracking her carbon footprint when she flies or drives, the author bears striking witness to destruction: Birds and fish die from plastic detritus; decades after World War II, the stomach of an albatross was perforated by a plastic shard from a bombing raid."—KIRKUS "In this elegiac missive from the frontlines of our plastic-filled world, Cobb uses a variety of narrative forms to convey her deep despair over how plastic has overwhelmed our planet… There is elegance and power in Cobb’s truly unique environmental memoir."—Starred Review in Booklist by Colleen Mondor "Why have we created a culture of such wanton waste if we want to live on earth? In the long shelf of books interrogating our moment in the climate crisis, this memoir is a sharp, urgent breakthrough, a triumph of honesty."—John Freeman, Oregon Book Award Judge"In Plastic, Cobb investigates the origins of our contemporary intertwining crises by constructing a circle of cross-linked lyrical essays about the eternal presence and persistence of plastic in our natural world, our bodies, and our communities. Into this circle of narratives, she weaves facts, remainders, curiosities, and griefs—'the plastic will outlast the bones, the sand, this writing'—and like the shards of plastic she traces, her narrative structures are periodically broken by verse, lists, etymologies, and other voices, such as Samuel Coleridge, Claudia Rankine, and Karen Barad."—Kenyon Review "Cobb is stridently warning us of imminent ecological peril and the need to systemic transformation of our systems of production and consumption."—New York Journal of Books"Allison Cobb’s Plastic is so epic that it’s hard to know where to begin. Its composition spans over a decade of Cobb’s life and encompasses enormous changes in her own biography and family story… The book’s intellectual and political allegiances shift radically from a respectful, if mournful, immersion in the patriarchal world of technology and science to a much more critical remove. I sit down with Allison Cobb to discuss her new book Plastic: An Autobiography and her process in writing it."—Lambda Literary"A stunning tapestry of carefully woven stories, Plastic: An Autobiography is essential reading for all who are concerned about the state of our environment as well as the impact it has on those it supports.—Split Lip Mag“Allison Cobb’s Plastic: An Autobiography is the story of all of our lives. Gripping, informative, and moving, the book is both convicted and convicting, revealing the dirty and the brilliant underpinnings of our modern world. Once I picked it up, I didn’t want to put this book down. And when I finished reading, I knew much more about all the things I didn’t know I needed to know."—Camille T. Dungy, author of Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History “Plastic: an Autobiography is a spinning gyre of history, biology, poetry, and chemistry, gathering centripetal force through attention to such particulars as a shard of plastic from WWII found lodged in the belly of an albatross sixty years later. This is a fierce and brilliant work that perhaps could only have been written by a poet who grew up in the shadow of Los Alamos, aware that the most destructive of human inventions can seem salvific until it is almost too late. Let this book be a call to awareness and action."—Carolyn Forché, author of What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance “Allison Cobb’s Plastic: An Autobiography gathers shards of story, history, and science, along with bits of plastic left orphaned in the world. She is a daughter of the nuclear age (her father a physicist at Los Alamos) and an environmentalist, giving her voice the authority of lived experience on the edge of our industrial nightmare."—Alison Hawthorne Deming “Allison Cobb is not only a dedicated environmentalist, but she is also one of America’s most original environmental writers. The form of this book embodies narrative plasticity as each chapter is molded by history, science, memory, experience, and personal travels through the plasticsphere. After reading the final page, you will never see plastic the same way again, and you will see it everywhere."—Craig Santos Perez “Cobb carries us on a collective and at times personal journey through environment and time, juxtaposing the persistent nature of industry and convenience against the righteous indignation of the people impacted by it. I found Plastic to be just the reminder that we all need in the fight for climate and environmental justice today."—Heather Toney

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Book SynopsisAlmost three tons of concrete are produced each year for every person on the planet; only water is consumed more per head of population. Now used almost universally in modern construction, concrete polarizes opinion: provoking intense loathing and fervent passion in others. Concrete and Culture breaks new ground by charting concrete's effects on culture since its reinvention in the modern period, examining the ways it has changed our understanding of nature, of time and of materiality. This book discusses architects' responses to and uses of concrete while also taking into account the role it has played in politics, literature, cinema and labour relations, as well as in present day arguments about sustainability.

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Book SynopsisTextile has been used as a medium of communication since the prehistoric period. Up until the 19th century, civilizations throughout the world manipulated thread and fabric to communicate in a way that would astound many of us now. Unlike text and images, textile is haptic and three-dimensional. Its meaning is unfixed, constantly shifting as it circulates between different owners and creators. In How Textile Communicates, Ganaele Langlois dissects textile's unique capacity for communication through a range of global case studies, before examining the profound impact of colonialism on textile practice and the appropriation of this medium by capitalist systems. A thought-provoking contribution to the fields of both fashion and communication studies, Langlois' writing challenges readers' preconceptions and shines new light on the profound impact of textiles on human communication.Trade ReviewA major contribution to intercultural and decolonial studies as it examines how the communicative capacities of textile have been taken for granted across boundaries, borders, disciplines and technologies. * Janis Jefferies, Emeritus Professor of Visual Arts, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Textile as Communication Winding Back Textile as a Medium Textile Making as Mediating Textile Making and Power Decolonizing Media and Communication Book Overview Part 1: Communicative Power 1. Unraveling Textile from Commodity to Communication A Plural Medium Textile as Communication Medium: Historical Pointers Two Common Understandings of Communication through Textile: as Representation and Information Towards a Third Aspect: textile as binding worlds through space and time Global Textile, or Communication as Expressive Power Textile, a Medium of Struggle 2. Quechua Textility Pre-Columbian Textiles: Media and Power Indigenous Identities in Contemporary Peru The Revival of Quechua Textiles Confronting Appropriation Part 2: Technology and Imagination 3. Jacquard and the Creativity of Extensions The Jacquard Mechanism, Automation and Digital Media Weaving Digital Images Weaving as Extension 4. Communicating Across the Abyss Of the Meanings, Symbols and Patterns in Diasporic Textile Mathematics, Rhythms and Signs The Values of Making Part 3: Transformative Entanglements 5. Reweaving the Interface Domestic Textiles and Power Marking Subjects Reading through the Lines: The Evanescent Maker Portable Technologies of Making “Where Am I going?”: Creative Meandering 6. Kené, or the Promise of Unknowing Shipibo-Conibo Textiles and Perspectival Anthropology Kené in the Global Market Delineating the Space of Unknowing and Potentials Back to the Basics Part 4: Cosmomedia 7. Cosmomedia - the Tale of Two Indigos Cosmotechnics and Ecosophical Media Combinations and Recombinations: Indigo dyeing and the making of worlds Colonizing Indigo Indigo and Collectives of Humans and Non-Humans Japanese Indigo and Natural Dyes as Cosmomedia Conclusion: The Shape of Things to Come

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Book SynopsisHighly Commended, Society for Renaissance Studies Biennial Book Prize 2022In sixteenth and seventeenth-century England, the female silhouette underwent a dramatic change. This very structured form, created using garments called bodies and farthingales, existed in various extremes in Western Europe and beyond, in the form of stays, corsets, hoop petticoats and crinolines, right up until the twentieth century. With a nuanced approach that incorporates a stunning array of visual and written sources and drawing on transdisciplinary methodologies, Shaping Femininity explores the relationship between material culture and femininity by examining the lives of a wide range of women, from queens to courtiers, farmer's wives and servants, uncovering their lost voices and experiences. It reorients discussions about female foundation garments in English and wider European history, arguing that these objects of material culture began to shape and define changing notions of the feminineTrade ReviewVirtually nothing is known about early modern undergarments, although they were clearly worn by (nearly) everyone. Moving beyond surviving inventories, images and objects, Bendall reconstructed her own garments in order to understand how they shaped the female body The result is a fascinating exploration of a – literally – disguised history, one that shows how female agency shaped and defined notions of femininity alongside the male gaze. * Judges' comments, Society for Renaissance Studies Biennial Book Prize 2022 *Sarah Bendall’s fascinating exploration of women’s foundation garments in Early Modern England shows not just how artisans made clothes, but how clothes made their wearers. Richly researched and beautifully illustrated, Shaping Femininity is both scholarly and accessible, and its innovative use of historical reconstruction ensures that it will become the essential study of female silhouettes before the Victorian corset. * Timothy McCall, Villanova University, USA *Body shaping garments determined the social spaces females claimed, an embodied assertion, always political. Sarah Bendall’s original and important interdisciplinary study reveals the gendered meanings of shaping garments, in elite and everyday life. History is enriched through her findings. * Beverly Lemire, University of Alberta, Canada *Shaping Femininity provides fascinating insight into female foundation garments in early modern England – their makers and wearers, their materiality and their meanings. With a richly evocative contextual background that takes in a wide range of texts, images, garments and objects, Bendall deftly shows how female bodies were a site of agency and contest, power and beauty. A powerful voice of the role of experiential learning, Bendall charts her own reconstructions of garments. The vital importance of making and experience is at the heart of this book, which insists that we take foundation garments – and the women who wore them – seriously. * Erin Griffey, University of Auckland, New Zealand *Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Notes to the Reader Abbreviations Introduction 1. The foundations of the body: foundation garments and the early modern female silhouette 2. The artificial body: courtiers, gentlewomen and disputed visions of femininity, 1560-1650 3. The socially mobile body: consumption of foundation garments by middling and common women, 1560 – 1650 4. The body makers: making and buying foundation garments in early modern England 5. The everyday body: assumptions, tropes and the lived experience 6. The sexual body: eroticism, reproduction and control 7. The respectable body: rising consumption and the changing sensibilities of late seventeenth-and early eighteenth-century England Conclusion: legacies and misconceptions Glossary Notes Selected Bibliography List of Illustrations Index

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Book SynopsisAn intimate portrait of Tudor England captured, revealed and explored in 100 defining objectsTrade ReviewEverything you wanted to know about the Merrie England of the Tudors and some things you probably did not. If the Tudors seem far removed, they are also curiously modern. They had spectacles and metal prosthetic arms, while a “fuming pot” was but a prototype Air Wick. Matusiak’s mini essays accompanying the photographs are perfectly sculpted and the book is beautiful to hold. -- Charlotte Heathcote * The Sunday Express *

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Book SynopsisWhat are the archives of gay and lesbian leather histories, and how have contemporary artists mined these archives to create a queer politics of the present? This book sheds light on an area long ignored by traditional art history and LGBTQ studies, examining the legacies of the visual and material cultures of US leather communities. It discusses the work of contemporary artists such as Patrick Staff, Dean Sameshima, Monica Majoli, AK Burns and AL Steiner, and the artist collective Die Kränken, showing how archival histories and contemporary artistic projects might be applied in a broader analysis of LGBTQ culture and norms. Hanky codes, blurry photographs of Tom of Finland drawings, a pin sash weighted down with divergent histories – these become touchstones for writing leather histories.Trade Review'An elegantly disciplined page turner, Bound Together interweaves the various cultures of leather sex and the archive with solid research, sly humor, and patient interpretation. In this context, Campbell's sections on a selected group of contemporary and modern artists are particularly insightful.'Catherine Lord, Claire Trevor School of the Arts, University of California, Irvine'Sex is good to think with, but Andy Campbell’s leathersex is even better. This exuberant, challenging, perceptive, cleverly crafted and generously illustrated study explores the role of BDSM in visual and material art, performance and archival practice – while, in the process, becoming its own sexual archive. A new kind of art history, Bound together transforms our comprehensions of sex and apprehensions of the archive.'Professor Barry Reay, author of New York Hustlers and Sex in the Archives -- .Table of ContentsList of platesList of figuresAcknowledgements1 Introduction: bound together2 The work of the master’s hand3 How to talk about Tom4 Yellow, or reading archives diagonally5 Numbers6 ‘Clubs that don’t exist anymore’7 Attached to history8 ‘Deep fist at the Modern’9 Conclusion: surrogates, envelopesSelect bibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisIllustrates how our consumer spending generates vast amounts of economic waste. This book provides explanations to show us why it's time to stop the madness and think twice before buying gifts for the holidays.Trade Review"Leave it to an economist to make an impassioned argument for why we shouldn't give gifts, especially during the holidays."--Los Angeles Times "[A] small but very well-written and well-argued book which makes some serious points as well as poking fun at the nightmare of Christmas shopping... Point by point the author demolishes the case for giving gifts. In fact, this is a very sensible book on every level."--Times Literary Supplement "Waldfogel delivers a badly needed poke in the eye at holiday-time consumer madness, positing that not only is compulsory gift giving stressful and expensive, but it's economically unsound... This lively, spot-on book may be the one gift that still makes sense to buy come Black Friday."--Publishers Weekly "Scroogenomics is a quick read. Not only is it well under 200 pages, but the book can easily fit in your pocket. This is no think volume intended to scare off non-economists. Better still, Scroogenomics is almost entirely free of jargon. And when technical terms do appear, they are immediately explained."--Ryan Young, Washington Times "Another huge, value-destroying hurricane is about to slam America, destroying billions of dollars of value. Another Katrina? No, another Christmas. This voluntary December calamity is explained in a darkly amusing little book that is about the size of an iPhone. Scroogenomics comes from a distinguished publisher, Princeton University Press, and an eminent author, Joel Waldfogel of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton business school."--George Will, Washington Post "In his new book, Scroogenomics--a perfect stocking-filler--Waldfogel argues that buying presents is no longer a luxury but a necessity because the social pressure is immense."--John-Paul Flintoff, Sunday Times "Waldfogel assesses holiday gift giving though the lens of economic tenets such as opportunity costs and deadweight loss. The result is a short but engaging manifesto on the inefficiency of the tradition, concluding with several solutions to increase satisfaction for both givers and receivers. Although his own suggestions mandate that you not buy this book for someone who wanted something else, fans of Freakonomics and The Economic Naturalist may love it."--Library Journal "[A] handsome little book... Waldfogel is, if not a unique, then certainly a rare economist."--Australian "Nobody has done more to damage relations between the joyous commercial festival that is Christmas and the economics profession than Joel Waldfogel. Long-term readers of this column will be well aware of Professor Waldfogel's research paper, 'The Deadweight Loss of Christmas'. Ever since it was published in 1993 it has been taken out by economic journalists and displayed like last year's decorations. Waldfogel--a witty writer himself--has evidently decided that if everyone is going to discuss the idea, he may as well get in on the act, so has published Scroogenomics, a book that--dare I say it--looks like it would make a terrific stocking-filler."--Tim Harford, Financial Times "And now, in a new book called Scroogenomics, a U.S. economist has helpfully done the math on the holiday he declares, as only an economist would, an 'organized institution for value destruction.'"--Erin Anderssen, Globe & Mail "You would have thought that a book entitled Scroogenomics, which has been published in a recession and exhorts us to give up buying presents this Christmas, would do so from a spirit of, if not outright meanness, then at least heartfelt thrift. But Professor Joel Waldfogel instead uses a rather arch economic formula to explain why giving presents is a complete waste of time."--Rosie Millard, New Statesman "[A]n interesting and provocative book."--Times Higher Education "[Scroogenomics] is a nicely-timed stocking filler from the man who estimates that badly-chosen Christmas presents will waste the equivalent of $25bn across the world this year."--Tim Harford, Prospect "Written in a breezy, engaging style (he quotes Homer Simpson, not Friedrich von Hayek), Waldfogel's book attempts to quantify the cost to society of millions of Grandmas, Aunt Beas, and Uncle Charlies bestowing incorrect sweaters, candles, and other dud gifts, and presents a couple of options to reduce that loss."--Baltimore City Paper "[F]ar from being Scrooge-like, Scroogenomics points out that we could do something much more useful with our money, such as redistribute it to those who really need it."--The Age "Leave it to an economist to trample on a cherished year-long tradition. Joel Waldfogel, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business, has written a book that promoters hype as one 'Santa doesn't want you to read.' Scroogenomics is a brief but biting little book about how our obsession with holiday spending generates some $85 billion dollars of economic waste each winter... Waldfogel doesn't just stomp on tradition. He offers solutions, such as charity gift cards that can be used as a force for good, and suggests transferring balances on regular store gift cards to charities after a certain time rather than let them go unredeemed."--Atlanta Journal-Constitution "If you're heading for the stores today, keep one thing in mind: Many of the gifts you buy today are likely unwanted. In his new book Scroogenomics, University of Pennsylvania economist Joel Waldfogel warns that most of us are not so great at gift-giving. He has data to back it up, and he offers a solution."--Fort Worth Star-Telegram "Joel Waldfogel has meticulously quantified the spirit of Christmas, giving in to a set of numbers and percentages that may discourage even the most enthusiastic Black Friday shopper this year. In his book Scroogenomics, he tells you why you should think twice before your holiday shopping spree, and why it's not better to give an unwanted beaded sweater or talking fish than no present at all."--Deseret News "My enthusiasm for buying gifts has been greatly reduced ... after reading Scroogenomics."--Shanghai Daily "This 186-page pocketbook measures just 4 by 6 inches in size, and invites readers to think just as small when it comes to holiday excess. Joel Waldfogel, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, goes beyond the obvious in arguing against habitual gift-giving."--Mark Jewell, Associated Press "This is a serious study of the economics of Christmas. It looks at the huge waste involved, looks back to earlier times and how previous generations celebrated the festive season, even suggests that buying presents should stop and then attempts to offer some solutions as to how Christmas can be a time of giving without being a time 'to max out our credit cards to finance the gift storm.'"--Sydney Morning Herald "Oftentimes in days of yore, I would sit by the fireside at Noel, glass of sherry I hand, warm, confused feeling in head, and survey the detritus of a Christmas-morning blitzkrieg of unwrapping and the shrapnel of packaging genocide and think: what a waste of money. Being of a naturally grump disposition, my attitude was habitually put down to an anti-Christmas 'Bah! Humbug!' tendency. But now here comes Joel Waldfogel to barge his way to the top of my (short) Christmas-card list telling everyone who sneered at my festive dispiritedness that I was right all along."--Stephen McCarty, South China Morning Post "It's blinding. Put it on your Christmas list."--Dan Douglass, Marketing Direct "[I]n his recent book Scroogenomics, Professor Waldfogel makes a knowingly provocative case for changing the entire cursed gift system."--Guardian "If Joel Waldfogel is correct, the Three Wise Men were just the sort of people who should not have bought Christmas presents."--Irish Times "If you enjoy the title, you will enjoy the book."--Declann Trott, Economic RecordTable of ContentsPreface ix CHAPTER ONE: Introduction 1 CHAPTER TWO: Spending and Satisfaction 6 CHAPTER THREE: U.S. Holiday Spending 23 CHAPTER FOUR: How Much Waste Occurs at Christmas? 29 CHAPTER FIVE: Why We Do It: Are Gift Recipients Crackheads, or What? 41 CHAPTER SIX: Giving and Waste around the World 57 CHAPTER SEVEN: A Century of American Yuletide Spending 71 CHAPTER EIGHT: Have Yourself a Borrowed Little Christmas 78 CHAPTER NINE: Is Christmas Like Spam, Underwear, or Caviar? 89 CHAPTER TEN: Christmas and Commercialism: Are Santa and Jesus on the Same Team? If So, Who's Team Captain? 99 CHAPTER ELEVEN: Stop Carping; It's All for the Best 104 CHAPTER TWELVE: Making Giving More Effi cient with Cash and Gift Cards 113 CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Giving and Redistribution 120 CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Solutions --Making Gift Giving a Force for Good 134 Notes 147 Index 171

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Public enemy. Crucial macronutrient. Health risk. Punchline. Moneymaker. Epidemic. Sexual fetish. Moral failing. Necessary bodily organ. Conveyor of flavor. Freak-show spectacle. Never mind the stereotype, fat is never sedentary: its definitions, identities, and meanings are manifold and in constant motion. Demonized in medicine and public policy, adored by chefs and nutritional faddists (and let's face it, most of us who eat), simultaneously desired and abhorred when it comes to sex, and continually courted by a multi-billion-dollar fitness and weight-loss industry, for so many people fat is ironically nothing more than an insult or a state of despair. In Hanne Blank''s Fat we find fat as state, as possession, as metaphor, as symptom, as object of desire, intellectual and carnal. Here, feeling fat and literal fat merge, blurring the boundaries and infusing one anotherTrade ReviewThroughout Fat, Blank beautifully disrupts and destabilizes the notion of fat and, in doing so, challenged me to think deeper about the category as a whole. * Fat Studies *Hanne Blank's characteristically honest, creative, wickedly funny, and sharply insightful voice comes through on every page of this eminently readable book. Blank reveals fat as polysemic, at once mundane and hidden, sexually charged, and socially vexed. Fat is a scholarly ethnography of an everyday object that manages to be a genuine page-turner. * Quill Rebecca Kukla, Professor of Philosophy and Senior Research Scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University, USA *Table of ContentsFrontispiece 1. Fact 2. Friend 3. Foe 4. Fetish 5. Figure Index

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Book Synopsis''Beautifully written and brilliantly argued, Possessed is one of the few things you really need to own'' Daniel GilbertHow ownership came to own us - and what we can do about itOur love affair with possessions seems to be all-consuming, even as we face economic and environmental breaking points. The global pandemic is a wake-up call that forces us to reassess what we value most in our lives, and yet we remain reluctant to change our ways when it comes to accumulating things. Why?The answer is our need for ownership. A uniquely human preoccupation rooted in our biology, psychological ownership can be seen in everything from nations fighting over resources to the rise of political extremism.Award-winning psychologist Bruce Hood draws on his own and international research to explain why ownership is an emotional state of mind that governs our behaviour from cradle to grave, even when it is often irrational and destructivTrade ReviewBeautifully written and brilliantly argued, Possessed is one of the few things you really need to own. -- Dan GilbertBruce Hood convincingly shows that we are possessed with possessions, but his book is one possession you have to have, especially now. Engagingly written, Possessed brings psychological science to bear on understanding how to exorcise this demon. -- Robert Plomin, author of 'Blueprint: How DNA makes us who we are'Science writing at its best: it's funny, smart, and on an fascinating topic. -- Paul Bloom * Twitter *Ownership is a surprisingly nuanced and wonderfully colorful topic, and no one is better poised to tell its story than psychologist and author Bruce Hood. The book he's written is a page-turner that puts our intuitions under the spotlight at every turn. -- David Eagleman, bestselling author of 'The Brain' and 'Incognito'Bruce Hood's excellent new book upends the concept of possession and ownership . . . Possessed combines philosophy with rigorous experimental research to examine the reasons why we want to own so much more than we need. Hood's writing is crisp and he covers an impressive range for such a slim volume. For practical strategies to declutter, read Marie Kondo. For those interested in the psychology and philosophy of materialism, this rich and engaging book will spark hours of joy. -- David Robson * The British Psychological Society blog *

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Book SynopsisIn The Language of Things Deyan Sudjic, Director of the Design Museum, decodes the things around us: their hidden meanings, our relationship with them, how they shape our lives and why we desire them. Design is everywhere. It seduces, pleases and inspires us. It makes us part with our money. It defines who we think we are. An iPhone, an anglepoise lamp, a Picasso, a banknote, an Armani suit, a William Morris textile, a Lucky Strike packet, a spacecraft - every object tells a story. And understanding their stories offers us a whole new way of seeing the world. ''Articulate and wonderfully knowledgeable ... for anyone who takes an interest in the world around us''   Time Out ''A nightmare vision of a world drowning in objects ... witty, well observed and wide-ranging''   Guardian ''An elegant, witty and free-ranging survey, from Thomas Chippendale''s ponderous 18th-century manor-house furniTrade ReviewAn elegant, witty and free-ranging survey of industrial product design from Thomas Chippendale's ponderous 18th-century manor-house furnishings to Jonathan Ive's sprightly Macintosh iBooks * Telegraph *Sudjic's book rebukes designers for their arrogance and increasing self-importance ... readable, sharp and worthwhile * FT *The Language of Things is a happy trot through the colourful landscape formed by design's eternal alternation between use and allure * Evening Standard *Deyan Sudjic presents us with a nightmare vision of a world drowning in objects ... witty, well observed and wide-ranging * Guardian *As a confessional, the book is witty and honest, and Deyan Sudjic remains one of our most insightful commentators * Royal Academy magazine *Articulate and wonderfully knowledgeable ... a very nice object in itself ... much in here for anyone who takes an interest in the world around us * Time Out *

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Book SynopsisWhat will become of the shops? More than ever, the high street appears to be under mortal threat, its shops boarded up as the sad ''bricks and mortar'' survivals of a pre-online retail world. But behind the bleak appearance, there is more to see.Back to the Shops offers a set of short and surprising chapters, each one a window into a different shop type or mode of selling. Old shopping streets are seen from new angles; fast fashion shows up in eighteenth-century edits. Here are pedlars and pop-ups, mail order catalogues and mobile greengrocers'' shops. Here too are food markets open till late on a Saturday night, and tiny subscription libraries tucked away at the back of the sweet shop.Over time, shops have occupied radically different places in cultural arguments and in our everyday lives. They are essential sources of daily provisions, but they are also the visible evidence of consuming excess. They are local community hubs and they are dreamlands of distraction. Shops are inherentlyTrade ReviewThis is a thoroughly enjoyable book for anyone interested in the twentieth century and it is a good place to start for anyone seeking a social history research project. * Rosemary Conely, Open History *She skillfully interweaves accounts from British literature, both well known (e.g., those by Charles Dickens or Jane Austen) and more obscure works with other sources to examine the evolving nature of consumer culture in modern Britain. * A. C. Stanley, CHOICE *Bowlby has been thinking about shops and shopping the length of her distinguished career as a critic of commerce and culture...Short chapters on different shops or modes of selling...offer a tour dhorizon that is both rich and unexpected. The commentary is concise and precise, featuring attention to language and flourishes of glee. * Norma Clarke, Times Literary Supplement *By looking to the historical role of a vast array of shops across two centuries, this book makes a spirited argument for their central, and continued, place in society. Its also packed with stories, case studies and diverting detours, including a consideration of the honourable tradition of hairdressers with punning names. * , BBC History Revealed *With the rise of internet shopping throwing future of the high street into uncertainty, this is a timely and intriguing read * BBC History Magazine *Rachel Bowlby has captured the essence of shopping all the way from the 18th century to todays chain stores and pop-ups in her fascinating social history... Well worth shopping for! * , People's Friend *A book for everyone... so readable * Tony Jasper, Methodist Recorder *Written throughout with a gait, a lilt and a swagger that are rather captivating, resonant with a personal voice that inhabits both time and space, collecting and recollecting gestures, images, imprints and practices as it does so Bowlby has a talent for words, for the world of associations and images that they can conjure and retrieve, for the incisiveness with which they can allow a mind like hers to read each step along the human journey of shopping and trade It is a fine journey into history, a resonant jaunt towards what we may well want to visit in the uncertain after * Mika Provata-Carlone, Bookanista *not only informative...but also a really lively and entertaining read * , Shiny New Books *A broad-based, long-run, and finely judged survey of our shopping history: this is the book to give us a necessary perspective on the twenty-first-century transformation now under way. * David Kynaston, author of Austerity Britain, Family Britain, and Modernity Britain *This book traces retailing trends from the first market stalls to internet shopping and is a timely indicator of how our town centres could develop over the next 50 years. * Sir John Timpson, Chair of Timpson and champion of town centre regeneration initiatives *Bowlby's book can be read as a whole. But it can equally well be dipped into and individual chapters read and reflected on. As such it is an invaluable addition to the literature on the history of shops and shopping in Britain. And it is a thoroughly good read * Ian Mitchell, History of Retailing and Consumption *This vital social function, and the significance of what Bowlby calls 'the small shopping cultures of daily purchasing life', absent from the online world, are powerfully advocated for in Back to the Shops. So too is the imaginative wealth to be found in the sheer variety of shopkeeping and shopping practices through history. * Miranda El-Rayess, Women: A Cultural Review *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Introduction SETTINGS 1 Chain stores 2 Convenience 3 Fixed prices 4 Local shops 5 Mail order 6 Markets 7 Self-service and supermarkets 8 Shopping centres 9 Shop windows 10 Sources ROLES 11 Collections 12 Counters 13 Credit and credibility 14 Customer loyalty 15 Motor vans and motor buses 16 Nineteenth-century bazaars 17 Pedlars 18 Saturday nights and Sundays 19 Scenes of shopping 20 Shopworkers and shopkeepers SPECIALITIES 21 Bakers 22 Butchers 23 Chemists 24 Florists 25 Furniture shops 26 Haberdashery 27 Household goods 28 Jewellers 29 Sweet shops 30 Umbrella shops Afterword Acknowledgements Index

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Book SynopsisBased on the rich museum collections of Harvard University, Tangible Things challenges rigid distinctions between history, anthropology, science, and the arts. Through 20 entertaining and inspiring case studies it demonstrates that almost any material thing, when examined closely, can be a link between present and past.Trade Review[A] rich resource for 'Making History through Objects'... [D]emonstrates the benefits of intra-institutional collaboration and is dedicated to the 'people who care for and preserve tangible things: museum curators, conservators, conservation scientists, collection managers, registrars, administrators, and volunteers'... They have done an excellent job of contextualisation, translating material evidence into text and image. * Dinah Eastop, Textile History *Table of Contents[tentative] ; Preface ; Introduction: Thinking with Things ; Chapter 1: Things in Place ; 1. Natural History ; Say it with Flowers: An Orchid Specimen and a Watercolor Drawing ; 2. Archaeology and Anthropology ; A Surface Find in the Semitic Museum: A Roman Four-Handled Glass Jar ; 3. Books and Manuscripts ; Plato from the Sharp-Nosed Trash ; 4. Art ; Set in Stone: A Limestone Mold for Casting Openwork Ornaments ; 5. Science and Medicine ; Political Chemistry ; 6. History ; A Knockabout Dress ; Chapter 2: Things Unplaced ; Memorandums of a Cottage ; An Enchanted Galapagos Tortoise Shell Marked <"Ship Abigail>" ; Pointing Fingers: A Carved Spoon, Human Hand ; An Errant Tortilla ; Exotic Opulence: An Iridescent Beetle Ornament ; Tracking Blondie: Blondie Goes to Leisureland ; Chapter 3: Things Out of Place ; A Palette and the Psychology of Vision ; A Blue Bird ; Plows and Swords: The Artemas Ward Plow in the Semitic Museum ; Nature or Culture? A Carved Helmeted Hornbill Skull ; Chapter 4: Things in Stories-Stories in Things ; Objects as Portals ; The Message ; Transits of Venus ; Changing Stories about American Indians ; Appendix: Glossary of Harvard Collections ; Photo Essay: Unexpected Discoveries: the Joy of Object Photography

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Book SynopsisIn A Room of One''s Own, Virginia Woolf described fictions as ''grossly material things'', rooted in their physical and economic contexts. This book takes Woolf''s brief hint as its starting point, asking who made the books of the English Renaissance, and what the material circumstances were in which they did so. It charts a new history of making and use, recovering the ways in which women shaped and altered the books of this crucial period, as co-authors, editors, translators, patrons, printers, booksellers, and readers. Drawing on evidence from a wide range of sources, including court records, letters, diaries, medical texts, and the books themselves, ''Grossly Material Things'' moves between the realms of manuscript and print, and tells the stories of literary, political, and religious texts from broadside ballads to plays, monstrous birth pamphlets to editions of the Bible. In uncovering the neglected history of women''s textual labours, and the places and spaces in which women wenTrade ReviewSmith has produced a study that argues convincingly for the integral engagement of women with the materiality of the printed text. The strength of this work comes from the wealth of illustrative examples placed within a convincing discussion of the many facets affecting the production and use of early modern books. * Jessica Malay, Women's History Review *Far from mere handmaids to their more accomplished male contemporaries, the early modern women who people this extraordinary book are revealed not only as patrons, printers, and translators of male-authored works, but also as stationers, chapwomen, and active readers who shape those works' very meanings. A welcome corrective to the familiar emphasis on prescriptive literature, Smith's work immerses us in the dirty, noisy world of early modern England where men and women jostled for position in the burgeoning economy of London and beyond. * Christina Luckyj, Early Theatre *brings a wealth of new insights to the field of book history * Alice Eardley, Journal of the Northern Renaissance *Smith's emphasis on materiality certainly alerts us to some tantalizing glimpses of the place of women in both printing houses and Stationers' Hall. * Maureen Bell, Times Literary Supplement *Smith presents a meticulous study of the participation of women in all aspects of book production ... the volume may prove useful to anyone researching the social, economic, and intellectual composition of the book trade. * N.C. Aldred, The Library *Helen Smith's fascinating Grossly Material Things opens an important window onto the basic circumstances of the Renaissance printing house and sheds new light on the significant roles women played in early modern Englands print marketplace ... Combining elegant writing with an abundance of useful details, Smith's study demands that we pay greater attention to the colophons of our favorite Renaissance books ... When others explore the role of women in the production of books in other markets, those scholars would do well to take Helen Smith's book as a model. * Andrew Fleck, Renaissance Quarterly *Helen Smith's Grossly Material Things is a fascinating, insightful, superbly researched book on the contributions women made to manuscript and book production in the Early Modern period. Anyone interested in the history of reading or of the book will learn a great deal from her investigation ... The great strength of her work is to refocus our attention on the web of gendered relations in writing, translating, patronizing, publishing and reading in this period. * Tom Rooney, Early Modern Literary Studies *Smith prods scholars to widen their definitions of textual labor to include books' physicality - an unexamined aspect of their cultural and intellectual impact. * Kathryn Narramore, Textual Cultures: Texts, Contexts, Interpretation *This ambitious, well-researched, and timely study sets out to revise our understanding not only of early modern women's roles in book production (as its subtitle promises) but also of their myriad contributions to the entire communications circuit, including the commissioning, manufacture, distribution, and consumption of print publications in England, and between England and the Continent ... it will be of interest to a wide array of readers including, but not limited to, specialists in book history. * Natasha Korda, Joural of British Studies *This monograph will be indispensable for early modern book historians as well as scholars of women's writing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. * Gillian Wright, SHARP News *Table of ContentsList of abbreviations ; List of illustrations ; Acknowledgments ; Note to the reader ; Introduction: 'Grossly Material Things' ; 1. 'Pen'd with double art': Women at the Scene of Writing ; 2. 'A dame, an owner, a defendresse': Women, Patronage, and Print ; 3. 'A free Stationers wife of this companye': Women and the Stationers ; 4. 'Certaine women brokers and peddlers': Beyond the London Book Trades ; 5. 'No deformitie can abide before the sunne': Imagining Early Modern Women's Reading ; Bibliography of Works Cited ; Index

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Book SynopsisThe first ever global history of luxury, from Roman villas to Russian oligarchs: a sparkling story of novelty, excess, extravagance, and indulgence through the centuriesTrade ReviewThere's a tension at the core of the very idea of luxury, and that tension gives this book its sinew. * The Wall Street Journal *Table of Contents1. Luxury, Antiquity, and the Antique ; 2. The Courts, the Church, and Medieval and Renaissance Luxury ; 3. Luxury and the Orient ; 4. Housing Luxury: From the Hotel Particulier to the Penthouses ; 5. Luxury and the Fashionable Body ; 6. Jet Set Life: From Trans-Atlantic to Global Elites ; 7. The Chic of Poverty: The Minimalism of Luxury ; 8. Everything that Money Can Buy? Manipulating Luxury ; 9. Has Luxury Lost its Lustre? ; Further Reading ; Notes ; Index

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Book SynopsisDisgust is among the strongest of aversions, characterized by involuntary physical recoil and even nausea. Yet paradoxically, disgusting objects can sometimes exert a grisly allure, and this emotion can constitute a positive, appreciative aesthetic response when exploited by works of art -- a phenomenon labelled here aesthetic disgust. While the reactive, visceral quality of disgust contributes to its misleading reputation as a relatively primitive response mechanism, it is this feature that also gives it a particular aesthetic power when manifest in art. Most treatments of disgust mistakenly interpret it as only an extreme response, thereby neglecting the many subtle ways that it operates aesthetically. This study calls attention to the diversity and depth of its uses, analyzing the emotion in detail and considering the enormous variety of aesthetic forms it can assume in works of art and --unexpectedly-- even in foods. In the process of articulating a positive role for disgust, thisTable of ContentsChapter 1 What Is Disgust? ; Chapter 2 Attractive Aversions ; Chapter 3 Delightful, Delicious, Disgusting ; Chapter 4 Varieties of Aesthetic Disgust ; Chapter 5 The Magnetism of Disgust ; Chapter 6 Hearts ; Chapter 7 The Foul and the Fair ; Bibliography

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Book SynopsisPresents an account of the ways in which ethnic populations are remaking themselves in the image of the corporation - while corporations coopt ethnic practices to open up fresh markets and regimes of consumption.Trade Review"The Comaroffs are among the very finest anthropologists working anywhere in the world today. As genuine leaders of the discipline, every new book they publish is an event and this one is no exception. Ethnicity, Inc. will be a watershed for anyone looking for new ways to explain our neoliberal world. This extraordinarily lucid book is one of the most ambitious, wide-ranging, and thought-provoking pieces of anthropological scholarship written over the last few decades; it sets a standard other scholars can only hope to emulate." - Matti Bunzl, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign"

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Book SynopsisFrom the candy bar to the cigarette, records to roller coasters, a technological revolution during the last quarter of the nineteenth century precipitated a colossal shift in human consumption and sensual experience. This book sheds new light on the origins of modern consumer culture and how technologies have transformed human sensory experience.Trade Review"This book persuasively addresses one of the key questions in modern history: how human experience has been reshaped by mass marketing. It includes but goes beyond attention to advertising, to a fascinating exploration of technology's impact on products and packaging, and how the result has transformed sensory response. A groundbreaking effort." -Peter N. Stearns, author of The Industrial Revolution in World HistoryTable of Contents1. The Carrot and the Candy Bar 2. Containing Civilization, Preserving the Ephemeral, Going Tubular 3. The Cigarette Story 4. Superfoods and the Engineered Origins of the Modern Sweet Tooth 5. Portable Packets of Sound: The Birth of the Phonograph and Record 6. Packaging Sight: Projections, Snapshots, and Motion Pictures 7. Packaging Fantasy: The Amusement Park as Mechanized Circus, Electric Theater, and Commercialized Spectacle 8. Pleasure on Speed and the Calibrated Life: Fast Forwarding through the Last Century 9. Red Raspberries All the Time? Notes Index

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Book SynopsisThe verb declutter has not yet made it into the Oxford English Dictionary, but its ever-increasing usage suggests that it's only a matter of time. The author finds that both the idea of organization and the role of the clutterologist are deeply ingrained in our culture, and that there is a fine line between clutter and deviance in America.Trade Review"My high expectations were fulfilled and indeed exceeded by Herring's brilliant, groundbreaking, fascinating, and lucid book. In traversing his rich and well-researched archive in the series of case studies that make up the book, Herring examines how and why hoarders have been stigmatized in a number of different contexts through the twentieth century. In doing so, he mounts a sustained and significant challenge to the pathologizing discourses about hoarding." (Jonathan Flatley, Wayne State University)"

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Book SynopsisIn this book, Nina Sylvanus tells a captivating story of global trade and cross-cultural aesthetics in West Africa, showing how a group of Togolese women through the making and circulation of wax cloth became influential agents of taste and history. Traveling deep into the shifting terrain of textile manufacture, design, and trade, she follows wax cloth around the world and through time to unveil its critical role in colonial and postcolonial patterns of exchange and value production. Sylvanus brings wax cloth's unique and complex history to light: born as a nineteenth-century Dutch colonial effort to copy Javanese batik cloth for Southeast Asian markets, it was reborn as a status marker that has dominated the visual economy of West African markets. Although most wax cloth is produced in China today, it continues to be central to the expression of West African women's identity and power. As Sylvanus shows, wax cloth expresses more than this global motion of goods, capital, aesthetics,

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Book SynopsisThrough much of its history, Italy was Europe's heart of the arts, an artistic playground for foreign elites and powers who bought, sold, and sometimes plundered countless artworks and antiquities. This loss of artifacts looted by other nations once put Italy at an economic and political disadvantage compared with northern European states. Now, more than any other country, Italy asserts control over its cultural heritage through a famously effective art-crime squad that has been the inspiration of novels, movies, and tv shows. In its efforts to bring their cultural artifacts home, Italy has entered into legal battles against some of the world's major museums, including the Getty, New York's Metropolitan Museum, and the Louvre. It has turned heritage into patrimony capitala powerful and controversial convergence of art, money, and politics. In 2006, the then-president of Italy declared his country to be the world's greatest cultural power. With Ruling Culture, Fiona Greenland traces Trade Review"The famous Art Squad police unit is pitted against thieves and smugglers in this broad-ranging study, which shows how Italy has transformed its rich heritage into global cultural capital." * Apollo, "Off the shelf" *"In this thought-provoking book, Greenland walks us through a couple of centuries of evolving cultural heritage policy in Italy. . . . The book offers a ground-breaking discussion of developing Italian policy for cultural heritage, ending with the inevitable neo-liberal entanglements of private capital, but it also contains a wealth of raw material and pointers for further research." -- Neil Brodie * Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Book Reviews *"Fiona Greenland’s Ruling Culture: Art Police, Tomb Robbers, and the Rise of Cultural Power in Italy is a meticulous and insightful work inviting the reader to look closer at the construction of Italian cultural power . . . This book is a model in terms of methodology and analysis for its depth and kaleidoscopic approach. It can also serve as a way to reflect on western cultural powers and legal systems in place for the preservation of artefacts and archaeological practices." * Cultural Sociology *“In this beautifully written and insightful study of the mutual entanglement between Italy’s national art police squad and the deeply entrenched tradition of tomb robbing, Greenland’s portrayal of the robbers—in whom Italians see heroic tricksters and traitorous villains by turns—is both sharply analytical and descriptively captivating. She deftly articulates historical and legal detail with a rattling good story.” -- Michael Herzfeld, author of Evicted from Eternity: The Restructuring of Modern Rome“Ruling Culture is groundbreaking. Greenland addresses the problem of how culture is used by states and various non-state actors to foster allegiance to nations, investigating culture as a key building block of national identity and making a convincing case for the difference between cultural power and ideological power.” -- Richard Lachmann, author of First Class Passengers on a Sinking Ship: Elite Politics and the Decline of Great Powers“Ruling Culture provides a detailed and thought-provoking analysis of the construction of Italian national identity. It promises to be a major contribution to our understanding of Italian national identity, the institutional and legal dimensions of heritage, and the disciplinary history of archaeology. Greenland has written a first-rate piece of work and a valuable scholarly contribution.” -- Joshua Arthurs, author of Excavating Modernity: The Roman Past in Fascist Italy"Tomb robbing is not the typical sociological fare, and thanks to Fiona Greenland’s expertise and beautiful writing, Ruling Culture: Art Police, Tomb Robbers, and the Rise of Cultural Power in Italy emerges as a fresh, fascinating work of cultural analysis." * Contemporary Sociology *"[Greenland's] methods and analysis reflect her positionality as a social scientist with a deep appreciation for and understanding of the humanities. Ruling Culture is a model for how to incorporate multiple sources of data within sociological analysis." * American Journal of Sociology *Table of ContentsIntroduction: The World’s Greatest Cultural Power 1 Art Squad Agonistes 2 The American Price 3 Distributing Sovereignty: From Fascism to the Art Squad 4 Tomb Robbers and Cultural Power from Below 5 Made in Italy 6 Farewell to the Tomb Robber Acknowledgments Appendix: Methodology Notes References Index

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"In this beautifully written and insightful study of the mutual entanglement between Italy's national art police squad and the deeply entrenched tradition of tomb robbing, Greenland's portrayal of the robbers--in whom Italians see heroic tricksters and traitorous villains by turns--is both sharply analytical and descriptively captivating. She deftly articulates historical and legal detail with a rattling good story."--Michael Herzfeld, author of Evicted from Eternity: The Restructuring of Modern Rome "Ruling Culture provides a detailed and thought-provoking analysis of the construction of Italian national identity. It promises to be a major contribution to our understanding of Italian national identity, the institutional and legal dimensions of heritage, and the disciplinary history of archaeology. Greenland has written a first-rate piece of work and a valuable scholarly contribution."--Joshua Arthurs, author of Excavating Modernity: The Roman Past in Fascist Italy "Ruling Culture is groundbreaking. Greenland addresses the problem of how culture is used by states and various non-state actors to foster allegiance to nations, investigating culture as a key building block of national identity and making a convincing case for the difference between cultural power and ideological power."--Richard Lachmann, author of First Class Passengers on a Sinking Ship: Elite Politics and the Decline of Great PowersTable of ContentsIntroduction: The World’s Greatest Cultural Power 1 Art Squad Agonistes 2 The American Price 3 Distributing Sovereignty: From Fascism to the Art Squad 4 Tomb Robbers and Cultural Power from Below 5 Made in Italy 6 Farewell to the Tomb Robber Acknowledgments Appendix: Methodology Notes References Index

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Book SynopsisLeor Halevi tells the story of the Islamic trials of technological and commercial innovations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Shedding light on culture, commerce, and consumption in Cairo and other colonial cities, Modern Things on Trial is a groundbreaking account of Islam's material transformation in a globalizing era.Trade ReviewLeor Halevi's original study offers important perspectives on turn of the twentieth-century Islamic reformist thought in the context of changing relations between law and material history. He matches up instructive readings in legal opinions delivered in Cairo by Rashid Rida with innovative background research on the new products and technologies that prompted questions to him from around the Muslim world. -- Brinkley Messick, author of Sharīʿa Scripts: A Historical AnthropologyThis nuanced, meticulously researched, yet accessible study illuminates how significant early-twentieth-century debates on Islamic law often revolved around some surprisingly ordinary objects and how local anxieties and input shaped a reformist Islam with transregional appeal. Halevi's focus on the material dimensions of modern Islamic thought adds a very welcome and promising dimension to the scholarship in this field. -- Muhammad Qasim Zaman, author of Islam in Pakistan: A HistoryBy tracing the evolution of 'laissez-faire Salafism' in response to consumer concerns about the religious status of new commodities and technologies, Halevi positions Islam's modern reformation as driven more by materialist than ideational forces. This is a highly original rethinking of the old question of religion and modernity by looking at the material transformations—the 'modern things'—that Muslims acquired from the industrializing West. -- Nile Green, Ibn Khaldun Endowed Chair in World History, University of California, Los AngelesThis is a remarkable intervention by a pioneering scholar of Islamic law and material culture. Focusing on Rashid Rida, a leading light of modern Islamic reform, it highlights the material entanglements that catalyzed his legal rulings on novel commodities, technologies, and financial instruments. In place of dogmatism and idealism, what emerges is a riveting narrative of pragmatic and materialist accommodations in a period marked by the impact of capitalism, consumerism, and colonialism. This is revisionist history in the best sense. -- Finbarr Barry Flood, director of Silsila: Center for Material Histories, New York UniversityAn outstanding work that sets a new standard for the writing of modern Islamic intellectual history...this book will prove of enduring interest to researchers in Islamic law and modern Islamic thought, historians of the late imperial and early nation-state Muslim worlds, and students of the processes of globalization more generally. * American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences *Halevi sheds light on Islam’s relationship with modernity by offering an account of how Islamic revivalists first responded to modern transformations through religious and legal rulings. * Middle East Journal *This excellent book is paradigm shifting. . . Essential. * Choice *Halevi’s work contributes to the larger understanding of how Islamic reform in this period was often driven through thehistorical narrative of Riḍā as a reformer, illustrating a bottom-up process. * Arab Studies Quarterly *A fresh, lively, and materialist intervention against reductive readings of modern Islam. * Jadaliyya *By rejecting abstractions like “Westernization” and turning instead to how tangible things were weighed on the moral scale of sharia, Leor Halevi presents a bold and lucid new analysis of the making of modern Islam. * Los Angeles Review of Books *Halevi’s book charts the way for other scholars of law and history to write history grounded in an eclectic mix of materials in several languages from various archives around the world. * Law and Social Inquiry *Halevi’s compelling monograph is relevant to a large audience and should interest global historians and historians of empire as much as scholars of modern Islam. * American Historical Review *He not only weaves intellectual and economic history together but comes forth with a contribution that is as ground breaking and original regarding the development of a consumer culture as it is concerning legal reform. * Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies *The writing is clear, engaging, and accessible. In addition to classes on Islam, the arguments advanced heremay be pertinent to courses on theory in religious studies. * International Journal of Middle East Studies *It is a new way of looking at the issue of religion and modernity. Among other things, this book would be an excellent focus for graduates reading law and change in the modern Muslim world. * Technology and Culture *Table of ContentsList of Maps and FiguresAcknowledgmentsPrologue: The Parable of the Montgolfière and the Translation of Haleby’s CorpseIntroduction: Good Things Made Lawful: Euro-Muslim Objects and Laissez-Faire Fatwas1. The Toilet Paper Fatwa: Hygienic Innovation and the Sacred Law in the Late Imperial Era2. Fatwas for the Partners’ Club: A Global Mufti’s Enterprise3. In a Material World: European Expansion from Tripoli to Cairo4. Paper Money and Consummate Men: Capitalism and the Rise of Laissez-Faire Salafism5. The Qurʾan in the Gramophone: Sounds of Islamic Modernity from Cairo to Kazan6. Telegraphs, Photographs, Railways, Law Codes: Tools of Empire, Tools of Islam7. Arabian Slippers: The Turn to Nationalistic Consumption8. Lottery Tickets, Luxury Hotels, and Christian Experts: Economic Liberalism Versus Islamic Exclusivism in a Territorial FrameworkConclusionsNotesSelected BibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisLeor Halevi tells the story of the Islamic trials of technological and commercial innovations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Shedding light on culture, commerce, and consumption in Cairo and other colonial cities, Modern Things on Trial is a groundbreaking account of Islam’s material transformation in a globalizing era.Trade ReviewLeor Halevi's original study offers important perspectives on turn of the twentieth-century Islamic reformist thought in the context of changing relations between law and material history. He matches up instructive readings in legal opinions delivered in Cairo by Rashid Rida with innovative background research on the new products and technologies that prompted questions to him from around the Muslim world. -- Brinkley Messick, author of Sharīʿa Scripts: A Historical AnthropologyThis nuanced, meticulously researched, yet accessible study illuminates how significant early-twentieth-century debates on Islamic law often revolved around some surprisingly ordinary objects and how local anxieties and input shaped a reformist Islam with transregional appeal. Halevi's focus on the material dimensions of modern Islamic thought adds a very welcome and promising dimension to the scholarship in this field. -- Muhammad Qasim Zaman, author of Islam in Pakistan: A HistoryBy tracing the evolution of 'laissez-faire Salafism' in response to consumer concerns about the religious status of new commodities and technologies, Halevi positions Islam's modern reformation as driven more by materialist than ideational forces. This is a highly original rethinking of the old question of religion and modernity by looking at the material transformations—the 'modern things'—that Muslims acquired from the industrializing West. -- Nile Green, Ibn Khaldun Endowed Chair in World History, University of California, Los AngelesThis is a remarkable intervention by a pioneering scholar of Islamic law and material culture. Focusing on Rashid Rida, a leading light of modern Islamic reform, it highlights the material entanglements that catalyzed his legal rulings on novel commodities, technologies, and financial instruments. In place of dogmatism and idealism, what emerges is a riveting narrative of pragmatic and materialist accommodations in a period marked by the impact of capitalism, consumerism, and colonialism. This is revisionist history in the best sense. -- Finbarr Barry Flood, director of Silsila: Center for Material Histories, New York UniversityAn outstanding work that sets a new standard for the writing of modern Islamic intellectual history...this book will prove of enduring interest to researchers in Islamic law and modern Islamic thought, historians of the late imperial and early nation-state Muslim worlds, and students of the processes of globalization more generally. * American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences *Halevi sheds light on Islam’s relationship with modernity by offering an account of how Islamic revivalists first responded to modern transformations through religious and legal rulings. * Middle East Journal *This excellent book is paradigm shifting. . . Essential. * Choice *Halevi’s work contributes to the larger understanding of how Islamic reform in this period was often driven through thehistorical narrative of Riḍā as a reformer, illustrating a bottom-up process. * Arab Studies Quarterly *A fresh, lively, and materialist intervention against reductive readings of modern Islam. * Jadaliyya *By rejecting abstractions like “Westernization” and turning instead to how tangible things were weighed on the moral scale of sharia, Leor Halevi presents a bold and lucid new analysis of the making of modern Islam. * Los Angeles Review of Books *Halevi’s book charts the way for other scholars of law and history to write history grounded in an eclectic mix of materials in several languages from various archives around the world. * Law and Social Inquiry *Halevi’s compelling monograph is relevant to a large audience and should interest global historians and historians of empire as much as scholars of modern Islam. * American Historical Review *He not only weaves intellectual and economic history together but comes forth with a contribution that is as ground breaking and original regarding the development of a consumer culture as it is concerning legal reform. * Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies *The writing is clear, engaging, and accessible. In addition to classes on Islam, the arguments advanced heremay be pertinent to courses on theory in religious studies. * International Journal of Middle East Studies *It is a new way of looking at the issue of religion and modernity. Among other things, this book would be an excellent focus for graduates reading law and change in the modern Muslim world. * Technology and Culture *Table of ContentsList of Maps and FiguresAcknowledgmentsPrologue: The Parable of the Montgolfière and the Translation of Haleby’s CorpseIntroduction: Good Things Made Lawful: Euro-Muslim Objects and Laissez-Faire Fatwas1. The Toilet Paper Fatwa: Hygienic Innovation and the Sacred Law in the Late Imperial Era2. Fatwas for the Partners’ Club: A Global Mufti’s Enterprise3. In a Material World: European Expansion from Tripoli to Cairo4. Paper Money and Consummate Men: Capitalism and the Rise of Laissez-Faire Salafism5. The Qurʾan in the Gramophone: Sounds of Islamic Modernity from Cairo to Kazan6. Telegraphs, Photographs, Railways, Law Codes: Tools of Empire, Tools of Islam7. Arabian Slippers: The Turn to Nationalistic Consumption8. Lottery Tickets, Luxury Hotels, and Christian Experts: Economic Liberalism Versus Islamic Exclusivism in a Territorial FrameworkConclusionsNotesSelected BibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisIn Things with a History, Héctor Hoyos argues that the roles of objects in recent Latin American fiction offer a way to integrate materialisms old and new, transforming our understanding of how things shape social and political relations.Trade ReviewIn this singular book, Hoyos unveils a world of unexplored relations between subjects, objects, materiality, and immateriality. He explores the social pact between words and things. Through the idea of transcultural materialism, Hoyos discusses how contemporary Latin American literature mobilizes cultural meanings to illuminate moments in an exploitative global economy. The book deploys a sophisticated web of literary genealogies, as well as theories of materialism, and engages us in new conversations on literature in the global context. -- Graciela Montaldo, Columbia UniversityThings with a History provides a fresh optic on the new materialisms of our time and on the history of things (rubber, cell phones, corpses) that have shaped the history of our present. Héctor Hoyos engages a wonderful range of contemporary Latin American authors and a powerful tradition attuned to both nonhuman agency and human responsibility, unwilling to unlearn the lessons of historical materialism. Grappling with these regional “literatures of extraction” as a political ecologist, Hoyos contributes to today’s most pressing critical conversations. -- Bill Brown, author of Other ThingsAmbitiously conceptualized and beautifully written, Things with a History takes up the formidable task of connecting the humanities with material science and biology and succeeds in opening up new spaces for critique. Hoyos offers provocative pairings of overconsumption and hunger, abundance and scarcity, overextraction and underutilization. By reading a dazzling array of authors and thinkers from Latin America and beyond, Hoyos demonstrates, with uncommon facility, the urgent need for an engaged world literary politics. -- B. Venkat Mani, author of Recoding World Literature: Libraries, Print Culture, and Germany's Pact with BooksIn a fine-grained textual commentary, Things with a History follows the texts’ meanderings, noting their complexities and avoiding unnecessary reductiveness. Combining critical imagination with theoretical rigor, Hoyos persuasively breathes new life and meaning into “new materialism” and its predecessors. -- Aníbal González-Pérez, Yale UniversityA great example on how to work beyond the false dichotomy of representation and practices and to deeply dissect the benefits and limitations of regional critical takes in the context of a globalized world. -- Valeria Meiller, Georgetown University * ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment *Table of ContentsList of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: A Tale of Two MaterialismsPart I: Objects1. Raw Stuff Disavowed2. Of Rocks and Particles3. Corpse Narratives as Literary HistoryPart II: Assemblages4. Politics and Praxis of Hyperfetishism5. Digitalia from the MarginsConclusions: Extractivism EstrangedNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisIn Things with a History, Héctor Hoyos argues that the roles of objects in recent Latin American fiction offers a way to integrate materialisms old and new, transforming our understanding of how things shape social and political relations.Trade ReviewIn this singular book, Hoyos unveils a world of unexplored relations between subjects, objects, materiality, and immateriality. He explores the social pact between words and things. Through the idea of transcultural materialism, Hoyos discusses how contemporary Latin American literature mobilizes cultural meanings to illuminate moments in an exploitative global economy. The book deploys a sophisticated web of literary genealogies, as well as theories of materialism, and engages us in new conversations on literature in the global context. -- Graciela Montaldo, Columbia UniversityThings with a History provides a fresh optic on the new materialisms of our time and on the history of things (rubber, cell phones, corpses) that have shaped the history of our present. Héctor Hoyos engages a wonderful range of contemporary Latin American authors and a powerful tradition attuned to both nonhuman agency and human responsibility, unwilling to unlearn the lessons of historical materialism. Grappling with these regional “literatures of extraction” as a political ecologist, Hoyos contributes to today’s most pressing critical conversations. -- Bill Brown, author of Other ThingsAmbitiously conceptualized and beautifully written, Things with a History takes up the formidable task of connecting the humanities with material science and biology and succeeds in opening up new spaces for critique. Hoyos offers provocative pairings of overconsumption and hunger, abundance and scarcity, overextraction and underutilization. By reading a dazzling array of authors and thinkers from Latin America and beyond, Hoyos demonstrates, with uncommon facility, the urgent need for an engaged world literary politics. -- B. Venkat Mani, author of Recoding World Literature: Libraries, Print Culture, and Germany's Pact with BooksIn a fine-grained textual commentary, Things with a History follows the texts’ meanderings, noting their complexities and avoiding unnecessary reductiveness. Combining critical imagination with theoretical rigor, Hoyos persuasively breathes new life and meaning into “new materialism” and its predecessors. -- Aníbal González-Pérez, Yale UniversityA great example on how to work beyond the false dichotomy of representation and practices and to deeply dissect the benefits and limitations of regional critical takes in the context of a globalized world. -- Valeria Meiller, Georgetown University * ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment *Table of ContentsList of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: A Tale of Two MaterialismsPart I: Objects1. Raw Stuff Disavowed2. Of Rocks and Particles3. Corpse Narratives as Literary HistoryPart II: Assemblages4. Politics and Praxis of Hyperfetishism5. Digitalia from the MarginsConclusions: Extractivism EstrangedNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisDung Kai-cheung’s A Catalog of Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On is a playful and imaginative glimpse into the consumerist dreamscape of late-nineties Hong Kong. First published in 1999, it comprises ninety-nine sketches of life just after the handover of the former British colony to China.Trade ReviewNamed a New York Times Notable Book. * New York Times Book Review *Playful and quirky, the sketches reveal Dung’s eye for this particular moment in history, and his vast imagination . . . Documenting a particular place and time, this vibrant and distinctive collection offers a kaleidoscopic vision of that era. -- Weike Wang * New York Times Book Review *Highly addictive, the equivalent of literary dim sum. * South China Morning Post Magazine *[These tales] are as relevant today as they were when they were first published in 1999 . . . Feed your inner nostalgia monster some of these surrealist pop-culture bites. * Kirkus Reviews *Fascinating and refreshing. * Publishers Weekly *Surreal, comical, and haunting, this short story collection sees magic in everyday items. * Foreword Reviews *Dung Kai-Cheung is Hong Kong’s greatest novelist. * Three Percent *Reading Dung Kai-cheung’s A Catalog of Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On is like descending into a beautiful fever dream of Hong Kong in the late ‘90s. The story collection is both a time capsule, capturing Hong Kong through pop culture references like Hello Kitty and Air Jordans, and an incantation, breathing life into a surreal cast of characters who transform themselves, literally and metaphorically, through their pop culture choices. * Necessary Fiction *Longtime urban chronicler Dung has achieved rare distinction as one of very few figures writing about Hong Kong to win recognition in world literature. He has done so by turning mundane, unexamined items in all our lives into haunting, near-Shakespearian spiritual forces. * Nikkei Asia *Dung Kai-cheung’s catalog is a cultural 'thick description' of popular culture filled with dry wit and humor. His sketches are not short stories. He offers flights of fancy. * Asian Review of Books *These half-allegorical sketches by a uniquely gifted Hong Kong writer bring to us a nostalgic mosaic of the sights and sounds of a city whose cosmopolitan splendor is fast fading. It is even more heart-rending to read them in English today than some twenty years ago when these astonishing literary tidbits first appeared in the Chinese original. -- Leo Ou-fan Lee, author of City Between Worlds: My Hong KongDung Kai-cheung is Hong Kong’s greatest living writer, and this translation is a cause for celebration, giving global readers another path into his unique, uncanny Hong Kong. May it help bring him the wider international readership that is long overdue. -- Antony Dapiran, author of City on Fire: The Fight for Hong KongDung Kai-cheung is the most prolific and imaginative Hong Kong writer of the past three decades. His A Catalog of Such Stuff as Dreams are Made On is a fascinating and singular literary meditation on how “objects” and “stuff” affect people’s everyday lives, create meaning, and contribute to cultural identity. -- Michael Berry, editor of The Musha Incident: A Reader on the Indigenous Uprising in Colonial TaiwanI read these ninety-nine sketches with a mixture of dreamy fondness and rueful melancholy. Dung Kai-cheung deftly captures the city at a time of fundamental change in this series of offbeat stories, and one couldn’t ask for better translators than Bonnie S. McDougall and Anders Hansson. -- Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, editor in chief of Cha: An Asian Literary JournalModeled on a remembrance of the Song dynasty capital city after it fell to northern invaders in the twelfth century, these vignettes record dreams of a bygone (yet never quite gone) Hong Kong with wistfulness and humor, translated by McDougall and Hansson with accuracy and elegance. -- Lucas Klein, editor and translator of Words as Grain: New and Selected Poems of Duo DuoThis publication represents a milestone in broadening the readership of Dung’s work and in fostering the teaching and research of Hong Kong and Sinophone literature. * Asian Studies Review *Table of ContentsAuthor’s Preface: The MaskTranslators’ Note1. Agnès b.2. Cutie Punk3. Magpaper4. Hello Kitty5. Tank Tops6. Sena’s Piano II7. IXUS8. Girl Specimens9. Che10. Pastéis de Nata11. Photo Stickers12. Football Kits13. Red Wing14. Eat as Much as You Like15. A Bathing Ape16. Hysteric Glamour17. Windows 9818. non-no19. Konjak Jellies20. Mebius21. Combat Trousers22. Puffy23. Sony DV24. Aprons25. Air Jordan26. ICQ27. The Colored Sunglasses28. Seiko Lukia29. My Melody30. Snoopy31. Panatellas32. Secondhand Clothes33. Teletubbies34. Ha Kam Shing35. Nokia 881036. Camouflage37. Le Couple38. Bucket Hats39. iMac40. Rolex Daytona41. Viva Japanese TV Drama42. Polaroids43. Lovegety Station44. Prada45. StarTAC46. Colors47. Beatmania48. Adidas49. Gucci50. Yahoo!51. Fujifilm Digital Camera52. Converse Lo Tec53. Hairpins54. Cut Sleeves55. Scarves56. Animal Prints57. The Pleated Skirt58. Miu Miu Flannel59. Gray60. The Cockroach61. The Cowboy Hat62. Signal Youths63. H2O+64. Depsea Water65. The Patagonia Fleece66. The Duffel Coat67. LV Vernis68. Panasonic DVD69. South Park70. Dreamcast71. Tomb Raider III72. Sharp MiniDisc Player73. Burberrys Blue Label74. MP375. Miffy76. Devon Aoki77. Motorola Dual Band78. Cheesecake79. PalmPilot80. PN Rouge Suplinic81. Final Fantasy VIII82. The Waist Bag83. Twisted Strands84. Sunday85. A Temporary Tattoo86. The Neck Pouch87. Cutie Cute & Horribly Horrid88. 5S89. Drawstrings90. The Three Skewer Brothers91. Khaki92. White Blouses93. Ballet Shoes94. Birkenstock95. Cargo Shorts96. Flip-Flops97. Hiromix98. Chappies99. Made in Hong Kong

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Book SynopsisDung Kai-cheung’s A Catalog of Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On is a playful and imaginative glimpse into the consumerist dreamscape of late-nineties Hong Kong. First published in 1999, it comprises ninety-nine sketches of life just after the handover of the former British colony to China.Trade ReviewNamed a New York Times Notable Book. * New York Times Book Review *Playful and quirky, the sketches reveal Dung’s eye for this particular moment in history, and his vast imagination . . . Documenting a particular place and time, this vibrant and distinctive collection offers a kaleidoscopic vision of that era. -- Weike Wang * New York Times Book Review *Highly addictive, the equivalent of literary dim sum. * South China Morning Post Magazine *[These tales] are as relevant today as they were when they were first published in 1999 . . . Feed your inner nostalgia monster some of these surrealist pop-culture bites. * Kirkus Reviews *Fascinating and refreshing. * Publishers Weekly *Surreal, comical, and haunting, this short story collection sees magic in everyday items. * Foreword Reviews *Dung Kai-Cheung is Hong Kong’s greatest novelist. * Three Percent *Reading Dung Kai-cheung’s A Catalog of Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On is like descending into a beautiful fever dream of Hong Kong in the late ‘90s. The story collection is both a time capsule, capturing Hong Kong through pop culture references like Hello Kitty and Air Jordans, and an incantation, breathing life into a surreal cast of characters who transform themselves, literally and metaphorically, through their pop culture choices. * Necessary Fiction *Longtime urban chronicler Dung has achieved rare distinction as one of very few figures writing about Hong Kong to win recognition in world literature. He has done so by turning mundane, unexamined items in all our lives into haunting, near-Shakespearian spiritual forces. * Nikkei Asia *Dung Kai-cheung’s catalog is a cultural 'thick description' of popular culture filled with dry wit and humor. His sketches are not short stories. He offers flights of fancy. * Asian Review of Books *These half-allegorical sketches by a uniquely gifted Hong Kong writer bring to us a nostalgic mosaic of the sights and sounds of a city whose cosmopolitan splendor is fast fading. It is even more heart-rending to read them in English today than some twenty years ago when these astonishing literary tidbits first appeared in the Chinese original. -- Leo Ou-fan Lee, author of City Between Worlds: My Hong KongDung Kai-cheung is Hong Kong’s greatest living writer, and this translation is a cause for celebration, giving global readers another path into his unique, uncanny Hong Kong. May it help bring him the wider international readership that is long overdue. -- Antony Dapiran, author of City on Fire: The Fight for Hong KongDung Kai-cheung is the most prolific and imaginative Hong Kong writer of the past three decades. His A Catalog of Such Stuff as Dreams are Made On is a fascinating and singular literary meditation on how “objects” and “stuff” affect people’s everyday lives, create meaning, and contribute to cultural identity. -- Michael Berry, editor of The Musha Incident: A Reader on the Indigenous Uprising in Colonial TaiwanI read these ninety-nine sketches with a mixture of dreamy fondness and rueful melancholy. Dung Kai-cheung deftly captures the city at a time of fundamental change in this series of offbeat stories, and one couldn’t ask for better translators than Bonnie S. McDougall and Anders Hansson. -- Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, editor in chief of Cha: An Asian Literary JournalModeled on a remembrance of the Song dynasty capital city after it fell to northern invaders in the twelfth century, these vignettes record dreams of a bygone (yet never quite gone) Hong Kong with wistfulness and humor, translated by McDougall and Hansson with accuracy and elegance. -- Lucas Klein, editor and translator of Words as Grain: New and Selected Poems of Duo DuoThis publication represents a milestone in broadening the readership of Dung’s work and in fostering the teaching and research of Hong Kong and Sinophone literature. * Asian Studies Review *Table of ContentsAuthor’s Preface: The MaskTranslators’ Note1. Agnès b.2. Cutie Punk3. Magpaper4. Hello Kitty5. Tank Tops6. Sena’s Piano II7. IXUS8. Girl Specimens9. Che10. Pastéis de Nata11. Photo Stickers12. Football Kits13. Red Wing14. Eat as Much as You Like15. A Bathing Ape16. Hysteric Glamour17. Windows 9818. non-no19. Konjak Jellies20. Mebius21. Combat Trousers22. Puffy23. Sony DV24. Aprons25. Air Jordan26. ICQ27. The Colored Sunglasses28. Seiko Lukia29. My Melody30. Snoopy31. Panatellas32. Secondhand Clothes33. Teletubbies34. Ha Kam Shing35. Nokia 881036. Camouflage37. Le Couple38. Bucket Hats39. iMac40. Rolex Daytona41. Viva Japanese TV Drama42. Polaroids43. Lovegety Station44. Prada45. StarTAC46. Colors47. Beatmania48. Adidas49. Gucci50. Yahoo!51. Fujifilm Digital Camera52. Converse Lo Tec53. Hairpins54. Cut Sleeves55. Scarves56. Animal Prints57. The Pleated Skirt58. Miu Miu Flannel59. Gray60. The Cockroach61. The Cowboy Hat62. Signal Youths63. H2O+64. Depsea Water65. The Patagonia Fleece66. The Duffel Coat67. LV Vernis68. Panasonic DVD69. South Park70. Dreamcast71. Tomb Raider III72. Sharp MiniDisc Player73. Burberrys Blue Label74. MP375. Miffy76. Devon Aoki77. Motorola Dual Band78. Cheesecake79. PalmPilot80. PN Rouge Suplinic81. Final Fantasy VIII82. The Waist Bag83. Twisted Strands84. Sunday85. A Temporary Tattoo86. The Neck Pouch87. Cutie Cute & Horribly Horrid88. 5S89. Drawstrings90. The Three Skewer Brothers91. Khaki92. White Blouses93. Ballet Shoes94. Birkenstock95. Cargo Shorts96. Flip-Flops97. Hiromix98. Chappies99. Made in Hong Kong

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Book SynopsisHow product design criticism has rescued some products from the trash and consigned others to the landfill.Product design criticism operates at the very brink of the landfill site, salvaging some products with praise but consigning others to its depths through condemnation or indifference. When a designed product's usefulness is past, the public happily discards it to make room for the next new thing. Criticism rarely deals with how a product might be used, or not used, over time; it is more likely to play the enabler, encouraging our addiction to consumption. With Sifting the Trash, Alice Twemlow offers an especially timely reexamination of the history of product design criticism through the metaphors and actualities of the product as imminent junk and the consumer as junkie. Twemlow explores five key moments over the past sixty years of product design criticism. From the mid-1950s through the 1960s, for example, critics including Reyner Banham, Deborah Allen,

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Book SynopsisA challenging study offering a new perspective on classical Japanese poems and how they interact with and are part of material cultureTrade Review“Anyone interested in Japanese court poetry, court ritual and culture, and painting should read this book with pleasure and come away with a more profound knowledge of the cultures it describes.”—Steven D. Carter, Monumenta Nipponica"Through the adroit use of four multivalent case studies, this authoritative work demonstrates with eloquence and insight the vital importance of material, social, conceptual, and other approaches to premodern Japanese poetic culture."—H. Mack Horton, University of California, Berkeley“Waka and Things, Waka as Things is a major contribution to the field and will be widely acknowledged as a major scholarly accomplishment. The research, writing, and exegesis on display in the book are all absolutely top-notch.”—Morgan Pitelka, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill“The theoretical framework is sound, engrossing, and wholly applicable. The scholarship and research that went into the book are superior, and the integration of primary and secondary sources is adroit and engaging.”—Joseph T. Sorensen, University of California, Davis

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