Reading African cities into contemporary theory - reprint of a richly illustrated reference work.

In their internationally acclaimed publication 'Kinshasa: Tales of the Invisible City', anthropologist Filip De Boeck and photographer Marie-Françoise Plissart provide a history not only of the physical and visible urban reality that Kinshasa presents today, but also of a second, invisible city as it exists in the mind and imagination of its inhabitants. They bring to light a mirroring reality l...

The changing attitude of Catholic culture towards modernity.After decades of a problematic, if not plainly hostile, approach to modernity by Catholic culture, the 1960s marked the beginning of a new era. As the Church employed a more positive approach to the world, voices in the Catholic milieu embraced a radical perspective, channeling the need for social justice for the poor and the oppressed. The alternative and complementary world views of 'universalism' and 'liberation' would drive the e...

The unique position of design in the political context of postwar Belgium.

In the postwar era, design became important as a marker of modernity and progress at world fairs and international exhibitions and in the global markets. The Belgian state took a special interest in this vanguard phenomenon of 'industrial design' as a vital political and economic strategic tool in the context of the Cold War and the creation of the European community. This book describes the unique position that design...

Despite our stereotypical ideas on photographic images as snapshots (slices of time), photography is fundamentally a time-based medium. The relationships between photography and time are manifold: time can be directly represented within the image, it can be its theme and philosophical horizon, but it can also represent the global framework in which photographic practices develop and change through time. It is the ambition of this book to bring together the various aspects of time in photograp...

Countless literary endeavours by ‘new Germans’ have come into the spotlight of academic research since the turn of the 21st century. Yet ‘minority writing’ and its distinctive renegotiation of traditional concepts of cultural identity are far from a recent phenomenon in German literature. More than a hundred years ago, German-Jewish writers put a clear stamp on German modernism and were intensely engaged in various cultural and political discourses on Jewish identity. This book is the...

Early 21st century media arts are addressing the anxieties of an age shadowed by ubiquitous surveillance, big-data profiling, and globalised translocations of people. Altogether, they tap the overwhelming changes in our lived experience of self, body, and intersubjective relations. Shifting Interfaces addresses current exciting exchanges between art, science, and emerging technologies, highlighting a range of concerns that currently prevail in the field of media arts. This book provides an up...

What is the gender of political power? Since the beginning of political thought, rule has been a male prerogative in European imagination. This is of course not to say that there never were women sovereigns. In-depth studies of women sovereigns have grown considerably in number in the past three decades and have added substantially to our understanding of the complexities of their rule of power.

Yet what is often obscured by such in-depth analyses is the fact that all women rulers throughout ...

Since the mid-nineteenth century photography has had a central place in cultural encounters within and between migrant communities. Migrant histories have been mediated through the photographic image, and the cultural practices of photography have themselves been transformed as migrant communities mobilise the photographic image to navigate experiences of cultural dislocation and the forging of new identities. Exploring photographic images and the cultural practices of photography as ‘conta...

How did citizens in Bruges create a home? What did an ordinary domestic interior look like in the sixteenth century? And more importantly: how does one study the domestic culture of bygone times by analysing documents such as probate inventories? These questions seem straightforward, yet few endeavours are more challenging than reconstructing a sixteenth-century domestic reality from written sources. This book takes full advantage of the inventory and convincingly frames household objects in ...

Acoustic atmospheres can be fleeting, elusive, or short-lived. Sometimes they are constant, but more often they change from one moment to the next, forming distinct impressions each time we visit certain places. Stable or dynamic, acoustic atmospheres have a powerful effect on our spatial experience, sometimes even more so than architecture itself. This book explores the acoustic atmospheres of diverse architectural environments, in terms of scale, function, location, or historic period—pro...