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Contested Legitimacies
Repression and Revolt in Post-Revolutionary Egypt
Jannis Julien Grimm
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
Since the military overthrow of President Mursi in mid-2013, Egypt has witnessed an authoritarian rollback. Through a combination of repression and nationalist securitizing discourses, popular pressure for reform was successfully channelled into a state-centric model of governance. But despite state violence and the restriction of public spaces, protests have anything but ceased. Contested Legitimacies explores this resilience of protest despite unprecedented repression through an approach attuned to the physical and discursive interactions among key players in Egypt’s post-revolutionary arena. Starting with the successful Tamarod uprising against President Mursi, to the unsuccessful Islamist resistance against the military coup, to the Rabaa massacre and the shrinking spaces for protest under Al-Sisi’s authoritarian rule, to the resurgence of popular resistance in the shape the Tiran and Sanafir island campaign, it investigates the rise and fall of different coalitions of contenders and explores their impact on Egypt’s political transition.
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Contesting Austerity
Social Movements and the Left in Portugal and Spain (2008-2015)
Tiago Carvalho
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
Despite the historical and political similarities between Portugal and Spain, the contentious responses to austerity diverged in terms of number, rhythm and players. This book compares the contentious responses to austerity in Portugal and Spain during the Eurozone crisis and the Great Recession between 2008 and 2015. While in Spain a sustained wave of mobilisation lasted for three years, involving various players and leading to a transformation of the party system, in Portugal social movements were only able to mobilise in specific instances, trade unions dominated protest and, by the end of the cycle, institutional change was limited. Contesting Austerity shows that the different trajectories and outcomes in these two countries are connected to the nature and configurations of the players in the mobilisation process. While in Spain actors’ relative autonomy from one another led to deeper political transformation, in Portugal the dominance of the institutional actors limited the extent of that change.
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Contesting Chineseness
Nationality, Class, Gender and New Chinese Migrants
Sylvia Ang
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
Nearly eleven million Chinese migrants live outside of China. While many of these faces of China’s globalization headed for the popular Western destinations of the United States, Australia and Canada, others have been lured by the booming Asian economies. Compared with pre-1949 Chinese migrants, most are wealthier, motivated by a variety of concerns beyond economic survival and loyal to the communist regime. The reception of new Chinese migrants, however, has been less than warm in some places. In Singapore, tensions between Singaporean-Chinese and new Chinese arrivals present a puzzle: why are there tensions between ethnic Chinese settlers and new Chinese arrivals despite similarities in phenotype, ancestry and customs? Drawing on rich empirical data from ethnography and digital ethnography, Contesting Chineseness investigates this puzzle and details how ethnic Chinese subjects negotiate their identities in an age of contemporary Chinese migration and China’s ascent.
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Contesting Cosmopolitan Europe
Euroscepticism, Crisis and Borders
James Foley
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
The project of European integration has undergone a succession of shocks, beginning with the Eurozone crisis, followed by reactions to the sudden growth of irregular migration, and, most recently, the Coronavirus pandemic. These shocks have politicised questions related to the governance of borders and markets that for decades had been beyond the realm of contestation. For some time, these questions have been spilling over into domestic and European electoral politics, with the rise of “populist” and Eurosceptic parties. Increasingly, however, the crises have begun to reshape the liberal narrative that have been central to the European project. This book charts the rise of contestation over the meaning of “Europe”, particularly in light of the Coronavirus crisis and Brexit. Drawing together cutting edge, interdisciplinary scholarship from across the continent, it questions not merely the traditional conflict between European and nationalist politics, but the impact of contestation on the assumed “cosmopolitan” values of Europe.
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Contesting the Foreshore
Tourism, Society and Politics on the Coast
Edited by Jeremy Boissevain and Tom Selwyn
Amsterdam University Press, 2005
This collection of essays examines social, political, and economic relations in primarily European coastal locations through the lens of tourism. The contributors explore the intersecting interests of fishing, tourism, and development and the conflict among local communities and market forces, all of which are infused with the symbolism of the sea as a place of mystery and danger. From the tensions between Cornish villagers and city visitors to the explosion of resort development in Gran Canaria, the authors consider the relationship between local residents, businesses, and tourist newcomers as they vie for status, influence, and, ultimately, for space.
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A Continent Moving West?
EU Enlargement and Labour Migration from Central and Eastern Europe
Edited by Richard Black, Godfried Engbersen, Marek Okólski, and Cristina Pantîru
Amsterdam University Press, 2010

A Continent Moving West? argues that the conceptualization of migration as a one-way or long-term process is becoming increasingly wide of the mark. Rather, east-west labor migration in Europe, in common perhaps with other flows in and from other parts of the world, is diverse, fluid, and influenced by the dynamics of local and sector-specific labor markets and migration-related political regulations.

The papers in this book contribute to critical understanding of the east-west migration within the European Union after the 2004 enlargement, from the new to the old member states.

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Contingent Loyalties
State Agents in the Yunnan Borderlands (1856-1911)
Diana Zhidan Duan
Amsterdam University Press, 2024
From the mid-nineteenth-century Hui rebellions, which challenged centralised state control, to the early-twentieth-century revolutions, which led to Yunnan’s decades-long independence, local actors shaped the history of Yunnan through their extensive cross-border networks and contradictory roles in the attempted state consolidation of this contested area. Among the local elites, the state agents, both Han and non-Han, acted on the state's behalf in the borderlands’ affairs while seeking the balance between the interests of the state and their own communities. The state agents competed with each other while utilising and wresting with the state authorities. The dynamic relationship between the state and local actors created another contested facet of modern Yunnan’s transformation. Competing narratives emerged when local actors negotiated and reconstructed their status within the contemporary Chinese nation-state. Bandits became heroes; separatists became patriots; a vibrant regional center became an isolated, exotic, and marginal province of the People’s Republic of China.
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Convair B-58 Hustler
cold war nuclear bomber
Nico Braas
Amsterdam University Press

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Conversations with Christian Metz
Selected Interviews on Film Theory (1970-1991)
Edited by Warren Buckland and Daniel Fairfax
Amsterdam University Press, 2018
From 1968 to 1991 the acclaimed film theorist Christian Metz wrote several remarkable books on film theory: Essais sur la signifi cation au cinéma, tome1 et 2; Langage et cinéma; Le signifiant imaginaire; and L’Enonciation impersonnelle. These books set the agenda of academic film studies during its formative period. Metz’s ideas were taken up, digested, refined,reinterpreted, criticized and sometimes dismissed, but rarely ignored.This volume collects and translates into English for the first time a series of interviews with Metz, who offers readable summaries,elaborations, and explanations of his sometimes complex and demanding theories of film. He speaks informally of the most fundamental concepts that constitute the heart of film theory as an academic discipline — concepts borrowed from linguistics, semiotics, rhetoric, narratology, and psychoanalysis.Within the colloquial language of the interview, we witness Metz’s initial formation and development of his film theory. The interviewers act as curious readers who pose probing questions to Metz about his books, and seek clarification and elaboration of his key concepts. We also discover the contents of his unpublished manuscript on jokes, his relation to Roland Barthes, and the social networks operative in the French intellectual community during the 1970s and 1980s.
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Cookies, Coleslaw, and Stoops
The Influence of Dutch on the North American Languages
Nicoline van der Sijs
Amsterdam University Press, 2009
In 1609, the first Dutch settlers arrived in America and established trading posts, small towns, and forts up and down what we now call the Hudson River. To this day, American children are taught the thrilling history of the transformation of this settlement, New Netherland, and its capital, New Amsterdam, from landmark port into present-day New York State and the island of Manhattan. But, the Dutch legacy extended far beyond New York, as Cookies, Coleslaw and Stoops reveals.From Santa Claus (after the Dutch folklore saint Sinterklaas) and his sleigh (the pronunciation of the Dutch slee is almost identical) to a dumbhead talking poppycock, the contributions of the Dutch language to American English are indelibly embedded to some of our most vernacular terms and expressions. The menu in most of our restaurants sports some originally Dutch names, and even our dollar is named after a Dutch coin (daalder). In this captivating volume, the renowned linguist Nicoline van der Sijs glosses over 300 Dutch loan words like these that travelled to the New World on board the Dutch ship the Halve Maan, captained by Henry Hudson, which dropped anchor in Manhattan more than 400 years ago. Surprisingly, the Dutch also gave several Native American languages words for everyday things like “pants”, “cat” and “turkey”. Lively and accessible, the information presented in this volume charts the journey of these words into the American territory and languages, from more obscure uses which maybe have survived in only regional dialects to such ubiquitous contributions to our language like Yankee, cookie, and dope. Each entry marks the original arrival of its term into American English and adds up-to-date information on its evolving meaning, etymology, and regional spread. Not to be missed by anyone with a passion for the history behind our everyday expressions, Cookies, Coleslaw and Stoops is the perfect gift for the linguistic adventurer in us all.
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The Costs and Cost-effectiveness of Tuberculosis Control
Anna Vassall
Amsterdam University Press, 2009
Tuberculosis is a leading cause of ill-health and death in low and middle income countries. Tuberculosis control is essential for achieving the Millennium Development Goals relating to health by 2015. However, despite efforts made to expand tuberculosis control over the past decades, tuberculosis remains a serious global health problem. This book aims to assist the expansion of tuberculosis control by adding to the evidence on the cost-effectiveness of different tuberculosis control strategies. It presents research from five countries: Egypt, Ethiopia, Syria, Peru and Ukraine. It examines the implementation of the World Health Organization recommended strategy, Directly Observed Treatment Strategy (dots). New technologies currently being developed to tackle drug resistance are also assessed. Emphasis throughout is placed on the importance of health systems and the costs for patients accessing treatment. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in economic aspects of tuberculosis control.
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Counter-Hispanization in the Colonial Philippines
Literature, Law, Religion, and Native Custom
John Blanco
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
In Counter-Hispanization in the Colonial Philippines, the author analyzes the literature and politics of “spiritual conquest” in order to demonstrate how it reflected the contribution of religious ministers to a protracted period of social anomie throughout the mission provinces between the 16th-18th centuries. By tracking the prose of spiritual conquest with the history of the mission in official documents, religious correspondence, and public controversies, the author shows how, contrary to the general consensus in Philippine historiography, the literature and pastoral politics of spiritual conquest reinforced the frontier character of the religious provinces outside Manila in the Americas as well as the Philippines, by supplanting the (absence of) law in the name of supplementing or completing it. This frontier character accounts for the modern reinvention of native custom as well as the birth of literature and theater in the Tagalog vernacular.
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Create or Die
Essays on the Artistry of Dennis Hopper
Stephen Lee Naish
Amsterdam University Press, 2016
Dennis Hopper (1936-2010) was one of most charismatic and protean figures to emerge from the American independent film movement of the 1960s and '70s, an incredibly compelling screen presence who helped give cult classics like Easy Rider and Blue Velvet their off-kilter appeal. But his artistic interests went far beyond acting, and this collection of essays is the first major work to take in Hopper as a creative artist in all his fields of endeavour, from acting and directing to photography, sculpture, and expressionist painting. Stephen Naish doesn't skimp on covering Hopper's best-known work, but he breaks new ground in putting it in context with his other creative enterprises, showing how one medium informs another, and how they offer a portrait of an artist who was restless, even flawed at times, but always aiming to live up to his motto: create or die.Follow the podcasts by Steve Naish here
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Creating Distinctions in Dutch Genre Painting
Repetition and Invention
Angela K. Ho
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
In the mid- to late seventeenth century, a number of Dutch painters created a new type of refined genre painting that was much admired by elite collectors. In this book, Angela Ho uses the examples of Gerrit Dou, Gerard ter Borch, and Frans van Mieris to show how this group of artists made creative use of repetition-such as crafting virtuosic, self-referential compositions around signature motifs, or engaging esteemed predecessors in a competitive dialogue through emulation-to project a distinctive artistic personality. The resulting paintings enabled purchasers and viewers to exercise their connoisseurial eye and claim membership in an exclusive circle of sophisticated enthusiasts-making creative repetition a successful strategy for both artists and viewers.
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front cover of Creating Memories in Late 8th-century Byzantium
Creating Memories in Late 8th-century Byzantium
The Short History of Nikephoros of Constantinople
Dragoljub Marjanovic
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
The Short History of Nikephoros of Constantinople is one of the key sources for our understanding of Byzantine history in the eighth century. This book offers a close look at that volume and its manner of representing the historical role of Byzantine emperors and ecclesiology, with particular attention to the use of images, an issue of central importance amid the period's first outburst of iconoclasm. When seen through this lens, the Short History is revealed to be more engaged with and burdened by contemporary political and ecclesiastical strife than has previously been thought.
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Creating Place in Early Modern European Architecture
Elizabeth Merrill
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
The importance of place—as a unique spatial identity—has been recognized since antiquity. Ancient references to the ‘genius loci’, or spirit of place, evoked not only the location of a distinct atmosphere or environment, but also the protection of this location, and implicitly, its making and construction. This volume examines the concept of place as it relates to architectural production and building knowledge in early modern Europe (1400-1800). The places explored in the book’s ten essays take various forms, from an individual dwelling to a cohesive urban development to an extensive political territory. Within the scope of each study, the authors draw on primary source documents and original research to demonstrate the distinctive features of a given architectural place, and how these are related to a geographic location, social circumstances, and the contributions of individual practitioners. The essays underscore the distinct techniques, practices and organizational structures by which physical places were made in the early modern period.
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The Crisis Imperative
Crisis Rhetoric and Welfare State Reform in Belgium and the Netherlands in the Early 1990s
Sanneke Kuipers
Amsterdam University Press, 2006
Belgium and the Netherlands were perfect examples of the “welfare without work” policy that characterized European welfare states — until a political crisis in both countries during the early 1990s produced a surprising divergence in administration. While Belgium’s government announced major reforms, its social security policy remained relatively resilient. In the Netherlands, however, policymakers implemented unprecedented cutbacks as well as a major overhaul of the disability benefits program. The Crisis Imperative explains this difference as the result of crisis rhetoric—that is, the deliberate construction of a crisis as the imperative for change. It will be a valuable resource for policymakers, researchers, and anyone interested in welfare reform in the United States and abroad.
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Cross-border Marriages and Mobility
Female Chinese Migrants and Hong Kong Men
Avital Binah-Pollak
Amsterdam University Press, 2019
*Cross-border Marriages and Mobility: Female Chinese Migrants and Hong Kong Men* focuses on cross-border marriages between mainland Chinese women and Hong Kong men, a phenomenon which is of critical importance to the transformation of Hong Kong. By examining the women’s motivations for migration and lived experiences in relation to the discursive, political, economic, and social circumstances of mainland China and Hong Kong, Avital Binah-Pollak demonstrates how these marital practices are causing the expanding and blurring of borders, so that there is a much wider strip of border in which the dichotomies of the rural/urban, periphery/center, and hybrid/national identities become more complex and negotiable. While this is particularly interesting and valid in the case of the border between mainland China and Hong Kong because of the particular nature of the relationship between these two societies, it may also apply to borders between many other societies worldwide.
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Cross-border Mobility
Women, Work and Malay Identity in Indonesia
Wendy Mee
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
Cross-border Mobility: Women, Work and Malay Identity in Indonesia offers a fresh perspective on the association between mobility and the ethnocultural category ‘Malay’. In so doing, it raises new research questions that are relevant to the study of Indonesian women’s socioeconomic mobility more generally. Based on fieldwork in Sambas, a region of Indonesia bordering Malaysia, this study documents the ethnocultural consequences of the highly mobile working lives of Sambas Malay women. Emphasising the significance of territorial borders in women’s working lives, this study highlights how women’s border location not only facilitates cross-border pathways of international labour migration and trade, but also generates feelings of peripherality that inform women’s imaginative construction of other, nonterritorial borders that need to be crossed. Shaped by social class, gender, and the economic and cultural possibilities of political decentralization, the study identifies three borderscopes that orient women’s work-related mobility and create diverse outcomes for the ethnocultural category 'Sambas Malay'.
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Cross-Border Traders in Northern Laos
Mastering Smallness
Simon Rowedder
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
Northern Laos has become a prominent spot in large-scale, top-down mappings and studies of neoliberal globalisation and infrastructural development linking Thailand and China, and markets further beyond. Yet in the common narrative, in which Laos appears as a weak victim helplessly exposed to its larger neighbours, attention is seldom paid to local voices. This book fills this gap. Building on long-term multi-sited fieldwork, it accompanies northern Lao cross-border traders closely in their transnational worlds of mobilities, social relations, economic experimentation and aspiration. Cross-Border Traders in Northern Laos: Mastering Smallness demonstrates that these traders’ indispensable but often invisible role in the everyday workings of the China-Laos-Thailand borderland economy relies on their rhetoric and practices of ‘smallness’—of framing their transnational trade activities in a self-deprecating manner and stressing their economic inferiority. Decoding their discursive surface of insignificance, this ethnography of ‘smallness’ foregrounds remarkable transnational social and economic skills that are mostly invisible in Sino-Southeast Asian borderland scholarship.
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Cruiser HNLMS Tromp
Jantinus Mulder
Amsterdam University Press

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Culinary Texts in Context, 1500-1800
Manuscript Recipe Books in Early Modern Europe
Sarah Kernan
Amsterdam University Press

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The Cultural Construction of Safety and Security
Imaginaries, Discourses and Philosophies that Shaped Modern Europe
Gemma Blok
Amsterdam University Press, 2024
This volume analyses cultural perceptions of safety and security that have shaped modern European societies. The articles present a wide range of topics, from feelings of unsafety generated by early modern fake news to safety issues related to twentieth-century drug use in public space. The volume demonstrates how ‘safety’ is not just a social or biological condition to pursue but also a historical and cultural construct. In philosophical terms, safety can be interpreted in different ways, referring to security, certainty or trust. What does feeling safe and thinking about a safe society mean to various groups of people over time? The articles in this volume are bound by their joint effort to take a constructionist approach to emotional expressions, artistic representations, literary narratives and political discourses of (un)safety and their impact on modern European society.
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Cultural Interactions
Conflict and Cooperation
Frans-Willem Korsten
Amsterdam University Press

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The Cultural Landscape and Heritage Paradox
Protection and Development of the Dutch Archaeological-Historical Landscape and its European Dimension
Edited by Tom Bloemers, Henk Kars, Arnold Van der Valk, and Mies Wijnen
Amsterdam University Press, 2011

Increasingly, the role of heritage management is to anticipate and guide future environmental change rather than to simply protect landscapes of the past. This charge presents a paradox for those invested in the preservation of the past: in order to preserve the historic environment, they have to collaborate with others who wish to change it, and in order to apply their expert knowledge, they must demonstrate its benefits for policy and society. The solution advocated here is an integrative landscape approach that draws on multiple disciplines and establishes links between archaeological-historical heritage and planning and between research and policy.

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The Cultural Legacy of the Royal Game of the Goose
400 years of Printed Board Games
Adrian Seville
Amsterdam University Press, 2019
The Game of the Goose is one of the oldest printed board games, dating back 400 years. It has spawned thousands of derivatives: simple race games, played with dice, on themes that mirror much of human activity. Its legacy can be traced in games of education, advertising and polemic, as well as in those of amusement and gambling - and games on new themes are still being developed. This book, by the leading international collector of the genre, is devoted to showing why the Game of the Goose is special and why it can lay claim to being the most influential of any printed game in the cultural history of Europe. Detailed study of the games reveals their historical provenance and - reversing the process - gives unusual insights into the cultures which produced them. They therefore provide rich sources for the cultural historian. This book is beautifully illustrated with more than 90 illustrations, many in color, which are integrated throughout the text.
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The Cultural Life of James Bond
Specters of 007
Jaap Verheul
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
The release of No Time To Die in 2020 heralds the arrival of the twenty-fifth installment in the James Bond film series. Since the release of Dr. No in 1962, the cinematic James Bond has expedited the transformation of Ian Fleming's literary creation into an icon of western popular culture that has captivated audiences across the globe by transcending barriers of ideology, nation, empire, gender, race, ethnicity, and generation. The Cultural Life of James Bond: Specters of 007 untangles the seemingly perpetual allure of the Bond phenomenon by looking at the non-canonical texts and contexts that encompass the cultural life of James Bond. Chronicling the evolution of the British secret agent over half a century of political, social, and cultural permutations, the fifteen chapters examine the Bond-brand beyond the film series and across media platforms while understanding these ancillary texts and contexts as sites of negotiation with the Eon franchise.
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Cultural Policy in the Polder
25 Years Dutch Cultural Policy Act
Edwin van Meerkerk
Amsterdam University Press, 2018
At the occasion of the 25 anniversary of the Dutch Cultural Policy Act, Dutch academics in cultural policy research have compiled a volume to commemorate the quarter century in which Dutch cultural policy has developed and analyse the key debates in Dutch cultural policy for the coming years.Historically, central public authority in the Netherlands has been problematic. The country's origin as a confederation of seven independent republics, has had effect in the sense that government usually works 'bottom up'. As a result the Netherlands has relatively few national cultural institutions when compared to other countries. Moreover, the national media never have been linked to the nation state. It is therefore surprising that the nation's cultural policy can be described as a national system in which the nation state sets the agenda rather than cities and regions.
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Cultural Styles of Knowledge Transmission
Essays in Honour of Ad Borsboom
Edited by Jean Kommers and Eric Venbrux
Amsterdam University Press, 2008
Anthropologist Dr Ad Borsboom, chair of Pacific Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen, devoted his academic career from 1972 onwards to the transmission of cultural knowledge. Borsboom handed the insights he acquired during many years of fieldwork among Australian Aborigines on to other academics, students and the general public. This collection of essays by his colleagues, specializing in cultures from across the globe, focuses on knowledge transmission. The contributions deal with local forms of education or pedagogics, the learning experiences of fieldwork and the nexus of status and education. Whereas some essays are reflexive, others are personal in nature. But all of the authors are fascinated by the divergent ways in which people handle ‘knowledge’. The volume provides readers with respectful representations of other cultures and their distinct epistemologies.
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The Culture of the Sound Image in Prewar Japan
Michael Raine
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
This collection of essays explores the development of electronic sound recording in Japanese cinema, radio, and popular music to illuminate the interrelationship of aesthetics, technology, and cultural modernity in prewar Japan. Putting the cinema at the center of a "culture of the sound image", it restores complexity to a media transition that is often described simply as slow and reluctant. In that vibrant sound culture, the talkie was introduced on the radio before it could be heard in the cinema, and pop music adaptations substituted for musicals even as cinema musicians and live narrators resisted the introduction of recorded sound. Taken together, the essays show that the development of sound technology shaped the economic structure of the film industry and its labour practices, the intermedial relation between cinema, radio, and popular music, as well as the architecture of cinemas and the visual style of individual Japanese films and filmmakers.
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Culture, Power and Politics in Treaty-Port Japan, 1854-1899
Key Papers, Press and Contemporary writings
James Hoare
Amsterdam University Press, 2018
This two–volume collection, supported by an in-depth introduction that addresses origins, actuality, endgame and afterlife, brings together for the first time contemporary documentation and more recent scholarship to give a broad picture of Japan’s Treaty Ports and their inhabitants at work and play in the second half of the nineteenth century. The material selected, shows how the ports’ existence and the Japanese struggle to end their special status, impacted on many aspects of modern Japan beyond their primary role as trading stations. Compared with their counterparts in China, the Japanese treaty ports cast a small shadow. They were far fewer – only four really mattered – and lasted for just under fifty years, while the Chinese ports made their centenary. Yet the Japanese ports were important. The thriving modern cities of Yokohama and Kobe had their origins as treaty ports. Nagasaki, a major centre of foreign trade since at least the sixteenth century, may not have owed so much to its treaty-port status, but it was a factor in its modern development.
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Cultures of Unemployment
A Comparative Look at Long-Term Unemployment and Urban Poverty
Godfried Engerbersen, Kees Schuyt, Jaap Timmer, and Frans van Waarden
Amsterdam University Press, 2006
In the 1980s a team of Dutch sociologists conducted a study on the daily life of unemployed in the Netherlands. They were inspired by the classical work Marienthal: the Sociology of an Unemployed Community first published in 1933. The authors conducted three neighborhood studies to analyze the social behavior of the unemployed. Based on the work of Robert K. Merton and Mary Douglas they developed a typology of different cultures of unemployment. This typology is still relevant to analyze contemporary reactions to unemployment in European welfare states. The authors also demonstrated that their cultural analysis is fruitful to understand the heterogeneity of urban marginality in the United States. A foreword by U.S. scholar William Julius Wilson emphasizes the universality of the method and the findings presented here.

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CW-21 Interceptor
Edwin Hoogschagen
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
The CW-21 was designed during the late 1930s. It combined light weight construction with a powerful engine, which resulted in an excellent rate of climb and manoeuvrability, allowing the fighter to quickly reach the height of attacking enemy aircraft, and attack them. The prototype was sent to China as a demonstration copy and an order for three aircraft, plus a further 32 as kits, followed. These would be assembled locally. Only the three production machines arrived in the chaos of war and would never see actual combat. A second modified variant was ordered by the Dutch government and 24 were delivered to the Netherlands Indies. The CW-21s were outnumbered and outgunned when the Japanese launched their attack on the Netherlands Indies. Despite the poor outlook, the pilots flying them put up a good fight...
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Cycling Pathways
The Politics and Governance of Dutch Cycling Infrastructure, 1920-2020
Henk-Jan Dekker
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
In an effort to fight climate change, many cities try to boost their cycling levels. They often look towards the Dutch for guidance. However, historians have only begun to uncover how and why the Netherlands became the premier cycling country of the world. Why were Dutch cyclists so successful in their fight for a place on the road? Cycling Pathways explores the long political struggle that culminated in today’s high cycling levels. Delving into the archives, it uncovers the important role of social movements and shows in detail how these interacted with national, provincial, and urban engineers and policymakers to govern the distribution of road space and construction of cycling infrastructure. It discusses a wide range of topics, ranging from activists to engineering committees, from urban commuters to recreational cyclists and from the early 1900s to today in order to uncover the long and all-but-forgotten history of Dutch cycling governance.
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Czech Broadside Ballads as Text, Art, Song in Popular Culture, c.1600–1900
Patricia Fumerton
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
This landmark collection makes a major contribution to the burgeoning field of broadside ballad study by investigating the hitherto unexplored treasure-trove of over 100,000 Central/Eastern European broadside ballads of the Czech Republic, from the 16th to the 19th century. Viewing Czech broadside ballads from an interdisciplinary perspective, we see them as unique and regional cultural phenomena: from their production and collecting processes to their musicology, linguistics, preservation, and more. At the same time, as contributors note, when viewed within a larger perspective—extending one’s gaze to take in ballad production in bordering lands (such as Germany, Poland, and Slovakia) and as far Northwest as Britain to as far Southwest as Brazil—we discover an international phenomenon at work. Czech printed ballads, we see, participated in a thriving popular culture of broadside ballads that spoke through text, art, and song to varied interests of the masses, especially the poor, worldwide.
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