Anthem Press

This delightful text combines the practicalities of a travel guide with the revealing observations of social journalism. ‘How to Enjoy Paris in 1842’ covers a wide range of subjects, from the history of the great city to contemporary commerce, conveyed by a witty, often satirical narrative reminiscent of Jonathan Swift. The author guides the reader on a leisurely walk around the monuments and attractions of the capital, bringing to life a vibrant and mesmerising city. Hervé’s narrative voice is engaging in that it constantly appeals to the reader, inviting their participation in his Parisian experience, and succeeds in combining anecdotal humour with witty observations of both the French and British. His Paris is populated by caricatures worthy of Dickens, the city familiarized through the inclusion of personal anecdotes performed by stereotypes still recognizable now. This fascinating book provides today's reader with a real sense of how much and how little things have changed in the intervening century and a half.

The book looks at the turn of the century, when organized soccer began to be played in a systematic way by the European community of Rio and São Paulo, mostly by the British. It shows that the new sport was embraced by these people as a way to celebrate their culture, and to imitate the activities of the elite schools in Britain that became quite popular throughout Europe. Young Brazilians from the elite also embraced the sport as a way of sharing a popular European sport that was identified with what was respected as a white/upper class activity. In this way making a distinction from the lower and darker populations. Making this distinction was important in this moment of post-emancipation, affirming the superiority of the upper/white class. It was also important for the European residents of Brazil in order to distinguish themselves from Brazilians (colonial mentality). Football was one aspect of the modernity that these two cities were craving to achieve.

The book highlights the impact of European-based racial assumptions on the development of professional soccer. It provides a broad discussion on how the official discourse after 1930 was one of conciliation, claiming that Brazil was not European, but unique due to its racial mixing. This idea began to be promoted by artists and intellectuals as an attempt to Brazilianize the country, but it was soon embraced by politicians with the leadership of President Getulio Vargas in an attempt to create a unified national identity. In this context, futebol was also unique in relation to European football because of its mulatoism. Although this new attitude would influence social and racial barriers within football to fall, racism did not end, nor did Brazil become a racial democracy – as it has been claimed by many. 

The Elizabethan popular audience had a natural love of clowning, slapstick and the mayhem that was released when the rules of society were relaxed, broken or subverted. A play set on Midsummer Night and structured as a dream was going to be fun and full of the resonances associated with a festal day that had age old overtones of love, marriage, misrule and jolllity. Midsummer was traditionally celebrated with dancing and feasting and always involved secret assignations in the woods later when it was dark. Indeed, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a play with a bit of everything – magic, moonlight, mayhem, love’s mad entanglements, fairies, mistakes, mechanicals as mummers, all set in the spookiness of the woods at midnight - and all of it provoking laughter.

The business of comedy was more important and serious than simply raising a laugh. It has always served a much graver purpose than mere humorous entertainment, but has also been regarded by religious, moral and cultural guardians as a lesser form than tragedy and a morally questionable one. In a world where society was strictly stratified even the arts had hierarchies. In painting devotional studies (Annunciations, Nativities, Crucifixions) were thought to be the highest endeavour, and historical subjects were thought superior to landscape and portraiture. Grotesque topics of common life (card-playing, village dances, tavern scenes) were thought of as very low art. In literature the epic poem, tragic drama, religious poetry, history plays, even lyrics and love verses were thought of as higher forms than mere comedy. Though the plays of Terence and Plautus were studied, translated and performed by schoolboys and undergraduates, and the satires of Juvenal and Horace were similarly on educational syllabuses, comedy was regarded with suspicion. It was thought to be a too vulgar form, too associated with the bourgeoisie and the commoners, too concerned with trickery, knavery and sex.

 It would not be amiss to re-title the play A Midsummer Night’s Nightmare, for, though matters in Athens are complicated and tense enough, the escape to the woods releases all manner of dark things and makes the entanglements even worse. The piece can be acted in two ways. The traditional approach has been to display it as a fast-moving, action-packed, farcical romp, a carnival of silliness; a light-hearted celebration of human foolishness, full of mistakes and misperceptions, nonsense and laughter, but turning out all right in the end, and not to be taken seriously as it is only a playful entertainment. It may also be seen as a play where oppressiveness, manipulation, misplaced love, hatred and menace dominate and the inconstancy of the human heart is disturbingly exposed. Hermia escapes from Egeus’ dictatorial threats only to find herself (and her complacent assumption of happiness to come in exile) at the mercy of forces she cannot control and does not understand. What happens in the woods is unsettling and represents the more frightening fears that lurk in the psyche and emerge in dreams. It is the woods that provoke the dream/nightmare element.

'Travelling Home' provides a detailed analysis of the contribution that the mid twentieth-century 'Walkabout' magazine made to Australia’s cultural history.  Spanning five central decades of the twentieth century (1934-1974), 'Walkabout' was integral to Australia’s sense of itself as a nation. By advocating travel—both vicarious and actual—'Walkabout' encouraged settler Australians to broaden their image of the nation and its place in the Pacific region. In this way, 'Walkabout' explicitly aimed to make its readers feel at home in their country, as well as including a diverse picture of Aboriginal and Pacific cultures. Like National Geographic in the United States, Walkabout presented a cornucopia of images and information that was accessible to a broad readership.

Given its wide availability and distribution, together with its accessible and entertaining content, 'Walkabout' changed how Australia was perceived, and the magazine is recalled with nostalgic fondness by most if not all of its former readers. Many urban readers learnt about Indigenous peoples and cultures through the many articles on these topics, and although these representations now seem dated and at times discriminatory, they provide a lens through which to see how contemporary attitudes about race and difference were defined and negotiated.

Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship, 'Travelling Home' engages with key questions in literary, cultural, and Australian studies about national identity and modernity. The book’s diverse topics demonstrate how 'Walkabout' canvassed subtle and shifting fields of representation. Grounded in the archival history of the magazine’s production, the book addresses questions key to Australian cultural history. These include an investigation of middle-brow print culture and the writers who contributed to Walkabout, and the role of 'Walkabout' in presenting diverse and often conflicting information about Indigenous and other non-white cultures. Other chapters examine how popular natural history enabled scientists and readers alike to define an unique Australian landscape, and to debate how a modernising nation could preserve its bush while advocating industrial and agricultural development. While the nation is central to 'Walkabout' magazine’s imagined world, Australia is always understood to be part of the Pacific region in complex ways that included neo-colonialism, and Pacific content was prominent in the magazine. Through complex and nuanced readings of Australian literary and cultural history, 'Travelling Home' reveals how vernacular understandings of key issues in Australia’s cultural history were developed and debated in this accessible and entertaining magazine.

The book looks at the turn of the century, when organized soccer began to be played in a systematic way by the European community of Rio and São Paulo, mostly by the British. It shows that the new sport was embraced by these people as a way to celebrate their culture, and to imitate the activities of the elite schools in Britain that became quite popular throughout Europe. Young Brazilians from the elite also embraced the sport as a way of sharing a popular European sport that was identified with what was respected as a white/upper class activity. In this way making a distinction from the lower and darker populations. Making this distinction was important in this moment of post-emancipation, affirming the superiority of the upper/white class. It was also important for the European residents of Brazil in order to distinguish themselves from Brazilians (colonial mentality). Football was one aspect of the modernity that these two cities were craving to achieve.

The book highlights the impact of European-based racial assumptions on the development of professional soccer. It provides a broad discussion on how the official discourse after 1930 was one of conciliation, claiming that Brazil was not European, but unique due to its racial mixing. This idea began to be promoted by artists and intellectuals as an attempt to Brazilianize the country, but it was soon embraced by politicians with the leadership of President Getulio Vargas in an attempt to create a unified national identity. In this context, futebol was also unique in relation to European football because of its mulatoism. Although this new attitude would influence social and racial barriers within football to fall, racism did not end, nor did Brazil become a racial democracy – as it has been claimed by many. 

This edited collection aims to contribute to the decolonial social and cultural analyses of global entangled inequalities by focusing on their local articulations. Drawing on empirical research conducted by scholars in Germany, Trinidad and Tobago, Australia and in Canada, the book engages with the conceptual framework of global inequalities and the methodological perspective on entanglement. It does so by approaching global inequalities and their local articulations: (a) global political economy, structural violence, entangled inequalities; (b) financial inequalities and state injustice; (c) inequality within and beyond race and ethnicity; (d) decolonial struggles against inequality; and (e) decolonial futurities. It is on these grounds that this edited volume aims to contribute to the analysis of entangled global inequalities by mobilizing a decolonial framework paying attention to the intersections of race, gender, labour, finances and the State.

This book presents the very first analysis of male homosexuality in modern rural Thailand that is based on sociological/anthropological research directly with 25 young same-sex attracted men. It explores changes in the way men view and describe their sexuality over time by interviewing them three times over a period of around 18 months. The men are followed during an important transition in their lives: the end of their high school years and the end (in most cases) of their life as a child with parents or extended family at a rural home. Nearly all decided to move to a city to continue their education or to find work. Some also had stints with sex work in one of Thailand’s well-known centers for prostitution. For nearly all men, this transition brought them into contact with new ideas about gender and sexuality, and many experienced an abrupt increase in their opportunities to have sex, leading to a readjustment of their moral universes. The young men in the study were still in the process of figuring out who they were/wanted to be, and many contradictions emerged in their narratives over the period of data collection. These contradictions, and the way they were resolved, presented an opportunity to critically explore the way the social structures in which these young men operate influence the way they think and explain their own sexual/gendered selves, and how changes in these social structures affect their sense of self.

A number of explanatory ‘lenses’ are used in the different book chapters that zoom in on different structuring/explanatory frameworks for making sense of gender and sexuality in Thai cultural contexts, as used and applied by the study participants. The first is Buddhism. Buddhist beliefs and traditional ideas about karma, fate, hierarchy, family, masculinity and femininity played important roles in the young men’s childhood understandings about homosexuality and same-sex relations–  especially in terms of their cause and morality. The second lens for understanding male homosexuality in Thailand is gender, where men are divided into feminine-oriented bottoms and masculine-oriented tops. A third lens is modernity/the desire to develop and grow, closely linked to Thailand’s globalizing economy and the increasing role of the Internet and social media. The Internet functioned as an important ‘playground’, a platform for trying-out different presentations of the self via Facebook and chat applications – and in many men this resulted in a rejection of their previous self-presentation as effeminate, which they gradually started to associate with being backwards, rural and ‘traditional’. The fourth lens is related to economy. Many of the young men in the study searched for romantic relationships based on complementarity and were looking for boyfriends who had something they did not have—money, a better position in society, or ‘wisdom’/the ability to guide. Most of the more effeminate men saw their sexuality as valuable, and several of the study participants described in this book – especially those coming from poor families – engaged in sex work and used their youth and beauty to find a wealthy long-term partner, in the hope of lifting their families out of poverty, towards a more prosperous future. The fifth lens is nationalism, or more specifically the concept of ‘being a good Thai’; gradually the young men learned that the Thai sense of self and the importance of performing one’s role as a ‘good’ son in public can be used as a strategy to cover-up private behaviors and desires. The sixth and final lens is family. Being ‘good’, respecting elders and elder siblings, financially supporting (grand-)parents, having good manners, meaning ‘acting appropriately in time and space’, gave the young men a way to retain the respect and support of elders and seniors, and determined how they dealt with (non-)disclosure of their sexuality to their families and others and explained their ability and desire to remain part of the mainstream of society. In the final chapter, a discussion about three critical concerns pertaining the health and wellbeing of same-sex attracted Thai men are discussed in the light of this proposed model: the ongoing HIV epidemic, mental health and LGBTI rights. 

Overall, this book presents significant new insights about the Thai sex/gender system, particularly on how it is affected by processes of globalization and the ascent of the Internet and mobile phones as tools for dating and romance.

This book throws new light on post-colonial evaluations of the Partition and its effect on eastern India. Until very recently, a striking state of 'near silence' has existed concerning the violence encountered by those who fled across the Bengal border. 'Bengal Partition Stories' addresses this silence through the retelling of stories inspired by the division of Bengal, the mass exodus that followed and their repercussions on the cultural, social and economic character of the region, modern India as a whole and the newly-formed nation of Bangladesh.

Despite numerous critical enquiries into the history, politics and social dynamics that contributed to the partition of Bengal, there remains a distinct lack of in-depth exploration into the personal experiences of those directly affected. Through oral histories, interviews and fictional retellings of the event and its aftermath, 'Bengal Partition Stories' seeks to fill this gap by unearthing and articulating the collective memories of a people traumatised by the brutal division of their homeland.