This book analyses parental anxieties about their children’s healthcare issues in urban China, engaging with wider theoretical debates about modernity, risk and anxiety. It examines the broader social
In the 1920s and 1930s, the port-cities of Southeast Asia were staging grounds for diverse groups of ordinary citizens to experiment with modernity, as a rising Japan and American capitalism challenged the predominance of European empires after the First World War. Both migrants and locals played a pivotal role in shaping civic culture. Moving away from a nationalist reading of the period, Su Lin Lewis explores layers of cross-cultural interaction in various spheres: the urban built environment, civic associations, print media, education, popular culture and the emergence of the modern woman. While the book focuses on Penang, Rangoon and Bangkok - three cities born amidst British expansion to the region - it explores connected experiences across Asia and in Asian intellectual enclaves in Europe. Cosmopolitan sensibilities were severely tested in the era of post-colonial nationalism, but are undergoing a resurgence in Southeast Asia's civil society and creative class today.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the port-cities of Southeast Asia were staging grounds for diverse groups of ordinary citizens to experiment with modernity, as a rising Japan and American capitalism challenged the predominance of European empires after the First World War. Both migrants and locals played a pivotal role in shaping civic culture. Moving away from a nationalist reading of the period, Su Lin Lewis explores layers of cross-cultural interaction in various spheres: the urban built environment, civic associations, print media, education, popular culture and the emergence of the modern woman. While the book focuses on Penang, Rangoon and Bangkok - three cities born amidst British expansion to the region - it explores connected experiences across Asia and in Asian intellectual enclaves in Europe. Cosmopolitan sensibilities were severely tested in the era of post-colonial nationalism, but are undergoing a resurgence in Southeast Asia's civil society and creative class today.
Body, Society, and Nation tells the story of China’s unfolding modernity by exploring the changing ideas, practices, and systems related to health and body in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Sh
Pathologies of Modern Space traces the rise of agoraphobia and ties its astonishing growth to the emergence of urban modernity. In contrast to traditional medical conceptions of the disorder, Kathryn
As the site of the Western capitalist "concessions," the Chinese city of Shanghai acquired a "creole" quality to its urban space that many in East Asia came to associate with both modernity and the de
In this book, Erik Swyngedouw explores how water becomes part of the tumultuous processes of modernization and development. Using the experience of Spain as a lens to view the interplay of modernity a
The Viennese cafe was a key site of urban modernity around 1900. In the rapidly growing city it functioned simultaneously as home and workplace, affording opportunities for both leisure and intellectu
Interwar Portugal was in many ways a microcosm of Europe's encounter with modernity: reshaped by industrialization, urban growth, and the antagonism between liberalism and authoritarianism, it also wi
The Arcades Project (1927–40), the monumental unfinished work of cultural criticism by Walter Benjamin, is the German philosopher’s effort to comprehend urban modernity through the 19th-century Parisi
Advertising is a central part of the global system of commerce and culture. Every day it exposes consumers around the world to practices associated with the West, urban life, prosperity, and modernity
Advertising is a central part of the global system of commerce and culture. Every day it exposes consumers around the world to practices associated with the West, urban life, prosperity, and modernity
Neurasthenia, meaning nerve weakness, was ‘invented’ in the United States as a disorder of modernity, caused by the fast pace of urban life. Soon after, from the early 1880s onwards, this modern disea
Colonial Modernity focuses on the dual topics of the relationship between the post-war aesthetic regime of modernism and the project of modernization in architecture and urban planning, as well as on
This book argues that Djuna Barnes and Jane Bowles counter the critical trend associating American modernity primarily with urban spaces, and instead locate the nomadic thrust of their times in the (p
Anke Gleber examines one of the most intriguing and characteristic figures of European urban modernity: the observing city stroller, or flaneur. In an age transformed by industrialism, the flaneur dri
Gregory Dart expands upon existing notions of Cockneys and the 'Cockney School' in the late Romantic period by exploring some of the broader ramifications of the phenomenon in art and periodical literature. He argues that the term was not confined to discussion of the Leigh Hunt circle, but was fast becoming a way of gesturing towards everything in modern metropolitan life that seemed discrepant and disturbing. Covering the ground between Romanticism and Victorianism, Dart presents Cockneyism as a powerful critical currency in this period, which helps provide a link between the works of Leigh Hunt and Keats in the 1810s and the early works of Charles Dickens in the 1830s. Through an examination of literary history, art history, urban history and social history, this book identifies the early nineteenth-century figure of the Cockney as the true ancestor of modernity.
This examination of the formally autonomous state of Hyderabad in a global comparative framework challenges the idea of the dominant British Raj as the sole sovereign power in the late colonial period. Beverley argues that Hyderabad's position as a subordinate yet sovereign 'minor state' was not just a legal formality, but that in exercising the right to internal self-government and acting as a conduit for the regeneration of transnational Muslim intellectual and political networks, Hyderabad was indicative of the fragmentation of sovereignty between multiple political entities amidst empires. By exploring connections with the Muslim world beyond South Asia, law and policy administration along frontiers with the colonial state, and urban planning in expanding Hyderabad City, Beverley presents Hyderabad as a locus for experimentation in global and regional forms of political modernity. This book recasts the political geography of late imperialism and historicises Muslim political modern
Calcutta, the centre of British imperial power in India, figures in scholarship as the locus of colonialism and the hotbed of anti-colonial nationalist movements. Yet, historians have largely ignored how the city shaped these movements. A Hygienic City-Nation is the first academic work that examines everyday urban formations in the colonial city that informed the broad global forces of imperialism, nationalism, and urbanism, and were, in turn, shaped by them. Drawing on previously unexplored archives of the Calcutta Improvement Trust and neighbourhood clubs, the author uncovers hidden stories of the city at the everyday level of neighbourhoods or paras, where kinship-like ties, caste, religion, and ethnicity constituted new urban modernity. Ghosh focuses on an emergent discourse on Hindu spatial hygiene that powered nationalist pedagogic efforts to train city dwellers in conduct fit for the city-nation. In such pedagogic efforts, upper-caste Bengalis were pitted against the lower-caste
