For the 10th anniversary of International Read an eBook Day, we’re highlighting 10 eBooks from our 2024 collections! Check out some of our exciting new titles below and browse for your next e-read on the Scholars Portal Books platform.

The Archival Afterlives of Philippine Cinema

Lim, Bliss Cua
Duke University Press, 2024

The Archival Afterlives of Philippine Cinema analyzes the crisis-ridden history of film archiving in the Philippines. Historically, the preservation of Philippine cinema has been unevenly supported by the government, and many films produced before digital recording have been lost. Bliss Cua Lim explores dynamics of cultural legislation and privatization in formal state and corporate archives, analyzing restorations of the last extant nitrate film and a star-studded lesbian classic as well as the Marcos regime’s cinematic and architectural propaganda. Lim argues for an anarchival history of Philippine cinema, one that highlights institutional precarity, scarcity, and the materiality of the archive. Weaving together questions of institutional history, political context, cultural policy alongside medial materiality, film analyses, and production histories, this book documents formal and informal attempts to archive Philippine cinema.

Educating the Body: A History of Physical Education in Canada

Hall, M. Ann; Kidd, Bruce; Vertinsky, Patricia
University of Toronto Press, 2024

Educating the Body presents a history of physical education in Canada, shedding light on its major advocates, innovators, and institutions. The book traces the major developments in physical education from the early nineteenth century to the present day – both within and beyond schools – and concludes with a vision for the future. It examines the realities of Canada’s classed, gendered, and racialized society and reveals the rich history of Indigenous teachings and practices that were marginalized and erased by the residential school system. Today, with the worrying decline in physical activity levels across the population, Educating the Body is indispensable to understanding our policy options moving ahead.

Discovering Nothing: In Pursuit of an Elusive Northwest Passage

Nicandri, David L.
University of British Columbia Press, 2024

The many attempts by navigators to find a Northwest Passage via its Pacific portal all ended in failure; however, their discoveries spurred expansionist developments that would change North America forever. In Discovering Nothing David L. Nicandri maps a cast of geographic visionaries and practical explorers as they promoted or sought a workable commercial route linking the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic. The discovery of the legendary northern passage proved elusive, but the equivalent land bridges that were built changed the futures of Canada and the United States. Drawing from close readings of explorers’ personal journals, Nicandri provides readers with a detailed, thoroughly researched work documenting the many players and failed enterprises at the core of this centuries-spanning cartographic undertaking, as well the technological innovations that followed: chiefly, the development of both the Canadian Pacific Railway and the Northern Pacific Railroad. Beginning in the eighteenth century with the final voyage of Captain James Cook and looking through to today and the impact of global climate change on Arctic passages, Nicandri provides a comprehensive examination of the key nautical and overland expeditions – including their many successes and failures – that the quest entailed.

Apartheid Remains

Chari, Sharad
Duke University Press, 2024

Apartheid Remains explores spatial segregation and racial capitalism in the Indian Ocean city of Durban, South Africa, both preceding and in the wake of apartheid, from the late nineteenth to early twentieth century. Sharad Chari argues that efforts to address the crises of racial capitalism through spatial fixes have produced new contradictions and struggles, and he investigates how state and capital forces harness biopolitical discourse in this circular struggle. Across the book’s chapters, a Black Marxist-feminist framework is used to analyze the recursive, racialized state violence of biopolitics, proving a need for “theory in action” or the active engagement with communities affected by and protesting their conditions, as demonstrated through a palimpsest of documentary photography, interviews, ethnography, and archival work. Apartheid Remains offers a method and form of ‘geography’ attentive to the spatial, material and embodied remains of history. Varied struggles led by denizens of South Durban point beyond the anti-apartheid horizon to persistent imaginations of abolition of all forms of racial capitalism and environmental suffering that define our planetary predicament.

Seapower in the Post-modern World

Germond, Basil
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2024

In an era of increasing geopolitical tensions, disruptive technologies, and the rise of authoritarianism, the question of who masters the seas is more than ever central to the future of the international order. But while naval operations, maritime security, and ocean governance have become increasingly relevant in world politics, the concept and definition of seapower have largely been neglected by the scholarship in the international relations field.

Seapower in the Post-modern World fills this gap with an analysis of the naval, economic, and ideational dimensions of seapower from antiquity to today. Exploring the extent to which the permanent elements associated with seapower – such as technology, commerce, and maritime culture – transcend historical periods, Basil Germond frames contemporary seapower as a combination of components, including traditional naval power, post-modern conceptions of collective and civilian seapower, and the neo-modern phenomena of maritime territorialization and the naval arms race.

By giving seapower a new conceptual definition, Seapower in the Post-modern World offers key analytical tools for understanding the stability of the global maritime order and seapower’s contribution to global leadership more broadly.

A Maritime Vietnam: From Earliest Times to the Nineteenth Century

Li, Tana
Cambridge University Press, 2024

Despite its 3,000 kilometre coastline, few people see Vietnam as a maritime country. Here Li Tana presents a powerful new argument about Vietnamese history: that key political changes resulted from the impact, economic and otherwise, of the sea. This is a finely layered account covering the two millennia before colonisation that radically restructures how we understand the role of the maritime and trans-regional in Vietnam’s early history. Drawing on exhaustive research of Chinese, Vietnamese and Japanese sources, Li reveals that it is only when viewed against the background of the sea that Vietnam’s past can be properly understood. In contrast to traditional perceptions of an inward-looking society dominated by Chinese cultural influence, Vietnam was shaped by dynamic littoral economic and cultural contact.

Scripting Empire: Broadcasting, the BBC, and the Black Atlantic 

Procter, James
Oxford University Press, 2024

Scripting Empire recovers the cultural history of West Indian and West African writing at the BBC in order to rethink the critical mid-century decades of decolonization, late modernism, and mass migration to the metropole. Between the 1930s and the 1960s, a remarkable group of black Atlantic artists and intellectuals became broadcasters, producers, editors, and scriptwriters at the corporation. They included Una Marson, Langston Hughes, Louise Bennett, Wole Soyinka, Derek Walcott, George Lamming Amos Tutuola, V. S. Naipaul, Sam Selvon, Cyprian Ekwensi, Stuart Hall, and C. L. R. James. Operating at the interface of a range of literary and broadcast genres, this loose network of writers and thinkers prompt a reassessment of aesthetic innovation and political imagination between the outbreak of World War II and the first airings of post-colonial independence. Moving beyond prevailing accounts of the novel, and narratives of extension, this book examines the role of short, serial formats and episodic structures within the vibrant economy of mid-century literary production. Focusing on the BBC as both a modernist institution and a mass medium, Scripting Empire works comparatively across dozens of different programmes spanning the Colonial Service, General Overseas Service, Home Service, Light Programme, and Third Programme. The book draws upon a transnational archive of materials including scripts, correspondence, periodicals, visual records, and sound recordings in order to reposition the cultural contribution of West Indians and West Africans within a more pervasive and porous account of radio transmission, the legacy of which extends well beyond broadcasting.

Unspooled: How the Cassette Made Music Shareable

Drew, Rob
Duke University Press, 2024

Unspooled examines the history of the audio cassette within the context of indie rock musical subcultures. Focusing on how the cassette heralded new modes of music sharing, intimacy, and communication through forms such as the mix tape, Rob Drew argues that the format’s emotional resonance is tied to its shareability. Each chapter traces the cassette’s history and evolution, from its predecessor open-reel tape and treatment in the music industry, to prominence in unauthorized secondhand music distribution. Positioning itself within discourses about the political economy of sound and the history of music technology, Unspooled offers an extended account of the role cassettes played in popular music cultures

 

The Rough Poets: Reading Oil-Worker Poetry

Unrau, Melanie Dennis
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2024

Oil workers are often typecast as rough: embodying the toxic masculinity, racism, consumerist excess, and wilful ignorance of the extractive industries and petrostates they work for. But their poetry troubles these assumptions, revealing the fear, confusion, betrayal, and indignation hidden beneath tough personas.

The Rough Poets presents poetry by workers in the Canadian oil and gas industry, collecting and closely reading texts published between 1938 and 2019: S.C. Ells’s Northland Trails, Peter Christensen’s Rig Talk, Dymphny Dronyk’s Contrary Infatuations, Mathew Henderson’s The Lease, Naden Parkin’s A Relationship with Truth, Lesley Battler’s Endangered Hydrocarbons, and Lindsay Bird’s Boom Time. These writers are uniquely positioned, Melanie Dennis Unrau argues, both as petropoets who write poetry about oil and as theorists of petropoetics with unique knowledge about how to make and unmake worlds that depend on fossil fuels. Their ambivalent, playful, crude, and honest petropoetry shows that oil workers grieve the environmental and social impacts of their work, worry about climate change and the futures of their communities, and desire jobs and ways of life that are good, safe, and just.

How does it feel to be a worker in the oil and gas industry in a climate emergency, facing an energy transition that threatens your way of life? Unrau takes up this question with the respect, care, and imagination necessary to be an environmentalist reader in solidarity with oil workers.

Shooting for change: Korean photography after the war

Lee, Jung Joon
Duke University Press, 2024

Shooting for Change examines postwar Korean photography and the discursive ways in which photography makes meaning and engages with memory in Korea and the Korean diaspora. Jung Joon Lee considers the role of photography-especially “national” photography-in shaping post-memory of historical events, representing the ideal national family, and motivating social movements. The book is organized thematically, following photographic practices from vernacular and art to documentary and archival, while treating the formative periods in nation-building and transnational militarization as both backdrop and cultivator for photographic works. Lee draws on photography of militarized sex work, political protest in the military era, war orphans, and mass protests. Shooting for Change is ultimately driven by a desire for an epistemologically decolonizing approach to Korean photography