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In this blog post, we’re sharing a roundup of 5 of UTP’s new releases to add to your reading list this summer. Scroll down to learn more:
Perfume on the Page in Nineteenth-Century France
By Cheryl Krueger
Despite long-standing assertions that languages, including French and English, cannot sufficiently communicate the experience of smell, much of France’s nineteenth-century literature has gained praise for its memorable evocation of odours. As French perfume was industrialized, democratized, cosmeticized, and feminized in the nineteenth century, stories of fragrant scent trails aligned perfume with toxic behaviour and viewed a woman’s scent as something alluring, but also something to be controlled. Shedding light on the French perfume culture that we know today, Perfume on the Page in Nineteenth-Century France follows the scent trails that ultimately challenge us to read perfume and literature in new ways.
Thug Criminology: A Call to Action
Edited by Adam Ellis, Olga Marques, and Anthony Gunter
Thug Criminology combines the urgent and as yet silenced voices of former gang/street-involved peoples turned academics, alongside their allies, in order to challenge and disrupt mainstream and academic knowledge about urban youth gangs specifically, and the “streets” more broadly. Challenging the colonial structure of criminology and other disciplines that focus on street crime, Thug Criminology aims to disrupt and disentangle the knowledge that has been produced on gangs and urban violence.
Uniform Fantasies: Soldiers, Sex, and Queer Emancipation in Imperial Germany
By Jeffrey Schneider
Starting in the nineteenth century in Germany, colourful military uniforms became a locus for various queer male fantasies, fostering an underground sexual economy of male prostitution as well as a political project to exploit the army’s prestige for queer emancipation. In the first decade of the twentieth century, however, a series of scandals derailed this emancipatory project. Drawing on a vast trove of materials ranging from sexological case studies, trial transcripts, and parliamentary debates to queer activist tracts, autobiographies, and literary texts, Uniform Fantasies uncovers a particularly modern set of concerns about such topics as outing closeted homosexuals, the presence of gay men in the military, and whether men in uniform are more masculine or more insecure about their sexual identity.
Creativity from Suburban Nowheres: Rethinking Cultural and Creative Practices
Edited by Ilja Van Damme, Ruth McManus, and Michiel Dehaene
Looking at suburbs as places of creativity gives rise to novel and thought-provoking narratives that typically run counter to the idea that suburbs are sites of “ordinary,” “mundane,” and “everyday” practices. Far from being geographies of “nowhere” – dull, materialistic, and monotone – suburbs are unpacked as being heterogeneous and historically layered places of living, work, and creation. Situating creativity in place and time, Creativity from Suburban Nowheres displaces mainstream understandings of creativity and widespread stereotypes commonly associated with the suburbs.
Moving Words: Literature, Memory, and Migration in Berlin
By Andrew Brandel
In the decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Berlin has re-emerged as a global city in large part thanks to its reputation as a literary city – a place where artists from around the world gather and can make a life. Rooted in ethnographic fieldwork, rich historical archives, and literary analysis, Moving Words examines the different claims people make on and for literature as it carries them through the city on irregular and intersecting paths. Along the way, Brandel offers a new approach to the ethnography of literature that aims to think anthropologically about crossings in time and in space, where literature provides a footing in a world constituted by a multiplicity of real possibilities.
