Cultures of Decolonisation : Transnational Productions and Practices, 1945-70
- Submitting institution
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University of Brighton
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 7128450
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
-
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- Publisher
- Manchester University Press
- ISBN
- 9780719096525
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- January
- Year of publication
- 2016
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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1
- Research group(s)
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A - Design History, Visual and Material Culture
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- In Cultures of Decolonisation Craggs and Wintle commissioned eleven new essays that together evidence the cross-disciplinary and transnational nature of decolonisation in the cultural sphere. The project originated with the editors’ provocation that the cultural sites, spaces and social practices of decolonisation in the middle years of the twentieth century had been overlooked. In order to address this lacuna, they convened a conference at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London (2012). They identified several critical themes that emerged, including a rejection of Eurocentric historiographies of decolonisation, the agency of a wide range of cultural forms, and the interconnections and commonalities between diverse creative forms. Contributors whose papers best evidenced these new frameworks were commissioned for the volume and directed to speak to these distinctive themes in their chapters. Thus, building on the editors’ own interdisciplinary scholarship, the book brings together research on visual, literary and material cultures to stake a claim for the ways in which cultural forms contributed to wider political, economic and social change in the mid-twentieth century.
The editors’ introduction provides a new historiography of decolonisation before articulating the threefold argument of the volume as a whole. First, its claim for the agency of culture in a process more often understood through a political-economic lens: architecture, theatre, poetry, literature, dictionaries, coinage, displays, heritage sites, fine art and interior design, amongst other things, are offered as crucial gauges, microcosms and agents of decolonisation. Second, the value of bringing to the fore the role of cultural institutions such as museums, mints, language agencies and architectural firms in decolonisation. Third, the need to recognise the transnational and comparative character of cultures of decolonisation (and of decolonisation itself). The editors’ selection of case studies for the volume underpins these central arguments.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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