This book focuses on the analysis of sensorial representations of violent images in contemporary films that portray embodied violation in urban environments of street clashes and prisons in Northern Ireland and Brazil during the late twentieth century. There is an emphasis on the representation of senses and how they play a significant role in structuring narratives and mapping the cinematic landscapes of conflict. Whether on the streets and prisons of Belfast, Derry, São Paulo or Rio, the attention is on the endangered body and its fragility or strength. Analyzing films through the novel framework of sensorial perspective enables the understanding of urban and prison landscapes as part of a somatic geography that affects the corporeal engagement of the participants. As a multicultural study, this is an essential book for those interested in the relationship between cinema and history while taking into consideration the interactive roles of the senses and perception.

"Without this testimony, we simply cannot grasp what is going on . . . Americans would do well to read [Gangster Warlords]." --The New York Times Book Review, Editor's Choice From the author of El Narco, the shocking story of the men at the heads of cartels throughout Latin America: what drives them, what sustains their power, and how they might be brought down. In a ranch south of Texas, the man known as The Executioner dumps five hundred body parts in metal barrels. In Brazil's biggest city, a mysterious prisoner orders hit-men to gun down forty-one police officers and prison guards in two days. In southern Mexico, a meth maker is venerated as a saint while enforcing Old Testament justice on his enemies. A new kind of criminal kingpin has arisen: part CEO, part terrorist, and part rock star, unleashing guerrilla attacks, strong-arming governments, and taking over much of the world's trade in narcotics, guns, and humans. What they do affects you now--from the gas in your car, to the gold in your jewelry, to the tens of thousands of Latin Americans calling for refugee status in the U.S. Gangster Warlords is the first definitive account of the crime wars now wracking Central and South America and the Caribbean, regions largely abandoned by the U.S. after the Cold War. Author of the critically acclaimed El Narco, Ioan Grillo has covered Latin America since 2001 and gained access to every level of the cartel chain of command in what he calls the new battlefields of the Americas. Moving between militia-controlled ghettos and the halls of top policy-makers, Grillo provides a disturbing new understanding of a war that has spiraled out of control--one that people across the political spectrum need to confront now.

How many emails have you deleted recently offering you inherited millions from a mystery relative, or the uncollected winnings from an unheard of lottery? Rather than press delete, Don Mullan decided to take the Scammers on at their own game...As a result, welcome to the fantasy world of the saintly Nod and Catherine Nallum and their associates, Bart Ahern, Biggles and Fr Jonathan Ross; of Pastor Patricio, Supreme Head of the Church of Serendipity and his Parisian friends, and of the 3rd Marquess of Miserly-Scholes of Stoke-on-Trent and his PA/lover, Lady Sarah Macbeth...As well as highlighting a very serious issue a recent study showed one million residents in the UK have been defrauded by internet scams Don Mullan begins his quest to scam the scammers, with very memorable results.

This book presents first-of-a-kind studies of films dealing with events of the recent past. The authors point to new phenomena which have been exposed by film directors. They deal with timely and important topics such as migration, diasporas, gender and stereotypes, post-communist political myths, social and political problems people face today.

Winner - 2022 Richard Wall Memorial Award, Theatre Library Association Beginning in the 1920s, audiences around the globe were seduced not only by Hollywood films but also by lavish movie theaters that were owned and operated by the major American film companies. These theaters aimed to provide a quintessentially “American” experience. Outfitted with American technology and accoutrements, they allowed local audiences to watch American films in an American-owned cinema in a distinctly American way. In a history that stretches from Buenos Aires and Tokyo to Johannesburg and Cairo, Ross Melnick considers these movie houses as cultural embassies. He examines how the exhibition of Hollywood films became a constant flow of political and consumerist messaging, selling American ideas, products, and power, especially during fractious eras. Melnick demonstrates that while Hollywood’s marketing of luxury and consumption often struck a chord with local audiences, it was also frequently tone-deaf to new social, cultural, racial, and political movements. He argues that the story of Hollywood’s global cinemas is not a simple narrative of cultural and industrial indoctrination and colonization. Instead, it is one of negotiation, booms and busts, successes and failures, adoptions and rejections, and a precursor to later conflicts over the spread of American consumer culture. A truly global account, Hollywood’s Embassies shows how the entanglement of worldwide movie theaters with American empire offers a new way of understanding film history and the history of U.S. soft power.

The book presents the case for the making of a new political imagination by offering a critique of existing political institutions, philosophy and practices that are unable to provide the thinking, means and leadership to deal with the complexity and crises of specific locales and the world at large. The authors make clear that there is a fundamental disjuncture between the complexity of the combined critical conditions that are now putting life on Earth at risk, and the divisions and theories of knowledge that are dominantly and instrumentally trying to understand the situation. In response, this work makes the case for the need for a new political imagination that rejects the sufficiency of existing political ideologies (including democracy) being the end point of politics. The book tackles the political underpinnings of social and economic life in a world still embedded in the inequities of the afterlife of colonialism and state socialism. Thereafter it engages narratives of change, rethinks imagination and critical practices, to finally present a relationally connected way to move forward. This trans-disciplinary volume is directed at those working in political philosophy and epistemology, critical global and security studies, decoloniality and postcolonial studies, design, critical anthropology and the post humanities. It is accessible to both academic audiences and activists and practitioners.