Alex Burchmore
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alexburchmore.bsky.social
Alex Burchmore
@alexburchmore.bsky.social
Lecturer in Art History and Curatorial Studies, Australian National University; author of New Export China (University of California Press, 2023) and Material Selves (Bloomsbury, 2024); scholar of things and people in motion
Reposted by Alex Burchmore
My book on design and consumerism - featuring critical accounts of Apple, IKEA, Nike, Zara and more. Learn how they seduce and distract you. Marxist and woke! You'll never shop again...
November 27, 2025 at 10:00 AM
Reposted by Alex Burchmore
It's Chinese Don Quixote in 1930s Shanghai! What happens when a gullible dupe reads too much kungfu fiction and decides he can save the nation? The Pidgin Warrior by Zhang Tianyi is what happens. I was lucky enough to translate it.

bookshop.org/p/books/the-...
The Pidgin Warrior
Check out The Pidgin Warrior - <p>In the 1930s, wartime Shanghai is a cosmopolitan metropolis where conmen and dance-hall girls mingle with refugees streaming in from the occupied areas.<br /> <br /> ...
bookshop.org
November 27, 2025 at 1:58 PM
Reposted by Alex Burchmore
This won an award and it just came out in paperback! yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300...
Fashion Victims
A thoughtful, lavishly illustrated, and highly readable account of the fabulous French fashion world in the pre-Revolutionary period   This award-winning bo...
yalebooks.yale.edu
November 27, 2025 at 5:52 AM
Reposted by Alex Burchmore
My book Transoceanic Blackface: Empire, Race, Performance is available from Northwestern University Press.

It maps the global history of blackface, minstrelsy, and related forms of racialized performance such as brownface and yellowface.
Transoceanic Blackface - Northwestern University Press
A sweeping history of racialized performance across the Anglophone imperial world from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century A material history of ra...
nupress.northwestern.edu
November 26, 2025 at 11:29 PM
Reposted by Alex Burchmore
Given the opportunity for a second edition, I would vastly broaden the examples, downplaying those aligning with my own collecting tendencies. But I'm happy with a lot of the book! It's extremely cheerful! I think Chatwin still has signed & numbered copies available!
Book Collecting Now — Chatwin Books
At a time when we take e-readers to the beach and read novels on our smartphones, is the book-collecting hobby still relevant? Yes, more than ever.&nbsp; Matthew Budman’s illustrated guide gives you ...
www.chatwinbooks.com
November 26, 2025 at 9:55 PM
Reposted by Alex Burchmore
If you like a writer's work, tell them! Email, LinkedIn message, DM, even in person at an event. It can make a huge difference in their lives, especially right now with declining freelance budgets, layoffs, stagnant salaries, the threat of AI, and dwindling book advances.
November 26, 2025 at 6:12 PM
Reposted by Alex Burchmore
This is fascinating! Sima Qian is surely making a comeback! People wrote Shiji-style biographies of Li Wenliang during Wuhan lockdown - my piece on this is just out, open-access journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
Genre borrowing in Chinese digital culture: Narrative imagination and grassroots storytelling on social media - Guobin Yang, 2025
A notable feature in Chinese digital culture is its playful style. Memes, jokes, parodies, and coded language of all sorts abound on social media. While researc...
journals.sagepub.com
October 6, 2025 at 11:39 PM