Comparative Literature and China: Methods and Perspectives

Sheldon Lu

This book aims at an exploration of Chinese literary studies in comparative, cross-cultural, transnational, and global contexts. It is one of the first of its kind in dealing with methodological and theoretical issues regarding Chinese, comparative, and world literature in recent years.

The Aquatic Metropolis

John F. López

For centuries, both the Aztec and the Spanish sought to control catastrophic flooding in Tenochtitlan and later Mexico City, but their responses were about more than just engineering. What might seem like straightforward hydraulic projects emerge, under rigorous examination, as complex intersections of visual cultures and philosophical worldviews about nature and cities.

Culture, Identity, and Essentialism

Wolfgang Wagner, Cristina Moya

Psychologists, cultural anthropologists, and evolutionary biologists weigh in on these questions in this volume, often using specific cultural contexts as case studies to elucidate both the particularities and common patterns in the ways essentialism does, or does not, work in the real world.

African Literature in Transition

Moradewun Adejunmobi

This volume offers literary histories and analyses of a wide range of genres in African literature and verbal arts. It provides a holistic and accessible presentation of African literary history that incorporates different types of texts, different regions of the continent, and different languages (English, French, Swahili, Hausa). 

Olfactory Worldmaking

Hsuan L. Hsu

Smell is a vital, if underappreciated, medium through which we inhabit and imagine the world. In Olfactory Worldmaking, Hsuan L. Hsu traces how olfactory experience communicates across visceral, material, and affective registers to offer new ways of relating, which challenge the extractive logics of racial and colonial capitalism. Blending environmental humanities, sensory studies, and critical ethnic studies, the book highlights how scent animates suppressed histories and marginalized memories.

Nice White Anglophones

Eric Louis Russell

Nice White Anglophones: Privilege, Power and Monolingualism is an innovative work exploring race, power and ideology via an extended fictional case study centring on a monolingual white American family—“The Smiths”. The reader is invited to follow this seemingly “normal” white English-speaking family through their everyday life and think critically about their linguistic and cultural reality, what they do and, especially, what they do not do.

Colorblind

Amy Motlagh

With this book, Amy Motlagh considers how racial thinking underpins cultural practices in Iran and the Iranian diaspora. Despite cultural traditions depicting black people and the documented presence of black Iranians, many have insisted that race is not an important aspect of Iranian culture, that "blackness" does not exist in Iran. Instead, it is the notion of being "Persian" that binds all Iranians together. But, as Motlagh argues, the word "Persian" masks a long racial history that depends on the specter of blackness to define what is truly Iranian.

Shelter for the Night

Fatima Mojaddedi

From narratives of modernist ambition and political violence to tragic romance and urbanite translators and their rural interlocutors, Shelter for the Night looks at the challenges of articulating the unspeakable to make a bold claim for the importance of thinking about the contemporary world starting from Afghanistan.

The English Language on Trial

John A. Hawkins

This book draws on over fifty cases involving disputed meanings in the American legal system where the author served as an expert witness or consultant, to explore the interaction between language and law. Stepping back from the legal specifics and their outcomes, it analyzes the disputes from the perspective of the language sciences, especially semantics and pragmatics, and language comprehension.

Chicane Mental Health, Second Edition

Flores, Yvette G