China's Literary Cosmopolitans offers a comprehensive introduction to the literary oeuvres of Qian Zhongshu (1910-98) and Yang Jiang (b. 1911). It assesses their novels, essays, stories, poetry, plays, translations, and criticism, and discusses their reception as two of the most important Chinese scholar-writers of the twentieth century. In addition to re-evaluating this married couple's intertwined literary careers, the book also explains why they have come to represent such influential models of Chinese literary cosmopolitanism. Uncommonly well-versed in Western languages and literatures, Qian and Yang chose to live in China and write in Chinese. China's Literary Cosmopolitans argues for their artistic importance while analyzing their works against the modern cultural imperative that Chinese literature be worldly. Christopher Rea (Ph.D., Columbia) is Associate Professor of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of The Age of Irreverence: A New History of Laughter in China (California, 2015), co-editor of The Business of Culture: Cultural Entrepreneurs in China and Southeast Asia, 1900-65 (ubc Press, 2015), and editor of Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts: Stories and Essays by Qian Zhongshu(Columbia, 2011).

In The Pragmatist Turn, renowned scholar of American literature and thought Giles Gunn offers a new critical history of the way seventeenth-century religion and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment influenced the formation of subsequent American writing. This shaping was dependent on their pragmatic refiguration less as systems of belief and thought than as frames of reflection and structures of feeling, what he calls spiritual imaginaries.Drawing on a large number of figures from earlier periods and examining how they influenced generations of writers from the nineteenth century into the early twenty-first -including Henry Adams, Frederick Douglass, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, William James, Henry James, Kenneth Burke, and Toni Morrison-Gunn reveals how the idea or symbolic imaginary of ""America"" itself was drastically altered in the process. As only a seasoned scholar can, Gunn here presents the history of American religion and literature in broad strokes necessary to reveal the seismic philosophical shifts that helped form the American canon.

Cultural Memory, a subtle and comprehensive process of identity formation, promotion and transmission, is considered as a set of symbolic practices and protocols, with particular emphasis on repositories of memory and the institutionalized forms in which they are embodied. High and low culture as texts embedded in the texture of memory, as well as material culture as a communal receptacle and reservoir of memory are analysed in their historical contingency. Symbolic representations of accepted and counter history/ies, and the cultural nodes and mechanisms of the cultural imaginary are also issues of central interest. Twenty-six contributions tackle these topics from a theoretical and historical perspective and bring to the fore case studies illustrating the interdisciplinary agenda that underlies the volume. Contributors: Luis Manuel A.V. Bernardo, Lina Bolzoni, Peter Burke, Pia Brinzeu, Adina Ciugureanu, Thomas Docherty, Christoph Ehland, Herbert Grabes, Laszlo Gyapay, Donna Landry, Christoph Lehner, Gerald MacLean, Dragos Manea, Daniel Melo, Miroslawa Modrzewska, Rares Moldovan, C.W.R.D. Mosely, Petruta Naidut, Francesca Orestano, Maria Lucia G. Pallares-Burke, Andreea Paris, Leonor Santa Barbara, Hans-Peter Soeder, Jukka Tiusanen, Ludmila Volna, Ioana Zirra.

This volume focusses on a rarely discussed method of meaning production, namely via the absence, rather than presence, of signifiers. It does so from an interdisciplinary, transmedial perspective, which covers systematic, media-comparative and historical aspects, and reveals various forms and functions of missing signifiers across arts and media. The meaningful silences, blanks, lacunae, pauses, etc., treated by the ten contributors are taken from language and literature, film, comics, opera and instrumental music, architecture, and the visual arts. Contributors are: Nassim Balestrini, Walter Bernhart, Olga Fischer, Saskia Jaszoltowski, Henry Keazor, Peter Revers, Klaus Rieser, Daniel Stein, Anselm Wagner, Werner Wolf

Violence has only increased in Mexico since 2000: 23,000 murders were recorded in 2016, and 29,168 in 2017. The abundance of laws and constitutional amendments that have cropped up in response are mirrored in Mexico's fragmented cultural production of the same period. Contemporary Mexican literature grapples with this splintered reality through non-linear stories from multiple perspectives, often told through shifts in time. The novels, such as Jorge Volpi's Una novela criminal [A Novel Crime] (2018) and JuliAn Herbert's La casa del dolor ajeno [The House of the Pain of Others] (2015) take multiple perspectives and follow non-linear plotlines; other examples, such as the very short stories in !Basta! 100 mujeres contra la violencia de gEnero [Enough! 100 Women against Gender-Based Violence] (2013), also present multiple perspectives. Few scholars compare cultural production and legal texts in situations like Mexico, where extreme violence coexists with a high number of human rights laws. Unlawful Violence measures fictional accounts of human rights against new laws that include constitutional amendments to reform legal proceedings, laws that protect children, laws that condemn violence against women, and laws that protect migrants and indigenous peoples. It also explores debates about these laws in the Mexican house of representatives and senate, as well as interactions between the law and the Mexican public.

This book discusses the pivotal role of African indigenous knowledge systems (AIKS) in promoting, enhancing, and sustaining livelihoods in Africa. The authors argue that AIKS are of central importance in the development of sustainable livelihoods, particularly in rural communities. In their analysis, they draw on interdisciplinary research in the fields of agriculture, cultural and indigenous studies, development studies, education, geography, political science, and sociology. The objective is to make AIKS more applicable to mainstream educational and development agendas in Africa, a pressing issue in areas where Eurocentric scientific practices are cost prohibitive. The Dynamic of African Indigenous Knowledge Systems will be of interest to development professionals, policy makers, academics, students, and anyone interested in the field of AIKS and sustainable development in rural communities.

Cognitive cultural theorists have rarely taken up sex, sexuality, or gender identity. When they have done so, they have often stressed the evolutionary sources of gender differences. In Sexual Identities, Patrick Colm Hogan extends his pioneering work on identity to examine the complexities of sex, the diversity of sexuality, and the limited scope of gender. Drawing from a diverse body of literary works, Hogan illustrates a rarely drawn distinction between practical identity (the patterns in what one does, thinks, and feels) and categorical identity (how one labels oneself or is categorized by society). Building on this distinction, he offers a nuanced reformulation of the idea of social construction, distinguishing ideology, situational determination, shallow socialization, and deep socialization. He argues for a meticulous skepticism about gender differences and a view of sexuality as evolved but also contingent and highly variable. The variability of sexuality and the near absence of gender fixity-and the imperfect alignment of practical and categorical identities in both cases-give rise to the social practices that Judith Butler refers to as "regulatory regimes." Hogan goes on to explore the cognitive and affective operation of such regimes. Ultimately, Sexual Identities turns to sex and the question of how to understand transgendering in a way that respects the dignity of transgender people, without reverting to gender essentialism.