Angloscene
Angloscene

Author: Jay Ke-Schutte

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-02-07

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 0520389816

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“A tremendously nuanced book that moves beyond the verities of postcolonial theory as much as liberal illusions of postracialism in the academy. The ethnographic richness of Angloscene in its expositions of tropes and situated encounters is remarkable and pointed—even poignant.”—Dilip M. Menon, author of Changing Theory: Concepts from the Global South “Reflecting a critical sensibility from the Global South, Jay Ke-Schutte’s book defies Euro-American-centric perspectives on language, race, and colonialism. The innovative concept of the Angloscene offers an imaginative way to unpack the transnational power matrix that conditions Afro-Chinese encounters.”—Fan Yang, author of Faked in China: Nation Branding, Counterfeit Culture, and Globalization “This book reveals the manner in which talk about signs of race and the racialization of those engaged in talk readily emerge hand in hand within social encounters, so that to isolate them from each other is to lose sight of the processes through which inequity persists in social life even when it is abjured.”—Asif Agha, Francis E. Johnston Term Professor of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania, and Editor-in-Chief, Signs and Society

Remapping African Literature
Remapping African Literature

Author: Olabode Ibironke

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-02-12

Total Pages: 351

ISBN-13: 3319692968

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This book is an exploration of the material conditions of the production of African literature. Drawing on the archives of Heinemann’s African Writers Series, it highlights the procedures, relationships, demands, ideologies, and counterpressures engendered by the publication of three major authors: Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and Ngugi wa Thiongo. As a study of the history and techniques of African literary texts, this book advances a theory of reciprocity of effects - what it terms 'auto-heteronomy' - to describe the dynamic of formalist activism by which texts anticipate and shape the forces of literary production in advance. It serves as a departure from the 'death of the author' thesis by reconsidering the role of the author in African literature and culture industry, as well as the influence of African publics on writers’ aesthetic choices, and on the overall processes of production. This work is a major contribution to African literary history, literary criticism, and book history.

Biting the Error
Biting the Error

Author: Gail Scott

Publisher: Coach House Books

Published: 2000-11-19

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1770560165

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What is the best way to tell a story? In this anthology, the first-ever collection of essays by innovative, cutting-edge writers on the theme of narration, forty of the continent's top experimental writers describe their engagement with language, storytelling and the world. The anthology includes renowned writers like Kathy Acker, Dennis Cooper, Nicole Brossard, Daphne Marlatt, Lydia Davis and Kevin Killian, writers who have spent years pondering the meaning of storytelling and how storytelling functions in our culture, as well as presenting a new generation of brilliant thinkers and writers, like Christian Bök, Corey Frost, Derek McCormack and Lisa Robertson. Contemporizing the friendly anecdotal style of Montaigne and written by daring writers of different ages, of different origins, from many different regions of the continent, from Mexico to Montreal, these essays run the gamut of mirth, prose poetry, tall tales and playful explorations of reader/writer dynamics. They discuss aesthetics founded on new explorations in the field of narrative, the mystery that is the body, questions of how representation may be torqued to deal with gender and sexuality, the experience of marginalized people, the negotiation between different orders of time, the 'performance' of outlaw subject matter. Brave, energetic and fresh, Biting the Error tells a whole new story about narrative. Biting the Error is edited by Mary Burger, Robert Glück, Camille Roy and Gail Scott, the co-founders of the Narrativity Website Magazine, based at the Poetry Center, San Francisco State University.

Disorienting Politics
Disorienting Politics

Author: Fan Yang

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2024-06-03

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 0472904469

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Disorienting Politics mines 21st-century media artifacts—including films like The Martian and TV/streaming media shows such as Firefly and House of Cards—to make visible the economic, cultural, political, and ecological entanglements of China and the United States. Describing these transpacific entanglements as “Chimerica”—coined by economic historians to reference the symbiosis of China and America—Yang examines how Chimerican media, originating in the US but traversing national boundaries in their production, circulation, and consumption, co-create the figure of rising China and extend a political imagination beyond the conventional ground of the nation. Examining how Chimerican media are shaped by and perpetuate uneven power relations, Disorienting Politics argues that the pervasive tendency among wide-ranging cultural producers to depict the Chinese state as a racialized Other in American media life diminishes the possibility of engaging transpacific entanglements as a basis for envisioning new political horizons. Such othering of China not only results in overt racism against people of Asian descent, Yang argues, but also impacts the wellbeing of people of color more generally. This interdisciplinary book demonstrates the ways in which race is embedded in geopolitics even when the subject of discussion is not the people, but the (Chinese) state. Bridging media and cultural studies, Asian and Asian American studies, geography, and globalization studies, Disorienting Politics calls for a relational politics that acknowledges the multifarious interconnectivity between people, places, media, and environment.

Anthropology of Ascendant China
Anthropology of Ascendant China

Author: Mayfair Yang

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-05-06

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 1040011608

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This volume represents the latest research in cultural anthropology on an ascendant and globalizing China, covering the many different dimensions of China’s ascendancy both within China itself and beyond. It focuses not only on the real and perceived successes of China in the past four decades, but also on the difficulties, tensions, and dangers that have emerged as a result of rapid economic development: class polarization, state expansion, psychological distress, and environmental degradation. Including contributions by some of the most well-known cultural anthropologists of China, as well as rising innovative younger scholars, this book documents and analyzes China’s multifaceted transformations in the modern era—both within Chinese society and in Chinese relations with the outside world. It features the unique perspective of anthropology, with its on-the-ground deep cultural immersion through long-term fieldwork, coupled with a macrolevel global perspective, a strong historical perspective, and theoretically engaged analyses to present a balanced account of China’s ascendancy. Anthropology of Ascendant China: Histories, Attainments, and Tribulations is suitable for students and scholars in Anthropology, Sociology, History, Political Science, and East Asian Studies, as well as those working on contemporary Chinese society and culture more broadly.