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People migrate to seek opportunities, to unite with family, and to escape war, persecution, poverty, and environmental disasters. A phenomenon that has real, lived effects on individuals and communities, migration also carries symbolic, ideological significance. Its depiction in literature, film, and other media powerfully shapes worldviews, identities, attitudes toward migrants, and a political landscape that is both local and global. It is imperative, then, to connect the disciplinary and theoretical tools we have for understanding migration and to put them in conversation with students' experiences.
Featuring a wide range of classroom approaches, this volume brings together topics that are often taught separately, including tourism, slavery, drug cartels, race, whiteness, settler colonialism, the Arab Spring, assimilation, and disability. Readers are introduced to terminology and legal frameworks and to theories of migration in relation to Black studies, ethnic studies, Asian American studies, Latinx studies, border studies, postcolonial studies, and Indigenous studies.
The writings of Fernando Pessoa, one of Portugal's most renowned authors, stand alongside other significant works of modernist world literature and offer a view into the specific milieu of early-twentieth-century Lisbon. Writing under several identities known as heteronyms, Pessoa created works in many genres, including fragments that were assembled into his best-known text, The Book of Disquiet, only after his death.
The essays in this volume explore questions raised by Pessoa about the nature of the self, the stability of the text, and the conflict between tradition and innovation. Part 1, “Materials,” describes editions, translations, and other resources. The essays in part 2, “Approaches,” address Pessoa's works and delve into the author's historical and cultural contexts, heteronyms and multiplicity, archives and editing processes, and connections with other authors and fields of study.
Known as a preeminent poet of queer male desire, C. P. Cavafy lived most of his life as part of the Greek minority community in Alexandria, Egypt. He was inspired by the possibilities offered by peripheries, whether sexual, geographic, or historical. Volumes of his poems, widely translated into English, give anglophone readers access to his distinctive mixture of irony and tenderness, directness and subtlety.
This volume will help instructors introduce students to Cavafy's works and explore them from many angles with the help of the extensive archives now available. Essays address teaching Cavafy both as a poetic historian of the Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine worlds and through the lens of postcoloniality. They also explore how he interpreted classical Greek works and how his work has been interpreted by composers, poets, and readers within and beyond Greece and the Greek diaspora.
Often considered a writer who transcends national borders, Jorge Luis Borges also aimed to reinvent the history and traditions of his own country, Argentina. His unconventional works appeal to students, who nonetheless can find his richly intertextual prose challenging. Addressing courses in Spanish and in English, this volume offers innovative approaches that help students navigate the texts, engage with them emotionally and creatively, and understand the time and place of their production while connecting them to the present.
Part 1, “Materials,” provides detailed biographical information about Borges as well as print and digital resources. The essays in part 2, “Approaches,” offer strategies for discussing his writing process, his manuscripts, and the material history and translation of his texts. Contributors also examine Borges's influences, which include film, mythology, history, and ideas of Islam and Judaism; the author's interest in humor and games; and resonances with other literary works.
The newspaper columnist Carmen de Burgos Seguí caused a sensation in 1903 when she called for a public discussion on divorce, then illegal in Spain. The fierce debate that ensued among Spain's leading thinkers—politicians, academics, feminists, journalists, and others—is collected in Divorce in Spain. This milestone volume ultimately contributed to Spain's legalizing divorce in the 1930s—a victory for women's rights that was subsequently rolled back by the Franco dictatorship and not regained for over fifty years. The opinions showcased here illuminate the uniqueness of feminism in early-twentieth-century Spain: because ideas about marriage and the role of women in society were anchored in Catholic teachings, feminist arguments focused on rights to education, divorce, and employment instead of on suffrage.
The newspaper columnist Carmen de Burgos Seguí caused a sensation in 1903 when she called for a public discussion on divorce, then illegal in Spain. The fierce debate that ensued among Spain's leading thinkers—politicians, academics, feminists, journalists, and others—is collected in El divorcio en España. This milestone volume ultimately contributed to Spain's legalizing divorce in the 1930s—a victory for women's rights that was subsequently rolled back by the Franco dictatorship and not regained for over fifty years. The opinions showcased here illuminate the uniqueness of feminism in early-twentieth-century Spain: because ideas about marriage and the role of women in society were anchored in Catholic teachings, feminist arguments focused on rights to education, divorce, and employment instead of on suffrage.
This casebook investigates how diverse writers from across East, South, and Southeast Asia and their diasporas have engaged with the struggle for gender justice. Each chapter analyzes works of literature originally written in Bengali, Chinese, English, Indonesian, Japanese, Khmer, Korean, Marathi, Thai, and Vietnamese.
Aimed at both specialists and nonspecialists, Gender Justice and Contemporary Asian Literatures addresses such subjects as gender imparity in male-dominated professions; the lives of migrant sex workers and caregivers; the fight against reproductive, family, non-partner, and intimate partner violence; and norms of shame and silence surrounding violence against women. Informed by the author's deep knowledge of literature, history, culture, law, and social conditions, this book will be a resource for instructors and students in gender studies, women's studies, ethnic studies, Asian studies, Asian American studies, Asian diaspora studies, comparative literature, and world literature.
One of the most important American authors and public intellectuals of the twentieth century, Ralph Ellison had a keen and unsentimental understanding of the relationship between race, art, and activism in American life. He contended with other writers of his day in his examination of the entrenched racism in society, and his writing continues to inform national conversations in letters and culture.
The essays in Approaches to Teaching the Works of Ralph Ellison will help instructors in colleges, high schools, and prisons teach not only the indispensable Invisible Man but also Ellison's short stories, his essays, and the two editions of his second, unfinished novel, Juneteenth and Three Days before the Shooting . . . . In considering Ellison's works in relation to jazz, technology, humor, politics, queerness, and disability, this volume mirrors the breadth of Ellison's own life, which extended from the Jim Crow era through the Black Power movement.
Migration from the Indian subcontinent began on a large scale over 150 years ago, and today there are diasporic communities around the world. The identities of South Asians in the diaspora are informed by roots in the subcontinent and the complex experiences of race, religion, nation, class, caste, gender, sexuality, language, trauma, and geography. The literature that arises from these roots and experiences is diverse, powerful, and urgent.
Teaching South Asian Anglophone Diasporic Literature embraces an intersectionality that attends to the historical and material conditions of cultural production, the institutional contexts of pedagogy, and the subject positions of teachers and students. Encouraging a deep engagement with works whose personal, political, and cultural insights are specific to South Asian diasporic consciousness, the volume also provokes meaningful reflection on other literatures in an age of increasing migration and diaspora.
This volume brings a diverse range of voices—from anthropology, communication studies, ethnomusicology, film, history, literature, linguistics, sociology, theater, and urban geography—into the conversation about film from the People's Republic of China. Essays seek to answer what films can reveal or obscure about Chinese history and society and demonstrate how studying films from the PRC can introduce students to larger issues of historical consciousness and media representation.
The volume addresses not only postsocialist fictional films but also a wide variety of other subjects including socialist period films, documentaries, films by or about people from ethnic minority groups, film music, the perspectives of female characters, martial arts cinema, and remakes of South Korean films. By exploring how films represent power, traditions, and ideologies, students learn about both the complexity of the PRC and the importance of cross-cultural and cross-ideological understanding.
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