This collection addresses broad questions of ethics and aesthetics in the framework of vernacular cosmopolitanism. With a common anthropological focus, the essays map literary and artistic practices involving cross-cultural transactions shaped by social forces, institutions, and the multiple mediations of the imagination. Some essays are based on community-based fieldwork, while all encompass an affective immersion in the places we inhabit, and the claims these make on the body's intelligibility. The authors consider the role of artists, writers, and literary scholars as cultural actors in a...

Reworlding Art History highlights the significance of contemporary Southeast Asian art and artists, and their place in the globalized art world and the internationalizing field of 'contemporary art'. In the light of the region's modern art history, the book surveys this relatively under-examined area of contemporary art which first found broad international recognition in the 1990s. Traced here are significant exhibitions that featured contemporary Southeast Asian art and brought it to regional and international attention. Examined are seminal foundational art histories, and dominant...

This collection is a timely reflection on the momentous concept of transculturalism. With its historical roots in globalization, transculturation, oriented to (new) aesthetics, seeks new cultural formations, and, with its heterogeneous author- and readership, enlists active participation by the individual. The volume focuses on the interplay between and lapses within interrelated domains of study - postcolonial, diaspora, and world-literary - which attend to the material and discursive circumstances of the literary work. The various readings argue for a situated mode of reading that attends...

This volume pays tribute to the formidable legacy of Hena Maes-Jelinek (1929-2008), a pioneering postcolonial scholar who was a professor at the University of Liege, in Belgium. Along with a few moving and affectionate pieces retracing the life and career of this remarkable and deeply human intellectual figure, the collection contains poems, short fiction, and metafiction. The bulk of the book consists of contributions on various areas of postcolonial literature, including the work of Wilson Harris, the ground-breaking writer to whom Hena Maes-Jelinek devoted much of her career. Other writers...

The African-Jamaican Aesthetic explores the ways in which diasporic African-Jamaican writers employ cultural referents aesthetically in their literary works to challenge dominant European literary discourses; articulate concerns about racialization and belonging; and preserve and enact cultural continuities in their new environment(s). The creative works considered provide insight into how local and indigenous Caribbean knowledges are both changed by the transfer to new, diasporic locales and reflect a unified consciousness of African-Jamaican roots and culture. The works surveyed also...

In Black South African Autobiography After Deleuze: Becoming in Black Self-Testimony, Kgomotso Michael Masemola uses Gilles Deleuze's theories of immanence and deterritorialization to explore South African autobiography as both the site and the limit of intertextual cultural memory. Detailing the intertextual turn that is commensurate with belonging to the African world and its diasporic reaches through the Black Atlantic, among others, this book covers autobiographies from Peter Abrahams to Es'kia Mphahlele, from Ellen Kuzwayo to Nelson Mandela. It proceeds further to reveal wider...