Contemporary theory is replete with metaphors of travel--displacement, diaspora, borders, exile, migration, nomadism, homelessness, and tourism to name a few. In "Questions of Travel," Caren Kaplan explores the various metaphoric uses of travel and displacement in literary and feminist theory, traces the political implications of this "traveling theory," and shows how various discourses of displacement link, rather than separate, modernism and postmodernism.
Addressing a wide range of writers, including Paul Fussell, Edward Said, James Clifford, Gilles Deleuze, Jean Baudrillard, Gayatri...

In this persuasive reversal of previous scholarship, Linda Schulte-Sasse takes an unorthodox look at Nazi cinema, examining Nazi films as movies that contain propaganda rather than as propaganda vehicles that happen to be movies. Like other Nazi artistic productions, Nazi film has long been regarded as kitsch rather than art, and therefore unworthy of critical textual analysis. By reading these films as consumer entertainment, Schulte-Sasse reveals the similarities between Nazi commercial film and classical Hollywood cinema and, with this shift in emphasis, demonstrates how Hollywood-style...

Blending history and theory, "Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms" offers both a historical narrative and a critical analysis of the cultural visions and experiences of China's post-Mao era. In this volume, Xudong Zhang rethinks Chinese modernism as a historical genre that arose in response to the historical experience of Chinese modernity rather than as an autonomous aesthetic movement. He identifies the ideologies of literary and cultural styles in the New Era (1979-1989) through a critical reading of the various "new waves" of Chinese literature, film, and intellectual discourse.
In...

Blending history and theory, "Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms" offers both a historical narrative and a critical analysis of the cultural visions and experiences of China's post-Mao era. In this volume, Xudong Zhang rethinks Chinese modernism as a historical genre that arose in response to the historical experience of Chinese modernity rather than as an autonomous aesthetic movement. He identifies the ideologies of literary and cultural styles in the New Era (1979-1989) through a critical reading of the various "new waves" of Chinese literature, film, and intellectual discourse.
In...

In this second edition of "The Repeating Island," Antonio Benitez-Rojo, a master of the historical novel, short story, and critical essay, continues to confront the legacy and myths of colonialism. This co-winner of the 1993 MLA Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize has been expanded to include three entirely new chapters that add a Lacanian perspective and a view of the carnivalesque to an already brilliant interpretive study of Caribbean culture. As he did in the first edition, Benitez-Rojo redefines the Caribbean by drawing on history, economics, sociology, cultural anthropology, psychoanalysis,...

In this intellectual history of British cultural Marxism, Dennis Dworkin explores one of the most influential bodies of contemporary thought. Tracing its development from beginnings in postwar Britain, through its various transformations in the 1960s and 1970s, to the emergence of British cultural studies at Birmingham, and up to the advent of Thatcherism, Dworkin shows this history to be one of a coherent intellectual tradition, a tradition that represents an implicit and explicit theoretical effort to resolve the crisis of the postwar British Left.
Limited to neither a single discipline...

Dance, whether considered as an art form or embodied social practice, as product or process, is a prime subject for cultural analysis. Yet only recently have studies of dance become concerned with the ideological, theoretical, and social meanings of dance practices, performances, and institutions. In "Meaning in Motion," Jane C. Desmond brings together the work of critics who have ventured into the boundaries between dance and cultural studies, and thus maps a little-known and rarely explored critical site.
Writing from a broad range of perspectives, contributors from disciplines as varied...

"Socialist Realism without Shores" offers an international perspective on the aesthetics of socialist realism--an aesthetic that, contrary to expectations, survived the death of its originators and the demise of its original domain. This expanded edition of a special issue of the "South Atlantic Quarterly" brings together scholars from various parts of the globe to discuss socialist realism as it appears across genres in art, architecture, film, and literature and across geographic divides--from the "center," Russia, to various points at the "periphery"--China, Germany, France, Poland, remote...

Although Gilles Deleuze is one of France's most celebrated twentieth-century philosophers, his theories of cinema have largely been ignored by American scholars. Film theorist D. N. Rodowick fills this gap by presenting the first comprehensive study, in any language, of Deleuze's work on film and images. Placing Deleuze's two books on cinema--"The Movement-Image "and "The Time-Image"--in the context of French cultural theory of the 1960s and 1970s, Rodowick examines the logic of Deleuze's theories and the relationship of these theories to his influential philosophy of difference.
Rodowick...

Since Germany became a colonial power relatively late, postcolonial theorists and histories of colonialism have thus far paid little attention to it. Uncovering Germany's colonial legacy and imagination, Susanne Zantop reveals the significance of colonial fantasies--a kind of colonialism without colonies--in the formation of German national identity. Through readings of historical, anthropological, literary, and popular texts, Zantop explores imaginary colonial encounters of "Germans" with "natives" in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century literature, and shows how these colonial...