In a parlor game played by the Surrealist group the foremost avant-gardists of their time participants made their marks on the quadrants of a folded sheet of paper: a many-eyed head, a distorted torso, hands fondling swollen breasts, snarling reptilian-dog feet descending from an egg-shaped midsection. The Exquisite Corpse, as it was called, is still very much alive, having found artistic and critical expression from the days of the Surrealists down to our own. This method has been used in collective artistic protocols as the rules of engagement for experimental art, as a form of social...

Germany's Colonial Pasts is a wide-ranging study of German colonialism and its legacies. Inspired by Susanne Zantop's landmark book Colonial Fantasies, and extending her analyses there, this volume offers new research by scholars from Europe, Africa, and the United States. It also commemorates Zantop's distinguished life and career (1945-2001). Some essays in this volume focus on Germany's formal colonial empire in Africa and the Pacific between 1884 and 1914, while others present material from earlier or later periods such as German emigration before 1884 and colonial discourse in...

Postcolonial Literatures in Context is a clear, accessible and concise introduction to postcolonial literatures in English (and English translation) and their wider contexts. It begins by introducing key issues involved in the study of postcolonial literature including old and new diasporas, postcolonial nationalisms, indigenous identities and politics and globalization. Close readings of commonly studied texts from and about Africa, Australia, Canada, Palestine and South Asian diasporas highlight critical questions and ways of reading postcolonial texts. A chapter on afterlives and...

A cultural critic of extraordinary erudition, encyclopedic knowledge, and boundless curiosity, Ilan Stavans, an Ashkenazic Jew who grew up in Mexico, negotiates wildly varied topics as effortlessly and deftly as he manages the multiple perspectives of a dual national, religious, and ethnic identity.In Singer s Typewriter and Mine, a follow-up to The Inveterate Dreamer (Nebraska, 2001), Stavans interweaves his own experience with that of other Jewish writers and thinkers, past and present, to explore modern Jewish culture across the boundaries of language and nation. Juxtaposing...

Keepers of the Motherland is the first comprehensive study of German and Austrian Jewish women authors. Dagmar Lorenz begins with an examination of the Yiddish author Glikl Hamil, whose works date from the late-seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and proceeds through such contemporary writers as Grete Weil, Katja Behrens, and Ruth Kluger. Along the way she examines an extraordinary range of distinguished authors, including Else Lasker-Schuler, Rosa Luxemburg, Nelly Sachs, and Gertrud Kolmar.Although Lorenz highlights the author s individualities, she unifies Keepers of the...