Peeren's book brings the work of Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin to bear on contemporary expressions of popular culture, including the novel and television series Sex and the City, the television series Queer as Folk, the films Nell and Flawless, and London's annual Notting Hill Carnival. This selection of artifacts and events is designed to show the continuing relevance of Bakhtin's ideas for present-day literary and cultural studies and to theorize the construction and political assertion of gender, racial, and sexual identities as fundamentally...

Alterity is not a mere synonym of difference; what it signifies is otherness, a distinction or separation that can entail similarity as well as difference. The articles collected here explore ways to define, situate and negotiate alterity in a manner that does not do away with the other through negation or neutralization but that instead engages alterity as a reconfiguring of identities that keeps them open to change, to a becoming without horizon. Alterity and its situated negotiations with identity are configured through the body, through the psyche and through translational politics. From...

In the twenty-first century, the terms "representation" and "identity" seem to have gone out of fashion. The essays collected here, however, seek to demonstrate the extent to which they continue to matter in the social, political and cultural struggles waged by marginalized communities across our postcolonial and globalizing world. The volume starts by offering contingent readings of prominent identity-related concepts - hybridity, insularity, the west, ubuntu, and orientalism - which ask how these concepts translate into practical, situated ways of grappling with the legacies of colonialism....

What does it mean to live as a ghost? Exploring spectrality as a metaphor in the contemporary British and American cultural imagination, Peeren proposes that certain subjects - migrants, servants, mediums and missing persons - are perceived as living ghosts and examines how this figuration can signify both dispossession and empowerment or agency.

This volume sheds new light on how today's peripheries are made, lived, imagined and mobilized in a context of rapidly advancing globalization. Focusing on peripheral spaces, mobilities and aesthetics, it presents critical readings of, among others, Indian caste quarters, the Sahara, the South African backyard and European migration, as well as films, novels and artworks about marginalized communities and repressed histories. Together, these readings insist that the peripheral not only needs more visibility in political, economic and cultural terms, but is also invaluable for creating...

The contributors are scholars from the humanities and social sciences, who analyze protests in particular regions, including Egypt, Iran, Australia, France, Spain, Greece, and Hong Kong, and transnational protests such as the NSA-leaks and the mobilization of migrants and refugees.

This open access book considers the concept of the hinterland as a crucial tool for understanding the global and planetary present as a time defined by the lasting legacies of colonialism, increasing labor precarity under late capitalist regimes, and looming climate disasters. Traditionally seen to serve a (colonial) port or market town, the hinterland here becomes a lens to attend to the times and spaces shaped and experienced across the received categories of the urban, rural, wilderness or nature. In straddling these categories, the concept of the hinterland foregrounds the human and...

This open access book considers the concept of the hinterland as a crucial tool for understanding the global and planetary present as a time defined by the lasting legacies of colonialism, increasing labor precarity under late capitalist regimes, and looming climate disasters. Traditionally seen to serve a (colonial) port or market town, the hinterland here becomes a lens to attend to the times and spaces shaped and experienced across the received categories of the urban, rural, wilderness or nature. In straddling these categories, the concept of the hinterland foregrounds the human and...