Beyond the Political Spider: Critical Issues in African Humanities by Kwesi Yankah is the first title in the newly established African Humanities Association (AHA) publication series. By integrating his own biography into a critique of the global politics of knowledge production, Yankah, through a collection of essays, interrogates critical issues confronting the Humanities that spawn intellectual hegemonies and muffle African voices. Using the example of Ghana, he brings under scrutiny, amongst others, endemic issues of academic freedom, gender inequities, the unequal global academic order, and linguistic imperialism in language policies in governance. In the face of these challenges, the author deftly navigates the complex terrain of indigenous knowledge and language in the context of democratic politics, demonstrating that agency can be liberatory when emphasising indigenous knowledge, especially expressed through the idiom of local languages and symbols, including Ananse, the protean spider, folk hero in Ghana and most parts of the pan-African world.

Wendy Doniger's foundational study is both modern in its engagement with a diverse range of religions and refreshingly classic in its transhistorical, cross-cultural approach. By responsibly analyzing patterns and themes across context, Doniger reinvigorates the comparative reading of religion, tapping into a wealth of narrative traditions, from the instructive tales of Judaism and Christianity to the moral lessons of the Bhagavad Gita. She extracts political meaning from a variety of texts while respecting the original ideas of each. A new preface confronts the difficulty of contextualizing the comparison of religions as well as controversies over choosing subjects and positioning arguments, and the text itself is expanded and updated throughout.

From J.R.R. Tolkien to Star Trek and from Game of Thrones to Battlestar Galactica and from The Walking Dead to Janelle Mone's Afrofuturist concept albums, transmedia world building offer us complex and immersive environments beyond capitalism. Science Fiction, Fantasy and Politics examines the ways in which these popular storyworlds offer tools for anticapitalist theory and practice. Building on Hardt and Negir's theory of global capitalism. Dan Hassler-Forest shows how transmedia world-building has the potential to offer more than a momentary escape from capitalist realism in the age of media a converagence and participator culture. This book feature eight fantastic storyworlds that offer vivid illustration of global capitalism contradictory logic. Approaching transmedia world-building both as a cultural form and as a political economy, Hassler-Forest demonstrates the limitations inherent in fandom and fan culture, which is increasingly absorbed as a form of immaterial labor. At the same time, he also explores the productive ways in which fantastic storyworlds contain a radical energy that can give us new ways of thinking about politics popular culture and anticapitalism.

The middle class, where the greatness of this nation is rooted, is under siege by an increasingly unethical system, managed by economic vampires who are sucking the lifeblood out of the American family and ripping the heart out of democracy itself. Big money-and the politicians who are swayed by it-play both parties against each other, using this false battle to distract most of us from the real war, which is a war against the American family. This is it, folks . . . the moment of truth. This will be the moment historians will look back upon and either say it was the moment this great ship of state corrected its course, or the moment it sailed completely away from its democratic ideals. To succeed, we have to reach back and rediscover our greatness. Progress may not come as fast as we, in our impatience and impertinence, demand. But if we are patient and persistent, it will come. All good things in life require a heavy lift, so roll up your sleeves. We are not done yet. --from Killer Politics According to a 2008 Pew Report, more than half of all Americans self-identify as middle class -- but the actual number of Americans with middle-class incomes is declining. The middle class is going away. As increasing numbers of Americans are faced with obstacles to education, health care, jobs, and equity, the middle class as a financial bracket is being replaced by the middle class as little more than a state of mind. The richest Americans are growing exponentially wealthier, while the rest of us struggle to bear the financial and emotional burdens of an increasingly broken system. In Killer Politics, Ed Schultz pulls the wool back from our eyes, shows us what the state of the middle class really is, and gives us the tools we need to fight back.

To teach political issues such as political struggle, justice, interstate conflict, etc. educators rely mostly on textbooks and lectures. However, many other forms of narrative exist that can elevate our understanding of such issues. This innovative work seeks new ways to foster learning beyond the textbook and lecture model, by using creative and new media, including graphic novels, animated films, hip-hop music, Twitter, and more. Discussing the opportunities these media offer to teach and engage students about politics, the work presents concrete ways on how to use them, along with teaching and assessment strategies, all tested in the classroom. The contributors are dedicated educators from various types of institutions whose essays span a variety of political topics and examine how non-traditional "texts" can promote critical thinking and intellectual growth among students in colleges and universities. The first of its kind to discuss a wide range of alternative texts and media, the book will be a valuable resource to anyone seeking to develop innovative curricula and engage their students in the study of politics.

"Fifteen years after its first publication, Spider Eaters remains my go-to memoir about coming of age during the Mao years. Rae Yang's work is notable for its reflectiveness, complexity, psychological insight, and unflinching honesty. I commend this riveting work to a generation of readers for whom the cultural Revolution is now of 'merely' historical interest."—Gail Hershatter, University of California, Santa Cruz "By oscillating between scenes that are bland in their matter-of-fact concreteness and ones that are almost unbelievable in their nightmarish cruelty and complexity, Rae Yang skillfully evokes the bizarre and contradictory 'revolutionary' world in which she grew up in Mao's China. Spider Eaters is a reminder of what a traumatic history the Chinese people have undergone this century and that a country's past—even when many would rather forget it—always lives irrevocably on within those who experienced it."—Orville Schell, author of Mandate of Heaven "How can we expect anyone to know the United States without understanding the effect the Sixties had on all of us? Similarly, how can we know China without comprehending the impact the Sixties and the Cultural Revolution had on its politics, culture, and people? Rae Yang's Spider Eaters goes far in building that understanding. It is a gripping memoir."—Lisa See, author of On Gold Mountain

A behind-the-scenes look at how the rich and powerful use offshore shell corporations to conceal their wealth and make themselves richer In 2015, the anonymous leak of the Panama Papers brought to light millions of financial and legal documents exposing how the superrich hide their money using complex webs of offshore vehicles. Spiderweb Capitalism takes you inside this shadow economy, uncovering the mechanics behind the invisible, mundane networks of lawyers, accountants, company secretaries, and fixers who facilitate the illicit movement of wealth across borders and around the globe. Kimberly Kay Hoang traveled more than 350,000 miles and conducted hundreds of in-depth interviews with private wealth managers, fund managers, entrepreneurs, C-suite executives, bankers, auditors, and other financial professionals. She traces the flow of capital from offshore funds in places like the Cayman Islands, Samoa, and Panama to special-purpose vehicles and holding companies in Singapore and Hong Kong, and how it finds its way into risky markets onshore in Vietnam and Myanmar. Hoang reveals the strategies behind spiderweb capitalism and examines the moral dilemmas of making money in legal, financial, and political gray zones. Dazzlingly written, Spiderweb Capitalism sheds critical light on how global elites capitalize on risky frontier markets, and deepens our understanding of the paradoxical ways in which global economic growth is sustained through states where the line separating the legal from the corrupt is not always clear.

This book is the first to articulate and challenge the consensus on the right and left that knowledge is the key to any problem, demonstrating how the left’s embrace of knowledge productivity keeps it trapped within capital’s circuits. As the knowledge economy has forced questions of education to the forefront, the book engages pedagogy as an underlying yet neglected motor of capitalism and its forms of oppression. Most importantly, it assembles new pedagogical resources for responding to the range of injustices that permeate our world. Building on yet critiquing the Marxist notion of the general intellect, Derek R. Ford theorizes stupidity as a necessary alternative pedagogical logic, an anti-value that is infinitely mute and unproductive.

Is 'development' the answer for positive social change or a cynical western strategy for perpetuating inequality? Moving beyond an increasingly entrenched debate about the role of NGOs, this book reveals the practices and social relations through which ideas of development are concretely enacted.