Recollections of Western Hunan is a collection of the letters and essays of Chinese novelist Shen Congwen. Describing his childhood and life in Western Hunan between 1902 and 1937, this collection paints a vivid picture of both the idyllic beauty and turmoil of life in a province once known as the “bandit area,” a countryside shrouded in mystery, mysticism, and chaos.

China Off Center takes as its fundamental assumption that contemporary China can only be understood as a complex, decentralized place, where the view from above (Beijing) and from tourist buses is a skewed one. Instead of generalizing about China, it demonstrates that this diverse national terrain is better conceived as it is experienced by Chinese, as a set of many Chinas. To that end, this anthology of interpretive essays and ethnographic reports focuses on the everyday, the particular, the local, and the puzzling. Together with contextualizing introductions, the readings provide students with a compelling look at some little-known but significant aspects of China from the past decade; for those already familiar with China, they furnish an assortment of uncommon viewpoints in a single, convenient volume. Foreword by Prasenjit Duara Contributors: A. Doak Barnett, Susan D. Blum, Diane Dorfman, Mary S. Erbaugh, Edward Friedman, Vincent E. Gil, Dru Gladney, Erwin J. Haeberle, Lionel M. Jensen, Andrew F. Jones, Eric Ivan Karchmer, Liu Binyan, Dalin Liu, Man Lun Ng, S. Robert Ramsey, Dorothy J. Solinger, Ann Tyson, James Tyson, Sydney White, David Yen-ho Wu, Li Ping Zhou.

Taking its starting point from women's contributions to the French revolution, this important anthology goes far beyond any particular historical, European or American context and expands its scope in space and time to an all-inclusive global theme, namely the contributions of radical women towards an ever-changing world and its revolutionary transformations everywhere. The superbly edited essays by diverse contributors from various continents and disciplines explore a wide platform of women's revolutionary involvements and elucidate the broad range of contributions by women scholars, scientists and activists to movements of social transformation, as well as to a reexamination of established methods of cultural analysis from enlightened liberalism to Marxism. The contributions of women scholars and activists from Africa, Asia and Latin America are particularly significant in that they transcend and expand European/North American feminism as relevant primarily to its own socio-cultural context and focus on women acting in terms of their own non-Western traditions and cultures, that is, on non-Western models based on indigenous strategies of social transformation. This rich anthology shuns any postulation of a single global model for revolution. Yet, despite the emergence of a `problematic relationship between Western or Western educated theorists and the causes of the oppressed', women's diverse social, cultural and historical experiences and strategies are united in this edition, as in their common causes, as emphasized by the following statement in the introduction: `the female body has become ... a privileged site for social analysis in the context of international capitalism as well as in the critique of traditional socialism.' Sabine Jell-Bahlsen, Ogbuide Films Women and Revolution covers an enormous socio-historical space, four continents - Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America – and quite a few countries within them. This huge field of human experience is looked at from the focal point which runs explicitly and implicitly through all nineteen chapters: the active if not revolutionary role women have played individually and collectively in various determining social situations, a role regularly suppressed by the coercive power of institutionalized domination. The impetus for this endeavor was the commemoration of the bicentennial of the French Revolution, an occasion to take an in-depth look at its less obvious agendas, through a focus on the activity of women, and on Olympe de Gouges in particular. But as Olympe de Gouges became acquainted with Mr. Guillotine, the considerable role of women became suppressed not only actually but as a kind of damnatio memoriae which the old Romans had already invented. As this work shows, there have been multiple forms and contents through which women have taken history into their own hands and have participated in emancipatory struggles throughout the world. They are at their best in their use of the resources of local village traditions, of dense social contexts, of mutual aid and in turning such grassroots resources into radical democratic struggles for the future. A fascinating and timely book!. Wolf-Dieter Narr, Freie Universität Berlin The vital role played by women in struggles for social transformation has scarcely been appreciated, and with the sense of defeat that hangs over the revolutionary project, stands to be further forgotten. That is why the publication of Women and Revolution is both welcome and necessary – on intellectual and scholarly grounds, but also because these are stories which have to be told if we are to resume the march toward a better world. Joel Kovel, Bard College

This book explores how the experience of modernization is revealed in China's newly constructed tourist landscapes. It argues that in China's burgeoning ethnic tourist villages and theme parks can be seen all the contradictions, debasement, and liberating potentials of Chinese modernity. Tim Oakes uses the province of Guizhou to examine the Chinese tourist industry as an example of the state's modernization policies and how local people have engaged with these changes.

A map of the mutual influence of Bloomsbury, the Crescent Moon Society, and modernism in English and Chinese culture Lily Briscoe's Chinese Eyes traces the romance of Julian Bell, nephew of Virginia Woolf, and Ling Shuhua, a writer and painter Bell met while teaching at Wuhan University in China in 1935. Relying on a wide selection of previously unpublished writings, Patricia Laurence places Ling, often referred to as the Chinese Katherine Mansfield, squarely in the Bloomsbury constellation. In doing so, she counters East-West polarities and suggests forms of understanding to inaugurate a new kind of cultural criticism and literary description. Laurence expands her examination of Bell and Ling's relationship into a study of parallel literary communities—Bloomsbury in England and the Crescent Moon group in China. Underscoring their reciprocal influences in the early part of the twentieth century, Laurence presents conversations among well-known British and Chinese writers, artists, and historians, including Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, G. L. Dickinson, Xu Zhimo, E. M. Forster, and Xiao Qian. In addition, Laurence's study includes rarely seen photographs of Julian Bell, Ling, and their associates as well as a reproduction of Ling's scroll commemorating moments in the exchange between Bloomsbury and the Crescent Moon group. While many critics agree that modernism is a movement that crosses national boundaries, literary studies rarely reflect such a view. In this volume Laurence links unpublished letters and documents, cultural artifacts, art, literature, and people in ways that provide illumination from a comparative cultural and aesthetic perspective. In so doing she addresses the geographical and critical imbalances—and thus the architecture of modernist, postcolonial, Bloomsbury, and Asian studies—by placing China in an aesthetic matrix of a developing international modernism.

Starting at the dawn of the 20th century, writers began experimenting with literary styles as never before. As perhaps the most far-reaching movement, Modernism swept across both the United States and Europe and has been embodied in the works of such writers as Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and T.S. Eliot. The existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, Samuel Beckett’s absurdist writings, and the range of literary output from around the world also reflect the spirit of the period. The lives and works of these and other authors from across the globe are surveyed in this absorbing volume.