During the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, insurgencies erupted in imperial states and colonies around the world, including Britain’s. As Nicole Rizzuto shows, the writings of Ukrainian-born Joseph Conrad, Anglo-Irish Rebecca West, Jamaicans H. G. de Lisser and V. S. Reid, and Kenyan Ng gi wa Thiong’o testify to contested events in colonial modernity in ways that question premises underlying approaches in trauma and memory studies and invite us to reassess divisions and classifications in literary studies that generate such categories as modernist, colonial, postcolonial, national, and world literatures. Departing from tenets of modernist studies and from methods in the field of trauma and memory studies, Rizzuto contends that acute as well as chronic disruptions to imperial and national power and the legal and extra-legal responses they inspired shape the formal practices of literatures from the modernist, colonial, and postcolonial periods.

In this provocative and captivating dialogue, bell hooks and Cornel West come together to discuss the dilemmas, contradictions, and joys of Black intellectual life. The two friends and comrades in struggle talk, argue, and disagree about everything from community to capitalism in a series of intimate conversations that range from playful to probing to revelatory. In evoking the act of breaking bread, the book calls upon the various traditions of sharing that take place in domestic, secular, and sacred life where people come together to give themselves, to nurture life, to renew their spirits, sustain their hopes, and to make a lived politics of revolutionary struggle an ongoing practice. This 25th anniversary edition continues the dialogue with "In Solidarity," their 2016 conversation at the bell hooks Institute on racism, politics, popular culture and the contemporary Black experience.

In the 1994 Rwanda genocide, around 1 million people were brutally murdered in just thirteen weeks. This book offers an in-depth study of posttraumatic growth in the testimonies of the men and women who survived, highlighting the ways in which they were able to build a new, and often enhanced, way of life. In so doing, Caroline Williamson Sinalo advocates a new reading of trauma: one that recognises not just the negative, but also the positive responses to traumatic experiences. Through an analysis of testimonies recorded in Kinyarwanda by the Genocide Archive of Rwanda, the book focuses particularly on the relationship between posttraumatic growth and gender and examines it within the wider frames of colonialism and traditional cultural practices. Offering a striking alternative to dominant paradigms on trauma, the book reveals that, notwithstanding the countless tales of horror, pain, and loss in Rwanda, there are also stories of strength, recovery, and growth.

The Palgrave Handbook of Magical Realism in the Twenty-First Century examines magical realism in literatures from around the globe. Featuring twenty-seven essays written by leading scholars, this anthology argues that literary expressions of magical realism proliferate globally in the twenty-first century due to travel and migrations, the shrinking of time and space, and the growing encroachment of human life on nature. In this global context, magical realism addresses twenty-first-century politics, aesthetics, identity, and social/national formations where contact between and within cultures has exponentially increased, altering how communities and nations imagine themselves. This text assembles a group of critics throughout the world—the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Australia—who employ multiple theoretical approaches to examine the different ways magical realism in literature has transitioned to a global practice; thus, signaling a new stage in the history and development of the genre.

How do our institutions shape us, and how do we shape them? From the late nineteenth-century era of high imperialism to the rise of the British welfare state in the mid-twentieth century, the concept of the institution was interrogated and rethought in literary and intellectual culture. In Institutional Character, Robert Higney investigates the role of the modernist novel in this reevaluation, revealing how for a diverse array of modernist writers, character became an attribute of the institutions of the state, international trade, communication and media, labor, education, public health, the military, law, and beyond. In readings of figures from the works of E. M. Forster, Joseph Conrad, and Virginia Woolf to Mulk Raj Anand, Elizabeth Bowen, and Zadie Smith, Higney presents a new history of character in modernist writing. He simultaneously tracks how writers themselves turned to the techniques of fiction to help secure a place in the postwar institutions of literary culture. In these narratives—addressing imperial administrations, global financial competition, women’s entry into the professions, colonial nationalism, and wartime espionage—we are shown the generative power of institutions in preserving the past, designing the present, and engineering the future, and the constitutive involvement of individuals in collective life.

How can the supremacy of the Western worldview be undone? This book argues that the cause of social and political inequalities is above all the inequality of non-Western worldviews when compared to that of the West. Developing a critical theory and praxis for undoing epistemicide, or in other words, the murder of knowledge this book challenges the approach of ‘the West and the rest.’ Epistemicide refers specifically to the destruction of non-Western forms of knowledge production that has facilitated the hegemony of Western-centric epistemology, or one that takes the West as a universalized perspective. Rather than rehashing well-known critiques of Western-centrism, this book develops the claim that, alternative to the West vs. Rest hierarchy, worldviews are necessarily plural as each way of looking at the world reflects a particular perspective on the world. Bringing this plurality of perspectives into a dialogue that celebrates difference and equality, this book presents both a theoretical understanding of the world as hosting multiple worldviews and a practical conception of these worldviews as always already enacted within the world. Undoing the dominance of the Western-centric worldview entails looking at the different ways of being in the world that exist today and that reflect the prospect of a world in which many worlds are possible.

How does coding change the way we think about architecture? This question opens up an important research perspective. In this book, Miro Roman and his AI Alice_ch3n81 develop a playful scenario in which they propose coding as the new literacy of information. They convey knowledge in the form of a project model that links the fields of architecture and information through two interwoven narrative strands in an “infinite flow” of real books. Focusing on the intersection of information technology and architectural formulation, the authors create an evolving intellectual reflection on digital architecture and computer science.

In Strolling in the Ruins Faith Smith engages with a period in the history of the Anglophone Caribbean often overlooked as nondescript, quiet, and embarrassingly pro-imperial within the larger narrative of Jamaican and Trinidadian nationalism. Between the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion and World War I, British imperialism was taken for granted among both elites and ordinary people, while nationalist discourses would not begin to shape political imagination in the West Indies for decades. Smith argues that this moment, far from being uneventful, disrupts the inevitability of nationhood in the mid-twentieth century and anticipates the Caribbean’s present-day relationship to global power. Smith assembles and analyzes a diverse set of texts, from Carnival songs, poems, and novels to newspapers, photographs, and gardens, to examine theoretical and literary-historiographic questions concerning time and temporality, empire and diaspora, immigration and indigeneity, gender and the politics of desire, Africa’s place within Caribbeanist discourse, and the idea of the Caribbean itself. Closely examining these cultural expressions of apparent quiescence, Smith locates the quiet violence of colonial rule and the insistence of colonial subjects on making meaningful lives.

How and why does the stage, and those who perform upon it, play such a significant role in the social makeup of modern Russia, Ukraine and Belarus? In New Drama in Russian, Julie Curtis brings together an international team of leading scholars and practitioners to tackle this complex question. New Drama, which draws heavily on techniques of documentary and verbatim writing, is a key means of protest in the Russian-speaking world; since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, theatres, dramatists, and critics have collaborated in using the genre as a lens through which to explore a wide range of topics from human rights and state oppression to sexuality and racism. Yet surprisingly little has been written on this important theatrical movement. New Drama in Russian rectifies this. Through providing analytical surveys of this outspoken transnational genre alongside case-studies of plays and interviews with playwrights, this volume sheds much-needed light on the key issues of performance, politics, and protest in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Meticulously researched and elegantly argued, this book will be of immense value to scholars of Russian cultural history and post-Soviet literary studies.