Cartografias in/justas: representaciones culturales del espacio urbano y rural en la España contemporánea ed. by Dr. Monica Lopez Lerma

Cartografias in/justas: representaciones culturales del espacio urbano y rural en la España contemporánea, edited by Dr. Monica Lopez Lerma, was published by Comares Editorial on May 15, 2024.

¿Cómo se relaciona el espacio con la (in)justicia en la España contemporánea? ¿Cuáles son los límites y posibilidades de esta relación en la era del Antropoceno? Los capítulos de este libro abordan estas preguntas considerando tres problemáticas fundamentales. Por un lado, a pesar de la crisis económica del 2008, las ciudades españolas continúan siendo centros de inversión y especulación inmobiliaria, perpetuando los procesos neoliberales de gentrificación, exclusión y segregación. Por otro lado, estos procesos profundizan la brecha entre el espacio urbano y el rural, exacerbando lo que el periodista Sergio del Molino (2016) ha denominado la “España vacía”, aunque movimientos sociales y activistas prefieren hablar de la “España vaciada” para resaltar su origen político y económico. Finalmente, más allá de la dicotomía entre lo rural y lo urbano, la era actual del “Antropoceno” o el “Capitaloceno”, marcada por el impacto destructivo del ser humano en el planeta, nos insta a reflexionar en una cartografía de la (in)justicia espacial que aborde los efectos del cambio climático y su conexión con el capitalismo.

Desde una perspectiva transdisciplinaria, los objetivos de este libro son: (1) examinar los límites que la justicia, en su sentido más amplio, enfrenta en los procesos de producción capitalista del “espacio” español (2) visibilizar situaciones específicas que desafían estos límites y otorgan a la justicia una manifestación tangible, aunque sea momentánea; y (3) demostrar que los límites, ya sean físicos, espaciales, sociales, políticos, ecológicos, legales, económicos, culturales, estéticos, o teóricos, conceptuales e interpretativos, siempre pueden ser cuestionados, y en consecuencia, redefinidos, abriendo así posibilidades para crear nuevas formas de pensamiento, imaginación y acción.

English Translation:

How does space relate to (in)justice in contemporary Spain? What are the limits and possibilities of this relationship in the era of the Anthropocene? The chapters of this book address these questions by considering three fundamental problems. On the one hand, despite the economic crisis of 2008, Spanish cities continue to be centres of investment and real estate speculation, perpetuating neoliberal processes of gentrification, exclusion and segregation. On the other hand, these processes deepen the gap between urban and rural space, exacerbating what journalist Sergio del Molino (2016) has called the “empty Spain”, although social movements and activists prefer to speak of the “empty Spain” to highlight its political and economic origin. Finally, beyond the dichotomy between the rural and the urban, the current era of the “Anthropocene” or the “Capitalocene”, marked by the destructive impact of human beings on the planet, urges us to reflect on a cartography of spatial (in)justice that addresses the effects of climate change and its connection with capitalism.

From a transdisciplinary perspective, the objectives of this book are: (1) to examine the limits that justice, in its broadest sense, faces in the capitalist production processes of the Spanish “space” (2) to make visible specific situations that challenge these limits and give justice a tangible manifestation, even if momentary; and (3) to demonstrate that limits, whether physical, spatial, social, political, ecological, legal, economic, cultural, aesthetic, or theoretical, conceptual and interpretive, can always be questioned, and consequently, redefined, thus opening up possibilities to create new forms of thought, imagination and action.

*All information copied from publisher’s website

Subject/Object and Beyond: Women in Early Modern France. Essays in Honour of Colette H. Winn ed. by Dr. Nancy Frelick and Dr. Edith Benkov

A collection of essays on early modern women from a collection of leading figures in the field. This edited volume was published by Iter Press in February 2024.

Subject/Object and Beyond brings together essays by established and emerging scholars to honor the exceptionally rich contributions and career of scholar Colette H. Winn. It also celebrates fifty years of sustained scholarship on early modern women, along with the foundation of Women’s Studies as a recognized academic discipline in North America. The collection comprises seventeen articles that explore multiple perspectives on early modern women, including their writings, translations, reception, and contributions to various fields, including literature, music, politics, religion, and science.

Nancy M. Frelick is associate professor of French and Renaissance Studies at the University of British Columbia.

Edith J. Benkov is professor emerita of French and European Studies at San Diego State University.

Reviews

“These essays give a sense of the really broad and incredibly varied swath of studies in early modern literature and culture that Colette Winn has influenced and helped to cultivate. The field of studying early modern women/writers is an incredibly vibrant, rich, and complex one, with really exciting things happening on many fronts.” — Nora Peterson, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

“…une contribution substantielle aux études sur les femmes de la première modernité.” — Luc Vaillancourt, Université de Quebec à Chicoutimi

WL W25 CES Office Worker

The Centre for European Studies (CES) is searching for a student to provide administrative support to the Senior Program Assistant and Director of CES.

Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies 23(2) ed. by Dr. Ross King

Dr. Ross King recently edited a special issue of Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies entitled “Inter- and Intralingual Translation in the Sinographic Cosmopolis.”

This special issue was published November 15, 2023.

The Crimean War and Cultural Memory: The War France Won and Forgot by Dr. Sima Godfrey

Sima Godfrey is an associate professor emerita of French at the University of British Columbia. Her book, The Crimean War and Cultural Memory: The War France Won and Forgot, was published in September 2023 by the University of Toronto Press.

The Crimean War (1854–56) is widely considered the first modern war with its tactical use of railways, telegraphs, and battleships, its long-range rifles, and its notorious trenches – precursors of the Great War. It is also the first media war: the first to know the impact of a correspondent on the field of battle and the first to be documented in photographs. No one, however, including the French themselves, seems to remember that France was there, fighting in Crimea, losing 95,000 soldiers and leading the Allied campaign to victory. It would seem that the Crimean War has no place in the canon of culturally retained historical events that define modern French identity.

Looking at literature, art, theatre, material objects, and medical reports, The Crimean War and Cultural Memory considers how the Crimean War was and was not represented in French cultural history in the second half of the nineteenth century. Ultimately, the book illuminates the forgotten traces that the Crimean War left on the French cultural landscape.

Reviews

“How does a war – a war that was won – disappear from a nation’s memory? Despite the strained efforts of Napoleon III to celebrate the victory, despite the wealth of images, plays, eye-witness accounts, and memorabilia, and despite the horrifying number of deaths, the Crimean War and its victims were forgotten. Godfrey’s vivid book exposes the powerful dynamics that wiped both the triumphs and the tragedies of the war from French collective memory.” — Judith A. Miller, Associate Professor of History, Emory University

“The Crimean War and Cultural Memory offers an outstanding, well-researched account of how national cultures remember and especially forget complex historical events. Godfrey’s insightful discussion of a war that strangely disappeared from French national memory combines excellent empirical details with theoretical reflections that explain how national identities evolve through constant forgetting as well as very selective remembering.” — Lloyd Kramer, Professor of History, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

“Godfrey’s thoroughly researched and engagingly written book offers not just an in-depth analysis of representations of the Crimean War in a variety of media but also a profound reflection on the vicissitudes of cultural memory. By asking why the French have forgotten one of their greatest victories, Godfrey leads us to consider how certain historical events retain their hold over the popular imagination while others fade into oblivion.” — Maurice Samuels, Betty Jane Anlyan Professor of French, Yale University, and author of The Spectacular Past

“An eminent scholar of French literature and culture, Godfrey examines France’s forgotten war in meticulous detail, showing us its half-erased traces in literature, visual culture, and monumental architecture. This haunting study is both timely and timeless.” — Patrick M. Bray, Professor of French Literature, University College London

The Interwar World ed. by Dr. Andrew Denning and Dr. Heidi J.S. Tworek

Dr. Andrew Denning and Dr. Heidi J.S. Tworek‘s edited volume The Interwar World was published August 29, 2023 by Routledge.

The Interwar World collects an international group of over 50 contributors to discuss, analyze, and interpret this crucial period in twentieth-century history. A comprehensive understanding of the interwar era has been limited by Euro-American approaches and strict adherence to the temporal limits of the world wars. The volume’s contributors challenge the era’s accepted temporal and geographic framings by privileging global processes and interactions. Each contribution takes a global, thematic approach, integrating world regions into a shared narrative.

Three central questions frame the chapters. First, when was the interwar? Viewed globally, the years 1918 and 1939 are arbitrary limits, and the volume explicitly engages with the artificiality of the temporal framework while closely examining the specific dynamics of the 1920s and 1930s. Second, where was the interwar? Contributors use global history methodologies and training in varied world regions to decenter Euro-American frameworks, engaging directly with the usefulness of the interwar as both an era and an analytical category. Third, how global was the interwar? Authors trace accelerating connections in areas such as public health and mass culture counterbalanced by processes of economic protectionism, exclusive nationalism, and limits to migration. By approaching the era thematically, the volume disaggregates and interrogates the meaning of the ‘global’ in this era.

As a comprehensive guide, this volume offers overviews of key themes of the interwar period for undergraduates, while offering up-to-date historiographical insights for postgraduates and scholars interested in this pivotal period in global history.

Anders als die Andern by Dr. Ervin Malakaj

Dr. Ervin Malakaj‘s book Anders als die Andern was published on August 1, 2023 by McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Released in 1919, Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others) stunned audiences with its straightforward depiction of queer love. Supporters celebrated the film’s moving storyline, while conservative detractors succeeded in prohibiting public screenings. Banned and partially destroyed after the rise of Nazism, the film was lost until the 1970s and only about one-third of its original footage is preserved today.

Directed by Richard Oswald and co-written by Oswald and the renowned sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, Anders als die Andern is a remarkable artifact of cinema culture connected to the vibrant pre-Stonewall homosexual rights movement of early-twentieth-century Germany. The film makes a strong case for the normalization of homosexuality and for its decriminalization, but the central melodrama still finds its characters undone by their public outing. Ervin Malakaj sees the film’s portrayal of the pain of living life queerly as generating a complex emotional identification in modern spectators, even those living in apparently friendlier circumstances. There is a strange comfort in knowing that we are not alone in our struggles, and Malakaj recuperates Anders als die Andern’s mournful cinema as an essential element of its endurance, treating the film’s melancholia both as a valuable feeling in and of itself and as a springboard to engage in an intergenerational queer struggle.

Over a century after the film’s release, Anders als die Andern serves as a stark reminder of how hostile the world can be to queer people, but also as an object lesson in how to find sustenance and social connection in tragic narratives.

*All information copied from publisher’s website

Presents and Futures of Catalan Studies: A North American Perspective ed. by Dr. Anna Casas Aguilar et al.

This special edition of Catalan Review was edited by Anna Casas Aguilar, Maria Dasca, Ignasi Gozalo and Núria Silleras and was published by Liverpool University Press on July 26, 2023. Read Volume 37, Issue 1, “Presents and Futures of Catalan Studies: A North American Perspective”.

Navigating from the White Anthropocene to the Black Chthulucene by Dr. William Brown

Dr. William Brown‘s book Navigating from the White Anthropocene to the Black Chthulucene was published on June 26, 2023 by CollectiveInk.

Navigating from the White Anthropocene to the Black Chthulucene radically re-interprets Buster Keaton’s iconic 1924 film, The Navigator, through the combined lenses of posthumanism and critical race theory. This book deconstructs the film’s underlying anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity while exposing the unthinking whiteness of theorists and philosophers, including Gilles Deleuze, who have given Keaton’s work pride of place in the history of cinema. Through its daring and provocative analysis of Keaton’s classic, Navigating from the White Anthropocene to the Black Chthulucene invites us to consider cinema itself, at least in its classical narrative form, as a tool for constructing and maintaining white supremacy while building the conceptual tools for a world beyond whiteness.

Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in the World of Wen: Reading Sheldon Pollock from the Sinographic Cosmopolis ed. by Dr. Ross King

Sheldon Pollock’s work on the history of literary cultures in the ‘Sanskrit Cosmopolis’ broke new ground in the theorization of historical processes of vernacularization and served as a wake-up call for comparative approaches to such processes in other translocal cultural formations. But are his characterizations of vernacularization in the Sinographic Sphere accurate, and do his ideas and framework allow us to speak of a ‘Sinographic Cosmopolis’? How do the special typology of sinographic writing and associated technologies of vernacular reading complicate comparisons between the Sankrit and Latinate cosmopoleis? Such are the questions tackled in this volume.

Access the published work.

Contributors are Daehoe Ahn, Yufen Chang, Wiebke Denecke, Torquil Duthie, Marion Eggert, Greg Evon, Hoduk Hwang, John Jorgensen, Ross King, David Lurie, Alexey Lushchenko, Si Nae Park, John Phan, Mareshi Saito, and S. William Wells.

*This blurb is taken from the publisher’s website.