Recent flashpointsmonographs items

First Contact: Speculative Visions of the Conquest of the Americas

Fri, 6 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

First Contact: Speculative Visions of the Conquest of the Americas

A Poetic Genealogy of North African Literature

Wed, 18 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A Poetic Genealogy of North African Literature

Forms of Mobility: Genre, Language and Media in African Literary Cultures

Wed, 20 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Forms of Mobility: Genre, Language and Media in African Literary Cultures

Disoriented Disciplines: China, Latin America, and the Shape of World Literature

Fri, 9 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Disoriented Disciplines: China, Latin America, and the Shape of World Literature

Dwelling in Fiction: Poetics of Place and the Experimental Novel in Latin America

Sun, 14 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Dwelling in Fiction: Poetics of Place and the Experimental Novel in Latin America

Late Colonial Sublime: Neo Epics and the End of Romanticism

Fri, 12 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Late Colonial Sublime: Neo Epics and the End of Romanticism

Entranced Earth: Art, Extractivism, and the End of Landscape

Wed, 17 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Entranced Earth: Art, Extractivism, and the End of Landscape

Cannibal Translation: Literary Reciprocity in Contemporary Latin America

Wed, 17 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Cannibal Translation: Literary Reciprocity in Contemporary Latin America

Traces of the Unseen: Photography, Violence, and Modernization in Early Twentieth-Century Latin America

Thu, 16 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Traces of the Unseen: Photography, Violence, and Modernization in Early Twentieth-Century Latin America

New World Maker: Radical Poetics, Black Internationalism, and the Translations of Langston Hughes

Wed, 13 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

New World Maker: Radical Poetics, Black Internationalism, and the Translations of Langston Hughes

Concepts of the World: The French Avant-Garde and the Idea of the International, 1910-1940

Wed, 13 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Concepts of the World: The French Avant-Garde and the Idea of the International, 1910-1940

Secondhand China: Spain, the East, and the Politics of Translation

Thu, 26 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Secondhand China: Spain, the East, and the Politics of Translation

The Idea of Indian Literature: Gender, Genre, and Comparative Method

Thu, 26 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The Idea of Indian Literature: Gender, Genre, and Comparative Method

Domestications: American Empire, Literary Culture, and the Postcolonial Lens

Mon, 14 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Domestications: American Empire, Literary Culture, and the Postcolonial Lens

Figures of the World: The Naturalist Novel and Transnational Form

Tue, 14 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Figures of the World: The Naturalist Novel and Transnational Form

Immaterial Archives: An African Diaspora Poetics of Loss

Mon, 10 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Immaterial Archives: An African Diaspora Poetics of Loss

Behold an Animal: Four Exorbitant Readings

Mon, 10 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Behold an Animal: Four Exorbitant Readings

Capital Letters: Hugo, Baudelaire, Camus, and the Death Penalty

Sun, 19 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Capital Letters: Hugo, Baudelaire, Camus, and the Death Penalty

Globalizing Race Antisemitism and Empire in French and European Culture

Wed, 20 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Engaging with what has been called the “spatial turn” in social theory, the book offers new tools for thinking about how racisms interact across space and time. Among these is what Bell calls racial scalarity.

Civilizing War: Imperial Politics and the Poetics of National Rupture

Wed, 11 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Civilizing War: Imperial Politics and the Poetics of National Rupture

The New Woman: Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine Allegory

Wed, 2 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

The New Woman: Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine Allegory

Acoustic Properties: Radio, Narrative, and the New Neighborhood of the Americas

Mon, 10 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Acoustic Properties: Radio, Narrative, and the New Neighborhood of the Americas

Intimate Relations: Social Reform and the Late Nineteenth-Century South Asian Novel

Fri, 23 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Intimate Relations: Social Reform and the Late Nineteenth-Century South Asian Novel

Media Laboratories: Late Modernist Authorship in South America

Fri, 23 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Media Laboratories: Late Modernist Authorship in South America

Bombay Modern: Arun Kolatkar and Bilingual Literary Culture

Thu, 21 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Bombay Modern: Arun Kolatkar and Bilingual Literary Culture

Form and Instability: Eastern Europe, Literature, Postimperial Difference

Sat, 16 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Form and Instability: Eastern Europe, Literature, Postimperial Difference

An Innocent Abroad: Lectures in China

Mon, 12 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

An Innocent Abroad: Lectures in China

Epic and Exile: Novels of the German Popular Front, 1933-1945

Thu, 16 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Epic and Exile: Novels of the German Popular Front, 1933-1945

The Object of the Atlantic: Concrete Aesthetics in Cuba, Brazil, and Spain, 1868-1968

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The Object of the Atlantic: Concrete Aesthetics in Cuba, Brazil, and Spain, 1868-1968

The Practical Past

Mon, 29 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The Practical Past

The Powers of the False: Reading, Writing, Thinking Beyond Truth and and Fiction

Mon, 29 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The Powers of the False: Reading, Writing, Thinking Beyond Truth and and Fiction

Fiction Beyond Secularism

Wed, 6 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Fiction Beyond Secularism

Periodizing Jameson: Dialectics, the University, and the Desire for Narrative

Wed, 6 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Periodizing Jameson: Dialectics, the University, and the Desire for Narrative

Cosmopolitan Desires: Global Modernity and World Literature in Latin America

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Cosmopolitan Desires: Global Modernity and World Literature in Latin America

Figurative Inquistions: Conversion, Torture, and Truth in the Luso Hispanic Atlantic

Mon, 6 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Figurative Inquistions: Conversion, Torture, and Truth in the Luso Hispanic Atlantic

The Fear of French Negroes: Transcolonial Collaboration in the Revolutionary Americas

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The Fear of French Negroes is an interdisciplinary study that explores how people of African descent responded to the collapse and reconsolidation of colonial life in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1845). Using visual culture, popular music and dance, periodical literature, historical memoirs, and state papers, Sara E. Johnson examines the migration of people, ideas, and practices across imperial boundaries. Building on previous scholarship on black internationalism, she traces expressions of both aesthetic and experiential transcolonial black politics across the Caribbean world, including Hispaniola, Louisiana and the Gulf South, Jamaica, and Cuba. Johnson examines the lives and work of figures as diverse as armed black soldiers and privateers, female performers, and newspaper editors to argue for the existence of “competing inter-Americanisms” as she uncovers the struggle for unity amidst the realities of class, territorial, and linguistic diversity. These stories...

Flesh and Fish Blood: Postcolonialism, Translation, and the Vernacular

Thu, 14 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

In Flesh and Fish Blood S. Shankar breaks new ground in postcolonial studies by exploring the rich potential of vernacular literary expressions. Shankar pushes beyond the postcolonial Anglophone canon and works with Indian literature and film in English, Tamil, and Hindi to present one of the first extended explorations of representations of caste, including a critical consideration of Tamil Dalit (so-called untouchable) literature. Shankar shows how these vernacular materials are often unexpectedly politically progressive and feminist, and provides insight on these oft-overlooked—but nonetheless sophisticated—South Asian cultural spaces. With its calls for renewed attention to translation issues and comparative methods in uncovering disregarded aspects of postcolonial societies, and provocative remarks on humanism and cosmopolitanism, Flesh and Fish Blood opens up new horizons of theoretical possibility for postcolonial studies and cultural analysis.

The Cultural Return

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This insightful book tracks the concept of culture across a range of scholarly disciplines and much of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—years that saw the emergence of new fields and subfields (cultural studies, the new cultural history, literary new historicism, as well as ethnic and minority studies) and came to be called “the cultural turn.” Since the 1990s, however, the idea of culture has fallen out of scholarly favor. Susan Hegeman engages with a diversity of disciplines, including anthropology, literary studies, sociology, philosophy, psychology, and political science, to historicize the rise and fall of the cultural turn and to propose ways that culture may still be a vital concept in the global present.

English Heart, Hindi Heartland: The Political Life of Literature in India

Thu, 8 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

English Heart, Hindi Heartland examines Delhi’s postcolonial literary world—its institutions, prizes, publishers, writers, and translators, and the cultural geographies of key neighborhoods—in light of colonial histories and the globalization of English. Rashmi Sadana places internationally recognized authors such as Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, Vikram Seth, and Aravind Adiga in the context of debates within India about the politics of language and alongside other writers, including K. Satchidanandan, Shashi Deshpande, and Geetanjali Shree. Sadana undertakes an ethnographic study of literary culture that probes the connections between place, language, and text in order to show what language comes to stand for in people’s lives. In so doing, she unmasks a social discourse rife with questions of authenticity and cultural politics of inclusion and exclusion. English Heart, Hindi Heartland illustrates how the notion of what is considered to be culturally and linguistically authentic...

Polymorphous Domesticities: Pets, Bodies, and Desire in Four Modern Writers

Thu, 8 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Polymorphous Domesticities maps out the play of gender, sexuality, and alternative forms of domesticity in the works of four modern European and American writers—Edith Wharton, Djuna Barnes, Colette, and J. R. Ackerley. What these four writers have in common is a defiance of patriarchal paradigms in their lives as well as in their works. Not only did they live outside the norms of the heterosexual family unit, they also pursued and wrote about alternative lifestyles that prominently involved animals. Through close readings from a feminist perspective, Juliana Schiesari reconfigures the ways in which interspecies relationships inflect domestic spheres, reading the “Other” through the lens of gender, home, and family. As she explores how domestic life is refigured by the presence of animals, Schiesari challenges anthropocentric frames of reference and brings the very definition of “human” into question.

The Cylinder: Kinematics of the Nineteenth Century

Thu, 8 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The Cylinder investigates the surprising proliferation of cylindrical objects in the nineteenth century, such as steam engines, phonographs, panoramas, rotary printing presses, silos, safety locks, and many more. Examining this phenomenon through the lens of kinematics, the science of forcing motion, Helmut Müller-Sievers provides a new view of the history of mechanics and of the culture of the industrial revolution, including its literature, that focuses on the metaphysics and aesthetics of motion. Müller-Sievers explores how nineteenth-century prose falls in with the specific rhythm of cylindrical machinery, re-imagines the curvature of cylindrical spaces, and conjoins narrative progress and reflection in a single stylistic motion. Illuminating the intersection of engineering, culture, and literature, he argues for a concept of culture that includes an epoch’s relation to the motion of its machines.

Wings for Our Courage: Gender, Erudition, and Republican Thought

Fri, 3 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

On January 6, 1537, Lorenzino de’ Medici murdered Alessandro de’ Medici, the duke of Florence. This episode is significant in literature and drama, in Florentine history, and in the history of republican thought, because Lorenzino, a classical scholar, fashioned himself after Brutus as a republican tyrant-slayer. Wings for Our Courage offers an epistemological critique of this republican politics, its invisible oppressions, and its power by reorganizing the meaning of Lorenzino’s assassination around issues of gender, the body, and political subjectivity. Stephanie H. Jed brings into brilliant conversation figures including the Venetian nun and political theorist Archangela Tarabotti, the French feminist writer Hortense Allart, and others in a study that closely examines the material bases—manuscripts, letters, books, archives, and bodies—of writing as generators of social relations that organize and conserve knowledge in particular political arrangements. In her highly original...

Disarming Words: Empire and the Seductions of Translation in Egypt

Fri, 3 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

In a book that radically challenges conventional understandings of the dynamics of cultural imperialism, Shaden M. Tageldin unravels the complex relationship between translation and seduction in the colonial context. She examines the afterlives of two occupations of Egypt—by the French in 1798 and by the British in 1882—in a rich comparative analysis of acts, fictions, and theories that translated the European into the Egyptian, the Arab, or the Muslim. Tageldin finds that the encounter with European Orientalism often invited colonized Egyptians to imagine themselves “equal” to or even “masters” of their colonizers, and thus, paradoxically, to translate themselves toward—virtually into—the European. Moving beyond the domination/resistance binary that continues to govern understandings of colonial history, Tageldin redefines cultural imperialism as a politics of translational seduction, a politics that lures the colonized to seek power through empire rather than against it, thereby...

Poetry in Pieces: César Vallejo and Lyric Modernity

Fri, 3 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Set against the cultural and political backdrop of interwar Europe and the Americas, Poetry in Pieces is the first major study of the Peruvian poet César Vallejo (1892–1938) to appear in English in more than thirty years. Vallejo lived and wrote in two distinct settings—Peru and Paris—which were continually crisscrossed by new developments in aesthetics, politics, and practices of everyday life; his poetry and prose therefore need to be read in connection with modernity in all its forms and spaces. Michelle Clayton combines close readings of Vallejo’s writings with cultural, historical, and theoretical analysis, connecting Vallejo—and Latin American poetry—to the broader panorama of international modernism and the avant-garde, and to writers and artists such as Rainer Maria Rilke, James Joyce, Georges Bataille, and Charlie Chaplin. Poetry in Piecessheds new light on one of the key figures in twentieth-century Latin American literature, while exploring ways of rethinking the parameters...

The Cosmic Time of Empire: Modern Britain and World Literature

Fri, 3 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Combining original historical research with literary analysis, Adam Barrows takes a provocative look at the creation of world standard time in 1884 and rethinks the significance of this remarkable moment in modernism for both the processes of imperialism and for modern literature. As representatives from twenty-four nations argued over adopting the Prime Meridian, and thereby measuring time in relation to Greenwich, England, writers began experimenting with new ways of representing human temporality. Barrows finds this experimentation in works as varied as Victorian adventure novels, high modernist texts, and South Asian novels—including the work of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, H. Rider Haggard, Bram Stoker, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad. Demonstrating the investment of modernist writing in the problems of geopolitics and in the public discourse of time, Barrows argues that it is possible, and productive, to rethink the politics of modernism through the politics of time.

On Pain of Speech: Fantasies of the First Order and Literary Rant

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

On Pain of Speech tracks the literary rant, an expression of provocation and resistance that imagines the power to speak in its own name where no such right is granted. Focusing on the "politics of address," Dina Al-Kassim views the rant through the lens of Michel Foucault's notion of the biopolitical subject and finds that its abject address is an essential yet overlooked feature of modernism. Deftly approaching disparate fields—decadent modernism, queer studies, subjection, critical psychoanalysis, and postcolonial avant-garde—and encompassing both Euro-American and Francophone Arabic modernisms, she offers an ambitious theoretical perspective on the ongoing redefinition of modernism. She includes readings of Jane Bowles, Abdelwahab Meddeb, and Oscar Wilde, and invokes a wide range of ideas, including those of Theodor Adorno, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Judith Butler, Jean Laplanche, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.

Moses and Multiculturalism

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Countering impressions of Moses reinforced by Sigmund Freud in his epoch-making Moses and Monotheism, this concise, engaging work begins with the perception that the story of Moses is at once the most nationalist and the most multicultural of all foundation narratives. Weaving together various texts—biblical passages, philosophy, poems, novels, opera, and movies—Barbara Johnson explores how the story of Moses has been appropriated, reimagined, and transmitted across cultures and historical moments. But she finds that already in the Bible, the story of Moses is a multicultural story, the story of someone who functions well in a world to which he, unbeknownst to the casual observer, does not belong. Using the Moses story as a lens through which to view questions at the heart of contemporary literary, philosophical, and ethical debates, Johnson shows how, through a close analysis of this figure's recurrence through time, we might understand something of the paradoxes, if not the...