Representation and Resistance: South Asian and African Women’s Texts at Home and in the Diaspora compares colonial and national constructions of gender identity in Western-educated African and South Asian women’s texts. Jaspal Kaur Singh argues that, while some writers conceptualize women’s equality in terms of educational and professional opportunity, sexual liberation, and individualism…
Europa kann neu gedacht werden: nicht von den Grenzen und Leitdifferenzen her, sondern von den Übergängen. Die aus vier Kontinenten stammenden Beiträgerinnen und Beiträger befassen sich mit der Frage, inwiefern die Fähigkeit, ästhetische, sprachliche und kulturelle Übergänge angesichts hoher Heterogenität hervorzubringen, Europa am ehesten ausmacht. Von Fatou Diome bis Yoko Tawada, von…
Migrants and Literature in Finland and Sweden presents new comparative perspectives on transnational literary studies. This collection provides a contribution to the production of new narratives of the nation. The focus of the contributions is contemporary fiction relating to experiences of migration. The volume discusses multicultural writing, emerging modes of writing and generic innovations.…
The fourth volume in the Approaches to Culture Theory series is a contemporary Estonian anthology in culture theory. Most of the authors are members of the research groups of the Centre of Excellence in Cultural Theory: archaeology, cultural communication studies, contemporary cultural studies, ethnology, folkloristics, religious studies, landscape studies, and semiotics. These scholars have re…
This book studies how the concepts of body, personhood and privacy can be expanded across disciplinary borders. Notwithstanding the diversity of empirical material and theoretical frameworks, the chapters suggest innovative tools for common key issues: dialogue with the cultural Other, the appropriation of space, and personality. Human embodiment and ethical aspects of representing and regulati…
This collection considers new phenomena emerging in a convergence environment from the perspective of adaptation studies. The contributions take the most prominent methods within the field to offer reconsiderations of theoretical concepts and practices in participatory culture, transmedia franchises, and new media adaptations. The authors discuss phenomena ranging from mash-ups of novels and Yo…
From self-help books and nootropics, to self-tracking and home health tests, to the tinkering with technology and biological particles - biohacking brings biology, medicine, and the material foundation of life into the sphere of »do-it-yourself«. This trend has the potential to fundamentally change people's relationship with their bodies and biology but it also creates new cultural narratives…
From Sir John Franklin's doomed 1845 search for the Northwest Passage to early twentieth-century sprints to the South Pole, polar expeditions produced an extravagant archive of documents that are as varied as they are engaging. As the polar ice sheets melt, fragments of this archive are newly emergent. In The News at the Ends of the Earth Hester Blum examines the rich, offbeat collection of pri…
The book raises semiotic questions of human–animal relations: what is the semiotic character of different species, how humans endow animals with meaning, and how animal sign exchange and communication has coped with environmental change. The book takes a zoosemiotic approach and considers different species as being integrated with the environment via their specific umwelt or subjective percep…
The power of stories to raise our concern for animals has been postulated throughout history by countless scholars, activists, and writers, including such greats as Thomas Hardy and Leo Tolstoy. This is the first book to investigate that power and explain the psychological and cultural mechanisms behind it. It does so by presenting the results of an experimental project that involved thousands …