Divercity Global Cities As A Literary Phenomenon

Based on the structured analysis of selected North American novels, this work examines global cities as a literary phenomenon (»DiverCity«). By analyzing Dionne Brand's Toronto, »What We All Long For« (2005), Chang-rae Lee's New York, »Native Speaker« (1995), and Karen Tei Yamashita's Los Angeles, »Tropic of Orange« (1997), Melanie U. Pooch provides the connecting link for exploring the triad of globalization and its effects, global cities as cultural nodal points, and cultural diversity in a globalizing age as a literary phenomenon. Thus, she contributes to a global, interdisciplinary, and multi-perspectival understanding of literature, culture, and society.

This book examines what literature and film reveal about the urban USA. Subjects include culture, class, race, crime, and disaster.

Translocality in Contemporary City Novels responds to the fact that twenty-first-century Anglophone novels are increasingly characterised by translocality—the layering and blending of two or more distant settings. Considering translocal and transcultural writing as a global phenomenon, this book draws on multidisciplinary research, from globalisation theory to the study of narratives to urban studies, to explore a corpus of thirty-two novels—by authors such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dionne Brand, Kiran Desai, and Xiaolu Guo—set in a total of ninety-seven cities. Lena Mattheis examines six of the most common strategies used in contemporary urban fiction to make translocal experiences of the world narratable and turn them into relatable stories: simultaneity, palimpsests, mapping, scaling, non-places, and haunting. Combining and developing further theories, approaches, and techniques from a variety of research fields—including narratology, human geography, transculturality, diaspora spaces, and postcolonial perspectives—Mattheis develops a set of cross-disciplinary techniques in literary urban studies.

What does migration-generated diversity mean for cultural policy and the performing arts scene in Germany and how is it promoted? Through bridging theory and practice, Özlem Canyürek introduces the concept of ›thinking and acting interculturally‹ and proposes a set of criteria as a stepping stone for a semantic shift in cultural policy towards achieving a fair and accessible performing arts scene for all. She delineates the framework conditions of a receptive cultural policy to envision cultural diversity in motion to enable the production and dissemination of multiplicity of thoughts, experiences, knowledge, worldviews, and aesthetics of an intercultural society.

Sound positions individuals as social subjects. The presence of human beings, animals, objects, or technologies reverberates into the spaces we inhabit and produces distinct soundscapes that render social practices, group associations, and socio-cultural tensions audible. The Acoustics of the Social on Page and Screen unites interdisciplinary perspectives on the social dimensions of sound in audiovisual and literary environments. The essays in the collection discuss soundtracks for shared values, group membership, and collective agency, and engage with the subversive functions of sound and sonic forms of resistance in American literature, film, and TV.

This book puts the trade war between the United States and China in historical context. Exploring the dynamics of isolation and internal reform from a Chinese perspective, the author draws upon valuable insights from China's years of isolation prior to the famous Nixon-Mao summit. Advocating internal reform as a more productive strategy than conflict with other powers, this powerful argument for globalization with Chinese characteristics will be of interest to scholars of China, economists, and political scientists.

This book examines labour in the age of US hegemony through the art that has grappled with it; and, vice versa, developments in American culture as they have been shaped by work’s transformations over the last century. Describing the complex relations between cultural forms and the work practices, Art, Labour and American Life explores everything from Fordism to feminization, from white-collar ascendency to zero hours precarity, as these things have manifested in painting, performance art, poetry, fiction, philosophy and music. Labour, all but invisible in cultural histories of the period, despite the fact most Americans have spent most of their lives doing it, here receives an urgent re-emphasis, as we witness work’s radical redefinition across the world.

As a transnational history of science, Japan's Empire of Birds: Aristocrats, Anglo-Americans, and Transwar Ornithology focuses on the political aspects of highly mobile Japanese explorer-scientists, or cosmopolitan gentlemen of science, circulating between Japanese and British/American spaces in the transwar period from the 1920s to 1950s. Annika A. Culver examines a network of zoologists united by their practice of ornithology and aristocratic status. She goes on to explore issues of masculinity and race related to this amidst the backdrop of imperial Japan's interwar period of peaceful internationalism, the rise of fascism, the Japanese takeover of Manchuria, and war in China and the Pacific. Culver concludes by investigating how these scientists repurposed their aims during Japan's Allied Occupation and the Cold War. Inspired by geographer Doreen Massey, themes covered in the volume include social space and place in these specific locations and how identities transform to garner social capital and scientific credibility in transnational associations and travel for non-white scientists.