Transcultural Turbulences

Today, hardly anything moves as fast across the globe as images and media. This fact opens new avenues to explore social and cultural change, but also poses new theoretical challenges of how to grasp and better understand these changes and flows. Moreover, such movements across geophysical and cultural borders have a historical depth that enables us to explore globalisation and localisation in new ways. Transculturality is still a relatively new field of research in the Humanities through which we sharpen our competence and ‘literacy’ to come to terms with the complexity of globalised cultures. This volume ventures into new domains of research on the transculturality of images and addresses the need to develop new or modify established often ethno- and Eurocentric interpretations of what happens when images travel. It does so by bringing together cutting-edge research from fields such as art history, cultural anthropology, colonial history, Islamic studies, religious studies and literary criticism.

For the 21st century, the often-quoted citation ‘past is prologue’ reads the other way around: The global present lacks a historical narrative for the global past. Focussing on a transcultural history, this book questions the territoriality of historical concepts and offers a narrative, which aims to overcome cultural essentialism by focussing on crossing borders of all kinds. Transcultural History reflects critically on the way history is constructed, asking who formed history in the past and who succeeded in shaping what we call the master narrative. Although trained European historians, the authors aim to present a useful approach to global history, showing first of all how a Eurocentric but universal historiography removed or essentialised certain topics in Asian history. As an empirical discipline, history is based on source material, analysed according to rules resulting from a strong methodological background. This book accesses the global past after World War I, looking at the well known stage of the Paris Peace Conferences, observing the multiplication of new borders and the variety of transgressing institutions, concepts, actors, men and women inventing themselves as global subjects, but sharing a bitter experience with almost all local societies at this time, namely the awareness of having relatives buried in far distant places due to globalised wars.

This book studies a selection of works of Philippine literature written in Spanish during the American occupation of the Philippines (1902-1946). It explores the place of Filipino nationalism in a selection of fiction and non-fiction texts by Spanish-speaking Filipino writers Jesús Balmori, Adelina Gurrea Monasterio, Paz Mendoza Guazón, and Antonio Abad. Taking an interdisciplinary approach that draws from Anthropology, History, Literary Studies, Cultural Analysis and World Literature, this book offers a comparative analysis of the position of these authors toward the cultural transformations that have taken place as a result of the Philippines' triple history of colonization (by Spain, the US, and Japan) while imagining an independent nation. Engaging with an untapped archive, this book is a relevant and timely contribution to the fields of both Filipino and Hispanic literary studies.

Featuring contributions from an international team of leading and up-and-coming scholars, this innovative volume provides a comprehensive sociolinguistic picture of current spoken British English based on the Spoken BNC2014, a brand new corpus of British speech. The book begins with short introductions highlighting the state-of-the-art in three major areas of corpus-based sociolinguistics, while the remaining chapters feature rigorous analysis of the research outcomes of the project grounded in Spoken BNC2014 data samples, highlighting English used in everyday situations in the UK, with brief summaries reflecting on the sociolinguistic implications of this research included at the end of each chapter. This unique and robust dataset allows this team of researchers the unique opportunity to focus on speaker characteristics such as gender, age, dialect and socio-economic status, to examine a range of sociolinguistic dimensions, including grammar, pragmatics, and discourse, and to reflect on the major changes that have occurred in British society since the last corpus was compiled in the 1990s. This dynamic new contribution to the burgeoning field of corpus-based sociolinguistics is key reading for students and scholars in sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, pragmatics, grammar, and British English.

The governance arrangements put in place for Siberia and Mongolia after the collapse of the Qing and Russian Empires were highly unusual, experimental and extremely interesting. The Buryat-Mongol Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic established within the Soviet Union in 1923 and the independent Mongolian People’s Republic established a year later were supposed to represent a new model of transnational, post-national governance, incorporating religious and ethno-national independence, under the leadership of the coming global political party, the Communist International. The model, designed to be suitable for a socialist, decolonised Asia, and for a highly diverse population in a strategic border region, was intended to be globally applicable. This book, based on extensive original research, charts the development of these unusual governance arrangements, discusses how the ideologies of nationalism, socialism and Buddhism were borrowed from, and highlights the relevance of the subject for the present day world, where multiculturality, interconnectedness and interdependency become ever more complicated.

Engaging Transculturality is an extensive and comprehensive survey of the rapidly developing field of transcultural studies. In this volume, the reflections of a large and interdisciplinary array of scholars have been brought together to provide an extensive source of regional and trans-regional competencies, and a systematic and critical discussion of the field’s central methodological concepts and terms. Based on a wide range of case studies, the book is divided into twenty-seven chapters across which cultural, social, and political issues relating to transculturality from Antiquity to today and within both Asian and European regions are explored. Key terms related to the field of transculturality are also discussed within each chapter, and the rich variety of approaches provided by the contributing authors offer the reader an expansive look into the field of transculturality. Offering a wealth of expertise, and equipped with a selection of illustrations, this book will be of interest to scholars and students from a variety of fields within the Humanities and Social Sciences.

This book analyses the relationship between Fascist Italy and the League of Nations in the interwar years. By uncovering the traces of those Italians working in the organization, this volume investigates Fascist Italy’s membership of the League, and explores the dynamics between nationalism and internationalism in Geneva. The relationship between Fascist Italy and the League of Nations was contradictory, shifting from active collaboration to open disagreement. Previous literature has not reflected this oscillation in policy, focusing disproportionally on the problems Italy caused for the League, such as the Ethiopian crisis. Yet Fascist Italy remained in the League for more than fifteen years, and was the third largest power within the institution. How did a Fascist dictatorship fit into an organization espousing principles of liberal internationalism? By using archival sources from four countries, Elisabetta Tollardo shows that Fascist Italy was much more concerned with, and involved in, the League than currently believed.

As the first book-length study of emergent Pakistani speculative fiction written in English, this critical work explores the ways in which contemporary Pakistani authors extend the genre in new directions by challenging the cognitive majoritarianism (usually Western) in this field. Responding to the recent Afro science fiction movement that has spurred non-Western writers to seek a democratization of the broader genre of speculative fiction, Pakistani writers have incorporated elements from djinn mythology, Qur'anic eschatology, "Desi" (South Asian) traditions, local folklore, and Islamic feminisms in their narratives to encourage familiarity with alternative world views. In five chapters, this book analyzes fiction by several established Pakistani authors as well as emerging writers to highlight the literary value of these contemporary works in reconciling competing cognitive approaches, blurring the dividing line between "possibilities" and "impossibilities" in envisioning humanity’s collective future, and anticipating the future of human rights in these envisioned worlds.