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The first book-length study to address the impact of the legacies of slavery on Spanish cultural representations and institutions.

This groundbreaking volume explores how culture produced in Spain, from the nineteenth century to the present, both reflects and shapes ways of understanding the history and heritage of a nation sustained by colonialism and slavery. Akiko Tsuchiya and Aurélie Vialette bring together an outstanding group of scholars, artists, cultural producers, and activists in a range of fields-from history to literary studies, anthropology to journalism, and flamenco to film. Drawing on interdisciplinary and comparative methodologies, contributors address the legacies of slavery in the archive; in cultural memory sites; and in literature, music, and visual arts. How, they ask, do different cultural forms and institutions represent and reckon with this past and push for justice in the face of persistent racial discrimination? In its focus on collective memory and the cultural afterlives of slavery and antislavery, Cultural Legacies of Slavery in Modern Spain will appeal not only to Iberian and Latin American specialists but also readers across Afro-Hispanic, postcolonial, transatlantic, and critical race studies.

This book offers a paradigm shift in the framing of identity development by advancing a new, shock-sensitive framework for diverse young adult identity development after high school.

The author builds on the critical theoretical contributions of Urie Bronfenbrenner and Margaret Beale Spencer that highlight the person-context nature of development and the dynamic nature of vulnerability, risk, and coping. The inclusive, policy-relevant theoretical approach emerges from the author’s mixed-methods study that examines the context-dependent identity development experiences of young adults. The book also accounts for the unique person-context dynamics during the Great Recession and COVID-19 global shocks that drive how diverse young adults make meaning of risk as they cope with the shock-related disruptions on their individual postsecondary journeys toward building their adult identities. Given that the qualitative interview component of the study occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, this research offers a unique, in-real-time vantage point from participants who are making meaning of their choices and decisions as the shock was underway. The book also tracks the heightened importance of online tools during this period and the implications of virtual contexts where developmental activities are pursued, such as online education, work, and socializing.

Advancing a new, shock-sensitive, interdisciplinary theory of identity development in postsecondary journeys of diverse young adults, it will appeal to scholars and students at the graduate level working across psychology, human development, educational psychology, sociology of education, and public policy.

Drawing on rich ethnographic data as well as archaeological evidence, The Boundaries of Ancient Trade challenges long-standing conceptions of highly centralized sociopolitical and economic organization and trade along the Afar salt trail—one of the last economically significant caravan-basedtrade routes in the world.

For thousands of years, farmers in the Tigray, Amhara, and Afar regions of Ethiopia and Eritrea have run caravans of nearly 250,000 people and pack animals annually along an eighty-mile route through both cold, high-altitude farmlands and some of the hottest volcanic desert terrain on earth. In her fieldwork, archaeologist Helina Solomon Woldekiros followed the route with her own donkey and camel caravan, observing and interviewing over 150 Arho (caravaners), salt miners, salt cutters, warehouse owners, brokers, shop owners, and salt village residents to model the political economy of the ancient Aksumite state. The first integrated ethnoarchaeological and archaeological research on this legendary route, this volume provides evidence that informal economies and local participation have played a critical role in regional trade and, ultimately, in maintaining the considerable power of the Aksumite state. Woldekiros also contributes new insights into the logistics of pack animal–based trade and variability in the central and regional organization of global ancient trade.

Using a culturally informed framework for understanding the organization of the ancient salt route and its role in linking the Aksumite state to rural highland agricultural and lowland mobile pastoralist populations, The Boundaries of Ancient Trade makes a key contribution to theoretical discussions of hierarchy and more diffuse power structures in ancient states. This work generates new interest in the region as an area of global relevance in archaeological and anthropological debates on landscape, social interaction, and practice theories.

Despite its persistence and viciousness, anti-Semitism remains undertheorized in comparison with other forms of racism and discrimination. How should anti-Semitism be defined? What are its underlying causes? Why do anti-Semites target Jews? In what ways has Judeophobia changed over time? What are the continuities and disconnects between medieval anti-Judaism and the Holocaust? How does criticism of the state of Israel relate to anti-Semitism? And how can social theory illuminate the upsurge in attacks on Jews today?
Considering these questions and many more, this book is at once a philosophical reflection on key problems in the analysis of anti-Semitism and a history of its leading theories and theorists. Jonathan Judaken explores the methodological and conceptual issues that have vexed the study of Judeophobia and calls for a reconsideration of the definitions, categories, and narratives that underpin overarching explanations. He traces how a range of thinkers have wrestled with these challenges, examining the theories of Jean-Paul Sartre, the Frankfurt School, Hannah Arendt, and Jean-François Lyotard, alongside the works of sociologists Talcott Parsons and Zygmunt Bauman and historians Léon Poliakov and George Mosse. Judaken argues against claims about the uniqueness of Judeophobia, demonstrating how it is entangled with other racisms: Islamophobia, Negrophobia, and xenophobia. Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism not only urges readers to question how they think about Judeophobia but also draws them into conversation with a range of leading thinkers whose insights are sorely needed in this perilous moment.

“Luminous” (The Guardian) and “brilliantly odd” (The Irish Independent), Danielle Dutton’s writing is as protean as it is beguiling. In the four eponymous sections of Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other, Dutton imagines new models for how literature might work in our fractured times.

The Bolex camera, 16mm reversal film stocks, commercial film laboratories, and low-budget optical printers were the small-gauge media technologies that provided the infrastructure for experimental filmmaking at the height of its cultural impact. Technology and the Making of Experimental Film Culture examines how the avant-garde embraced these material resources and invested them with meanings and values adjacent to those of semiprofessional film culture.

In the late nineteenth century, Chinese reformers and revolutionaries believed that there was something fundamentally wrong with the Chinese writing system. The Chinese characters, they argued, were too cumbersome to learn, blocking the channels of communication, obstructing mass literacy, and impeding scientific progress. What had sustained a civilization for more than two millennia was suddenly recast as the root cause of an ongoing cultural suicide. China needed a new script to survive in the modern world.
Codes of Modernity explores the global history of Chinese script reforms―efforts to alphabetize or simplify the writing system―from the 1890s to the 1980s. Examining the material conditions and political economy underlying attempts to modernize scripts, Uluğ Kuzuoğlu argues that these reforms were at the forefront of an emergent information age. Faced with new communications technologies and infrastructures as well as industrial, educational, and bureaucratic pressures for information management, reformers engineered scripts as tools to increase labor efficiency and create alternate political futures.
Kuzuoğlu considers dozens of proposed scripts, including phonetic alphabets, syllabaries, character simplification schemes, latinization, and pinyin. Situating them in a transnational framework, he stretches the geographical boundaries of Chinese script reforms to include American behavioral psychologists, Soviet revolutionaries, and Central Asian typographers, who were all devising new scripts in pursuit of informational efficiency. Codes of Modernity brings these experiments together to offer new ways to understand scripts and rethink the shared experiences of a global information age.

The Social Topography of a Rural Community is a micro-history of an exceptionally well-documented seventeenth-century English village: Chilvers Coton in north-eastern Warwickshire. Drawing on a rich archive of sources, including an occupational census, detailed estate maps, account books, private journals, and hundreds of deeds and wills, and employing a novel micro-spatial methodology, it reconstructs the life experience of some 780 inhabitants spread across 176 households. This offers a unique opportunity to visualize members of an English rural community as they responded to, and in turn initiated, changes in social and economic activity, making their own history on their own terms. In so doing the book brings to the fore the social, economic, and spatial lives of people who have been marginalized from conventional historical discourse, and offers an unusual level of detail relating to the spatial and demographic details of local life.
Each of the substantive chapters focuses on the contributions and experiences of a particular household in the parish-the mill, the vicarage, the alehouse, the blacksmith's forge, the hovels of the labourers and coalminers, the cottages of the nail-smiths and ribbon-weavers, the farms of the yeomen and craftsmen, and the manor house of Arbury Hall itself-locating them precisely on specific sites in the landscape and the built environment; and sketching the evolving 'taskscapes' in which the inhabitants dwelled. A novel contribution to spatial history, as well as early modern material, social and economic history more generally, this study represents a highly original analysis of the significance of place, space, and flow in the history of English rural communities.

Many birders travel far and wide to popular birding destinations to catch sight of rare or “exotic” birds. In Slow Birding, evolutionary biologist Joan E. Strassmann introduces readers to the joys of birding right where they are.

For many of us, the great scientific discoveries of the modern age–the Big Bang, evolution, quantum physics, relativity–point to an existence that is bleak, devoid of meaning, pointless. But in “The Sacred Depths of Nature,” eminent biologist Ursula Goodenough shows us that the scientific world view need not be a source of despair. Indeed, it can be a wellspring of solace and hope.

The first book of poetry by Matthias Göritz to be available in English, in a translation by a renowned writer.

Very few books of poetry by contemporary German writers are available to English-speaking readers. In “Colonies of Paradise,” acclaimed poet and translator Mary Jo Bang introduces the poems of novelist, poet and translator Matthias Göritz, one of the most exciting German writers publishing today. The poems in this book, which originally appeared in German under the title “Loops,” take the reader on a tour of Paris, Chicago, Hamburg and Moscow as they explore childhood, travel and the human experience. Unsettling our expectations about adulthood, the book permeates the quotidian with a disquieting strangeness that leads us deeper into our own lives and histories. Göritz’s sly humor, keen insight, and artistry are brought to the fore in Bang’s careful and innovative translation, allowing an English-language audience to enter fully the intricate interiority of Göritz’s work. 

See also: Translation as duet

Matthias Göritz is a poet, translator, and novelist. He has written four poetry collections, “Loops,” “Pools,” “Tools” and “Spools”; three novels, including “Der kurze Traum des Jakob Voss (The Brief Dream of Jakob Voss)” and “Parker”; and three novellas. He has received the Hamburg Literature Prize, the Mara Cassens Prize, the Robert Gernhardt Prize, and the William Gass Award. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

Mary Jo Bang is the author of eight books of poetry—including “Elegy: Poems,” which received the National Book Critics Circle Award—and the translator of Dante’s “Inferno,” illustrated by Henrik Drescher, and “Purgatorio.” She has received a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Berlin Prize Fellowship. She teaches creative writing at Washington University in St. Louis.

“There are no neat stories and anecdotes here: the flashes of perception, of understanding, are given to us via stark metaphors, images, unpredictable syntax, musical structures that are by turns surprising and illuminating . . . This is the kind of art that is never willing to rest, always in motion. Matthias Göritz is an original, talented contemporary German poet, and translator Mary Jo Bang is one of the most interesting poets currently at work in the English language. Bravo.” —Ilya Kaminsky, author of “Deaf Republic: Poems”

“Matthias Göritz’s ‘Colonies of Paradise’ is unlike any book of American poetry I can recall reading. It’s a close-up, high speed tour of life, passing through various world cities—none of them home, yet each haunted by the gargoyle-like figures of Mother and Father. This may be the ‘Giant Redeye Cicada’ eye view of modern human existence—what one can see when one gives up thinking one understands. The book is rendered into sharp, pithy, idiomatic English by the poet and translator Mary Jo Bang, who has recently translated Dante. With her help, Göritz asks, ‘Isn’t it time we went missing?’” —Rae Armantrout, author of “Finalists”

“Matthias Göritz is a poet of tremendous gifts and knowledge. His unique poetic voice is grounded and marked by historical and personal scars and horizons, which make his writing profound, intelligent, musical, playful, and innovative. A must for anyone with interest in contemporary European poetry.” —Aleš Šteger, author of “The Book of Things”