This book offers a multidisciplinary analysis of approach in the field of energy studies of Japan, examining post-closure coal mining towns in Japan and their gentrification. It considers the impact of closures on the agricultural industry, the re-absorption of laid off coal miners into service and industrial sectors, and the gentrification of former coal mines into agricultural farms and communities. It also considers the historical process of gentrification in terms of origins, social hi...

This collection casts the spotlight on Asia and its place in global studies on trauma to explore the ways in which violence and trauma are (re)enacted, (re)presented, (re)imagined, reconciled, and consumed through various mediums in the region. The discussions revolve around the ethics of representing and discussing trauma as we negotiate the tensions between trauma and political, historical, literary, and cultural representations in written, visual, digital, and hybrid forms. It examines ...

Identity has become one of the most widely used terms today, appearing in many different contexts. Anything and everything has an identity, and identity crises have become almost equally pervasive. Yet 'identity' is extremely versatile, meaning different things to different people and in different scientific disciplines. To many its meaning seems self-evident, since its various uses share common features, so often the term is used without a definition of what, exactly, is meant by it. This...

Although the era of European colonialism has long passed, misgivings about the inequality of the encounters between European and non-European languages persist in many parts of the postcolonial world. This unfinished state of affairs, this lingering historical experience of being caught among unequal languages, is the subject of Rey Chow's book. A diverse group of personae, never before assembled in a similar manner, make their appearances in the various chapters: the young mulatto happeni...

Jhumpa Lahiri is among the few contemporary writers being read widely by both mainstream and minority audiences, the general public and academic scholars, in the U.S. and globally. While her works focus on specific ethnic experiences of highly educated, upper middle-class professional Bengalis and their children living in New England since the 1970s, they simultaneously address universal themes that consistently keep them on the New York Times bestseller lists, and that have made the film ...

This provocative book explores the ideology of truth and deception in China, offering a nuanced perspective on social interaction in different cultural settings. Drawing on decades of fieldwork in China, Susan D. Blum offers an authoritative examination of rules, expectations, and beliefs regarding lying and honesty in society. Blum points to a propensity for deception in Chinese public interactions in situations where people in the United States would expect truthfulness, yet argues that ...

Postmodernism Literature and Race explores the question of how dramatic shifts in conceptions of race in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have been addressed by writers at the cutting edge of equally dramatic transformations of literary form. An opening section engages with the broad question of how the geographical and political positioning of experimental writing informs its contribution to racial discourses, while later segments focus on central critical domains withi...

As a growing number of contemporary novelists write for publication in multiple languages, the genre's form and aims are shifting. Born-translated novels include passages that appear to be written in different tongues, narrators who speak to foreign audiences, and other visual and formal techniques that treat translation as a medium rather than as an afterthought. These strategies challenge the global dominance of English, complicate "native" readership, and protect creative works against ...

Drawing on a vast archive of world history, anthropology, geography, cultural theory, postcolonial studies, gender studies, literature, and art, Susan Stanford Friedman recasts modernity as a networked, circulating, and recurrent phenomenon producing multiple aesthetic innovations across millennia. Considering cosmopolitan as well as nomadic and oceanic worlds, she radically revises the scope of modernist critique and opens the practice to more integrated study.Friedman moves from ...

The Cambridge Companion to Asian American Literature offers an engaging survey of Asian American literature from the nineteenth century to the present day. Since the 1980s, Asian American literary studies has developed into a substantial and vibrant field within English and American Studies. This Companion explores the variety of historical periods, literary genres and cultural movements affecting the development of Asian American literature. Written by a host of leading scholars in the fi...

A vital resource for anyone interested in literature and politics, this is the first in-depth study of epistemic injustice as a concept for literary studies. Focusing on contemporary fiction in an age of post-truth, it shows how eight novels set in different global contexts reveal epistemic injustice as an authoritarian practice and offer an aesthetics of resistance. Epistemic injustice valorises the thinking of those in power while suppressing other people’s knowledge; it declares some pe...

China has been China for four thousand years; concealment may be a reaction to a past redolent of autocracy, but it seems prevelent in all aspects of Chinese life. Confucious' idea of keeping the masses ignorant in order to make them easier to govern remains in force. We in America have had, or had until just recently, an underlying assumption that things are going to get better and better. This idea of long-term success is alien to Chinese culture, however, where dynastic decay is an hist...