Transformations Of Cultural Identity In The English Speaking World

In a context where cultural transformations have become a basic feature of modern life as people and nations are brought closer together, this book tackles transformations occurring within and across cultures of the English-speaking world in the fields of literature, painting, architecture, photography and film. It helps readers decipher these dynamic phenomena and situate them in a historical perspective. The articles move within and across cultures and mirror the broad range of approaches to cultural practices that have appeared in the past few decades. They provide readers with tools to work out the transformations these practices undergo and the new life and meaning this process infuses into cultures of the English-speaking world. This book will be useful to graduate and doctoral students as well as post-doctoral researchers working in film studies, cultural studies, art history, literature and creative writing. Its clear language and pedagogical approaches will also make it accessible to the general public.

The first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama, Suzan-Lori Parks has received international recognition for her provocative and influential works. Her plays capture the nightmares of African Americans endangered by a white establishment determined to erase their history and eradicate their dreams. A dozen essays address Parks's plays, screenplays and novel. Additionally, this book includes two original interviews (one with Parks and another with her long-time director Liz Diamond) and a production chronology of her plays.

From the international bestselling author of In the Time of the Butterflies and Afterlife, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents is "poignant...powerful... Beautifully captures the threshold experience of the new immigrant, where the past is not yet a memory." (The New York Times Book Review) Julia Alvarez’s new novel, The Cemetery of Untold Stories, is coming April 2, 2024. Pre-order now! Acclaimed writer Julia Alvarez’s beloved first novel gives voice to four sisters as they grow up in two cultures. The García sisters—Carla, Sandra, Yolanda, and Sofía—and their family must flee their home in the Dominican Republic after their father’s role in an attempt to overthrow brutal dictator Rafael Trujillo is discovered. They arrive in New York City in 1960 to a life far removed from their existence in the Caribbean. In the wondrous but not always welcoming U.S.A., their parents try to hold on to their old ways as the girls try find new lives: by straightening their hair and wearing American fashions, and by forgetting their Spanish. For them, it is at once liberating and excruciating to be caught between the old world and the new. Here they tell their stories about being at home—and not at home—in America. "Alvarez helped blaze the trail for Latina authors to break into the literary mainstream, with novels like In the Time of the Butterflies and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents winning praise from critics and gracing best-seller lists across the Americas."—Francisco Cantú, The New York Times Book Review "A clear-eyed look at the insecurity and yearning for a sense of belonging that are a part of the immigrant experience . . . Movingly told." —The Washington Post Book World

From his arrival in Britain in the 1950s and involvement in the New Left, to founding the field of cultural studies and examining race and identity in the 1990s and early 2000s, Stuart Hall has been central to shaping many of the cultural and political debates of our time. Essential Essays—a landmark two-volume set—brings together Stuart Hall's most influential and foundational works. Spanning the whole of his career, these volumes reflect the breadth and depth of his intellectual and political projects while demonstrating their continued vitality and importance. Volume 2: Identity and Diaspora draws from Hall's later essays, in which he investigated questions of colonialism, empire, and race. It opens with “Gramsci's Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity,” which frames the volume and finds Hall rethinking received notions of racial essentialism. In addition to essays on multiculturalism and globalization, black popular culture, and Western modernity's racial underpinnings, Volume 2 contains three interviews with Hall, in which he reflects on his life to theorize his identity as a colonial and diasporic subject.

The reinvention of identity in today's world.

The author stages a series of conversations with prominent writers and artists to assess how to define cultural identity in the modern world and age of mass media and global migration. His premise is that conventional cultural identity is not static.

Writing Galicia explores a part of Europe’s cultural and social landscape that has until now remained largely unmapped—the exciting body of creative work that, since the 1970s, has emerged as a result of contact between the small Atlantic nation of Galicia and the Anglophone world. Paying particular attention to the community of London Galicians and their descendants, this book traces representations of Galician cultural history through art and close, critical readings of literary works by, among others, Carlos Durán, Manuel Rivas, Xesús Fraga, and Ramiro Fonte. Too often neglected in literary studies, Galician culture is strongly evident throughout Europe’s cultural landscape, and this book allows us to reframe this small Atlantic culture.

A great deal has been written in recent years about nationalism. Yet scholars remain sharply divided as to a coherent theoretical model of this phenomenon and many have called for further empirical research. This volume pursues this line of inquiry, examining a variety of geographical contexts within the English-speaking world, including Australia, Canada, India, the United Kingdom and the United States at different historical periods. These interdisciplinary studies combine elements of sociology, political science, history, literature, and cultural studies.

Early America Re-Explored is a transatlantic joint venture in which scholars from the United States, England, and Germany re-read and recontextualize American writings from the colonial to the antebellum periods. The authors and topics analyzed range from Winthrop and Puritan rhetorics, the Pynchons and Ha(w)thornes, Puritan missionary discourse, Rowlandson's captivity narrative in the context of Native American history, Scottish-American self-fashioning, the cultural inscription of Ashbridge's autobiography, and the transatlantic subtext of Wheatley's poetry, to the theory and practice of the early American novel, play, and short story, the role of geography books in the construction of American identities, women and Native Americans in Child and Sedgwick, the abolitionist writings of M. Stewart, political dimensions of Bryant's poetry and of the nineteenth-century rogue narrative, technology in antebellum short stories, and postcolonial aspects of Cooper's, Poe's, and Melville's sea fiction. The contributors include J. Achilles, S. Bercovitch, M. Brückner, V. Carretta, W. Fluck, U. Hebel, F. Kelleter, S. Krause, G. Mackenthun, D. Madsen, S. Matter-Seibel, O. Moore, N. Salisbury, D. Schloss, J. Schöpp, D. Williams, and J. Zanger.