Abiayalan Pluriverses: Bridging Indigenous Studies and Hispanic Studies looks for pathways that better connect two often siloed disciplines. This edited collection brings together different disciplinary experiences and perspectives to this objective, weaving together researchers, artists, instructors, and authors who have found ways of bridging Indigenous and Hispanic studies through trans-Indigenous reading methods, intercultural dialogues, and reflections on translation and epistemology. Each chapter brings rich context that bears on some aspect of the Indigenous Americas and its crossroads with Hispanic studies, from Canada to Chile. Such a hemispheric and interdisciplinary approach offers innovative and significant means of challenging the coloniality of Hispanic studies.

This is the first book to offer a comprehensive history of abortion pills in the United States. Public intellectual and lawyer Carrie N. Baker shows how courageous activists waged a decades-long campaign to establish, expand, and maintain access to abortion pills. Weaving their voices throughout her book, Baker recounts both dramatic and everyday acts of their resistance. These activists battled anti-abortion forces, overly cautious policymakers, medical gatekeepers, and fearful allies in their four-decade-long fight to free abortion pills. In post-Roe America, abortion pills are currently playing a critically important role in providing safe abortion access to tens of thousands of people living in states that now ban and restrict abortion. Understanding this struggle will help to ensure continued access into the future. 
 

In celebration of the 200th anniversary of Amherst College, a group of scholars and alumni explore the school’s substantial past in this volume. Amherst in the World tells the story of how an institution that was founded to train Protestant ministers began educating new generations of industrialists, bankers, and political leaders with the decline in missionary ambitions after the Civil War. The contributors trace how what was a largely white school throughout the interwar years begins diversifying its student demographics after World War II and the War in Vietnam. The histories told here illuminate how Amherst has contended with slavery, wars, religion, coeducation, science, curriculum, town and gown relations, governance, and funding during its two centuries of existence. Through Amherst’s engagement with educational improvement in light of these historical undulations, it continually affirms both the vitality and the utility of a liberal arts education.

Contributions by Martha Saxton, Gary J. Kornblith, David W. Wills, Frederick E. Hoxie, Trent Maxey, Nicholas L. Syrett,  Wendy H. Bergoffen, Rick López, Matthew Alexander Randolph, Daniel Levinson Wilk, K. Ian Shin, David S. Reynolds, Jane F. Thrailkill, Julie Dobrow, Richard F. Teichgraeber III, Debby Applegate, Michael E. Jirik, Bruce Laurie, Molly Michelmore, and Christian G. Appy.

Amherst Suite: Emily Dickinson, Spanish Translation & Poetic Transcreation is a dialogue between Emily Dickinson and Alberto Blanco, one of Mexico’s most acclaimed contemporary poets. At the book’s heart is a selection of Dickinson’s most emblematic poems, masterfully translated into Spanish by Blanco—fifty-five poems to celebrate each year of Emily Dickinson’s life. Blanco’s translations closely match Dickinson’s metric and rhythm while also preserving her signature imagery, symbols, and moods. Following these translations is Blanco’s collection of original poems dedicated to Dickinson, "Amherst Suite," translated into English by Jennifer Rathbun for the first time. Staying true to Dickinson’s style, Blanco uses dashes, unusual capitalization, vivid imagery, quatrains, and rhyme while exploring her recurring themes—nature, mortality, and spirituality. Bold and innovative, Blanco’s “suite” unites the American and Mexican poetic traditions. 

Opening with a creative essay by renowned author Ilan Stavans, the volume also includes a conversation between Blanco and scholar Ronald J. Friis; Blanco’s own essay on Dickinson, translated into English by Jennifer Rathbun; as well as an introduction by Rathbun that helpfully situates this interlinguistic, intercultural, and inter-generational network. Amherst Suite is a fascinating and unique look into the work and worlds of poets and their translators and will be an invaluable text for students, scholars, and all readers of Emily Dickinson. 

Explicitly—or not—protocols determine much of what we do. Far exceeding traditional notions of “good manners,” protocols are systems of language that regulate how we relate to each other, to our cultural, social, and political environments, and to the technologies that create them. The first publication to look at protocols across a wide range of disciplines, As for Protocols brings together contributions by twenty-two international artists, writers, scholars, musicians, architects, and scientists who explore protocols across various fields, foregrounding opportunities for creating new protocols that are inclusive and equitable. Through essays, artworks, interviews, and scores, the book speaks to protocols as practice—neither conventional mannerisms nor abstract concepts, but material processes, relational affinities, shared responsibilities, and mutual care.

Edited by Re’al Christian, Carin Kuoni, and Eriola Pira, an opening score by Raven Chacon and contributions by Salome Asega, Carolina Caycedo with Lupita Limón Corrales, Raven Chacon, Jesse Chun, Asia Dorsey, Taraneh Fazeli and Cannach MacBride, Pablo Helguera, Emmanuel Iduma, Mary Maggic, Shannon Mattern, V. Mitch McEwen with Nadir Jeevanjee, Rashaun Mitchell with Silas Riener, Romy Opperman, Rasheedah Phillips, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson with Maria Hupfield, Ultra-red with Robert Sember, and Underground Resistance.

Racism has historically been a taboo topic in Mexico. This is largely due to the nationalist project of mestizaje which contends that because all Mexicans are racially mixed, race is not a salient political issue. In recent years, however, race and racism have become important topics of debate in the country’s public sphere and academia. This book introduces readers to a sample of these diverse and sometimes conflicting views that also intersect with discussions of class. The activists and scholars included in the volume come from fields such as anthropology, linguistics, history, sociology, and political science. Through these diverse epistemological frameworks, the authors show how people in contemporary Mexico interpret the world in racial terms and denounce racism.
 

Border of Lights, a volunteer collective, returns each October to Dominican-Haitian border towns to bear witness to the 1937 Haitian Massacre ordered by Dominican dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo. This crime against humanity has never been acknowledged by the Dominican government and no memorial exists for its victims. A multimodal, multi-vocal space for activists, artists, scholars, and others connected to the BOL movement, The Border of Lights Reader provides an alternative to the dominant narrative that positions Dominicans and Haitians as eternal adversaries and ignores cross-border and collaborative histories. This innovative anthology asks large-scale, universal questions regarding historical memory and revisionism that countries around the world grapple with today.

"By bringing together in one volume poetry, visual arts, literary analysis, in-depth interviews and historical analysis this volume will provide its readers with a comprehensive view of the causes and the aftermath of the massacre." —Ramón Antonio Victoriano-Martínez, University of British Columbia

Contributions by Julia Alvarez, Amanda Alcántara, DeAndra Beard, Nancy Betances, Jésula Blanc, Matías Bosch Carcuro, Cynthia Carrión, Raj Chetty, Catherine DeLaura, Magaly Colimon, Juan Colón, Robin Maria DeLugan, Lauren Derby, Rosa Iris Diendomi Álvarez, Polibio Díaz, Rana Dotson, Rita Dove, Rhina P. Espaillat, Maria Cristina Fumagalli, Saudi García, Scherezade García, Juan Carlos González Díaz, Kiran C. Jayaram, Pierre Michel Jean, Nehanda Loiseau Julot, Jake Kheel, Carlos Alomia Kollegger, Jackson Lorrain “Jhonny Rivas”, Radio Marién, Padre Regino Martínez Bretón, Sophie Maríñez, April J. Mayes, Jasminne Mendez, Komedi Mikal PGNE, Osiris Mosquea, Megan Jeanette Myers, Rebecca Osborne, Ana Ozuna, Edward Paulino, John Presimé, Laura Ramos, Amaury Rodríguez, Doña Carmen Rodríguez de Paulino, The DREAM Project, Silvio Torres-Saillant, Ilses Toribio, Deisy Toussaint, Évelyne Trouillot, Richard Turits, William Vazquez, Chiqui Vicioso, Bridget Wooding, and Óscar Zazo.

Boundless expands conversations on Native and Indigenous art and literature by presenting words and images in kinship. Starting in the collections of the Mead Art Museum and the Collection of Native American Literature at Amherst College and centered on the creative production of Native peoples of the Northeast, the project follows relationships between Indigenous authors and artists across the United States and beyond borders. Boundless presents an engagement of Indigenous curatorial methods as practiced by guest curator Heid E. Erdrich (Ojibwe) in an exhibition in two iterations hosted by the Mead in 2023 and 2024. Advisors to Boundless include Mohegan, Nipmuc, Shinnecock, and Wampanoag artists and scholars, along with others, who supported Erdrich in her urge to center the project in the Northeast. Advisors contributed both visual art and writing to the exhibition and publication. Collaborative co-creation between artists, students, faculty, Mead staff Lisa Crossman and Emily Potter-Ndiaye and the guest curator are also explored in this illustrated volume.

Amherst College’s Collection of Native American Literature contains thousands of Indigenous-authored works spanning centuries. The Collection’s abundance of books, prints, music, ephemera, and artist-made works, all by Native people, provide rich selections for Boundless. Crosscurrents of Indigenous visual art and literature are considered in this broad and interdisciplinary project. Boundless crosses generations to explore relatedness, kinship, and collegiality.

Boundless brings artists and writers together across generations, often drawing together works by members of the same tribe or even the same family to show the history, presence, and futurity of Native American creative and intellectual production.

Constructed Latinx(s) Identities: Racialized Bodies in Visual and Textual Culture consists of ten interdisciplinary essays that discuss recent forms and interpretations of the histories and traditions of the Latinx communities present in film, literature, television, and other cultural expressions. Using specific case studies, the authors of this collection delve into the intersections of identity in Latinx production and representation and challenge the colonial and modern power structures that have continuously racialized and gendered Latinx bodies. In addition to deconstructing these power structures, the chapters attempt to recover knowledge buried or shunned by colonialism and modernity, as well as offer alternative and nonhierarchical forms of defining Latinx and forming pluri-identitary and multivoiced communities. The concept of Latinx continues to evolve, to be renegotiated, and to be embedded with new meanings and subjectivities. As such, all chapters not only encourage further debate about racialization and the interaction of the various historical, political, and social contexts in identity formation but also propel all scholars to question their positionality when approaching the concept of Latinx.

Critical Making in the Age of AI invites students, teachers, learners, and digital humanists to explore making as scholarship. Inspired by the craft traditions of textile arts, this book combines a survey of forms of alternative scholarly communication—such as comics, GIFs, maps, games, and generative AI—and a pattern book, where patterns serve as starting points that makers can reimagine and remix. Firmly grounded in the humanities and utilizing free tools and platforms (including Twine, Voyant, and Tracery) wherever possible, this engaging and accessible guide to digital methods introduces and puts into practice concepts that are essential to preparing students to navigate a changing landscape of media and information without investing in proprietary software, dedicated lab space, or expensive creative tools.

The book’s eight patterns are especially appropriate for those just beginning to explore digital scholarly methods, and one goal of Critical Making in the Age of AI is to provide structure for work that is both meaningful and achievable with limited resources and time. By centering critical making through a design-justice and feminist lens, the coauthors model how inclusive and expansive approaches to making in research and teaching are vital to shaping the humanities of the future.

The specifics of ecological destruction often take a cruel turn, affecting those who can least resist its impacts and are least responsible for it. Deep Horizons: A Multisensory Archive of Ecological Affects and Prospects gathers contributions from multiple disciplines to investigate intersectional questions of how the changing planet affects specific peoples, communities, wildlife species, and ecosystems in varying and inequitable ways. A multisensory, artistic-archival supplement to the Mellon Sawyer Environmental Futures Project, the volume enriches current conversations bridging the environmental humanities and affect theory with insights from Native and Indigenous philosophies as well as by highlighting artistic practices that make legible the long-term durational effects of ecological catastrophe.

Poems, nonfiction essays, sound-texts, photographs, and other artworks invite readers and viewers to consider the less visible losses and prospects of environmental transformation. Gathering contributions from multiple disciplines, this multimodal, multisensorial volume pushes the boundaries of scholarship with an experimental, born-digital format that offers a set of responses to collective traumas such as climate change, environmental destruction, and settler colonialism. The artists and authors honor the specificity of real historical and material injustices while also reflecting the eclectic nature of such assorted feelings, working through them in creative and border-crossing modes.

With contributions from Robert Bailey, Nina Elder, Erin Espelie, Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds, Maya Livio, Erika Osborne, Craig Santos Perez, Kim Tallbear, Julianne Warren, and Kyle Powys White.

"The compelling juxtaposition of poetry, music, video, audio, photography, printmaking, and traditional essays is among Deep Horizons' considerable strengths. I don’t know of any other project quite like this one. The subject is timely—indeed, urgent—and the innovative approach to archiving environmental change will interest scholars and artists in a range of disciplines and resonate with a wide audience." —Jennifer Ladino, University of Idaho

The first volume to theorize and historicize contemporary artistic practices from Chile in the English language, Dismantling the Nation begins from a position of radical criticism against the nation-state of Chile and its capitalist, heteronormative, and extractivist rule. At a truly pivotal moment in the country’s history, when it is redefining what it wants to be, the works here propose a way of forging a feminist and decolonial future for Chile. The authors attend to practices from distinct locations in Chile, reconceptualizing geographical borders from a transnational and transdisciplinary perspective while engaging with ecocriticism and Indigenous epistemologies. This is an essential volume for anyone looking to understand the current social, political, and artistic movements in Chile.

EnTwine: Critical and Creative Teaching with Twine is the first full-length collection devoted to teaching with the popular, digital story-telling platform Twine. Until now, few scholarly accounts have focused on how disparate communities use, share, and learn about Twine. Contributors to this volume demonstrate how Twine helps to forge communities of practice committed to learning and sharing together, inside and outside of classrooms. The book’s case studies range across humanities, STEM, industry, and activist contexts. Authors from across the world share how they use Twine in teaching—whether creating Twines for students, holding workshops, or using Twine to build communities and preserve the voices of the people who use it. Readers will find practical examples in the Twine Objects featured at the end of each section as well as a wealth of open-access resources hosted in an online repository and connected to the book’s digital version. EnTwine invites readers, teachers, students, and makers of all kinds to learn, adapt, share, and teach with Twine.

Expressive Networks convenes an urgent conversation on digital media and the social life of contemporary poetry. Tracing how poems circulate through online spaces and how capitalized platforms have come to pattern the reading and writing of poetry, contributors emphasize both the expressivist cast of digital literary culture and the deep-running ambivalence that characterizes aesthetic and critical responses to platformed cultural production. The volume features chapters on Pan- African spoken word programs, Singaporean Facebook groups, decolonial hemispheric networks, and Japanese media-critical poetries as well as platforms such as Twitter/X, Instagram, and Amazon.

Though contributors write from a variety of methodological positions and address themselves to a range of archives, they share the primary conviction that the impact of Web 2.0 on literary practice is far-reaching, far from self-evident, and far more variegated and unpredictable than easy summations of social media’s influence suggest. Expressive Networks asks after poetry’s present and future by examining what poems themselves express about the social make-up of networked platforms.

Edited by Matthew Kilbane with contributions from Cameron Awkward-Rich, Micah Bateman, Andrew Campana, Sumita Chakraborty, Scott Challener, C.R. Grimmer, Tess McNulty, Michael Nardone, Seth Perlow, Anna Preus, Susanna Sacks, Carly Schnitzler, Melanie Walsh, and Samuel Caleb Wee.

Forgotten Friendships: Yugoslavia and the Anticolonial Francophone World examines transnational friendships and alliances between intellectuals from Yugoslavia and the Francophone African and Caribbean world during the mid-twentieth century. The book argues that transnational political friendships helped shape major intellectual movements like Négritude, African socialism, and global socialist feminisms, which surged beyond national, regional, and even diasporic spaces. Blending archival research, literary analysis, and biography, the book fills a significant gap in our understanding of how intellectuals from the Global South and the socialist world collaborated on shared goals of decolonization, anti-racism, and socialist worldmaking.

Forgotten Friendships emphasizes the ways in which writers, intellectuals, and activists envisioned alternative futures rooted in collaboration across peripheries. Personal bonds of friendship were not mere footnotes to the anti-colonial struggle, but vital political tools for rethinking global solidarity.

Scholars, critics, and creators describe certain videogames as being “poetic,” yet what that means or why it matters is rarely discussed. In Game Poems: Videogame Design as Lyric Practice, independent game designer Jordan Magnuson explores the convergences between game making and lyric poetry and makes the surprising proposition that videogames can operate as a kind of poetry apart from any reliance on linguistic signs or symbols.

This rigorous and accessible short book first examines characteristics of lyric poetry and explores how certain videogames can be appreciated more fully when read in light of the lyric tradition—that is, when read as “game poems.” Magnuson then lays groundwork for those wishing to make game poems in practice, providing practical tips and pointers along with tools and resources. Rather than propose a monolithic framework or draw a sharp line between videogame poems and poets and their nonpoetic counterparts, Game Poems brings to light new insights for videogames and for poetry by promoting creative dialogue between disparate fields. The result is a lively account of poetic game-making praxis.

“Everyone who loves the true power of games will benefit from the treasure trove of insights in Game Poems.” — Jesse Schell, author of The Art of Game Design

“Magnuson shines a sensitive and incisive light on small, often moving, videogames.” — D. Fox Harrell, Ph.D., Professor of Digital Media, Computing, and Artificial Intelligence, MIT

“[Game Poems] tells a new story about games— that games can be lyrical, beautiful, emotionally challenging—to inspire creators and critics alike.” —Noah Wardrip-Fruin, author of How Pac-Man Eats

“Even as the news swells with impending doom for creativity, writing, and text itself, this literate and crafty book pursues poetry not through implacable algorithms but in concrete and personal play.  It should be an indispensable guide for anyone who aims to maintain the true, human promise of technical poetics.”—Stuart Moulthrop, coauthor of Twining: Critical and Creative Approaches to Hypertext Narratives
 
“For far too long videogames have flourished – and commanded both capital and attention – in a kind of counterculture that they seem to have created as if ex nihilo for themselves and their players. But we are these players, and their culture has always been integrated with all of our own. In this evenhanded artist-scholar’s ars poetica Jordan Magnuson respects the material cultural specificity of videogames while regarding them through the ‘lens of poetry’ in order to discover – and help create – a practice and an art of Game Poems within the wider field. Magnuson formally, int(erv)entionally embraces this art as lyrically poetic.”—John Cayley, Brown University
 
“In Game Poems, Magnuson listens carefully to videogames, and hears them speak to questions of art, language, and meaning that connect our written past to our software future. Read this book and you will hear it too.”—Frank Lantz, Director, NYU Game Center
 
“Jordan Magnuson has created a work that ties together the worlds of poetry and videogames in a deep and enlightening way. For those of us who care about the potential of poetic games, Jordan greatly improves the language of how we talk about them and expands our ability to see what this unique form can become. This is one of my favorite books on game design and I apologize in advance to those whom I will end up cornering and not being able to stop talking to about it.”—Benjamin Ellinger, Game Design Program Director, DigiPen Institute of Technology
 
“A groundbreaking and accessible book that helps us think about games as poems. With patient tenacity, Magnuson teases out what he felt for years as he engaged in his own practice of making videogames. His mission to help us apply a ‘lyric reading’ to games so that our engagement with, and appreciation of, games can be enhanced feels deeply personal. Drawing from a wide range of games and computational media scholars, poetry scholars, game creators, and poets, Magnuson provides a rigorous, balanced, and unique interdisciplinary contribution. A must-read for videogame scholars, practicing game makers, and anyone interested in the potential of ‘game poems.’”—Susana Ruiz, University of California, Santa Cruz
 
“This book tenaciously wrenches videogame hermeneutics from the insatiable maws of rhetoric and narratology—to the cheers of poets everywhere. In elucidating the lyric characteristics of the "game poem," Magnuson demonstrates not just that poetry is a useful lens for understanding videogames, but also that videogames can be a useful lens for understanding poetry. A rewarding text for scholars, game designers, poets, and anyone in between.”—Allison Parrish, Interactive Telecommunications Program and Interactive Media Arts, NYU
 
“A concise, passionate articulation - and defense! - of an artistic space between poems and videogames. If game scholars wish to prove that they are not engaged merely in an apologetics for violent pornography, they need only to teach this book.”—Chris Bateman, author of Imaginary Games and 21st Century Game Design
 
“I feel I've found a kindred spirit in Jordan Magnuson and his practical recommendations for creating distilled, compelling, personal videogames – throw out the conventions of game design one at a time? Yes, please! The revelation for me in this book, however, is the heat and power of the language of poets and poetry brought close to videogame design. There's much in here worth pursuing to kindle the fires of new and exciting videogame poems, and Jordan is a capable and delightfully humble guide.”—Pippin Barr, author of How to Play a Video Game and The Stuff Games Are Made Of
 
“With Game Poems, Jordan Magnuson lays to rest any last vestige of the notion that the implicit limits of games are as ‘entertainment products’. By taking games seriously as successors of the lyric poetry tradition, he opens up new avenues for how game designers can think about what they do, how critical game theorists can approach their many-faceted object of study, and how players can more fully engage with videogames.”—Soraya Murray, author of On Video Games
 
“Game Poems shines an important light on a neglected area of videogame theory and provides unique guidance for those interested in exploring the poetic potential of videogames.”—Jenova Chen, designer of Flow, Flower, Journey, and Sky: Children of the Light
 
“Popular frameworks for video game scholarship consistently fail to account for the most avant-garde and affective works of interactive art. With Game Poems, Jordan Magnuson provides not only a lens to understand these diverse and important titles but also a guide to constructing the next generation of personal and incisive games. With numerous examples from decades of experimental games, including Magnuson's own minimalist and insightful work, this book is an excellent introduction to the form for neophytes as well as finally providing words to describe a movement that many experienced game poets previously understood only intuitively.”—Gregory Avery-Weir, creator of The Majesty of Colors and Looming
 
“Jordan Magnuson is one of a surprisingly small group of artists who see in the technology of videogames a versatile medium capable of expressing much more than conventional games.”—Michaël Samyn, co-founder, Tale of Tales; co-creator of Sunset, The Graveyard, and The Path
 
“So much has been written about what games are, and yet there’s always a new way of thinking about them. In Jordan Magnuson’s Game Poems we discover that games are also a lyrical form of art; that games can be understood as poetry, and that the making games as poetry creates new modes of artistic expression. Jordan Magnuson’s book is a fascinating exploration of games as poetry, and the poetry of play.”—Miguel Sicart, author of Play Matters, Beyond Choices: The Design of Ethical Gameplay, and Playing Software
 
“In Game Poems, I found a new perspective on the kind of videogames that are dearest to me: short, personal, poetic games. By looking at games through the lens of lyric poetry, Jordan Magnuson puts into focus the workings of that mysterious hodgepodge of audio, visuals, and interactivity: the language of videogames. Both experienced and novice game makers will find approachable, practical advice on the craft of videogames. And anyone who plays short games will find new ways of appreciating and talking about them. I know I will be returning to it for inspiration when making my own small games!”—Adam Le Doux, creator of Bitsy
 
“As a creator and researcher, Jordan Magnuson has been able to demonstrate through the utmost visual simplicity, by enhancing basic geometric forms, the empathetic capacity of the videogame medium. Game Poems explores this idea and the reconfiguration of the videogame beyond its ludic component, highlighting the artistic and poetic potential of games.”—Antonio César Moreno Cantano, University Complutense of Madrid
 
“Poems ask us to slow down, pay attention, and take the time to appreciate our experiences. Emerging from Magnuson's need to find ways to talk about his own creative practice, this book is all about discovering ways to do this with videogames. Magnuson explores what it means to view videogames as poetry, and provides insight, as a practitioner, on how to make game poems that enable and encourage this type of reflection. Drawing on a wide range of sources, from literature and philosophy to game studies and game design, this book covers a lot of material, but always remains grounded in concrete examples and solid theory. The book ends with a call to “go make some game poems!” After reading the book, I was keen to do exactly that. I urge you to do the same!”—Alex Mitchell, National University of Singapore
 
“To many, poetry is a dying – or dead – art form. Few people sit down at night to open their favorite poet’s chapbook with the latest streaming service at hand or their favorite videogame console sitting nearby. Spectacle seems to be the cultural norm, and this can be no more evident than in videogames: when the latest and greatest offers 60+ hours of spine-tingling excitement, why would someone want to launch a smaller-form game about expressions such as love, death, loneliness, or even God? But, as Jordan Magnuson, in his new book Games Poems, shows, poems have always been an integral piece of forming human culture. Poems have the ability to get right to the heart of the matter and, in fact, pierce the heart of the reader. Poems can be a form of cultural resistance, and even launch revolutions. Magnuson’s book highlights what it means to use the medium of game design as poetry. Magnuson presents several examples of the intricacies of poetry in general, as well as work that fuses the ideals of poetry with game design. Magnuson succinctly examines how the imagination, rhythm, intensity, style – and brevity – of poetry can enlighten the game design process in order to form possibility spaces within videogames that are pointed and powerful.”—Tim Samoff, Games and Interactive Media Program Director, Azusa Pacific University

How people traveled, and how people wrote about travel, changed in the interwar years. Novel technologies eased travel conditions, breeding new iterations of the colonizing gaze. The sense that another war was coming lent urgency and anxiety to the search for new places and “authentic” experiences. In Interwar Itineraries: Authenticity in Anglophone and French Travel Writing, Emily O. Wittman identifies a diverse group of writers from two languages who embarked on such quests. For these writers, authenticity was achieved through rugged adventure abroad to economically poorer destinations. Using translation theory and new approaches in travel studies and global modernisms, Wittman links and complicates the symbolic and rhetorical strategies of writers including André Gide, Ernest Hemingway, Michel Leiris, Isak Dinesen, Beryl Markham, among others, that offer insight into the high ethical stakes of travel and allow us to see in new ways how models of the authentic self are built and maintained through asymmetries of encounter.

“This book offers a valuable account of literary activity in a genre still inadequately covered in literary-critical history. Emily Witt- man organizes her material through pairings and contextualizing that are instructive and illuminating and often exciting . . . This is comparative literature at its best.” —Vincent Sherry, Washington University

In Italy to Argentina: Travel Writing and Emigrant Colonialism, Tullio Pagano examines Italian emigration to Argentina and the Rio de la Plata region through the writings of Italian economists, poets, anthropologists, and political activists from the 1860s to the beginning of World War I. He shows that Italians played an important role in the so-called conquest of the desert, which led to Argentina's economic expansion and the suppression and killing of the remaining indigenous population. Many of the texts he discusses have hardly been studied before: from Paolo Mantegazza’s real and imaginary travel narratives at the time of Italian unification to Gina Lombroso’s descriptions of Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina in early 1900s. Pagano questions the apparent opposition between diaspora and empire and argues that there was a continuity between the “peaceful conquest” though spontaneous emigration envisioned by Italian liberal intellectuals at the turn of the century and the military colonialism of Italian Nationalists and Fascists. He shows that racist assumptions about Native American and “creole” cultures were present in the work of progressive authors like Edmondo de Amicis, whose writings became enormously popular in Argentina, and anarchist militants and legal scholars like Pietro Gori, who founded the first revolutionary unions in Buenos Aires while remaining dangerously attached to Cesare Lombroso’s theories of atavism and primitivism. The “growl” of Italian emigrants about to land in Argentina, found in Dino Campana’s poem Buenos Aires (1907), echoes throughout Pagano’s book, and encourages the reader to explore the apparent oxymoron of “emigration colonialism” and the role of literature and public media in the formation of our social imaginary.

“Italy to Argentina shows meticulous bibliographic work and is attentive to both fundamental and marginal texts in a double task, on the one hand, of textual analysis, and on the other, of rescuing and recovering a corpus forgotten by critics even when it is highly significant. It is, then, a research work that addresses the Italian emigration to Argentina from an original point of view, linking texts that have not been studied or that have not been sufficiently analyzed.” —Fernanda Elisa Bravo Herrera, author of Huellas y recorridos de una utopía: La emigración italiana en la Argentina

"From Boccadasse to La Boca. Tullio Pagano complexifies the relationship between ‘diaspora’ and ‘colonialism’ in the context of Italian migration to South America. In six thematic chapters, Pagano explores the thought of authors on and off the canon. Such diverse voices lead the reader to a new approach to the study of emigrant colonialism and creole studies, towards a deeper, more realistic understanding of the  ‘conquest of the desert’ that Italian emigrants wanted to perform in Argentina."—Giuseppe Gazzola, Stony Brook University

Contemporary Spain reflects broader patterns of globalization and has been the site of tensions between nationalists and immigrants. This case study examines a rural town in Spain’s Andalucía in order to shed light on the workings of coexistence. The town of Órgiva’s diverse population includes hippies from across Europe, European converts to Sufi Islam, and immigrants from North Africa. Christina Civantos combines the analysis of written and visual cultural texts with oral narratives from residents. In this book, we see that although written and especially televisual narratives about the town highlight tolerance and multiculturalism, they mask tensions and power differentials. Toleration is an ongoing negotiation, and this book shows us how we can identify the points of contact that create robust, respect-based tolerance.

“This is a book that is both a personal account and a rigorous academic study. It is a model for the kind of engaged humanistic work we are now beginning to see as a hallmark of the post-theory moment, and one that remembers the hard lessons of ethnographic fieldwork as well as the challenging foundational work from philosophically-tinged theory.” —Debra A. Castillo, Cornell University

“Filled with rich descriptions and interwoven personal anecdotes of both Civantos and her interlocuters that complement scholarly analysis.” —Jessica R. Boll, Carroll University

In 1847, Russian military engineer and diplomat Egor Petrovich Kovalevsky embarked on a journey through what is today Egypt, Sudan, Eritrea, and Ethiopia, recording his impressions of a region in flux. Invited by Egyptian ruler Mohammed Ali to look for gold and construct mines in the area between the Blue and White Nile, Kovalevsky captured the social milieu of both elites and ordinary people as well as compiled a rich record of the Upper Nile’s climate and natural resources. A Journey to Inner Africa, masterfully translated into English for the first time by Anna Aslanyan, is both a tale of encounter between Russia and northern Africa and an important document in the history and development of the Russian imperial project.

Contributions by Egor Kovalevsky, Anna Aslanyan, Sergey Glebov, David Schimmelpenninck, Mukaram Hhana, and Michal Wasiucionek

All judges legitimize their decisions in writing, but US Supreme Court justices depend on public acceptance to a unique degree. Previous studies of judicial opinions have explored rhetorical strategies that produce legitimacy, but none have examined the laudatory, even operatic, forms of writing Supreme Court justices have used to justify fundamental rights decisions. Doug Coulson demonstrates that such “judicial rhapsodies” are not an aberration but a central feature of judicial discourse.

First examining the classical origins of divisions between law and rhetoric, Coulson tracks what he calls an epideictic register—highly affective forms of expression that utilize hyperbole, amplification, and vocabularies of praise—through a surprising number of landmark Supreme Court opinions. Judicial Rhapsodies recovers and revalues these instances as significant to establishing and maintaining shared perspectives that form the basis for common experience and cooperation.

“Judicial Rhapsodies is both compelling and important. Coulson brings his well-developed knowledge of rhetoric to bear on one of the most central (and most democratically fraught) means of governance in the United States: the Supreme Court opinion. He demonstrates that the epideictic, far from being a dispensable or detestable element of judicial rhetoric, is an essential feature of how the Court operates and seeks to persuade.” —Keith Bybee, Syracuse University

Kemtzij: Weaving Reciprocal Indigenous Ontologies in Kaqchikel Maya Arts focuses on the artistic contributions of contemporary Kaqchikel Mayas in Guatemala and their diasporas. Rather than representing Kaqchikel Mayas as exclusively existing in their pre-Hispanic past, the contributors to this edited volume—Kaqchikel and non-Kaqchikel scholars—demonstrate the distinct interdisciplinary ways that contemporary Kaqchikels engage with present-day Maya aesthetics and artistic initiatives in Guatemala and abroad. With a focus on the key concepts of reciprocity and duality, the chapters in this book consider the myriad ways in which Kaqchikel Mayas express their identities, through poetry, textiles, community street art, and digital photo collages. Kemtzij is unique in being published bilingually in Kaqchikel and English, making it one of few texts to consider Kaqchikel lives and artistic production—and the ontological implications of that work—in and through the Kaqchikel language.

Local Ecologies: Artistic Investigations of Eastern Massachusetts is an innovative multimedia exploration of the entangled natural and cultural ecologies of Eastern Massachusetts. The book’s rich archive of essays, interviews, and artistic projects reveals the region’s layered Indigenous, colonial, and industrial histories, showing how art can deepen understanding of place. The volume foregrounds multiple ways of knowing and making place—through observation, research, memory, and collective action—offering the reader models for ongoing engagement with the region and beyond.

Developed through a multiyear collaboration among artists, scholars, activists, and community stakeholders, this volume takes its name from an initiative hosted by three University of Massachusetts campuses (Boston, Dartmouth, and Lowell) in 2019 and 2020. Through essays, videos, sound artworks, artist books, and other intermedia offerings, the book’s contributors reflect on sites such as Walden Pond, Deer Island in Boston Harbor, New Bedford Harbor, and the Merrimack River, tracing histories of use and interpretation of place, and exploring contemporary responses to those legacies through creative acts of reclamation. At a moment when the infrastructures of cultural memory are increasingly under threat, Local Ecologies insists on art as a vital mode of collective reckoning and possibility.

Decadence meets gothic in Manfred Macmillan (1907), a carefully constructed tale of doppelgangers, magical intrigue, and the rootless scion of a noble house. This annotated, first-ever English translation presents an early queer novel long unavailable except in the original Czech. Author Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic (1871–1951) was a major cultural figure in his native Bohemia and cultivated ties with fellow artists from across Central Europe. In their extensive scholarly introduction, translator Carleton Bulkin and translation scholar Brian James Baer situate the novel within longer histories of gay literature, fascinations with the occult, and the cultural and linguistic politics of so-called peripheral European nations. They persuasively frame Karásek as a queer author and cultural disruptor in the fin de siècle Habsburg space.

Karasék rejected Czech translations of ancient Greek writers that bowdlerized gay themes, and he personally and vigorously defended Oscar Wilde in print, both on the grounds of artistic freedom and of private morality. He also published a cycle of homoerotic poems under the title Sodom, confiscated by the Austrian authorities but republished in 1905 and repeatedly afterward. A colonized subject, a literary decadent, and a sexual outlaw, Karasék’s complex responses to his own marginalization can be traced through his fantastically strange novel trilogy Three Magicians. As the first volume in that series, Manfred Macmillan is a gorgeous, compelling, and important addition to expanding canons of LGBTQI+ literature.

In an era of climate change, extractivist economies, and forced mobility, who and what belongs? Throughout her prolific career, Brazilian artist Maria Thereza Alves has focused precisely on this question. Perhaps her most iconic, generative, and expansive work is Seeds of Change, a twenty-year investigation into the hidden history of ballast flora—displaced plant seeds found in the soil used to balance shipping vessels during the colonial period.

The project examines the influx and significance of imported plants, materializing at port cities across several continents: Marseille, Reposaari, Liverpool, Exeter and Topsham, Dunkerque, Bristol, Antwerp, and most recently New York, where it was awarded the Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School. In each city, Seeds of Change has revealed the entangled relationship between “alien” plant species and the colonial maritime trade of goods and enslaved peoples, contrasting their seemingly innocuous beauty with the violent history associated with their arrival. By focusing on ballast flora, Alves invites us to de-border postcolonial historical narratives and consider a “borderless history.”

The first monograph of Alves’s historic project, Seeds of Change is edited by Carin Kuoni and Wilma Lukatsch and features essays by the artist as well as Katayoun Chamany, Seth Denizen, Jean Fisher, Yrjö Haila, Richard William Hill, Heli M. Jutila, J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Lara Khaldi, Tomaž Mastnak, Marisa Prefer, and Radhika Subramaniam.

Examining Russian-language media from the “long 1990s”—the period beginning with Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost (“openness”) and ending with the election of President Vladimir Putin—Media Cultures of the Russian 1990s shows how post-Soviet civil society emerged simultaneously with the explosion of new media, especially a newly liberated television and internet. A brief and contested period of media independence ensued as explosive creativity collided with rank commercialism, journalistic integrity with burgeoning political ambitions, and fringe with mainstream. By the late 1990s, however, the media landscape had succumbed to economic and political exploitation. The causes and nature of this shift, which set the stage for Putin’s crackdown on independent media after 2000—as well as Russia’s slide into aggressive authoritarianism—are embedded in the era’s media artifacts.

Written by an interdisciplinary group of experts, this edited collection addresses the mutual influence among disparate spheres of public life that enabled the media “Wild West” of the first post-Soviet decade. As a joint platform, the volume and the associated Multimedia Sourcebook of the Russian 1990s present the decade’s media cultures in a manner that reflects their historical interconnectedness and relationship to the global present.

Edited by Maya Vinokour with contributions from Bradley Gorski, Courtney Doucette, Fabrizio Fenghi, Rita Safariants, Daniil Leiderman, Thomas Keenan, and Pavel Khazanov.

Media Travels: Toward An Atlas of Global Media fills a significant gap in global media scholarship by offering short, readable articles covering different types of media from around the world. Through careful and informed analysis, these eleven accessibly written chapters illustrate the particularities of different media practices and situate them within social, historical, and geographical contexts. Examples range from South African video games to Korean TV series popular in Latin America to Indigenous film and media from the US and Canada.

Media studies courses, particularly introductory courses, are often narrowly focused on US and Western European canons. Instructors for introductory media studies courses wishing to expand the offerings in their curricula will find in these essays new ways of approaching foundational concepts and issues in the field, including globalization, social difference, and diverse media cultures. Scholars wishing to expand their research into specific media forms or representational issues can also turn to these case studies for approaches from beyond the US. By including a variety of media and several geographical areas, the collection introduces readers to the formal, technological, and cultural diversity of global media studies.

Edited by Juan Llamas-Rodriguez with contributions from Anthony Adah and Añulika Agina, Maria Corrigan, Benjamin Han, Anna Shah Hoque, Meryem Kamil, Angelica Marie Lawson, Lilia Adriana Perez Limon, Sonia Robles, Kuhu Tanvir, David Tenorio, and Rachel van der Merwe.

What is—what should be—the place of art in society? Is it merely decorative? Is it only to affirm a given set of cultural preferences? Or should it examine, challenge, even upend these norms to bring open new perspectives for those who experience what artists create?

Social practice artists offer a clear and unflinching answer to this question, setting before us works intended not merely to ask questions but to propose pathways toward large societal change.

In this volume, the work of two social practice artists of different generations and different social locations—Suzanne Lacy and Pablo Helguera—are brought into creative tension by two visionary curators: Elyse A. Gonzalez of the Art, Design & Architecture Museum of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Sara Reisman of the Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation of New York. Working together, Gonzales and Reisman bring the work of these two engaged and activist artists into dialogue, showing how art can be not merely the mirror of society but the means of making it more just, more inclusive, and more humane.

Netprov is an emerging interdisciplinary digital art form that offers a literature-based “show” of insightful, healing satire that is as deep as the novels of the past. This accessible history of Netprov emerges out of an ongoing conversation about the changing roles and power dynamics of author and reader in an age of real-time interactivity. Rob Wittig describes a literary genre in which all the world is a platform and all participants are players. Beyond serving as a history of the genre, this book includes tips and examples to help those new to the genre teach and create netprovs.

“Jargon-free and ambitious in scope, Netprov meets the needs of several types of readers. Casual readers will be met with straightforward and easy-to-follow definitions and examples. Scholars will find deep wells of in- formation about networked roleplay games. Teachers and students will find instructions for how-to play, and a ready-made academic context to make their play meaningful and memorable.” —Kathi Inman Berens, Portland State University

Painting History: The Murals of Northern Ireland, 1908–2024 is the first book-length study of the oldest and most enduring tradition of political wall art. Tony Crowley shows how muralism became an important medium for the unionist and loyalist community in its political domination of public space before and after Partition. The text also demonstrates that nationalists and republicans painted few murals before the start of the 1981 Hunger Strike, during which they painted wall art across republican areas of Northern Ireland as a way of publicizing their cause. In the context of a divided society, by the mid 1980s murals had become an established genre for the expression of political demands and aspirations.

In Painting History, Tony Crowley provides a detailed analysis of the complex tradition of muralism in the context of the history that produced it, with particular attention given to the cultural politics of this remarkable form. The book also raises and discusses a series of theoretical questions about murals and muralism that transcend Northern Ireland: issues of propriety and legality, form and content, authority and censorship. The work ends with a consideration of the future of the murals in a still polarized but changing region.

While uses and studies of XR technology within STEM-based education have been plentiful in recent years, there has been lesser or even, at times, a lack of coverage for this novel learning tool in the arts and humanities.Past and Future Presence aims to bridge some of that gap by presenting research-based theory and case studies of successful application and implementation of XR technology into postsecondary educational settings, ranging in topics from ancient to modern languages, classical and contemporary art, and reenvisioned historical scenes and events presented in ways never seen before. The studies also contemplate how this novel medium can enhance and supplement learning in classrooms and other formal or informal learning environments. The volume as a whole is intended to demonstrate to educators, scholars, and researchers in higher education the potential value of integrating XR technology into their classrooms and to provide a strong argument for college and university administrators to invest in training and development of new research and content for classrooms inside and outside of STEM. The authors of these chapters come from a diverse range of backgrounds at different stages of their careers, providing a broad crosssection of scholastic work within the humanities and arts. Each chapter offers a different angle or approach to incorporating XR technology into teaching or research within different subject areas. As the volume suggests, this technology also places additional emphasis on the humanity within the humanities, by focusing on increasing connection between users and different cultures, time periods, and perspectives.
 

Game streamers and live commentators are producing increasingly comprehensive analyses of gameplay, yet scholarship still tends to flatten the experiential media of video games into text for close reading. By shifting focus toward the immersiveness of video games, Playthrough Poetics makes the case for gameplay as a necessary, alternate method. Contributors to this volume engage widely with the activity of play through autoethnographies, meta-analyses of self-broadcasting, new procedural methods like gamespace soundwalking, as well as the affective aspects of games research. In doing so, they model new possibilities for academic players and gamers alike.

Rigorous scholarship meets cultural practice in this innovative, multi-modal edited collection that includes video essays and offers transcripts of the playthroughs themselves. Readers (and viewers) will come away with a toolkit of models, case studies, and conceptual frameworks for analyzing video games through gameplay. This volume is a fresh return to the joy of play: the poetics of games as contemporary forms of storytelling and interactivity.

With contributions from Ashlee Bird, Brandon Blackburn, Milena Droumeva, Kishonna Gray, Robyn Hope, Ben Scholl, Maria Sommers, Ashlyn Sparrow, Christine Tran, and Aaron Trammell.

Public Scholarship in Literary Studies demonstrates that literary criticism has the potential not only to explain, but to actively change our terms of engagement with current realities. Rachel Arteaga and Rosemary Johnsen bring together accomplished public scholars who make significant contributions to literary scholarship, teaching, and the public good. The volume begins with essays by scholars who write regularly for large public audiences in primarily digital venues, then moves to accounts of research-based teaching and engagement in public contexts, and finally turns to important new models for cross-institutional partnerships and campus-community engagement. Grounded in scholarship and written in an accessible style, Public Scholarship in Literary Studies will appeal to scholars in and outside the academy, students, and those interested in the public humanities.

"There are books of literary criticism that attempt to reach crossover audiences but none that take this particular public-humanities-focused-on-literary criticism perspective."—Kathryn Temple, Georgetown University

Contributions by Rachel Arteaga, Christine Chaney, Jim Cocola, Daniel Coleman,  Christopher Douglas, Gary Handwerk, Cynthia L. Haven, Rosemary Erickson Johnsen, Anu Taranath, Carmaletta M. Williams, and Lorraine York. 

This first title in the “Law, Literature & Culture” series uses six legal disputes from the South Carolina courts to illuminate the complex legal history of race in the U.S. South from slavery through Jim Crow. The first two cases—one criminal, one civil—both illuminate the extreme oppressiveness of slavery. The third explores labor relations between newly emancipated Black agricultural workers and white landowners during Reconstruction. The remaining cases investigate three prominent features of the Jim Crow system: segregated schools, racially biased juries, and lynching, respectively. Throughout the century under consideration, South Carolina’s legal system obsessively drew racial lines, always to the detriment of non-white people, but it occasionally provided a public forum within which racial oppression could be challenged. The book emphasizes how dramatically the degree of legal oppressiveness experienced by Black South Carolinians varied during the century under study, based largely on the degree of Black access to political and legal power.

“Recent arguments in African American History have emphasized the theme of continuity. . . . Race and Law in South Carolina recovers the theme of change over time by showing just how things have changed, and it does so through patient, thick description.” —H. Robert Baker, Georgia State University

“This book and its concomitant student project is an exciting endeavor. . . . The cases are captivating and accessibly written, making this a possible college classroom read.” —Vanessa Blanck, Rowan University

While all history has the potential to be political, public history is uniquely so: public historians engage in historical inquiry outside the bubble of scholarly discourse, relying on social networks, political goals, practices, and habits of mind that differ from traditional historians. Radical Roots: Public History and a Tradition of Social Justice Activism theorizes and defines public history as future-focused, committed to the advancement of social justice, and engaged in creating a more inclusive public record. Edited by Denise D. Meringolo and with contributions from the field’s leading figures, this groundbreaking collection addresses major topics such as museum practices, oral history, grassroots preservation, and community-based learning. It demonstrates the core practices that have shaped radical public history, how they have been mobilized to promote social justice, and how public historians can facilitate civic discourse in order to promote equality.

"This is a much-needed recalibration, as professional organizations and practitioners across genres of public history struggle to diversify their own ranks and to bring contemporary activists into the fold." — Catherine Gudis, University of California, Riverside.

"Taken all together, the articles in this volume highlight the persistent threads of justice work that has characterized the multifaceted history of public history as well as the challenges faced in doing that work."—Patricia Mooney-Melvin, The Public Historian

Covering nearly two centuries of cultural production, this compelling collection brings together critical readings from the genesis of Afro-Brazilian literary studies alongside some of Brazil’s most vital contemporary voices. From nineteenth-century pioneer Maria Firmina dos Reis to the boundary-breaking trans performer Linn da Quebrada, the contributions to this book trace a powerful lineage of Black intellectual, artistic, and political expression.

The authors engage urgently with questions of identity and the enduring realities of racism in Brazilian society, while confronting why race remains both central and controversial in Brazil’s cultural imagination. The contributors illuminate how Afro-Brazilian writers, artists, and thinkers have continually forged spaces to create, theorize, and assert their own subjectivities—challenging erasure and reclaiming Black agency. By mapping this expansive tradition across literature, music, and cultural thought, this book reveals not only the richness of Afro-Brazilian creativity, but also why Brazil still struggles to fully embrace its Blackness. Both historically grounded and sharply contemporary, it is an essential exploration of race, culture, and resistance in Brazil that will speak to scholars not just of Brazil but also of Latin America and the African diaspora.

In Reimagining Nabokov: Pedagogies for the 21st Century, eleven teachers of Vladimir Nabokov describe how and why they teach this notoriously difficult, even problematic, writer to the next generations of students. Contributors offer fresh perspectives and embrace emergent pedagogical methods, detailing how developments in technology, translation and archival studies, and new interpretative models have helped them to address urgent questions of power, authority, and identity. Practical and insightful, this volume features exciting methods through which to reimagine the literature classroom as one of shared agency between students, instructors, and the authors they read together.

“It is both timely and refreshing to have an influx of teacher-scholars who engage Nabokov from a variety of perspectives… this volume does justice to the breadth of Nabokov’s literary achievements, and it does so with both pedagogical creativity and scholarly integrity."—Dana Dragunoiu, Carleton University

"[A] valuable study for any reader, teacher, scholar, or student of Nabokov. Amongst specific and urgent insights on the potential for digital methods, the relevance of Nabokov for students today, and how to reconcile issues of identity with an author who disavowed history and politics, are much wider and timeless questions of authorial control and the ability to access reality."—Anoushka Alexander-Rose, Nabokov Online Journal 
 

Contributions by Galya Diment, Tim Harte, Robyn Jensen, Sara Karpukhin, Yuri Leving, Roman Utkin, José Vergara, Meghan Vicks, Olga Voronina, Lisa Ryoko Wakamiya, and Matthew Walker.

Contemporary popular culture is riddled with references to Mexican drug cartels, narcos, and drug trafficking. In the United States, documentary filmmakers, journalists, academics, and politicians have taken note of the increasing threats to our security coming from a subculture that appears to feed on murder and brutality while being fed by a romanticism about power and capital. Carlos Alberto Sánchez uses Mexican narco-culture as a point of departure for thinking about the nature and limits of violence, culture, and personhood. A Sense of Brutality argues that violent cultural modalities, of which narco-culture is but one, call into question our understanding of “violence” as a concept. The reality of narco-violence suggests that “violence” itself is insufficient to capture it, that we need to redeploy and reconceptualize “brutality” as a concept that better captures this reality. Brutality is more than violence, other to cruelty, and distinct from horror and terror—all concepts that are normally used interchangeably with brutality, but which, as the analysis suggests, ought not to be. In narco-culture, the normalization of brutality into everyday life is a condition upon which the absolute erasure or derealization of people is made possible.

"The study is original, bringing a wide range of voices into dialogue to present a problem that is pressing and deserving of careful analysis. The study will contribute to the field of Latin American philosophy in important ways... This is the only book by a philosopher on the topic of narco-culture, and I think it’s an important contribution to a topic that should be addressed by philosophers." —Elizabeth Millán, DePaul University

Shredding the Map investigates Russian place consciousness in the decade between the start of World War I and the end of the Russian civil war. Attachment to place is a vital aspect of human identity, and connection to homeland, whether imagined or real, can be especially powerful. Drawing from a large digital database of period literature, Shredding the Map investigates the metamorphic changes in how Russians related to places–whether abstractions like “country” or concrete spaces of borders, fronts, and edgelands–during these years.

An innovative, digitally-aided study of Russia’s “imagined geography” during the early decades of the twentieth century, Shredding the Map uncovers vying emotional patterns and responses to Russian ideas of place, some familiar and some quite new. The book includes new visualizations that connect otherwise invisible networks of shared place, feeling, and perception among dozens of writers in order to trace patterns of geospatial identity. A scholarly companion to the “Mapping Imagined Geographies of Revolutionary Russia” website and database, this book offers an innovative analysis of place and identity beyond the centers of power, enhancing our perceptions of Russia and encouraging debate about the possibilities for digital humanities and literary analysis.
 

Silencing the Drum exposes the profound struggle of Afro-Brazilian sacred music against escalating intolerance. Danielle N. Boaz and Umi Vaughan blend legal scholarship with ethnomusicology, offering a compelling narrative rooted in interviews with religious leaders, musicians, and activists across Brazil. This multidisciplinary exploration examines the relentless attacks against the practitioners of Afro-Brazilian religions—from discriminatory noise complaints in Bahia to vigilante violence in Rio de Janeiro.

The volume integrates multimedia elements including musical samples to vividly illustrate the struggles and resilience of Afro-Brazilian communities in the face of discrimination. As Silencing the Drum confronts the larger global issues of racism and religious freedom, it provides essential insights for scholars, activists, and anyone passionate about human rights and cultural preservation.

Sin fronteras: Inclusive Spanish Grammar Guidebook is the first ever Spanish language text to teach non-binary and gender-neutral language. It is an invaluable resource for intermediate and advanced learners that offers concise explanations and exercises for all major clausal structures, tenses, and moods. Along with including non-binary and gender-neutral language, the volume also incorporates the voseo, or the use of vos as a second-person singular pronoun that is common in many Latin American countries. This book expands the scope of traditional grammar instruction by including reading, writing, discussion, and independent research tasks that support the development of the competencies necessary to thrive in an increasingly interconnected and diverse world. Sin fronteras is suitable for independent study or for supplemental use in conversation classes, classes for heritage speakers, classes with a focus on the professions (e.g., medical Spanish, Spanish for business), and literature classes.

In Paloma Vidal's unforgettable novel Somewhere, an Argentine-Brazilian woman narrates her struggles to determine her identity and maintain relationships while moving between three languages and as many locations: Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, and Buenos Aires, her birthplace. The novel’s shifting first-, second-, and third-person narration mirrors the fragmentation the protagonist feels and encounters around her, engaging themes of immigration, identity, translation, war, and geographical estrangement. Translated into English from Portuguese for the first time, Somewhere reflects the narrator’s persistent attempts to position herself in relation to others and to make each city her own. Given our fraught geopolitical climate, the book's themes will resonate with readers of many different backgrounds. 

There have been few times in US American history when the very concept of freedom of speech—its promise and its contradictions—has been under greater scrutiny. Guided by acclaimed artist, filmmaker, and activist Amar Kanwar, the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School convened a series of public seminars on freedom of speech with the participation of some of the most original thinkers and artists on the topic. Structured as an open curriculum, each seminar examined a particular aspect of freedom of speech, reflecting on and informed by recent debates around hate speech, censorship, sexism, and racism in the US and elsewhere. Studies into Darkness emerges from these seminars as a collection of newly commissioned texts, artist projects, and resources that delve into the intricacies of free speech. Providing a practical and historical guide to free speech discourse and in-depth investigations that extend far beyond the current moment, and featuring poetic responses to the crises present in contemporary culture and society around expression, this publication provocatively questions whether true communication is ever attainable.

Contributions by Zach Blas, Mark Bray, Natalie Diaz, Aruna D’Souza, Silvia Federici and Gabriela López Dena, Jeanne van Heeswijk, shawné michaelain holloway, Prathibha Kanakamedala and Obden Mondésir, Amar Kanwar, Carin Kuoni, Lyndon, Debora, and Abou, Svetlana Mintcheva, Mendi + Keith Obadike, Vanessa Place, Laura Raicovich, Michael Rakowitz, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and Nabiha Syed.

Tania El Khoury’s Live Art is the first book to examine the work of Tania El Khoury, a “live” artist deeply engaged in the politics and histories of the South West Asia and North Africa (SWANA) region. Since the 2011 Syrian uprisings, El Khoury has conceived and created works about lived experiences at and across international borders in collaboration with migrants, refugees, and displaced persons as well as other artists, performers, and revolutionaries. All of El Khoury’s works cross borders: between forms of artistic practice, between artists and audiences, and between art and activism. Facilitating critical dialogue about the politics of SWANA and the impact of globalization, her performances and installations also test the boundaries of aesthetic, political, and everyday norms. This interdisciplinary and multimedia reader features essays by artists, curators, and scholars who explore the dynamic possibilities and complexities of El Khoury’s art. From social workers to archeologists to archivists, contributing authors engage with the radical epistemological and political revolutions that El Khoury and her collaborators invite us all to join.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Symbolist writers and thinkers at the forefront of Russian modernism cast Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy as their chosen ancestors—examples to be exalted, repudiated, and ultimately surpassed. Their writings transformed the way these novelists were read within and beyond the Russian Empire. But many of these seminal essays either have never been translated from Russian, or exist in unreliable translations that are now over a hundred years old. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in Russian Symbolist Criticism: A Reader opens this globally influential body of criticism to a new anglophone audience. The volume gathers fresh annotated translations of essays and readers will discover threads that extend toward writers from Sigmund Freud and J. M. Coetzee to Virginia Woolf and Mikhail Bakhtin. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in Russian Symbolist Criticism will appeal alike to students encountering Tolstoy’s and Dostoevsky’s novels for the first time, and to scholars of literary history and theory. This volume fills a longstanding gap in the study of Dostoevsky’s and Tolstoy’s novels and provides English-speaking readers with a missing key to the absorbing—and ongoing—story of their reception.

Hypertext is now commonplace: links and linking structure nearly all of our experiences online. Yet the literary, as opposed to commercial, potential of hypertext has receded. One of the few tools still focused on hypertext as a means for digital storytelling is Twine, a platform for building choice-driven stories without relying heavily on code. In Twining, Anastasia Salter and Stuart Moulthrop lead readers on a journey at once technical, critical, contextual, and personal. The book’s chapters alternate careful, stepwise discussion of adaptable Twine projects, offer commentary on exemplary Twine works, and discuss Twine’s technological and cultural background. Beyond telling the story of Twine and how to make Twine stories, Twining reflects on the ongoing process of making.

"While there have certainly been attempts to study Twine historically and theoretically... no single publication has provided such a detailed account of it. And no publication has even attempted to situate Twine amongst its many different conversations and traditions, something this book does masterfully." —James Brown, Rutgers University, Camden

Ultima and World-Building in the Computer Role-Playing Game is the first scholarly book to focus exclusively on the long-running Ultima series of computer role-playing games (RPG) and to assess its lasting impact on the RPG genre and video game industry. Through archival and popular media sources, examinations of fan communities, and the game itself, this book historicizes the games and their authors. By attending to the salient moments and sites of game creation throughout the series’ storied past, authors Carly A. Kocurek and Matthew Thomas Payne detail the creative choices and structural forces that brought Ultima’s celebrated brand of role-playing to fruition.

This book first considers the contributions of series founder and lead designer, Richard Garriott, examining how his fame and notoriety as a pioneering computer game auteur shaped Ultima’s reception and paved the way for the evolution of the series. Next, the authors retrace the steps that Garriott took in fusing analog, tabletop role-playing with his self-taught lessons in computer programming. Close textual analyses of Ultima I outline how its gameplay elements offered a foundational framework for subsequent innovations in design and storytelling. Moving beyond the game itself, the authors assess how marketing materials and physical collectibles amplified its immersive hold and how the series’ legions of fans have preserved the series. Game designers, long-time gamers, and fans will enjoy digging into the games’ production history and mechanics while media studies and game scholars will find Ultima and World-Building in the Computer Role-Playing Game a useful extension of inquiry into authorship, media history, and the role of fantasy in computer game design.

Unbroken Nostalgia: Haitian Kreyòl Poetry in Cuba is the first English translation and scholarly edition of the collection Nostalji san pwen ni vigil: pwezi kreyòl nan peyi Kiba (2016) by Hilario Batista Félix. A poet, journalist, and language activist, Batista (1955– ) embodies and expresses Cuba’s cultural and linguistic diversity as a descendant of Haitian migrant workers to Eastern Cuba during the mid-twentieth century; his poems bridge regions usually separated by language—the Spanish and Creolophone/Francophone Caribbean—and vividly depict the distinct heritage of Haitian Cubans and their shared dreams and challenges. A scholarly introduction by translator and editor Mariana F. Past provides biographical information about the author, situates his work within Haitian diasporic literature, and addresses patterns of Haitian migration to Cuba. Batista’s original poems appear alongside facing-page English translations with annotations that clarify historical figures and events, geographical features, and Haitian cultural and religious practices. Grounded in oral storytelling traditions, Unbroken Nostalgia brings to light the collective memory and complicated hybridity of the Haitian community in Cuba and upholds Haitian Kreyòl as a language of resistance.

Climate change, biodiversity loss, and environmental injustice are complex, messy, and gravely important issues. In addressing these concerns, traditional ecocriticism understandably has taken itself very seriously. Unserious Ecocriticism, by contrast, highlights alternative responses to the challenges of environmental collapse and catastrophe. By theorizing an unserious ecocriticism, contributors to this volume validate and empower alternatives to mainstream environmentalism, scholarship, and artmaking. The essays, artworks, and non-traditional scholarly formats of this edited collection demonstrate that the creative tools available to artists and those who study them are particularly well positioned to inventively disrupt normative modes of ecocritical presentation and environmentalist thought.

Rather than approach environmental crises through tragic and dire warnings, contributors take seriously the unexpected or easily dismissed, play with format and form, embrace the bodily and abject, take pleasure in their subjects of study, have fun, and crack jokes. In Unserious Ecocriticism, humor, playfulness, parody, and irreverence become tools to challenge expectations, cope with complicated problems, and imagine new futures.

Edited by Jessica Landau and Maria Lux, with a foreword by Aaron Sachs and contributions from Allie ES Wist, Deke Weaver, Kathleen McDermott, Annie Ronan, Kimiko Matsumura, Ina Linge, Paula Kupfer, Craig Carey, Anna Ialeggio, Topher Lineberry, Stentor Danielson, Patrick Gonder, Matthew Teti, Nicole Seymour, with Emily Eliza Scott, Rob Gioielli, and Jenny Price, Phaan Howng, and Jennifer Schell.

Following the California Gold Rush, writing by local Latinas was increasingly published in the California Spanish-language press, including many women who were not wealthy or of elite social standing. In Vasto Pensamiento, Vast Thought: Latinas in the Nineteenth-Century California Press, Vanessa Ovalle Perez identifies a diverse selection of Latina voices, focusing particularly on social justice messages and creative works. She traces how Latinas leveraged rhetorical strategies that were both socially performative and literary in a culturally specific Latinx context. In the oscillation between expressions of intimacy and self-conscious cultural and social positioning, these women sought platforms for both their personal ambitions and social justice causes. Taking an intersectional feminist approach paired with deep historical investigation, Vasto Pensamiento, Vast Thought centers the words and stories of these women writers and public speakers, providing transcriptions and translations of numerous key texts. These include Anastasia Leyva’s testimony of her brother’s lynching; speeches and toasts of women who participated in Mexican Patriotic Assemblies; fiction and poetry of sisters Guadalupe and Carlota Gutierrez; and verses by the anonymous poet “Josefina.” These texts offer insight related to nineteenth-century Latina personal and political investments across both sides of the border, allowing us to see the connectedness of rhetorical strategy and Latina self-fashioning in the public sphere.

The inaugural issue of VGAR celebrates video game culture as inclusive and global. Opening with an interview with the art director of the first independent Cuban video game, Savior, while the following essays from art historians, literary theorists, game designers, artists, educators, museum curators, and programmers all engage with video games as an important part of the global art landscape. Each engages with what makes good game art with special attention to the transnational cadre of gamers that play them.

Contributions by Jesse de Vos, Jacob Euteneuer, Monica Evans, Tiffany Funk, René Glas, Eddie Lohmeyer, Evan Meaney, Kieran Nolan, Josuhe Pagliery, Sercan Şengün, Teresa Silva, Christopher W. Totten, and Jasper van Vught.

This volume of VGAR critically analyzes video game art as a means of survival. Though “survival strategy” exists as a defined gaming genre, all video games—as unique, participatory artworks—model both individual and collaborative means of survival through play. Video games offer opportunities to navigate both historical and fictional conflicts, traverse landscapes devastated by climate change or nuclear holocaust, and manage the limited resources of individuals or even whole civilizations on earth and beyond. They offer players a dizzying array of dystopian scenarios in which to build and invent, cooperate with others (through other players, NPCs, or AI) to survive another day. Contributors show how video games focus attention, hone visuospatial skills, and shape cognitive control and physical reflexes and thus have the power to participate in the larger context of radical, activist artworks that challenge destructive hegemonic structures as methods of human conditioning, coping, and creating.

Contributions by Anna Anthropy , Andrew Bailey, Michael Anthony DeAnda, Luisa Salvador Dias, Tiffany Funk, Elizabeth LaPensée, Treva Michelle Legassie, Michael Paramo, and Martin Zeilinger.

This special edition of the VGA Reader, guest-edited by Christopher W. Totten and Enrica Lovaglio Costello, focuses on the connections between video games and architectural design. Each of the essays in this volume engages in critical investigations that reveal how game spaces evoke meaning, enhance game narratives, and explore unconventional themes.

Contributions by Christopher Barney, Enrica Lovaglio Costello, Ross De Vito, Chanelle Mosquera, Zack Ragozzino, Gabriella Santiago, Bobby Schweizer, Christopher W. Totten, Dr. Zöe J. Wood, and Robert Yang. 

In computing, overclocking refers to the common practice of increasing the clock rate of a computer to exceed that certified by the manufacturer. The concept is seductive but overclocking may destroy your motherboard or system memory, even irreparably corrupt the hard drive. Volume 4 of the Video Game Art Reader (VGAR) proposes overclocking as a metaphor for how games are produced and experienced today, and the temporal compressions and expansions of the many historical lineages that have shaped game art and culture. Contributors reflect on the many ways in which overclocking can be read as a means of oppression but also a strategy to raise awareness of how inequities have shaped video games.

Contributions by Uche Anomnachi, Andrew Bailey, Chaz Evans, Tiffany Funk, D’An Knowles Ball, Alexandre Paquet, Chris Reeves, and Regina Siewald.

Many ambitious and experimental game forms don't fit into the digital download or retail distribution channels that support so-called “traditional” video games. Instead, these games are supported by a new global movement in video game curation. This special edition of the Video Game Art Reader features an international collaboration of video game professionals working together to create a resource for game exhibition organization, design, and curation. Professionals, artists, and others who organize and curate video game exhibitions and events act within a rhizomatic network of methods, missions, and goals. They establish organizations like galleries, collectives, and non-profits. Methods of sharing video games as critical cultural phenomena continue to evolve and expand. Conceived during the first meeting of GAIA (Game Arts International Assembly), the Game Art Curators Kit documents and shares the collective experience of an international network of video game curators and organizers. Sharing practical tips on everything from accessibility to preservation, the book also serves as a guide to support a new global movement in video game curation.
 

Winner of the 2023 Richard J. Finneran Award for the best book about editorial theory or practice.

For more than half a century, the story of Emily Dickinson’s “Master” documents has been the largely biographical tale of three letters to an unidentified individual. Writing in Time seeks to tell a different story—the story of the documents themselves. Rather than presenting the “Master” documents as quarantined from Dickinson’s larger scene of textual production, Marta Werner’s innovative new edition proposes reading them next to Dickinson’s other major textual experiment in the years between ca. 1858–1861: the Fascicles. In both, Dickinson can be seen testing the limits of address and genre in order to escape bibliographical determination and the very coordinates of “mastery” itself. A major event in Dickinson scholarship, Writing in Time: Emily Dickinson’s Master Hours proposes new constellations of Dickinson’s work as well as exciting new methodologies for textual scholarship as an act of “intimate editorial investigation.”