Blending biography with evocative vignettes, Chapal Rani traces the career of Bengali stage actor Chapal Bhaduri and his struggle for artistic identity in a changing world.

As the last great female impersonator of Bengali theater, Chapal Bhaduri—known as Chapal Rani—once held audiences spellbound in the jatra tradition, where men became goddesses and heroines. But when women finally took their place on stage, Chapal found himself exiled from the world he had ruled. In this groundbreaking biography, Sandip Roy captures the rise and fall of a performer whose art was inseparable from his identity.

Told in Chapal’s own voice and interwoven with evocative fictional vignettes, Chapal Rani, the Last Queen of Bengal brings to life Kolkata’s golden age of theater and the resilience of a man who refused to disappear. Through decades of research and deeply personal interviews, Roy crafts a moving portrait of gender and belonging.

Chinese Animation: Multiplicities in Motion is the first edited volume that explores the multiple histories, geographies, industries, technologies, media, and transmedialities of Chinese animation, from early animated special effects to socialist classics, from computer-generated-imagery (CGI) blockbusters to edgy independent films, and from stop-motion to virtual reality.

Its fifteen chapters, grouped under the five themes of junctures, gender, identities, digitality, and practices, span a century of animation since the 1920s across mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and the diasporic world. Derived from the 2021 Inaugural Conference of the Association for Chinese Animation Studies (ACAS), this volume as a whole defines Chinese animation studies as a new field of research emerging from the peripheries of modern Chinese literature and film studies on the one hand, and from the margins of Western and Japanese animation studies on the other. Incorporating diverse academic approaches and perspectives, this groundbreaking book is an indispensable guide for a rapidly growing community of scholars, students, animators, fans, and general readers interested in Chinese and world animation.

Following Stalin’s death in 1953 and Khrushchev’s acknowledgment of Stalin’s crimes in 1956, “sincerity” emerged as a cultural imperative in the Soviet Union. The cinema of this period turned inward, insisting on ordinary characters and creating a sense of spontaneity through particular staging methods and cinematic techniques, such as interior monologue and the close-up. These changes shifted the understanding of what “realism” meant and allowed Soviet cinema to reestablish with its audiences the trust that had been corrupted by serving Stalin’s cult of personality.

Using both theory and close readings of specific films produced in the Soviet Union during the Thaw, a period known for its relative political and cultural liberalization, Cinema of Sincerity treats sincerity as both a concept and an aesthetic strategy. Viktoria Paranyuk argues that Soviet cinema’s use of sincerity was a reworking of a trend in global cinema that sought to bridge the gap between reality and the filmed image. This period saw increased accessibility to world cinematic traditions, new voices in criticism, and, above all, the multigenerational effort in filmmaking that developed and thrived in centers outside Moscow. Paranyuk demonstrates how these changes allowed Soviet cinema to renew its visual language and use film as a space for collective self-examination.

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.

A wide-ranging group of scholarly essays that probe the historical nature of English identity, both through self-definition and in relationship to the rest of Europe

As the Iron Curtain fell and Cold War suspicions thickened in the second half of the twentieth century, the quintessentially American genre of rock and roll, seen as a potent symbol and product of an enemy ideology, quickly became a clandestine import in the USSR. The Soviet underground embraced the forbidden sounds, despite official propaganda that called rock stars social parasites and corrupting sluggards. Contrary to the regime’s desires, the genre grew in popularity until it could no longer be ignored. In the Soviet Union’s last decade, a flailing film industry, controlled by and dependent on an increasingly unstable central government, seized on the rock star as a central figure—and the Soviet rock film was born.

In Soviet Rock on Screen, Rita Safariants chronicles the birth, life, death, and resurrection of a genre that rapidly became one of the most readily recognized cultural signifiers of the perestroika era and which continues to reflect and codify Russian culture. During their initial heyday in the 1980s, rock films were influenced by and encouraged the cultural shifts of perestroika and the incipient political storm. Today, Safariants argues, the reemergence and reconfiguration of the genre indicates the extent to which Soviet-era cultural emblems inform Russian national identity and obliquely support the current political repression under Putin.