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Characters with disabilities are often overlooked in fiction, but many occupy central places in literature by celebrated authors like Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie, J. M. Coetzee, Anita Desai, Jhumpa Lahiri, Edwidge Danticat, and others. These authors deploy disability to do important cultural work, writes Christopher Krentz in his innovative study, Elusive Kinship.  Such representations not only relate to the millions of disabled people in the global South, but also make more vivid such issues as the effects of colonialism, global capitalism, racism and sexism, war, and environmental disaster. 

Krentz is the first to put the fields of postcolonial studies, studies of human rights and literature, and literary disability in conversation with each other in a book-length study. He enhances our appreciation of key texts of Anglophone postcolonial literature of the global South, including Things Fall Apart and Midnight’s Children. In addition, he uncovers the myriad ways fiction gains energy, vitality, and metaphoric force from characters with extraordinary bodies or minds. 

Depicting injustices faced by characters with disabilities is vital to raising awareness and achieving human rights.  Elusive Kinship nudges us toward a fuller understanding of disability worldwide.

In this groundbreaking book, author Margaret Cantú-Sánchez takes on the U.S. educational system. Cantú-Sánchez introduces the concept of the education/educación conflict, where Latinas navigate the clash between home and school epistemologies under Anglocentric, assimilationist pedagogies.

By analyzing literature, such as Barbara Renaud González’s Golondrina, Why Did You Leave Me?, and education testimonios from seminal works like This Bridge Called My Back and Telling to Live, Cantú-Sánchez reveals how Latina/Chicana protagonists and students negotiate this conflict through a mestizaje of epistemologies—blending elements of both home and school cultures within the third space of education.

Cantú-Sánchez utilizes an interdisciplinary approach, deploying critical race theory, Chicana third-space feminism, and other pedagogical theories like sentipensante (a sensing/thinking) pedagogy employed by education scholar Laura Rendon, among others. By providing pivotal insights and strategies, she demonstrates how educators can implement culturally relevant pedagogies in their classrooms from K–12 through higher education, fostering environments where Latina/Chicana students can thrive without forsaking their cultural identities.

Empowering Latina Narratives not only identifies the challenges Latina/Chicana students face but also offers a roadmap for overcoming them, making this book an essential resource for scholars, educators, and students committed to culturally inclusive education.

A sweeping analysis of the lasting effects of neocolonial extractivism in Latin American aesthetic modernity from 1920 to the present

Looking to the extractive frontier as a focal point of Latin American art, literature, music, and film, Jens Andermann asks what emerges at the other end of landscape. Art in the Global South has long represented and interrogated “insurgent nature”—organic and inorganic matter, human and nonhuman life, thrown into turmoil.

In Entranced Earth: Art, Extractivism, and the End of Landscape, Andermann traces the impact of despaisamiento—world-destroying un-landscaping—throughout the Latin American modernist archive. At the same time, he explores innovative, resilient modes of allyship forged between diverse actors through their shared experiences of destruction. From the literary regionalism of the 1930s to contemporary bio art, from modernist garden architecture to representations of migration and displacement in sound art and film, Entranced Earth tracks the crisis of landscape and environmental exhaustion beyond despair toward speculative, experimental forms of survival.

American landscape painter Mary Sipp Green, based in the bucolic Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts, has a superlative ability to engage the viewer in the emotive atmosphere of her landscapes and seascapes. The intensely saturated colors in her works evoke an immediate sense of place and a unique perspective on an intimate tableau. Sipp Green achieves an ethereal, nuanced quality in her paintings that imparts a refined and inimitable serenity. In Every Hour of the Light: The Paintings of mary Sipp Green, many of the subjects she paints—salt marshes, barns, meadows, rivers, and the occasional cityscape—are captured in the exquisite twilight of early evenings or a luminescent sunrise. The effect is dreamy yet grounded and familiar.

Sipp Green states, "While my preferred medium has always been oil on linen, my methods, techniques, and aesthetic aims have all undergone significant transformations since I first began. I learned my craft in the studio, painting still lifes and portraits, as well as landscapes drawn directly from nature. Over time, I became increasingly engaged with more abstract and spiritual aspects of the landscape form and I began to pursue a less representational, more expressive style." When describing her "diffuse quality of color," she explains, "I use many layers of paint, allowing each to dry before the next is applied. Along the way, the surface of the paint is often refigured in unpredictable ways, and there is much that has to be scraped, sanded, destroyed and reapplied before the essence of a place, its mood and atmosphere, finally emerges onto the canvas."

An anthology of poems and essays by and celebrating Disabled writers

Declaring that Disabled people exist, innovate, thrive, and persevere, Every Place on the Map Is Disabled imagines the world we deserve. Its contributors spotlight the wisdom Disabled people embody from living within and navigating the economic and medical systems, communities, and families that often oppress their existence. This anthology is an intersectional compass pointing to the creative ways Disabled people build bridges to each other through Disability poetics and perspectives.

The contributing poets write about love, resistance, loss, pain, beauty, and culture. They capture tender and life-affirming moments where one Disabled person recognizes themself in another. The essays illustrate how Disability poetics suggest avenues for embracing the full spectrum of disability experiences. Every Place on the Map Is Disabled offers students, scholars, members of disability communities, and any reader a direction for paving a wider path toward a collective survival.

A timely look into how fascist ideas permeate contemporary culture well beyond the far right

As challenges posed by climate change have intensified in the twenty-first century, right-wing figures in the United States and abroad have increasingly framed anti-immigrant, anti-Indigenous, and white-supremacist sentiments in terms of environmental survival. Everyday Ecofascism explores the insidious nature of this tendency, revealing how permutations of these perspectives in fact resonate across the political spectrum. Drawing on comparative studies of fascism writ large, Alexander Menrisky demonstrates that ecofascism is best understood not as a uniquely right-wing ideology but as a political genre that reinforces white supremacy and other forms of domination.

Presenting a view of fascism as a complex power network that plays out on scales both large and small, Menrisky shows how extremist sentiments have crept into everyday language, stories, and ideas. Through a literary and cultural studies lens, he illuminates ecofascism’s narrative patterns and their easy permeation of environmentalist discourses, from back-to-the-land movements to the resurgence of psychedelic drugs, food localism, and pandemic politics. Opposite his analysis of ecofascism in action, Menrisky sheds important light on narrative resistances to dominant conceptions of race, nation, and territory by Native, queer, and women-of-color writers who have countered ethnonationalism for generations.

Bridging past and present, Menrisky powerfully nails down the emergent concept of ecofascism and forms a basis for understanding phenomena like Covid-19, ecological utopianism, and psychedelic environmentalism that detangles ecofascist tendencies from justice-oriented visions of place-based belonging.

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A richly illustrated account of the development of Singapore’s modern built environment.
 
Everyday Modernism is the first comprehensive documentation of Singapore’s modern built environment. Through a lens of social, cultural, and architectural histories, the book uncovers the many untold stories of the Southeast Asian city-state’s modernization, from the rise of heroic skyscrapers, such as the Pearl Bank Apartments, to the spread of typical utilitarian buildings like the multistory parking garage. It investigates how modernism, through both form and function, radically transformed Singapore and made its inhabitants into modern citizens. The most intensive period of such change, the author shows, happened in the 1960s and 1970s under the rise of a developmental state that sought to safeguard its new-found independence. The book also looks both earlier and later, however, ranging from the 1930s to the 1980s to cover a wider range of histories, building types, and architectural styles, expanding from the International Style and Brutalism into Art Deco and even a touch of Postmodernism. The book’s essays are richly illustrated with hundreds of archival images and illustrations, as well as contemporary photos by architectural photographer Darren Soh. By examining the evolution of the once exceptional into the typical and by learning how abstract spaces become lived places, the book traces how modernism has become part of everyday life in Singapore.
 

Evoking Newark is a systematic photographic documentation of Newark, NJ, from 1977-2024. This project creates a flexible framework for tracing Newark’s evolution. In this ambitious volume, award-winning photographer Camilo José Vergara creates an indelible record of the city, beginning along its most important commercial thoroughfares, such as Broad, Market, Springfield Ave., Clinton Ave., Central Ave., and MLK Jr. Blvd. He also takes a closer look at landmarks as well as more modest buildings whose folksy character caught his eye. As an urban documentary photographer, Vergara frequently returned to re-photograph Newark in order to track changes over time. For almost fifty years, he identified multiple street intersections that were particularly revealing settings for charting developments in the city.
 
Vergara examines in particular the slow renewal of these main thoroughfares, the demolition of high-rise housing projects, the ruination and clearing of industrial sites, the building of multi-family houses in once-vacant lots, and the construction of skyscrapers and cultural institutions. To complete the project, he added photos of graffiti and murals that comment on local and national events celebrating African American and Hispanic heroes and heroines and memorials remembering the dead. With these efforts at careful documentation, Brick City demonstrates the usefulness of a time-based documentary approach to the study of post-industrial urban areas. The photographs are accompanied by detailed captions about the locations portrayed, and in many cases by Vergara's own observations and transcripts of his interviews with local people as well as overheard conversations. The photos and captions are one way of telling us that “this happened,” and a means of refreshing the memories of viewers who have experienced Newark generations ago--recollections that contribute to their sense of identity.

How do we come to terms with what can't be forgotten?

How do we bear witness to extreme experiences that challenge the limits of language? This remarkable volume explores the emotional, political, and aesthetic dimensions of testimonies to trauma as they translate private anguish into public space. Nancy K. Miller and Jason Tougaw have assembled a collection of essays that trace the legacy of the Holocaust and subsequent events that have shaped twentieth-century history and still haunt contemporary culture.

Extremities combines personal and scholarly approaches to a wide range of texts that bear witness to shocking and moving accounts of individual trauma: Toni Morrison's Beloved, Sylvia Plath's "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus," Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss, Tatana Kellner's Holocaust art, Ruth Klüger's powerful memoir Still Alive, and Binjamin Wilkomirski's controversial narrative of concentration camp suffering Fragments. The book grapples with the cultural and social effects of historical crises, including the Montreal Massacre, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and the medical catastrophes of HIV/AIDS and breast cancer.

Developing insights from autobiography, psychoanalysis, feminist theory and gender studies, the authors demonstrate that testimonies of troubling and taboo subjects do more than just add to the culture of confession–-they transform identities and help reimagine the boundaries of community. Extremities offers an original and timely interpretive guide to the growing field of trauma studies. The volume includes essays by Ross Chambers, Sandra M. Gilbert, Susan Gubar, Marianne Hirsch, Wayne Koestenbaum, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and others.