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A century ago, activists confronting racism and colonialism—in India, South Africa, and Black America—used print media to connect with one another. Then, as now, the most effective medium for their undertakings was the English language. Imperfect Solidarities: Tagore, Gandhi, Du Bois, and the Global Anglophone tells the story of this interconnected Anglophone world. Through Rabindranath Tagore’s writings on China, Mahatma Gandhi’s recollections of South Africa, and W. E. B. Du Bois’s invocations of India, Madhumita Lahiri theorizes print internationalism. This methodology requires new terms within the worldwide hegemony of the English language (“the global Anglophone”) in order to encourage alternate geographies (such as the Global South) and new collectivities (such as people of color).

The women of print internationalism feature prominently in this account. Sonja Schlesin, born in Moscow, worked with Indians in South Africa. Sister Nivedita, an Irish woman in India, collaborated with a Japanese historian. Jessie Redmon Fauset, an African American, brought the world home to young readers through her work as an author and editor.

Reading across races and regions, genres and genders, Imperfect Solidarities demonstrates the utility of the neologism for postcolonial literary studies.

Locating the diffusion of mathematical concepts into modern literature, experimental music, and critical theory in twentieth-century Japan

In Indecomposable Continuum, Steven C. Ridgely explores where theoretical mathematics meets culture in twentieth-century Japan, tracing how concepts from relativity theory and topology migrated into Japanese art and literature. Through readings of avant-garde fiction, experimental sound practices, and postmodern theory, Ridgely demonstrates how topology became a language for rethinking space and perception.

Ridgely focuses on abstract models such as the Klein bottle, non-Euclidean geometry, and the Lakes of Wada to reveal how Japanese artists and intellectuals like Yuasa Jōji, Inagaki Taruho, and Asada Akira transformed difficult mathematical ideas into powerful aesthetic and social imaginaries in surprising and clever ways. Rather than treating mathematics as separate from cultural studies, Ridgely positions topology itself as a cultural form whose abstractions generated new possibilities for artistic creation and theoretical inquiry in music, novels, and popular media.

Indecomposable Continuum demonstrates how Japanese artists made seemingly impossible abstractions accessible and compelling, revealing the unexpected creativity that emerged when modern mathematics entered the cultural sphere. In doing so, the book offers a fresh perspective on the relationship between scientific thought and artistic modernism in Japan.

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Intersex Figures in Modern Japanese Literature and Art explores the history of intersex or futanari figures in modern Japanese literature and culture to examine the provocative discourses that defied a sexual regime as the modern nation-state of Japan advanced its national and imperial designs. As sexologists and medical practitioners continued reinforcing categories of “male” and “female,” “normal” and “pathological,” intersex literary figures garnered attention because the perceived subject was expected to be male or female—any variation was unintelligible. Many of the same century-old tropes and societal attitudes of needing to “cure” intersex persist. At the same time the 1991 novel Ringu by Suzuki Kōji testifies to a denial of futanari subjectivity, while the 1998 Japanese horror film (Ringu) and its 2002 American remake (The Ring) erase intersex all together.

Winston interrogates how the trope of the futanari is deployed for pragmatic or aesthetic purposes, thereby complicating the trajectory of the dominant sexological ideology of the time. Winston reads the figurative futanari in the works of Shimizu Shikin, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, and Takabatake Kashō, and reveals how the artists’ different approaches to the futanari served their agendas and expressed views that challenged the dominant discourse on intersex.