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Historians often assume a one-directional transmission of knowledge and ideas, leading to the establishment of spatial hierarchies defined as centers and peripheries. In recent decades, transnational and global historians have contributed to a more inclusive understanding of intellectual and cultural exchanges that profoundly challenges the ways we draw our mental maps. Covering the early modern and modern periods, Re-Mapping Centre and Periphery investigates the asymmetrical and multidirectional structure of such encounters within Europe as well as in a global context. The international team of contributors demonstrates how, as products of human agency, center and periphery are conditioned by mutual dependencies. Rather than representing absolute categories of analysis, they are subjective constructions determined by a constantly changing discursive context. Through its analysis, the volume develops and implements a conceptual framework for remapping centers and peripheries, based on conceptual history and discourse history

ecent scholarship tends to explain such influences as contributing to language hybridity---an advance over the traditional "deficit model." But Mao suggests that the "hybridity" approach is perhaps too arid or sanitized, missing rich nuances of mutual exchange, resistance, or even subversion. Through his concept of "togetherness in difference, Mao suggests that speakers of hybrid discourse may not be attempting the standard (and failing), but instead may be deliberately importing cultural material to create a distance between themselves and the standard. This practice, over time, becomes a process that transforms English, enriching and enlarging it through the infusion of non-Western discourse features, subverting power structures, and even providing unique humorous touches.

Of interest to scholars in composition, cultural studies, and linguistics as well, Reading Chinese Fortune Cookie leads in an important new direction for both our understanding and our teaching of English.

Asian American rhetorics, produced through cultural contact between Asian traditions and US English, also comprise a dynamic influence on the cultural conditions and practices within which they move. Though always interesting to linguists and "contact language" scholars, in an increasingly globalized era, these subjects are of interest to scholars in a widening range of disciplines—especially those in rhetoric and writing studies.

Mao, Young, and their contributors propose that Asian American discourse should be seen as a spacious form, one that deliberately and selectively incorporates Asian “foreign-ness” into the English of Asian Americans. These authors offer the concept of a dynamic “togetherness-in-difference” as a way to theorize the contact and mutual influence. Chapters here explore a rich diversity of histories, theories, literary texts, and rhetorical practices. Collectively, they move the scholarly discussion toward a more nuanced, better balanced, critically informed representation of the forms of Asian American rhetorics and the cultural work that they do.