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14 books match the query 'Foreign influences'

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Art beyond Borders

Artistic Exchange in Communist Europe (1945-1989)

Jérôme Bazin

Central European University Press, 2016

This book presents and analyzes artistic interactions both within the Soviet bloc and with the West between 1945 and 1989. During the Cold War the exchange of artistic ideas and products united Europe’s avant-garde in a most remarkable way. Despite the Iron Curtain and national and political borders there existed a constant flow of artists, artworks, artistic ideas and practices. The geographic borders of these exchanges have yet to be clearly defined. How were networks, centers, peripheries (local, national and international), scales, and distances constructed? How did (neo)avant-garde tendencies relate with officially sanctioned socialist realism? The literature on the art of Eastern Europe provides a great deal of factual knowledge about a vast cultural space, but mostly through the prism of stereotypes and national preoccupations. By discussing artworks, studying the writings on art, observing artistic evolution and artists’ strategies, as well as the influence of political authorities, art dealers and art critics, the essays in Art beyond Borders compose a transnational history of arts in the Soviet satellite countries in the post war period.

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CROSS-CULTURAL VISIONS IN AFRICAN AMERICAN MODERNISM

FROM SPATIAL NARRATIVE TO JAZZ HAIKU

YOSHINOBU HAKUTANI

The Ohio State University Press, 2006

Yoshinobu Hakutani traces the development of African American modernism, which initially gathered momentum with Richard Wright’s literary manifesto “Blueprint for Negro Writing” in 1937. Hakutani dissects and discusses the cross-cultural influences on the then-burgeoning discipline in three stages: American dialogues, European and African cultural visions, and Asian and African American cross-cultural visions.

In writing Black Boy, the centerpiece of the Chicago Renaissance, Wright was inspired by Theodore Dreiser. Because the European and African cultural visions that Wright, Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison acquired were buttressed by the universal humanism that is common to all cultures, this ideology is shown to transcend the problems of society. Fascinated by Eastern thought and art, Wright, Walker, Sonia Sanchez, and James Emanuel wrote highly accomplished poetry and prose. Like Ezra Pound, Wright was drawn to classic haiku, as reflected in the 4,000 haiku he wrote at the end of his life. As W. B. Yeats’s symbolism was influenced by his cross-cultural visions of noh theatre and Irish folklore, so is James Emanuel’s jazz haiku energized by his cross-cultural rhythms of Japanese poetry and African American music.

The book demonstrates some of the most visible cultural exchanges in modern and postmodern African American literature. Such a study can be extended to other contemporary African American writers whose works also thrive on their cross-cultural visions, such as Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, Charles Johnson, and haiku poet Lenard Moore.

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Distancing English

A Chapter in the History of the Inexpressible

Page Richards

The Ohio State University Press, 2009

How did fears of cultural inadequacy play out in the English language after American independence and the War of 1812? Like many of his nineteenth-century contemporaries, essayist Walter Channing suggests that the country’s perceived deficiency in literature is due to a crucial overlap with England, that is, having “the same language with a nation, totally unlike it in almost every relation.” In Distancing English, Page Richards shows how these concerns of language are historically interwoven with the inexpressible.

Often overlooked, the topos of the inexpressible redirects the ventriloquism of the English language. From its beginning, this topos combines the hyperbole of high expectations with the failure of inadequate words. In Charles Brockden Brown or George Tucker, it can register deficiency of “character” on and off the page, establishing important strategies of decenteredness also associated with modernism.

In writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Wallace Stevens, and John Berryman, the inexpressible seizes advantage from disadvantage. It runs through literary framing strategies and flexible shaggy dog humor. An opening to the 1855 Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman’s Preface remaps the topos andemerges as a distinguished moment in the articulation of the inexpressible.

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Empire Burlesque

The Fate of Critical Culture in Global America

Daniel T. O Hara

Duke University Press, 2003

Empire Burlesque traces the emergence of the contemporary global context within which American critical identity is formed. Daniel T. O’Hara argues that globalization has had a markedly negative impact on American cultural criticism, circumscribing both its material and imaginative potential, reducing much of it to absurdity. By highlighting the spectacle of its own self-parody, O’Hara aims to shock U.S. cultural criticism back into a sense of ethical responsibility.

Empire Burlesque presents several interrelated analyses through readings of a range of writers and cultural figures including Henry James, Freud, Said, De Man, Derrida, and Cordwainer Smith (an academic, spy, and classic 1950s and 1960s science fiction writer). It describes the debilitating effects of globalization on the university in general and the field of literary studies in particular, it critiques literary studies’ embrace of globalization theory in the name of a blind and vacant modernization, and it meditates on the ways critical reading and writing can facilitate an imaginative alternative to institutionalized practices of modernization. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalytical theory, it diagnoses contemporary American Studies as typically driven by the mindless abjection and transference of professional identities.

A provocative commentary on contemporary cultural criticism, Empire Burlesque will inform debates on the American university across the humanities, particularly among those in literary criticism, cultural studies, and American studies.

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Foreign Objects

Rethinking Indigenous Consumption in American Archaeology

Edited by Craig N. Cipolla

University of Arizona Press, 2017

Brass tinklers and pendants. Owl effigies, copper kettles, crucifixes with blue glass stones. What do they have in common? The answer spans thousands of years and a multitude of peoples and places, and reveals how people made sense of their world as they collected and used the objects they encountered.

Foreign Objects demonstrates the breadth and vibrancy of contemporary archaeology. Taking a broad set of archaeological cases from across the Americas, editor Craig N. Cipolla and the volume contributors explore how indigenous communities have socialized foreign objects over time. The book critiques the artificial divide between prehistory and history, studying instead the long-term indigenous histories of consumption, a term typically associated with capitalism and modern-world colonialism.

The case studies range from “exotic” stone tools used millennia ago to nineteenth-century patent medicines made and marketed by an Indian doctress. Foreign Objects focuses on how indigenous groups and foreign objects became entangled with one another in myriad ways. The book explores how the framework of consumption can shed new light on trade, exchange, materiality, and cultural production.

Contributors place foreign objects in the spotlight and offer a comparison of how this general class of material played a part in indigenous and colonial worlds. Each chapter illustrates how notions of consumption fit into their place in time and also delves into how foreign objects related to ideas of the body and personhood, how people used them to participate in political and spiritual worlds, and how they presented new ways of enduring or resisting European colonialism and capitalism. Foreign Objects is a critical look at consumption through the lens of indigenous knowledge and archaeological theory.

Contributors:

Matthew A. Beaudoin
Lewis Borck
Kathleen J. Bragdon
Craig N. Cipolla
Charles R. Cobb
John L. Creese
Diana DiPaolo Loren
Martin Gallivan
Meghan C. L. Howey
Barbara J. Mills
Maxine Oland
Lee M. Panich
Patricia E. Rubertone
Christopher Shephard
Keith D. Stephenson

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Full Metal Apache

Transactions Between Cyberpunk Japan and Avant-Pop America

Takayuki Tatsumi

Duke University Press, 2006

Takayuki Tatsumi is one of Japan’s leading cultural critics, renowned for his work on American literature and culture. With his encyclopedic knowledge and fan’s love of both Japanese and American art and literature, he is perhaps uniquely well situated to offer this study of the dynamic crosscurrents between the avant-gardes and pop cultures of Japan and the United States. In Full Metal Apache, Tatsumi looks at the work of artists from both sides of the Pacific: fiction writers and poets, folklorists and filmmakers, anime artists, playwrights, musicians, manga creators, and performance artists. Tatsumi shows how, over the past twenty years or so, writers and artists have openly and exuberantly appropriated materials drawn from East and West, from sources both high and low, challenging and unraveling the stereotypical images Japan and America have of one another.

Full Metal Apache introduces English-language readers to a vast array of Japanese writers and performers and considers their work in relation to the output of William Gibson, Thomas Pynchon, H. G. Wells, Jack London, J. G. Ballard, and other Westerners. Tatsumi moves from the poetics of metafiction to the complex career of Madame Butterfly stories and from the role of the Anglo-American Lafcadio Hearn in promoting Japanese folklore within Japan during the nineteenth century to the Japanese monster Godzilla as an embodiment of both Japanese and Western ideas about the Other. Along the way, Tatsumi develops original arguments about the self-fashioning of “Japanoids” in the globalist age, the philosophy of “creative masochism” inherent within postwar Japanese culture, and the psychology of “Mikadophilia” indispensable for the construction of a cyborg identity. Tatsumi’s exploration of the interplay between Japanese and American cultural productions is as electric, ebullient, and provocative as the texts and performances he analyzes.

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German Empires and Decolonial Fantasies, 1492–1942

Patricia Anne Simpson

University of Michigan Press, 2025

2026 DAAD/GSA Prize for the Best Book in History and Social Sciences Winner

German Empires and Decolonial Fantasies, 1492–1942 investigates the ways German-speaking Europe’s cultural narratives reflect histories of entanglement with the colonial world. Drawing from an impressive range of sources, Patricia Anne Simpson decodes the ironclad colonial logic that reproduces and inflects tropes of the conquistador, scientific explorer, and pioneers. She brings them into dialogue with a cast of historical agents who reimagine the cannibal, the enslaved, the conquered, Indigenous interlocutors, and the ungovernable. Throughout, intersectional attributes of race, gender, ethnicity, and religion reconfigure around shades of European whiteness. Individual chapters explore the Hohenzollern legacy in early modernity; debates about sovereignty and enslavement; recruitment literature, prose and fiction about migration and colonization in Africa and the Americas; and colonial memoirs driven by recolonial fantasies after 1918. German Empires and Decolonial Fantasies advances efforts to decolonize the multiple disciplines that intersect the field of German studies, including literary criticism, history, philosophy, art history, and anthropology.

German Empires and Decolonial Fantasies, 1492–1942 draws from a wide range of sources, from a seventeenth-century Brandenburg fort on the coast of Ghana to a novella about a beleaguered colonial administrator in German East Africa, to advance an interdisciplinary discourse at the nexus of colonial narratives and national imaginaries. Through detailed case studies, Simpson argues for the inclusion of voices that pushed back against imperialist expansion or intervention, as well as those historical actors who disputed the supremacy of whiteness and the persuasive power of German-centric national history.

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In the Mood for Texture

The Revival of Bangkok as a Chinese City

Arnika Fuhrmann

Duke University Press, 2026

In the Mood for Texture considers the revival of Chinese pasts and the aesthetics of colonial modernity in contemporary Southeast Asian cultural production, both virtual and material. By analyzing how twentieth-century Shanghai and Hong Kong have been revived in modern Bangkok’s architecture, design, fashion, and nightlife, Arnika Fuhrmann shows how Chinese pasts are redeployed in contemporary film, literature, and hospitality venues to shape present visions of Asia. At the heart of this inquiry stand Shanghai and Hong Kong’s anomalous colonial temporalities and Thailand’s semi-colonial temporality of the “never” and “yet still” of colonization. Attending to the textures of built environments and agentive female subjects, Fuhrmann reconceptualizes the revival of Bangkok’s Chinese pasts and demonstrates how Southeast Asian imaginations can challenge both domestic and diasporic narratives of identity and collectivity beyond China.

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Modern Japanese Literary Studies

Seth Jacobowitz and Jonathan E. Abel, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2026

Explores new directions in modern Japanese literature

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New Orleans and the Creation of Transatlantic Opera, 1819–1859

Charlotte Bentley

University of Chicago Press, 2022

A history of nineteenth-century New Orleans and the people who made it a vital, if unexpected, part of an emerging operatic world.

New Orleans and the Creation of Transatlantic Opera, 1819–1859 explores the thriving operatic life of New Orleans in the first half of the nineteenth century, drawing out the transatlantic connections that animated it. By focusing on a variety of individuals, their extended webs of human contacts, and the materials that they moved along with them, this book pieces together what it took to bring opera to New Orleans and the ways in which the city’s operatic life shaped contemporary perceptions of global interconnection. The early chapters explore the process of bringing opera to the stage, taking a detailed look at the management of New Orleans’s Francophone theater, the Théâtre d’Orléans, as well as the performers who came to the city and the reception they received. But opera’s significance was not confined to the theater, and later chapters of the book examine how opera permeated everyday life in New Orleans, through popular sheet music, novels, magazines and visual culture, and dancing in its many ballrooms. Just as New Orleans helped to create transatlantic opera, opera in turn helped to create the city of New Orleans.

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Reclaiming Diasporic Identity

Transnational Continuity and National Fragmentation in the Hmong Diaspora

Sangmi Lee

University of Illinois Press, 2024

The Hmong diaspora radiates from Southeast Asia to include far-flung nations like the United States, New Zealand, and Argentina. Sangmi Lee draws on the concept of diasporic identity to explore the contemporary experiences of Hmong people living in Vang Vieng, Laos, and Sacramento, California. Hmong form a sense of belonging based on two types of experiences: shared transnational cultural and social relations across borders; and national differences that arise from living in separate countries. As Lee shows, these disparate influences contribute to a dual sense of belonging but also to a transnational mobility and cultural fluidity that defies stereotypes of Hmong as a homogenous people bound to one place. Lee’s on-the-ground fieldwork lends distinctive detail to communities and individuals while her theoretically informed approach clarifies and refines what it means when already hybrid and dynamic identities become diasporic.

In-depth and interdisciplinary, Reclaiming Diasporic Identity blends ethnography and history to provide a fresh consideration of Hmong life today.

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Secondhand China

Spain, the East, and the Politics of Translation

Carles Prado-Fonts

Northwestern University Press, 2022

This transcultural study of cultural production brings to light the ways Spanish literature imagined China by relying on English- and French-language sources. Carles Prado-Fonts examines how the simultaneous dependence on and obscuring of translation in these cross-cultural representations created the illusion of a homogeneous West. He argues that Orientalism became an instrument of hegemony not only between “the West and the rest” but also within the West itself, where Spanish writers used representations of China to connect themselves to Europe, hone a national voice, or forward ideas of political and cultural modernity.

Uncovering an eclectic and surprising archive, Prado-Fonts draws on diverse cultural artifacts from popular literature, journalism, and early cinema to offer a rich account of how China was seen across the West between 1880 and 1930. Enrique Gaspar, Luis de Oteyza, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, and lesser-known authors writing in Spanish and Catalan put themselves in dialogue with Leo Tolstoy, John Dewey, W. Somerset Maugham, Bertrand Russell, Pearl Buck, and André Malraux, as well as stereotypical figures from popular culture like Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan. Throughout, Prado-Fonts exposes translation as a technology of cultural hegemony and China as an appealing object for representation. A timely contribution to our understanding of how we create and consume knowledge about the world, Secondhand China is essential reading for scholars and students of Orientalism, postcolonial studies, translation studies, comparative literature, and cultural studies.

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The Emperor’s New Epistemology

Music, Empire, and Empiricism in Early Modern China

Lester Hu

University of Chicago Press, 2027

An innovative account of listening and empire-building in 17th- and 18th-century China.

The Emperor’s New Epistemology explores how listening shaped knowledge and empire-building in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century China. As the Manchu dynasty expanded deep into Inner Asian territories deemed foreign by the majority-Han population, the Qing Empire’s musical culture encompassed the sounds of Mongols, Uyghurs, and Tibetans, as well as Western music brought by Jesuit and other Christian missionaries. Lester Hu reveals that this diversity transformed not only Qing court culture but the very grounds on which knowledge and power could be established.

In one revealing episode from 1692, the Kangxi Emperor (1654–1722) misinterpreted a key term of Classical Chinese music after studying European music with the Jesuits. Hu situates this anecdote within the political, social, and epistemic shifts that transformed late-imperial China. As Hu shows, listening was an instrument of Qing imperial authority: Knowledge about music, language, and even the universe could only be verified through the emperor’s ears. Furthermore, listening facilitated new theories of empirical knowledge, which both lent themselves to Qing-imperial ideology and generated new epistemic tensions. By exploring their echoes in similar shifts in early modern Europe, Hu’s book brings a global perspective to the study of music in the early modern world and reconsiders the transcendental ground on which such comparative and intercultural knowledge is possible.

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