New Books in Literary Studies

Christina M. García’s book, Corporeal Readings of Cuban Literature and Art: The Body, the Inhuman, and Ecological Thinking (University Press of Florida, 2024), looks at Cuban literature and art that challenge traditional assumptions about the body. García examines how writers and artists have depicted racial, gender, and species differences throughout the past century - specifically, how these works interact with ecologies of the human and nonhuman across diverse media, time periods, and ideologies. To answer these questions, García uses the lenses of new materialism, critical race studies, critical animal studies, queer studies, and poststructuralism and identifies historical continuities in the way they have emphasized the shared materiality of bodies. Corporeal Readings of Cuban Literature and Art demonstrates that through their attention to the connections that different kinds of bodies share, Cuban creators have long undermined rules of classification and unification, reimagining community as shared vulnerability and difference.Christina M. García is assistant professor of Spanish at the College of Charleston.Tatiana Klepikova is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Regensburg, where she leads a research group on queer literatures and cultures under socialism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Drawing on literary texts, conversion manuals, and colonial correspondence from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain and Peru, Forms of Relation: Composing Kinship in Colonial Spanish America (University of Virginia, 2023) shows the importance of textual, religious, and bureaucratic ties to struggles over colonial governance and identities.Dr. Matthew Goldmark analyses these ties as forms of kinship forged outside of the well-studied paradigms of sex, biology, and procreation. He demonstrates how colonial actors—Spanish and Indigenous—vied for power when they argued that identity could be shaped by spiritual fatherhood, standardised education, or the regulation of doctrine.Forms of Relation illustrates why we must interrogate the dominant paradigms of mestizaje, heterosexuality, and biology that are too often left unchallenged in studies of Spanish colonialism, demonstrating how non-procreative kinships shaped the Spanish colonial regime.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Life on Earth is facing a mass extinction event of our own making. Human activity is changing the biology and the meaning of extinction. What Is Extinction?: A Natural and Cultural History of Last Animals (Fordham UP, 2023) examines several key moments that have come to define the terms of extinction over the past two centuries, exploring instances of animal and human finitude and the cultural forms used to document and interpret these events.Offering a critical theory for the critically endangered, Joshua Schuster proposes that different discourses of limits and lastness appear in specific extinction events over time as a response to changing attitudes toward species frailty. Understanding these extinction events also involves examining what happens when the conceptual and cultural forms used to account for species finitude are pressed to their limits as well. Schuster provides close readings of several case studies of extinction that bring together environmental humanities and multispecies methods with media-specific analyses at the terminus of life.What Is Extinction? delves into the development of last animal photography, the anthropological and psychoanalytic fascination with human origins and ends, the invention of new literary genres of last fictions, the rise of new extreme biopolitics in the Third Reich that attempted to change the meaning of extinction, and the current pursuit of de-extinction technologies. Schuster offers timely interpretations of how definitions and visions of extinction have changed in the past and continue to change in the present.Joshua Schuster is an associate professor of English and core faculty member of the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at Western University. He is the author of The Ecology of Modernism: American Environments and Avant-Garde Poetics and co-author of Calamity Theory: Three Critiques of Existential Risk. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In 2009, Fudan University launched China’s first MFA program in creative writing, spurring a wave of such programs in Chinese universities. Many of these programs’ founding members point to the Iowa Writers Workshop and, specifically, its International Writers Program, which invited dozens of Mainland Chinese writers to take part between 1979 and 2019, as their inspiration.In her book, The Transpacific Flow: Creative Writing Programs in China (Association for Asian Studies, 2024), Jin Feng explores why Chinese authors took part in the U.S. programs, and how they tried to implement its teaching methods in mainland China–clearly, a very different political and cultural environment.In this interview, Jin and I talk about the Iowa Writers Workshop, the Chinese authors that attended, and the surprising links between U.S. and Chinese academia.Jin Feng is Professor of Chinese and Japanese and the Orville and Mary Patterson Routt Professor of Literature at Grinnell College, USA. She has published four English monographs: The New Woman in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction (Purdue University Press: 2004), The Making of a Family Saga (SUNY Press: 2009), Romancing the Internet: Producing and Consuming Chinese Web Romance (Brill, 2013), and Tasting Paradise on Earth: Jiangnan Foodways (University of Washington Press, 2019), three Chinese books such as A Book for Foodies and numerous articles in both English and Chinese.You can read an excerpt of The Transpacific Flow here.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Transpacific Flow. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Anti-Blackness and Human Monstrosity in Black American Horror Fiction (Ohio State UP, 2024), Jerry Rafiki Jenkins examines four types of human monsters that frequently appear in Black American horror fiction--the monsters of White rage, respectability, not-ness, and serial killing. Arguing that such monsters represent specific ideologies of American anti-Blackness, Jenkins shows that despite their various motivations for harming and killing Black people, these monsters embody the horrors that emerge when Black American is disassociated from American. Although these monsters of anti-Blackness are dangerous because they can terrorize Black people with virtual impunity, their "anti-Black sadism," as Jenkins calls it, is what makes them repulsive. Jenkins examines a variety of these monstrous forms in Tananarive Due's The Between, Victor LaValle's The Changeling, Octavia Butler's Kindred, Nnedi Okorafor's Who Fears Death, and many other works. While these monsters and the texts that they populate ask us to think about the role that anti-Blackness plays in being or becoming American, they also offer intellectual resources that Black and non-Black people might use to combat the everyday versions of human monstrosity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Growing Up in the Gutter: Diaspora and Comics (U Arizona Press, 2024) by Dr. Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo offers new understandings of contemporary graphic coming-of-age narratives by looking at the genre’s growth in stories by and for young BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and diasporic readers. Through a careful examination of the genre, Dr. Quintana-Vallejo analyses the complex identity formation of first- and subsequent-generation migrant protagonists in globalised rural and urban environments and dissects the implications that these diasporic formative processes have for a growing and popular genre.While the most traditional iteration of the bildungsroman—the coming-of-age story—follows middle-class male heroes who forge their identities in a process of complex introspection, contemporary graphic coming-of-age narratives represent formative processes that fit into, resist, or even disregard narratives of socialisation under capitalism, of citizenship, and of nationhood.Dr. Quintana-Vallejo delves into several important themes: how the coming-of-age genre can be used to study adulthood, how displacement and international or global heritage are fundamental experiences, how multi-diasporic approaches foreground lived experiences, and how queerness opens narratives of development to the study of adulthood as fundamentally diverse and nonconforming to social norms. Dr. Quintana-Vallejo shows how openness enables belonging among chosen families and, perhaps most importantly, freedom to disidentify. And, finally, how contemporary authors writing for the instruction of BIPOC children (and children otherwise affected by diaspora and displacement) use the didactic power of the coming-of-age genre, combined with the hybrid language of graphic narratives, to teach difficult topics in accessible ways.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Anthony Grafton is the Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton, where he has taught since 1975. He is an historian of early modern Europe, and the author and co-author of over a dozen books, including The Footnote: A Curious History (Harvard University Press, 1997), and Inky Fingers: The Making of Books in Early Modern Europe (Harvard University Press, 2020).In November 2006 he spoke to the Institute about Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea (Harvard University Press, 2006), which he co-wrote with Megan Hale Williams. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Women across the Caribbean have been writing, reading, and exchanging cookbooks since at least the turn of the nineteenth century. These cookbooks are about much more than cooking. Through cookbooks, Caribbean women, and a few men, have shaped, embedded, and contested colonial and domestic orders, delineated the contours of independent national cultures, and transformed tastes for independence into flavours of domestic autonomy.Culinary Colonialism, Caribbean Cookbooks, and Recipes for National Independence (Rutgers University Press, 2024) by Dr. Keja Valens integrates new documents into the Caribbean archive and presents them in a rare pan-Caribbean perspective. The first book-length consideration of Caribbean cookbooks, Culinary Colonialism joins a growing body of work in Caribbean studies and food studies that considers the intersections of food writing, race, class, gender, and nationality. A selection of recipes, culled from the archive that Culinary Colonialism assembles, allows readers to savour the confluence of culinary traditions and local specifications that connect and distinguish national cuisines in the Caribbean.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

How can the novel be a way to understand the development of nation-state borders? An important work in the intersections of law, literature, history, and migration, Stephanie DeGooyer's Before Borders: A Legal and Literary History of Naturalization (Johns Hopkins UP, 2022) offers fascinating insight into understanding naturalization. Tracing the idea of naturalization as it can be understood as a legal fiction and through literary fiction, DeGooyer offers a compelling approach to understanding naturalization as a generative mechanism for national expansion. Through a careful and engaging analysis that spans from Mary Shelley to court proceedings, De Gooyer's Before Borders is a compelling read that will be of great interest for those interested in histories of migration, creative approaches to studying the state, and ways to approach law through and alongside literature.Stephanie DeGooyer is Assistant Professor and Frank Borden and Barbara Lasater Hanes Fellow in the Department of English & Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina. Her research focuses on the intersections between law and literature.Rine Vieth is an incoming FRQSC Postdoctoral Fellow at Université Laval. Interested in how people experience state legal regimes, their research centres around questions of law, migration, gender, and religion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Plato is a philosophical writer of unusual and ingenious versatility. His works engage in argument but are also full of allegory, imagery, myth, paradox and intertextuality. He astutely characterises the participants whom he portrays in conversation. Sometimes he composes fictive dialogues in dramatic form while at other times he does so as narratives. In How Plato Writes: Perspectives and Problems (Cambridge UP, 2023), world-renowned scholar Malcolm Schofield illustrates the variety of the literary resources that Plato deploys to achieve his philosophical purposes. He draws key passages for discussion particularly, but not only, from Republic and the less well-known Laws and also shows how reconstructing the original historical context of a dialogue and of its assumed readership is essential to understanding Plato's approach. The book will open the eyes of readers of all levels of expertise to Plato's masterly ability as a writer and how an understanding of this is crucial if we are to appreciate his philosophy.Malcolm Schofield is Emeritus Professor of Ancient Philosophy and Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge UniversityMorteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies