Theatre as Alter/"Native" in Derek Walcott

Nirjhar Sarkar, Raiganj University, India

October 2022 / ISBN: 978-1-64889-431-2
Availability: In stock
179pp. ¦ $55 £40 €46

'Theatre as Alter/“Native” in Derek Walcott' attempts a close and detailed politico-aesthetic analysis of his major plays. At the core of this book lies the attempt to answer the question of how postcolonial artists and intellectuals have dared to imagine radically different ways of living in the face of oppositional, binary choices. And as the title suggests, Walcott’s plays carve out critical spaces for new narratives of “becoming” and alternative priorities, entangled in contesting identities inscribed by race, language and ethnicity. Theatre, as Walcott knew, would be instrumental in demystifying Caribbean “Absence” and “Void” and generating an alternative version of dominant reality. By a deliberate unseating of the Western texts, filled with banal stereotypes and their representational biases, and by triggering “re-action” to the scripts of the colonizers in profoundly paradoxical ways, Walcott’s plays affirm the Caribbean identity. This study seeks to demonstrate how his plays open an alter/“native” universe in terms of aesthetics, dramaturgy and the performative, and reclaims ‘New World’ identity in terms of negotiation rather than negation—undermining the claim of “solid”, “authentic” culture. Placing the arts at the forefront of nation-building, Walcott situated his plays at a crucial juncture between the passing of the Empire and the newly-born Federation in his archipelago.

Women and Religion in Britain Today

Belonging

Edited by Yvonne Bennett, Canterbury Christ Church University

November 2022 / ISBN: 978-1-64889-222-6
Availability: In stock
218pp. ¦ $87 £72 €82

Little is written about the lived religious lives of women in 21st-century Britain. The authors of this book seek to address this gap by exploring contemporary women’s spirituality in Britain. As the authors inhabit different academic fields, we bring together an interdisciplinary collection of voices to address this subject. We examine a range of ways in which religion continues to impact the lives of women in Britain today. The chapters of this book examine the manner in which religion and spirituality continue to impact women’s lives, and by doing so, we offer a heterogeneous look at religion in the 21st century. We not only tackle the spirituality of our research participants but, by writing about our experiences as ‘women being spiritual’, we offer a hybrid academic-practitioner viewpoint. From Islamic marriage laws to the ordination of female Anglican clergy, we focus on the concept of belonging (or not) through culture and the use of female-only spaces and organisations. Belonging is an important social motive; the need for acceptance and belonging is a fundamental concept that drives behaviours. Exploring how we belong grants an understanding of how choices are made, both by the individual and the group.

New to the LSP classroom? A selection of monographs on successful practices

Edited by Martina Vranova, Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic

January 2023 / ISBN: 978-1-64889-150-2
Availability: In stock
262pp. ¦ $87 £72 €83

As Languages for Specific Purposes have always been defined as student-oriented, the rationale behind this volume is to use the rather neglected niche of the other necessary agent of language instruction and thus focus on the LSP practitioner. This turn towards the instructor has been motivated by the fact that a great number of LSP practitioners enter their jobs without previous expertise. They lack LSP education, or they may not even have a background in applied linguistics. This motivation has proven valid as many of the volume’s contributors have faced this particular situation in their professional lives. For insights into the LSP field and guidelines on the best practices, they must rely on their colleagues who offer to share their experience through workshops, conferences, or papers, which is what this volume provides. The primary goal of this volume is to present considerations of what challenges LSP practitioners face and should be prepared for in their jobs and to provide practice-tested methodological guidelines on such demanding teaching techniques as blended and flipped learning or tandem learning. All papers have been written by LSP practitioners and researchers in higher education. Thus, this volume provides both guidance and self-reflection. In other words, it is written by experienced LSP practitioners for aspiring LSP practitioners about how they see themselves and what effort they make to meet the challenges of their jobs. As proof that LSP practice is a global challenge, papers have been collected from many European countries, the USA, Uruguay. Even though most papers are naturally concerned with English, being the lingua franca of today, the collection also features guidelines for teaching Spanish, French and Dutch for specific purposes. Moreover, the target disciplines these languages are taught for encompass business, engineering, sociology or medicine, thus supporting the assumption of the universal character of problems LSP practitioners deal with.

Being in Conscience: A Theory of Ethics

Lambros Philippou

December 2022 / ISBN: 978-1-64889-533-3
Availability: In stock
218pp. ¦ $74 £58 €69

This book aims to suggest a worldview departing from an articulation of a theory of conscience. It analyses the constitutive parts of conscience, a concept that has not been thoroughly examined and analysed in the discussions on ethics. Having the mechanisms of production of conscience as a point of reference, the book proceeds to discuss the concepts of subjective and collective evil. The concept of being in enhanced conscience aims to position the subjective conscience in human historicity. Based on the analysis of the roots of conscience, the subject is placed in the public sphere from the point of view of its corporeal harmony and disharmony as the conditions for its binding with the institutions and the spirit of a worldsphere. The book then expands its scope by addressing the question of what makes a worldsphere functional and dysfunctional. This analysis is useful for scholars who are interested in the deep structural conditions that produce and sustain a liberal democratic state. Through the analysis of inner-worldly and inter-worldly temporality, the mode of the creative rhythm is depicted by underlining the creative divergence that occurs not only within distinct worlds but also between worldspheres. The mediation of this analysis introduces the concept of planetary functionality whereby what is at stake is the islands of functionality that serve the survival of an interconnected world. The theory of conscience is applied also to the analysis of the state and of the economy. Conscience is also identified with the properties attributed to God, suggesting a new understanding of the meaning of religion and its role in human historicity. Finally, it argues that we should understand the future as the future of conscience that can function as the only motor of historical evolution.

Transnational Spaces: Celebrating Fifty Years of Literary and Cultural Intersections at NeMLA

Edited by Carine Mardorossian, University of Buffalo and Simona Wright, The College of New Jersey

December 2022 / ISBN: 978-1-64889-233-2
Availability: In stock
144pp. ¦ $66 £56 €63

This volume celebrates fifty years of NeMLA’s important presence in the world of academia with a collection of essays that adopt a transnational critical lens. With the present selection, we intend to add our voices to the ongoing debate centered on the renegotiation of space, national, and cultural geographies; to foster both the re-thinking of language(s) and literature(s) not exclusively in English and the study of race, gender, sexuality, and class within and across national boundaries. Most pertinently for this collection, we hope to add meaningful material to produce new theoretical paradigms and to rethink the role and significance of the humanities in today’s world. In this light, 'Transnational Spaces: Celebrating Fifty Years of Literary, Cultural, and Language Intersections at NeMLA' offers a contribution to the study of our present, transnational condition, from the point of view of an organization, the 'Northeast Modern Language Association', that since its inception in 1969, has sought to provide a space of encounter, debate, and open intellectual exchange for all its members as well as for the academe at large. The essays contained in this volume emphasize the interdependency and interrelations engendered by the globalized world in which we live, highlighting the possibility to create new knowledge and forms of understanding across the boundaries of nationhood and region. At the same time, they remind us that the present situation calls for a radical self-examination of a history of systemic racism which continues to produce episodes of police brutality, rationalizes cultural and economic exclusion, and normalizes the incarceration of African Americans and “illegal” immigrants, including children and minorities. In this light, with this volume, we hope to have provided inclusive, egalitarian, and cosmopolitan spaces of encounter, exchange, and interrogation.