Remaking a Global Cantonese Community with Television and Social Media

Simin Li, University of Victoria

Cantonese (Jyut Jyu) is a language prevailing in the Guangdong province of China, Hong Kong, Macau, and ethnic Chinese groups in Southeast Asia and North America. It evolves with the engagements of the authoritarian government and globalization over time. Cantonese in China is special because it remains strong under the constant suppression from the administration and the continual interactions between the natives and migrants. However, the concern about Cantonese dying among the natives has been increasing in recent years. The speaking population, the imposed language policy, and the economy at least determine Cantonese’s life. In particular, the economy is also a window to examine the central-local relations in China due to the leading roles of the Pearl River Delta, Hong Kong, and Macau in China’s economic growth. Therefore, the struggles of local language between the younger generation and the Communist Party via the Internet are exposed. The book intends to explore the rising of a potential language community around the globe that speaks Cantonese by analyzing the usage and images of Cantonese of a popular TV show on YouTube, discussion groups on Baidu Tieba and Facebook, and talk shows on Bilibili with content analysis, interviews, and cases studies. Through this research, the relations between language and collective identity will be presented in an innovative way. "Remaking a Global Cantonese Community with Television and Social Media" has something to offer everyone, regardless of age or background. For those residing in mainland China, it’s a journey back in time. Older Cantonese speakers will reminisce about their childhood, with memories of delicious Cantonese food, playful children’s songs, and cherished customs. Even those who aren’t native Cantonese speakers will recall the Cantonese TV shows, movies, and music that colored their youth. Younger readers will find familiar elements in the short videos they currently enjoy. For language preservation advocates, this book sheds light on Cantonese speakers’ efforts to protect their native language and the challenges they face. For readers outside of mainland China, it offers insights into the country’s internal changing landscape, especially grassroots practices and identities. By blending the disciplines of linguistics, political science, and communication, this book provides a broad perspective on how language is intertwined with our sense of belonging.

The Labyrinth of Multitude and Other Reality Checks on Being Latino/x

Julio Marzán

Seventies “Hispanics,” identifying with Latin American emergence and increasing immigration to the U.S., adopted the epithet 'latino', soon written as Latino. Media fast-tracked, English Latino would eventually tilt presidential elections, advocate national programs, and protest policies, with native and immigrant subgroups presumed homogenous. Enunciated identically as 'latino' and presumed to be 'latino' or its exact translation, “Latino” proved to be a transliteration that since its coining started diverging from 'latino'. Latino became the political mask of unity over discrete subgroups; its primary agenda identity politics as a racialized, brown consciousness divested of its Hispanic cultural history. In contrast, 'latino' retains its Spanish transracial semantics, invoking an 'hispano' cultural history. Nationally Latino represents the entire Hispanic demographic while internecinely not all subgroups identify as Latinos. Latino is defined by immediate sociopolitical issues yet when needed invokes the 'latino' cultural history it presumably disowns. Intellectual inconsistency and semantic amorphousness make Latino a confusing epithet that subverts both speech and scholarship. Collective critical thinking on its semantic dysfunction, deferring to solidarity, is displaced with politically correct but circumventing tweaks, creating Latino/a, Latin@, Latinx. On the other hand, Latino exists because its time had come, expressing an aspiration for a more participatory identity in a multicultural America. Julio Marzán, author of 'The Spanish American Roots of William Carlos Williams', suspends solidarity to articulate the intellectual challenges of his Latino identity. Writing to academic standards in a style accessible to the general reader, Marzán argues that from 'latino' roots Latino evolved into an American identity as a demographic summation implying a culture that actually origin cultures provide, ambiguously an ethnicity and a nostalgic assimilation. “Latino” are American-germane sociopolitical extrapolations of 'latino' experiential details, the often-conflicted distinction illustrated in Marzán’s equally engaging essays that revisit iconic personages and personal events with more nuance than seen as Latino.

Impressions from Paris: Women Creatives in Interwar Years France

Edited by Sylvie Eve Blum-Reid, University of Florida

‘Impressions from Paris’ studies the contributions of various women artists and writers who lived in Paris during the Interwar Years, from the 1920s to 1940. The “Roaring Twenties” constituted years of experimentation and freedom to test new techniques and lifestyles at a time affected by serious political changes leading to World War II. Their trajectories have left traces that can be mapped out, studied, and addressed today, a hundred years later. The volume revisits their experiences through various lenses that include art history, gender, fashion, literary analysis, psychology, philosophy, as well as film and food. The volume revisits the artistic, literary, and journalistic contributions of women worldwide, including France, as they flocked to Paris from the 1920s to 1940. The overall principle lies in the inclusion of female painters, visual artists, and writers from diverse international and national backgrounds. Scholars who participate in the volume explore the possibilities presented in a modern literary and artistic history while building on previous scholarship. Two seminal books and a documentary film inspire this project: Shari Benstock’s ‘Women of the Left Bank. Paris 1900-1940’ (Texas UP 1986) and Andrea Weiss’s ‘Paris was a woman. Portraits from the Left Bank’ (HarperSanFrancisco 1995), which in turn produced an eponymous film (Greta Schiller/Andrea Weiss 1996). These works highlight the community of women artists, editors and writers during the interwar years in Paris. There is scholarship in the area, although most of it is scattered in single monographs, crossing various genres, and various languages, from (recent) graphic novels, to fiction, biographical studies, cultural histories as well as scholarly artistic and literary studies.

Practical and Theoretical Reason in Modern Philosophy

Edited by Paniel Reyes Cárdenas, Oblate School of Theology; The University of Sheffield et al.

The present collection aims to examine this fertile period in the history of philosophy concerning its significance for understanding the relation between theoretical and practical reason, or, relatedly, facts and values. Our contributors have explored different important ways in which both the shortcomings and insights of the theoretical/practical distinction have shaped Western philosophy.

Italy in the Second Half of the 19th Century: Bridging New Cultures

Edited by Francesca Cadel, University of Calgary and Paola Nastri

A period of turmoil, uncertainty, and fears, the second half of the nineteenth century in Italy is also characterized by resilience, creativity, courageous discussions on the emancipation of women, and a variety of cultural products that are instrumental for the birth of a new and modern culture that will lead to the achievements of the twentieth century. Contributing to and expanding on recent scholarships on Italian literature of the nineteenth century, the book presents a series of literary, interdisciplinary and intercultural case studies. These case studies explore the social and cultural dimensions of the period, investigating the historical, literary, artistic, cultural, and social events of the time while probing their significance and relevance in bridging new Italian cultures.

Transformational analysis in practice: Music-analytical studies on composers and musicians from around the world

Edited by Bozhidar Chapkanov

'Transformational analysis in practice' is a Must-Have for everyone working in the field or aspiring to develop their music-analytical and theoretical skills in transformational theory. This co-authored book puts together a plethora of analytical studies, diverse both in the repertoires covered and the methodologies employed. It is a much-needed anthology in this sub-field of music analysis, which has been developing and growing in recent years, reaching ever wider outlets in English-speaking countries and beyond, from dedicated conference panels to YouTube videos. The book is divided into four parts based on the repertoires under discussion. Part I encompasses four analytical studies on familiar composers from the European Romanticism of the nineteenth century. Part II analyzes the music of less familiar composers from Brazil and Turkey. Part III offers four contrasting ways to adapt the analytical capabilities of neo-Riemannian theory to the post-tonal music of the twentieth century. Catering to the interests of jazz performers and researchers, as well as those into popular music production, Part IV offers transformational analytical approaches to both notated and improvised jazz, emphasizing John Coltrane’s performance. Providing an invaluable synthesis of a wide range of analytical studies, this book will be an essential companion for many musicology students, as well as for performers and composers.

The theory of the kingdom: A unified model of human agency

Andrew Root

This original monograph presents a comprehensive theory regarding the economy of the kingdom of God. The theory and associated model will help individuals make better choices. The research integrates fundamentals of the temporal real economy, and the permanent economy of the kingdom of God, to present a unified model of human agency. According to the model, effective agents are salt and light in the real economy, arresting corruption and revealing the truth. Effective agency produces life, peace, and growth. Individual and organizational practices that arrest corruption and reveal truth can resolve longstanding economic grievances. The list of spiritual credence goods is extensive and includes commonly known virtues such as humility, patience, and hope. Spiritual goods are allocated based on the owner-agent relationship. The quantity of goods the owner supplies is in proportion to an individual’s sacrificial offering of time and money. Spiritual goods are stored as heart capital. In a process analogous to the real economy, heart labor applied to heart capital produces desirable outputs. The owner relates to his agents through a heart-inscribed behavioral contract. The owner generally intervenes in the real economy by communicating with agents rather than by restricting choice. Prior studies across economics, finance, and sociology prove the efficiency of behavioral contracts and communication over restricted choice. Herein researchers will find new testable propositions, and practitioners will find new ideas and practices to live better, more consequential lives. Examples of practical applications include methods of resolving group-level bias and understanding the purpose of life’s difficulties.

Many Rivers to Cross: Black Migrations in Brazil and the Caribbean

Edited by Elaine P. Rocha, The University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, Barbados

Since the first contact with Europeans, the Americas have been a continent of immigrants as much as a continent of continuous migrations. Black migrations represent more than the transit of people between countries and regions and from rural areas to urban centers. It contributed to constructing networks that made survival possible, creating neighborhoods and cultural expression, impacting dietary habits, exchanging crops and agricultural techniques, and uplifting families from slavery and misery to ownership, education, and political representation. The most dangerous elements that moved from place to place with blacks were the ideas of freedom and citizenship. This book brings together articles from authors dedicated to the study of black migrations in diverse countries as well as in diverse historical periods to highlight that the movement of black people has been continuous over the centuries. Sometimes voluntarily, others coerced, people have moved from one place to another, carrying with them history and important cultural traditions such as language, music, and religion. Moreover, dangerous ideas of liberty and equality would spread through the African Diaspora. Ten authors from renowned universities contributed with their works on black migrations from a transnational perspective, exploring how people have transited between regions, countries, and continents, carrying their ideas, costumes, beliefs, and strategies for survival. In their trajectories, migrants built communities, created religions, musical traditions, languages, and much more. They influenced politics, contributed to revolutions and wars, to the economy, and shaped societies. For centuries, Latin America's official history has pushed black immigrants' histories to the margins, keeping them in the shadows and denying their importance in the construction of the modern world. The works brought together in this book aim to contribute to breaking this pattern, bringing the experiences of black migrants from the margins to the center.

Behavior Analysis in Higher Education: Applications to Teaching and Supervision

Edited by Andresa A. De Souza, University of Missouri-St. Louis and Darlene E. Crone-Todd, Salem State University

This cutting edge, timely book is a primary resource for students, faculty, coordinators, and supervisors in the growing field of behavior analysis. This book acts as a single resource that pulls together the background, current status, and future directions related to the relevance of a behavior analytic approach to teaching, assessment, and supervision. The authors collaborating in this volume are experts at various stages of career development and have a known presence in the field. This combination of theory driven, and high-caliber authors have collaborated to create a one-of-a-kind book drawing from backgrounds of diversity in terms of gender, areas of expertise, and geography. The recent pandemic has resulted in a pivot to remote learning and online supervision; this text will provide an important contribution in terms of understanding how to provide high quality teaching, supervision, and assessment in behavior analysis and among other areas. As the field is moving to increasing standards for programs that correspond to accreditation body standards, this book also provides timely information about how to prepare for this process including cultural competency and ethics, which guide our teaching and practice.

Lost Kingdom: Animal Death in the Anthropocene

Edited by Wendy A. Wiseman, University of California Santa Barbara and Burak Kesgin, Beykent University

The authors in ‘Lost Kingdom’ grapple with both the catastrophe of mass animal extinction, in which the panoply of earthly life is in the accelerating process of disappearing, and with the mass death of industrial animal agriculture. Both forms of anthropogenic violence against animals cast the Anthropocene as an era of criminality and loss driven by boundless human exceptionalism, forcing a reckoning with and an urgent reimagining of human-animal relations. Without the sleights of hand that would lump “humanity” into a singular Anthropos of the Anthropocene, the authors recognize the differential nature of human impacts on animal life and the biosphere as a whole, while affirming the complexity of animal worlds and their profound imbrications in human cultures, societies, and industries. Confronting the reality of the Sixth Mass Extinction and mass animal death requires forms of narrativity that draw on traditional genres and disciplines, while signaling a radical break with modern temporalities and norms. Chapters in this volume reflect this challenge, while embodying the interdisciplinary nature of inquiry into non-human animality at the edge of the abyss—historiography, cultural anthropology, post-colonial studies, literary criticism, critical animal studies, ethics, religious studies, Anthropocene studies, and extinction studies entwine to illuminate what is arguably the greatest crisis, for all creatures, in the past 65 million years.

Development in Africa's Informal Settlements: Below the Proletariat

Angela R. Pashayan, American University, Washington, DC

This book discusses the effectiveness of international development programs in African informal settlements (slums). It also represents the voices of slum dwellers and how they view the programs offered. With over 60% of Africans living in slums, the book intends to foster dialogue among development professionals to determine how to improve service to their clients, people experiencing extreme poverty. This book examines the critical thinking disconnect between development professionals and slum dwellers. It enables practitioners, professors, and their students to investigate the gap between the types of development programs offered versus what is most beneficial to reduce extreme poverty in slum communities. With a sample of 500 residents from Mukuru Slum in Nairobi, Kenya, and 100 development professionals with expertise in poverty reduction in slums, this book sheds light on the similarities and differences between various programs. Most importantly, this book provides a theoretical way forward (The Theory of Extreme Poverty Reduction) based on Freirean pedagogy to stimulate discussion on how to program new strategies for authentic dialogue with slum dwellers that leads to the critical consciousness necessary for successful poverty reduction.

The City on Screen: Modern Strangers of Cinematic Istanbul

Sertaç Timur Demir, Gümüşhane Üniversitesi, Turkey

‘The City on Screen: Modern Strangers of Cinematic Istanbul’ attempts to analyze how Istanbul is captured through the projector; in other words, the ontological relationship between city and film and how it is elaborated within the context of Istanbul and the sense of strangerhood. This book shifts the axis of Istanbul, typically known as a touristic city, to its underlying details through the strangers in the modern city. Five different films set in this region are analyzed in the text that help to reveal and clarify the socio-urban life of modern Istanbul. The characters and stories in these films tell how Istanbul has socially and architecturally become a city of strangers. The films analyzed include ‘A Touch of Spice’ (2004), ‘Men on the Bridge’ (2009), ‘A Run for Money’ (1999), ‘Distant’ (2002), and ‘10 to 11’ (2009). The theoretical framework of this book is based on the works of Georg Simmel, Zygmunt Bauman and Richard Sennett. These three thinkers have all attempted to look for answers to the sociological question of strangerhood in urban living. This book accomplishes this connection by discussing the similarities and differences between each of their theories regarding the city, cinema and strangerhood.

Science, technology and society for a post-truth age: Comparative dialogues on reflexivity

Edited by Melike Sahinol and Emine Onculer Yayalar

In an era shaped by misinformation, conspiracy theories, and anti-science movements, Science and Technology Studies / Science, Technology and Society (STS) provides a lighthouse of insight and interdisciplinary research. This volume, 'Science, technology and society for a post-truth age: Comparative dialogues on reflexivity,' embarks on a transformative journey through the interdependencies of science, technology, and society, offering vital perspectives and new insights on these challenging topics. This book, written by scholars in the field, reshapes post-truth discourse through STS and positions STS as a central force in addressing the post-truth crisis. It presents a compelling contribution that anchors STS at the heart of contemporary debates about truth and knowledge. 'Science, technology and society for a post-truth age: Comparative dialogues on reflexivity' is a contemporary and thought-provoking exploration of the evolving relationship between knowledge, truth, and society. It makes the case that STS is a catalyst for reshaping our understanding of truth in an age characterised by scepticism and uncertainty.

Monsters in the Classroom: Noam Chomsky, Human Nature, and Education

Philip G. Hill

In this lucid, original, and comprehensive work, the articulated approaches to pedagogy are based on specific conceptions of human nature. Drawing on a vast range of Chomsky’s prodigious output in linguistics, politics, biology, cognitive science, and education, Hill highlights two fundamental elements of Chomsky’s understanding of human nature and uses these elements as the foundation of a highly creative approach to pedagogy. The originality of the work is apparent in the way the author identifies how key ideas in Chomsky’s linguistics and political discourse are rooted in a liberatory approach to education. The value of the work lies in its practical nature. Even though it makes reference to ideas in various academic disciplines, the work’s overall value is reflected in the way ideas relate to Hill’s personal teaching experiences and how they apply in a concrete classroom setting. The reader is offered a practical and highly creative way to apply Chomsky’s understanding of human nature in a classroom setting.

Transfiction: Characters in Search of Translation Studies

Edited by Marko Miletich, SUNY Buffalo State University

This book explores the uses of translation, translators, and interpreters in fiction as a gateway to introduce issues related to Translation Studies. The volume follows recent scholarship on Transfiction, a term used to describe the portrayal of translation (both a topic and a motif), as well as translators and interpreters in fiction and film. It expands on the research by Kalus Kaindl, Karleheinz Splitzl, Michael Cronin, and Rosemary Arrojo, among others. Although the volume reflects the preoccupation with translator visibility, it concentrates on the importance of power struggles within the translatorial task. The volume could be an invaluable tool to be used for pedagogical purposes to discuss theoretical aspects within Translation and Interpreting Studies.

Women’s Representations from Radical Naturalism to the New Woman Response

A Transatlantic Perspective of European, Latin American, and American Narratives

José F. Rojas-Viana, Louisiana State University

In this book, Rojas explores comparatively the representations of deviant and criminal women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from Transatlantic perspectives in literary productions of the first-wave feminist writers of the New Woman movement and writers of Radical Naturalism. This work addresses how the writers' sex is relevant in depictions of social constructions of female characters and how they established a dialogue based on gender through the themes of 'femme fatale', marginal spaces, eugenics, and social Darwinism in the novels of Emilia Pardo Bazán's 'La piedra angular' (1891), 'La gota de sangre' (1911), and "Tio Terrones" (1920); Refugio Barragán de Toscano's 'La hija del bandido o los subterráneos del nevado' (1887); Federico Gamboa's 'Santa' (1903); Kate Chopin's (Katherine O'Flaherty) 'The Awakening' (1899); Thomas Hardy's 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles' (1891); and 'Grand's Ideala' (1888). There is a good volume of research on different aspects of these novels, but this book addresses issues of the social constructions of deviant and criminal women from an interdisciplinary and metatheoretical perspective often missed from established criticism. This work is not only reachable for the non-expertise reader, graduate, or undergraduate students but also it is sufficiently elaborated for the expert reader in different fields. It provides a detailed analysis of the social, historical, philosophical, and scientific background that shows how the treatment of the female characters converges and diverges from male and female writers of the New Woman and Radical Naturalism points of view. It can be a good contribution for references or classes in Hispanic studies, gender studies, women's studies, sexuality studies, nineteenth-century studies, and in other fields.

CHOICES: Never-Ending Dilemmas in Everyday Life

Arthur Asa Berger, San Francisco State University

This book is about the never-ending need we have to make choices. If you think about it, we have to decide what time to wake up every morning, what to wear (unless we need to wear a uniform), what to have for breakfast (if we eat breakfast), lunch and dinner (and if we eat in restaurants, what to order), and our need to make all kinds of other choices all day long. Some of our choices are mundane, like what to have for breakfast (if we eat breakfast): to have coffee or tea (and if so, plain or with milk), cereal, toast or a bagel (and if so, what kind: plain, with poppy seeds, with everything) or a sweet roll, eggs (if so, fried, soft boiled, scrambled), and so on. Most of the choices we make are not important, and we often develop habits to relieve us of having to think about our choices. For example, I have the same thing for breakfast every day: a bowl of oatmeal with chia seeds and flax seeds, hot milk, a cup of espresso coffee with hot milk, and half a bagel with butter. Occasionally, I have a soft-boiled egg, as well. But other choices we have to make are life-changing, such as how to live (single, living with a partner, or getting married), what kind of education to get, what kind of job or profession to choose, where to live and what kind of house to buy (if you can afford a house), whom to vote for, and so on. After reading this book, you will better understand the role that the choices we make play in society and culture and in our everyday lives.

On Second Language Learner Acquisition of English Collocations

James Martin Rogers, Meijo University, Japan

Collocations are words that commonly co-occur, such as ‘jury’ and ‘verdict.’ Collocational fluency is an essential aspect of second language fluency. Learning a language via collocations improves upon the efficacy of language acquisition because it essentially kills three birds with one stone: students learn vocabulary, collocations, and also subconsciously absorb the grammar patterns of language through mastery of these chunks of language. This is, in fact, similar to the way native speakers learn language and an efficient way to become fluent. This book will detail efforts to create and then apply a methodology to develop a large-scale high-frequency collocation list and custom-tailored collocation resources for Japanese, Chinese, and Korean learners to study directly and for practitioners to utilize as reference materials to create additional resources. Presented in this book is a novel approach taken to fill a major gap in the research and to create large-scale resources that were previously unavailable. Therefore, this book should be considered a valuable contribution to research that aims to help second language learners more effectively achieve fluency in English as a second language.

The Singularity of State Repression

Alexei Anisin, Anglo-American University

What sets a single bout of state repression apart from a longer trajectory of political violence? Why does state repression of protesters sometimes result in discrete events of violence while, in other cases, it spurs larger cascades of political violence such as politicide, genocide, or civil war? This book introduces a new framework for state repression and its relationship to different forms of civil resistance. It argues that state repression in the modern era of history is an empirical phenomenon that has been marked by singularity. Through taking the law of coercive responsiveness as a starting point, this book reveals that when political status quos are challenged by civilians, states do respond in law-like ways, but the impact that state repression has on social change is more heterogeneous than previously considered. State repression has brought about indeterminate effects and outcomes across space and time. Through analyzing event-based data featuring 24 variables on a cross-national sample of 171 different protest massacres that arose from 1819-2022, this book provides among the more wide-reaching comparative inquiries into repression and dissent to date. It draws on comparative sequential analysis to identify three different processes in which the sample of cases is matched alongside causal mechanisms and sequence types. The mixed methodological approach drawn in this book features quantitative analysis, process tracing, and qualitative case studies. Readers are taken on a journey through tumultuous periods of political violence that range from 19th-century massacres in the U.S. to 1928 Colombia and 1970s Apartheid, 1990s China, the Arab Spring, and contemporary Syria and Myanmar, among a diverse range of other cases. Along with identifying new quantitative insights into civil resistance strategies and various geographic and temporal dynamics associated with repression, the analyses presented in this book offer timely insight into policies that can aid the prevention of human rights violations.

Eros and Thanatos. Love across Civilizations

Alberto Castelli, Hainan University, China

'Eros and Thanatos' is about the deadly nature of love. It is remarkable that literary critics have paid so little attention to the combination between love and death in literature. This book seeks to address this significant scholarly lacuna by exploring key literary texts of the last two hundred years as exemplary of a consistent tendency toward love and death. Its emphasis on singular characters and close readings suggests the spectrum of an arbitrary dichotomy never fully resolved. The existential discussion triggered by each plot is so intense that the erotic and the merely sexual seem inappropriate. Indeed, each writer chose to reduce it to the setting and background of a story that takes place elsewhere. With this in mind, the author intends to reflect love’s paradoxical nature. If love is triggered by beauty, beauty can be immoral and love must die to preserve the illusion of beauty.