The Urban Condition: Literary Trajectories through Canada’s Postmetropolis

Edited by Eva Darias-Beautell, Universidad de La Laguna, Spain

August 2018 / ISBN: 978-1-62273-417-7
Availability: In stock
200pp. ¦ $60 £43 €49

Examining the centrality of the city in Canadian literary production post-1960, this collection of critical essays presents an interdisciplinary representation of the urban from a variety of backgrounds and perspectives. By analysing contemporary Canadian literature (in English), the contributors intend to produce not only an alternative picture of the national literary traditions but also fresh articulations of the relationship between (Canadian) identity, citizenship, and nation. Since the 1960s, metropolitan regions across the world have experienced radical transformation. For critical urban studies scholars, this phenomenon has been described as a ‘restructuring’. This study argues that in Canada this ‘restructuring’ has been accompanied by a literary rearrangement of its canon, consisting of a gradual shift of focus from the wild or rural to the urban. Alluding to the changes within contemporary Canadian cities, the term ‘postmetropolis’ locates the contributors’ shared theoretical framework within a critical postmodern paradigm. Centered on a particular selection of poetic or fictional texts, each essay pushes the theoretical framework further, suggesting the need for new tools of interpretation and analysis. This book presents an urban literary portrait of Canada that is both thematically and conceptually coherent. Using a range of interdisciplinary methodologies, it adeptly navigates a range of urban issues such as surveillance, asylum, diaspora, mobility, the queer, and the post-political. This book will be of interest to those studying or working on Canadian literature, both in Canada and internationally, as well as to those scholars engaged in investigations that intersect literature and urban studies.

Nomads of Mauritania

Diane Himpan Sabatier and Brigitte Himpan

September 2018 / ISBN: 978-1-62273-410-8
Availability: In stock
552pp. [Color] ¦ $106 £80 €90

Nomads of Mauritania aims at understanding the cultural identity (religious beliefs, language, values, relationships with others) of the Mauritanian nomads through their geographical environment, an original history, their lifestyle, caste system, diet, housing and crafts and how it is revealed by their art, materially expressed on the everyday objects and the body and defined for the first time as geometrical-abstract and respectively as ephemeral usual art and ephemeral living art. Furthermore, what has become of the nomads of Mauritania with the climate warming and the economic and cultural globalization and to what extent are they still the pillars and heart of the Mauritanian society of today?

Onomastics between Sacred and Profane

Edited by Oliviu Felecan, Technical University Of Cluj-Napoca, North University Center Of Baia Mare, Romania

August 2018 / ISBN: 978-1-62273-401-6
Availability: In stock
434pp. ¦ $68 £53 €59

Religiously, God is the creator of everything seen and unseen; thus, one can ascribe to Him the names of His creation as well, at least in their primordial form. In the mentality of ancient Semitic peoples, naming a place or a person meant determining the role or fate of the named entity, as names were considered to be mysteriously connected with the reality they designated. Subsequently, God gave people the freedom to name persons, objects, and places. However, people carried out this act (precisely) in relation to the divinity, either by remaining devoted to the sacred or by growing estranged from it, an attitude that generated profane names. The sacred/profane dichotomy occurs in all the branches of onomastics, such as anthroponymy, toponymy, and ergonymy. It is circumscribed to complex and interdisciplinary analysis which does not rely on language sciences exclusively, but also on theology, ethnology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, anthropology, geography, history and other connected fields, as well as culture in general. Despite the contributors’ cultural diversity (29 researchers from 16 countries – England, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Kenya, Nigeria, Poland, Romania, Russia, South Africa, Spain, U.S.A., and Zimbabwe – on four continents) and their adherence to different religions and faiths, the studies in Onomastics between Sacred and Profane share a common goal that consist of the analysis of names that reveal a person’s identity and behavior, or the existence, configuration and symbolic nature of a place or an object. One can state that names are tightly connected to the surrounding reality, be it profane or religious, in every geographical area and every historical period, and this phenomenon can still be observed today. The particularity of this book lies in the multicultural and multidisciplinary approach in theory and praxis.

How Sex Got Screwed Up: The Ghosts that Haunt Our Sexual Pleasure - Book One

From the Stone Age to the Enlightenment

Jon Knowles

September 2018 / ISBN: 978-1-62273-361-3
Availability: In stock
1078pp. ¦ $81 £61 €69

The ghosts that haunt our sexual pleasure were born in the Stone Age. Sex and gender taboos were used by tribes to differentiate themselves from one another. These taboos filtered into the lives of Bronze and Iron Age men and women who lived in city-states and empires. For the early Christians, all sex play was turned into sin, instilled with guilt, and punished severely. With the invention of sin came the construction of women as subordinate beings to men. Despite the birth of romance in the late middle ages, Renaissance churches held inquisitions to seek out and destroy sex sinners, all of whom it saw as heretics. The Age of Reason saw the demise of these inquisitions. But, it was doctors who would take over the roles of priests and ministers as sex became defined by discourses of crime, degeneracy, and sickness. The middle of the 20th century saw these medical and religious teachings challenged for the first time as activists, such as Alfred Kinsey and Margaret Sanger, sought to carve out a place for sexual freedom in society. However, strong opposition to their beliefs and the growing exploitation of sex by the media at the close of the century would ultimately shape 21st century sexual ambivalence. Book One of this two-part publication traces the history of sex from the Stone Age to the Enlightenment. Interspersed with ‘personal hauntings’ from his own life and the lives of friends and relatives, Knowles reveals how historical discourses of sex continue to haunt us today. This book is a page-turner in simple and plain language about ‘how sex got screwed up’ for millennia. For Knowles, if we know the history of sex, we can get over it.

Knowledges, Practices and Activism from Feminist Epistemologies

Edited by Eulalia Pérez Sedeño, Instituto de Filosofía-Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, IFS-CSIC, Spain et al.

January 2019 / ISBN: 978-1-62273-461-0
Availability: In stock
240pp. ¦ $61 £45 €52

Science, Technology and Gender studies (STG) include the different approaches to feminist epistemologies, their current debates and also the theoretical analysis of different scientific controversies around cases that involve women's bodies and health, sex/gender, and techno-scientific practices. These studies are linked to the demand for another type of hybrid knowledge that revalorizes the practices, the embodied experience and care, as well as the subject positions traditionally excluded from the scientific community. The diversity of voices has allowed a plural knowledge in techno-scientific practices to emerge as well as the identification of gender, class, sexuality, race, functional diversity inequalities, for example. This has made possible a bioethical reflection which is not understood as abstract normative principles but linked to the practices and lived experience. Divided into three parts, this edited volume presents original and insightful research on STG from feminist epistemologies. The first part addresses fundamental theoretical questions that feminist epistemologies raise; and how they confront complex social problems, such as gender-based violence. The second part deals with research practices or processes, explicitly showing the relationship between science and policy. Finally, the third part presents some case studies that show the multidimensionality of the problems and the depth and richness of these analyses. The contributions included in the volume present original and in-depth research on local case studies within Spain. Not only challenging the hegemonic and global perspectives on different issues, this volume also opens up and enables discussion of these global narratives. This edited volume is a useful tool for researchers and university students in multiple fields such as gender studies, feminist epistemologies, STS, cultural history or transgender studies.