Contested Borders broadens understandings of dissident sexualities in Africa through examining new representations of same-sex desire emerging in recent francophone autofictional writing from the Maghreb, where long-established traditions pertaining to gender and sexuality are brought into contact with new forms of gender and sexual dissidence, resulting from the inflection of globally circulating discourses and embodiments of queerness in North Africa, and from the experience of emigration and settlement by the writers concerned in France. The book analyses specifically how Franco-Maghrebi writers Rachid O., Abdellah Taïa, Eyet-Chékib Djaziri, and Nina Bouraoui foreground translation and narrative reflexivity around incommensurable spaces of queerness in order to index their crossings and negotiations of multiple languages, histories and cultures. By writing in French, Spurlin demonstrates that the writers are not merely mimicking the language of their former coloniser but inflecting a European language with discursive turns of phrase indigenous to North Africa, thus creating new possibilities of meaning and expression to name their lived experiences of gender and sexual alterity—a form of (queer) translational praxis that destabilises received gender/sexual categories both within the Maghreb and in Europe.

Contests over heritage in Asia are intensifying and reflect the growing prominence of political and social disputes over historical narratives shaping heritage sites and practices, and the meanings attached to them. These contests emphasize that heritage is a means of narrating the past that demarcates, constitutes, produces, and polices political and social borders in the present. In its spaces, varied intersections of actors, networks, and scales of governance interact, negotiate and compete, resulting in heritage sites that are cut through by borders of memory. This volume, edited by Edward Boyle and Steven Ivings, and with contributions from scholars across the humanities, history, social sciences, and Asian studies, interrogates how particular actors and narratives make heritage and how borders of memory shape the sites they produce.

Certainly the territorial disputes within the former Soviet Union have become front page news recently. This collection of essays offers some historical perspective to contemporary events by providing an analysis of eight potential or actual border disputes stemming from Soviet expansion at the end of World War II, and a discussion of the regional identities of annexed border regions within Russia. Specific treatment is given to territorial disputes concerning: Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina, Carpatho-Ukraine, Eastern Poland, East Prussia, Abrene, the East of Narva and Petserimaa, Karelia, and the Kurile Islands. Distributed by Ashgate. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Western Sahara is a disputed territory located in North Africa, bordered by Morocco to the north, Algeria to the northeast, and Mauritania to the east and south. The territory was colonized by Spain in the late 19th century and was known as Spanish Sahara until the 1970s. After Spain withdrew in 1975, Morocco and Mauritania claimed the territory as their own, sparking a war that lasted until 1991. Today, Morocco administers most of the territory, while the Polisario Front, a separatist group backed by Algeria, controls the remaining areas. The United Nations has been involved in the conflict since the 1990s, attempting to negotiate a peaceful settlement between the two parties. The population of Western Sahara is estimated to be around 600,000, with most living in areas controlled by Morocco. The majority of the population are Sahrawis, an indigenous group that has been fighting for independence from Moroccan rule. The dispute over the territory's sovereignty has been ongoing for decades, with the Polisario Front calling for a referendum to determine the territory's fate. However, Morocco has rejected the proposal, stating that the territory is an integral part of their kingdom. The conflict has resulted in displacement of thousands, as well as human rights abuses and restrictions on freedom of expression.

The history of Eritrea is told in this reference through a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and over 500 cross-referenced dictionary entries on significant persons, events, places, organizations, and other aspects of Eritrea's history from the earliest times to the present. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Eritrea.

This book investigates the maintenance of multilingualism and minority languages in 12 different minority communities across Europe, all of which are underrepresented in international minority language studies. The book presents a number of case studies covering a broad range of highly diverse minorities and languages with different historical and socio-political backgrounds. Despite current legislation and institutional and educational support, the authors surmise there is no guarantee for the maintenance of minority languages, suggesting changes in attitudes and language ideologies are the key to promoting true multilingualism. The book also introduces a new tool, the European Language Vitality Barometer, for assessing the maintenance of minority languages on the basis of survey data. The book is based on the European Language Diversity for All (ELDIA) research project which was funded by the European Commission (7th framework programme, 2010–2013).

Asian American literature abounds with complex depictions of American cities as spaces that reinforce racial segregation and prevent interactions across boundaries of race, culture, class, and gender. However, in Cities of Others, Xiaojing Zhou uncovers a much different narrative, providing the most comprehensive examination to date of how Asian American writers - both celebrated and overlooked - depict urban settings. Zhou goes beyond examining popular portrayals of Chinatowns by paying equal attention to life in other parts of the city. Her innovative and wide-ranging approach sheds new light on the works of Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese American writers who bear witness to a variety of urban experiences and reimagine the American city as other than a segregated nation-space. Drawing on critical theories on space from urban geography, ecocriticism, and postcolonial studies, Zhou shows how spatial organization shapes identity in the works of Sui Sin Far, Bienvenido Santos, Meena Alexander, Frank Chin, Chang-rae Lee, Karen Tei Yamashita, and others. She also shows how the everyday practices of Asian American communities challenge racial segregation, reshape urban spaces, and redefine the identity of the American city. From a reimagining of the nineteenth-century flaneur figure in an Asian American context to providing a framework that allows readers to see ethnic enclaves and American cities as mutually constitutive and transformative, Zhou gives us a provocative new way to understand some of the most important works of Asian American literature.

This book is a case-study collection examining the influences and functions of British Columbia’s (BC) borders in the 21st century. British Columbia’s Borders in Globalization examines bordering processes and the causes and effects of borders in the Cascadian region, from the perspective of BC. The chapters cover diverse topics including historical border disputes and cannabis culture and identity; the governance of transboundary water flows, migration, and preclearance policies for goods and people; and the emerging issue of online communities. The case studies provide examples that highlight the simultaneous but contradictory trends regarding borders in BC: while boundaries and bordering processes at the external borders shift away from the territorial boundary lines, self-determination, local politics, and cultural identities re-inscribe internal boundaries and borders that are both virtual and real. Moreover, economic protectionism, racial discourses, and xenophobic narratives, driven by advances in technology, reinforce the territorial dimensions of borders. These case studies contribute to the literature challenging the notion that territorial borders are sufficient for understanding how borders function in BC; and in a few instances they illustrate the nuanced ways in which borders (or bordering processes) are becoming detached from territory. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Borderlands Studies.

In the context of the current explosion of interest in Gothic literature and popular culture, this interdisciplinary collection of essays explores for the first time the rich and long-standing relationship between war and the Gothic. Critics have described the global Seven Year’s War as the "crucible" from which the Gothic genre emerged in the eighteenth century. Since then, the Gothic has been a privileged mode for representing violence and extreme emotions and situations. Covering the period from the American Civil War to the War on Terror, this collection examines how the Gothic has provided writers an indispensable toolbox for narrating, critiquing, and representing real and fictional wars. The book also sheds light on the overlap and complicity between Gothic aesthetics and certain aspects of military experience, including the bodily violation and mental dissolution of combat, the dehumanization of "others," psychic numbing, masculinity in crisis, and the subjective experience of trauma and memory. Engaging with popular forms such as young adult literature, gaming, and comic books, as well as literature, film, and visual art, War Gothic provides an important and timely overview of war-themed Gothic art and narrative by respected experts in the field of Gothic Studies. This book makes important contributions to the fields of Gothic Literature, War Literature, Popular Culture, American Studies, and Film, Television & Media.

The study of medieval literature has experienced a revolution in the last two decades, which has reinvigorated many parts of the discipline and changed the shape of the subject in relation to the scholarship of the previous generation. 'New' texts (laws and penitentials, women's writing, drama records), innovative fields and objects of study (the history of the book, the study of space and the body, medieval masculinities), and original ways of studying them (the Sociology of the Text, performance studies) have emerged. This has brought fresh vigour and impetus to medieval studies, and impacted significantly on cognate periods and areas. The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English brings together the insights of these new fields and approaches with those of more familiar texts and methods of study, to provide a comprehensive overview of the state of medieval literature today. It also returns to first principles in posing fundamental questions about the nature, scope, and significance of the discipline, and the directions that it might take in the next decade. The Handbook contains 44 newly commissioned essays from both world-leading scholars and exciting new scholarly voices. Topics covered range from the canonical genres of Saints' lives, sermons, romance, lyric poetry, and heroic poetry; major themes including monstrosity and marginality, patronage and literary politics, manuscript studies and vernacularity are investigated; and there are close readings of key texts, such as Beowulf, Wulf and Eadwacer, and Ancrene Wisse and key authors from Ælfric to Geoffrey Chaucer, Langland, and the Gawain Poet.