The essays in this volume discuss narrative strategies employed by international writers when dealing with rape and sexual violence, whether in fiction, poetry, memoir, or drama. In developing these new feminist readings of rape narratives, the contributors aim to incorporate arguments about trauma and resistance in order to establish new dimensions of healing. This book makes a vital contribution to the fields of literary studies and feminism, since while other volumes have focused on retroactive portrayals of rape in literature, to date none has focused entirely on the subversive work that is being done to retheorize sexual violence. Split into four sections, the volume considers sexual violence from a number of different angles. 'Subverting the Story' considers how the characters of the victim and rapist might be subverted in narratives of sexual violence. In 'Metaphors for Resistance,' the essays explore how writers approach the subject of rape obliquely using metaphors to represent their suffering and pain. The controversy of not speaking about sexual violence is the focus of 'The Protest of Silence,' while 'The Question of the Visual' considers the problems of making sexual violence visible in the poetic image, in film and on stage. These four sections cover an impressive range of world writing which includes curriculum staples like Toni Morrison, Sarah Kane, Sandra Cisneros, Yvonne Vera, and Sharon Olds.

The first book to trace the critical reception of the great African American woman writer, attending not only to her fiction but to her nonfiction and critical writings.

In this collection of scholarly essays on the works of Ngugi wa Thiong’o, one of the most important postcolonial writers alive, the contributors adopt a range of reading approaches and analytical models like feminism, postcolonialism, historicism, formalism, and psychoanalysis, to excavate new meanings and provide fresh insights into Ngugi’s artistic oeuvre. Through some robust and engaging scholarly discourses, the volume animates the politics, poetics, and artistic vision of Ngugi wa Thiong’o, as well as his commitment to the enterprise of decolonisation. The comprehensiveness of this collection is partly illustrated by the fact that it addresses a range of diverse issues in all of Ngugi’s novels, most of his plays, and some of his scholarly works. To this end, the volume is a valuable addition to the body of literature on Ngugi’s works and an important resource material to students, teachers, and researchers of African literature.

What is the role of aesthetic expression in responding to discrimination, tragedy, violence, even genocide? How does gender shape responses to both literal and structural violence, including implicit linguistic, familial, and cultural violence? How might writing or other works of art contribute to healing? Art from Trauma: Genocide and Healing beyond Rwanda explores the possibility of art as therapeutic, capable of implementation by mental health practitioners crafting mental health policy in Rwanda. This anthology of scholarly, personal, and hybrid essays was inspired by scholar and activist Chantal Kalisa (1965-2015). At the commemoration of the nineteenth anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda, organized by the Rwandan Embassy in Washington DC, Kalisa gave a presentation, "Who Speaks for the Survivors of the Genocide against Tutsi?" Kalisa devoted her energy to giving expression to those whose voices had been distorted or silenced. The essays in this anthology address how the production and experience of visual, dramatic, cinematic, and musical arts, in addition to literary arts, contribute to healing from the trauma of mass violence, offering preliminary responses to questions like Kalisa's and honoring her by continuing the dialogue in which she participated with such passion, sharing the work of scholars and colleagues in genocide studies, gender studies, and francophone literatures.

This book contextualizes the complexity of sexual violence within its broader context – from war to the resolution of interpersonal disputes – and covers a wide span including sexual harassment, bullying, rape and murder as well as domestic violence. Written by leading academics from a variety of disciplines, contributions also include commentaries that relate the research to the work of practitioners. Despite advances made in the investigation of sexual offences, evidence still points to a continued belief in the culpability of victims in their own victimization and a gap between the estimated incidence of sexual violence and the conviction of perpetrators. Adopting an implicitly and explicitly critical stance to contemporary policy responses that continue to fail in addressing this problem, this book focuses on attitudes and behaviour towards sexual violence from the point of view of the individual experiencing the violence – perpetrator and victim – and situates them within a broader societal frame. It is through an understanding of social processes and psychological mechanisms that underpin sexual violence that violence can be combated and harm reduced, and at this individual level that evidence-based interventions can be designed to change policy and practice. The Handbook is split into four sections: 'Legacies: Setting the Scene' offers a critical overview of historical, legal and cultural processes which help to explain the origins of current thinking and offer steers for future developments 'Theories and Concepts' examines contemporary thinking on sexual violence and reviews explanatory frameworks from a number of perspectives 'Acts of Sexual Violence' reviews a number of specific types of sexual violence, elaborating the range of circumstances, victims and perpetrators with a view to addressing the general and pervasive nature of such violence thus contradicting narrow cultural stereotyping 'Responding to Sexual Violence' overviews and evaluates current policies and practices and offers new ideas to develop different types of interventions. The editors’ conclusion not only draws out the key themes and ideas from contributions to the Handbook, but also considers the nature of and the extent to which any progress has been made in understanding and responding to sexual violence. This will be a key text for students and academics studying sexual violence and an essential reference tool for professionals working in the field including police officers, probation staff, lawyers and judges.

At present, the bulk of the existing research on sex trafficking originates in the social sciences. Sex Trafficking in Postcolonial Literature adds an original perspective on this issue by examining representations of sex trafficking in postcolonial literature. This book is a sustained interdisciplinary study bridging postcolonial literature, in English and Spanish, and sex trafficking, as analyzed through literary theory, anthropology, sociology, history, trauma theory, journalism, and globalization studies. It encompasses postcolonial theory and literature’s aesthetic analysis of sex trafficking together with research from social sciences, psychology, anthropology, and economics with the intention of offering a comprehensive analysis of the topic beyond the type of Orientalist discourse so prevalent in the media. This is an important and innovative resource for scholars in literature, postcolonial studies, gender studies, human rights and global justice.

The Routledge Handbook of Latinx Life Writing provides an in‐depth introduction to Latinx life writing, taking a historical approach to the study of a variety of key Latinx life writers, genres, and thematic concerns. This volume includes chapters on fundamental genres of Latinx life writing including memoir, autobiography, oral history, testimonio, comics and graphic texts, poetry of protest, and theatre to more fully depict the breadth, dynamism, and vibrancy of Latinx life writing. Latinx people continuously engaged in the empowering act of telling their stories and narrating their lives, producing writing that at various times and in various ways expressed their joy, expressed their rage and anguish, and ultimately, asserted their subjectivity all the while indelibly contributing to the American literary landscape.

This collection of essays explores the cultural significance of children’s reading by analyzing a series of Anglo-American case studies from the eighteenth century to the present. Marked by historical continuity and technological change, children’s reading proves to be a phenomenon with broad influence, one that shapes both the development of individual readers and wider social values. The essays in this volume capture such complexity by invoking the conception of “mediation” to approach children’s reading as a site of interaction among individual people, material texts, and institutional networks. Featuring a range of scholarly perspectives from the disciplines of literature, education, graphic design, and library and information science, this collection uncovers both the intricacies and wider stakes of children’s reading. The books, public programs, and archives that focus explicitly on children’s interests and needs are powerful arenas that give expression to the key ideological investments of a culture.

While scholarship on Caribbean women’s literature has grown into an established discipline, there are not many studies explicitly connected to the maternal subject matter, and among them only a few book-length texts have focalized motherhood and maternity in writings by Caribbean women. Reading/Speaking/Writing the Mother Text: Essays on Caribbean Women’s Writing encourages a crucial dialogue surrounding the state of motherhood scholarship within the Caribbean literary landscape, to call for attention on a theme that, although highly visible, remains understudied by academics. While this collection presents a similar comparative and diasporic approach to other book-length studies on Caribbean women’s writing, it deals with the complexity of including a wider geographical, linguistic, ethnic and generic diversity, while exposing the myriad ways in which Caribbean women authors shape and construct their texts to theorize motherhood, mothering, maternity, and mother-daughter relationships.

The World-Literary System and the Atlantic grapples with key questions about how American studies, and the Atlantic region in general, engages with new considerations of literary comparativism, international literary space and the world-literary system. The edited collection furthers these discussions by placing them into a relationship with the theory of combined and uneven development – a theory that has a long pedigree in Marxist sociology and political economy and that continues to stimulate debate across the social sciences, but whose implications for culture have received less attention. Drawing on the comparative modes, concepts, and methods being developed in the "new" world-literary studies, the essays cover a diverse range of topics such as, the periodization of world literature, racism and the world-system, singular modernity, critical "irrealism," commodity frontiers, semi-peripherality, and world-ecology. The chapters in this book were originally published in the journal, Atlantic Studies.