This comparative study, the first of its kind, discusses paradise discourse in a wide range of writing from Mexico, Zanzibar, and Sri Lanka, including novels by authors such as Malcolm Lowry, Leonard Woolf, Juan Rulfo, Wilson Harris, Abdulrazak Gurnah, and Romesh Gunesekera. Tracing dialectical tropes of paradise across the "long modernity" of the capitalist world-system, Deckard reads literature from postcolonial nations in context with colonial discourse in order to demonstrate how paradise begins as a topos motivating European exploration and colonization, shifts into an ideological myth justifying imperial exploitation, and finally becomes a literary motif used by contemporary writers to critique neocolonial representations and conditions in the age of globalization. Combining a range of critical perspectives—cultural materialist, ecocritical, and postcolonial—the volume opens up a deeper understanding of the relation between paradise discourse and the destructive dynamics of plantation, tourism, and global capital. Deckard uncovers literature from East Africa and South Asia which has been previously overlooked in mainstream postcolonial criticism, and gestures to how the utopian dimensions of the paradise myth might be reclaimed to promote cultural resistance.

Tourism is vital to the economies of most Pacific nations and as such is an important site for the meaningful production of shared and disputed cultural values and practices. This is especially the case when tourism intersects with other important arenas for cultural production, both directly and indirectly. Touring Pacific Cultures captures the central importance of tourism to the visual, material and performed cultures of the Pacific region. In this volume, we propose to explore new directions in understanding how culture is defined, produced, experienced and sustained through tourism-related practices across that region. We ask, how is cultural value, ownership, performance and commodification negotiated and experienced in actual lived practice as it moves with people across the Pacific? ‘This collection is a welcome addition to tourism studies, or perhaps we should say post- or para-tourism. The essays bring out many facets and experiences too quickly bundled under a single label and focused exclusively on “destinations” visited by “outsiders”. Tourism, we see here, actively involves many different populations, societies, and economies, a range of local/global/regional engagements that can be both destructive and creative. Western outsiders aren’t the only ones on the move. Unequal power, (neo)colonial exploitation and capitalist commodification are very much part of the picture. But so are desire, adventure, pleasure, cultural reinvention and economic development. The effect, overall, is an attitude of alert, critical ambivalence with respect to a proliferating historical phenomenon. A bumpy and rewarding ride.’ — James Clifford, Professor Emeritus, University of California, Santa Cruz

Cultural Writing. Nonfiction. Asian American Studies. ASIAN AMERICANS ON WAR AND PEACE is the first book to respond to the events of September 11, 2001 from Asian American perspectives, from the vantage point of those whose lives and communities have been forged by both war and peace. Together, twenty-four scholars, writers, activists and legal scholars reveal how Asians in America view the future of the planet in relation to the events of this last year and this last century, both in America and in the Middle East. Includes essays by Helen Zia, Jessica Hagedorn, Vijay Prashad, Amitava Kumar, Russell C. Leong, Jerry Kang, Frank Chin, Moustafa Bayoumi, Stephen Lee, Janice Mirikitani, Arif Dirlik, Grace Lee Boggs, and many others.

There are two major aims for this book: first, to make a contribution to the academic debates; and second, to urge frontline INGO practitioners to reflect critically on their practices. Referring to the practices of CEP in reforming the system of higher education in Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova, this book seeks to engage in two major debates: one, over the role of INGO in social development; and two, over the relationship between INGO and Imperialism. In the discussion, the author highlighted the elements that are usually overlooked in the existing literature, namely, contradiction and contingency. Data is in the form of my first-hand experience of working as a university lecturer teaching in several universities in Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova, and as a CEP visiting fellow actively involved in its activities. The data poses challenges to the development logic of INGO and the logic of Imperialism; this provides an interesting basis for a provocative discussion. Since data also offers an interesting evaluation of CEP, they reveal not only difficulties facing CEP in bringing changes to the former-Soviet countries but also common problems of the system of higher education in this region.

Focuses on the interaction between American authorities, the Popular Democratic Party (PPD), and its multiple supporters that informed colonial politics in Puerto Rico.

Kamari Maxine Clarke and Deborah A. Thomas argue that a firm grasp of globalization requires an understanding of how race has constituted, and been constituted by, global transformations. Focusing attention on race as an analytic category, this state-of-the-art collection of essays explores the changing meanings of blackness in the context of globalization. It illuminates the connections between contemporary global processes of racialization and transnational circulations set in motion by imperialism and slavery; between popular culture and global conceptions of blackness; and between the work of anthropologists, policymakers, religious revivalists, and activists and the solidification and globalization of racial categories. A number of the essays bring to light the formative but not unproblematic influence of African American identity on other populations within the black diaspora. Among these are an examination of the impact of "black America" on racial identity and politics in mid-twentieth-century Liverpool and an inquiry into the distinctive experiences of blacks in Canada. Contributors investigate concepts of race and space in early-twenty-first century Harlem, the experiences of trafficked Nigerian sex workers in Italy, and the persistence of race in the purportedly non-racial language of the "New South Africa." They highlight how blackness is consumed and expressed in Cuban timba music, in West Indian adolescent girls' fascination with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and in the incorporation of American rap music into black London culture. Connecting race to ethnicity, gender, sexuality, nationality, and religion, these essays reveal how new class economies, ideologies of belonging, and constructions of social difference are emerging from ongoing global transformations. Contributors. Robert L. Adams, Lee D. Baker, Jacqueline Nassy Brown, Tina M. Campt, Kamari Maxine Clarke, Raymond Codrington, Grant Farred, Kesha Fikes, Isar Godreau, Ariana Hernandez-Reguant, Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, John L. Jackson Jr., Oneka LaBennett, Naomi Pabst, Lena Sawyer, Deborah A. Thomas