"This interdisciplinary, international, and multi-lingual collection of essays explores a broad range of issues related to hospitality and hostility, in literary and cultural contexts from antiquity to the present. Insightful theoretical and historical discussions undergird richly detailed particular studies. The central focus unifies the diverse pieces, which are original, well-researched and reasoned, and clearly written. A solid contribution to scholarship in several fields (including linguistics, anthropology and Internet culture), the volume is also enjoyable to read. Its lively and appealing pieces on recent novels and contemporary trends lend a fresh and contemporary feel." -ÿProf. Pamela S. Saur, Lamar University, Texas

Reflecting debate around hospitality and the Baltic Sea region, this open access book taps into wider discussions about reception, securitization and xenophobic attitudes towards migrants and strangers. Focusing on coastal and urban areas, the collection presents an overview of the responses of host communities to guests and strangers in the countries surrounding the Baltic Sea, from the early eleventh century to the twentieth. The chapters investigate why and how diverse categories of strangers including migrants, war refugees, prisoners of war, merchants, missionaries and vagrants, were portrayed as threats to local populations or as objects of their charity, shedding light on the current predicament facing many European countries. Emphasizing the Baltic Sea region as a uniquely multi-layered space of intercultural encounter and conflict, this book demonstrates the significance of Northeastern Europe to migration history.

This book investigates the transnational dimensions of European cultural memory and how it contributes to the construction of new non-, supra, and post-national, but also national, memory narratives. The volume considers how these narratives circulate not only within Europe, but also through global interactions with other locations. The Changing Place of Europe in Global Memory Cultures responds to recent academic calls to break with methodological nationalism in memory studies. Taking European memory as a case study, the book offers new empirical and theoretical insights into the transnational dimensions of cultural memory, without losing sight of the continued relevance of the nation. The articles critically examine the ways in which various individuals, organizations, institutions, and works of art are mobilizing future-oriented memories of Europe to construct new memory narratives. Taking into account the heterogeneity and transnational locations of commemorative groups, the multidirectionality of acts of remembrance, and a variety of commemorative media such as museums, film, photography, and literature, the volume not only investigates how memory discourses circulate within Europe, but also how they are being transferred, translated, or transformed through global interactions beyond the European continent.

An important collection which explores the complex interrelationships between race, gender, and sex as these are conceptualised within contemporary thought.

In Kwaito Bodies Xavier Livermon examines the cultural politics of the youthful black body in South Africa through the performance, representation, and consumption of kwaito, a style of electronic dance music that emerged following the end of apartheid. Drawing on fieldwork in Johannesburg's nightclubs and analyses of musical performances and recordings, Livermon applies a black queer and black feminist studies framework to kwaito. He shows how kwaito culture operates as an alternative politics that challenges the dominant constructions of gender and sexuality. Artists such as Lebo Mathosa and Mandoza rescripted notions of acceptable femininity and masculinity, while groups like Boom Shaka enunciated an Afrodiasporic politics. In these ways, kwaito culture recontextualizes practices and notions of freedom within the social constraints that the legacies of colonialism, apartheid, and economic inequality place on young South Africans. At the same time, kwaito speaks to the ways in which these legacies reverberate between cosmopolitan Johannesburg and the diaspora. In foregrounding this dynamic, Livermon demonstrates that kwaito culture operates as a site for understanding the triumphs, challenges, and politics of post-apartheid South Africa.

This interdisciplinary volume explores the ancient Greek myth of Medea and its global analogues found in other mythic and folk tales of deadly, exiled women, such as those of La Malinche and La Llorona, examining the connections between these figures and their depictions from antiquity to modernity. The book considers the figure of the foreign woman, her exile, fratricide, and infanticide, in its ancient Greek form and in global, postcolonial receptions in a range of media, including drama, film, novels, and the visual arts. The chapters illuminate the contradictions of considering the classical Medea as a central reference point for analysis of other female figures from peripheral territories, while simultaneously acknowledging the insights that such comparisons can yield. Emphasizing the ways in which Medea’s seditious nature enables the establishment of an extensive and heterogeneous intertextual network with other mythic characters who represent a similarly disruptive role in their specific local historical and cultural contexts, the book argues for a comparative analysis that is equally attentive to myths and folk tales from all regions. These essays – by scholars of classics, comparative and world literatures, and postcolonial studies – represent a plurality of perspectives from different academic contexts in Africa, Latin America, North America, and Europe and examine how different cultures have depicted women, foreigners, crime, and abjection. The foundations of Greek myth and subsequently of the classical tradition itself are interrogated from a postcolonial perspective. In tracing the portrayals of Medea and other mythic women through the overlapping features of different female characters and plots, and intertwining local cultural and literary materials with broader debates, this volume challenges Eurocentric narratives of power and cultural domination, and works to decentralize the discussion of Medea from the exclusive domain of classical studies. Medea’s Long Shadow in Postcolonial Contexts will be of interest to students and scholars working on Greek tragedy and its reception, as well as tomthose studying postcolonial and global approaches to literature, culture, and gender studies.