Asian Canadian activism, resistance, and art of the 1970s and 80s Laughing Back at Empire is a ground-breaking examination of The Asianadian, one of Canada’s first anti-racist, anti- sexist, and anti-homophobic magazines. Over the course of its seven-year run, the small but mighty magazine led a nation-wide dialogue for all Canadians on the struggles and social issues that concerned Asians in Canada. The Asianadian established a national platform for then-emerging Asian Canadian writers, artists, musicians, activists, and scholars like Sky Lee, Jim Wong-Chu, Joy Kogawa, Himani Bannerji, and Paul Yee. Columns like “On the Firing Line” and the “Dubious Achievement Awards” provided space to laugh back at the embarrassing concoction of Orientalist stereotypes in the media and to critique inconsistencies and superficialities within Canada’s newfound multicultural image. Situating the story of The Asianadian within the history of Canada, Angie Wong celebrates and builds on the work of its creators from the Asianadian Resource Workshop. Extensive interview material with the co-founding members, editors, volunteers, readers, and contributors captures their dedication and spirit of anti-racist collectivism. Wong’s analysis helps to dismantle cultural assumptions that have relegated Asian Canadian history, contributions, and injustices to the periphery of Canadian experience and identity. On the heels of the COVID-19 pandemic and a resurgence of anti-Asian racism, Laughing Back at Empire amplifies the voices that speak, shout, and laugh together at empire’s self-congratulatory and exclusionary narratives.

Laughing Back at Empire is a groundbreaking examination of The Asianadian, one of Canada's first anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-homophobic magazines. Wong's work amplifies Asian Canadian voices that speak, shout, and laugh together at empire's self-congratulatory and exclusionary narratives.

Humour is a key feature, laughter a central element, disrespect a vital textual strategy of postcolonial transcultural practice. Devices such as irony, parody, and subversion, can be subsumed under an interventionist stance and have accordingly received some critical attention. But literary and cultural postcolonial criticism has been marked by a restraint verging on the pious towards the wider significance and functions of laughter. This collection transcends such orthodoxies: laughter can constitute an intervention – but it can also function otherwise. The essays collected here take an interest in the strategic use of what can loosely be termed laughter – in all its manifestations. Examining postcolonial transcultural practice from a range of disciplinary and methodological perspectives, this study seeks to analyse laughter and the postcolonial in their complexity. For the first time, then, this collection gathers a group of international specialists in postcolonial transcultural studies to analyse the functions of laughter, the comic and humour in a wide range of cultural texts. Contributors work on texts from Africa, Asia, Australia, North America, the Caribbean, and Britain, reading work by authors such as Zakes Mda, Timothy Mo, VS Naipaul, and Zadie Smith. This interdisciplinary collection is a contribution to both, postcolonial studies and humour theory.

What made the Romans laugh? Was ancient Rome a carnival, filled with practical jokes and hearty chuckles? Or was it a carefully regulated culture in which the uncontrollable excess of laughter was a force to fear—a world of wit, irony, and knowing smiles? How did Romans make sense of laughter? What role did it play in the world of the law courts, the imperial palace, or the spectacles of the arena? Laughter in Ancient Rome explores one of the most intriguing, but also trickiest, of historical subjects. Drawing on a wide range of Roman writing—from essays on rhetoric to a surviving Roman joke book—Mary Beard tracks down the giggles, smirks, and guffaws of the ancient Romans themselves. From ancient “monkey business” to the role of a chuckle in a culture of tyranny, she explores Roman humor from the hilarious, to the momentous, to the surprising. But she also reflects on even bigger historical questions. What kind of history of laughter can we possibly tell? Can we ever really “get” the Romans’ jokes?

Pathologies of Paradise presents the rich complexity of anglophone Caribbean literature from pluralistic perspectives that contest the reduction of the region to Edenic or infernal stereotypes. But rather than reiterate the familiar critiques of these stereotypes, Supriya Nair draws on the trope of the detour to plumb the depths of anti-paradise discourse, showing how the Caribbean has survived its history of colonization and slavery. In her reading of authors such as Jamaica Kincaid, Michelle Cliff, V. S. Naipaul, Zadie Smith, Junot Díaz, and Pauline Melville, among others, she examines dominant symbols and events that shape the literature and history of postslavery and postcolonial societies: the garden and empire, individual and national trauma, murder and massacre, contagion and healing, grotesque humor and the carnivalesque. In ranging across multiple contexts, generations, and genres, the book maps a syncretic and flexible approach to Caribbean literature that demonstrates the supple literary cartographies of New World identities.

The fall of the Spanish Empire: that period in the nineteenth century when it lost its colonies in Spanish America and the Philippines. How did it happen? What did the process of the "end of empire" look like? Empire's End considers the nation's imperial legacy beyond this period, all the way up to the present moment. In addition to scrutinizing the political, economic, and social implications of this "end," these chapters emphasize the cultural impact of this process through an analysis of a wide range of representations—literature, literary histories, periodical publications, scientific texts, national symbols, museums, architectural monuments, and tourist routes—that formed the basis of transnational connections and exchange. The book breaks new ground by addressing the ramifications of Spain's imperial project in relation to its former colonies, not only in Spanish America, but also in North Africa and the Philippines, thus generating new insights into the circuits of cultural exchange that link these four geographical areas that are rarely considered together. Empire's End showcases the work of scholars of literature, cultural studies, and history, centering on four interrelated issues crucial to understanding the end of the Spanish empire: the mappings of the Hispanic Atlantic, race, human rights, and the legacies of empire.

The dead refuse to stay dead. The Reaper is here to put them down. As winter sets in and America’s survivors struggle to rebuild a semblance of civilization, terrifying new enemies are gathering—both in the lawless badlands and within the walls of the safe zone. Most fearsome of all is the “King of the Dead.” His zombified troupe of sideshow curiosities is but a fraction of his growing pack. The Reaper’s quest to safeguard the humans he has befriended places him on the trail of these feral undead. But he is sorely unprepared for the return of the zombie transformed by his own flesh, the Omega—a fiend driven by something more sinister than any virus. Meanwhile, Death’s questions about his origin haunt him, and he is close to the answers... but the worst of both the living and the dead are rising in his path, and he’ll have to cut them all down to reach the cosmic endgame.