Incorporating readings of key cultural texts from the environmental humanities, studies of globalization and economics, postmodernism, psychoanalytic criticism, and feminist theory, Stephen Tatum addresses the ongoing crises of displacement and loss of home in the modern urban West.

Philosophical reflections on journeys and crossings, homes and habitats, have appeared in all major East Asian and Western philosophies. Landscape and travelling first emerged as a key issue in ancient Chinese philosophy, quickly becoming a core concern of Daoism and Confucianism. Yet despite the eminence of such reflections, Landscape and Travelling East and West: A Philosophical Journey is the first academic study to explore these philosophical themes in detail. Individual case studies from esteemed experts consider how philosophical thought about places and journeys have inspired and shaped major intellectual and cultural traditions; how such notions concretely manifested themselves in Chinese art, particularly in the genres of landscape painting and garden architecture. The studies present a philosophical dialogue between Confucianism and Daoism on issues of social space and belonging and include discussion on travel and landscape in Buddhism as well as Japanese and Tibetan contexts. Approaching the topic from an inter-cultural perspectives, particularly East Asian philosophies, and using these to enrich contemporary reflections on space, the environment, and traversing, this unique collection adds an important voice to present philosophical, political, and cultural discourses.

The essays in this volume capture the exciting energy of the emergent novel in East and West Africa, drawing on diffe¬rent theoretical insights to offer fresh and engaging perspectives on what has been variously termed the ‘new wave’, ‘emer¬gent generation’, and ‘third generation’. Subjects addressed include the politics of identity, especially when (re)constructed outside the homeland or when African indigenous values are eroded by globaliz¬ation, transnationalism, and the exilic condition or the self undergoes fragmen¬tation. Other essays examine once-taboo concerns, including gendered accounts of same-sex sexualities. Most of the essays deal with shifting perceptions by African women of their social condition in patriarchy in relation to such issues as polygamy, adultery, male domination, and the woman’s quest for fulfilment and respect through access to quality education and full economic and socio-political participation. Themes taken up by other novels examined in¬clude the sexual exploitation of women and criminality generally and the ex¬posure of children to violence. Likewise examined is the contemporary textual¬izing of orality (the trickster figure). Writers discussed include Chima¬manda Ngozi Adichie, Okey Ndibe, Helon Habila, Ike Oguine, Chris Abani, Tanure Ojaide, Maik Nwosu, Unoma Azuah, Jude Dibia, Lola Shoneyin, Mary Karooro Okurut, Violet Barungi, Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, Abidemi Sanusi, Akachi Ezeigbo, Sefi Atta, Kaine Agary, Kojo Laing, Ahmadou Kourouma, Uwen Akpan, and Alobwed’Epie Ogaga Okuyade teaches popular/folk culture, African literature and culture, African American and African diasporic studies, and the English novel in the Department of English and Literary Studies, Niger Delta University, Wilberforce Island, Nigeria. He has guest-edited special issues of ARIEL and Imbizo, and is the editor of Eco-Critical Literature: Regreening African Landscapes (2013).

In this bold intervention into the understanding of the diasporic experience within cultural studies, McCarthy challenges a critical position emergent over the last thirty years (what he calls the 'new marginalism'). He confronts the liberal orthodoxies that prevail in this area, exposing contradictions in the thinking of its major theorists.

About the Book This is a collection of essays on fiction written in English, Spanish, and Bengali that has emerged recently. This fiction is seen to reflect biculturalism, that is the amalgam of two cultures that are both hegemonic in their own ways. This approach provides insight into the works discussed by uncovering elements of the the seemingly "other," non-Euroculture, and elevates both cultures to the same level. Authors discussed in the essays include: Black British Caryl Phillips, Chicana Sandra Cisneros, Chinese American Maxine Hong Kingston, Cuban American Dolores Prida, Danish Izak Dinesen, Greek Americans Nikos Papandreou and Catherine Temma Davidson, Kenyan Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Japanese American John Okada, New Zealander Patricia Grace, Peruvian José Maria Arguedas, Turkish American Güneli Gün, and contemporary English-language Indian authors Vikram Chandra, Chitra B. Divakaruni, Attia Hosain, Manju Kapur, Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie, as well as Rabindranath Tagore. Praise "Perhaps only a decade ago, such an ambitious, world-spanning project would have seemed absurd outside a congress of anthropologists or bankers. Today, it represents a state-of-the-art sensibility reflecting the efforts of an equally vari- ous geocultural assembly of scholars. The implications for a community of readers not only interested in but competently sensitive to such far-flung narrative geographies is equally stunning." - William Boelhower, University of Padua. Italy. Author of Through a Glass Darkly, Ethnic Semiosis in American Literature.