Mariano Siskind’s groundbreaking debut book redefines the scope of world literature, particularly regarding the place of Latin America in its imaginaries and mappings. In Siskind’s formulation, world literature is a modernizing discursive strategy, a way in which cultures negotiate their aspirations to participate in global networks of cultural exchange, and an original tool to reorganize literary history. Working with novels, poems, essays, travel narratives, and historical documents, Siskind reads the way Latin American literary modernity was produced as a global relation, from the rise of planetary novels in the 1870s and the cosmopolitan imaginaries of modernism at the turn of the twentieth century, to the global spread of magical realism. With its unusual breadth of reference and firm but unobtrusive grounding in philosophy, literary theory, and psychoanalysis, Cosmopolitan Desires will have a major impact in the fields of Latin American studies and comparative literature.

An in depth look at how globalization affects Western and Moslem cultures in Morocco. In the Alterations Series.

Winner, LGBT Studies Lammy Award presented by Lambda Literary Neither queer theory nor queer activism has fully reckoned with the role of race in the emergence of the modern gay subject. In A Taste for Brown Bodies, Hiram Pérez traces the development of gay modernity and its continued romanticization of the brown body. Focusing in particular on three figures with elusive queer histories—the sailor, the soldier, and the cowboy— Pérez unpacks how each has been memorialized and desired for their heroic masculinity while at the same time functioning as agents for the expansion of the US borders and neocolonial zones of influence. Describing an enduring homonationalism dating to the “birth” of the homosexual in the late 19th century, Pérez considers not only how US imperialist expansion was realized, but also how it was visualized for and through gay men. By means of an analysis of literature, film, and photographs from the 19th to the 21st centuries—including Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Anne Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain,” and photos of abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison—Pérez proposes that modern gay male identity, often traced to late Victorian constructions of “invert” and “homosexual,” occupies not the periphery of the nation but rather a cosmopolitan position, instrumental to projects of war, colonialism, and neoliberalism. A Taste for Brown Bodies argues that practices and subjectivities that we understand historically as forms of homosexuality have been regulated and normalized as an extension of the US nation-state, laying bare the tacit, if complex, participation of gay modernity within US imperialism.

How does cinema imagine our place in the world? Worldly Desires: Cosmopolitanism and Cinema in Hong Kong and Taiwan looks at the studios, films and policies that charted the transnational vision of Hong Kong and Taiwan, two places with an uneasy relationship to the idea of nationhood. Examining the cultural, political and industrial overlaps between these cinemas, as well as the areas where they uniquely parallel each other, this book brings together perspectives from cinema studies, Chinese studies and Asian American studies to show how culture is produced in the spaces between empires. With case studies of popular stars like Linda Lin Dai and Edison Chen, and spectacular genres like the Shaolin Temple cycle of martial arts films, the book explores what it meant to be both cosmopolitan and Chinese in the second half of the 20th century.

Love, and the different manifestations of it, is a common theme in literature around the world. In Cosmopolitan Love, Sijia Yao examines the writings of D. H. Lawrence, a British writer whose literature focused primarily on interpersonal relationships in domestic settings, and Eileen Chang, a Chinese writer who migrated to the United States and explored Chinese heterosexual love in her writing. While comparing the writings of a Chinese writer and an English one, Yao avoids a direct comparison between East and West that could further enforce binaries. Instead, she uses the comparison to develop an idea of cosmopolitanism that shows how the writers are in conversation with their own culture and with each other. Both D. H. Lawrence and Eileen Chang wrote stories that are influenced by—but sometimes stand in opposition to—their own cultures. They offer alternative understandings of societies dealing with modernism and cultural globalization. Their stories deal with emotional pain caused by the restrictions of local politics and economics and address common themes of incestuous love, sexual love, adulterous love, and utopian love. By analyzing their writing, Yao demonstrates that the concept of love as a social and political force can cross cultural boundaries and traditions to become a basis for human meaning, the key to a cosmopolitan vision.

Does travel broaden the mind? This book explores this question through an innovative sociological study of gap year travel. Taking a year out overseas between school and university is an increasingly legitimate practice for young people in the UK. But what do young people get out of gap years? A wide range of 'official' sources acknowledge gap years as a way of becoming a global citizen and more employable at the same time. Instead of automatically assuming that gap years are a 'good thing', this book critically considers how this contemporary rite of passage could contribute to the reproduction of structural disadvantage at both a national and international level in relation to young people's routes into education and employment, and representations of difference and distinction in cultural practices. The key argument running throughout the book is that well-established ways of thinking about and understanding the world are used to frame gap year experiences, including how other people and places are different; the influence of class in determining what has cultural value; and what sort of identity work is worthwhile. Gap years are located at a point where a number of fields overlap: education, employment and the consumption of leisure travel. A Cosmopolitan Journey? will therefore be of interest to students, academics and practitioners in these areas.

The Cosmopolitan Dream presents the broad patterns in the transformations of mainland Chinese masculinity over recent years, covering both representations (in film, fiction, and on television) and the lived experiences of Chinese men on four continents. Exposure to transnational influences has made Chinese notions of masculinity more cosmopolitan than ever before, yet the configurations of these hybrid masculinities retain the imprint of Chinese historical models. With the increasing interconnectivity of markets around the world, the hegemonic mode of manhood is now a highly mobile transnational business form of masculinity. However, the fusion of this kind of cosmopolitanism with Chinese characteristics has not diminished the conventional class and gender privileges for educated men. On the other hand, the traditionally prized intellectual masculinity in Chinese culture, which did not hold commerce in high regard, has reconciled with today’s business values. Together these factors shape the outlook of the contemporary generation of Chinese elites. At the same time globalization has increased the cross-country mobility of blue-collar Chinese men, who may possess a masculine ideal that is different from their white-collar counterparts. Therefore it is important to examine various types of masculinity with the recent, reform-era mainland Chinese migration. The migrant man—whether he is a worker, student, pop idol, or writer (all cases studied in this volume)—could face challenges to his masculinity based on his race, class, intimate partners, or fatherhood. The strategies adopted by the Chinese men to reinvent their masculine identities in these stories offer much insight into the complex connections between masculinity and the rapid socioeconomic developments of postsocialist China. “The Cosmopolitan Dream provides a rich and multidisciplinary window into how Chinese masculinities are both shaping and being shaped by a new era of globalization, one in which circulations of Chinese capital, images, and people play an ever more important role. This is an insightful and engaging work that makes important contributions to the study of media, gender, migration, and globalization more broadly.” —John Osburg, University of Rochester “A pioneering contribution toward understanding transnational Chinese masculinities. Covering both imagined representations and the actual experience of migrating Chinese men, this volume is definitely greater than the sum of its parts in conveying the contents and significance of cosmopolitanism to Chinese masculinities.” —Harriet Zurndorfer, Leiden University