This collection of thirteen essays examines sociolinguistic phenomena in a wide variety of marginal environments, providing both an overview of globalizaiton on the margins and a foundation for an expanded understanding of the processes of linguistic and cultural changes at work in these settings. Taking an expansive conceptual view of margins, the volume is organized in three parts, looking at examples of marginal spaces in the nation-state, in online environments, and in the peripheries of urban locations, globally to call attention to new and changing discursive genres, patterns, practices, and identities emerging in these spaces as a result of contemporary mobilities, the evolving global economy, and socio-political changes. With previous research previously confined to the study of globalization in urban areas, this volume opens the door for further research on the complex sociolinguistic processes resulting from globalization on the margins, making this an ideal resource for students and scholars in sociolinguistics, globalization and heritage studies, new media, anthropology, and cultural studies.

In Culture on the Margins, Jon Cruz recounts the "discovery" of black music by white elites in the nineteenth century, boldly revealing how the episode shaped modern approaches to studying racial and ethnic cultures. Slave owners had long heard black song making as meaningless "noise." Abolitionists began to attribute social and political meaning to the music, inspired, as many were, by Frederick Douglass's invitation to hear slaves' songs as testimonies to their inner, subjective worlds. This interpretive shift--which Cruz calls "ethnosympathy"--marks the beginning of a mainstream American interest in the country's cultural margins. In tracing the emergence of a new interpretive framework for black music, Cruz shows how the concept of "cultural authenticity" is constantly redefined by critics for a variety of purposes--from easing anxieties arising from contested social relations to furthering debates about modern ethics and egalitarianism. In focusing on the spiritual aspect of black music, abolitionists, for example, pivoted toward an idealized religious singing subject at the expense of absorbing the more socially and politically elaborate issues presented in the slave narratives and other black writings. By the end of the century, Cruz maintains, modern social science also annexed much of this cultural turn. The result was a fully modern tension-ridden interest in culture on the racial margins of American society that has long had the effect of divorcing black culture from politics.

In the interpretation of Shakespeare, wordplay has often been considered inconsequential, frequently reduced to a decorative "quibble." But in Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context, Patricia Parker, one of the most original interpreters of Shakespeare, argues that attention to Shakespearean wordplay reveals unexpected linkages, not only within and between plays but also between the plays and their contemporary culture. Combining feminist and historical approaches with attention to the "matter" of language as well as of race and gender, Parker's brilliant "edification from the margins" illuminates much that has been overlooked, both in Shakespeare and in early modern culture. This book, a reexamination of popular and less familiar texts, will be indispensable to all students of Shakespeare and the early modern period.

Focusing on the Ming and Qing eras, this book analyses crucial moments in the formation of cultural, regional and religious identities. It demonstrates how the imperial discourse is many-faceted, rather than a monolithic agent of cultural assimilation.

Who invented national literature? What is the relationship between script, identity, and history? This volume contains papers from a symposium, which brought leading philologists together with anthropologists and historians to connect theories of writing, language, and identity with the results of ancient Near Eastern scholarship.

The state of Tibetan culture within contemporary China is a highly politicized topic on which reliable information is rare. Based on fieldwork and interviews conducted between 1998 and 2000 in China's Tibetan Autonomous Prefectures, this book investigates the present conditions of Tibetan cultural life and cultural expression.

"A remarkable study. . . . The first book of its kind and essential for any future discussion of modernism and its embattled boundaries."—Françoise Meltzer, author of Hot Property "One of the very best books of literary criticism, literary scholarship, or literary theory I have ever read. . . . It illuminates interrelationships between historical studies and theory in any humanist discipline."—Menachim Brinker, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem "A milestone in the study of modern Jewish literature. It seriously engages and recontextualizes all the scholarship that came before, and by so doing sets it on a new course: applying a rigorous definition of modernism yet insistent upon methodological diversity; deeply grounded in Hebrew culture yet unabashedly diaspora-centered. This is not a book that readers will take lightly."—David G. Roskies, author of Against the Apocalypse