Through meticulous textual and contextual analysis of the sixteenth-century Chinese tale The Seven Brothers and its fifteen contemporary variants, Juwen Zhang unveils the ways in which the translation and illustration of folk and fairy tales can perpetuate racist stereotypes. By critically examining the conscious and unconscious ideological biases harbored by translators, adapters, and illustrators, the author calls for a paradigm shift in translation practices grounded in decolonization and anti-racism to ensure respectful and inclusive representation of diverse cultures. Translating, Interpreting, and Decolonizing Chinese Fairy Tales not only offers insights for translators, researchers, and educators seeking to leverage folktales and picture books for effective children's education and entertainment, but also challenges our preconceived notions of translated and adapted folk and fairy tales.

Winner, 2023 Harry Levin Prize, American Comparative Literature Association Beginning in the late Qing era, Chinese writers and intellectuals looked to India in search of new literary possibilities and anticolonial solidarity. In their view, India and China shared both an illustrious past of cultural and religious exchange and a present experience of colonial aggression. These writers imagined India as an alternative to Western imperialism—a Pan-Asian ideal that could help chart an escape route from colonialism and its brutal grasp on body and mind by ushering in a new kind of modernity in Asian terms. Gal Gvili examines how Chinese writers’ image of India shaped the making of a new literature and spurred efforts to achieve literary decolonization. She argues that multifaceted visions of Sino-Indian connections empowered Chinese literary figures to resist Western imperialism and its legacies through novel forms and genres. However, Gvili demonstrates, the Global North and its authority mediated Chinese visions of Sino-Indian pasts and futures. Often reading Indian literature and thought through English translations, Chinese writers struggled to break free from deeply ingrained imperialist knowledge structures. Imagining India in Modern China traces one of the earliest South-South literary imaginaries: the hopes it inspired, the literary rejuvenation it launched, and the shadow of the North that inescapably haunted it. By unearthing Chinese writers’ endeavors to decolonize literature and thought as well as the indelible marks that imperialism left on their minds, it offers new perspective on the possibilities and limitations of anticolonial movements and South-South solidarity.

Decolonization in Practice speaks to the practical work of dismantling colonial ideologies and features contributions from Indigenous, Black, racialized immigrant, refugee, and ally scholars, researchers, and practitioners who share their experiences enacting decolonizing work in their communities. Each chapter presents stories of inspiration, resistance, unlearning, relearning, and transformation on the journey towards reconciliation. This edited collection asks, “How do we understand anti-racist practice as a framework for reconciliation?” “How can we identify areas of obstacle and opportunity?” and “How can we take responsibility for decolonizing our ways of knowing and acting?” These questions are asked in response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s assertion that meaningful engagement among Indigenous Peoples and non-Indigenous people will be key in advancing reconciliation through anti-racist solidarity. Contributors share personal decolonial stories and explore taking responsibility for building a decolonial community from and within everyday practice for transforming our learning into action to achieve social and environmental justice goals. This unique collection serves a variety of courses, including as a primary text for upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses in Canada focused on decolonization, as a supplementary text for introductory-level courses in Canada that are incorporating discussions of decolonization, and as a primary or supplementary text for international courses.

Political Theories of Decolonization provides an introduction to some of the seminal texts of postcolonial political theory. The difficulty of founding a new regime is an important theme in political theory, and the intellectual history of decolonization provides a rich--albeit overlooked--opportunity to explore it. Many theorists have pointed out that the colonized subject was a divided subject. This book argues that the postcolonial state was a divided state. While postcolonial states were created through the struggle for independence, they drew on both colonial institutions and reinvented pre-colonial traditions. Political Theories of Decolonization illuminates how many of the central themes of political theory such as land, religion, freedom, law, and sovereignty are imaginatively explored by postcolonial thinkers. In doing so, it provides readers access to texts that add to our understanding of contemporary political life and global political dynamics.

The Routledge Companion Literature and the Global South offers a comprehensive overview of the field at a key moment in its development—a snapshot of where Global South literary studies stands in its second decade. As the aftermath of a string of global cataclysms since the rise of neoliberal globalization has demonstrated, it is the poor, the disenfranchised, and the marginalized who consistently bear the brunt of the suffering. What defines the Global South is the recognition across the world that globalization’s promised bounties have not materialized. It has failed as a global master narrative. Global South studies centers on three general areas: Globalization, its aftermath/failure, and how those on the economic bottom survive it. Organized into three parts, this volume consists of original essays by 25 contributors from around the world. Part I focuses on the origins and objects of Global South studies, and how this field has come to define and historicize its organizing concept. Part II considers subsequent critical developments in Global South studies, particularly those that embrace interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches. Part III features case studies which highlight a range of applications and interventions. The contributors critique the boundaries and definitions explored in the earlier parts and push "settled" literatures or methods into new analytical spaces. This innovative collection is an invaluable resource for anyone studying and researching Global South studies and literature, but also those interested in world literature, contemporary literature, postcolonialism, decolonizing the curriculum, critical race studies, gender studies, and politics.

In Oral Traditions in Contemporary China: Healing a Nation, Juwen Zhang provides a systematic survey of such oral traditions as folk and fairy tales, proverbs, ballads, and folksongs that are vibrantly practiced today. Zhang establishes a theoretical framework for understanding how Chinese culture has continued for thousands of years with vitality and validity, core and arbitrary identity markers, and folkloric identity. This framework, which describes a cultural self-healing mechanism, is equally applicable to the exploration of other traditions and cultures in the world. Through topics from Chinese Cinderella to the Grimms of China, from proverbs like “older ginger is spicier” to the life-views held by the Chinese, and from mountain songs and ballads to the musical instruments like the clay-vessel-flute, the author weaves these oral traditions across time and space into a mesmerizing intellectual journey. Focusing on contemporary practice, this book serves as a bridge between Chinese and international folklore scholarship and other related disciplines as well. Those interested in Chinese culture in general and Chinese folklore, literature, and oral tradition in particular will certainly delight in perusing this book.

This book makes the case that the idea of a "world" in the cultural and philosophical sense is not an exclusively Western phenomenon. During the Cold War and in the wake of decolonization a plethora of historical attempts were made to reinvent the notions of world literature, world art, and philosophical universality from an anticolonial perspective. Contributing to recent debates on world literature, the postcolonial, and translatability, the book presents a series of interdisciplinary and multilingual case studies spanning Europe, the United States, and China. The case studies illustrate how individual anti-imperialist writers and artists set out to remake the conception of the world in their own image by offering a different perspective centered on questions of race, gender, sexuality, global inequality, and class. The book also discusses how international cultural organizations like the Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau, UNESCO, and PEN International attempted to shape this debate across Cold War divides.