Confluence Narratives: Ethnicity, History and Nation-Making in the Americas explores how a collection of contemporary novels calls attention to the impact of ethnicity on national identities in the Americas. These historical narratives portray the cultural encounters—the conflicts and alliances, peaceful borrowings and violent seizures—that have characterized the history of the American continents since the colonial period. In the second half of the twentieth century, North and South American readers have witnessed a steady output of novels that revisit moments of cultural confluence as a means of revising national histories. Confluence Narratives proposes that these historical novels, published in such places as Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, the United States, and Canada, make up a key literary genre in the Americas. The genre links the various parts of the hemisphere together through three common historical experiences: colonization, slavery, and immigration. Luciano Tosta demonstrates how numerous texts from the United States, Canada, Spanish America, the Caribbean, and Brazil fall into the genre. The book focuses on four case studies from ethnic groups in the Americas: Amerindians, Afro-descendants, Jewish Americans, and Japanese Americans. Tosta uses the experience of the American nations as a springboard to problematize the concept of the contemporary nation, an identity marked by border-crossings and other experiences of deterritorialization. Based on the exploration of “confluence narratives,” Tosta argues that the “contemporary” nation is not as contemporary as one may think. Informed by postcolonial theory and transnational and ethnic studies, this book offers an important comparative study for and of inter-American literature. Its analysis of the representation of cultural encounters within distinctive national histories underscores the complex nature of ‘otherness’ in the Americas, as well as the inherently transcultural aspect of a trans-continental American identity.

Writers and intellectuals in modern Japan have long forged dialogues across the boundaries separating the spheres of literature and thought. This book explores some of their most provocative connections in the volatile years of the 1920s to 1950s, revealing unexpected intersections of literature, ideas, and politics in a global transwar context.

"Podmore's essays resemble Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau with an extra dose of social, racial and political analysis." —ARIZONA DAILY SUN In the wake of his river–running mother's death, Zak Podmore explores the healing power of wild places through a lens of grief and regeneration. Visceral, first–person narratives include a canoe crossing of the Colorado River delta during a rare release of water, a kayak sprint down a flash–flooding Little Colorado River, and a packraft trip on the Elwha River in Washington through the largest dam removal project in history. Award–winning journalist and film producer ZAK PODMORE covers conservation issues, outdoor sports, and Utah politics. He is a Report for America fellow at the Salt Lake Tribune and editor–at–large for Canoe & Kayak magazine. His work appears in Outside, High Country News, Four Corners Free Press, and the Huffington Post. He lives in Bluff, Utah.

In examining the intellectual history in contemporary South Africa, Eze engages with the emergence of ubuntu as one discourse that has become a mirror and aftermath of South Africa s overall historical narrative. This book interrogates a triple socio-political representation of ubuntu as a displacement narrative for South Africa s colonial consciousness; as offering a new national imaginary through its inclusive consciousness, in which different, competing, and often antagonistic memories and histories are accommodated; and as offering a historicity in which the past is transformed as a symbol of hope for the present and the future. This book offers a model for African intellectual history indignant to polemics but constitutive of creative historicism and healthy humanism.

The historical novels of Manuel Zapata Olivella and Ana Maria Gonçalves map black journeys from Africa to the Americas in a way that challenges the Black Atlantic paradigm that has become synonymous with cosmopolitan African diaspora studies. Unlike Paul Gilroy, who coined the term and based it on W.E.B. DuBois’s double consciousness, Zapata, in Changó el gran putas (1983), creates an empowering mythology that reframes black resistance in Colombia, Haiti, Mexico, Brazil, and the United States. In Um defeito de cor (2006), Gonçalves imagines the survival strategies of a legendary woman said to be the mother of black abolitionist poet Luís Gama and a conspirator in an African Muslim–⁠led revolt in Brazil’s “Black Rome.” These novels show differing visions of revolution, black community, femininity, sexuality, and captivity. They skillfully reveal how events preceding the UNESCO Decade of Afro-Descent (2015–2024) alter our understanding of Afro-⁠Latin America as it gains increased visibility. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

This open access book explores the transformative effects of remittances. Remittances are conceptualized as flows of money, objects, ideas, traditions, and symbolic capital, mapping out a cross-border space in which people live, work, and communicate with multiple belongings. By doing so, they effect social change both in places of origin and destination. However, their power to improve individual living conditions and community infrastructure mainly results from global inequality. Hence, we challenge the remittance mantra and go beyond the migration-development-nexus by revealing dependencies and frictions in remittance relations. Remittances are thus scrutinized in their effects on both social cohesion and social rupture. By highlighting the transformative effects of remittance in the context of conflict, climate change, and the postcolonial, we shed light on the future of transnational society. Presenting empirical case studies from Ghana, Burkina Faso, Sri Lanka, New Zealand, Turkey, Lebanon, USA, Japan, and various European countries, as well as historical North America and the Habsburg Empire, we explore remittance relations from a range of disciplines including anthropology, sociology, history, design, architecture, governance, and peace studies.

During the global Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, many called upon the United States to finally face its painful past. Tim Gruenewald’s new book is an in-depth investigation of how that past is currently remembered at the national museums in Washington, DC. Curating America’s Painful Past reveals how the tragic past is either minimized or framed in a way that does not threaten dominant national ideologies. Gruenewald analyzes the National Museum of American History (NMAH), the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), and the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). The NMAH, the nation’s most popular history museum, serves as the benchmark for the imagination of US history and identity. The USHMM opened in 1993 as the United States’ official Holocaust memorial and stands adjacent to the National Mall. Gruenewald makes a persuasive case that the USHMM established a successful blueprint for narrating horrific and traumatic histories. Curating America’s Painful Past contrasts these two museums to ask why America’s painful memories were largely absent from the memorial landscape of the National Mall and argues that social injustices in the present cannot be addressed until the nation’s painful past is fully acknowledged and remembered. It was only with the opening of the NMAAHC in 2016 that a detailed account of atrocities committed against African Americans appeared on the National Mall. Gruenewald focuses on the museum’s narrative structure in the context of national discourse to provide a critical reading of the museum. When the NMAI opened in 2004, it presented for the first time a detailed history from a Native American perspective that sought to undo conventional museum narratives. However, criticism led to more traditional exhibitions and national focus. Nevertheless, the museum still marginalizes memories of the vast numbers of Indigenous victims to European colonization and to US expansion. In a final chapter, Gruenewald offers a thought experiment, imagining a memory site like the recently opened National Memorial for Peace and Justice (Montgomery, Alabama) situated on the National Mall so the reader can assess how profound an effect projects of national memory can have on facing the past as a matter of present justice.