This book makes a significant contribution to contemporary debates on "globalization," culture and gender. Focusing on intersections of the local and the global in Africa, contributors elucidate how translocal and transnational cultural currents are mediated by gender, how they reshape gender constructs and relations, and how they both manifest and impinge on relations of power.

This volume provides new insights into gendered interactions over the past two centuries between Germany and Asia, including India, China, Japan, and previously overlooked Asian countries including Vietnam, the Philippines, Thailand, and Korea. This volume presents scholarship from academics working in the field of German-Asian Studies as it relates to gender across transnational encounters in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Gender has been a lens of analysis in isolated published chapters in previous edited volumes on German-Asian connections, but nowhere has there been a volume specifically dedicated to the analysis of gender in this field. Rejecting traditional notions of West and East as seeming polar opposites, their contributions to this volume attempts to reconstruct the ways in which German and Asian men and women have cooperated and negotiated the challenge of modernity in various fields.

A feminist approach to the Anthropocene that recovers the relevance of sensation and phenomenology. Earthly Encounters develops a fuller account of the lived experience of racialized gender formation as it exists on this planet, earth. It analyzes sensations: the chill of winter, the warm embrace of the wind, the feeling of being immersed in water, and a stifling sense of containment. Through this analysis in settler colonial and colonial contexts, in twentieth-century North America and Africa, Stephanie D. Clare shows how sensation is unevenly distributed within social worlds and productive of racial, national, and gendered subjectivities. From revealing the relevance of phenomenology, especially in the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Frantz Fanon, to debates concerning new materialism and affect theory, Clare shows how the phenomenology of race and gender must consider both the production of the body-subject and the environment. She concludes by making a case for the continued significance of sensation in the context of the Anthropocene. “This book charts a course that is simultaneously materialist and attentive to the politics of representation. It aims to hold on to the legacy of feminist theory and to develop a queer political strategy that on the one hand gives an account of the earth as an active, living organism and, on the other hand, holds on to the critique of the politics of representation.”— Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky, Ruhr-Universität Bochum

Examining the relationship between strangers, embodiment and community, Strange Encounters challenges the assumptions that the stranger is simply anybody we do not recognize and instead proposes that he or she is socially constructued as somebody we already know. Using feminist and postcolonial theory this book examines the impact of multiculturalism and globalization on embodiment and community whilst considering the ethical and political implication of its critique for post-colonial feminism. A diverse range of texts are analyzed which produce the figure of 'the stranger', showing that it has alternatively been expelled as the origin of danger - such as in neighbourhood watch, or celebrated as the origin of difference - as in multiculturalism. The author argues that both of these standpoints are problematic as they involve 'stranger fetishism'; they assume that the stranger 'has a life of its own'.

Illustrated by revealing interviews with women and men in the tourist resorts in the Sinai, Egypt, this book is ostensibly about western women who sleep with 'native' men while on holiday. Broadening the scope of issues involved, it examines the link between these holiday romances and a much wider romanticism of place and people - of the landscapes of paradise, deserts and the lure of the Bedouin sheikh - that are used to sell these destinations. It argues that the romantic stereotyping and deliberate positioning of 'Third World' resorts as places that somehow exist outside of the modernities the women come from is inextricably bound up in the relationships. Similarly, for the local man the tourist resort is perceived as a place other than his own cultural space and time and represents a modernity that is otherwise only found in the 'West'. The relationships that ensue can therefore only occur because the tourist resort acts as an intermediate space. In analyzing the interaction of these men and women within the context of modernity, the book provides insights into gender issues to do with globalization, travel and sexuality, as well as opening up the debate on sex tourism and showing this to be a lot more ambiguous and complicated than it might at first appear.

From the award-winning author of Dressing Up, a riveting and diverse history of women’s hair that reestablishes the cultural power of hairdressing in nineteenth-century America. In the nineteenth century, the complex cultural meaning of hair was not only significant, but it could also impact one’s place in society. After the Civil War, hairdressing was also a growing profession and the hair industry a mainstay of local, national, and international commerce. In Beyond Vanity, Elizabeth Block expands the nascent field of hair studies by restoring women’s hair as a cultural site of meaning in the early United States. With a special focus on the places and spaces in which the hair industry operated, Block argues that the importance of hair has been overlooked due to its ephemerality as well as its misguided association with frivolity and triviality. As Block clarifies, hairdressing was anything but frivolous. Using methods of visual and material culture studies informed by concepts of cultural geography, Block identifies multiple substantive categories of place and space within which hair acted. These include the preparatory places of the bedroom, hair salon, and enslaved peoples’ quarters, as well as the presentation places of parties, fairs, stages, and workplaces. Here are also the untold stories of business owners, many of whom were women of color, and the creators of trendsetting styles like the pompadour and Gibson Girl bouffant. Block’s ground-breaking study examines how race and racism affected who participated in the presentation and business of hair, and according to which standards. The result of looking closely at the places and spaces of hair is a reconfiguration that allows a new understanding of the cultural power of hair in the period.

A Century of Encounters analyzes Arab, American, and European literary depictions of self and other as they interact with each other in Arab North Africa throughout the twentieth century and introduces the trope of the encounter as a lens through which to read contemporary world literature comparatively. A focus on the transnational encounter allows for the in-depth study of constructions of gender, race, and national identities both for the self and the other in order to answer the seemingly simple questions: What makes up different encounters in the twentieth century, and how can we facilitate a productive and positive encounter between these groups? This book illustrates connections between literary texts that have hitherto been overlooked and establishes an intertextual genealogy of transcultural encounters throughout the twentieth century that coalesce around the themes of desire, family, and travel. In its literary analysis, A Century of Encounters aims to facilitate a better understanding of other cultures in general and contribute to constructive cross-cultural interactions between the United States, Europe, and Arab North Africa in particular.