Territories and Trajectories: Cultures in Circulation

Product Description The contributors to Territories and Trajectories propose a model of cultural production and transmission based on the global diffusion, circulation, and exchange of people, things, and ideas across time and space. This model eschews a static, geographically bounded notion of cultural origins and authenticity, privileging instead a mobility of culture that shapes and is shaped by geographic spaces. Reading a diverse array of texts and objects, from Ethiopian song and ancient Chinese travel writing to Japanese literature and aerial and nautical images of the Indian Ocean, the contributors decenter national borders to examine global flows of culture and the relationship between thinking at transnational and local scales. Throughout, they make a case for methods of inquiry that encourage innovative understandings of borders, oceans, and territories and that transgress disciplinary divides. Contributors. Homi Bhabha, Jacqueline Bhabha, Lindsay Bremner, Finbarr Barry Flood, Rosario Hubert, Alina Payne, Kay Kaufman Shelemay, Shu-mei Shih, Diana Sorensen, Karen Thornber, Xiaofei Tian Review "This rich collection of essays--ably framed and introduced by Diane Sorensen and Homi Bhabha--brings a series of finely rendered cases to bear on the inner dynamics that connect disciplinary and diversity, departures and destinations, home and the foreign. It will help us all move beyond the fake binary that opposes flow and fixity in critical cultural studies."--Arjun Appadurai, author of "Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger ""Territories and Trajectories offers a new conceptual vocabulary even as it explores the ramifications of thinking relationally across space, time, genres, media, and political forms. Nation and region-based categories are happily abjured in favor of constellations that expose us to the wonders of unexpected cross-spatial analyses across two millennia. A welcome addition to the enterprise of global humanities, this volume refreshes for our times the logics of mobility, cultural entanglements, disjunctive temporalities, and spatial realignments that have informed humanistic work on globalization over the past few decades."--Debjani Ganguly, director of the Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures, University of Virginia and author of "This Thing Called the World " Review “This rich collection of essays—ably framed and introduced by Diane Sorensen and Homi K. Bhabha—brings a series of finely rendered cases to bear on the inner dynamics that connect disciplinarity and diversity, departures and destinations, home and the foreign. It will help us all move beyond the fake binary that opposes flow and fixity in critical cultural studies.” -- Arjun Appadurai, author of ― Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger About the Author Diana Sorensen is James F. Rothenberg Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, as well as the author of A Turbulent Decade Remembered: Scenes from the Latin American Sixties. Homi K. Bhabha is Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University.