New Release Books by Lars Eckstein

Remembering German- Australian Colonial Entanglements emphatically promotes a critical and nuanced understanding of the complex entanglement of German colonial actors and activities within Australian colonial institutions and different imperial ideologies. Case studies ranging from the German reception of James Cook''s voyages through to the legacies of 19th- and 20th- century settler colonialism foreground the highly ambiguous roles played by explorers, missionaries, intellectuals and other individuals, as well as by objects and things that travelled between worlds - ancestral human remains, rare animal skins, songs and even military tanks. The chapters foreground the complex relationship between science, religion, art and exploitation, displacement and annihilation. Contributors trace how these entanglements have been commemorated or forgotten over time - by Germans, settler-Australians and Indigenous people. Bringing to light a critical understanding of the German involvement in the Australian colonial project, Remembering German- Australian Colonial Entanglements will be of great interest to scholars of colonialism, postcolonialism, German Studies and Indigenous Studies. But for the editors'' substantial new introductory chapter, these contributions originally appeared in a special issue of Postcolonial Studies.

The term ‘postcolonial literatures in English’ designates English-language literatures from Africa, Asia, the Americas and Oceania, as well as the literatures of diasporic communities who have moved from those regions to the global north. This volume introduces the central themes of postcolonial literary studies and delineates how these themes are reflected and elaborated in exemplary literary works by postcolonial authors from around the world. It also offers succinct definitions of key terms like Orientalism, hybridity, Indigeneity or writing back.

The Atlantic slave trade continues to haunt the cultural memories of Africa, Europe and the Americas. There is a prevailing desire to forget: While victims of the African diaspora tried to flee the sites of trauma, enlightened Westerners preferred to be oblivious to the discomforting complicity between their enlightenment and chattel slavery. Recently, however, fiction writers have ventured to ''re-member'' the Black Atlantic.This book is concerned with how literature performs as memory. It sets out to chart systematically the ways in which literature and memory intersect, and offers readings of three seminal Black Atlantic novels. Each reading illustrates a particular poetic strategy of accessing the past and presents a distinct political outlook on memory. Novelists may choose to write back to texts, images or music: Caryl Phillips''sCambridgebrings together numerous fragments of slave narratives, travelogues and histories to shape a brilliant montage of long-forgotten texts. David Dabydeen''sA Harlot''s Progressapproaches slavery through the gateway of paintings by William Hogarth, Sir Joshua Reynolds and J.M.W. Turner. Toni Morrison''sBeloved, finally, is steeped in black music, from spirituals and blues to the art of John Coltrane. Beyond differences in poetic strategy, moreover, the novels paradigmatically reveal distinct ideologies: their politics of memory variously promote an encompassing transcultural sense of responsibility, an aestheticist ''creative amnesia'', and the need to preserve a collective ''black'' identity.

Reading Song Lyrics offers the first systematic introduction to lyrics as a vibrant genre of (performed) literature. It takes lyrics seriously as a complex form of verbal art that has been unjustly neglected in literary, music, and, to a lesser degree, cultural studies, partly as it cuts squarely across institutional boundaries. The first part of this book accordingly introduces a thoroughly transdisciplinary interpretive framework. It outlines theoretical approaches to issues such as performance and performativity, generic convention and cultural capital, sound and songfulness, mediality and musical multimedia, and step by step applies them to the example of a single song. The second part then offers three extended case studies which showcase the larger cultural and historical viability of this model. Probing into the relationship between lyrics and the ambivalent performance of national culture in Britain, it offers exemplary readings of a highly subversive 1597 ayre by John Dowland, of an 1811 broadside ballad about Sara Baartman, ‘The Hottentot Venus’, and of a 2000 song by ‘jungle punk’ collective Asian Dub Foundation. Reading Song Lyrics demonstrates how and why song lyrics matter as a paradigmatic art form in the culture of modernity.