New Release Books by Nicole Waller

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.

People in general have a hard time letting go of things that weigh them down. It is difficult to muster up the strength and courage to live a life free from worry, guilt, and fear. Now is the time to take your lives back! Get your freedom back. Whenever you''re down and out and can''t see what lies ahead because of the things cluttering your vision or the things pulling you backwards, write a letter and tell those things goodbye! Author Marcia Waller, in "Goodbye Letters", gives you a chance to bring your emotions to the forefront, tackle them head on and then whisk them out of your life permanently. Do you keep a diary? Are you faced with challenges that are trying to destroy you? Put down the journal and pick up this book, choose your emotion, and say "Goodbye!"

This study explores American encounters with Islam from the colonial era to the present via narratives of captivity. Throughout American history, texts depicting Americans'' captivity at the hands of Muslims have served to situate the American colonies and the American nation in an Atlantic context, creating cultural scripts that move beyond the scope of local histories to establish a mapping of the world into economic, political, religious, and racial spheres. ''American Encounters with Islam'' traces the establishment of such scripts and examines how subsequent generations of Americans have adjusted or rewritten them to map their world and suit their political context. Texts include the autobiographical writings of Captain John Smith, letters and sermons by Cotton Mather, the political journal of James Leander Cathcart, Rick Bragg''s book on the captivity of Jessica Lynch, and Diana Abu-Jaber''s novel ''Crescent''.

This study combines approaches of the humanities and social sciences to explore contemporary Caribbean narratives of the historical trauma of slavery and the revolutionary or subversive strategies of anti-colonial struggle. Drawing on various works (novels, films, plays, political pamphlets) by writers and activists such as Frantz Fanon, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, Michelle Cliff, Erna Brodber, Wilson Harris, Iris Morales, Nicholasa Mohr, Culture Clash, and The Young Lords, the project traces narratives of historical slave uprisings, Maroon wars, and struggles against colonial and neo-colonial governments in and around the Caribbean. ''Contradictoy Violence'' addresses questions of the legitimacy of violence in the struggle for liberation, the price to be paid by individuals and groups for the decision to begin such a forceful struggle, the possibility of escaping the colonizers'' value-system through ''reverse discourse,'' and the limits and possibilites of ''writing violence.'' In a reversal of older master narratives of the postcolonial nation, contemporary Caribbean works have produced new definitions of nationhood which nevertheless keep the nation intact as a site of agency and create an alternative vision of the Americas which could serve to ''remap'' the geo-political boundaries existing on the American continent today.