PUBLICATIONS > Books & JOURNALS

Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay et al. (eds.) / Indian Genre Fiction: Pasts and Future Histories

Routledge

This volume maps the breadth and domain of genre literature in India across seven languages (Tamil, Urdu, Bangla, Hindi, Odia, Marathi, English), and nine genres for the first time. Over the last few decades, detective/crime fiction and especially science fiction/fantasy have slowly made their way into university curricula and consideration by literary critics in India and the West. However, there has been no substantial study of genre fiction in the Indian languages, least of all from a comparative perspective. This volume, with contributions from leading national and international scholars, addresses this lacuna in critical scholarship and provides an overview of diverse genre fictions.

Using methods from literary analysis, book history, and Indian aesthetic theories, the volume throws light on the variety of contexts in which genre literature is read, activated and used, from political debates surrounding national and regional identities to caste and class conflicts. It shows that Indian genre fiction (including pulp fiction, comics and graphic novels) transmutes across languages, time periods, in translation and through publication processes. While the book focuses on contemporary postcolonial genre literature production, it also draws connections to individual, centuries-long, literary traditions of genre literature in the Indian subcontinent. Further, it traces contested hierarchies within these languages as well as current trends in genre fiction criticism. More

Espen Ytreberg / Kapp Hjertstein: Historien om Nita Kakot Amundsen, Camilla Carpendale og Roald Amundsen

Forlaget Press

This literary nonfiction book is published from Forlaget Press in Norwegian. An English-language translation is being planned.

In Cape Heartstone: the story of Nita Kakot Amundsen, Camilla Carpendale and Roald Amundsen, Espen Ytreberg for the first time tells the full story of the Siberian children Nita Kakot Amundsen and Camilla Carpendale, who were taken To Norway by the explorer Roald Amundsen in the 1920s – and then sent back. Through a research-based and attentive use of the sources available – through texts, film and photography – Ytreberg reveals an unknown story and puts it into a broader context. Cape Heartstone is a book about colonialism and polar history, about modernity and migration, mediated technologies and communication, family and emotions. Sample Chapters in English

På ettervinteren 1921 tok Roald Amundsen til seg to små jenter i Øst-Sibir. Da Amundsen forlot Østkapp og den mislykte «Maud»-ekspedisjonen senere samme år, tok han jentene med seg hjem til Norge. De to lærte seg å snakke norsk, gikk på norsk skole og fikk norske venner. De var det nærmeste Roald Amundsen noensinne kom å få sin egen familie. Men i desember 1924 sendte han jentene brått fra seg igjen.

Her forteller Espen Ytreberg for første gang historien om Camilla Carpendale og Nita Kakot Amundsen. Kapp Hjertestein er en forskningsbasert og reflekterende sakprosafortelling om kolonialisme og polarhistorie, kulturmøter og modernisering, mediterte teknologier og kommunikasjoner, om familieliv og følelser. More

Hall Bjørnstad, Helge Jordheim, Anne Régent-Susini (eds.) / Universal History and the Making of the Global

Routledge

By examining the history of universal history from the late Middle Ages until the early nineteenth century we trace the making of the global. Early modern universal history can be seen as a response to the epistemological crisis provoked by new knowledge and experience. Traditional narratives were no longer sufficient to gain an understanding of events. Inspired by recent developments in theory of history, the volume argues that the relevance of universal history resides in the laboratory of intense, diverse and mainly unsuccessful attempts at thinking history and universals together. They all shared the common aim of integrating all time and space: assemble the world and keep it together. More

Helge Jordheim and Erling Sandmo (eds.) / Conceptualizng the World: An Exploration across Disciplines

Berghahn Books

What is—and what was—“the world”? Though often treated as interchangeable with the ongoing and inexorable progress of globalization, concepts of “world,” “globe,” or “earth” instead suggest something limited and absolute. This innovative and interdisciplinary volume concerns itself with this central paradox: that the complex, heterogeneous, and purportedly transhistorical dynamics of globalization have given rise to the idea and reality of a finite—and thus vulnerable—world. Through studies of illuminating historical moments that range from antiquity to the era of Google Earth, each contribution helps to trace the emergence of the world in multitudinous representations, practices, and human experiences. More

Einar Wigen / State of Translation: Turkey in Interlingual Relations

University of Michigan Press

International politics often requires two or more languages, and the resulting interlingual relations mean translation, either by interpreters who are quite literally in the middle of conversations, or by bilingual statesmen who negotiate internationally in one language and then legitimize domestically in another. Since no two languages are the same, what can be argued in one language may be impossible in another. Political concepts can thus be significantly reformulated in the translation process. State of Translation examines this phenomenon using a case study of how 19th-century Ottoman and later Turkish statesmen struggled with reconciling their arguments in external languages (French, then English) with those in their internal language (Ottoman, later Turkish), and in the process further entangled them. Einar Wigen shows how this process structured social relations between the Ottoman state and its interlocutors, both domestically and internationally, and shaped the dynamics of Turkish relations with Europe. More

Iver B. Neumann & Einar Wigen / The Steppe Tradition in International Relations

Cambridge University Press

Neumann and Wigen counter Euro-centrism in the study of international relations by providing a full account of political organisation in the Eurasian steppe from the fourth millennium BCE up until the present day. Drawing on a wide range of archaeological and historical secondary sources, alongside social theory, they discuss the pre-history, history and effect of what they name the ‘steppe tradition’. Writing from an International Relations perspective, the authors give a full treatment of the steppe tradition’s role in early European state formation, as well as explaining how politics in states like Turkey and Russia can be understood as hybridising the steppe tradition with an increasingly dominant European tradition. They show how the steppe tradition’s ideas of political leadership, legitimacy and concepts of succession politics can help us to understand the policies and behaviour of such leaders as Putin in Russia and Erdogan in Turkey. More

Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay (ed.) / Alle Grenser er Midlertidige: 10 undersøkelser

Transnational Arts Production

This magazine anthology of global science fiction is based on the theme “All Borders are Temporary”. It explores the passing of thresholds and borders, and question who is given access to re-imagine the future. As an anthology of science fiction stories and science fiction art, it gains impulses from a genre that uses literature as a social tool – with different thoughts on the theme of border-crossing as phenomena. The works are from different countries, spread out over six continents.

Edited by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, the featured authors are Oluwole Talabi (Nigeria / Malaysia), Susana Maia (Portugal), Gabriela Lee (The Philippines), Matthew Daniels (Canada) Martine Svanevik (Norway), Isa Prospero (Brazil), Max Knight (Australia / Vietnam), Toby Bennett (South Africa) and Ximena Miranda (Costa Rica).The artists are Agnes Denes (USA), Anawana Haloba (Oslo/Zambia), Lucy McRae (USA), Nelly Ben Hayoun (France), Sarah Magdi Ali (Egypt), Songee Yoon (USA), Wadim Kashin (Moscow). The stories have been translated into Norwegian by Tove B. Gullbrandsen and the introduction has been translated by Tonje Andersen. The designer is João Doria.

On Saturday April 7th, the magazine was distributed with the newspaper Klassekampen all over Norway. On April 6th we had a launch party at Ugla, Oslo, where Martine Svanevik read her story featured in the collection and Camara Lundestad Joof read the introduction. More

Nora S. Eggen and Rana Issa (eds.) / Philologists in the World: a Festschrift in honour of Gunvor Mejdell

Novus forlag

This anthology is dedicated to Professor of Arabic Language and Culture, Gunvor Mejdell, in acknowledgement of and gratitude for her service through more than four decades in the field of Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies. From the early 1970s onwards Gunvor Mejdell has had an outstandingly vital role in the teaching, research, and other academic activities at the University of Oslo. She has been a major contributor to the development of a Norwegian expertise on issues related to the languages, peoples and societies of the Middle East and North Africa, and has played an active role in the Norwegian public sphere. Internationally, Gunvor Mejdell has contributed substantially over the years in the field of sociolinguistics, as well as in cultural and translation studies. This volume, Philologists in the World, reflects Gunvor Mejdell’s philological ethos. 21 articles both by young scholars as well as well-established international scholars in Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies, present a wide array of topics and themes organised in three sections: Language, Culture and Society. More

Margrit Pernau, Helge Jordheim, et al. / Civilizing Emotions: Concepts in Nineteenth Century Asia and Europe

Oxford University Press

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the vocabulary of civility and civilization is very much at the forefront of political debate. Most of these debates proceed as if the meaning of these words were self-evident. This is where Civilizing Emotions intervenes, tracing the history of the concepts of civility and civilization and thus adding a level of self-reflexivity to the present debates. Unlike previous histories, Civilizing Emotions takes a global perspective, highlighting the roles of civility and civilization in the creation of a new and hierarchized global order in the era of high imperialism and its entanglements with the developments in a number of well-chosen European and Asian countries.

Emotions were at the core of the practices linked to the creation of a new global order in the nineteenth century. Civilizing Emotions explores why and how emotions were an asset in civilizing peoples and societies – their control and management, but also their creation and their ascription to different societies and social groups. The study is a contribution to the history of emotions, to global history, and to the history of concepts, three rapidly developing and innovative research areas which are here being brought together for the first time. More

Helge Jordheim / Forum: Multiple Temporalities

History and Theory 53.4 (Dec 2014).

This special issue of History & Theory focusing on the theme of multiple temporalities serves as the introduction to the synchronizing theoretical model. Introduced by Helge Jordheim, the special issue features articles by Jordheim, Shahzad Bashir, Stefan Helgesson, Geoffrey C. Bowker, and Lucian Hölscher. Jordheim’s essay, which introduces the forum on Multiple Temporalities, discusses how the existence of a plurality or a multiplicity of times has been conceptualized in the historiographical tradition, partly by entering into a dialogue with recent writers, historians, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, and literary scholars, partly by returning to the eighteenth century, to the origin of “the modern regime of historicity” (Hartog). In these theoretical and historical investigations Jordheim explores and discusses different ways of conceptualizing multiple times, in terms of nonsynchronicities, layers of time, or natural and historical times on the one hand; and on the other hand, traces how these multiple times have been compared, unified, and adapted by means of elaborate conceptual and material practices that he calls “practices of synchronization.” Jordheim argues that from the eighteenth century onward, these synchronizing practices, inspired by, but by no means reducible to, chronology have given rise to homogeneous, linear, and teleological time, often identified as modern time per se, or simply referred to as “progress.” In focusing on the practices of synchronization, however, Jordheim shows how this regime of temporality during its entire existence, but especially at the moment of its emergence in the eighteenth century and at the present moment of its possible collapse, has been challenged by other times, other temporalities, slower, faster, with other rhythms, other successions of events, other narratives, and so on. More