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Settler Attachments and Asian Diasporic Film is an interdisciplinary examination of the stubborn attachment of Asian diasporas to settler-colonial ideals and of the decolonial possibilities Asian diasporic films imagine. Beenash Jafri uniquely addresses the complexities of Asian–Indigenous relationality through film and visual media, urging film scholars to approach their subjects with an eye to the entanglements of race, diaspora, and Indigeneity.

Highlighting how Asian diasporic attachments to settler colonialism are structural, she explores how they are manifested through melancholic yearning within the figure of the Asian cowboy in films such as Cowgirl and Wild West and through the aesthetic and representational politics of body and land in experimental films by Shani Mootoo and Vivek Shraya. While recognizing the pervasive violence of settler colonialism, Jafri maintains a hopeful outlook, showcasing how Asian diasporic filmmakers persistently work toward decolonial worldmaking. This emerging vision can be seen in the radical friendship between Ali Kazimi and Onondaga artist Jeffrey Thomas in Kazimi’s film Shooting Indians, in the queer relational survivance depicted in films such as This Place and Scarborough, and in the sensory disruptions of Jin-me Yoon’s interactive art project Untunnelling Vision.

From film and media studies to diaspora studies and critical ethnic studies, Indigenous studies to queer theory, Settler Attachments and Asian Diasporic Film provides a critical framework for engaging cinematic media to understand and imagine beyond the entrenched settler-colonial dynamics within Asian diasporic communities.

Although the history of Indonesian music has received much attention from ethnomusicologists and Western composers alike, almost nothing has been written on the interaction of missionaries with local culture. This study represents the first attempt to concentrate on the musical dimension of missionary activities in Indonesia. In fourteen essays, a group of distinguished scholars show the complexity of the topic: while some missionaries did important scholarship on local music, making recordings and attempting to use local music in services, others tried to suppress whatever they found. Many were collaborating closely with anthropologists who admitted freely that they could not have done their work without them. And both parties brought colonial biases into their work. By grappling with these realities and records, this book is a collective effort to decolonize the project of making music histories.

The story of how Mesoamerican food activists faced down Monsanto . . . and wonRight before the 2014 World Cup, US trade interests pressured Guatemala’s legislature into lifting its national ban on genetically modified (GM) crops and criminalizing traditional seed saving practices. Maya elders responded with a campaign of mass civil disobedience, blocking highways until the Guatemalan Congress repealed this “Monsanto Law.” Uniting rural and urban Guatemalans, this uprising spotlighted the existential threat of GM corn to the livelihood, dignity, and cultural heritage of maize-producing milperos (small farmers) throughout Mesoamerica. Ten years later, Mexico is also facing down US trade aggression to defend a 2020 presidential ban on the import of GM corn for human consumption.Liza Grandia chronicles how diverse coalitions in Mexico and Guatemala have defended their sacred maize against corporate threats to privatize it. Rather than just “voting with their forks” like the consumer-driven US food movement, Mesoamerican farmers and their allies have voted with their feet through direct action. In a world of interconnected trade, their victories chart a path that other food movements might follow. They also show how everyday people can demand better regulatory protections for environmental health and forge more climate-resilient agricultural systems with native seed saving.Dramatic and timely, Kernels of Resistance celebrates this Indigenous triumph over corporate greed.

A contemporary defense of conservationist Aldo Leopold’s vision for human interaction with the environment. Informed by his experiences as a hunter, forester, wildlife manager, ecologist, conservationist, and professor, Aldo Leopold developed a view he called the land ethic. In a classic essay, published posthumously in A Sand County Almanac, Leopold advocated for an expansion of our ethical obligations beyond the purely human to include what he variously termed the “land community” or the “biotic community”—communities of interdependent humans, nonhuman animals, plants, soils, and waters, understood collectively. This philosophy has been extremely influential in environmental ethics as well as conservation biology and related fields. Using an approach grounded in environmental ethics and the history and philosophy of science, Roberta L. Millstein reexamines Leopold’s land ethic in light of contemporary ecology. Despite the enormous influence of the land ethic, it has sometimes been dismissed as either empirically out of date or ethically flawed. Millstein argues that these dismissals are based on problematic readings of Leopold’s ideas. In this book, she provides new interpretations of the central concepts underlying the land ethic: interdependence, land community, and land health. She also offers a fresh take on of his argument for extending our ethics to include land communities as well as Leopold-inspired guidelines for how the land ethic can steer conservation and restoration policy.

The Lithic Imagination from More to Milton explores how stones, rocks, and the broader mineral realm play a vital role in early modern England’s religious and cultural systems that in turn informs the period’s poetic and visual imagination. The twin buttresses of a human lifespan and the gyre-like turns of England’s long Reformation provide a broad dome under which to locate the many textual and visual archives this book studies. These texts and images participate in specifically English histories (literary, artistic, political, religious), although Continental influences are frequently in dialogue. The religious orbit tracks the rivalries firstly between Jewish and Christian culture, touches on Christianity’s tension with Islam, but most intently follows the antagonisms of Catholic and variants of Reformed or Protestant belief. The bibliography features canonical names such as Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne, Wroth, Herbert, Milton, and Pulter, but puts them in company with lesser-known religious polemicists, alchemists, anatomists, painters, mothers, and stonemasons. The visual archive attends to biblical illustration, tapestries, church furniture, and paintings, anatomical drawings, as well as statues to form a multimedia archive. Similarly, the lithic embraces a wide continuum of mineral forms from bodily encrustations like the kidney and bezoar stone, to salt, iron, limestone, marble, flint, and silicon. The assemblage of materials speaks to aspirational imperial fantasies, looming colonial conquests, syncretism, and supersession, as well as issues of gender and the race-making category of hue, alongside elitist ideologies of an elect, chosen people. All connect via the storied pathways of stone as densely material and a foundation for the abstract imaginary along the scala naturae. Across these human–stone encounters, stone fascinates and betrays and is equal parts damnation and salvation.

Pragmatic Liberation and the Politics of Puerto Rican Diasporic Drama explores the work of a unique group of playwrights—Puerto Rican dramatists writing in the United States—who offer a model of political engagement. As members of the Puerto Rican diaspora, they have a heightened awareness of the systematic discrimination and the colonial citizenship created by Puerto Rico's territorial status. Pragmatic Liberation analyzes the work of established playwrights as well as work that has previously received little attention in the world of theater studies, including René Marqués's Palm Sunday. The book demonstrates the strategies these playwrights use to model a nuanced way of moving toward liberation while being sensitive to the potential impact these actions might have on those closest to us. This is a crucially important model that needs more attention in our currently polarized political moment.

Suzana Sawyer traces Ecuador’s lawsuit against the Chevron corporation for the environmental devastation resulting from its oil drilling practices, showing how distinct legal truths were relationally composed of, with, and through crude oil.

Offering a new approach to the intersection of literature and philosophy, Modernist Idealism contends that certain models of idealist thought require artistic form for their full development and that modernism realizes philosophical idealism in aesthetic form. This comparative view of modernism employs tools from intellectual history, literary analysis, and philosophical critique, focusing on the Italian reception of German idealist thought from the mid-1800s to the Second World War. Modernist Idealismintervenes in ongoing debates about the nineteenth- and twentieth-century resurgence of materialism and spiritualism, as well as the relation of decadent, avant-garde, and modernist production. Michael J. Subialka aims to open new discursive space for the philosophical study of modernist literary and visual culture, considering not only philosophical and literary texts but also early cinema. The author’s main contention is that, in various media and with sometimes radically different political and cultural aims, a host of modernist artists and thinkers can be seen as sharing in a project to realize idealist philosophical worldviews in aesthetic form.