Dominika Ferens

Katarzyna Nowak-McNeice

Marcin Tereszewski

Ewa Kębłowska-Ławniczak

This interdisciplinary collection explores the diverse relationships between the frequently ignored and inherently ambiguous hinterlands and their manifestations in literature and culture. Moving away from perspectives that emphasize the marginality of hinterlands and present them as devoid of agency and “cultural currency”, this collection assembles a series of original essays using various modes of engagement to reconceptualize hinterlands and highlight their semiotic complexity. Apart from providing a reassessment of hinterlands in terms of their geocultural significance, this book also explores hinterlands through such concepts as nostalgia, heterotopia, identity formation, habitation, and cognitive mapping, with reference to a wide geographical field. Literary and filmic revisions of familiar hinterlands, such as the Australian outback, Alberta prairie, and Arizona desert, are juxtaposed in this volume with representations of such little-known European hinterlands as Lower Silesia and Ukraine, and the complicated political dimension of First World War internment camps is investigated with regard to Kapuskasing (Ontario). Rural China and the Sussex Downs are examined here as writers’ retreats. Inner-city hinterlands in Haiti, India, Morocco, and urban New Jersey take on new meaning when contrasted with the vast hinterlands of megacities like Johannesburg and Los Angeles. The spectrum of diverse approaches to hinterlands helps to reinforce their multilayered and multivocal nature as spaces that defy clear categorization.

Literary and Cultural Representations of the Hinterlands

Tomasz Basiuk

Tomasz Sikora

Out Here originates from a series of queer studies conferences which took place in Poland between 2002 and 2004, and includes essays, an autobiographical account, and two short stories. Their authors are of eight nationalities: Canadian, Belgian, Flemish, German, Hungarian, Polish, Spanish, Ukrainian, and U.S. American. The academic papers represent a wide range of disciplines: philosophy, literature, ethnography, cultural and gender studies. Some combine theoretical insights and critical analysis with suggestions for activism. The short stories explore the formative moments of a queer adolescence in Anglophone Canada. The eclecticism of Out Here reflects the cauldron-like mix of concerns taken up locally in places considered peripheral in relation to the centers of queer theory in British and American academia. It is out here (or back then), often within the context of rampant homophobia, that queer methodologies prove especially productive. Out here, queer theory is alive and kicking. Whether the authors write about sexual awakenings in Sri Lanka and Canada, or heterosexism in contemporary Ukraine, Hungary, Belgian parks, and 1970s Britain, or racial exclusion in American gay bars, or the veiled homophobia of Polish textbooks, what connects them is the commitment to questioning the limitations placed on queer desire.

Local and International Perspectives in Queer Studies

Out Here

In this reappraisal of the vision and accomplishments of the Eaton sisters, Dominika Ferens departs boldly from the dichotomy that has informed most commentary on them: Edith's "authentic" representations of the Chinese North Americans versus Winnifred's "phony" portrayals of Japanese characters and settings.".

Dominika Ferens

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