I was reading Worlds of Knowledge in Women’s Travel Writing on an airplane when the pilot suddenly announced that we would be returning to our airport of origin due to a possible issue with the plane’s de-icing system. It was only my third flight since the onset of the pandemic and things were not going smoothly. As my plane banked sharply, my mind turned to the words of the volume’s editor, James Uden, who references the hurdles of COVID-era travel in the introduction.
Essays
Paper Republic is an alliance of Chinese-to-English translators who have come together to promote Chinese literature in English translation, with a focus on new writing. It has now published its own guide to contemporary Chinese literature, a directory of authors and publications prefaced by six essays on different aspects of Chinese writing. Each entry in the directory includes a biography, and a list of selected works, subdivided by form—novellas, short stories, essays, etc.
Making Kin: Ecofeminist Essays from Singapore contemplates and re-centres Singapore women in the overlapping discourses of family, home, ecology and nation. For the first time, this collection of ecofeminist essays focuses on the crafts, minds, bodies and subjectivities of a diverse group of women making kin with the human and non-human world as they navigate their lives.
Just as the denial of tenure for Nikole Hannah-Jones with University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Wang Ping at Macalester have made headlines for academic racism targeting Black professors and professors of color, Truong Tran’s book of the other is a timely commentary on the inequities built into the white establishment within academia and beyond.
Environmental Movements and Politics of the Asian Anthropocene is a collection of eleven academic essays, by multiple scholars, edited by Paul Jobin, Ming-sho Ho, and Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao, that focus on the dynamic interplay between political systems and environmental movements in seven of the ten ASEAN regional economies, plus Taiwan and Hong Kong, over the past two decades.
The title of novelist Dara Horn’s new collection of essays, People Love Dead Jews: Reports From A Haunted Present, says it all and hints at Horn’s thesis that stories about Jews which receive the most traction are ones in which we are dead.
A prominent, activist Asian-American poet, writer and professor, Cathy Park Hong’s first non-fiction book, Minor Feelings, is a bold and essential collection of essays that questions the racial identity of Asian-American immigrants and the problem of stereotypes that obstruct mutual understanding between the white and non-white population in the US.