FlashPoints publishes books that consider literature beyond strictly national and disciplinary boundaries and that are distinguished by their historical grounding, their openness to multiple genres and media, and their theoretical rigor and conceptual reach. In a Benjaminian mode, the series focuses on instances of literature that wrest tradition from conformism, contributing to the formation of new cultural constellations. Titles in this series engage theory without losing touch with history. They approach topical aesthetic and social concerns that operate critically in the present. They are grounded in comparative analysis—often based on archival research—yet eschew uncritical positivism. FlashPoints aspires to reach an interdisciplinary audience within literary studies, broadly defined, concerned with moments of cultural emergence and transformation and the poetics of cultural forms. Each book is published in print and made available in Open Access through the California Digital Library, reflecting the series’ commitment to simultaneous publication in both forms since the beginning.
Series editors: Michelle Clayton (Coordinator), Edward Dimendberg, Nouri Gana, Susan Gillman, Richard Terdiman (Founder). Editors emeriti: Ali Behdad, Judith Butler, Catherine Gallagher, Jody Greene.
A Poetic Genealogy of North African Literature engages the poetic on its own terms, allowing poetic texts to dictate the search for meaning and significance and to expand our imagination of what Maghrebi literature in French was, is, and might become.
Forms of Mobility: Genre, Language, and Media in African Literary Cultures studies new categories of fiction—including migrant forms, township tales, weekend stories, and digital diaries—to examine how contemporary writers have envisaged southern Africa's changing literary and political terrains.
This is a study of the archival formations, theoretical debates, and geopolitical frameworks that constructed an idea of China in Latin America from the nineteenth century to the present.
This study offers new insights into notoriously difficult texts from Latin America and calls attention to a previously unrecognized transnational community of thinkers and writers united by a critical regionalist ethos.
First Contact: Speculative Visions of the Conquest of the Americas examines the power of speculative fiction to reimagine historical accounts of the conquest of the Americas, asking whether it is truly possible to decolonize the speculative imagination.
Entranced Earth looks at audiovisual, literary, performative, and testimonial sources to examine the impact of neocolonial extractivist industries on the natural environment in the Western Hemisphere.
This bold comparative study demonstrates the creative potential for translations that embrace reciprocity and resist assimilation. Isabel C. Gómez analyzes the creative translation practices of canonical Latin American writers such as Haroldo and Augusto de Campos, Clarice Lispector, and Octavio Paz.
Traces of the Unseen situates photography's role in documenting the destruction wrought by infrastructure development and extractive capitalist expansion in the Amazon and outside the Brazilian metropole at the turn of the twentieth century.
This book delves into the interwar world as it was represented in the poetry, theater, prose, and art of French-speaking avant‑garde writers and artists—creators whose aspirations for a global audience transformed everything about their intellectual movements.
New World Maker reappraises Langston Hughes's political poetry, reading the writer's leftist works in the context of his practice of translation to reveal an important meditation on diaspora.
FlashPoints publishes books that consider literature beyond strictly national and disciplinary boundaries and that are distinguished by their historical grounding, their openness to multiple genres and media, and their theoretical rigor and conceptual reach. In a Benjaminian mode, the series focuses on instances of literature that wrest tradition from conformism, contributing to the formation of new cultural constellations. Titles in this series engage theory without losing touch with history. They approach topical aesthetic and social concerns that operate critically in the present. They are grounded in comparative analysis—often based on archival research—yet eschew uncritical positivism. FlashPoints aspires to reach an interdisciplinary audience within literary studies, broadly defined, concerned with moments of cultural emergence and transformation and the poetics of cultural forms. Each book is published in print and made available in Open Access through the California Digital Library, reflecting the series’ commitment to simultaneous publication in both forms since the beginning.
Series editors: Michelle Clayton (Coordinator), Edward Dimendberg, Nouri Gana, Susan Gillman, Richard Terdiman (Founder). Editors emeriti: Ali Behdad, Judith Butler, Catherine Gallagher, Jody Greene. 
