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This volume of essays focuses on the meanings of the spirited and its navigation in the diverse, dynamic, and polarized creative environment of the 21^st century. The animation medium and its related subjects including fine art, comics, children literature, folklore, religion, and philosophy lead inter-disciplinary discussions, ranging from theory to practice, within the framework of an ever-changing media landscape and social-cultural-political environment. Working on different continents and coming from varying cultural backgrounds, the contributors are like-minded scholars, artists, curators, and educators demonstrating the insights of the spirited and how the spirited-oriented sub-themes, journeys and transformations are exemplified, examined, and interpreted in the context of visual representations. The publication also aims to appeal to a broader reading public interested in the ever expanding dimensions of mental health, culture, and related expressions of human living and interactions. In 2017, the theme of World Health Day (April 7) was mental health, and the World Health Organization (WHO) designated the year-long campaign slogan as “let’s talk”. As humans, getting back in touch with our spirited and spiritual sides is a craving many are unable to express or voice. The essays discussed in this collection speak to, and provoke a desired connection with something more meaningful beyond our material world. While the book recognizes and acknowledges the particularities of the spirited across cultures, it also highlights its universality, demonstrating how it is being studied, researched, comprehended, expressed, and consumed in various parts of the world in both similar and at once unique ways.

Dis-Orienting Planets: Racial Representations of Asia in Science Fiction continues where Black and Brown Planets: The Politics of Race in Science Fiction (2014) left off. This anthology features essays depicting Asia and Asians in science fiction literature, film, and fandom with particular attention paid to China, Japan, India, and Korea. The collection concentrates on political representations of Asian identity in science fiction’s imagination, from fear of the Yellow Peril and its host of stereotypes to techno-Orientalism and the remains of a post-colonial heritage. In fact, Dis-Orienting Planets engages the extremely negative and racist connotations of “orientalism” that obscure time, place, and identity perceptions of Asians, so-called yellow and brown peoples, in this historically white genre, provokes debate on the pervading imperialistic terminologies, and reconfigures the study of race in science fiction. In this respect, the title “disses” culturally inaccurate representations of the eastern hemisphere. In three parts, the seventeen collected essays consider the racial politics governing the renewed visibility of the Orient in science fiction. The first part emphasizes the interpretive challenges of science fictional meetings between the East and West by investigating entwined racial and political tensions. The second part concentrates on the tropes of Yellow Peril and techno-Orientalism, where fear of and desire for Orientalized futures generate racial anxiety and war. The third section explores technologized Asian subjectivities in the eco-critical spaces of mainland China, the Pacific Rim, the Korean peninsula, and the Indian subcontinent. Clearly, our future visions must absolutely include all people of color.

While differences and conflicts between younger and older generations have been frequently studied in children’s literature criticism, this book breaks new ground by arguing for the fundamental role of children’s and YA literature and film in propagating and facilitating a culture of generational interconnections. The collection highlights the potential of children’s literature studies as a site of intergenerational solidarity and opens possibilities for a new socially significant inquiry into the culture of childhood that addresses urgent challenges posed by the rapid aging of the global population. The sixteen contributions—by international scholars from Belgium, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, the UK and the US—explore representations of intergenerational relations in classical texts and contemporary ones to show the importance of intergenerational bonds for the sustainability and welfare of societies. Some of the contributions also focus on writing children’s literature as an intergenerational practice of empathy between adult authors and young audiences.

Next Generation Adaptation: Spectatorship and Process explores the ways in which cross-cultural adaptations often stage a collusion between competing cultural capital. The collusion conceals and reveals commonalities and differences between these cultural traditions before giving way to the differences that can distinguish one textual expression from another, just as it ultimately distinguishes one set of readers from another. An adaptation of any sort, but especially those that cross accepted stereotypes, or geographic or political boundaries, provide spectators space to negotiate attitudes and ideas that might otherwise lay latent in the text. Spectators are left to parse through each, often with special attention to the differences that exist between two expressions. Each new set of readers, each generation, distinguishes itself from an earlier set of readers, even as they exist along the same family tree. Given enough time, some new shared organizing strategy emerges until a new encounter or new expression of a text restarts the adaptational process every adaptation can trigger. Taken together, the chapters in Next Generation Adaptation each argue that the texts they consider foreground the kinds of space that exists between texts, between political commitments, between ethical obligations that every filmic text can open when the text is experienced as an adaptation. The chapters esteem the expansive dialogue adaptations accelerate when they realize their capacity to bring together two or more texts, two or more peoples, two or more ideologies without allowing one expression to erase another.

This book uses a folkloristic approach to stand-up comedy, engaging the discipline's central method of studying interpersonal, artistic communication and performance. Because stand-up comedy is a rather broad category, people who study it often begin by relating it to something they recognize—“literature” or “theater”; “editorial” or “morality”—and analyze it accordingly. This book begins with a more fundamental observation: someone is standing in front of a group of people, talking to them directly, and trying to make them laugh. So this book takes the moment of performance as its focus, that stand-up comedy is a collaborative act between the comedian and the audience. Although the form of talk on the stage resembles talk among friends and intimates in social settings, stand-up comedy remains a profession. As such, it requires performance outside of the comedian's own community to gain larger and larger audiences. How do comedians recreate that atmosphere of intimacy in a roomful of strangers? This book regards everything from microphones to clothing and LPs to Twitter as strategies for bridging the spatial, temporal, and socio-cultural distances between the performer and the audience.