Literary theory Books
Duke University Press Experiments with Empire
Book SynopsisIn Experiments with Empire Justin Izzo examines how twentieth-century writers, artists, and anthropologists from France, West Africa, and the Caribbean experimented with ethnography and fiction in order to explore new ways of knowing the colonial and postcolonial world. Focusing on novels, films, and ethnographies that combine fictive elements and anthropological methods and modes of thought, Izzo shows how empire gives ethnographic fictions the raw materials for thinking beyond empire's political and epistemological boundaries. In works by French surrealist writer Michel Leiris and filmmaker Jean Rouch, Malian writer Amadou Hampate Ba, Martinican author Patrick Chamoiseau, and others, anthropology no longer functions on behalf of imperialism as a way to understand and administer colonized peoples; its relationship with imperialism gives writers and artists the opportunity for textual experimentation and political provocation. It also, Izzo contends, helps readers to better make sense of the complicated legacy of imperialism and to imagine new democratic futures.Trade Review"Experiments with Empire deserves an audience beyond the academic. Izzo makes some perceptive points about how seeing the connections between ethnography and fiction can help us reimagine the world." -- Emilie de Brigard * The Arts Fuse *“The book’s scope is bold and impressive…. Izzo’s study is an important contribution to research on the French Atlantic and on speculative forms in general, and it offers a fresh look at the crossings between ethnography and fiction that go beyond questions of truth and veracity, mimicry and resistance.” -- Christina Kullberg * New West Indian Guide *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Introduction: Ethnographic Fictions in the French Atlantic 1 1. Ethnographic Didacticism and Africanist Melancholy: Leiris, Hampăté Bă, and the Epistemology of Style 17 2. The Director of Modern Life: Jean Rouch's Ethnofiction 55 3. Folkore, Fiction, and Ethnographic Nation Building: Price-Mars, Alexis, Depestre, Laferrière 98 4. Creole Novels and the Ethnographic Production of Literary History: Glissant, Chamoiseau, Confiant 134 5. Speculative Cityscapes and Premillennial Policing: Ethnographies of the Present in Jean-Claude Izzo's Crime Trilogy 169 Conclusion: Empire, Democracy, and Nonsovereign Knowledges 203 Notes 217 Bibliography 257 Index 273
£98.60
Duke University Press Experiments with Empire
Book SynopsisIn Experiments with Empire Justin Izzo examines how twentieth-century writers, artists, and anthropologists from France, West Africa, and the Caribbean experimented with ethnography and fiction in order to explore new ways of knowing the colonial and postcolonial world. Focusing on novels, films, and ethnographies that combine fictive elements and anthropological methods and modes of thought, Izzo shows how empire gives ethnographic fictions the raw materials for thinking beyond empire's political and epistemological boundaries. In works by French surrealist writer Michel Leiris and filmmaker Jean Rouch, Malian writer Amadou Hampate Ba, Martinican author Patrick Chamoiseau, and others, anthropology no longer functions on behalf of imperialism as a way to understand and administer colonized peoples; its relationship with imperialism gives writers and artists the opportunity for textual experimentation and political provocation. It also, Izzo contends, helps readers to better make sense of the complicated legacy of imperialism and to imagine new democratic futures.Trade Review"Experiments with Empire deserves an audience beyond the academic. Izzo makes some perceptive points about how seeing the connections between ethnography and fiction can help us reimagine the world." -- Emilie de Brigard * The Arts Fuse *“The book’s scope is bold and impressive…. Izzo’s study is an important contribution to research on the French Atlantic and on speculative forms in general, and it offers a fresh look at the crossings between ethnography and fiction that go beyond questions of truth and veracity, mimicry and resistance.” -- Christina Kullberg * New West Indian Guide *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Introduction: Ethnographic Fictions in the French Atlantic 1 1. Ethnographic Didacticism and Africanist Melancholy: Leiris, Hampăté Bă, and the Epistemology of Style 17 2. The Director of Modern Life: Jean Rouch's Ethnofiction 55 3. Folkore, Fiction, and Ethnographic Nation Building: Price-Mars, Alexis, Depestre, Laferrière 98 4. Creole Novels and the Ethnographic Production of Literary History: Glissant, Chamoiseau, Confiant 134 5. Speculative Cityscapes and Premillennial Policing: Ethnographies of the Present in Jean-Claude Izzo's Crime Trilogy 169 Conclusion: Empire, Democracy, and Nonsovereign Knowledges 203 Notes 217 Bibliography 257 Index 273
£25.19
Duke University Press Allegories of the Anthropocene
Book SynopsisElizabeth M. DeLoughrey traces how indigenous and postcolonial peoples in the Caribbean and Pacific Islands grapple with the enormity of colonialism and anthropogenic climate change through art, poetry, and literature by using allegorical narratives.Trade Review"DeLoughrey brings her considerable background in environmental humanities and postcolonial literature studies to bear in this volume. . . . This book is not to be missed by those interested in keeping up with recent conversations, across the environmental humanities, around issues of the Anthropocene." -- L. C. Bayne * Choice *“Allegoriesof the Anthropocene brings human histories of dispossession, toxicity, and creative survival to the fore where they might get lost in the geologic fixation on sediment. . . . It is powerful that this rich and careful book should end with a turn to the reader, showing how allegory at its most potent is about the entanglement, not leap, between part/whole or island/planet.” -- Isabel Lockhart * Journal of British Studies *“DeLoughrey’s new book is to be strongly recommended for its highly original tack: focusing upon the rising importance of allegory as a way of making sense of times of rupture and catastrophic environmental change.” -- Jonathan Pugh * Island Studies Journal *“Whenever Elizabeth DeLoughrey makes a critical intervention within a specific theoretical or literary field, established certainties, or matters of general consensus, seem suddenly in need of recalibration…. Allegories of the Anthropocene does something similar to the overburdened discourse surrounding the proposed geological epoch…. Like an exciting crossword puzzle, the book is delightfully difficult as it deconstructs the complexities and inconsistencies of the Anthropocene discourse.” -- Malcolm Sen * New West Indian Guide *“This is a meticulously researched, compellingly argued and richly suggestive book that builds on various strands in DeLoughrey’s previous research to produce an important and timely intervention into ecocritical, indigenous and literary / visual studies. DeLoughrey has an enviable ability to summarize and synthesize enormous bodies of scholarship across multiple disciplines, and to bring them into productive relation, also deploying highly nuanced close reading skills in relating (social) scientific discourses to specific literary, artistic and filmic ‘texts.’” -- Michelle Keown * Literary Research *“[DeLoughrey] shows how thinking beyond the Anthropocene . . . is now required. Then, evoking striking examples from poetry, literature, art, and philosophy, she demonstrates that allegory has been pervasive in modern times and that it remains pointedly relevant to creativity in our contemporary situation.” -- Terry Smith * Art Bulletin *“Allegories of the Anthropocene is a resounding success, one that promises to reframe and reshape the environmental humanities for decades to come.” -- Jonathan Elmore * Modern Fiction Studies *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Introduction: Allegories of the Anthropocene 1 1. Gendering Earth: Excavating Plantation Soil 33 2. Planetarity: Militarized Radiations 63 3. Accelerations: Globalization and States of Waste 98 4. Oceanic Futures: Interspecies Worldings 133 5. An Island Is a World 165 Notes 197 Index 257
£72.25
Duke University Press Animate Literacies
Book SynopsisNathan Snaza proposes a new theory of literature and literacy in which he outlines how literacy operates at the interface of humans, nonhuman animals, and objects and has been used as a means to define the human in ways that marginalize others.Trade Review“Challenging us to discover, create, and practice modes of literacy that depart from the conventional paths that have disciplined us, Nathan Snaza puts forth significant and bracing provocations about the relationship between reading and the production of Man. In his brilliant formulation, literacy is no longer exclusively human—it happens within a thick web of animating entities that affect and bewilder. An outstanding work.” -- Stacy Alaimo, author of * Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times *“Offering stimulating readings of familiar literary texts, Nathan Snaza recasts literacy within a field of material objects and conditions by weaving new materialism together with postcolonial and posthumanist thought into meditations on literacies within and beyond the human.” -- Carla Freccero, author of * Queer/Early/Modern *"Dovetailing feminist and queer new materialism, posthumanism, affect theory, ecocriticism, and a touch of Marx and Foucault, Animate Literacies demands a lot of its reader, though it almost always, rewards strenuous attention with its rich and energizing combination of love and critique." -- Margaret Mendenhall * Ethnic and Third World Literatures *“This book is delightfully peripatetic, crisscrossing critical fields and literary texts with acuity and grace. Pulled into these movements, we become 'reading things' that cannot but feel the very bewilderment so key to building alternate futures.” -- Erica Fretwell * Studies in the Novel *"Snaza’s book provides a rich ensemble of literary accounts that illustrate his expanded notion of literacy. . . . Animate Literacies is a demonstration of both the vitality and the crisis of the humanities, sitting at a point where different roads cross, as it simultaneously takes on a speculative and a critical approach to the concept of literacy." -- Ana Marques * Expanded Literacies *"[Animate Literacies] can help us to imagine our way out of the colonial structures that order academic libraries and librarianship." -- Melissa Adler * College and Research Libraries *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii 1. The Human(ities) In Crisis 1 2. Beloved's Dispersed Pedagogy 11 3. Haunting, Love, and Attention 19 4. Humanizing Assemblages I: What Is Man? 28 5. Slavery, the Human, and Dehumanization 38 6. Literacy, Slavery, and the Education of Desire 48 7. What Is Literacy? 55 8. Humanizing Assemblages II: Discipline and Control 66 9. Bewilderment 77 10. Toward a Literary Ethology 86 11. What Happens When I Read? 99 12. The Smell of Literature 115 13. Pleasures of the Text 124 14. Those Changeful Sites 134 15. Literacies against the State 145 16. Futures of Anima-Literature 153 Notes 165 References 193 Index 209
£90.10
Duke University Press Fictions of Land and Flesh
Book SynopsisMark Rifkin turns to black and indigenous speculative fiction to show how it offers a site to better understand black and indigenous political movements' differing orientations in ways that can foster forms of mutual engagement and cooperation without subsuming them into a single political framework in the name of solidarity.Trade Review“Fictions of Land and Flesh considers the points at which Black and Indigenous studies might relate across histories and struggles. It does so with an eye toward the necessity of that engagement and the danger of conflating the urgencies that constitute those histories and struggles. With characteristic brilliance and creativity, Mark Rifkin turns to Black and Indigenous futurist work as a way to produce that difficult but necessary dialogue.” -- Roderick A. Ferguson, author of * One-Dimensional Queer *“Anchored in the contemporary movements of #NoDAPL and Black Lives Matter, Fictions of Land and Flesh is a welcome and expert guide to thinking through the resonances and impasses that attend Black and Indigenous articulations of justice. Essential reading in American studies.” -- Beth H. Piatote, author of * Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native American Literature *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Introduction 1 1. On the Impasse 15 2. Fungible Becoming 73 3. Carceral Space and Fugitive Motion 117 4. The Maroon Matrix 168 Coda: Diplomacy in the Undercommons 220 Notes 233 Bibliography 287 Index 313
£98.60
Duke University Press Allegories of the Anthropocene
Book SynopsisElizabeth M. DeLoughrey traces how indigenous and postcolonial peoples in the Caribbean and Pacific Islands grapple with the enormity of colonialism and anthropogenic climate change through art, poetry, and literature by using allegorical narratives.Trade Review"DeLoughrey brings her considerable background in environmental humanities and postcolonial literature studies to bear in this volume. . . . This book is not to be missed by those interested in keeping up with recent conversations, across the environmental humanities, around issues of the Anthropocene." -- L. C. Bayne * Choice *“Allegoriesof the Anthropocene brings human histories of dispossession, toxicity, and creative survival to the fore where they might get lost in the geologic fixation on sediment. . . . It is powerful that this rich and careful book should end with a turn to the reader, showing how allegory at its most potent is about the entanglement, not leap, between part/whole or island/planet.” -- Isabel Lockhart * Journal of British Studies *“DeLoughrey’s new book is to be strongly recommended for its highly original tack: focusing upon the rising importance of allegory as a way of making sense of times of rupture and catastrophic environmental change.” -- Jonathan Pugh * Island Studies Journal *“Whenever Elizabeth DeLoughrey makes a critical intervention within a specific theoretical or literary field, established certainties, or matters of general consensus, seem suddenly in need of recalibration…. Allegories of the Anthropocene does something similar to the overburdened discourse surrounding the proposed geological epoch…. Like an exciting crossword puzzle, the book is delightfully difficult as it deconstructs the complexities and inconsistencies of the Anthropocene discourse.” -- Malcolm Sen * New West Indian Guide *“This is a meticulously researched, compellingly argued and richly suggestive book that builds on various strands in DeLoughrey’s previous research to produce an important and timely intervention into ecocritical, indigenous and literary / visual studies. DeLoughrey has an enviable ability to summarize and synthesize enormous bodies of scholarship across multiple disciplines, and to bring them into productive relation, also deploying highly nuanced close reading skills in relating (social) scientific discourses to specific literary, artistic and filmic ‘texts.’” -- Michelle Keown * Literary Research *“[DeLoughrey] shows how thinking beyond the Anthropocene . . . is now required. Then, evoking striking examples from poetry, literature, art, and philosophy, she demonstrates that allegory has been pervasive in modern times and that it remains pointedly relevant to creativity in our contemporary situation.” -- Terry Smith * Art Bulletin *“Allegories of the Anthropocene is a resounding success, one that promises to reframe and reshape the environmental humanities for decades to come.” -- Jonathan Elmore * Modern Fiction Studies *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Introduction: Allegories of the Anthropocene 1 1. Gendering Earth: Excavating Plantation Soil 33 2. Planetarity: Militarized Radiations 63 3. Accelerations: Globalization and States of Waste 98 4. Oceanic Futures: Interspecies Worldings 133 5. An Island Is a World 165 Notes 197 Index 257
£19.79
Duke University Press Animate Literacies
Book SynopsisIn Animate Literacies Nathan Snaza proposes a new theory of literature and literacy in which he outlines how literacy is both constitutive of the social and used as a means to define the human. Weaving new materialism with feminist, queer, and decolonial thought, Snaza theorizes literacy as a contact zone in which humans, nonhuman animals, and nonvital objects such as chairs and paper all become active participants. In readings of classic literature by Kate Chopin, Frederick Douglass, James Joyce, Toni Morrison, Mary Shelley, and others, Snaza emphasizes the key roles that affect and sensory experiences play in literacy. Snaza upends common conceptions of literacy and its relation to print media, showing instead how such understandings reinforce dehumanizations linked to dominant imperialist, heterosexist, and capitalist definitions of the human. The path toward disrupting such exclusionary, humanist frameworks, Snaza contends, lies in formulating alternative practices of literaTrade Review“Challenging us to discover, create, and practice modes of literacy that depart from the conventional paths that have disciplined us, Nathan Snaza puts forth significant and bracing provocations about the relationship between reading and the production of Man. In his brilliant formulation, literacy is no longer exclusively human—it happens within a thick web of animating entities that affect and bewilder. An outstanding work.” -- Stacy Alaimo, author of * Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times *“Offering stimulating readings of familiar literary texts, Nathan Snaza recasts literacy within a field of material objects and conditions by weaving new materialism together with postcolonial and posthumanist thought into meditations on literacies within and beyond the human.” -- Carla Freccero, author of * Queer/Early/Modern *"Dovetailing feminist and queer new materialism, posthumanism, affect theory, ecocriticism, and a touch of Marx and Foucault, Animate Literacies demands a lot of its reader, though it almost always, rewards strenuous attention with its rich and energizing combination of love and critique." -- Margaret Mendenhall * Ethnic and Third World Literatures *“This book is delightfully peripatetic, crisscrossing critical fields and literary texts with acuity and grace. Pulled into these movements, we become 'reading things' that cannot but feel the very bewilderment so key to building alternate futures.” -- Erica Fretwell * Studies in the Novel *"Snaza’s book provides a rich ensemble of literary accounts that illustrate his expanded notion of literacy. . . . Animate Literacies is a demonstration of both the vitality and the crisis of the humanities, sitting at a point where different roads cross, as it simultaneously takes on a speculative and a critical approach to the concept of literacy." -- Ana Marques * Expanded Literacies *"[Animate Literacies] can help us to imagine our way out of the colonial structures that order academic libraries and librarianship." -- Melissa Adler * College and Research Libraries *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii 1. The Human(ities) In Crisis 1 2. Beloved's Dispersed Pedagogy 11 3. Haunting, Love, and Attention 19 4. Humanizing Assemblages I: What Is Man? 28 5. Slavery, the Human, and Dehumanization 38 6. Literacy, Slavery, and the Education of Desire 48 7. What Is Literacy? 55 8. Humanizing Assemblages II: Discipline and Control 66 9. Bewilderment 77 10. Toward a Literary Ethology 86 11. What Happens When I Read? 99 12. The Smell of Literature 115 13. Pleasures of the Text 124 14. Those Changeful Sites 134 15. Literacies against the State 145 16. Futures of Anima-Literature 153 Notes 165 References 193 Index 209
£22.49
Duke University Press Fictions of Land and Flesh
Book SynopsisMark Rifkin turns to black and indigenous speculative fiction to show how it offers a site to better understand black and indigenous political movements' differing orientations in ways that can foster forms of mutual engagement and cooperation without subsuming them into a single political framework in the name of solidarity.Trade Review“Fictions of Land and Flesh considers the points at which Black and Indigenous studies might relate across histories and struggles. It does so with an eye toward the necessity of that engagement and the danger of conflating the urgencies that constitute those histories and struggles. With characteristic brilliance and creativity, Mark Rifkin turns to Black and Indigenous futurist work as a way to produce that difficult but necessary dialogue.” -- Roderick A. Ferguson, author of * One-Dimensional Queer *“Anchored in the contemporary movements of #NoDAPL and Black Lives Matter, Fictions of Land and Flesh is a welcome and expert guide to thinking through the resonances and impasses that attend Black and Indigenous articulations of justice. Essential reading in American studies.” -- Beth H. Piatote, author of * Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native American Literature *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Introduction 1 1. On the Impasse 15 2. Fungible Becoming 73 3. Carceral Space and Fugitive Motion 117 4. The Maroon Matrix 168 Coda: Diplomacy in the Undercommons 220 Notes 233 Bibliography 287 Index 313
£25.19
Duke University Press Reading Sedgwick
Book SynopsisThe contributors to Reading Sedgwick reflect on the long and influential career of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, whose pioneering work in queer theory has transformed understandings of affect, intimacy, politics, and identity.Trade Review“Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's writing remains indispensable, never more so than now when the light of her intelligence illuminates a darkening horizon. We need her intelligence, her queer sensibility, and her way with words. Reading Sedgwick will be welcome both for those encountering her for the first time and as a reprise for those wishing to be reminded of her work's particular charm, enlivening curiosity, and power.” -- Christina Crosby, author of * A Body, Undone: Living on after Great Pain *"This volume is required reading in queer studies. Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty." -- D. M. Jarrett * Choice *Table of ContentsPreface. Reading Sedgwick, Then and Now / Lauren Berlant 1 Introduction. "An Open Mesh of Possibilities": The Necessity of Eve Sedgwick in Dark Times / Ramzi Fawaz 6 Note. From H. A. Sedgwick / H. A. Sedgwick 34 1. What Survives / Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman 37 2. Proust at the End / Judith Butler 63 3. For Beauty Is a Series of Hypotheses? Sedgwick as Fiber Artist / Jason Edwards 72 4. In / Denis Flannery 92 5. Early and Earlier Sedgwick / Jane Gallop 113 6. Eve's Future Figures / Jonathan Goldberg 121 7. Sedgwick's Perverse Close Reading and the Question of an Erotic Ethics / Meredith Kruse 132 8. On the Eve of the Future / Michael Moon 141 9. Race, Sex, and the Incommensurate: Gary Fisher with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick / José Esteban Muñoz 152 10. Sedgwick Inexhaustible / Chris Nealon 166 11. The Age of Frankenstein / Andrew Parker 178 12. Queer Patience: Sedgwick's Identity Narratives / Karin Sellberg 189 13. Weaver's Handshake: The Aesthetics of Chronic Objects (Sedgwick, Emerson, James) / Michael D. Snediker 203 14. Eighteen Things I Love about You / Melissa Solomon 236 15. Eve's Triangles: Queer Studies Beside Itself / Robyn Wiegman 242 Afterword / Kathryn Bond Stockton 274 Acknowledgments 279 Bibliography 281 Contributors 295 Index 299
£112.20
Duke University Press Reading Sedgwick
Book SynopsisOver the course of her long career, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick became one of the most important voices in queer theory, and her calls for reparative criticism and reading practices grounded in affect and performance have transformed understandings of affect, intimacy, politics, and identity. With marked tenderness, the contributors to Reading Sedgwick reflect on Sedgwick''s many critical inventions, from her elucidation of poetry''s close relation to criticism and development of new versions of queer performativity to highlighting the power of writing to engender new forms of life. As the essays in Reading Sedgwick demonstrate, Sedgwick''s work is not only an ongoing vital force in queer theory and affect theory; it can help us build a more positive world in the midst of the bleak contemporary moment. Contributors. Lauren Berlant, Kathryn Bond Stockton, Judith Butler, Lee Edelman, Jason Edwards, Ramzi Fawaz, Denis Flannery, Jane Gallop, Jonathan Goldberg, Meridith Trade Review“Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's writing remains indispensable, never more so than now when the light of her intelligence illuminates a darkening horizon. We need her intelligence, her queer sensibility, and her way with words. Reading Sedgwick will be welcome both for those encountering her for the first time and as a reprise for those wishing to be reminded of her work's particular charm, enlivening curiosity, and power.” -- Christina Crosby, author of * A Body, Undone: Living on after Great Pain *"This volume is required reading in queer studies. Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty." -- D. M. Jarrett * Choice *Table of ContentsPreface. Reading Sedgwick, Then and Now / Lauren Berlant 1 Introduction. "An Open Mesh of Possibilities": The Necessity of Eve Sedgwick in Dark Times / Ramzi Fawaz 6 Note. From H. A. Sedgwick / H. A. Sedgwick 34 1. What Survives / Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman 37 2. Proust at the End / Judith Butler 63 3. For Beauty Is a Series of Hypotheses? Sedgwick as Fiber Artist / Jason Edwards 72 4. In / Denis Flannery 92 5. Early and Earlier Sedgwick / Jane Gallop 113 6. Eve's Future Figures / Jonathan Goldberg 121 7. Sedgwick's Perverse Close Reading and the Question of an Erotic Ethics / Meredith Kruse 132 8. On the Eve of the Future / Michael Moon 141 9. Race, Sex, and the Incommensurate: Gary Fisher with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick / José Esteban Muñoz 152 10. Sedgwick Inexhaustible / Chris Nealon 166 11. The Age of Frankenstein / Andrew Parker 178 12. Queer Patience: Sedgwick's Identity Narratives / Karin Sellberg 189 13. Weaver's Handshake: The Aesthetics of Chronic Objects (Sedgwick, Emerson, James) / Michael D. Snediker 203 14. Eighteen Things I Love about You / Melissa Solomon 236 15. Eve's Triangles: Queer Studies Beside Itself / Robyn Wiegman 242 Afterword / Kathryn Bond Stockton 274 Acknowledgments 279 Bibliography 281 Contributors 295 Index 299
£28.80
Duke University Press Urban Horror
Book SynopsisIn Urban Horror Erin Y. Huang theorizes the economic, cultural, and political conditions of neoliberal post-socialist China. Drawing on Marxist phenomenology, geography, and aesthetics from Engels and Merleau-Ponty to Lefebvre and Rancière, Huang traces the emergence and mediation of what she calls urban horror—a sociopolitical public affect that exceeds comprehension and provides the grounds for possible future revolutionary dissent. She shows how documentaries, blockbuster feature films, and video art from China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan made between the 1990s and the present rehearse and communicate urban horror. In these films urban horror circulates through myriad urban spaces characterized by the creation of speculative crises, shifting temporalities, and dystopic environments inhospitable to the human body. The cinematic image and the aesthetics of urban horror in neoliberal post-socialist China lay the groundwork for the future to such an extent, Huang contendsTrade Review“What is ‘horror’ in the contemporary world? With reference to numerous interesting Chinese-language films, Erin Y. Huang argues that horror is a morphing assemblage of sociohistorical forces, one that creates a disjuncture between a perceived external reality and an internal frame of comprehension. An admirably timely statement on the often hypermedial—and horrific—performativity of urban public sentiments, in post-socialist China as in EuroAmerica and beyond.” -- Rey Chow, author of * Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films: Attachment in the Age of Global Visibility *“In this visionary book Erin Y. Huang lays out a new epistemology of the political, cultural, and affective present while gesturing toward desirable futures. This book will galvanize the study of Chinese cinema and interdisciplinary studies of the urban; it will be of unique interest to all those across the humanities who are striving to decipher the logics of the global, neoliberal present. Like no other book, Urban Horror makes the affective, political, and material contours of the contemporary Asian city available to social theory. A vitally innovative work.” -- Arnika Fuhrmann, author of * Ghostly Desires: Queer Sexuality and Vernacular Buddhism in Contemporary Thai Cinema *“What makes Urban Horror particularly valuable is Huang’s attention to historical and cultural specificity in her application of Western theories. For example, in her discussion of Li Shaohong’s films, she avoids taking feminism as a transhistorical and universal category. Rather, she excavates the nuanced and complex meanings of Chinese femininity to theorize postsocialist feminism within the context of modern and socialist Chinese history…. Huang’s theoretical approach is an excellent model for contextualizing Western theories and philosophies for Asian studies.” -- Li Zeng * Film Quarterly *“Huang’s close reading of films and theoretical texts is lucid and persuasive.... Urban Horror is suitable not only for readers who are interested in understanding the post-socialist condition in China but also those who are generally drawn to the long-standing academic tradition of theorizing the relationship between aesthetics and politics....” -- Ziwei Chen * Asiascape *“Few books can be timelier than Erin Y. Huang’s erudite and insightful Urban Horror.... Huang could not have foreseen the emergence of COVID-19 when writing, but it has certainly amplified the resonance of her work.” -- Chris Berry * The China Journal *“Huang’s study is impressive in her sophisticated theoretical analysis and innovative textual readings. I highly recommend [Urban Horror] to scholars and students in the fields of contemporary Chinese or Sinophone studies, film and media studies, urban studies, as well as studies of affect and sensuality.” -- Yu Zhang * Journal of Asian Studies *“Urban Horror is a sprawling, complex, and challenging book, full of acute theoretical insights and detailed close readings of narrative and documentary films. . . . [It] is a powerful and timely piece of speculative theory and film criticism, a pressing read for scholars of modern and contemporary China, film and media studies, and the study of postsocialist culture.” -- Hongwei Thorn Chen * MCLC Resource Center *“Urban Horror provides a fascinating read especially for those interested in bringing together economic and cultural histories of the recent past. . . . Urban Horror is an indispensable read for any historian trying to get a grasp of the relation between popular culture and public sentiment in the neoliberal era.” -- Dennis Koelling * European Review of History *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction. Urban Horror: Speculative Futures of Chinese Cinemas 1 1. Cartographies of Socialism and Post-Socialism: The Factory Gate and the Threshold of the Visible World 33 2. Intimate Dystopias: Post-Socialist Femininity and the Marxist-Feminist Interior 69 3. The Post- as Media Time: Documentary Experiments and the Rhetoric of Ruin Gazing 101 4. Post-Socialism in Hong Kong: Zone Urbanism and Marxist Phenomenology 146 5. The Ethics of Representing Precarity: Film in the Era of Global Complicity 184 Epilogue 218 Notes 223 Bibliography 245 Index 259
£98.60
Duke University Press The Visceral Logics of Decolonization
Book SynopsisFocusing on the work of a Marxist anticolonial literary group active in India between the 1930s and 1950s, Neetu Khanna rethinks the project of decolonization by showing how embodied and affective responses to colonial subjugation provide the catalyst for developing revolutionary consciousness.Trade Review“In this fascinating study of complex psychosomatic responses in modernist Indian literature, Neetu Khanna shows how the attempt on the part of Marxist writers associated with the Progressive Writers' Association to ‘think with the visceral’ repeatedly brought them to questions of time. The Visceral Logics of Decolonization makes a striking and original contribution to the study of affect and anticolonial politics, deepening our understanding of ‘corporeal aesthetics.’” -- Sianne Ngai, University of Chicago“Neetu Khanna's turn to the visceral aesthetics of anticolonial struggles is timely in its call for a renewed attention to the affective logics of revolutionary writings. Such a calibration directly confronts critical disavowal of multiple visceral archives that are so central to the Marxist consciousness of colonial and postcolonial thinkers. Khanna's introduction of ‘colonial affect’ in this provocative book makes an important contribution to affect studies.” -- Anjali Arondekar, author of * For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India *"Visceral Logics challenges scholars of African and African-American literatures to carry out similar investigations. . . . Students of postcolonialism will find the book exceptionally rewarding." -- Fouad Mami * Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies *“Visceral Logics is a rich contribution to the fields of affect, performance, postcolonial and feminist theory. It is, too, a beautiful book, pulsing with the revolutionary spirit it traces. . . . Khanna reminds of the radical stakes of everyday feeling, embodied performance, and in turn, of literary study, as a political praxis of close reading.” -- Sadie Barker * Women & Performance *“[The Visceral Logics of Decolonization] possesses political and theoretical implications that deserve to reach a wide audience in postcolonial studies, affect studies, and literary studies more generally.” -- Christopher Lee * Science & Society *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Introduction. The Visceral Logics of Decolonization 1 1. Agitation 35 2. Irritation 60 3. Compulsion 85 4. Evisceration 109 Coda. Explosion 132 Notes 151 Bibliography 161 Index 175
£74.70
Duke University Press History 4 Celsius
Book SynopsisIan Baucom puts black studies into conversation with climate change, outlining how the ongoing concerns of critical race, diaspora, and postcolonial studies are crucial to understanding the Anthropocene and vice versa.Trade Review“Giving a conceptual and timely empirical account of the Anthropocene and the problem it presents for the scale of history, Ian Baucom combines intellectual provocation with a series of fascinating insights from the sciences all while taking seriously the imaginative and conceptual challenges that the sciences pose to the humanities. History 4° Celsius will be a major book for the humanities in general. I was enthralled reading it.” -- Claire Colebrook, author of * Death of the PostHuman: Essays on Extinction, Volume 1 *“Empirically grounded, theoretically nimble and nuanced, generous toward those whose ideas he opposes and yet resolute in his opposition, Ian Baucom develops in this book a powerful, self-reflexive, and original approach to questions of methods in the emergent field of Anthropocene humanities. His argument will deeply interest postcolonial critics and other humanists as they ponder and negotiate the planetary environmental crises that so mark our times. An exemplary and thoughtful contribution.” -- Dipesh Chakrabarty, author of * The Crises of Civilization: Exploring Global and Planetary Histories *“History 4° Celsius is a complexly argued book that adds to the many interesting humanistic perspectives on the Anthropocene circulating today.” -- Sean M. Smith * H-Slavery, H-Net Reviews *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix 1. Of Forces and Forcings 1 2. History 4° Celsius: Search for a Method 35 3. The View from the Shore 73 Coda. The Youngest Day 110 Notes 119 Bibliography 131 Index 137
£84.15
Duke University Press Gramsci in the World
Book SynopsisThe contributors to Gramsci in the World examine the varying receptions and uses of Antonio Gramsci's thought in diverse geographical, historical, and political contexts, highlighting its possibilities and limits for understanding and changing the social world.Trade Review“Practically from the first to the last page, this is a fabulous book. Not only does it attest to the productive interdisciplinary use of Gramsci's conceptual instruments in the analysis of contemporary sociocultural and political developments across many global regions; it also underscores the fact that the critico-philological reconstructions of Gramsci's theoretical frameworks are far from complete. Newcomers to Gramscian studies—as well as experienced scholars—will profit from this extraordinary collection of essays. It reflects a most capacious editorial spirit anchored in creative autonomy, historical integrity, and transnational sensitivities.” -- Renate Holub, author of * Antonio Gramsci: Beyond Marxism and Postmodernism *“Comprehensive in its geographical and historical range, and impressive in its intellectual rigor, theoretical sophistication, and historical sensitivity, Gramsci in the World locates questions surrounding Gramsci's ideas within debates that are central to much of contemporary theoretical, moral, intellectual, and political writing. A significant and necessary contribution to Gramsci scholarship, this volume demonstrates that his ideas and writing will continue to exert a deep influence in the twenty-first century.” -- Benedetto Fontana, author of * Hegemony and Power: On the Relation between Gramsci and Machiavelli *“This collection of essays, edited by Roberto M. Dainotto and Fredric Jameson, is a timely and valuable contribution to cultural studies, political and social theory, postcolonial studies, as well as generally to the history of the Left and particularly to the history of Marxism.” -- Mihaela Czobor-Lupp * Perspectives on Politics *“Taken together, the essays in [Gramsci in the World] highlight the numerous complexities and dimensions to Gramsci’s writings, and the various reasons why his unique approach to Marxist analysis and revolutionary praxis influenced, or in many cases did not influence, leftist intellectuals and militants....” -- Brian Griffith * H-Italy, H-Net Reviews *“The goal of Gramsci in the World is to put forward ‘different pragmatics’ of how scholars accept or reject Gramscian thinking for their interests.... It does not simply add non-Western case studies into analysis, but changes how we think about a range of periods and geographies.” -- Thomas Furse * Global Intellectual History *"[Gramsci in the World] will interest Gramsci scholars, theorists of social change and revolution, and political activists." -- J. C. Berg * Choice *Table of ContentsNote on Sources ix Preface; Gramsci in the World / Fredric Jameson xi Introduction / Roberto Dainotto 1 1. Toward the Modern Prince / Peter D. Thomas 17 2. Gramsci, Historian of Modernity / Alberto Burgio 38 3. Adam Smith: A Bourgeois Organic Intellectual? ? Kate Crehan 60 4. Gramsci's Bergson / Cesare Casarino 77 5. Scattered Ashes: The Reception of the Gramscian Legacy in Postwar Italy / Andrea Scapoio 93 6. Subalterns in the World: Typologies and Nexus with Different Forms of Religious Experience / Cosimo Zene 113 7. Some Reflections on Gramsci: The Southern Question in the Deprovincializing of Marx / Harry Harootunian 140 8. Why No Gramsci in the United States? / Michael Denning 158 9. Gramsci on la questione del negri: Gli intellettuali and the Poesis of Americanization / R. A. Judy 165 10. Reverse Hegemony? / Maria Elisa Cevasco 179 11. Thinking Andean Abya Yala with and against Gramsci: Notes on State, Nature, and Buen Vivir / Catherine E. Walsh 190 12. Gramsci and the Chinese Left: Reappraising a Missed Encounter / Pu Wang 204 13. Antonio Gramsci in the Arab World: The Ongoing Debate / Patrizia Manduchi 224 Works Cited 241 Contributors 259 Index 263
£98.60
Duke University Press Urban Horror
Book SynopsisIn Urban Horror Erin Y. Huang theorizes the economic, cultural, and political conditions of neoliberal post-socialist China. Drawing on Marxist phenomenology, geography, and aesthetics from Engels and Merleau-Ponty to Lefebvre and RanciÈre, Huang traces the emergence and mediation of what she calls urban horror-a sociopolitical public affect that exceeds comprehension and provides the grounds for possible future revolutionary dissent. She shows how documentaries, blockbuster feature films, and video art from China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan made between the 1990s and the present rehearse and communicate urban horror. In these films urban horror circulates through myriad urban spaces characterized by the creation of speculative crises, shifting temporalities, and dystopic environments inhospitable to the human body. The cinematic image and the aesthetics of urban horror in neoliberal post-socialist China lay the groundwork for the future to such an extent, Huang contends, that the seeds of dissent at the heart of urban horror make it possible to imagine new forms of resistance.Trade Review“What is ‘horror’ in the contemporary world? With reference to numerous interesting Chinese-language films, Erin Y. Huang argues that horror is a morphing assemblage of sociohistorical forces, one that creates a disjuncture between a perceived external reality and an internal frame of comprehension. An admirably timely statement on the often hypermedial—and horrific—performativity of urban public sentiments, in post-socialist China as in EuroAmerica and beyond.” -- Rey Chow, author of * Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films: Attachment in the Age of Global Visibility *“In this visionary book Erin Y. Huang lays out a new epistemology of the political, cultural, and affective present while gesturing toward desirable futures. This book will galvanize the study of Chinese cinema and interdisciplinary studies of the urban; it will be of unique interest to all those across the humanities who are striving to decipher the logics of the global, neoliberal present. Like no other book, Urban Horror makes the affective, political, and material contours of the contemporary Asian city available to social theory. A vitally innovative work.” -- Arnika Fuhrmann, author of * Ghostly Desires: Queer Sexuality and Vernacular Buddhism in Contemporary Thai Cinema *“What makes Urban Horror particularly valuable is Huang’s attention to historical and cultural specificity in her application of Western theories. For example, in her discussion of Li Shaohong’s films, she avoids taking feminism as a transhistorical and universal category. Rather, she excavates the nuanced and complex meanings of Chinese femininity to theorize postsocialist feminism within the context of modern and socialist Chinese history…. Huang’s theoretical approach is an excellent model for contextualizing Western theories and philosophies for Asian studies.” -- Li Zeng * Film Quarterly *“Huang’s close reading of films and theoretical texts is lucid and persuasive.... Urban Horror is suitable not only for readers who are interested in understanding the post-socialist condition in China but also those who are generally drawn to the long-standing academic tradition of theorizing the relationship between aesthetics and politics....” -- Ziwei Chen * Asiascape *“Few books can be timelier than Erin Y. Huang’s erudite and insightful Urban Horror.... Huang could not have foreseen the emergence of COVID-19 when writing, but it has certainly amplified the resonance of her work.” -- Chris Berry * The China Journal *“Huang’s study is impressive in her sophisticated theoretical analysis and innovative textual readings. I highly recommend [Urban Horror] to scholars and students in the fields of contemporary Chinese or Sinophone studies, film and media studies, urban studies, as well as studies of affect and sensuality.” -- Yu Zhang * Journal of Asian Studies *“Urban Horror is a sprawling, complex, and challenging book, full of acute theoretical insights and detailed close readings of narrative and documentary films. . . . [It] is a powerful and timely piece of speculative theory and film criticism, a pressing read for scholars of modern and contemporary China, film and media studies, and the study of postsocialist culture.” -- Hongwei Thorn Chen * MCLC Resource Center *“Urban Horror provides a fascinating read especially for those interested in bringing together economic and cultural histories of the recent past. . . . Urban Horror is an indispensable read for any historian trying to get a grasp of the relation between popular culture and public sentiment in the neoliberal era.” -- Dennis Koelling * European Review of History *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction. Urban Horror: Speculative Futures of Chinese Cinemas 1 1. Cartographies of Socialism and Post-Socialism: The Factory Gate and the Threshold of the Visible World 33 2. Intimate Dystopias: Post-Socialist Femininity and the Marxist-Feminist Interior 69 3. The Post- as Media Time: Documentary Experiments and the Rhetoric of Ruin Gazing 101 4. Post-Socialism in Hong Kong: Zone Urbanism and Marxist Phenomenology 146 5. The Ethics of Representing Precarity: Film in the Era of Global Complicity 184 Epilogue 218 Notes 223 Bibliography 245 Index 259
£25.19
Duke University Press History 4 Celsius
Book SynopsisIan Baucom puts black studies into conversation with climate change, outlining how the ongoing concerns of critical race, diaspora, and postcolonial studies are crucial to understanding the Anthropocene and vice versa.Trade Review“Giving a conceptual and timely empirical account of the Anthropocene and the problem it presents for the scale of history, Ian Baucom combines intellectual provocation with a series of fascinating insights from the sciences all while taking seriously the imaginative and conceptual challenges that the sciences pose to the humanities. History 4° Celsius will be a major book for the humanities in general. I was enthralled reading it.” -- Claire Colebrook, author of * Death of the PostHuman: Essays on Extinction, Volume 1 *“Empirically grounded, theoretically nimble and nuanced, generous toward those whose ideas he opposes and yet resolute in his opposition, Ian Baucom develops in this book a powerful, self-reflexive, and original approach to questions of methods in the emergent field of Anthropocene humanities. His argument will deeply interest postcolonial critics and other humanists as they ponder and negotiate the planetary environmental crises that so mark our times. An exemplary and thoughtful contribution.” -- Dipesh Chakrabarty, author of * The Crises of Civilization: Exploring Global and Planetary Histories *“History 4° Celsius is a complexly argued book that adds to the many interesting humanistic perspectives on the Anthropocene circulating today.” -- Sean M. Smith * H-Slavery, H-Net Reviews *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix 1. Of Forces and Forcings 1 2. History 4° Celsius: Search for a Method 35 3. The View from the Shore 73 Coda. The Youngest Day 110 Notes 119 Bibliography 131 Index 137
£21.59
Duke University Press Gramsci in the World
Book SynopsisThe contributors to Gramsci in the World examine the varying receptions and uses of Antonio Gramsci's thought in diverse geographical, historical, and political contexts, highlighting its possibilities and limits for understanding and changing the social world.Trade Review“Practically from the first to the last page, this is a fabulous book. Not only does it attest to the productive interdisciplinary use of Gramsci's conceptual instruments in the analysis of contemporary sociocultural and political developments across many global regions; it also underscores the fact that the critico-philological reconstructions of Gramsci's theoretical frameworks are far from complete. Newcomers to Gramscian studies—as well as experienced scholars—will profit from this extraordinary collection of essays. It reflects a most capacious editorial spirit anchored in creative autonomy, historical integrity, and transnational sensitivities.” -- Renate Holub, author of * Antonio Gramsci: Beyond Marxism and Postmodernism *“Comprehensive in its geographical and historical range, and impressive in its intellectual rigor, theoretical sophistication, and historical sensitivity, Gramsci in the World locates questions surrounding Gramsci's ideas within debates that are central to much of contemporary theoretical, moral, intellectual, and political writing. A significant and necessary contribution to Gramsci scholarship, this volume demonstrates that his ideas and writing will continue to exert a deep influence in the twenty-first century.” -- Benedetto Fontana, author of * Hegemony and Power: On the Relation between Gramsci and Machiavelli *“This collection of essays, edited by Roberto M. Dainotto and Fredric Jameson, is a timely and valuable contribution to cultural studies, political and social theory, postcolonial studies, as well as generally to the history of the Left and particularly to the history of Marxism.” -- Mihaela Czobor-Lupp * Perspectives on Politics *“Taken together, the essays in [Gramsci in the World] highlight the numerous complexities and dimensions to Gramsci’s writings, and the various reasons why his unique approach to Marxist analysis and revolutionary praxis influenced, or in many cases did not influence, leftist intellectuals and militants....” -- Brian Griffith * H-Italy, H-Net Reviews *“The goal of Gramsci in the World is to put forward ‘different pragmatics’ of how scholars accept or reject Gramscian thinking for their interests.... It does not simply add non-Western case studies into analysis, but changes how we think about a range of periods and geographies.” -- Thomas Furse * Global Intellectual History *"[Gramsci in the World] will interest Gramsci scholars, theorists of social change and revolution, and political activists." -- J. C. Berg * Choice *Table of ContentsNote on Sources ix Preface; Gramsci in the World / Fredric Jameson xi Introduction / Roberto Dainotto 1 1. Toward the Modern Prince / Peter D. Thomas 17 2. Gramsci, Historian of Modernity / Alberto Burgio 38 3. Adam Smith: A Bourgeois Organic Intellectual? ? Kate Crehan 60 4. Gramsci's Bergson / Cesare Casarino 77 5. Scattered Ashes: The Reception of the Gramscian Legacy in Postwar Italy / Andrea Scapoio 93 6. Subalterns in the World: Typologies and Nexus with Different Forms of Religious Experience / Cosimo Zene 113 7. Some Reflections on Gramsci: The Southern Question in the Deprovincializing of Marx / Harry Harootunian 140 8. Why No Gramsci in the United States? / Michael Denning 158 9. Gramsci on la questione del negri: Gli intellettuali and the Poesis of Americanization / R. A. Judy 165 10. Reverse Hegemony? / Maria Elisa Cevasco 179 11. Thinking Andean Abya Yala with and against Gramsci: Notes on State, Nature, and Buen Vivir / Catherine E. Walsh 190 12. Gramsci and the Chinese Left: Reappraising a Missed Encounter / Pu Wang 204 13. Antonio Gramsci in the Arab World: The Ongoing Debate / Patrizia Manduchi 224 Works Cited 241 Contributors 259 Index 263
£25.19
Duke University Press Sexual Hegemony
Book SynopsisIn Sexual Hegemony Christopher Chitty traces the five-hundred year history of capitalist sexual relations by excavating the class dynamics of the bourgeoisie''s attempts to regulate homosexuality. Tracking the politicization of male homosexuality in Renaissance Florence, Amsterdam, Paris, and London between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as twentieth-century New York City, Chitty shows how sexuality became a crucial dimension of the accumulation of capital and a technique of bourgeois rule. Whether policing male sodomy during the Medici rule in Florence or accusing the French aristocracy of monstrous sexuality in the wake of the French Revolution, the bourgeoisie weaponized both sexual constraint and sexual freedom in order to produce and control a reliable and regimented labor class and subordinate it to civil society and the state. Only by grasping sexuality as a field of social contention and the site of class conflict, Chitty contends, can we embark on a pTrade Review“In this theoretically sophisticated and historically rigorous book, Christopher Chitty builds a compelling argument for an approach to the history of sexuality that is embedded in property relations, economic crises, and political institutions. The result is a modernized History of Sexuality that speaks to contemporary concerns with increasing forms of precarity. A work ahead of its time, Sexual Hegemony makes an uncannily prescient and powerful intervention. Its importance and brilliance cannot be overstated.” -- Petrus Liu, author of * Queer Marxism in Two Chinas *“[Sexual Hegemony] is extraordinary, even singular—and my hope is that it will change the way we think about sexuality and anticapitalist struggle alike.” -- Christopher Nealon, from the Introduction"Both a labor of love and a collaboration across the frontier of death, Sexual Hegemony is one of that desire’s most uniquely affecting expressions." -- Josephine Livingstone * The New Republic *“Sexual Hegemony is not a theory of sexuality but a history of it. It’s a history of the people who were left out of previous histories and who more closely resemble the same people left out of the modern, mainstream gay and lesbian movement…. In Chitty’s history, queerness is criminality and vice versa, and until we undo the stigmatization of those working against the regime of property and its armed wing, the state, our gender and sexuality will be, in Chitty’s phrase, only ‘partially emancipated.’… The implications of Chitty’s history are not just for those who study the broad movements of capitalism but also those who live within it now.” -- Adam Fales * Homintern *“Homosexuality is a modern invention, and 150 years later, we’re still arguing about what it means and where it came from, and whether it was invented at all. It is, to quote Andrew Holleran, ‘like a boarding school in which there are no vacations.’ Chitty invites us to burn the boarding school down, and in the ashes, with history as our guide, to build something for everyone.” -- Ben Miller * The Baffler *“Christopher Chitty’s Sexual Hegemony, an ambitious retelling of the history of capitalism through the politics of gay sex...suggests new substantive and methodological directions for the history of homosexuality—directions that could transform the meaning of queer politics in our moment.” -- Kate Redburn * Dissent Magazine *"Sexual Hegemony is thought provoking, theoretically intricate, and wide-ranging. Likely to become a significant text for advanced students and scholars of gender and sexuality studies, history, and philosophy. Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty." -- L. Hengehold * Choice *“Max Fox has done an excellent job in bringing together Chitty’s work and editing the texts into a coherent volume that (I have no doubt) will go down as a classic in queer history and political theory.” -- Matthew J. Cull * Women, Gender & Research *“Sexual Hegemony . . . is a book clearly shaped by the financial crisis of 2008, the failures of neoliberalism, and the supposed successes of gay rights activism in much of the developed world. . . . His work stands as an incitement for scholars to probe the entanglements of sexuality and capital in the past and in our own rapidly changing world.” -- Samuel Clowes Huneke * Journal of Social History *“Chitty’s passion and engagement are evident on every page. Few academic works attest so strongly to a young scholar’s desire to make sense of the world in all its complexity. It is fortunate that Chitty wrote as much as he did and that Max Fox and others made sure that what he wrote made it into print.” -- Ian Frederick Moulton * Journal of the History of Sexuality *“Chitty’s work opens many possibilities for postcolonial, decolonial and geographically grounded analysis. As a researcher of Chinese queer politics, Chitty provides a way of thinking about sexuality within East Asia’s long tradition of intersovereign trades, market civilization and proletarianization. . . . Sexual Hegemony will rock the world of Marxism as well as queer theory in the Anglophone academia.” -- Ian L Tian * Sexualities *“Among Sexual Hegemony’s most striking interventions is Chitty’s insistence (one supported by a rich historical archive) that heterosexism is a tool of class struggle rather than a prejudice rooted in morality or religion. . . . SexualHegemony takes no easy guesses at the shape future sexual solidarities will take. Instead, it offers a usable past that helps us think better about what it might look like to build them.” -- Heather Berg * GLQ *Table of ContentsForeword / Max Fox vii Introduction / Christopher Nealon 1 Part I: Sexual Hegemonies of Historical Capitalism 1. Homosexuality and Capitalism 21 2. Sodomy and the Government of Cities 42 3. Sexual Hegemony and the Capitalist World System 73 4. Homosexuality and Bourgeois Hegemony 106 Part II. Homosexuality and the Desire for History 5. Historicizing the History of Sexuality 141 6. Homosexuality as a Category of Bourgeois Society 167 Notes 193 Index 217
£72.25
Duke University Press Sexual Hegemony
Book SynopsisIn Sexual Hegemony Christopher Chitty traces the five-hundred year history of capitalist sexual relations by excavating the class dynamics of the bourgeoisie's attempts to regulate homosexuality. Tracking the politicization of male homosexuality in Renaissance Florence, Amsterdam, Paris, and London between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as twentieth-century New York City, Chitty shows how sexuality became a crucial dimension of the accumulation of capital and a technique of bourgeois rule. Whether policing male sodomy during the Medici rule in Florence or accusing the French aristocracy of monstrous sexuality in the wake of the French Revolution, the bourgeoisie weaponized both sexual constraint and sexual freedom in order to produce and control a reliable and regimented labor class and subordinate it to civil society and the state. Only by grasping sexuality as a field of social contention and the site of class conflict, Chitty contends, can we embark on a politics that destroys sexuality as a tool and an effect of power and open a front against the forces that keep us unfree.Trade Review“In this theoretically sophisticated and historically rigorous book, Christopher Chitty builds a compelling argument for an approach to the history of sexuality that is embedded in property relations, economic crises, and political institutions. The result is a modernized History of Sexuality that speaks to contemporary concerns with increasing forms of precarity. A work ahead of its time, Sexual Hegemony makes an uncannily prescient and powerful intervention. Its importance and brilliance cannot be overstated.” -- Petrus Liu, author of * Queer Marxism in Two Chinas *“[Sexual Hegemony] is extraordinary, even singular—and my hope is that it will change the way we think about sexuality and anticapitalist struggle alike.” -- Christopher Nealon, from the Introduction"Both a labor of love and a collaboration across the frontier of death, Sexual Hegemony is one of that desire’s most uniquely affecting expressions." -- Josephine Livingstone * The New Republic *“Sexual Hegemony is not a theory of sexuality but a history of it. It’s a history of the people who were left out of previous histories and who more closely resemble the same people left out of the modern, mainstream gay and lesbian movement…. In Chitty’s history, queerness is criminality and vice versa, and until we undo the stigmatization of those working against the regime of property and its armed wing, the state, our gender and sexuality will be, in Chitty’s phrase, only ‘partially emancipated.’… The implications of Chitty’s history are not just for those who study the broad movements of capitalism but also those who live within it now.” -- Adam Fales * Homintern *“Homosexuality is a modern invention, and 150 years later, we’re still arguing about what it means and where it came from, and whether it was invented at all. It is, to quote Andrew Holleran, ‘like a boarding school in which there are no vacations.’ Chitty invites us to burn the boarding school down, and in the ashes, with history as our guide, to build something for everyone.” -- Ben Miller * The Baffler *“Christopher Chitty’s Sexual Hegemony, an ambitious retelling of the history of capitalism through the politics of gay sex...suggests new substantive and methodological directions for the history of homosexuality—directions that could transform the meaning of queer politics in our moment.” -- Kate Redburn * Dissent Magazine *"Sexual Hegemony is thought provoking, theoretically intricate, and wide-ranging. Likely to become a significant text for advanced students and scholars of gender and sexuality studies, history, and philosophy. Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty." -- L. Hengehold * Choice *“Max Fox has done an excellent job in bringing together Chitty’s work and editing the texts into a coherent volume that (I have no doubt) will go down as a classic in queer history and political theory.” -- Matthew J. Cull * Women, Gender & Research *“Sexual Hegemony . . . is a book clearly shaped by the financial crisis of 2008, the failures of neoliberalism, and the supposed successes of gay rights activism in much of the developed world. . . . His work stands as an incitement for scholars to probe the entanglements of sexuality and capital in the past and in our own rapidly changing world.” -- Samuel Clowes Huneke * Journal of Social History *“Chitty’s passion and engagement are evident on every page. Few academic works attest so strongly to a young scholar’s desire to make sense of the world in all its complexity. It is fortunate that Chitty wrote as much as he did and that Max Fox and others made sure that what he wrote made it into print.” -- Ian Frederick Moulton * Journal of the History of Sexuality *“Chitty’s work opens many possibilities for postcolonial, decolonial and geographically grounded analysis. As a researcher of Chinese queer politics, Chitty provides a way of thinking about sexuality within East Asia’s long tradition of intersovereign trades, market civilization and proletarianization. . . . Sexual Hegemony will rock the world of Marxism as well as queer theory in the Anglophone academia.” -- Ian L Tian * Sexualities *“Among Sexual Hegemony’s most striking interventions is Chitty’s insistence (one supported by a rich historical archive) that heterosexism is a tool of class struggle rather than a prejudice rooted in morality or religion. . . . SexualHegemony takes no easy guesses at the shape future sexual solidarities will take. Instead, it offers a usable past that helps us think better about what it might look like to build them.” -- Heather Berg * GLQ *Table of ContentsForeword / Max Fox vii Introduction / Christopher Nealon 1 Part I: Sexual Hegemonies of Historical Capitalism 1. Homosexuality and Capitalism 21 2. Sodomy and the Government of Cities 42 3. Sexual Hegemony and the Capitalist World System 73 4. Homosexuality and Bourgeois Hegemony 106 Part II. Homosexuality and the Desire for History 5. Historicizing the History of Sexuality 141 6. Homosexuality as a Category of Bourgeois Society 167 Notes 193 Index 217
£18.89
Duke University Press Sensory Experiments
Book SynopsisErica Fretwell examines how psychophysics—a nineteenth-century scientific movement originating in Germany dedicated to the empirical study of sensory experience—became central to the process of creating human difference along the lines of race, gender, and ability in nineteenth-century America.Trade Review“With precision, writerly grace, and great analytic power, Erica Fretwell uses the backstory of psychophysics to map out the contradictory ways feeling subjects came to be thought in the nineteenth century. This is a uniquely strong book, anchored in exacting historical, theoretical, and exegetical scholarship. It stands to make a powerful intervention into nineteenth-century literary studies and especially into science studies, critical race studies, and biopolitical critique.” -- Peter Coviello, author of * Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism *“Historicizing the intersections among nineteenth-century conceptions of materiality, race, and aesthetic experience, Erica Fretwell produces a wide-reaching framework for understanding the stakes of sensory experience. The result is a rigorous historical approach to nineteenth-century science and culture that underscores efforts to ‘educate’ or ‘civilize’ the senses. This brilliant, original, and important book will make waves in race studies, sensory studies, American studies, the history of science, and American literature.” -- Hsuan L. Hsu, author of * Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain’s Asia and Comparative Racialization *“In her excellent Sensory Experiments, Erica Fretwell puts forward an insightful thesis informed by an intelligent selection of the literature and a rigorous multi-disciplinary analysis. . . . It should appeal . . . to any reader with an interest in the history of psychology, aesthetics, or U.S. culture in the post-Civil War period.” -- Jorge Castro-Tejerina * Centaurus *“Fretwell hits a sweet spot between science and culture, offering a wide-ranging experimental archive on the aesthetic history of the US. Like any good archive, this work opens a view not only to the past but also forcefully into the future. Anyone interested in the aesthetic dimension of contemporary social life, regardless of its specific context, will benefit from reading the textual experiments Fretwell so deftly performs. Highly recommended.” -- B. G. Chang * Choice *“[Sensory Experiments] is poised to make a significant and lasting intervention across fields. For scholars of sensory studies, affect theory, and American literature, it is deeply important reading.” -- Jake McGinnis * Papers On Language & Literature *“Sensory Experiments points us not only to the ways in which senses served as a substrate for considerations of self and subjectivity for cultural producers in the nineteenth century; it also suggests that we be continually aware—and conscious of, and careful with—our own assessments of contemporary sense and sensation.” -- Michael Rossi * The Senses and Society *“[Fretwell’s] writing is deeply satisfying and provocative. . . . Fretwell deftly navigates a shocking variety of source types and between the disciplines of literature studies, cultural and intellectual history, and sensory studies with ease. SensoryExperiments will be an important book for all of these fields and more.” -- Alexandra Huis * Social History Of Medicine *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction. New Sensation 1 1. Sight: Unreconstructed Body Images 35 Interval 1. Colorful Sounds 79 2. Sound: The Acoustics of Social Harmony 87 Interval 2. Notes on Scent 124 3. Smell: Perfume, Women, and Other Volatile Spirits 131 Interval 3. Olfactory Gusto 167 4. Taste: Scripts for Sweetness, Measures of Pleasure 174 Interval 4. Mouthfeel 213 5. Touch: Life Writing Between Skin and Flesh 221 Coda. Afterlives and Antelives of Feeling 257 Notes 265 Bibliography 298 Index
£98.60
Duke University Press Sentient Flesh
Book SynopsisIn Sentient Flesh R. A. Judy takes up freedman Tom Windham’s 1937 remark “we should have our liberty ''cause . . . us is human flesh' as a point of departure for an extended meditation on questions of the human, epistemology, and the historical ways in which the black being is understood. Drawing on numerous fields, from literary theory and musicology, to political theory and phenomenology, as well as Greek and Arabic philosophy, Judy engages literary texts and performative practices such as music and dance that express knowledge and conceptions of humanity appositional to those grounding modern racialized capitalism. Operating as critiques of Western humanism, these practices and modes of being-in-the-world—which he theorizes as “thinking in disorder,” or “poiesis in black”—foreground the irreducible concomitance offlesh, thinking, and personhood. As Judy demonstrates, recognizing this concomitance is central to finding a way pastTrade Review“Sentient Flesh constitutes a unique and emphatic announcement of what a certain fundamental strain of black studies has long been—the disruptive turning and overturning of the ontological, metaphysical, and epistemological foundations of the modern world. Its extreme and profound generativity is bracing and invigorating, and it forces and allows its readers to do more, confront more, read more, and think more. I love this book, I feel this book, I am pleased by this book because I am undone and disturbed and disrupted and transported by this book.” -- Fred Moten, author of * Black and Blur *“Weaving a clear and critical story about the making of the so-called Negro and how this making is deeply connected to questions of the flesh not the body, R. A. Judy makes one of the most critical arguments in contemporary humanities. Sentient Flesh is well placed to make a major intervention.” -- Anthony Bogues, author of * Empire of Liberty: Power, Desire, and Freedom *“This text is nothing if not a call for communal forms of thinking.... R.A. Judy has presented us with an opening to consider and reconsider what it means to be Black in this world and I hope it is a challenge that is taken up and serves to enrich the archive of Black Radical Thought.” -- Michael E. Sawyer * New Formations *"R. A. Judy’s Sentient Flesh, in its 600 or so pages, stands as a monumental contribution to this literature, leading us through, sometimes in dazzling detail, a teeming array of figures, themes, disciplinary scenes, and texts in order to arrive at a full account of its main conceptual contributions." -- Emanuela Bianchi * Cultural Critique *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations ix Notes on Translation and Transliteration xi Preface: Preliminary Signposts xiii Acknowledgments xxi Introduction: Body and Flesh 1 [1st Set] On Lohengrin's Swan 25 Sentient Flesh 150 [2nd Set] Sentient Flesh Dancing 215 Poiēsis in Black 252 Para-Semiosis 319 Coda: Gifting Blues Love-Improper 418 Notes 457 Bibliography 543 Index 573
£95.20
Duke University Press The Sense of Brown
Book SynopsisThe Sense of Brownis José Esteban Muñoz''s treatise on brownness and being as well as his most direct address to queer Latinx studies. In this book, which he was completing at the time of his death, Muñoz examines the work of playwrights Ricardo Bracho and Nilo Cruz, artists Nao Bustamante, Isaac Julien, and Tania Bruguera, and singer José Feliciano, among others, arguing for a sense of brownness that is not fixed within the racial and national contours of Latinidad. This sense of brown is not about the individualized brown subject; rather, it demonstrates that for brown peoples, being exists within what Muñoz calls the brown commons—a lifeworld, queer ecology, and form of collectivity. In analyzing minoritarian affect, ethnicity as a structure of feeling, and brown feelings as they emerge in, through, and beside art and performance, Muñoz illustrates how the sense of brown serves as the basis for other ways of knowing and being inTrade Review“The final work of José Esteban Muñoz—scholar, mentor, and precious node in an intergenerational and transnational web of intellectual and social relations—will be received with eager enthusiasm and a box of tissues.” -- Juana María Rodríguez, author of * Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings *“In The Sense of Brown, José Esteban Muñoz maps and grapples with an evolving theory and method of feeling and being in the world that he names brown. In this work, brownness 'is already here, . . . vast, present, and vital.’ Muñoz gives his theory ‘historically specific affective particularity,’ rejecting the abjective. Read on their own and in tandem with Muñoz's earlier works, these thirteen essays written with care and a sense of urgency outlive his too-soon passing. Lovingly edited, they are a gift.” -- Christina Sharpe, author of * In the Wake: On Blackness and Being *"Conceptualizing Latinx studies within the terms Muñoz offers, those of affect, aesthetics, and performance, gives way for more room in which to construct a Latinx studies that seeks to counter anti-blackness and anti-indigeneity, assimilationism, settler nation-state borders and boundaries, language essentialisms, and other settler colonial logics which merely reify the power structures perpetuating global precarity, exploitation, violence, and death." -- Marcos Gonsalez * ASAP/Journal *"The Sense of Brown is a classic academic work, so it has a density that requires effort to parse through, but it’s well worth the read. In this book, Muñoz examines how brownness, particularly for queer Latinx people, becomes a 'lifeworld' that reveals itself through performance of all kinds, including plays, films, and albums. If you loved his prior work, then The Sense of Brown serves as a perfect ending—both putting a bow on his scholarship and creating pathways for those who want to further it." -- Evette Dionne * Bitch Magazine *"The book is his most pointed intervention into Latinx studies and the contradictions of Latinx racializations, and it represents the work of nearly two decades, done alongside and around two books and over a dozen essays and lectures. . . . As students, friends, and readers, we meet The Sense of Brown, finally, as a consolation in the midst of a global crisis that’s paradoxically lonely and chaotically social." -- Roy Pérez * Los Angeles Review of Books *"Offers ... startling moments of insight and ... profound intellectual generosity." -- Jane Hu * Bookforum *"Expertly edited after his passing by Joshua Chambers-Letson and Tavia Nyong’o, The Sense of Brown is Muñoz’s final work, and it’s a true testament to an intersectional project that suggests that 'queerness is in the horizon, forward dawning and not-yet-here. Brownness diverges from my definition of queerness. Brownness is already here.'” -- Maximilíano Durón * ARTnews *"With The Sense of Brown, José Esteban Muñoz left a love-letter to brownness that acts as a dream for its desire. Extending to the minerals of the soil, to the animals, and to the people who bare its shade, it is an ode to a brown of rapturous multiplicity. . . [T]his book and Muñoz’s thoughts remain an arsenal full for any minoritarian subject who desires to understand and even love themselves, and their sense of being, more–a radical proposition." -- Jess Saldaña * Lambda Literary Review *"The Sense of Brown is more than a sketch of brownness as an ontology of relations; it is an opportunity to sit inside Muñoz’s writing and thinking space, an almost wistful feeling of being in his thoughts as they formed, as they firmed. Reading Muñoz’s essays invokes a meditative feeling; one gets a sense that Muñoz was reflecting on his ideas, the drafty in/coherence of this ensemble reveal the essay as process. The essays are inviting, soft and melancholic." -- Moon Charania * Society and Space *"The Sense of Brown . . . provides theoretical concepts in performance studies, Latinx studies, queer theory, and other studies of race, gender, and sexuality that are invaluable to expanding our notions of performance and racial hegemony." -- kt shorb * E3W Review of Books *"Chambers-Letson and Nyong’o provide a beautiful genealogy of Muñoz’s scholarship in queer studies, Latinx studies, and performance studies. . . . [T]he book provides readers with myriad understandings of brownness, feeling/sensing brown, and the brown commons." -- James Huynh * GLQ *"Muñoz offers a different way of being found in art and world making." -- Patricia Ybarra * Performance Research *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Editors' Introduction. The Aesthetic Resonance of Brown / Joshua Chambers-Letson and Tavia Nyong'o ix 1. The Browns Commons 1 2. Feeling Brown: Ethnicity and Affect in Ricardo Bracho's The Sweetest Hangover (and Other STDs) 8 3. The Onus of Seeing Cuba: Nilo Cruz's Cubanía 24 4. Meandering South: Isaac Julien and The Long Road to Mazatlán 29 5. "Chico, What Does It Feel Like to Be a Problem?": The Transmission of Brownness 36 6. The Vulnerability Artist: Nao Bustamante and the Sad Beauty of Reparation 47 7. Queer Theater, Queer Theory: Luis Alfaro's Cuerpo Polizado 59 8. Performing the Bestiary: Carmelita Tropicana's With What Ass Does the Cockroach Sit?/ Con Que Culo se Sienta la Cucaracha? 78 9. Performing Greater Cuba: Tania Bruguera and the Burden of Guilt 86 10. Wise Latinas 100 11. Brown Worldings: José Rodríguez-Soltero, Tania Bruguera, and María Irene Fornés 118 12. The Sense of Wildness: The Brown Commons after Paris Burned 128 13. Vitalism's Afterburn: The Sense of Ana Mendieta 141 Notes 151 Bibliography 167 Index 175
£72.25
Duke University Press Dear Science and Other Stories
Book SynopsisIn Dear Science and Other Stories Katherine McKittrick presents a creative and rigorous study of black and anticolonial methodologies. Drawing on black studies, studies of race, cultural geography, and black feminism as well as a mix of methods, citational practices, and theoretical frameworks, she positions black storytelling and stories as strategies of invention and collaboration. She analyzes a number of texts from intellectuals and artists ranging from Sylvia Wynter to the electronica band Drexciya to explore how narratives of imprecision and relationality interrupt knowledge systems that seek to observe, index, know, and discipline blackness. Throughout, McKittrick offers curiosity, wonder, citations, numbers, playlists, friendship, poetry, inquiry, song, grooves, and anticolonial chronologies as interdisciplinary codes that entwine with the academic form. Suggesting that black life and black livingness are, in themselves, rebellious methodologies, McKittrick imagines withTrade Review“Drawing from black anticolonial thought and study, black poetics, music, and expressive arts, Katherine McKittrick's Dear Science and Other Stories is an experiment in materializing black method and black wonder in stories of black livingness and relation, in spite of conditions of racial colonial violence and antiblack science of maps, algorithms, and life chances. It insists on other sensoria, consciousness, creation, and knowing—a black sense of place.” -- Lisa Lowe, author of * The Intimacies of Four Continents *“Freedom is a place made through rehearsals of thought and human-environment inter-action. Katherine McKittrick's stories show geography in the making through their persistent refusal to recite empirics of suffering and catastrophe. What a gift to travel these surprising, complex paths through rage toward life. I am grateful for this book.” -- Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of * Change Everything! Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition *"In this innovative, rich work, Katherine McKittrick works tirelessly to make us aware of how Black thought is a form of knowledge production. McKittrick uses a fascinating essay structure — stories and letters to science — to discuss jazz, computer science, poetry, Black history, and more. It contains one of the most powerful analyses of scientific racism that I’ve read in recent times, arguing that sometimes our efforts to articulate race and racism as social phenomena actually reinforce the idea that they are somehow biological in nature." -- Chanda Prescod-Weinstein * Bookriot *"McKittrick’s prose is beautiful and timely, and she demonstrates that there is a cost to reducing Black life to any description without deep thought. Her readers—no matter their relationship to science—are pressed to question what we know, how we know, and who we know. Dear Science urges us to be cautious of a single narrative, to articulate our thoughts with exacting labor, and it provides insight into how we can create a universe beyond Black suffering." -- Edna Bonhomme * The Baffler *"Reading the richly poetic and sonically-driven Dear Science, we can see the many complex projects and thoughts of McKittrick’s work. The stories are citational observations and calls for a theory and method of storytelling and reading practice as a way to undo discipline (41), a reimagination of the academic text as a genre and incomplete visions of defining ‘science’. The text itself is artfully arranged, breaking from the conventional academic structure. . . ." -- Anna Nguyen * LSE Review of Books *"For those of us working inside, along, and through environmental studies, the environmental humanities, science studies, and all disciplines in between, Dear Science challenges us to confront the stories that our fields of study tell us about ourselves and the world around us and to consider what is possible if we center Black ways of knowing to imagine more equitable futures." -- Erin Gilbert and Leah Rubinsky * ISLE *"You are my black feminist answer to Borges and his short story, 'On Rigor in Science.' In the rigor and incisiveness of your stories you challenge and dismantle singular, unified, totalizing representations, narratives of classification and ways of knowing and being that discipline and punish, stifle, crush and suffocate. In their stead, you offer and practice relationality, generative collaborative praxis, black creative consciousness, method, and life. Thank you." -- Hazel Carby * Society and Space *"Dear Science is like no other scholarly book." -- Dina Georgis * Society and Space *"Dear Science and Other Stories is a one-of-a-kind,theoretical-practical-creative work that promises to intrigue, inspire, and question the reader, urging them toward new relational ways of thinking and living. It is a wonderful book, which encourages the reader to step out of their comfort zone and to explore interdisciplinary and cross-theory-making and art, in and through Black creativity and ‘livingness’, storytelling, and ways of knowing." -- Lena Anggren * Feminist Studies Association *"Katherine McKittrick's book about Black livingness and Black knowledge is a mind-altering and world-bending read that rarely leaves my side. I turn to it constantly, as a way to recognize the world that the Black studies tradition is constantly building. . . . A must-read for anyone interested in finding alternative ways of being and knowing rooted in abolition." -- Orlando Serrano * Smithsonian Magazine *"Refreshingly, Dear Science . . . [shows] what science misses in trying to define Black spiritual and corporeal existence. McKittrick urges Black studies thinkers to resist the hold of biocentric knowledge and to imagine ways of being and thinking that exist beyond and beside it." -- Cera Smith * The Black Scholar *"Dear Science is generous and expansive—disrupting normative disciplinary approaches often rehearsed in academic writing. It demands careful engagement and deep study. . . . Reading this book will, borrowing from Fanon, cause your heart to make your head swim." -- Jade How and Gada Mahrouse * Lateral *"Each exquisite sentence of Dear Science is comprised of layers of meaning. Still, McKittrick thought carefully about the importance of readability. . . . On each page of Dear Science, readers will find a reminder that Black (livingness) is beautiful, complex, and brilliant." -- Chanda Prescod-Weinstein * Catalyst *"Though McKittrick’s short book may seem humble, it offers a wide-ranging examination of both racist and liberatory methodologies. . . . To anyone working within Western academia, especially to those invested in anti-racist, feminist, and anti-colonial study, this book provides teachings, guidance, and support for re-examining one’s critical practices so they may better serve and imagine non-colonial futures." -- Tavleen Purewal * Letters in Canada *"By reading in and with black studies, Dear Science is a discipline-shattering love letter to the possibilities imbued in the black imagination." -- Ladipo Famodu & Temitope Famodu * Antipode *"McKittrick’s work, and Black Studies more broadly, are offering us a home, a safe space, outside, which is empowering and life-affirming and generous. I want us to applaud McKittrick’s work. I want us to celebrate and cherish and protect this place, outside, and to get lost in it." -- Lioba Hirsch * Antipode *Table of ContentsHe Liked to Say that This Love was the Result of a Clinical Error ix Curiosities (My Heart Makes My Head Swim) 1 Footnotes (Books and Papers Scattered about the Floor) 14 The Smallest Cell Remembers a Sound 35 Consciousness (Feeling like, Feeling like This) 58 Something That Exceeds All Efforts to Definitively Pin It Down 71 No Place, Unknown, Undetermined 75 Notes 79 Black Ecologies. Coral Cities. Catch a Wave 83 Charmaine's Wire 87 Polycarbonate, Aluminum (Gold), and Lacquer 91 Black Children 95 Telephone Listing 99 Failure (My Head Was Full of Misty Fumes of Doubt) 103 The Kick Drum Is the Fault 122 (Zong) Bad Made Measure 125 I Got Life/Rebellion Invention Groove 151 (I Entered the Lists) 168 Dear Science 186 Notes and Reminders 189 Storytellers 193 Diegeses and Bearings 211
£70.55
Duke University Press Wild Things
Book SynopsisIn Wild Things Jack Halberstam offers an alternative history of sexuality by tracing the ways in which wildness has been associated with queerness and queer bodies throughout the twentieth century. Halberstam theorizes the wild as an unbounded and unpredictable space that offers sources of opposition to modernity''s orderly impulses. Wildness illuminates the normative taxonomies of sexuality against which radical queer practice and politics operate. Throughout, Halberstam engages with a wide variety of texts, practices, and cultural imaginaries—from zombies, falconry, and M. NourbeSe Philip''s Zong! to Maurice Sendak''s Where the Wild Things Are and the career of Irish anticolonial revolutionary Roger Casement—to demonstrate how wildness provides the means to know and to be in ways that transgress Euro-American notions of the modern liberal subject. With Wild Things, Halberstam opens new possibilities for queer theory and for wild thinking more bTrade Review“Where can the wild take you? With Jack Halberstam as guide, to places fabulous, cruel, soaring, undead, hilarious, dark, seductive, promising, nonprovidential. Wild Things is a brilliant phenomenology of the (more than) human condition of bewilderment. Its critique of invocations of wildness tethered to colonial, racist fantasies also marks how the figure can contribute to forms of desire bent toward the feral, the incipient, the otherwise. Wild Things is an awesome trip.” -- Jane Bennett, author of * Influx and Efflux: Writing Up with Walt Whitman *“How does one learn about wildness? Coming from a longtime scholar of sexuality, the animal, desire, and anarchy, Jack Halberstam's Wild Things fosters a generous archive, favoring bewilderment over a ritual turn back to order and knowing. Following this book constitutes a kind of epistemological travel and culminates in a habit of sensation, a disorderly campaign, and a queer method that will stay with you.” -- Mel Y. Chen, author of * Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect *"[A] creative, discipline-smashing study exploring the human attraction to 'the wild.' . . . Halberstam’s approach is equal parts academic and poetic, making for a dense and, at times, beautiful text. This is a work that demands attention, which it rewards with both insight and entertainment." * Publishers Weekly *“In Wild Things Halberstam moves restlessly across literature, cinema, theater, music, and poetry, determining the various modes by which people have devoted themselves to, or been effectively written within, the incomprehensibilities of the wild, of wildness, and of bewilderment…. Wild Things (un)clarifies the wild as an always-present threat to modernity’s coherence, illuminating the anti-Black and heteronormative carceral logics at the heart of liberal democracy by unveiling those under common ways of knowing and being that liberalism seeks to obscure, incorporate, lock up, or destroy.” * Invisible Culture *"The limits of Halberstam's analysis are boundlessly educative and entertaining: one chapter calls out proto-queer male writers for their affinity and identification with feral falconry while another examines the nature of family pets. Within the realms of what the author himself calls a 'counterintuitive queer project,' Halberstam's intellectually engrossing phenomenology evokes thoughts of how the concept of 'wild' can be applied to creatures and concepts both great and small while inspiring spirited conversation and debate." -- Jim Piechota * Bay Area Reporter *"Wild Things offers readers and scholars working on environmental questions a vibrant archive for thinking histories of sexuality and desire alongside concepts of the “wild” and its disorders. . . . The text is especially rich as an archive of the ways wildness persists within and can be activated against modernist writers. Halberstam’s wildness is a morally ambivalent, non-identitarian invitation—one that might lead to bewilderment, zombies, children’s books, hawks, or any number of other queer, wild things." -- Julia Dauer * Edge Effects *“Through Halberstam’s examination of pop culture and political projects, his analysis is consistently brought back to racial tropes that define the socio-political state of colonialism today.... Wild Things is a reminder that critical scholarship’s penchant for world-making and un-making is a political imperative to thinking beyond our hegemonic constraints.” -- Jake Kyer Townsend * Cultural Studies *“The book’s first half is a remarkable example of ecstatic intellectual curiosity, flying high on seemingly perpendicular currents Halberstam teaches us to navigate with smooth and logical flow. . . . Halberstam wrote exactly the wild book he set out to write.” -- Nicholas Tyler Reich * Transgender Studies Quarterly *“With regard to queer topics, Halberstam has been an influential figure in modern queer theory and Wild Things attests to this status as it is steadfastly grounded in the scholarship of the field. . . . The author does not simply connect wildness with queerness, but braids the two strands of theory together thus expanding their discursive potential.” -- Constantine Chatzipapatheodoridis * European Journal of American Studies *Table of ContentsPreface ix Acknowledgments xiii Part I. Sex in the Wild Introduction. Sex before, after, and against Nature 3 1. Wildness, Loss, and Death 33 2. "A New Kind of Wildness": The Rite of Spring and and Indigenous Aesthetics of Bewilderment 51 3. The Epistemology of the Ferox: Sex, Death, and Falconry 77 Part II. Animality Introduction. Into the Wild 115 4. Where the Wild Things Are: Humans, Animals, and Children 125 5. Zombie Antihumanism at the End of the World 147 Conclusions. The Ninth Wave 175 Notes 181 Bibliography 201 Index 211
£72.25
Duke University Press Interimperiality
Book SynopsisWeaving together feminist, decolonial, and dialectical theory, Laura Doyle theorizes the co-emergence of empires, institutions, language regimes, stratified economies, and literary cultures over the longue durée.Trade Review“Notable for its recognition of the crucial, but often ignored, dialectical relationship between political economy and literary production, Inter-imperiality provides powerful examples of how a scholar can engage with one problematic across disciplines, using literary texts as an anchor. This big, bold book is a major intervention in continuing debates on the emergence of literature in relation to a world defined by the phenomenon of empires of time and space.” -- Simon Gikandi, author of * Slavery and the Culture of Taste *“[Inter-imperiality] offers a transhistorical, interdisciplinary, intersectional, and decolonial analysis of the fundamentally relational processes that constitute imperial powers and individual lives. Polities and persons alike are enmeshed in shifting entanglements that enable coercion and violence as well as care and community. Aiming to ‘honor the struggles and the sustaining practices’ that are elided when this existential interdependence is disavowed, Doyle chronicles a longue durée of dialectical state and identity (co)formation that spans the eleventh to the twentieth centuries.” * American Literature *“Inter-imperiality might be described as an attempt to reiterate the ontological insights of Hegel regarding the dialectical truth of our lived identity, extended and expanded through the longue durée of Braudel, but couched crucially in the terminology of feminist, Marxist, and postcolonial thought. It is a paean, among other things, to the untold history of female, non-Western labor. . . . There is a fervor and a seriousness to Doyle’s desire to expand and decenter contemporary global historiography, which is inspiring to read.” -- Ian Almond * Comparative Literature *“How did European colonialism happen? Why is racism still permeating many quarters of life? How can we prevent the existence of colonialism and racism? Inter-imperiality innovatively engages these questions. . . . Doyle’s call for a return to the avowal of the materialist dialectic and for ‘care, and cure’ presents inspiring new ways for thinking about the future of decolonial studies.” -- Lidan Lin * Modern Fiction Studies *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Theoretical Introduction. Between States 1 Part I. Co-Constituted Worlds 1. Dialectics in the Longue Durée 35 2. Refusing Labor's (Re)production in The Thousand and One Nights 68 Part II. Convergence and Revolt 3. Remapping Orientalism among Eurasian Empires 95 4. Global Revolts and Gothic Interventions 121 5. Infrastructure, Activism, and Literary Dialectics in the Early Twentieth Century 156 Part III. Persisting Temporalities 6. Rape, Revolution, and Queer Male Longing in Carpentier's The Kingdom of This World 195 7. Inter-imperially Neocolonial: The Queer Returns of Writing in Powell's The Pagoda 227 Conclusion. A River Between 251 Notes 255 Bibliography 331 Index
£112.20
Duke University Press Borderwaters
Book SynopsisBrian Russell Roberts dispels continental-centric US national mythologies to advance an alternative image of the United States as an archipelagic nation to better reflect its claims to archipelagoes in the Pacific and Caribbean.Trade Review“Brian Russell Roberts's astonishing new paradigm recasts the United States as a nation of islands and oceans, engaging Benoit Mandelbrot (among others) to elucidate the archipelagic fractals of the Pacific and the Caribbean. Examining works ranging from Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God to Florence Frisbie's Miss Ulysses from Puka-Puka to the visual arts by Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias, this detail-rich study is eye-opening in every way. Essential reading for all Americanists.” -- Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University“Offering an important new theoretical way of understanding American literature and culture, Brian Russell Roberts suggests how ‘archipelagic thinking’ can induce us to reconceive American literary culture as something other than a landlocked affair. Borderwaters should resonate widely among Americanists across a broad range of disciplinary fields and is certain to be widely influential.” -- Paul Giles, author of * Backgazing: Reverse Time in Modernist Culture *"The extraordinary contribution of Brian Russell Roberts’ recent book is not only to the advancement of the field of a specifically archipelagic American Studies which sits in ready conversation with Atlantic and Pacific discourse and study and in whose conception he has been for the last decade an innovator, but that it sets up the possibility for a renewal of dialogue within interdisciplinary global studies and world literary studies from the early modern to the present, with the archipelagic as dominant paradigm; the reach of this book is far greater than the field of contemporary American Studies in which it most obviously finds a home." -- Heather H. Yeung * New Global Studies *"This monograph marries the interdisciplinarity of American studies to that of the environmental humanities. Readers will find themselves parsing heady engagements with geology, marine biology, fractal geometry, international maritime law, philosophy, the visual arts, and literature. . . . Roberts often dredges from the archipelagic archives potent rereadings from the terraqueous sphere of American studies." -- Jason Frydman * American Literary History *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction. Archipelagic Thinking and the Borderwaters: A US-Eccentric Vision 1 1. Interlapping Continents and Archipelagoes of American Studies 45 2. Archipelagic Diaspora and Geographic Form 82 3. Borderwaters and Geometries of Being Amid 111 4. Fractal Temporality on Vulnerable Foreshores 159 5. Spiraling Futures of the Archipelagic States of America 202 Conclusion. Distant Reading the Archipelagic Gyre: Digital Humanities Archipelagoes 248 Notes 275 Bibliography 323 Index 359
£80.75
Duke University Press Sensory Experiments
Book SynopsisErica Fretwell examines how psychophysicsa nineteenth-century scientific movement originating in Germany dedicated to the empirical study of sensory experiencebecame central to the process of creating human difference along the lines of race, gender, and ability in nineteenth-century America.Trade Review“With precision, writerly grace, and great analytic power, Erica Fretwell uses the backstory of psychophysics to map out the contradictory ways feeling subjects came to be thought in the nineteenth century. This is a uniquely strong book, anchored in exacting historical, theoretical, and exegetical scholarship. It stands to make a powerful intervention into nineteenth-century literary studies and especially into science studies, critical race studies, and biopolitical critique.” -- Peter Coviello, author of * Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism *“Historicizing the intersections among nineteenth-century conceptions of materiality, race, and aesthetic experience, Erica Fretwell produces a wide-reaching framework for understanding the stakes of sensory experience. The result is a rigorous historical approach to nineteenth-century science and culture that underscores efforts to ‘educate’ or ‘civilize’ the senses. This brilliant, original, and important book will make waves in race studies, sensory studies, American studies, the history of science, and American literature.” -- Hsuan L. Hsu, author of * Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain’s Asia and Comparative Racialization *“In her excellent Sensory Experiments, Erica Fretwell puts forward an insightful thesis informed by an intelligent selection of the literature and a rigorous multi-disciplinary analysis. . . . It should appeal . . . to any reader with an interest in the history of psychology, aesthetics, or U.S. culture in the post-Civil War period.” -- Jorge Castro-Tejerina * Centaurus *“Fretwell hits a sweet spot between science and culture, offering a wide-ranging experimental archive on the aesthetic history of the US. Like any good archive, this work opens a view not only to the past but also forcefully into the future. Anyone interested in the aesthetic dimension of contemporary social life, regardless of its specific context, will benefit from reading the textual experiments Fretwell so deftly performs. Highly recommended.” -- B. G. Chang * Choice *“[Sensory Experiments] is poised to make a significant and lasting intervention across fields. For scholars of sensory studies, affect theory, and American literature, it is deeply important reading.” -- Jake McGinnis * Papers On Language & Literature *“Sensory Experiments points us not only to the ways in which senses served as a substrate for considerations of self and subjectivity for cultural producers in the nineteenth century; it also suggests that we be continually aware—and conscious of, and careful with—our own assessments of contemporary sense and sensation.” -- Michael Rossi * The Senses and Society *“[Fretwell’s] writing is deeply satisfying and provocative. . . . Fretwell deftly navigates a shocking variety of source types and between the disciplines of literature studies, cultural and intellectual history, and sensory studies with ease. SensoryExperiments will be an important book for all of these fields and more.” -- Alexandra Huis * Social History Of Medicine *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction. New Sensation 1 1. Sight: Unreconstructed Body Images 35 Interval 1. Colorful Sounds 79 2. Sound: The Acoustics of Social Harmony 87 Interval 2. Notes on Scent 124 3. Smell: Perfume, Women, and Other Volatile Spirits 131 Interval 3. Olfactory Gusto 167 4. Taste: Scripts for Sweetness, Measures of Pleasure 174 Interval 4. Mouthfeel 213 5. Touch: Life Writing Between Skin and Flesh 221 Coda. Afterlives and Antelives of Feeling 257 Notes 265 Bibliography 298 Index
£25.19
Duke University Press Sentient Flesh
Book SynopsisIn Sentient Flesh R. A. Judy takes up freedman Tom Windham’s 1937 remark “we should have our liberty ''cause . . . us is human flesh' as a point of departure for an extended meditation on questions of the human, epistemology, and the historical ways in which the black being is understood. Drawing on numerous fields, from literary theory and musicology, to political theory and phenomenology, as well as Greek and Arabic philosophy, Judy engages literary texts and performative practices such as music and dance that express knowledge and conceptions of humanity appositional to those grounding modern racialized capitalism. Operating as critiques of Western humanism, these practices and modes of being-in-the-world—which he theorizes as “thinking in disorder,” or “poiesis in black”—foreground the irreducible concomitance offlesh, thinking, and personhood. As Judy demonstrates, recognizing this concomitance is central to finding a way pastTrade Review“Sentient Flesh constitutes a unique and emphatic announcement of what a certain fundamental strain of black studies has long been—the disruptive turning and overturning of the ontological, metaphysical, and epistemological foundations of the modern world. Its extreme and profound generativity is bracing and invigorating, and it forces and allows its readers to do more, confront more, read more, and think more. I love this book, I feel this book, I am pleased by this book because I am undone and disturbed and disrupted and transported by this book.” -- Fred Moten, author of * Black and Blur *“Weaving a clear and critical story about the making of the so-called Negro and how this making is deeply connected to questions of the flesh not the body, R. A. Judy makes one of the most critical arguments in contemporary humanities. Sentient Flesh is well placed to make a major intervention.” -- Anthony Bogues, author of * Empire of Liberty: Power, Desire, and Freedom *“This text is nothing if not a call for communal forms of thinking.... R.A. Judy has presented us with an opening to consider and reconsider what it means to be Black in this world and I hope it is a challenge that is taken up and serves to enrich the archive of Black Radical Thought.” -- Michael E. Sawyer * New Formations *"R. A. Judy’s Sentient Flesh, in its 600 or so pages, stands as a monumental contribution to this literature, leading us through, sometimes in dazzling detail, a teeming array of figures, themes, disciplinary scenes, and texts in order to arrive at a full account of its main conceptual contributions." -- Emanuela Bianchi * Cultural Critique *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations ix Notes on Translation and Transliteration xi Preface: Preliminary Signposts xiii Acknowledgments xxi Introduction: Body and Flesh 1 [1st Set] On Lohengrin's Swan 25 Sentient Flesh 150 [2nd Set] Sentient Flesh Dancing 215 Poiēsis in Black 252 Para-Semiosis 319 Coda: Gifting Blues Love-Improper 418 Notes 457 Bibliography 543 Index 573
£25.19
Duke University Press The Sense of Brown
Book SynopsisThe Sense of Brownis José Esteban Muñoz''s treatise on brownness and being as well as his most direct address to queer Latinx studies. In this book, which he was completing at the time of his death, Muñoz examines the work of playwrights Ricardo Bracho and Nilo Cruz, artists Nao Bustamante, Isaac Julien, and Tania Bruguera, and singer José Feliciano, among others, arguing for a sense of brownness that is not fixed within the racial and national contours of Latinidad. This sense of brown is not about the individualized brown subject; rather, it demonstrates that for brown peoples, being exists within what Muñoz calls the brown commons—a lifeworld, queer ecology, and form of collectivity. In analyzing minoritarian affect, ethnicity as a structure of feeling, and brown feelings as they emerge in, through, and beside art and performance, Muñoz illustrates how the sense of brown serves as the basis for other ways of knowing and being inTrade Review“The final work of José Esteban Muñoz—scholar, mentor, and precious node in an intergenerational and transnational web of intellectual and social relations—will be received with eager enthusiasm and a box of tissues.” -- Juana María Rodríguez, author of * Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings *“In The Sense of Brown, José Esteban Muñoz maps and grapples with an evolving theory and method of feeling and being in the world that he names brown. In this work, brownness 'is already here, . . . vast, present, and vital.’ Muñoz gives his theory ‘historically specific affective particularity,’ rejecting the abjective. Read on their own and in tandem with Muñoz's earlier works, these thirteen essays written with care and a sense of urgency outlive his too-soon passing. Lovingly edited, they are a gift.” -- Christina Sharpe, author of * In the Wake: On Blackness and Being *"Conceptualizing Latinx studies within the terms Muñoz offers, those of affect, aesthetics, and performance, gives way for more room in which to construct a Latinx studies that seeks to counter anti-blackness and anti-indigeneity, assimilationism, settler nation-state borders and boundaries, language essentialisms, and other settler colonial logics which merely reify the power structures perpetuating global precarity, exploitation, violence, and death." -- Marcos Gonsalez * ASAP/Journal *"The Sense of Brown is a classic academic work, so it has a density that requires effort to parse through, but it’s well worth the read. In this book, Muñoz examines how brownness, particularly for queer Latinx people, becomes a 'lifeworld' that reveals itself through performance of all kinds, including plays, films, and albums. If you loved his prior work, then The Sense of Brown serves as a perfect ending—both putting a bow on his scholarship and creating pathways for those who want to further it." -- Evette Dionne * Bitch Magazine *"The book is his most pointed intervention into Latinx studies and the contradictions of Latinx racializations, and it represents the work of nearly two decades, done alongside and around two books and over a dozen essays and lectures. . . . As students, friends, and readers, we meet The Sense of Brown, finally, as a consolation in the midst of a global crisis that’s paradoxically lonely and chaotically social." -- Roy Pérez * Los Angeles Review of Books *"Offers ... startling moments of insight and ... profound intellectual generosity." -- Jane Hu * Bookforum *"Expertly edited after his passing by Joshua Chambers-Letson and Tavia Nyong’o, The Sense of Brown is Muñoz’s final work, and it’s a true testament to an intersectional project that suggests that 'queerness is in the horizon, forward dawning and not-yet-here. Brownness diverges from my definition of queerness. Brownness is already here.'” -- Maximilíano Durón * ARTnews *"With The Sense of Brown, José Esteban Muñoz left a love-letter to brownness that acts as a dream for its desire. Extending to the minerals of the soil, to the animals, and to the people who bare its shade, it is an ode to a brown of rapturous multiplicity. . . [T]his book and Muñoz’s thoughts remain an arsenal full for any minoritarian subject who desires to understand and even love themselves, and their sense of being, more–a radical proposition." -- Jess Saldaña * Lambda Literary Review *"The Sense of Brown is more than a sketch of brownness as an ontology of relations; it is an opportunity to sit inside Muñoz’s writing and thinking space, an almost wistful feeling of being in his thoughts as they formed, as they firmed. Reading Muñoz’s essays invokes a meditative feeling; one gets a sense that Muñoz was reflecting on his ideas, the drafty in/coherence of this ensemble reveal the essay as process. The essays are inviting, soft and melancholic." -- Moon Charania * Society and Space *"The Sense of Brown . . . provides theoretical concepts in performance studies, Latinx studies, queer theory, and other studies of race, gender, and sexuality that are invaluable to expanding our notions of performance and racial hegemony." -- kt shorb * E3W Review of Books *"Chambers-Letson and Nyong’o provide a beautiful genealogy of Muñoz’s scholarship in queer studies, Latinx studies, and performance studies. . . . [T]he book provides readers with myriad understandings of brownness, feeling/sensing brown, and the brown commons." -- James Huynh * GLQ *"Muñoz offers a different way of being found in art and world making." -- Patricia Ybarra * Performance Research *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Editors' Introduction. The Aesthetic Resonance of Brown / Joshua Chambers-Letson and Tavia Nyong'o ix 1. The Browns Commons 1 2. Feeling Brown: Ethnicity and Affect in Ricardo Bracho's The Sweetest Hangover (and Other STDs) 8 3. The Onus of Seeing Cuba: Nilo Cruz's Cubanía 24 4. Meandering South: Isaac Julien and The Long Road to Mazatlán 29 5. "Chico, What Does It Feel Like to Be a Problem?": The Transmission of Brownness 36 6. The Vulnerability Artist: Nao Bustamante and the Sad Beauty of Reparation 47 7. Queer Theater, Queer Theory: Luis Alfaro's Cuerpo Polizado 59 8. Performing the Bestiary: Carmelita Tropicana's With What Ass Does the Cockroach Sit?/ Con Que Culo se Sienta la Cucaracha? 78 9. Performing Greater Cuba: Tania Bruguera and the Burden of Guilt 86 10. Wise Latinas 100 11. Brown Worldings: José Rodríguez-Soltero, Tania Bruguera, and María Irene Fornés 118 12. The Sense of Wildness: The Brown Commons after Paris Burned 128 13. Vitalism's Afterburn: The Sense of Ana Mendieta 141 Notes 151 Bibliography 167 Index 175
£18.89
Duke University Press Wild Things
Book SynopsisIn Wild Things Jack Halberstam offers an alternative history of sexuality by tracing the ways in which wildness has been associated with queerness and queer bodies throughout the twentieth century. Halberstam theorizes the wild as an unbounded and unpredictable space that offers sources of opposition to modernity''s orderly impulses. Wildness illuminates the normative taxonomies of sexuality against which radical queer practice and politics operate. Throughout, Halberstam engages with a wide variety of texts, practices, and cultural imaginaries—from zombies, falconry, and M. NourbeSe Philip''s Zong! to Maurice Sendak''s Where the Wild Things Are and the career of Irish anticolonial revolutionary Roger Casement—to demonstrate how wildness provides the means to know and to be in ways that transgress Euro-American notions of the modern liberal subject. With Wild Things, Halberstam opens new possibilities for queer theory and for wild thinking more bTrade Review“Where can the wild take you? With Jack Halberstam as guide, to places fabulous, cruel, soaring, undead, hilarious, dark, seductive, promising, nonprovidential. Wild Things is a brilliant phenomenology of the (more than) human condition of bewilderment. Its critique of invocations of wildness tethered to colonial, racist fantasies also marks how the figure can contribute to forms of desire bent toward the feral, the incipient, the otherwise. Wild Things is an awesome trip.” -- Jane Bennett, author of * Influx and Efflux: Writing Up with Walt Whitman *“How does one learn about wildness? Coming from a longtime scholar of sexuality, the animal, desire, and anarchy, Jack Halberstam's Wild Things fosters a generous archive, favoring bewilderment over a ritual turn back to order and knowing. Following this book constitutes a kind of epistemological travel and culminates in a habit of sensation, a disorderly campaign, and a queer method that will stay with you.” -- Mel Y. Chen, author of * Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect *"[A] creative, discipline-smashing study exploring the human attraction to 'the wild.' . . . Halberstam’s approach is equal parts academic and poetic, making for a dense and, at times, beautiful text. This is a work that demands attention, which it rewards with both insight and entertainment." * Publishers Weekly *“In Wild Things Halberstam moves restlessly across literature, cinema, theater, music, and poetry, determining the various modes by which people have devoted themselves to, or been effectively written within, the incomprehensibilities of the wild, of wildness, and of bewilderment…. Wild Things (un)clarifies the wild as an always-present threat to modernity’s coherence, illuminating the anti-Black and heteronormative carceral logics at the heart of liberal democracy by unveiling those under common ways of knowing and being that liberalism seeks to obscure, incorporate, lock up, or destroy.” * Invisible Culture *"The limits of Halberstam's analysis are boundlessly educative and entertaining: one chapter calls out proto-queer male writers for their affinity and identification with feral falconry while another examines the nature of family pets. Within the realms of what the author himself calls a 'counterintuitive queer project,' Halberstam's intellectually engrossing phenomenology evokes thoughts of how the concept of 'wild' can be applied to creatures and concepts both great and small while inspiring spirited conversation and debate." -- Jim Piechota * Bay Area Reporter *"Wild Things offers readers and scholars working on environmental questions a vibrant archive for thinking histories of sexuality and desire alongside concepts of the “wild” and its disorders. . . . The text is especially rich as an archive of the ways wildness persists within and can be activated against modernist writers. Halberstam’s wildness is a morally ambivalent, non-identitarian invitation—one that might lead to bewilderment, zombies, children’s books, hawks, or any number of other queer, wild things." -- Julia Dauer * Edge Effects *“Through Halberstam’s examination of pop culture and political projects, his analysis is consistently brought back to racial tropes that define the socio-political state of colonialism today.... Wild Things is a reminder that critical scholarship’s penchant for world-making and un-making is a political imperative to thinking beyond our hegemonic constraints.” -- Jake Kyer Townsend * Cultural Studies *“The book’s first half is a remarkable example of ecstatic intellectual curiosity, flying high on seemingly perpendicular currents Halberstam teaches us to navigate with smooth and logical flow. . . . Halberstam wrote exactly the wild book he set out to write.” -- Nicholas Tyler Reich * Transgender Studies Quarterly *“With regard to queer topics, Halberstam has been an influential figure in modern queer theory and Wild Things attests to this status as it is steadfastly grounded in the scholarship of the field. . . . The author does not simply connect wildness with queerness, but braids the two strands of theory together thus expanding their discursive potential.” -- Constantine Chatzipapatheodoridis * European Journal of American Studies *Table of ContentsPreface ix Acknowledgments xiii Part I. Sex in the Wild Introduction. Sex before, after, and against Nature 3 1. Wildness, Loss, and Death 33 2. "A New Kind of Wildness": The Rite of Spring and and Indigenous Aesthetics of Bewilderment 51 3. The Epistemology of the Ferox: Sex, Death, and Falconry 77 Part II. Animality Introduction. Into the Wild 115 4. Where the Wild Things Are: Humans, Animals, and Children 125 5. Zombie Antihumanism at the End of the World 147 Conclusions. The Ninth Wave 175 Notes 181 Bibliography 201 Index 211
£18.89
Duke University Press Interimperiality
Book SynopsisWeaving together feminist, decolonial, and dialectical theory, Laura Doyle theorizes the co-emergence of empires, institutions, language regimes, stratified economies, and literary cultures over the longue durée.Trade Review“Notable for its recognition of the crucial, but often ignored, dialectical relationship between political economy and literary production, Inter-imperiality provides powerful examples of how a scholar can engage with one problematic across disciplines, using literary texts as an anchor. This big, bold book is a major intervention in continuing debates on the emergence of literature in relation to a world defined by the phenomenon of empires of time and space.” -- Simon Gikandi, author of * Slavery and the Culture of Taste *“[Inter-imperiality] offers a transhistorical, interdisciplinary, intersectional, and decolonial analysis of the fundamentally relational processes that constitute imperial powers and individual lives. Polities and persons alike are enmeshed in shifting entanglements that enable coercion and violence as well as care and community. Aiming to ‘honor the struggles and the sustaining practices’ that are elided when this existential interdependence is disavowed, Doyle chronicles a longue durée of dialectical state and identity (co)formation that spans the eleventh to the twentieth centuries.” * American Literature *“Inter-imperiality might be described as an attempt to reiterate the ontological insights of Hegel regarding the dialectical truth of our lived identity, extended and expanded through the longue durée of Braudel, but couched crucially in the terminology of feminist, Marxist, and postcolonial thought. It is a paean, among other things, to the untold history of female, non-Western labor. . . . There is a fervor and a seriousness to Doyle’s desire to expand and decenter contemporary global historiography, which is inspiring to read.” -- Ian Almond * Comparative Literature *“How did European colonialism happen? Why is racism still permeating many quarters of life? How can we prevent the existence of colonialism and racism? Inter-imperiality innovatively engages these questions. . . . Doyle’s call for a return to the avowal of the materialist dialectic and for ‘care, and cure’ presents inspiring new ways for thinking about the future of decolonial studies.” -- Lidan Lin * Modern Fiction Studies *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Theoretical Introduction. Between States 1 Part I. Co-Constituted Worlds 1. Dialectics in the Longue Durée 35 2. Refusing Labor's (Re)production in The Thousand and One Nights 68 Part II. Convergence and Revolt 3. Remapping Orientalism among Eurasian Empires 95 4. Global Revolts and Gothic Interventions 121 5. Infrastructure, Activism, and Literary Dialectics in the Early Twentieth Century 156 Part III. Persisting Temporalities 6. Rape, Revolution, and Queer Male Longing in Carpentier's The Kingdom of This World 195 7. Inter-imperially Neocolonial: The Queer Returns of Writing in Powell's The Pagoda 227 Conclusion. A River Between 251 Notes 255 Bibliography 331 Index
£27.90
Duke University Press Borderwaters
Book SynopsisBrian Russell Roberts dispels continental-centric US national mythologies to advance an alternative image of the United States as an archipelagic nation to better reflect its claims to archipelagoes in the Pacific and Caribbean.Trade Review“Brian Russell Roberts's astonishing new paradigm recasts the United States as a nation of islands and oceans, engaging Benoit Mandelbrot (among others) to elucidate the archipelagic fractals of the Pacific and the Caribbean. Examining works ranging from Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God to Florence Frisbie's Miss Ulysses from Puka-Puka to the visual arts by Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias, this detail-rich study is eye-opening in every way. Essential reading for all Americanists.” -- Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University“Offering an important new theoretical way of understanding American literature and culture, Brian Russell Roberts suggests how ‘archipelagic thinking’ can induce us to reconceive American literary culture as something other than a landlocked affair. Borderwaters should resonate widely among Americanists across a broad range of disciplinary fields and is certain to be widely influential.” -- Paul Giles, author of * Backgazing: Reverse Time in Modernist Culture *"The extraordinary contribution of Brian Russell Roberts’ recent book is not only to the advancement of the field of a specifically archipelagic American Studies which sits in ready conversation with Atlantic and Pacific discourse and study and in whose conception he has been for the last decade an innovator, but that it sets up the possibility for a renewal of dialogue within interdisciplinary global studies and world literary studies from the early modern to the present, with the archipelagic as dominant paradigm; the reach of this book is far greater than the field of contemporary American Studies in which it most obviously finds a home." -- Heather H. Yeung * New Global Studies *"This monograph marries the interdisciplinarity of American studies to that of the environmental humanities. Readers will find themselves parsing heady engagements with geology, marine biology, fractal geometry, international maritime law, philosophy, the visual arts, and literature. . . . Roberts often dredges from the archipelagic archives potent rereadings from the terraqueous sphere of American studies." -- Jason Frydman * American Literary History *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction. Archipelagic Thinking and the Borderwaters: A US-Eccentric Vision 1 1. Interlapping Continents and Archipelagoes of American Studies 45 2. Archipelagic Diaspora and Geographic Form 82 3. Borderwaters and Geometries of Being Amid 111 4. Fractal Temporality on Vulnerable Foreshores 159 5. Spiraling Futures of the Archipelagic States of America 202 Conclusion. Distant Reading the Archipelagic Gyre: Digital Humanities Archipelagoes 248 Notes 275 Bibliography 323 Index 359
£21.59
Duke University Press Black Aliveness or A Poetics of Being
Book SynopsisIn Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being, Kevin Quashie imagines a Black world in which one encounters Black being as it is rather than only as it exists in the shadow of anti-Black violence. As such, he makes a case for Black aliveness even in the face of the persistence of death in Black life and Black study. Centrally, Quashie theorizes aliveness through the aesthetics of poetry, reading poetic inhabitance in Black feminist literary texts by Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Toni Morrison, and Evie Shockley, among others, showing how their philosophical and creative thinking constitutes worldmaking. This worldmaking conceptualizes Blackness as capacious, relational beyond the normative terms of recognition—Blackness as a condition of oneness. Reading for poetic aliveness, then, becomes a means of exploring Black being rather than nonbeing and animates the ethical question “how to be.” In this way, Quashie offers a Black feminist philosophy oTrade Review“Black studies is a spiritual discipline, one devoted to that dispersed and disseminated gathering of a nonexclusionary black world. Kevin Quashie has helped me think about this and has given me intellectual and theoretical tools and language for this. Black Aliveness is one of the most intellectually stimulating, illuminating, and spiritually moving books I’ve read in a very long time. Its impact will be immediate.” -- J. Kameron Carter, author of * Race: A Theological Account *“Decentering the focus on ‘social death’ in current black studies, Black Aliveness is the first book to push us to the next step when we start with the feeling of aliveness rather than with black death as a way of understanding black life. There is magical thinking and writing in this paradigm-shifting book.” -- Margo Natalie Crawford, author of * Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics *"I found great relief in Quashie's formulation of the concept of 'oneness,' which he insists is 'not akin to individualism.'… Quashie's book has shifted decades of denial, distancing, and suppression for me, not by rescuing the I, but by giving me one, the becoming, the relational.… In dealing with my ontological anxieties, I have dreamed of dissolution, a release into the elements of the universe of which we are all made. But even if we mingle with the stars we are still left with particles and forms of relation between these particles. What an aha! moment for me, reading Quashie…. How freeing and wonderful. To relate, to mingle, is not a dissolve, but a proliferation." -- Jayna Brown * Critical Inquiry *"This deeply poetic, rich book may be paradigm shifting. Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers." -- J. A. Kegley * Choice *"Kevin Quashie's book provides a blueprint for alternative methods of reading and studying Black life, Black worldmaking, and Black relationality." -- Daisy Guzman * E3W Review of Books *"Quashie's efforts are triumphant. . . . This work and its tender attention to that which constitutes humanity within these texts of aliveness would retain its magic regardless of the world, 'the episteme,' in which one finds it." -- Erin Tatz * Theory & Event *"One of the most significant contributions of the book as a whole is the quiet but insistent contention that poetry and poetics can do the work of social analysis. It is here, in Quashie’s attention to aesthetic choices and form, that we appreciate the value of Black Aliveness. . . . Quashie has written a field-shifting book that centers aesthetic paths to life in place of restraint in its treatment of Black being." -- Gershun Avilez * Genre *"Quashie’s Black Aliveness is not a blueprint or a definitive answer to his opening question. Rather, the book is more like a gesture and an invitation; it offers a path for studying Black life and world-making through aesthetics. Throughout, Quashie’s prose emulates the beauty, splendor, and energy of the writings that constitute the matrix for his reflections. The reader will appreciate how the author frequently pauses to consider the grandeur of an essay or the rhythm of a poem. Students of Black literature and aesthetics should also praise Quashie’s practice of sitting with Black texts as primary sources for critical thought and ethics." -- Joseph Winters * American Literary History *"Black Aliveness is an important intervention in a conversation that has come to dominate black studies in recent years, under a variety of different names: the question of the human, black ontology, the(im)possibility of black subjectivity, and afropessimism. . . . Quashie’s book offers a loving response to and reorientation of a field that has come to read blackness as synonymous with death, and antiblackness as constitutive of black life." -- Jennifer C. Nash * Cultural Critique *Table of ContentsIntroduction. Aliveness 1 1. Aliveness and Relation 15 2. Aliveness and Oneness 31 3. Aliveness and Aesthetics 57 4. Aliveness in Two Essays 83 5. Aliveness and Ethics 107 Conclusion. Again, Aliveness 141 Acknowledgments 155 Notes 157 Bibliography 219 Permissions 227 Index 229
£72.25
Duke University Press Decolonizing Memory
Book SynopsisJill Jarvis examines the crucial role that writers and artists have played in cultivating historical memory and nurturing political resistance in Algeria, showing how literature offers the unique ability to reckon with colonial violence and to render the experiences of those marginalized by the state.Trade Review“Decolonizing Memory is a remarkable account of literature as a form of witnessing and the aesthetic as the primary register for imagining the unthinkable. Presented with elegance and a keen attention to language, the book locates Algeria at the center of the traumas of the twentieth century and demonstrates how literature could push back against the politics of silence promoted by the state. This is postcolonial scholarship at its best—theoretically sophisticated and historically grounded.” -- Simon Gikandi, Robert Schirmer Professor of English, Princeton University“Jill Jarvis's comparative study of Algeria, which engages with Arabic materials alongside the French, is very impressive. Meeting a significant demand in the field, Decolonizing Memory is a strong addition to Francophone studies, memory studies, and postcolonial studies and it will appeal to all those interested in the relationship between justice and the literary.” -- Ranjana Khanna, author of * Algeria Cuts: Women and Representation, 1830 to the Present *“By engaging with literary works that span decades and continents, Decolonizing Memory is a useful text to think with across disciplinary lines. . . . By arguing that literature occupies a special place in the analysis of colonialism, Jarvis entreats scholars in other fields to take literature seriously.” -- Meghan Tinsley * French History *“Decolonizing Memory is a promising contribution to the flourishing research being done in the field of Memory Studies, that is challenging the Western and in this case the French politics of testimony from the postcolonial point of view.” -- T. S. Kavitha * Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy *“Jarvis offers her readers a compelling theoretic work. . . . Her text marks a significant contribution to Francophone literary theory at a time when Algeria is experiencing a new chapter in its history, with both its citizens and its writers continuing the fight for justice as they hope for a brighter future.” -- Mildred Mortimer * International Journal of Middle East Studies *"Decolonizing Memory is a welcome contribution to the emerging field of postcolonial memory studies. A theoretically sophisticated intervention in debates about the representation of violence and collective trauma in colonial and postcolonial settings. . . ." -- Olivia C. Harrison * MLQ *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction. The Future of Memory 1 1. Remnants of Muslims 27 2. Untranslatable Justice 63 3. Mourning Revolt 98 4. Open Elegy 141 Conclusion. Prisons without Walls 168 Notes 197 Bibliography 255 Index 267
£72.25
Duke University Press The Ruse of Repair
Book SynopsisPatricia Stuelke traces the hidden history of the reparative turn, showing how it emerged out of the failed struggle against US empire and neoliberal capitalism in the 1970s and 1980s and unintentionally supported new forms of neoliberal and imperial governance.Trade Review“This brilliant study is a long-overdue critique of the flight from paranoid reading to reparative feeling in the humanities. Patricia Stuelke historicizes the turn to repair as symptom of, rather than as solution to, US violence, militarism, and counterinsurgency. Her examination of the rise of US neoliberal empire in the 1970s and 1980s from Southeast Asia to Latin America to the Middle East is sui generis and eye-opening.” -- David L. Eng, Richard L. Fisher Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania“Patricia Stuelke offers an exciting interrogation of reparative modes of artistic, literary, and solidarity activism to establish how fantasies of repair serve US militaristic inventions and neoliberal financialization. Calling into question one of the foundations of liberal investments in political economy—that repair is achievable outside the circuits of capitalism and governance---Stuelke makes an important intervention into arguments about reparative justice in American studies, critical ethnic studies, literary studies, and critical theory.” -- Jodi Byrd, author of * The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism *“The Ruse of Repair will require its readers to reevaluate some of the beliefs they hold most dear, transforming American studies, ethnic and critical race studies, feminist studies, and beyond in the process.” -- María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, author of * Indian Given: Racial Geographies across Mexico and the United States *"The Ruse of Repair seamlessly interweaves two core methodological paradigms of American Studies scholarship: the political history of cultural formations and the cultural history of political formations. The Ruse of Repair makes audible, with great clarity, the echoes of an emergent neoliberal ideology in the rhetorics and social forms of feminism, antiracism, and anti-imperialism." -- Eli Jelly-Schapiro * ALH *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Introduction: "After That, Baby . . ." 1 1. Freedom to Want 31 2. "Debt Work" 71 3. Solidarity as Settler Absolution 107 4. Veteran Diversity, Veteran Asynchrony 149 5. Invasion Love Plots and Antiblack Acoustics 189 Conclusion: Against Repair 215 Notes 219 Bibliography 265 Index 301
£75.65
Duke University Press The Deconstruction of Sex
Book SynopsisJean-Luc Nancy and Irving Goh discuss how a deconstructive approach to sex helps us negotiate discourses about sex and reconsider our relations to ourselves and others through sex.Trade Review“Happily, no one will leave this book with an understanding of sex. To the contrary, these trenchant and provocative dialogues challenge any construction of sex that relies on a copular verb. As astutely as Irving Goh places sex in a politicophilosophical framework, just as astutely does Jean-Luc Nancy lay out how sex exceeds it. This results in an exemplary enactment of the becoming-word of sex, ‘leaving in us,’ to quote Nancy, ‘a sort of dizziness and bedazzlement’ by comparison with which ‘understanding’ sex can only seem delusional.” -- Lee Edelman, author of * No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive *“In this fascinating dialogue between the renowned continental thinker Jean-Luc Nancy and the critic Irving Goh, the foundational terms of sex are brilliantly deconstructed in ways directly relevant to sensual experience, modalities of affect, intimate co-relationality and the fluid subjects of contemporary gender self-identification. Sexual philosophy, post-Foucault and post-Irigaray, gains a new classic with this indispensable text, topped by the bonus of Claire Colebrook's trenchant afterword on killjoy sex.” -- Emily Apter, Silver Professor of French and Comparative Literature, New York UniversityTable of ContentsIntroduction: Sex "Is" Deconstruction / Irving Goh 1 0. The Deconstruction of Sex: Opening Questions 16 1. Troubling Thought(s): Sex and Deconstruction 20 2. On Touching—Sex 35 3. Who Comes before/after Sex? 53 4. S/exscription 70 Afterword: Sex and the Killjoy / Claire Colebrook 83 Acknowledgments 93 Notes 95 Bibliography 105 Index 109
£62.90
Duke University Press A Fictional Commons
Book SynopsisMichael K. Bourdaghs presents a radical reframing of the works of Natsume Sōseki—widely considered to be Japan's greatest modern novelist—as critical and creative responses to the emergence of new forms of property ownership in nineteenth-century Japan.Trade Review“Michael K. Bourdaghs's A Fictional Commons provides a strikingly new approach to thinking about the fiction and theories of Natsume Sōseki as well as for thinking how literature as a practice gestures to something beyond the modern regime of private property. Literature, Bourdaghs demonstrates, is one of the sites where we imagine the return in a higher dimension of the commons, the gift, and primitive communism.” -- Karatani Kojin, author of * Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy *“Both erudite and innovative, A Fictional Commons brilliantly demonstrates how Natsume Sōseki, through his fiction and criticism, explored literature as a domain for imagining the alternatives to modern private property regime and the related conceptualization of modern personhood. It is a major contribution to Sōseki studies and modern Japanese literary studies. It also joins broader debates over the value of literature in the twenty-first century—how literature may inspire creative modes of sharing that traverse national, regional, and other boundaries dividing our troubled present.” -- Tomiko Yoda, Takashima Professor of Japanese Humanities, Harvard University"As more and more people question the extremes of capitalism, Bourdaghs’ study of Soseki adds a fascinating lens for further examining other works of literature. . . . In A Fictional Commons, Bourdaghs reveals Soseki’s sharp mind, ever wrestling with the most important sociological issue of his time. Through this book, Bourdagh also reminds us that the role of literature is to rethink what is possible — and thereby literally rewrite the world." -- Kris Kosaka * Japan Times *“[Bourdaghs] makes extensive use of Japanese and Western sources, both primary and secondary, drawing seamlessly on work in multiple languages. [A Fictional Commons] is extensively referenced and comes with an exhaustive list of bibliographic studies . . . which will be of immense help to both students and scholars interested in Sōseki, and in Meiji- and Taisho-era Japanese literature more broadly.” -- Gouranga Charan Pradhan * Japan Review *“Bourdaghs’s exploration of the question of property for Sōseki is broad, trenchant, and productive, and it drew connections for me that I would not have otherwise imagined.” -- Edward Mack * Journal of Japanese Studies *Table of ContentsNote on Usage ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction. Owning up to Sōseki 1 1. Fables of Property: Nameless Cats, Trickster Badgers, Stray Sheep 13 2. House under a Shadow: Disowning the Psychology of Possessive Individualism in The Gate 51 3. Property and Sociological Knowledge: Sōseki and the Gift of Narrative 91 4. The Tragedy of the Market:Younger Brothers, Women, and Colonial Subjects in Kokoro 121 Conclusion. Who Owns Sōseki? Or, How Not to Belong in World Literature 147 Notes 177 Bibliography 205 Index 219
£72.25
Duke University Press Black Aliveness or A Poetics of Being
Book SynopsisIn Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being, Kevin Quashie imagines a Black world in which one encounters Black being as it is rather than only as it exists in the shadow of anti-Black violence. As such, he makes a case for Black aliveness even in the face of the persistence of death in Black life and Black study. Centrally, Quashie theorizes aliveness through the aesthetics of poetry, reading poetic inhabitance in Black feminist literary texts by Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Toni Morrison, and Evie Shockley, among others, showing how their philosophical and creative thinking constitutes worldmaking. This worldmaking conceptualizes Blackness as capacious, relational beyond the normative terms of recognition—Blackness as a condition of oneness. Reading for poetic aliveness, then, becomes a means of exploring Black being rather than nonbeing and animates the ethical question “how to be.” In this way, Quashie offers a Black feminist philosophy oTrade Review“Black studies is a spiritual discipline, one devoted to that dispersed and disseminated gathering of a nonexclusionary black world. Kevin Quashie has helped me think about this and has given me intellectual and theoretical tools and language for this. Black Aliveness is one of the most intellectually stimulating, illuminating, and spiritually moving books I’ve read in a very long time. Its impact will be immediate.” -- J. Kameron Carter, author of * Race: A Theological Account *“Decentering the focus on ‘social death’ in current black studies, Black Aliveness is the first book to push us to the next step when we start with the feeling of aliveness rather than with black death as a way of understanding black life. There is magical thinking and writing in this paradigm-shifting book.” -- Margo Natalie Crawford, author of * Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics *"I found great relief in Quashie's formulation of the concept of 'oneness,' which he insists is 'not akin to individualism.'… Quashie's book has shifted decades of denial, distancing, and suppression for me, not by rescuing the I, but by giving me one, the becoming, the relational.… In dealing with my ontological anxieties, I have dreamed of dissolution, a release into the elements of the universe of which we are all made. But even if we mingle with the stars we are still left with particles and forms of relation between these particles. What an aha! moment for me, reading Quashie…. How freeing and wonderful. To relate, to mingle, is not a dissolve, but a proliferation." -- Jayna Brown * Critical Inquiry *"This deeply poetic, rich book may be paradigm shifting. Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers." -- J. A. Kegley * Choice *"Kevin Quashie's book provides a blueprint for alternative methods of reading and studying Black life, Black worldmaking, and Black relationality." -- Daisy Guzman * E3W Review of Books *"Quashie's efforts are triumphant. . . . This work and its tender attention to that which constitutes humanity within these texts of aliveness would retain its magic regardless of the world, 'the episteme,' in which one finds it." -- Erin Tatz * Theory & Event *"One of the most significant contributions of the book as a whole is the quiet but insistent contention that poetry and poetics can do the work of social analysis. It is here, in Quashie’s attention to aesthetic choices and form, that we appreciate the value of Black Aliveness. . . . Quashie has written a field-shifting book that centers aesthetic paths to life in place of restraint in its treatment of Black being." -- Gershun Avilez * Genre *"Quashie’s Black Aliveness is not a blueprint or a definitive answer to his opening question. Rather, the book is more like a gesture and an invitation; it offers a path for studying Black life and world-making through aesthetics. Throughout, Quashie’s prose emulates the beauty, splendor, and energy of the writings that constitute the matrix for his reflections. The reader will appreciate how the author frequently pauses to consider the grandeur of an essay or the rhythm of a poem. Students of Black literature and aesthetics should also praise Quashie’s practice of sitting with Black texts as primary sources for critical thought and ethics." -- Joseph Winters * American Literary History *"Black Aliveness is an important intervention in a conversation that has come to dominate black studies in recent years, under a variety of different names: the question of the human, black ontology, the(im)possibility of black subjectivity, and afropessimism. . . . Quashie’s book offers a loving response to and reorientation of a field that has come to read blackness as synonymous with death, and antiblackness as constitutive of black life." -- Jennifer C. Nash * Cultural Critique *Table of ContentsIntroduction. Aliveness 1 1. Aliveness and Relation 15 2. Aliveness and Oneness 31 3. Aliveness and Aesthetics 57 4. Aliveness in Two Essays 83 5. Aliveness and Ethics 107 Conclusion. Again, Aliveness 141 Acknowledgments 155 Notes 157 Bibliography 219 Permissions 227 Index 229
£18.89
Duke University Press The Ruse of Repair
Book SynopsisPatricia Stuelke traces the hidden history of the reparative turn, showing how it emerged out of the failed struggle against US empire and neoliberal capitalism in the 1970s and 1980s and unintentionally supported new forms of neoliberal and imperial governance.Trade Review“This brilliant study is a long-overdue critique of the flight from paranoid reading to reparative feeling in the humanities. Patricia Stuelke historicizes the turn to repair as symptom of, rather than as solution to, US violence, militarism, and counterinsurgency. Her examination of the rise of US neoliberal empire in the 1970s and 1980s from Southeast Asia to Latin America to the Middle East is sui generis and eye-opening.” -- David L. Eng, Richard L. Fisher Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania“Patricia Stuelke offers an exciting interrogation of reparative modes of artistic, literary, and solidarity activism to establish how fantasies of repair serve US militaristic inventions and neoliberal financialization. Calling into question one of the foundations of liberal investments in political economy—that repair is achievable outside the circuits of capitalism and governance---Stuelke makes an important intervention into arguments about reparative justice in American studies, critical ethnic studies, literary studies, and critical theory.” -- Jodi Byrd, author of * The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism *“The Ruse of Repair will require its readers to reevaluate some of the beliefs they hold most dear, transforming American studies, ethnic and critical race studies, feminist studies, and beyond in the process.” -- María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, author of * Indian Given: Racial Geographies across Mexico and the United States *"The Ruse of Repair seamlessly interweaves two core methodological paradigms of American Studies scholarship: the political history of cultural formations and the cultural history of political formations. The Ruse of Repair makes audible, with great clarity, the echoes of an emergent neoliberal ideology in the rhetorics and social forms of feminism, antiracism, and anti-imperialism." -- Eli Jelly-Schapiro * ALH *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Introduction: "After That, Baby . . ." 1 1. Freedom to Want 31 2. "Debt Work" 71 3. Solidarity as Settler Absolution 107 4. Veteran Diversity, Veteran Asynchrony 149 5. Invasion Love Plots and Antiblack Acoustics 189 Conclusion: Against Repair 215 Notes 219 Bibliography 265 Index 301
£20.69
Duke University Press The Deconstruction of Sex
Book SynopsisJean-Luc Nancy and Irving Goh discuss how a deconstructive approach to sex helps us negotiate discourses about sex and reconsider our relations to ourselves and others through sex.Trade Review“Happily, no one will leave this book with an understanding of sex. To the contrary, these trenchant and provocative dialogues challenge any construction of sex that relies on a copular verb. As astutely as Irving Goh places sex in a politicophilosophical framework, just as astutely does Jean-Luc Nancy lay out how sex exceeds it. This results in an exemplary enactment of the becoming-word of sex, ‘leaving in us,’ to quote Nancy, ‘a sort of dizziness and bedazzlement’ by comparison with which ‘understanding’ sex can only seem delusional.” -- Lee Edelman, author of * No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive *“In this fascinating dialogue between the renowned continental thinker Jean-Luc Nancy and the critic Irving Goh, the foundational terms of sex are brilliantly deconstructed in ways directly relevant to sensual experience, modalities of affect, intimate co-relationality and the fluid subjects of contemporary gender self-identification. Sexual philosophy, post-Foucault and post-Irigaray, gains a new classic with this indispensable text, topped by the bonus of Claire Colebrook's trenchant afterword on killjoy sex.” -- Emily Apter, Silver Professor of French and Comparative Literature, New York UniversityTable of ContentsIntroduction: Sex "Is" Deconstruction / Irving Goh 1 0. The Deconstruction of Sex: Opening Questions 16 1. Troubling Thought(s): Sex and Deconstruction 20 2. On Touching—Sex 35 3. Who Comes before/after Sex? 53 4. S/exscription 70 Afterword: Sex and the Killjoy / Claire Colebrook 83 Acknowledgments 93 Notes 95 Bibliography 105 Index 109
£17.09
Duke University Press A Fictional Commons
Book SynopsisMichael K. Bourdaghs presents a radical reframing of the works of Natsume Sosekiwidely considered to be Japan's greatest modern novelistas critical and creative responses to the emergence of new forms of property ownership in nineteenth-century Japan.Trade Review“Michael K. Bourdaghs's A Fictional Commons provides a strikingly new approach to thinking about the fiction and theories of Natsume Sōseki as well as for thinking how literature as a practice gestures to something beyond the modern regime of private property. Literature, Bourdaghs demonstrates, is one of the sites where we imagine the return in a higher dimension of the commons, the gift, and primitive communism.” -- Karatani Kojin, author of * Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy *“Both erudite and innovative, A Fictional Commons brilliantly demonstrates how Natsume Sōseki, through his fiction and criticism, explored literature as a domain for imagining the alternatives to modern private property regime and the related conceptualization of modern personhood. It is a major contribution to Sōseki studies and modern Japanese literary studies. It also joins broader debates over the value of literature in the twenty-first century—how literature may inspire creative modes of sharing that traverse national, regional, and other boundaries dividing our troubled present.” -- Tomiko Yoda, Takashima Professor of Japanese Humanities, Harvard University"As more and more people question the extremes of capitalism, Bourdaghs’ study of Soseki adds a fascinating lens for further examining other works of literature. . . . In A Fictional Commons, Bourdaghs reveals Soseki’s sharp mind, ever wrestling with the most important sociological issue of his time. Through this book, Bourdagh also reminds us that the role of literature is to rethink what is possible — and thereby literally rewrite the world." -- Kris Kosaka * Japan Times *“[Bourdaghs] makes extensive use of Japanese and Western sources, both primary and secondary, drawing seamlessly on work in multiple languages. [A Fictional Commons] is extensively referenced and comes with an exhaustive list of bibliographic studies . . . which will be of immense help to both students and scholars interested in Sōseki, and in Meiji- and Taisho-era Japanese literature more broadly.” -- Gouranga Charan Pradhan * Japan Review *“Bourdaghs’s exploration of the question of property for Sōseki is broad, trenchant, and productive, and it drew connections for me that I would not have otherwise imagined.” -- Edward Mack * Journal of Japanese Studies *Table of ContentsNote on Usage ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction. Owning up to Sōseki 1 1. Fables of Property: Nameless Cats, Trickster Badgers, Stray Sheep 13 2. House under a Shadow: Disowning the Psychology of Possessive Individualism in The Gate 51 3. Property and Sociological Knowledge: Sōseki and the Gift of Narrative 91 4. The Tragedy of the Market:Younger Brothers, Women, and Colonial Subjects in Kokoro 121 Conclusion. Who Owns Sōseki? Or, How Not to Belong in World Literature 147 Notes 177 Bibliography 205 Index 219
£18.89
Duke University Press Dockside Reading
Book SynopsisIsabel Hofmeyr traces the relationship between print culture, colonialism, and the ocean through the institution of the late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British colonial custom houses, which acted as censors and pronounced on copyright and checked imported printed matter for piracy, sedition, or obscenity.Trade Review“As we have come to expect from Isabel Hofmeyr, Dockside Reading is dazzlingly creative, intellectually playful, and immaculately crafted. This is a brilliant history of the ideas and textual forms that emerged from the damp crates that customs officials scoured at the water’s edge for signs of contamination. Setting sail from South Africa, ranging across the world’s oceans, this is a quietly revolutionary, fully aquatic literary history for our times.” -- Sunil Amrith, Dhawan Professor of History, Yale University“What happens to books when they cross borders? Isabel Hofmeyr sets her radically new history of literature not in the library but at the dock. In pages where authors and scholars are upstaged by censors, customs officers, and even dockhands, she challenges literary critics to think beyond the text as a static entity tied to a single nation or a single landmass. This is that rare book that will make it impossible to continue doing business as usual—for literary critics, for legal scholars, and for book historians.” -- Leah Price, author of * What We Talk about When We Talk About Books: The History and Future of Reading *“Hofmeyr addresses themes that acknowledge but transcend the particularities of place, revealing instead the connecting threads that bind disparate parts of the world together.” -- Dane Kennedy * International Journal of African Historical Studies *“Hofmeyr’s scholarship is exemplary in its marriage of evocative detail with magisterial overview. She gives a compelling account of how customs procedure developed and changed over the course of almost a century. . . . She teaches us a new way to read.” -- Matthew P.M. Kerr * Modern Language Review *"[Hofmeyr's] work sheds important light on the interdependency between reading practices and the book as object. . . . Hofmeyr deftly interweaves her research into customs documents with environmental and postcolonial theory, animating what is usually perceived as a dull or colorless archive through semantic resignification." -- Neelam Srivastava * Journal of Postcolonial Inquiry *"In her stimulating investigation, Dockside Reading, Isabel Hofmeyr offers a fresh perspective on book history in the British Empire." -- Katharine Anderson * Journal of British Studies *"Hofmeyr has produced a remarkable volume combining elements of both historical and 'literary' scholarship. It is a must read for those who study English Literature, the British Empire, the history of material culture, and international trade transactions of both human and non-human 'cargo.'” -- Paul Chiudiza Banda * African Studies Review *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction. Hydrocolonialism: The View from the Dockside 1 1. The Custom House and Hydrocolonial Governance 27 2. Customs and Objects on a Hydrocolonial Frontier 39 3. Copyright on a Hydrocolonial Frontier 49 4. Censorship on a Hydrocolonial Frontier 63 Conclusion. Dockside Genres and Postcolonial Literature 77 Notes 85 Bibliography 103 Index 117
£62.90
Duke University Press The Politics of Vibration
Book SynopsisMarcus Boon explores music as a material practice of vibration that emerges from a politics of vibration and which constructs a vibrational space of individual and collective transformation.Trade Review"The boldest aspect of Boon's argument . . . is his move to the level of ontology—to the nature of being or reality itself. For him music's social and racial significance operates not at the level of social codes or experience, but as an intervention in how reality itself is organised: 'music does tell us something about being.' His framework certainly allows a place for aspects of music-making that usually get screened out of modern criticism: its religious power, its role in many cultures' sense of the world's structure. . . ." -- Dan Barrow * The Wire *Table of ContentsIntroduction. Music as a Cosmopolitical Practice 1 1. Lord’s House, Nobody’s House: Pandit Pran Nath and Music as Sadhana 29 2. The Drone of the Real: The Sound-Works of Catherine Christer Hennix 75 3. Music and the Continuum 125 4. Slowed and Throwed: DJ Screw and the Decolonization of Time 179 Coda. July 2, 2020 227 Acknowledgments 231 Notes 235 Bibliography 255 Index 269
£70.55
Duke University Press On the Inconvenience of Other People
Book SynopsisIn On the Inconvenience of Other People Lauren Berlant continues to explore our affective engagement with the world. Berlant focuses on the encounter with and the desire for the bother of other people and objects, showing that to be driven toward attachment is to desire to be inconvenienced. Drawing on a range of sources, including Last Tango in Paris, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Claudia Rankine, Christopher Isherwood, Bhanu Kapil, the Occupy movement, and resistance to anti-Black state violence, Berlant poses inconvenience as an affective relation and considers how we might loosen our attachments in ways that allow us to build new forms of life. Collecting strategies for breaking apart a world in need of disturbing, the book’s experiments in thought and writing cement Berlant’s status as one of the most inventive and influential thinkers of our time.Trade Review"The author is as sharp as ever at drawing from postcolonial, queer, and affect theory. Fans of Berlant’s bright, electrifying thinking will want to check this out." * Publishers Weekly *"In Inconvenience, that pedagogy is sly, confiding, and digressive. . . . On the Inconvenience of Other People is, finally, a book in all its feels—from happiness to a death wish—all at once. And it’s the last work of a scholar whose theory felt personal, and whose death was mourned far beyond those who knew Berlant: a perfect encapsulation of intimacy within publicity and the publicity of intimacy, a monument to their very work." -- Hannah Zeavin * Bookforum *"A coherent and helpful addition to the ideas, now influential throughout the culture, that Berlant wrought in 2011’s Cruel Optimism." -- Jo Livingstone * 4Columns *"Offers moments of stunning clarity with the kinds of pithy declarative revelations that can easily spiral a reader toward an entirely new outlook on life. Their writing is a paragon of world-breaking and world-making insight." -- Megan Volpert * Popmatters *"Berlant was anything but ordinary. They wanted their writing to draw the reader into the unpredictability of their own mind. . . . Berlant asked the reader to remain in the thought with them, accepting its formlessness and volatility. Writing was a race against life. . . . The breathlessness was left intact in the prose. If the result is that one sometimes comes away from Berlant’s books with only an impressionistic understanding, that might be an appropriate response to a theorist of vibes." -- Erin Maglaque * London Review of Books *"A book about proceeding in brokenness, On The Inconvenience of Other People is simultaneously an experiment, if not a map, on how to do theory in a damaged world." -- Lilly Markaki * LSE Review of Books *"Berlant offers brilliant insights about the progressive and regressive forces that produce, promote, and frustrate individuals' (perceived) freedoms. Recommended. Graduate students and faculty." * Choice *Table of ContentsNote to the Reader vii Preface. What Now? ix Introduction. Intentions 1 1. Sex. Sex in the Event of Happiness 31 2. Democracy. The Commons: Infrastructures for Troubling Times 75 3. Life. On Being in Life without Wanting the World: No World Poetics, or, Elliptical Life 117 Coda. My Dark Places 149 Acknowledgments 175 Notes 177 Bibliography 205 Index 231
£70.55
Duke University Press Bad Education
Book SynopsisLong awaited after No Future, and making queer theory controversial again, Lee Edelman’s Bad Education proposes a queerness without positive identity—a queerness understood as a figural name for the void, itself unnamable, around which the social order takes shape. Like Blackness, woman, incest, and sex, queerness, as Edelman explains it, designates the antagonism, the structuring negativity, preventing that order from achieving coherence. But when certain types of persons get read as literalizing queerness, the negation of their negativity can seem to resolve the social antagonism and totalize community. By translating the nothing of queerness into the something of “the queer,” the order of meaning defends against the senselessness that undoes it, thus mirroring, Edelman argues, education’s response to queerness: its sublimation of irony into the meaningfulness of a world. Putting queerness in relation to Lacan’s “ab-sens” Trade Review"This intervention is provocative in its paradoxes. . . . Bad Education thus poses a stunning criticism of all that ‘is’ by commanding a radical (re)turn to a deeply radical Lacan." -- Dylan Lackey * Invisible Culture *"Bad Education expands on Edelman’s widely influential claims in No Future, clarifying his framework and answering his critics. . . . Edelman doubles down on abstraction while engaging deeply with the work of recent Afro-pessimist critics. Refusing the charge that by pitching his argument at the level of structure rather than social reality he has disregarded race, Edelman instead argues that Blackness, like queerness, should be apprehended primarily as structure." -- Heather Love * Critical Inquiry *Table of ContentsPreface ix Acknowledgments xxi Introduction. Nothing Ventured: Psychoanalysis, Queer Theory, and Afropessimism 1 1. Learning Nothing: Pedro Almodóvar’s Bad Education 45 2. Against Survival: Queerness in a Time That’s Out of Joint 93 3. Funny/Peculiar/Queer: Michael Haneke’s Aesthetic Education 123 4. There Is No Freedom to Enjoy: Harriet Jacobs’s Negativity 162 Coda: Nothing Gained: Irony, Incest, Indiscernibility 207 Notes 261 Bibliography 317 Index 333
£73.95
Duke University Press Breathing Aesthetics
Book SynopsisJean-Thomas Tremblay examines the prominence of breathing in responses to contemporary crises within literature, film, and performance cultures, showing how breathing has emerged as a medium through which biopolitical and necropolitical forces are increasingly exercised and experienced.Trade Review“'Breathing is inevitably morbid,' reads the opening line of Jean-Thomas Tremblay’s exquisite new first monograph, Breathing Aesthetics. . . . By closely studying the writings and performances of Dodie Bellamy, CAConrad, and Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose, Tremblay is attentive to breathing’s knotty role in the space of queer life in how it ‘organizes desire amid crises ranging from the personal to the planetary.’ Similarly, by surveying the Black and Indigenous feminist respiratory rituals outlined in the works of Toni Cade Bambara and Linda Hogan, Tremblay asks us to consider ‘minoritarian models of collective life inspired by respiration,’ those that exist outside of and beyond mainstream feminist spaces of organizing.” -- Ricky Varghese * Los Angeles Review of Books *“Tremblay’s text is an exercise in exchange, in permeability. It begins with an acknowledgement that ‘breathing for’ is in the action of ‘I breathe,’ a ritual Tremblay learns from the poet M. NourbeSe Philip. This acknowledgement of human autopoetic respiration discloses the multiplicity and vulnerability of breathing. . . . Exchange, I have said, includes an etymological link to bartering. And [Breathing Aesthetics is] a bartering with the unknown amidst all too knowable crises." -- Laurel V. McLaughlin * ASAP/Journal *"Tremblay’s book does for breath what scholars like Zoe Todd have done for broad concepts like climate change, which is to push back against the Platonic understanding of said concepts that cannot be confined to a single, material form. Breathing Aesthetics pushes back on the idea of a disembodied breath, of air as a vacuum-like space that surrounds us. . . . Not only are we breathing together, our individual forms part of an amorphous and often chaotic whole, but breath is also being negotiated in a variety of different ways, the morbid and the meditative existing side by side." -- Margaryta Golovchenko * Visual Studies *"What is perhaps most revelatory about Tremblay’s intervention is that there is no call for a full restoration of breath. Notwithstanding its impossibility for minoritarian communities, a return to optimal breathing could only work through a guise of self-determined liberation that masks persisting violence against and estrangement among those whose lives cannot be extricated from conditions of 'breathlessness.' Readers of Breathing Aesthetics will quickly find that Tremblay’s assertion that respiratory crises are contagious between survivor and spectator in that the latter is made to suffer shortages of breath also apply here." -- Jennifer Cho * ISLE *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction: Ecologies of the Particular 1 1. Breathing against Nature 33 2. Aesthetic Self-Medication (Three Regimens) 65 3. Feminist Breathing 94 4. Smog Sensing 113 5. Death in the Form of Life 139 Coda: A Queer Theory of Benign Respiratory Variations 158 Notes 163 Bibliography 197 Index 221
£70.55
Duke University Press Uncanny Rest
Book SynopsisFocusing on his personal day to day experiences of the shelter-in-place period during the first months of the coronavirus pandemic, Alberto Moreiras offers a meditation on intellectual life and the nature of thought under the suspension of time and conditions of isolation.Table of ContentsPreface ix March 20, 2020 3 Remark 1: The Path of the Goddess March 27, 2020 7 March 29, 2020 7 April 1, 2020 A.M. 8 Remark 2: The Pandemic and the Event April 1, 2020 P.M. 15 April 3, 2020 17 April 4, 2020 18 April 9, 2020 21 April 12, 2020 23 Remark 3: Self-precursion April 15, 2020 26 April 16, 2020 30 April 18, 2020 32 April 24, 2020 35 April 25, 2020 38 April 28, 2020 39 May 2, 2020 39 May 5, 2020 41 May 6, 2020 43 May 7, 2020 47 May 9, 2020 48 May 10, 2020 50 Remark 4: Fools and Free Spirits May 11, 2020 57 May 12, 2020 A.M. 59 May 12, 2020 P.M. 61 May 13, 2020 A.M. 62 May 13, 2020 P.M. 64 May 14, 2020 68 May 15, 2020 72 May 16, 2020 A.M. 73 May 16, 2020 P.M. 78 May 17, 2020 84 May 18, 2020 88 May 19, 2020 88 Remark 5: The Fourth Position May 20, 2020 A.M. 98 Remark 6: An Invitation to Social Death May 20, 2020 P.M. 106 Remark 7: Infracendence: Unpublished Fragments from Fernando Pessoa’s (Posthumous?) Milieu Notebook of Alberto Moreira, Heteronym Appendix 1. More Questions for Jorge Alemán: A Presentation for 17 Instituto de Estudios Críticos, Ciudad de México, May 25, 2020 123 Appendix 2. From a Conversation with Jaime 127 Appendix 3. From a Conversation with Gerardo 131 Appendix 4. Alain Badiou's Age of the Poets 139 Notes 165 Bibliography 183 Index 189
£67.15
Duke University Press The Specter of Materialism
Book SynopsisPetrus Liu challenges key premises of classic queer theory and Marxism, turning to an analysis of the Beijing Consensusglobal capitalism's latest mutationto develop a new theory of the political economy of sexuality.Trade Review"Petrus Liu’s The Specter of Materialism is intellectually courageous and theoretically sophisticated, advancing both queer theory and Marxist thought. This review has only scratched the surface of this paradigm-shifting work. Scholars of queer theory, gender and sexuality studies, Marxism, and China Studies will all find this book indispensable for their fields." -- Wenqing Kang * Modern Chinese Literature And Culture *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction: Periodizing the Post-1989 World Order 1 Part I: Theory 1. Alterity in Queer Theory and the Political Economy of the Beijing Consensus 21 2. The Specter of Materialism 52 Part II: History 3. The Subsumption of Literature: Lu Xun’s Queer Modernism in the Chinese Revolution 81 4. The Subsumption of the Cold War: The Material Unconscious of Queer Asia 104 5. The Subsumption of Sexuality: Translating Gender from the Beijing Fourth World Conference on Women to the Beijing Consensus 135 Conclusion: Toward a Transnational Queer Marxism 161 Notes 165 Bibliography 195 Index
£70.55