Social and cultural anthropology Books
Duke University Press Citizens of Photography
Book SynopsisCitizens of Photography explores how photography offers access to forms of citizenship beyond those available through ordinary politics. Through contemporary ethnographic investigations of photographic practice in Nicaragua, Nigeria, Greece, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Cambodia, the PhotoDemos Collective traces the resonances between political representation and photographic representation. The authors emphasize photography as lived practice and how photography’s performative, transformative, and transgressive possibilities facilitate the articulation of new identities. They analyze photography ranging from family albums and social media to state and public archives, showing how it points to new destinations in the context of social movements, the aftermath of atrocity and civil war, and the legacies of past injustices. By foregrounding photography’s open-ended and contingent nature and its ability to subvert and reconfigure conventional political identiTrade Review“Ambitious in its theoretical and ethnographic reach, this vital volume robustly explores the unruly political potentialities of photography while laying out multiple directions for a future anthropology of photography. Citizens of Photography is a landmark book.” -- Karen Strassler, author of * Demanding Images: Democracy, Mediation, and the Image-Event in Indonesia *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Introduction. Photographing; or, the Future of the Image / Christopher Pinney 1 1. “The Truth Is in the Soil”—The Political Work of Photography in Northern Sri Lanka / Vidhya Buthpitiya 63 2. Visual Citizenship in Cambodia—From Apocalypse to Visual “Political Emancipation” / Sokphea Young 111 3. Photography, Citizenship, and Accusatory Memory in the Greek Crisis / Konstantinos Kalantzis 150 4. Insurgent Archive—The Photographic Making and Unmaking of the Nicaraguan Revolutionary State / Ileana L. Selejan 192 5. “We Are Moving with Technology”—Photographing Voice and Belonging in Nigeria / Naluwembe Binaisa 234 6. Citizenship, Contingency, and Futurity—Photographic Ethnographies from Nepal, India, and Bangladesh / Christopher Pinney 273 Bibliography 319 Contributors 337 Index 339
£77.35
Duke University Press Brown Saviors and Their Others
Book SynopsisArjun Shankar draws from his long-term ethnographic work with an educational NGO in India to critique the role of the “brown savior”—the group of globally mobile, upper-caste, liberal Indian and Indian diasporic technocrats who dominate India’s contemporary help economy.Trade Review“In this ‘nervous’ and ‘sweaty’ ethnography of an education NGO in South India, Arjun Shankar offers an original, historically and theoretically robust analysis of the global helping economy, elaborating a complex system that unites racial capitalism, technocratic solutionism, neocolonialism and development ideologies under the figure of the ‘brown savior.’” -- Adia Benton, Associate Professor of Anthropology and African Studies, Northwestern University"A needed take on the growing neoliberalization of caste values and racialization of cultural capital in the globalized world. The color-cosmetic desires penetrate into markets of patronship and subjecthood. The analogy of the brown savior is damning the philosophy of the underclass in the colonial width. 'Brown saviors' is a befitting jargon of the neoliberal postcolonial world. Brown is colonized and therefore it is global. Its structural hangouts are cultural, and thus it thinks of itself as a savior to its people because it has become a savior in the global economy and corporate diversity. This powerful manuscript, packed with accessible ethnography, points out the obvious in the room with demanding rigor and engaging theory. A dutiful addition to the global castes." -- Suraj Yengde, Harvard University"Brown Saviors and their Others will appeal to scholars and students of development studies, postcolonial and decolonial studies, and of critical race studies. The nervous ethnography that characterizes it is sure to enrich ongoing debates about what it would mean for ethnography to truly break from its colonial and white supremacist past and about what it would mean to address social inequality outside of a savior mentality and within a framework that seeks to undo the racial and caste hierarchies that are facilitated by our current global capitalist system." -- Nell Gabiam * Ethnic and Racial Studies *Table of ContentsPreface: Encountering Saviorism vii Premise One: Global Shadows vii Premise Two: Nervous Ethnography xii Introduction: Brown Saviorism 1 I. Theorizing Saviorism 1. Global Help Economics and Racial Capitalism 31 2. The Racial Politics of the Savarna Hindu (or the Would-Be Savior) 45 II. Neocolonial Saviorism 3. Poverty’s Motivational Double Bind (or Neo-Mathusian Visions) 63 4. Fatal Pragmatism (or the Politics of “Going There”) 75 5. The Case of Liberal Intervention 85 6. Hindu Feminist Rising and Falling 95 7. Gatekeepers (or the Anti-Muslim Politics of Help) 107 III. Urban Saviorism 8. The Road to Accumulation 121 9. Urban Altruism/Urban Corruption 133 10. A Global Death 145 11. The Insult of Precarity (or “I Don’t Give a Damn”) 157 12. AC Cars and the Hyperreal Village 167 IV. Digital Saviorism 13. Digital Saviors 181 14. Digital Time (and Its Others) 193 15. Digital Audit Culture (or Metadata) 203 16. Digital Scaling (or Abnormalities) 215 17. Digital Dustbins 227 Conclusion: Against Saviorism 239 Acknowledgments 251 Notes 257 Bibliography 299 Index 323
£77.35
Duke University Press Petrochemical Planet
Book SynopsisIn Petrochemical Planet Alice Mah examines the changing nature of the petrochemical industry as it faces the existential threats of climate change and environmental activism. Drawing on research from high-level industry meetings, petrochemical plant tours, and polluted communities, Mah juxtaposes the petrochemical industry’s destructive corporate worldviews with environmental justice struggles in the United States, China, and Europe. She argues that amid intensifying public pressures, a profound planetary industrial transformation is underway that is challenging the reigning age of plastics and fossil fuels. This challenge comes from what Mah calls multiscalar activism—a form of collective resistance that spans local, regional, national, and planetary sites and scales and addresses the interconnected issues of environmental justice, climate, pollution, health, extraction, land rights, workers’ rights, systemic racism, and toxic colonialism. Reflecting on the obTrade Review“This exciting and inspiring book takes a bold approach to the petrochemical industry’s historical and present-day activities and impacts while raising critical questions about its possible futures. Alice Mah’s research reveals that many environmental and labor struggles go beyond mobilizing against a single polluting facility to show how networks and coalitions constitute a movement on a global scale. Petrochemical Planet speaks to the urgency of our epoch, in which the petrochemical industry has had an outsized influence on the health of humanity and the planet, while actors from multiple quarters are demanding and creating inspiring models of change.” -- David Naguib Pellow, author of * What Is Critical Environmental Justice? *“It is remarkable that while there have been a handful of broad accounts of the economic history of the petrochemical industry, critical scholarship on the industry has primarily focused on particular sites and accidents. In this context, Alice Mah’s book stands out as a vital wide-ranging intervention. Petrochemical Planet illuminates both the pervasive harms of petrochemical capitalism and the multiple conflicts that its development continues to foster. What is needed is a counter-hegemonic project that engages with environmental justice. Mah shows us how and why such a project is both possible and necessary.” -- Andrew Barry, author of * Material Politics: Disputes along the Pipeline *"Alice Mah’s book assembles content that facilitates our departure from a state of ignorance, regardless of our current level of knowledge on the subject. It is not designed solely for experts. Quite the opposite, its language is accessible, and the content seamlessly intertwines elements of the petrochemical industry. . . . A robust, comprehensive, and up-to-date foundation that strengthens discussions, proposals, and actions towards a paradigm shift in our understanding of human growth and progress." -- Carolina Ibelli-Bianco * International Journal of Environmental Studies *"Mah warns that failure to control the petrochemical industry’s expansion could result in social, health, and economic deteriorations and she offers her reflections on transforming this complex industry. Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers." -- J. Tavakoli * Choice *Table of ContentsAbbreviations vii Preface ix Acknowledgments xvii Introduction 1 1. The Petrochemical Game of War 25 2. Enduring Toxic Injustice and Fenceline Mobilizations 53 3. Multiscalar Activism and Petrochemical Proliferation 71 4. The Competing Stakes of the Planetary Petrochemical Crisis 95 5. Petrochemical Degrowth, Decarbonization, and Just Transformations 119 6. Toward an Alternative Planetary Petrochemical Politics 141 Notes 153 Bibliography 185 Index 207
£72.25
Duke University Press Indifference
Book SynopsisIn Indifference, Naisargi N. Davé examines the complex worlds of animalists and animalism in India. Through ethnographic fieldwork with animal healers, animal activists, farmers, laborers, transporters, and animals themselves, and moving across animal shelters and dairy farms to city streets and abattoirs, Davé shows how human-animal relations often manifest through care and violence. More surprisingly, what Davé also finds animating interspecies relationality in India is an ethic of indifference---that is, an orientation of mutual regard rather than curiosity, love, desire, or animus. For Davé, indifference is a respect for others in their otherness that allows human and nonhuman animals to flourish in immanent encounters. Indifference, then, becomes the basis for an interspecies ethics and a method of care and practice in everyday life. With indifference, Davé describes both a mode of relationality in the world and a scholarly approach: seeking what is possible when we approach ethico-political concepts with indifference rather than commitment or antagonism. Moments of indifference, Davé contends, offer the promise of otherwise worlds.Trade Review“Naisargi N. Davé is one of the most sophisticated, imaginative, and interdisciplinarily literate scholars of animality, activism on behalf of animals, animal slaughter, queerness, and postcolonial South Asia that I know. There is practically no one else to whom she can be compared for the counterintuitive turns of her thought and the spellbinding character of her ethnography. Not surprisingly, then, Indifference is a work of considerable consequence.” -- Parama Roy, author of * Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial *“Naisargi N. Davé offers a deeply moving exploration of the vital political work of ‘indifference’ as a mobilizing dehumanist force in this world. Davé brings us through animal activism and sacrifice with candor and extraordinary care. A riveting ethnography of immense beauty and force; I would follow her anywhere.” -- Julietta Singh, author of * Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements *Table of ContentsIntroduction: What Is Indifference? 1 1. Witness: How Do We Come to Occupy a Different Skin? 13 2. Biography: Why Is Moral Attention to the Animal so Repulsive? 31 3. Contradiction: How Is the Otherwise Exhausted? 55 4. Sound: Can the Subaltern Be Silent? 73 5. Interlude: Take a Walk with Me 91 6. Touch: Can Indifference Be the Basis for an Ethical Engagement with the World? 108 7. Sex: What Does Cow Protection Protect (with Alok Gupta) 125 8. Appetite: Does That Which Is Inevitable Cease to Matter? 146 Acknowledgments 167 Bibliography 171 Index 191
£70.55
Duke University Press Unseen Flesh
Book SynopsisNessette Falu explores how Black lesbians in Brazil define and sustain their well-being and self-worth against persistent racial, sexual, class, and gender-based prejudice within hostile gynecological spaces.Trade Review“An original and necessary work, Unseen Flesh opens an important critical window on well-being and gynecological health in Brazil, which are colored and conditioned by race/color, class, and sexual identity. Nessette Falu’s focus on Black Brazilian lesbians is historic and significant in itself—the result of her long-term, invested, and loving encounters with people who had been silenced.” -- Jafari S. Allen, author of * There’s a Disco Ball between Us: A Theory of Black Gay Life *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction. Bearing Witness to Unseen Flesh 1 1. The Virgin Who Lives within Her Erotic Worth 21 2. Unseen Flesh: Gynecological Trauma, Emotional Power, and Intimate Sociomedical Violence 51 Interlude One: Angela 77 3. The Social Clinic: Mapping the Social and Colonial World of Gynecology 79 Interlude Two: It Doesn’t Matter 111 4. Are We Ethical Subjects? Seeing Ourselves in Shapeshifting Ethics 113 5. Bem-Estar Negra: Lésbicas Negras’ Beautiful Experiments of Worth 141 Notes 169 References 179 Index 195
£70.55
Duke University Press Architecture of Migration
Book SynopsisEnvironments associated with migration are often seen as provisional, lacking both history and architecture. As Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi demonstrates in Architecture of Migration, a refugee camp’s aesthetic and material landscapes—even if born out of emergency—reveal histories, futures, politics, and rhetorics. She identifies forces of colonial and humanitarian settlement, tracing spatial and racial politics in the Dadaab refugee camps established in 1991 on the Kenya-Somalia border—at once a dense setting that manifests decades of architectural, planning, and design initiatives and a much older constructed environment that reflects its own ways of knowing. She moves beyond ahistorical representations of camps and their inhabitants by constructing a material and visual archive of Dadaab, finding long migratory traditions in the architecture, spatial practices, landscapes, and iconography of refugees and humanitarians. Countering conceptualizations of refugeTrade Review“This beautifully written and brilliantly original work elucidates a seemingly irresolvable tension, central to the condition of migrants, between the transience of the refugee category and how refugees’ lives are anchored in hard infrastructures and histories. By tracing the entanglement of aesthetics and politics in the Dadaab refugee camp, Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi ties migration to encampment in a visceral and material way.” -- Miriam Ticktin, author of * Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France *“Architecture of Migration deftly deconstructs humanitarian discourses in architecture, planning, and global crisis management. Its compelling ethnographic research with camp residents and aid workers shares lived experiences within these built-to-be-temporary camps of tents and tarps that have become permanent sprawling urban settlements. Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi’s insightful histories share spatial narratives of lives caught in the wake of colonialism and political, economic, and environmental upheaval. Siddiqi produces an unparalleled study of how neoliberal policies strategically and violently underdevelop spaces for the world’s most vulnerable people.” -- Mabel O. Wilson, Professor of Architecture and Professor of Black Studies, Columbia UniversityTable of ContentsAbbreviations xiii Author’s Note xv Introduction. Architecture and History in a Refugee Camp 1 1. From Partitions 51 2. Land, Emergency, and Sedentarization in East Africa 99 3. Shelter and Domesticity 141 4. An Archive of Humanitarian Settlement 181 5. Design as Infrastructure 249 Afterword. “Poetry Is a Weapon That We Use in Both War and Peace” 305 Acknowledgments 321 Notes 329 Primary Sources 363 References 371 Index 397
£83.30
Duke University Press The Cunning of Gender Violence
Book SynopsisThe Cunning of Gender Violence focuses on how a once visionary feminist project to combat gender-based violence and violence against women has folded itself into contemporary world affairs in ways that that harm the very people it seeks to protect.Trade Review“The Cunning of Gender Violence is a riveting and much-needed interdisciplinary collection that aims both to understand and radically shift the securitized, racialized, and imperial approaches to gender violence that dominate law, policy, and the media. Compellingly calling on feminists to recognize the Faustian bargain they have struck by perpetuating these dominant approaches, the book brings to the fore lives and experiences that have often been relegated to the margins of global feminist attention, even as they are at the center of multiple forms of quotidian global and state violence.” -- Karen Engle, author of * author of The Grip of Sexual Violence in Conflict: Feminist Interventions in International Law *“Those committed to an anti-Muslim agenda appoint themselves as modern, humanitarian, democratic, and feminist, a status achieved against a Third World constituted as premodern, illiberal, Muslim, and uniquely given to gender-based violence. It is a major contribution of this book to show how global racial governance is achieved through the idea of gender-based violence as a defining feature of Third World cultures and communities.” -- Sherene H. Razack, author of * Nothing Has to Make Sense: Upholding White Supremacy through Anti-Muslim Racism *"A remarkable piece of work within the realm of geopolitical feminism. ... It stands out for its sharp acumen and the detailed analysis of scholars who have dedicated themselves to researching and confronting gender-based violence against women in various global contexts." -- Yanyan Zhu * Affilia *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Introduction: Circuits of Power in GBVAW Governance / Lila Abu-Lughod, Rema Hammami, and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian 1 I. Securitization 1. Lawfare, CVE, and International Conflict Feminism / Vasuki Nesiah 55 2. Securofeminism: Embracing a Phantom / Lila Abu-Lughod 88 3. The Role of “Honor Killings” in the Muslim Ban / Leti Volpp 122 4. Because Religion: Does Something Called “Religion” Cause Gender-Based Violence? / Janet R. Jakobsen 151 II. States of Violence, Unruly Subjects 5. GBV and Postcolonial India: Transnational Media, Hindutva, and Muslim Racializations / Inderpal Grewal 177 6. The Politics of Legislating “Honor Crime” in Contemporary Pakistan / Shenila Khoja-Moolji 209 7. State Criminality and Gender-Based Violence: Palestinian Schoolgirls between Books and Rifles / Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian 233 8. Power, Subjectivity, and Sexuality in Iranian Political Prisons / Shahla Talebi 259 III. Civilizing Interventions: Development and Humanitarianism 9. Child Marriage in the Feminist Imagination / Dina M. Siddiqi 293 10. Catastrophic Aid: GBV Humanitarianism in Gaza / Rema Hammami 324 11. What Counts as Violence? Transgender Refugees, Torture, and Sanctions / Sima Shakhsari 361 IV. Media Frames 12. Weaponized Bodies: Female Genital Mutilation and Immigrant Exclusion / Rafia Zakaria 391 13. Breaking the Frame: The Power of Media Narratives and the Question of Agency / Samira Shackle 405 14. Dressed Up, Stripped Down: Media Depictions of Conflict Rape / Nina Berman 422 Contributors 439 Index 445
£23.39
Duke University Press Borderland Dreams
Book SynopsisIn Borderland Dreams June Hee Kwon explores the trajectory of the Korean dream that has fueled the massive migration of Korean Chinese workers from the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in northeast China to South Korea since the early 1990s. Charting the interplay of bodies, money, and time, the ethnography reveals how these migrant workers, in the course of pursuing their borderland dreams, are transformed into a transnational ethnicized class. Kwon analyzes the persistent desire of Korean Chinese to leave to live better at the intersection between the neoliberalizing regimes of post-socialist China and postCold War South Korea. Scrutinizing the tensions and affinities among the Korean Chinese, North and South Koreans, and Han Chinese whose lives intertwine in the borderland, Kwon captures the diverse and multifaceted aspirations of Korean Chinese workers caught between the ascendant Chinese dream and the waning Korean dream.Trade Review“Offering ethnographically rich insights into labor migration between China and South Korea from the early 1990s to the mid-2010s, June Hee Kwon tracks ethnic and kin affinities and tensions amid changing political and global economic conditions, providing nuanced descriptions and analysis of the distinct temporal-spatial experiences of the Korean Chinese migrants entangled in transnational flows of labor, money, and consumption. Borderland Dreams makes an important contribution to scholarship on translocal and transnational migration, political economy, ethnicity, and China and East Asia.” -- Julie Y. Chu, author of * Cosmologies of Credit: Transnational Mobility and the Politics of Destination in China *“Borderland Dreams tells a powerful, complex, and ethnographically driven story about capitalist modernity in China, ethnicity, borders and labor migration, remittance economies, and the temporalities of global capitalism. Drawing on highly original and important fieldwork, June Hee Kwon depicts the dreams, aspirations, and frustrations of her interlocutors through lively and engaging prose.” -- Eleana J. Kim, author of * Making Peace with Nature: Ecological Encounters along the Korean DMZ *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction. Winds of Migration 1 Part I: The Rising Korean Dream 1. Ethnic Borderland 29 2. The Un/Welcoming Homeland 52 Part II: Dreams in Flux 3. Rhythms of “Free” Movement 77 4. The Work of Waiting 100 Part III: Dreaming Anew 5. The Leaving and the Living 123 6. Break the Cycle! 150 Conclusion. The Afterlife of the Korean Dream 177 Notes 187 References 213 Index 231
£76.50
Duke University Press Trust Matters
Book SynopsisAlthough numbering fewer than 60,000 in a city of more than 12 million people, Mumbai’s Parsi community is one of the largest private landowners in the city due to its network of public charitable trusts. In Trust Matters Leilah Vevaina explores the dynamics and consequences of this conjunction of religion and capital as well as the activities of giving, disputing, living, and dying it enables. As she shows, communal trusts are the legal infrastructure behind formal religious giving and ritual in urban India that influence communal life. Vevaina proposes the trusts as a horoscope of the city—a constellation of housing, temples, and other spaces providing possible futures. She explores the charitable trust as a technology of time, originating in the nineteenth century, one that structures intergenerational obligations for Mumbai’s Parsis, connecting past and present, the worldly and the sacred. By approaching Mumbai through the legal mechanism of the trust and tTrade Review“This fascinating ethnography’s twinned focus on the charitable trust as a property form and on the Parsi community of Mumbai brings to light the tensions for both in maintaining a perpetual life. If trusts fix property and obligation, Leilah Vevaina shows how their perpetuity strains against community divisions, urban development, and global networks of philanthropic capital. This is a strikingly original and at times surprising book, with implications that stretch beyond Mumbai and toward rethinkings of unlikely modes of capital and forms of wealth that seem ‘forever.’” -- Bill Maurer, Professor of Anthropology and Law, University of California, Irvine“Leilah Vevaina presents a fascinating array of processes, lives, and practices of the Parsi community in Mumbai across legal, spiritual, and material spaces to illuminate the dynamic workings of the public charitable trusts it operates throughout the city. This book makes important contributions to theoretical discussions in anthropology, law, and South Asian studies.” -- Ritu Birla, author of * Stages of Capital: Law, Culture, and Market Governance in Late Colonial India *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction: Inheritances 1 1. In Perpetuity: The Trust and Timely Obligations 27 2. Presents and Futures: The Trust and Obligation’s Asymmetries 52 3. No House, No Spouse: The Bombay Parsi Punchayet 75 4. The Beneficiary, the Law, and Sacred Space 105 5. From Excarnation to Ashes: Trust to Trust 128 6. Awakening the “Dead Hand”: Liquid and Solid Properties 146 Conclusion: An Unsettled (E)state 167 Notes 175 References 185 Index 201
£72.25
Duke University Press Haunting Biology
Book SynopsisIn Haunting Biology Emma Kowal recounts the troubled history of Western biological studies of Indigenous Australians and asks how we now might see contemporary genomics, especially that conducted by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander scientists. Kowal illustrates how the material persistence of samples over decades and centuries folds together the fates of different scientific methodologies. Blood, bones, hair, comparative anatomy, human biology, physiology, and anthropological genetics all haunt each other across time and space, together with the many racial theories they produced and sustained. The stories Kowal tells feature a variety of ghostly presences: a dead anatomist, a fetishized piece of hair hidden away in a war trunk, and an elusive white Indigenous person. By linking this history to contemporary genomics and twenty-first-century Indigeneity, Kowal outlines the fraught complexities, perils, and potentials of studying Indigenous biological difference in the twentyTrade Review“Resistances and refusals by bodies and spirits of Indigenous peoples continue to haunt and disrupt white settler bio-logics. Haunting Biology reveals settler colonial science as the white fellas’ desiring apparatus: generating meticulous inscriptions of blood, bone, hair, genomics, and metabolisms to try to make beguiling differences but repeatedly failing to capture lived Indigeneity. How, Emma Kowal asks, can all the ancestral ghosts troubling the white scientific machine be engaged with respectfully, not exorcised, in future biologies?” -- Warwick Anderson, author of * The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health, and Racial Destiny in Australia *“Examining exemplary cases in the history of biological, physical anthropological, and medical research, Emma Kowal uniquely argues that all biological knowledge contains the possibility of being affected and facilitated by a problematic practice from distant places and times. She shows that the messy history of biological differences is not a history left behind, but one that lingers and haunts our current-day shiny laboratory science. It is this realization that prompts a much-needed evaluation of the history of anthropology.” -- Amade M’charek, author of * The Human Genome Diversity Project: An Ethnography of Scientific Practice *Table of ContentsA Note on Terminology xi Acknowledgments xiii Introduction 1 1. Living with Ghosts 11 2. Blood, Bones, and the Ghosts of the Ancestors 33 3. A Century in the Life of an Aboriginal Hair Sample 67 4. Race and Nation: Aboriginal Whiteness and Settler Belonging 91 5. Indigenous Physiology: Metabolism, Cold Tolerance, and the Possibility of Human Hibernation 119 6. Spencer’s Double: The Decolonial Afterlife of a Postcolonial Museum Prop 143 Conclusion 167 Appendix 1. Dramatis Personae 173 Appendix 2. Timeline of Relevant Events 175 Notes 181 References 199 Index 235
£73.95
Duke University Press Citizens of Photography
Book SynopsisCitizens of Photography explores how photography offers access to forms of citizenship beyond those available through ordinary politics. Through contemporary ethnographic investigations of photographic practice in Nicaragua, Nigeria, Greece, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Cambodia, the PhotoDemos Collective traces the resonances between political representation and photographic representation. The authors emphasize photography as lived practice and how photography’s performative, transformative, and transgressive possibilities facilitate the articulation of new identities. They analyze photography ranging from family albums and social media to state and public archives, showing how it points to new destinations in the context of social movements, the aftermath of atrocity and civil war, and the legacies of past injustices. By foregrounding photography’s open-ended and contingent nature and its ability to subvert and reconfigure conventional political identiTrade Review“Ambitious in its theoretical and ethnographic reach, this vital volume robustly explores the unruly political potentialities of photography while laying out multiple directions for a future anthropology of photography. Citizens of Photography is a landmark book.” -- Karen Strassler, author of * Demanding Images: Democracy, Mediation, and the Image-Event in Indonesia *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Introduction. Photographing; or, the Future of the Image / Christopher Pinney 1 1. “The Truth Is in the Soil”—The Political Work of Photography in Northern Sri Lanka / Vidhya Buthpitiya 63 2. Visual Citizenship in Cambodia—From Apocalypse to Visual “Political Emancipation” / Sokphea Young 111 3. Photography, Citizenship, and Accusatory Memory in the Greek Crisis / Konstantinos Kalantzis 150 4. Insurgent Archive—The Photographic Making and Unmaking of the Nicaraguan Revolutionary State / Ileana L. Selejan 192 5. “We Are Moving with Technology”—Photographing Voice and Belonging in Nigeria / Naluwembe Binaisa 234 6. Citizenship, Contingency, and Futurity—Photographic Ethnographies from Nepal, India, and Bangladesh / Christopher Pinney 273 Bibliography 319 Contributors 337 Index 339
£21.59
Duke University Press The Ends of Research
Book SynopsisIn The Ends of Research Tom Özden-Schilling explores the afterlives of several research initiatives that emerged in the wake of the “War in the Woods,” a period of anti-logging blockades in Canada in the late twentieth century. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among neighboring communities of White environmental scientists and First Nations mapmakers in northwest British Columbia, Özden-Schilling examines these researchers’ lasting investments and the ways they struggle to continue their work long after the loss of government funding. He charts their use of planning documents, Indigenous territory maps, land use plots, reports, and other documents that help them not only to survive institutional restructuring but to hold on to the practices that they hope will enable future researchers to continue their work. He also shows how their lives and aspirations shape and are shaped by decades-long battles over resource extraction and Indigenous land claims.Trade Review“In this nuanced ethnographic study of the lives and work of two intertwined communities of professional researchers in British Columbia, Tom Özden-Schilling captures the researchers’ hopes, dreams, frustrations, and disappointments as they struggle to make a living and make their work matter to current and future generations. Extremely well written and tightly argued, The Ends of Research is an impressive and timely work of scholarship that makes important contributions to anthropology and science studies.” -- Paul Nadasdy, author of * Sovereignty’s Entailments: First Nation State Formation in the Yukon *“In this wonderful book Tom Özden-Schilling rightly challenges and nuances overly simplistic narratives that present contemporary resource governance processes as either simply an antipolitical form of rule by experts or a neoliberal regime of token gestures to regulation in the service of capital. Extending the dialogue between critical science and technology studies, northern and Indigenous studies, and scholarship on environmental conflicts, The Ends of Research is one of the best books I’ve read on Indigenous-settler relations in natural resource science.” -- Tyler McCreary, author of * Indigenous Legalities, Pipeline Viscosities: Colonial Extractivism and Wet’suwet’en Resistance *Table of ContentsTimeline of Key Events vi A Note on the Maps ix Preface xiii Acknowledgments xix Introduction 1 1. Nostalgia: Placing Histories in a Shrinking State 35 2. Calling: The Returns of Gitxsan Research 73 3. Inheritance: Replacement and Leave-Taking in a Research Forest 111 4. Consignment: Trails, Transects, and Territory without Guarantees 149 5. Resilience: Systems and Survival after Forestry’s Ends 190 Epilogue 224 Notes 237 References 259 Index 287
£75.65
Duke University Press ConspiracyTheory
Book SynopsisThe contributors to Conspiracy/Theory evaluate the relationship between critical theory and conspiracy theory as the basis for political thought, showing how people rely on conspiracy theory or critical theory to make sense of complex and confusing events and social crises.Trade Review“In a time of increasing epistemic confusion, Joseph Masco and Lisa Wedeen brilliantly complicate the usual distinction between fact-based rationality and conspiracy theory by analyzing the infiltration of official disinformation into the public sphere and by exploring the blurred line between paranoid thinking and critical theory. Their book is an innovative and crucial contribution to the understanding of the politics of uncertainty and suspicion in contemporary societies.” -- Didier Fassin, Professor at the Collège de France and the Institute for Advanced Study“This brilliant collection envisions conspiracy theories anew. It not only showcases distinct conspiracies across global sites and time periods, but also petitions readers to examine their own investments in conspiratorial thinking. Conspiracy/Theory is a dazzling provocation and an important intervention.” -- Elisabeth R. Anker, author of * Ugly Freedoms *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Conspiracy/Theory / Joseph Masco and Lisa Weeden Part I. Organizing Fictions 1. Impasse and Genre in American Politics and Literature / George Shulman 37 2. Where Did AIDS Come from? / Lochlann Jain 61 3. A False Flag / Joseph Masco 81 4. Conspiracy Attunement and Context: The Case of the President’s Body / Elizabeth Anne Davis 104 5. Conspiracy, Theory, and the “Post-Truth” Public Sphere / Timothy Melley 127 Part II. Atmospheres of Doubt 6. On Certainty and the Question of Judgment / Lisa Wedeen 149 7. Resonant Apophenia / Susan Lepselter 174 8. The Play of Conspiracy in Plato’s Republic / Demetra Kasimis 190 9. An Economy of Suspicion: On the “Military-Civilian Divide” and the New American Militarism / Nadia Abu El-Haj 210 Part III. The Force of Capital 10. Conspiracies of Theory: Of Gold in the Shadow of Deindustrialization / Rosalind C. Morris 235 11. Adrian Piper and Alien Conspiracies of Bullying and Whistleblowing / Joseph Dumit 264 12. Humanitarian Profiteering in the Central African Republic as Conspiracy and Rumor / Louisa Lombard 291 13. Confessions of an Accused Conspiracy Theorist: The Financialization of Higher Education / Robert Meister 314 Part IV. The Politics of Enmity 14. Conspiracy and Its Curious Afterlives / Faith Hillis 341 15. Comedy of Terrors: National Security Fictions and the Origins of al-Qa‘ida / Darryl Li 362 16. After Muslims: Authority, Suspicion, and Secrecy in the Liberal Democratic State / Hussein Ali Agrama 386 17. Flame and Steel inside the Capitol / Kathleen Belew 409 Epilogue / Joseph Masco and Lisa Wedeen 425 Acknowledgments 435 References 437 Contributors 483 Index
£87.55
Duke University Press The Trauma Mantras
Book SynopsisThe Trauma Mantras is a memoir by medical anthropologist, teacher, and writer Adrie Kusserow, who has worked with refugees and humanitarian projects in Bhutan, Nepal, India, Uganda, South Sudan, and the United States. It is a memoir of witness and humility and, ultimately, a way to critique and gain a fresh perspective on Western approaches to the self, suffering, and healing. Kusserow interrogates the way American culture prizes a psychologized individualism, the supposed fragility of the self. In relentlessly questioning the Western tribe of individualism with a hunger to bust out of such narrow confines, she hints at the importance of widening the American self. As she delves into humanity’s numerous social and political ills, she does not let herself off the hook, reflecting rigorously on her own position and commitments. Kusserow travels the world in these poetic meditations, exploring the desperate fictions that “East” and “West” still Trade Review“In this memoir to a shaken world, Adrie Kusserow roams India, the Sudan, and Vermont, feeling out the vulnerable spots that throb and swell. Words are flocks of murmurations hidden in a refugee’s coma or in fields wild and still as the arctic blue. Trauma bullies resilience. Teenagers wade ghostlike, hungover on bytes. Adults hard-watch like hooded falcons. We are prompted into what knowing could be.” -- Kathleen Stewart, coauthor of * The Hundreds *“Adrie Kusserow’s The Trauma Mantras spares no one-not the author herself and not the reader who encounters her unflinching anthropological gaze and vivid, often searing writing focused on the experience of refugees in Southern Sudan, Nepal, and Vermont. In powerful scenes and unforgettable images, Kusserow captures the force of the sacred and complicates the idea that embracing trauma is a required component of healing. She dedicates this work to all refugees, everywhere. It is a courageous and insightful book.” -- Renato Rosaldo, author of * The Day of Shelly’s Death: The Poetry and Ethnography of Grief *“A singular gem of a book. Part invitation, part memoir, The Trauma Mantras is an intimate reflection on how culture shapes our experiences—from refugees’ lives and being American to family, illness, and the possibilities for healing and going home. In this stunning book, Adrie Kusserow shares her poetic gifts while baring her ethnographic heart. Read and you will be the richer for it.” -- Carole McGranahan, editor of * Writing Anthropology: Essays on Craft and Commitment *“In this stunning collage of vignettes, Adrie Kusserow seamlessly bridges anthropology, poetry, and memoir, shamans and iPhones, and offers a manifesto for refugees everywhere. The Trauma Mantras teach us how the deepest healing comes from the magic of words woven into stories that affirm the scary yet beautiful mysteries of life.” -- Ruth Behar, author of * The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart *“The Trauma Mantras reads like a diary, a logbook, of travels to the margins, but the balance between the voices of others and Adrie Kusserow’s own meditations makes it an astonishing mix of research and quest that cannot be covered by a single descriptor. You will be riveted by the beauty of her writing, the autumnal mood of separation and loss that permeates these pages, and the deft ways she interweaves her own experiences with those she documents in remote corners of the world where refugees collect like leaves, blown hither and thither on a dusty street.” -- Michael Jackson, Harvard University“Trained as an anthropologist and nurtured as a lyric poet, Adrie Kusserow has written a book illustrative of the many cross-cultural journeys she has taken, not as a tourist or a bystander, but as someone committed to hard-core development work with the people who need it the most. This life and these struggles inform her writing in deeply abiding ways. The prose is penetrating, and I envy the way it sometimes explodes off the page in realization of the brute facts of our lives. Present also throughout is a keen sense of good science, woven into these narratives like a golden thread that serves as an unwavering foundation. Kusserow has taken something very big and reduced it to more than manageable prose passages, sometimes only a page long, that resonate, shimmer, even, on the page, with startling observations of the failed beauty of our humanness, with some antidotes for our survival. Pick this book up, read a few paragraphs, anywhere, then I know you’ll walk away with a copy and be glad.” -- Bruce Weigl, author of * The Abundance of Nothing: Poems *“While reading The Trauma Mantras I found myself compelled and broken by the people who populate these stories—including the author herself, who examines the emergence of her own confusion as she lives and works in places most of us only hear about or see on television before being offered some dimwitted commercial relief. Adrie Kusserow writes as our avatar. It’s a daring book, troubling and beautiful in its revelations about human resilience and vulnerability in the face of systemic cruelty. Throughout her work that is chronicled here, she asks questions that few would dare—questions essential for all of us who aspire to our full humanity. The great poet, Theodore Roethke, has written ‘In a dark time, the eye begins to see.’ This riveting collection by Adrie Kusserow is clear evidence of this.” -- Tim Seibles, author of * Voodoo Libretto: New and Selected Poems *“Adrie Kusserow’s The Trauma Mantras is an unapologetic and courageous book. Where others would have perfunctorily narrated stories of participating on the fringes of geopolitical conflicts that inevitably yield witnessing as a default to global suffering, Adrie’s deeply lyrical imagination transforms compelling anecdotes into testimonials of fiery indignation and contemplative wisdom. One feels this book in the body. Here is a self-critical look at compassion run amok as well as observations of the emptiness beneath our technological driven lives that sends us searching for meaning elsewhere. At the center of this book, however, is a pursuit for the self, marked by an abiding sense of justice and a loving concern for the earth and for the spirits that roam here.” -- Major Jackson, author of * Razzle Dazzle: New and Selected Poems *“In The Trauma Mantras, Adrie Kusserow discovers a congruence both shocking and liberating: the congruence of trauma and eternity. Neither occupies a simple expanse of time, because each exists in an immeasurable and vividly detailed absence of time. Virtually every detail in this book—an animal’s leap in the snow, a refugee’s glance—elides narrative and progression, taking refuge in an eternity all and always its own. Such liberation transcends comfort and consolation. It is, even amongst the powerless, a pure and certain power.” -- Donald Revell, author of * White Campion *"The Trauma Mantras is a an insightful lyrical memoir, featuring stories within stories and critiquing Western historical guilt as human beings try to live with different truths at the same time." -- Leanne Galvan * Foreword Reviews *
£67.15
Duke University Press An Archive of Possibilities
Book SynopsisIn An Archive of Possibilities, anthropologist and surgeon Rachel Marie Niehuus explores possibilities of healing and repair in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo against a backdrop of 250 years of Black displacement, enslavement, death, and chronic war. Niehuus argues that in a context in which violence characterizes everyday life, Congolese have developed innovative and imaginative ways to live amid and mend from repetitive harm. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and the Black critical theory of Achille Mbembe, Christina Sharpe, Alexis Pauline Gumbs and others, Niehuus explores the renegotiation of relationships with land as a form of public healing, the affective experience of living in insecurity, the hospital as a site for the socialization of pain, the possibility of necropolitical healing, and the uses of prophesy to create collective futures. By considering the radical nature of cohabitating with violence, Niehuus demonstrates that Congolese practices of healing imTrade Review“This ethnography of violence and repair, hospitals and therapeutics, is set in eastern Congo’s still warlike Kivu region. It is mediated by the astute eyes and sensibilities of the very talented American anthropologist and surgeon, Rachel Marie Niehuus. Her focus on the intimate, the clinical, and the traumatic, with her pressing arguments about repair, stands to transform how anthropologists and conflict studies scholars approach medical practice, violence, enmity, and injury in Congo and well beyond. Awash with original contributions to studies of violence, humanitarianism, and the affective, this moving book tells some crucial regional histories while it investigates lively strands about hope and possible futures.” -- Nancy Rose Hunt, author of * A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in Colonial Congo *“In this outstanding work of storytelling and ethnography, Rachel Marie Niehuus delves deep into the harrowing realities of life in the war-torn landscape of eastern Congo. Beyond the hospital’s sterile walls, amid the constant specters of violence and death, Niehuus uncovers a resilient and profoundly human story of survival, repair, and healing. Vivid and eye-opening, An Archive of Possibilities is a poignant exploration of a people’s unwavering determination to create a future beyond the scars of their past. An immensely thought-provoking and illuminating book.” -- Laurence Ralph, author of * Sito: An American Teenager and the City That Failed Him *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction: Where the Scars Are So Thick 1 1. Dirt Work 21 Interlude 1: A Timeline 45 2. A Sea of Insecurity 47 Interlude 2: Running 69 3. The Body, the Flesh, and the Hospital 73 Interlude 3: Where War Is (Always) Coming 95 4. When Life Demands Release 99 Interlude 4: Joy 121 5. “We Are Creating a World We Have Never Seen” 123 Interlude 5: Otherwise 143 Conclusion: Cohabitation 147 Notes 157 Bibliography 179 Index
£72.25
Duke University Press Push the Button
Book SynopsisElizabeth Rodwell follows the conflict between mass media conglomerates and independent media creators as they worked to redefine what interactivity meant for Japan's television industry.Trade Review“Across a polymorphous array of new media engagements, Elizabeth Rodwell questions how and with what affects/effects television is being recrafted in Japan following the ‘crisis’ of news dissemination during 3.11. Attentively ethnographic and analytically astute, Push the Button explores the implications—political, social, and technological—of inviting viewers to interact so intimately with their televisual machines.” -- Anne Allison, author of * Being Dead Otherwise *“Based on solid fieldwork with excellent theoretical analysis, Push the Button provides a fascinating ethnographic overview of interactive television in Japan and offers striking new insights into media in the early twenty-first century. This wonderful book speaks to experts and newcomers alike—a real gem!” -- Ian Condry, author of * The Soul of Anime: Collaborative Creativity and Japan’s Media Success Story *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction. Pushing Buttons 1 1. The Interactive Consumer-Viewer: The Social TV Promotion Collective, Ratings, and Advertising 25 2. Interactivity and Gatekeeping: The Compass and the Limits of Conservative Corporate Culture 46 3. Cultures of Independent Journalism: The Free Press Association of Japan, Independent Web Journal, and GoHoo 64 4. The New Interactive Television 89 5. Teaching Citizen Journalism: Media Activism and Our Planet-TV 108 Conclusion 129 Notes 143 Bibliography 163 Index 179
£74.70
Duke University Press Brown Saviors and Their Others
Book SynopsisArjun Shankar draws from his long-term ethnographic work with an educational NGO in India to critique the role of the brown saviorthe group of globally mobile, upper-caste, liberal Indian and Indian diasporic technocrats who dominate India's contemporary help economy.Trade Review“In this ‘nervous’ and ‘sweaty’ ethnography of an education NGO in South India, Arjun Shankar offers an original, historically and theoretically robust analysis of the global helping economy, elaborating a complex system that unites racial capitalism, technocratic solutionism, neocolonialism and development ideologies under the figure of the ‘brown savior.’” -- Adia Benton, Associate Professor of Anthropology and African Studies, Northwestern University"A needed take on the growing neoliberalization of caste values and racialization of cultural capital in the globalized world. The color-cosmetic desires penetrate into markets of patronship and subjecthood. The analogy of the brown savior is damning the philosophy of the underclass in the colonial width. 'Brown saviors' is a befitting jargon of the neoliberal postcolonial world. Brown is colonized and therefore it is global. Its structural hangouts are cultural, and thus it thinks of itself as a savior to its people because it has become a savior in the global economy and corporate diversity. This powerful manuscript, packed with accessible ethnography, points out the obvious in the room with demanding rigor and engaging theory. A dutiful addition to the global castes." -- Suraj Yengde, Harvard University"Brown Saviors and their Others will appeal to scholars and students of development studies, postcolonial and decolonial studies, and of critical race studies. The nervous ethnography that characterizes it is sure to enrich ongoing debates about what it would mean for ethnography to truly break from its colonial and white supremacist past and about what it would mean to address social inequality outside of a savior mentality and within a framework that seeks to undo the racial and caste hierarchies that are facilitated by our current global capitalist system." -- Nell Gabiam * Ethnic and Racial Studies *Table of ContentsPreface: Encountering Saviorism vii Premise One: Global Shadows vii Premise Two: Nervous Ethnography xii Introduction: Brown Saviorism 1 I. Theorizing Saviorism 1. Global Help Economics and Racial Capitalism 31 2. The Racial Politics of the Savarna Hindu (or the Would-Be Savior) 45 II. Neocolonial Saviorism 3. Poverty’s Motivational Double Bind (or Neo-Mathusian Visions) 63 4. Fatal Pragmatism (or the Politics of “Going There”) 75 5. The Case of Liberal Intervention 85 6. Hindu Feminist Rising and Falling 95 7. Gatekeepers (or the Anti-Muslim Politics of Help) 107 III. Urban Saviorism 8. The Road to Accumulation 121 9. Urban Altruism/Urban Corruption 133 10. A Global Death 145 11. The Insult of Precarity (or “I Don’t Give a Damn”) 157 12. AC Cars and the Hyperreal Village 167 IV. Digital Saviorism 13. Digital Saviors 181 14. Digital Time (and Its Others) 193 15. Digital Audit Culture (or Metadata) 203 16. Digital Scaling (or Abnormalities) 215 17. Digital Dustbins 227 Conclusion: Against Saviorism 239 Acknowledgments 251 Notes 257 Bibliography 299 Index 323
£21.59
Duke University Press Unseen Flesh
Book SynopsisNessette Falu explores how Black lesbians in Brazil define and sustain their well-being and self-worth against persistent racial, sexual, class, and gender-based prejudice within hostile gynecological spaces.Trade Review“An original and necessary work, Unseen Flesh opens an important critical window on well-being and gynecological health in Brazil, which are colored and conditioned by race/color, class, and sexual identity. Nessette Falu’s focus on Black Brazilian lesbians is historic and significant in itself—the result of her long-term, invested, and loving encounters with people who had been silenced.” -- Jafari S. Allen, author of * There’s a Disco Ball between Us: A Theory of Black Gay Life *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction. Bearing Witness to Unseen Flesh 1 1. The Virgin Who Lives within Her Erotic Worth 21 2. Unseen Flesh: Gynecological Trauma, Emotional Power, and Intimate Sociomedical Violence 51 Interlude One: Angela 77 3. The Social Clinic: Mapping the Social and Colonial World of Gynecology 79 Interlude Two: It Doesn’t Matter 111 4. Are We Ethical Subjects? Seeing Ourselves in Shapeshifting Ethics 113 5. Bem-Estar Negra: Lésbicas Negras’ Beautiful Experiments of Worth 141 Notes 169 References 179 Index 195
£18.99
Duke University Press Borderland Dreams
Book SynopsisIn Borderland Dreams June Hee Kwon explores the trajectory of the Korean dream that has fueled the massive migration of Korean Chinese workers from the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in northeast China to South Korea since the early 1990s. Charting the interplay of bodies, money, and time, the ethnography reveals how these migrant workers, in the course of pursuing their borderland dreams, are transformed into a transnational ethnicized class. Kwon analyzes the persistent desire of Korean Chinese to leave to live better at the intersection between the neoliberalizing regimes of post-socialist China and postCold War South Korea. Scrutinizing the tensions and affinities among the Korean Chinese, North and South Koreans, and Han Chinese whose lives intertwine in the borderland, Kwon captures the diverse and multifaceted aspirations of Korean Chinese workers caught between the ascendant Chinese dream and the waning Korean dream.Trade Review“Offering ethnographically rich insights into labor migration between China and South Korea from the early 1990s to the mid-2010s, June Hee Kwon tracks ethnic and kin affinities and tensions amid changing political and global economic conditions, providing nuanced descriptions and analysis of the distinct temporal-spatial experiences of the Korean Chinese migrants entangled in transnational flows of labor, money, and consumption. Borderland Dreams makes an important contribution to scholarship on translocal and transnational migration, political economy, ethnicity, and China and East Asia.” -- Julie Y. Chu, author of * Cosmologies of Credit: Transnational Mobility and the Politics of Destination in China *“Borderland Dreams tells a powerful, complex, and ethnographically driven story about capitalist modernity in China, ethnicity, borders and labor migration, remittance economies, and the temporalities of global capitalism. Drawing on highly original and important fieldwork, June Hee Kwon depicts the dreams, aspirations, and frustrations of her interlocutors through lively and engaging prose.” -- Eleana J. Kim, author of * Making Peace with Nature: Ecological Encounters along the Korean DMZ *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction. Winds of Migration 1 Part I: The Rising Korean Dream 1. Ethnic Borderland 29 2. The Un/Welcoming Homeland 52 Part II: Dreams in Flux 3. Rhythms of “Free” Movement 77 4. The Work of Waiting 100 Part III: Dreaming Anew 5. The Leaving and the Living 123 6. Break the Cycle! 150 Conclusion. The Afterlife of the Korean Dream 177 Notes 187 References 213 Index 231
£18.89
Duke University Press Haunting Biology
Book SynopsisIn Haunting Biology Emma Kowal recounts the troubled history of Western biological studies of Indigenous Australians and asks how we now might see contemporary genomics, especially that conducted by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander scientists. Kowal illustrates how the material persistence of samples over decades and centuries folds together the fates of different scientific methodologies. Blood, bones, hair, comparative anatomy, human biology, physiology, and anthropological genetics all haunt each other across time and space, together with the many racial theories they produced and sustained. The stories Kowal tells feature a variety of ghostly presences: a dead anatomist, a fetishized piece of hair hidden away in a war trunk, and an elusive white Indigenous person. By linking this history to contemporary genomics and twenty-first-century Indigeneity, Kowal outlines the fraught complexities, perils, and potentials of studying Indigenous biological difference in the twentyTrade Review“Resistances and refusals by bodies and spirits of Indigenous peoples continue to haunt and disrupt white settler bio-logics. Haunting Biology reveals settler colonial science as the white fellas’ desiring apparatus: generating meticulous inscriptions of blood, bone, hair, genomics, and metabolisms to try to make beguiling differences but repeatedly failing to capture lived Indigeneity. How, Emma Kowal asks, can all the ancestral ghosts troubling the white scientific machine be engaged with respectfully, not exorcised, in future biologies?” -- Warwick Anderson, author of * The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health, and Racial Destiny in Australia *“Examining exemplary cases in the history of biological, physical anthropological, and medical research, Emma Kowal uniquely argues that all biological knowledge contains the possibility of being affected and facilitated by a problematic practice from distant places and times. She shows that the messy history of biological differences is not a history left behind, but one that lingers and haunts our current-day shiny laboratory science. It is this realization that prompts a much-needed evaluation of the history of anthropology.” -- Amade M’charek, author of * The Human Genome Diversity Project: An Ethnography of Scientific Practice *Table of ContentsA Note on Terminology xi Acknowledgments xiii Introduction 1 1. Living with Ghosts 11 2. Blood, Bones, and the Ghosts of the Ancestors 33 3. A Century in the Life of an Aboriginal Hair Sample 67 4. Race and Nation: Aboriginal Whiteness and Settler Belonging 91 5. Indigenous Physiology: Metabolism, Cold Tolerance, and the Possibility of Human Hibernation 119 6. Spencer’s Double: The Decolonial Afterlife of a Postcolonial Museum Prop 143 Conclusion 167 Appendix 1. Dramatis Personae 173 Appendix 2. Timeline of Relevant Events 175 Notes 181 References 199 Index 235
£19.79
Duke University Press Trust Matters
Book SynopsisAlthough numbering fewer than 60,000 in a city of more than 12 million people, Mumbai’s Parsi community is one of the largest private landowners in the city due to its network of public charitable trusts. In Trust Matters Leilah Vevaina explores the dynamics and consequences of this conjunction of religion and capital as well as the activities of giving, disputing, living, and dying it enables. As she shows, communal trusts are the legal infrastructure behind formal religious giving and ritual in urban India that influence communal life. Vevaina proposes the trusts as a horoscope of the city—a constellation of housing, temples, and other spaces providing possible futures. She explores the charitable trust as a technology of time, originating in the nineteenth century, one that structures intergenerational obligations for Mumbai’s Parsis, connecting past and present, the worldly and the sacred. By approaching Mumbai through the legal mechanism of the trust and tTrade Review“This fascinating ethnography’s twinned focus on the charitable trust as a property form and on the Parsi community of Mumbai brings to light the tensions for both in maintaining a perpetual life. If trusts fix property and obligation, Leilah Vevaina shows how their perpetuity strains against community divisions, urban development, and global networks of philanthropic capital. This is a strikingly original and at times surprising book, with implications that stretch beyond Mumbai and toward rethinkings of unlikely modes of capital and forms of wealth that seem ‘forever.’” -- Bill Maurer, Professor of Anthropology and Law, University of California, Irvine“Leilah Vevaina presents a fascinating array of processes, lives, and practices of the Parsi community in Mumbai across legal, spiritual, and material spaces to illuminate the dynamic workings of the public charitable trusts it operates throughout the city. This book makes important contributions to theoretical discussions in anthropology, law, and South Asian studies.” -- Ritu Birla, author of * Stages of Capital: Law, Culture, and Market Governance in Late Colonial India *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction: Inheritances 1 1. In Perpetuity: The Trust and Timely Obligations 27 2. Presents and Futures: The Trust and Obligation’s Asymmetries 52 3. No House, No Spouse: The Bombay Parsi Punchayet 75 4. The Beneficiary, the Law, and Sacred Space 105 5. From Excarnation to Ashes: Trust to Trust 128 6. Awakening the “Dead Hand”: Liquid and Solid Properties 146 Conclusion: An Unsettled (E)state 167 Notes 175 References 185 Index 201
£19.94
Duke University Press The Ends of Research
Book SynopsisIn The Ends of Research Tom Özden-Schilling explores the afterlives of several research initiatives that emerged in the wake of the “War in the Woods,” a period of anti-logging blockades in Canada in the late twentieth century. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among neighboring communities of White environmental scientists and First Nations mapmakers in northwest British Columbia, Özden-Schilling examines these researchers’ lasting investments and the ways they struggle to continue their work long after the loss of government funding. He charts their use of planning documents, Indigenous territory maps, land use plots, reports, and other documents that help them not only to survive institutional restructuring but to hold on to the practices that they hope will enable future researchers to continue their work. He also shows how their lives and aspirations shape and are shaped by decades-long battles over resource extraction and Indigenous land claims.Trade Review“In this nuanced ethnographic study of the lives and work of two intertwined communities of professional researchers in British Columbia, Tom Özden-Schilling captures the researchers’ hopes, dreams, frustrations, and disappointments as they struggle to make a living and make their work matter to current and future generations. Extremely well written and tightly argued, The Ends of Research is an impressive and timely work of scholarship that makes important contributions to anthropology and science studies.” -- Paul Nadasdy, author of * Sovereignty’s Entailments: First Nation State Formation in the Yukon *“In this wonderful book Tom Özden-Schilling rightly challenges and nuances overly simplistic narratives that present contemporary resource governance processes as either simply an antipolitical form of rule by experts or a neoliberal regime of token gestures to regulation in the service of capital. Extending the dialogue between critical science and technology studies, northern and Indigenous studies, and scholarship on environmental conflicts, The Ends of Research is one of the best books I’ve read on Indigenous-settler relations in natural resource science.” -- Tyler McCreary, author of * Indigenous Legalities, Pipeline Viscosities: Colonial Extractivism and Wet’suwet’en Resistance *Table of ContentsTimeline of Key Events vi A Note on the Maps ix Preface xiii Acknowledgments xix Introduction 1 1. Nostalgia: Placing Histories in a Shrinking State 35 2. Calling: The Returns of Gitxsan Research 73 3. Inheritance: Replacement and Leave-Taking in a Research Forest 111 4. Consignment: Trails, Transects, and Territory without Guarantees 149 5. Resilience: Systems and Survival after Forestry’s Ends 190 Epilogue 224 Notes 237 References 259 Index 287
£21.84
Duke University Press ConspiracyTheory
Book SynopsisIn an era of intensified information warfare, ranging from global disinformation campaigns to individual attention hacks, what are the compelling terms for political judgment? How are we to build the knowledge needed to recognize and address important forms of harm when critical information is either not to be trusted or kept hidden? Rather than approach conspiratorial narrative as an irrational response to an obviously decipherable reality, Conspiracy/Theory identifies important affinities between conspiracy theory and critical theory. It recognizes the motivation people have—in their capacities as experts, theorists, and ordinary citizens—to search for patterns in events, to uncover what is covert and attend to dimensions of life that might be hiding in plain sight. If it seems strange that so many find themselves living in incommensurable, disorienting realities, the multidisciplinary contributors to Conspiracy/Theory explore how and why that came to be. AcTrade Review“In a time of increasing epistemic confusion, Joseph Masco and Lisa Wedeen brilliantly complicate the usual distinction between fact-based rationality and conspiracy theory by analyzing the infiltration of official disinformation into the public sphere and by exploring the blurred line between paranoid thinking and critical theory. Their book is an innovative and crucial contribution to the understanding of the politics of uncertainty and suspicion in contemporary societies.” -- Didier Fassin, Professor at the Collège de France and the Institute for Advanced Study“This brilliant collection envisions conspiracy theories anew. It not only showcases distinct conspiracies across global sites and time periods, but also petitions readers to examine their own investments in conspiratorial thinking. Conspiracy/Theory is a dazzling provocation and an important intervention.” -- Elisabeth R. Anker, author of * Ugly Freedoms *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Conspiracy/Theory / Joseph Masco and Lisa Weeden Part I. Organizing Fictions 1. Impasse and Genre in American Politics and Literature / George Shulman 37 2. Where Did AIDS Come from? / Lochlann Jain 61 3. A False Flag / Joseph Masco 81 4. Conspiracy Attunement and Context: The Case of the President’s Body / Elizabeth Anne Davis 104 5. Conspiracy, Theory, and the “Post-Truth” Public Sphere / Timothy Melley 127 Part II. Atmospheres of Doubt 6. On Certainty and the Question of Judgment / Lisa Wedeen 149 7. Resonant Apophenia / Susan Lepselter 174 8. The Play of Conspiracy in Plato’s Republic / Demetra Kasimis 190 9. An Economy of Suspicion: On the “Military-Civilian Divide” and the New American Militarism / Nadia Abu El-Haj 210 Part III. The Force of Capital 10. Conspiracies of Theory: Of Gold in the Shadow of Deindustrialization / Rosalind C. Morris 235 11. Adrian Piper and Alien Conspiracies of Bullying and Whistleblowing / Joseph Dumit 264 12. Humanitarian Profiteering in the Central African Republic as Conspiracy and Rumor / Louisa Lombard 291 13. Confessions of an Accused Conspiracy Theorist: The Financialization of Higher Education / Robert Meister 314 Part IV. The Politics of Enmity 14. Conspiracy and Its Curious Afterlives / Faith Hillis 341 15. Comedy of Terrors: National Security Fictions and the Origins of al-Qa‘ida / Darryl Li 362 16. After Muslims: Authority, Suspicion, and Secrecy in the Liberal Democratic State / Hussein Ali Agrama 386 17. Flame and Steel inside the Capitol / Kathleen Belew 409 Epilogue / Joseph Masco and Lisa Wedeen 425 Acknowledgments 435 References 437 Contributors 483 Index
£24.29
Duke University Press The Trauma Mantras
Book SynopsisThe Trauma Mantras is a memoir by medical anthropologist, teacher, and writer Adrie Kusserow, who has worked with refugees and humanitarian projects in Bhutan, Nepal, India, Uganda, South Sudan, and the United States. It is a memoir of witness and humility and, ultimately, a way to critique and gain a fresh perspective on Western approaches to the self, suffering, and healing. Kusserow interrogates the way American culture prizes a psychologized individualism, the supposed fragility of the self. In relentlessly questioning the Western tribe of individualism with a hunger to bust out of such narrow confines, she hints at the importance of widening the American self. As she delves into humanity’s numerous social and political ills, she does not let herself off the hook, reflecting rigorously on her own position and commitments. Kusserow travels the world in these poetic meditations, exploring the desperate fictions that “East” and “West” still Trade Review“In this memoir to a shaken world, Adrie Kusserow roams India, the Sudan, and Vermont, feeling out the vulnerable spots that throb and swell. Words are flocks of murmurations hidden in a refugee’s coma or in fields wild and still as the arctic blue. Trauma bullies resilience. Teenagers wade ghostlike, hungover on bytes. Adults hard-watch like hooded falcons. We are prompted into what knowing could be.” -- Kathleen Stewart, coauthor of * The Hundreds *“Adrie Kusserow’s The Trauma Mantras spares no one-not the author herself and not the reader who encounters her unflinching anthropological gaze and vivid, often searing writing focused on the experience of refugees in Southern Sudan, Nepal, and Vermont. In powerful scenes and unforgettable images, Kusserow captures the force of the sacred and complicates the idea that embracing trauma is a required component of healing. She dedicates this work to all refugees, everywhere. It is a courageous and insightful book.” -- Renato Rosaldo, author of * The Day of Shelly’s Death: The Poetry and Ethnography of Grief *“A singular gem of a book. Part invitation, part memoir, The Trauma Mantras is an intimate reflection on how culture shapes our experiences—from refugees’ lives and being American to family, illness, and the possibilities for healing and going home. In this stunning book, Adrie Kusserow shares her poetic gifts while baring her ethnographic heart. Read and you will be the richer for it.” -- Carole McGranahan, editor of * Writing Anthropology: Essays on Craft and Commitment *“In this stunning collage of vignettes, Adrie Kusserow seamlessly bridges anthropology, poetry, and memoir, shamans and iPhones, and offers a manifesto for refugees everywhere. The Trauma Mantras teach us how the deepest healing comes from the magic of words woven into stories that affirm the scary yet beautiful mysteries of life.” -- Ruth Behar, author of * The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart *“The Trauma Mantras reads like a diary, a logbook, of travels to the margins, but the balance between the voices of others and Adrie Kusserow’s own meditations makes it an astonishing mix of research and quest that cannot be covered by a single descriptor. You will be riveted by the beauty of her writing, the autumnal mood of separation and loss that permeates these pages, and the deft ways she interweaves her own experiences with those she documents in remote corners of the world where refugees collect like leaves, blown hither and thither on a dusty street.” -- Michael Jackson, Harvard University“Trained as an anthropologist and nurtured as a lyric poet, Adrie Kusserow has written a book illustrative of the many cross-cultural journeys she has taken, not as a tourist or a bystander, but as someone committed to hard-core development work with the people who need it the most. This life and these struggles inform her writing in deeply abiding ways. The prose is penetrating, and I envy the way it sometimes explodes off the page in realization of the brute facts of our lives. Present also throughout is a keen sense of good science, woven into these narratives like a golden thread that serves as an unwavering foundation. Kusserow has taken something very big and reduced it to more than manageable prose passages, sometimes only a page long, that resonate, shimmer, even, on the page, with startling observations of the failed beauty of our humanness, with some antidotes for our survival. Pick this book up, read a few paragraphs, anywhere, then I know you’ll walk away with a copy and be glad.” -- Bruce Weigl, author of * The Abundance of Nothing: Poems *“While reading The Trauma Mantras I found myself compelled and broken by the people who populate these stories—including the author herself, who examines the emergence of her own confusion as she lives and works in places most of us only hear about or see on television before being offered some dimwitted commercial relief. Adrie Kusserow writes as our avatar. It’s a daring book, troubling and beautiful in its revelations about human resilience and vulnerability in the face of systemic cruelty. Throughout her work that is chronicled here, she asks questions that few would dare—questions essential for all of us who aspire to our full humanity. The great poet, Theodore Roethke, has written ‘In a dark time, the eye begins to see.’ This riveting collection by Adrie Kusserow is clear evidence of this.” -- Tim Seibles, author of * Voodoo Libretto: New and Selected Poems *“Adrie Kusserow’s The Trauma Mantras is an unapologetic and courageous book. Where others would have perfunctorily narrated stories of participating on the fringes of geopolitical conflicts that inevitably yield witnessing as a default to global suffering, Adrie’s deeply lyrical imagination transforms compelling anecdotes into testimonials of fiery indignation and contemplative wisdom. One feels this book in the body. Here is a self-critical look at compassion run amok as well as observations of the emptiness beneath our technological driven lives that sends us searching for meaning elsewhere. At the center of this book, however, is a pursuit for the self, marked by an abiding sense of justice and a loving concern for the earth and for the spirits that roam here.” -- Major Jackson, author of * Razzle Dazzle: New and Selected Poems *“In The Trauma Mantras, Adrie Kusserow discovers a congruence both shocking and liberating: the congruence of trauma and eternity. Neither occupies a simple expanse of time, because each exists in an immeasurable and vividly detailed absence of time. Virtually every detail in this book—an animal’s leap in the snow, a refugee’s glance—elides narrative and progression, taking refuge in an eternity all and always its own. Such liberation transcends comfort and consolation. It is, even amongst the powerless, a pure and certain power.” -- Donald Revell, author of * White Campion *"The Trauma Mantras is a an insightful lyrical memoir, featuring stories within stories and critiquing Western historical guilt as human beings try to live with different truths at the same time." -- Leanne Galvan * Foreword Reviews *
£15.19
Duke University Press Push the Button
Book SynopsisElizabeth Rodwell follows the conflict between mass media conglomerates and independent media creators as they worked to redefine what interactivity meant for Japan's television industry.Trade Review“Across a polymorphous array of new media engagements, Elizabeth Rodwell questions how and with what affects/effects television is being recrafted in Japan following the ‘crisis’ of news dissemination during 3.11. Attentively ethnographic and analytically astute, Push the Button explores the implications—political, social, and technological—of inviting viewers to interact so intimately with their televisual machines.” -- Anne Allison, author of * Being Dead Otherwise *“Based on solid fieldwork with excellent theoretical analysis, Push the Button provides a fascinating ethnographic overview of interactive television in Japan and offers striking new insights into media in the early twenty-first century. This wonderful book speaks to experts and newcomers alike—a real gem!” -- Ian Condry, author of * The Soul of Anime: Collaborative Creativity and Japan’s Media Success Story *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction. Pushing Buttons 1 1. The Interactive Consumer-Viewer: The Social TV Promotion Collective, Ratings, and Advertising 25 2. Interactivity and Gatekeeping: The Compass and the Limits of Conservative Corporate Culture 46 3. Cultures of Independent Journalism: The Free Press Association of Japan, Independent Web Journal, and GoHoo 64 4. The New Interactive Television 89 5. Teaching Citizen Journalism: Media Activism and Our Planet-TV 108 Conclusion 129 Notes 143 Bibliography 163 Index 179
£18.99
Duke University Press The Banality of Good
Book SynopsisIn The Banality of Good, Lieba Faier examines why contemporary efforts to curb human trafficking have fallen so spectacularly short of their stated goals despite well-funded campaigns by the United Nations and its member-state governments. Focusing on Japan’s efforts to enact the UN’s counter-trafficking protocol and assist Filipina migrants working in Japan’s sex industry, Faier draws from interviews with NGO caseworkers and government officials to demonstrate how these efforts disregard the needs and perspectives of those they are designed to help. She finds that these campaigns tend to privilege bureaucracies and institutional compliance, resulting in the compromised quality of life, repatriation, and even criminalization of human trafficking survivors. Faier expands on Hannah Arendt’s idea of the “banality of evil” by coining the titular “banality of good” to describe the reality of the UN’s fight against human traffickin
£75.65
Duke University Press Sovereignty and Extortion
Book SynopsisOver the past fifteen years in Mexico, more than 450,000 people have been murdered and 110,000 more have been disappeared. In Sovereignty and Extortion, Claudio Lomnitz examines the Mexican state in relation to this extreme violence, uncovering a reality that challenges the familiar narratives of a war on drugs or a failed state. Tracing how neoliberal reforms, free trade agreements, and a burgeoning drug economy have shaped Mexico's sociopolitical landscape, Lomnitz shows that the current crisis does not represent a tear in the social fabric. Rather, it reveals a fundamental shift in the relationship between the state and the economy in which traditional systems of policing, governance, and the rule of law have eroded. Lomnitz finds that power is now concentrated in the presidency and enforced through militarization, which has left the state estranged from itself and incapable of administering justice or regaining control over violence. Through this critical examination, Lomnitz offers a new theory of the state, its forms of sovereignty, and its shifting relation to capital and militarization.
£76.50
Duke University Press Precarious Accumulation
£81.60
New York University Press Racial Asymmetries
Book SynopsisEmploys an interdisciplinary approach to reveal the unbounded nature of fictional worlds.Trade ReviewStephenSohnsRacial Asymmetriesprovides rich, nuanced readings of the performance, permutations, and persistence of race in 21st-century Asian American literature. In calling attention to the interplay between diverse Asian American texts and their conditions of emergence as such,Sohns analyses appreciate the cultural politics of difference that Asian American fictional worlds continue to critically express. -- Victor Bascara,University of California, Los AngelesAmbitious, innovative, and rigorously researched,Racial Asymmetrieslicenses Asian American writers to exercise their fictive imaginations, releasing them from the burdens of racial representation, while calling on Asian Americanists to expansively reimagine their field. -- Martin Joseph Ponce,author of Beyond the NationAn incisive guide to reading Asian American writing in a & post-race era,Racial Asymmetriescompels us to rethink our assumptions about ethnic literatures. Sohndemonstrates that the unmooring of narrative perspective from authorial background should be understood not as an emptying out of politics, but rather as a profusion of political critique as well as cultural creativity. -- Juliana Chang,author of Inhuman CitizenshipStephen Hong Song has written one of the smartest, analytical books on literature in the past year with Racial Asymmetries: Asian American Fictional Worlds.Sohn isn't just a scholar, but an excavator, an archaeologist, an explorer, and a poet, traversing racial narratives. * Entropy Magazine *Sohn's project unsettles the boundary between the fictional world and its cultural context, revealing how refractive and elliptical the relation between the two can be--a move that deflects our gaze from Elaine H. Kim's foundational view of Asian American literature 'as both social document and a mirror of memory.' After reading Racial Asymmetries, one cannot help but look differently at what constitutes Asian American studies, as well as the storytelling practices that define Asian American literatures. * Journal of American Studies *With the proliferation of works by Asian Americans who are transnational/first-generation or multiracial and who publish in genres not normally associated with Asian American literature, the current challenge of criticism is to expand & social-context methodologies. In doing so, Sohn argues that we will move & beyond the limits of cultural nationalist models in order to foreground a & deconstructive critical methodology.Racial Asymmetries is at its best when staking out new ground for Asian Americanist critique, especially in helping redefine the kinds of narratives we should seek out and work to understand the relation to the political dimensions of difference. . . . Sohns ambitious work asks fundamental questions of the Asian Americanist critical enterprise by examining and challenging old loyalties and gesturing toward more productive ways of selecting and interpreting literary texts that fall outside of normal expectations. * MELUS *SohnsRacial Asymmetriesargues that considering novels by Asian American writers that feature non-Asian American narrators both widens the usual scope of literary criticism and remains true to the fields activist origins. [] Telling these and other stories from unexpected points of view challenges our sometimes limited view of Asian Americans and adds complexity to our understanding of their relations with white and ethnic others. * American Literature *What constitutes Asian American literature? Who can claim to be an Asian American author? Sohn builds a theory of categorization that places him in a distinguished genealogy of field-defining critics, including Elaine Kim, Yen Le Espiritu, Viet Nguyen, and Min Song. * ALH Online Review *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: The Many Storytellers of Asian American Fiction 1 White Flight, White Narration: Suburban Deviancies in Chang-rae Lee's Aloft 2 When the Minor Becomes Major: Asian American Literary California, Chicano Narration, and Sesshu Foster's Atomik Aztex 3 The Incomplete Biography in the Post-Civil Rights Era: Narrating Imagined Lives in Sigrid Nunez's Fictions 4 Comparative Colonial Narration: Conquest and Consumption in Sabina Murray's Fictions 5 Impossible Narration: Racial Analogies and Asian American Speculative Fictions Coda: Fiction Unbound Notes Works Cited IndexAbout the Author
£24.99
New York University Press Dust to Dust
Book SynopsisA revealing look at how death and burial practices influence the livingDust to Dust offers a three-hundred-year history of Jewish life in New York, literally from the ground up. Taking Jewish cemeteries as its subject matter, it follows the ways that Jewish New Yorkers have planned for death and burial from their earliest arrival in New Amsterdam to the twentieth century.Allan Amanik charts a remarkable reciprocity among Jewish funerary provisions and the workings of family and communal life, tracing how financial and family concerns in death came to equal earlier priorities rooted in tradition and communal cohesion. At the same time, he shows how shifting emphases in death gave average Jewish families the ability to advocate for greater protections and entitlements such as widows' benefits and funeral insurance. Amanik ultimately concludes that planning for life's end helps to shape social systems in ways that often go unrecognized.Trade ReviewAmanik has crafted a detailed, compelling study that uses the universal experience of death and dying to interrogate the transitions in New York’s Jewish community (16). His work invites scholars to see the deeply personal and human aspect of religious rituals behind and beyond more abstract theological arguments. In so doing, he shines a light on the struggles of generations of Jewish Americans to find a place they could call their own. * Early American Literature *Through meticulous research, Amanik has uncovered the intriguing story of how Jews in New York, over more than three centuries, have dealt with end of life concerns and dilemmas. Decidedly not a maudlin work on death and dying, this engaging book deepens our understanding of Jewish family life in Gotham and highlights tensions within the community over control of cemeteries the most basic Jewish institution. A notable contribution to the saga of the worlds largest Jewish community. -- Jeffrey S. Gurock,Author of Jews in Gotham: New York Jews and Their Changing CityDust to Dust does an excellent job showing how the desire for a Jewish burial continues to change as society changes… Anyone looking for a different take on Jewish American social history should enjoy this work. * The Reporter *Dust to Dust is a meticulously researched and solidly written study making the case for how powerfully end-of-life matters have continually molded the daily lives of American Jews. Throughout, New York City emerges as the cornerstone for related precedents and debates, setting the tone across Jewish communities in North America and beyond. * AJS Review *Amanik is a meticulous social historian adept at featuring individuals or events that illustrate overall trends or unique phenomena. * The Journal of Interdisciplinary History *Allan Amanik’s Dust to Dust will engage scholars of American Jewish history and institutions, as well as immigration and ethnic history more generally. * Journal of American Ethnic History *Will be of interest to historians of Americans death-practices, and to students of American Jewish history. Yet it also should appeal to those who are themselves New Yorkers wishing to learn more of their citys past, and especially to the descendants of those many persons buried in the cemeteries described in the book. -- Lucy Bregman,Temple UniversityThe chronological presentation flows smoothly and the book is well written. In order to gain a better appreciation of the development and issues involved in cemeteries, the book should be read by a wide audience and especially by those interested in Jewish history and identity. I encourage ethnic historians, sociologists, and anthropologists to read the book because of the parallels in the evolution of their cemeteries from tight control by early merchants to the fight over cemetery lands and who and how one should be buried, especially when religious groups, fraternal organizations, and professional funeral services compete for “members.” This book is a gem among the few works available on cemetery studies. * Journal of Jewish Identities *
£31.35
New York University Press Queering the Midwest
Book SynopsisHow LGBTQ community life in a small Midwestern city differs from that in larger cities with established gayborhoodsRiver City is a small, Midwestern, postindustrial city surrounded by green hills and farmland with a population of just over 50,000. Most River City residents are white, working-class Catholics, a demographic associated with conservative sexual politics. Yet LGBTQ residents of River City describe it as a progressive, welcoming, and safe space, with active LGBTQ youth groups and regular drag shows that test the capacity of bars. In this compelling examination of LGBTQ communities in seemingly unfriendly places, Queering the Midwest highlights the ambivalence of LGBTQ lives in the rural Midwest, where LGBTQ organizations and events occur occasionally but are generally not grounded in long-standing LGBTQ institutions. Drawing on in-depth interviews and ethnographic observation, Clare Forstie offers the story of a community that does not fit neatly into a narrative of progreTrade ReviewWe are everywhere—even in small post-industrial cities in “flyover country.” Queering the Midwest offers an astute analysis of the ambivalence many of us feel toward the LGBTQ communities that nurture us. We can’t live with them, but can’t live without them. It upends simple notions of progress, coming out, and even liberation without diminishing their importance for overcoming stigma and anchoring the self. * Arlene Stein, author of Unbound: Transgender Men and the Remaking of Identity *Queering the Midwest is a readable book about the complex way that community happens. I appreciated the way this research centers friendship instead of partners, organizations, or bars in the lives of LGBTQ people. This book makes us rethink the role of institutions and relationships in making LGBTQ community in small cities and in the Midwest. * Amy L. Stone, author of Queer Carnival: Festivals and Mardi Gras in the South *Forstie ‘Midwesternizes’ LGBTQ studies, convincingly demonstrating that conventional understandings of community gleaned from gayborhoods don’t always hold water beyond the big city. It is impossible to be ambivalent about this timely account of the role of that emotion in LGBTQ life today. As rich and satisfying as mom’s hotdish, Queering the Midwest is a landmark study. * Greggor Mattson, author of forthcoming The Cultural Politics of European Prostitution Reform: Governing Loose Women *
£62.90
New York University Press Extreme Weight Loss
Book SynopsisA study that explores patients' perspectives on a life-altering surgeryBariatric surgery rates around the world have increased exponentially over the past decade. In Extreme Weight Loss, anthropologists Sarah Trainer, Alexandra Brewis, and Amber Wutich provide us with an inside look at how patients experience this medical procedure, as well as its far-reaching and complex personal implications. Drawing on patient interviews, survey data, and more, Trainer, Brewis, and Wutich explore why people decide to undergo bariatric surgery, and how that decision transforms their lives. They show, in painstaking detail, how the journey to weight loss is can be at once painful and liberating, dispiriting and self-affirming. Extreme Weight Loss explores questions about which bodies are treated as though they belong in modern societies, and which bodies are treated as unwanted. It considers how people challenge and manage these unfair standards, illuminating what it means to be large-bodied in AmerTrade ReviewWhile this accessible and empathic ethnography of a cohort of bariatric surgery patients describes the extremes of obesity and of body transformation, it speaks to our wider struggle with weight control and disordered eating. The authors present a sophisticated anthropological analysis of the social, economic, political, and psychological consequences of being “fat” in the US, yet they never lose sight of the voices of the patient-participants and their hopes and challenges through their bariatric surgery journey. Extreme Weight Loss is a must-read for anyone concerned with the body, stigma, and surveillance in the 21st century. -- Tina Moffat, co-editor of Human Diet and Nutrition in Biocultural Perspective: Past Meets PresentExtreme Weight Loss is that rare book that tells us not only about its subject, but also serves as a prism through which to view some of the cultural patterns that characterize a society. For anyone interested in women undergoing bariatric surgery and the clinical settings in which this takes place, this ethnographic study is jam-packed with rich, nuanced detail. The authors take us on a journey into a culture where, despite contemporary rhetoric on valuing all bodies, thinness ideals remain intractable, fat bodies continue to be pathologized, and the ability to lose weight – or not – is a moral status. The bariatric patients described here are not victims: they are deeply aware of the ways in which they are circumscribed by cultural ideals that render them unwell and unworthy. The real power of this book is in what we learn about why these women submit to the judgement, surveillance, and intervention that our society imposes on those deemed unfit. This is a story not just about body weight, but about the ways in which we weigh down those who don’t fit. -- Jodi O'Brien, editor of Encyclopedia of Gender and SocietyTrainer, Brewis, and Wutich offer an effective and affecting ethnographic account of what it means to undergo extreme weight loss. The analysis is presented thematically, describing the medicalization of obesity, the stigmatization of fat bodies, and the restrictions on daily life that surgery imposes on patients. * Medical Anthropology Quarterly *Extreme Weight Loss is a good read, providing important ethnographic insight into the world of a US bariatric surgery clinic and people's experience of passing through it. Readers from many backgrounds will learn about the material realities of fatness and weight loss surgery, as well as the reconfiguration of identity that is involved in the process of trying to conform to societal norms. * Sociology of Health and Illness *The book is a valuable addition to the rich body of writing on the complex status of body weight in human societies. The study features as a part of the authors Sarah Trainer’s, Alexandra Brewis’ and Amber Wutich’s sustained research engagement with the themes of social inequality, obesity, and stigma in the context of global public health. * Anthropology Book Forum *
£19.79
New York University Press Korean American Families in Immigrant America
Book SynopsisAn engaging ethnography of Korean American immigrant families navigating the United States Both scholarship and popular culture on Asian American immigrant families have long focused on intergenerational cultural conflict and stereotypes about tiger mothers and model minority students. This book turns the tables on the conventional imagination of the Asian American immigrant family, arguing that, in fact, families are often on the same page about the challenges and difficulties navigating the U.S.'s racialized landscape. The book draws on a survey with over 200 Korean American teens and over one hundred parents to provide context, then focusing on the stories of five families with young adults in order to go in-depth, and shed light on today's dynamics in these families. The book argues that Korean American immigrant parents and their children today are thinking in shifting ways about how each member of the family can best succeed in the U.S. Rather than being marked by a generational Trade ReviewConventional or stereotypical discourse surrounding Asian American families, Korean Americans in particular, in both popular and scholarly literature indicates that immigrant parents, even at the sacrifice of their own future, pressure their children to be successful academically or professionally while ignoring other aspects of their children’s growth … Okazaki and Abelmann's research reveals a very different picture from that simplified portrait of Korean Americans. -- ChoiceIn this must-read book, Okazaki and Abelman rigorously capture portraits of how Korean American immigrant parents and their childrenmake family work. These vivid portraits provide stereotype-breaking depictions based on lived reality riddled with nativism and racism andnotsimplistic accounts of 'Tiger Moms,' high expectations, and Asian immigrant success. This riveting book powerfully turns the Model Minority Stereotype on its head! -- Gilberto Q. Conchas,UC Irvine
£73.80
New York University Press Contemporary ArabAmerican Literature
Book SynopsisTakes in the sweep of literary and cultural texts by Arab-American writers in order to understand the ways in which their depictions of Arab homelands, whether actual or imagined, play a crucial role in shaping cultural articulations of US citizenship and belonging.Trade Review"Engaging a stunning array of Arab American writers, Fadda-Conrey offers an original analysis of the ways in which Arab American literature articulates new forms of citizenship, forms that are transnational in scope and that reconfigure notions of geography and belonging. This will be the go-to book on Arab American literature." -- Evelyn Alsultany,author of Arabs and Muslims in the Media"Fadda-Conrey's work is sure to make a lasting impact on the way we think about not only Arab American artistic and cultural production but also the relationship between ethnic identity, American citizenship, and transnational belonging." * MELUS *"This book can be read as an introduction to Arab-American literature or as a reference to enrich ones understanding of this relatively new and exciting field. Fadda-Conrey writes with passion and analytical precision about a topic in which she is obviously well versed and deeply involved." * Jordan Times *"[Fadda-Conreys] preference for the term & transnational enactments allows for such variances as physical mobility and imaginative attachment and favors & larger structures of belonging." * American Literary Scholarship *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: Transnational Arab-American Belonging 1 Reimagining the Ancestral Arab Homeland 2 To the Arab Homeland and Back: Narratives of Returns and Rearrivals 3 Translocal Connections between the US and the Arab World 4 Representing Arabs and Muslims in the US after 9/11: Gender, Religion, and Citizenship Conclusion: Transnational Solidarity and the Arab UprisingsNotes Works Cited Index About the Author
£22.79
New York University Press From the Land of Shadows
Book SynopsisIn a century of mass atrocities, the Khmer Rouge regime marked Cambodia with one of the most extreme genocidal instances in human history. What emerged in the aftermath of the regime's collapse in 1979 was a nation fractured by death and dispersal. It is estimated that nearly one-fourth of the country's population perished from hard labor, disease, starvation, and executions. Another half million Cambodians fled their ancestral homeland, with over one hundred thousand finding refuge in America. From the Land of Shadows surveys the Cambodian diaspora and the struggle to understand and make meaning of this historical trauma. Drawing on more than 250 interviews with survivors across the United States as well as in France and Cambodia, Khatharya Um places these accounts in conversation with studies of comparative revolutions, totalitarianism, transnationalism, and memory works to illuminate the pathology of power as well as the impact of auto-genocide on individual and collective healingTrade ReviewOffering an impressive archive of the legacy of the Khmer Rouge,From the Land of Shadowsprovides vivid first-hand accounts of starvation, hard labor, disappearances and executions, post-migration trauma, and intergenerational remembering and forgetting. With beautiful storytelling and compelling prose, Khatharya Um deftly situates rich narratives of the survivors struggles to make meaning out of lives that have been forever ruptured within the larger historical context of Cambodias colonial and post-colonial history. A deeply affecting and much-awaited book. -- Yen Le Espiritu,author of Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es)With rich ethnographic details, From the Land of Shadows places survivor narratives in conversation with literature on revolution, diaspora, transnationalism, and memory. Khatharya Um makes visible the lived experiences of Cambodians as they try to make sense of their new identities in multiple contexts. A remarkable book. -- Chia Youyee Vang,author of Hmong America: Reconstructing Community in DiasporaThe book, which includes an incisive discussion of the paradoxes but necessity of return, will interest those considering the nature of diasporas. * Choice *Um writes with scholarly rigor. * Journal of American History *
£66.60
New York University Press Critical Dialogues in Latinx Studies
Book Synopsis**WINNER, D. Scott Palmer Prize for Best Edited Collection, given by the New England Council of Latin American Studies**Introduces new approaches, theoretical trends, and understudied topics in Latinx StudiesThis groundbreaking work offers a multidisciplinary, social-science oriented perspective on Latinx studies, including the social histories and contemporary lives of a diverse range of Latina and Latino populations. Editors Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas and Mérida M. Rúa have crafted an anthology that is unique in both form and content. The book combines previously published canonical pieces with original, cutting-edge works created for this volume. The sections of the text are arranged thematically as critical dialogues, each with a brief preface that provides context and a conceptual direction for the scholarly conversation that ensues. The editors frame the volume around the humanistic social sciences, using the term to highlight the historical and social contexts under which expressive culTrade ReviewBrilliantly crafted. . . . Brings together a wide range of scholars and offers a fresh take on Latinx Studies through its discussion of nine key diálogos that touch upon the social histories and contemporary experiences of diverse Latinx populations including immigrants, exiles, refugees, and US-born groups of various backgrounds. . . . Blurs the boundaries between the humanities and social sciences, making the modes of analysis in every chapter special and unique. Ramos-Zayas and Rúa have put together an incredibly rich volume that has something for everyone. -- Glenda M. Flores, author of Latina Teachers: Creating Careers and Guarding CultureCapacious, lively, beautifully organized. . . . Contributors cover colonization and decolonization, race and racialization, differing migration histories, gendered and queer experiences, language and the politics of labeling, cultural production, humor, religion, and the carceral, punitive states Latinx populations must navigate. But they also document past and present Latinx activisms, and open the door to analyzing the many new political coalitions of the present. -- Micaela di Leonardo, Northwestern University
£84.15
New York University Press Critical Dialogues in Latinx Studies
Book Synopsis**WINNER, D. Scott Palmer Prize for Best Edited Collection, given by the New England Council of Latin American Studies**Introduces new approaches, theoretical trends, and understudied topics in Latinx StudiesThis groundbreaking work offers a multidisciplinary, social-science oriented perspective on Latinx studies, including the social histories and contemporary lives of a diverse range of Latina and Latino populations. Editors Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas and Mérida M. Rúa have crafted an anthology that is unique in both form and content. The book combines previously published canonical pieces with original, cutting-edge works created for this volume. The sections of the text are arranged thematically as critical dialogues, each with a brief preface that provides context and a conceptual direction for the scholarly conversation that ensues. The editors frame the volume around the humanistic social sciences, using the term to highlight the historical and social contexts under which expressive culTrade ReviewBrilliantly crafted. . . . Brings together a wide range of scholars and offers a fresh take on Latinx Studies through its discussion of nine key diálogos that touch upon the social histories and contemporary experiences of diverse Latinx populations including immigrants, exiles, refugees, and US-born groups of various backgrounds. . . . Blurs the boundaries between the humanities and social sciences, making the modes of analysis in every chapter special and unique. Ramos-Zayas and Rúa have put together an incredibly rich volume that has something for everyone. -- Glenda M. Flores, author of Latina Teachers: Creating Careers and Guarding CultureCapacious, lively, beautifully organized. . . . Contributors cover colonization and decolonization, race and racialization, differing migration histories, gendered and queer experiences, language and the politics of labeling, cultural production, humor, religion, and the carceral, punitive states Latinx populations must navigate. But they also document past and present Latinx activisms, and open the door to analyzing the many new political coalitions of the present. -- Micaela di Leonardo, Northwestern University
£35.15
New York University Press Undisciplined
Book SynopsisIn the 19th century, personhood was a term of regulation and discipline in which slaves, criminals, and others, could be made and unmade. Yet it was precisely the fraught, uncontainable nature of personhood that necessitated its constant legislation, wherein its meaning could be both contested and controlled.Examining scientific and literary narratives, Nihad M. Farooq's Undisciplined encourages an alternative consideration of personhood, one that emerges from evolutionary and ethnographic discourse. Moving chronologically from 1830 to 1940, Farooq explores the scientific and cultural entanglements of Atlantic travelers in and beyond the Darwin era, and invites us to attend more closely to the consequences of mobility and contact on disciplines and persons. Bringing together an innovative group of readingsfrom field journals, diaries, letters, and testimonies to novels, stage plays, and audio recordingsFarooq advocates for a reconsideration of science, personhood, and the prioTrade ReviewPersuasive and thought-provoking,Undisciplinedargues against overly simplistic accounts of the work of modern science in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With dazzling archival work, Nihad M. Farooq examines the sometimes-playful and often-sobering negotiations of those who were being studied as they returned the gaze ofand spoke backtotheir Western observers. Engaging with histories of slavery, colonialism, and diaspora, Farooq makes a compelling case for the centrality of race within the emergent sciences of evolutionary biology and anthropology. -- Jane Thrailkill,author of Affecting Fictions: Mind, Body, and Emotion in American Literary RealismThis work would serve as a worthwhile addition to courses or reading lists on the history of science, anthropology, literature, and citizenship in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. * Civil War Book Review *
£23.74
New York University Press The Smell of Risk
Book SynopsisA timely exploration of how odor seeps into structural inequality Our sense of smell is a uniquely visceraland personalform of experience. As Hsuan L. Hsu points out, smell has long been spurned by Western aesthetics as a lesser sense for its qualities of subjectivity, volatility, and materiality. But it is these very qualities that make olfaction a vital tool for sensing and staging environmental risk and inequality. Unlike the other senses, smell extends across space and reaches into our bodies. Hsu traces how writers, artists, and activists have deployed these embodied, biochemical qualities of smell in their efforts to critique and reshape modernity's olfactory disparities. The Smell of Risk outlines the many ways that our differentiated atmospheres unevenly distribute environmental risk. Reading everything from nineteenth-century detective fiction and naturalist novels to contemporary performance art and memoir, Hsu takes up modernity's differentiated atmospheres as a subject woTrade Review"Hsuan Hsu takes an exceptionally imaginative approach to the relationship between aesthetics and environmental justice. The Smell of Risk contributes significantly to the field of environmental humanities by exploring what has been a largely overlooked aspect of how we construct our environments and structure our social interactions. Hsu demonstrates the co-construction of ‘race’ and ‘environment’ as discursive technologies of state power and shows, in particular, how olfaction delineates the notion of an “environment” and its relation to the unequal distribution of risk. This deeply engaging and insightful work will change the way readers approach their olfactory senses." * Priscilla Wald, author of Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative *"Hsu invites, in fact, urges us to think of olfactory perception beyond individual sensory experience or the well-established mnemonics in larger frames of decolonization, emancipation, liberation, as well as environmental ‘slow violence.’ The Smell of Risk may just make perceivers think, perceive, and feel differently. Hsu’s study then is another significant step forward in the rapid evolution of the sense of smell as a critical tool of cultural analysis" -- Hans J. Rindisbacher * American Literary History *
£62.90
New York University Press Citizen Student Soldier
Book SynopsisSince the 1990s, Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) programs have experienced unprecedented expansion in American public schools. The program and its proliferation in poor, urban schools districts with large numbers of Latina/o and African American students is not without controversy. Public support is often based on the belief that the program provides much-needed discipline for at risk youth. Meanwhile, critics of JROTC argue that the program is a recruiting tool for the U.S. military and is yet another example of an increasingly punitive climate that disproportionately affect youth of color in American public schools. Citizen, Student, Soldier intervenes in these debates, providing critical ethnographic attention to understanding the motivations, aspirations, and experiences of students who participate in increasing numbers in JROTC programs. These students have complex reasons for their participation, reasons that challenge the reductive idea that they are either dangeroTrade ReviewCitizen, Student, Soldieroffers a nuanced portrait of the nexus between race, militarism, and contemporary public education, giving fresh insight to the deeply intertwined histories of Latina/os and military service. Written in accessible prose and drawing from Latina/o studies, political science, anthropology, and critical military studies, Perezs text represents an invaluable contribution toward our understanding of race, social membership. National belonging and what it means to be a & good citizen. * Lat Stud *Citizen, Student, Soldieris an important book for scholars and students of U.S. anthropology. It could form the backbone for a course on an increasingly militarized homeland that stubbornly remains invisible. By making & America visible, Perez also makes it available for critique. * American Anthropologist *Readers will find detailed descriptions of marginalized youths attempts to undertake positive forms of development that might lead to social inclusion. Perez puts these descriptions in context in terms of the current debates about citizenship in the US, including civic obligation, social opportunity, and US militarism in the & land of opportunity. * CHOICE *In this important and much anticipated work anthropologist extraordinaire Gina Pérez provides a powerful portrait of the making of American citizenship today. By examining Latino/a youth and their aspirations and attitudes towards the JROTC in relation to the rapid expansion of the military and larger neoliberal policies of retrenchment, Perez challenges narrow understandings of citizenship through a rich portrayal that truly honors their voices and dreams. -- Arlene Davila,New York UniversityPresents a provocative analysis of how young Latinas and Latinos navigate the JROTC program, where significant portions of the participants are students of color and young women, in the context of neoliberalism and the new American militarism. Pérez argues persuasively that Latina/o youths aspirations for recognition as full citizens within limited structural conditions lead them toward the personal, social, and economic benefits offered by the military. Her work provides a fresh perspective on Latino youth, the military as an avenue for upward mobility, and citizenship in the post 9/11 era. -- Patricia Zavella,University of California, Santa CruzPerezs new book is a very readable, even conversational, account of the Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps or JROTC in a high school in OhioCitizen, Student, Soldier is highly accessible, depending more heavily on descriptions and interviews than on theoretical argument. While Perez does engage some of the theoretical questions of the day, the book is not especially theory-driven. That is mostly a positive for making the book readable and relevant * Anthropology Review Database *
£23.74
New York University Press Unbelonging
Book SynopsisHow Latinx artists engage in sonic subcultures to reject neoliberal definitions of belongingWhat is the connection between the British rock star Morrissey and the Latinx culture of transnational unbelonging? What is the relevance of dyke chords in Chicana feminist punk and lesbian dissolution? In what ways can dissonant sounds challenge systems of dominance?Unbelonging answers these questions and more through an exploration into Mexican and US-based Latinx artists', writers', and creators' use of the discordant sounds of punk, metal, and rock to give voice to the aesthetic of unbelonging, a rejection of consumerist and nationalist mentalities. Iván A. Ramos argues that racial identity and belonging have historically required legible forms of performance. Sound has been the primary medium that amplifies and is used to assign cultural citizenship and, for Latinx individuals, legibility is essential to music perceived as traditional and authentic to their natiTrade ReviewSound is the ground for Iván Ramos’s brilliant writing on visual art, performance, and subcultures that radiate out from Mexico, Los Angeles, and through the rest of Latina/o America. Ramos’s sonic grounding, actual and conceptual, is far from stable. Records melt, checkpoints are refused, the inauthentic is genuine, geopolitical narratives shake, punk is a Latina/o given rather than a something taken. The castaways of neoliberalism are key protagonists. The illegible artists and audiences and the bootleg tapes that live and play in this indispensable book push Ramos towards transformative theories about performance and aesthetics. Readers will no doubt become forever altered having come to know them intimately through Ramos’s beautiful treatise on unbelonging. -- Alexandra Vazquez, New York UniversityA lucid and theoretically informed account of how listening practices between Mexico and the United States can work in opposition to the national popular and its regimes of affect. Unbelonging sets the record straight on whitewashed accounts of rock and punk that ignore how Latinx subjects took up subcultural spaces and stances. Taking time to ‘feel brown’ beyond the boundaries of race and nation, Iván Ramos delivers up a new and vibrant account of aesthetic dissensus that will forward queer-of-color critique. -- Tavia Amolo Ochieng' Nyong'o, Yale UniversityIn his gloriously cranky yet deeply moving book, the performance-studies scholar Iván A. Ramos invites us to relish in the dissonance of the punk, metal, and other 'inauthentic sounds' bootlegged and bartered in the marketplaces of Mexico City and beyond from the late 1980s to 2015... In the company of Chicana punks, queer performance artists, filmmakers, and disaffected Morrissey fans on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, Ramos gives us the space, time, and fortitude to not belong together. -- Karen Tongson * The Chronicle of Higher Education *
£62.90
New York University Press Unbelonging
Book SynopsisHow Latinx artists engage in sonic subcultures to reject neoliberal definitions of belongingWhat is the connection between the British rock star Morrissey and the Latinx culture of transnational unbelonging? What is the relevance of dyke chords in Chicana feminist punk and lesbian dissolution? In what ways can dissonant sounds challenge systems of dominance?Unbelonging answers these questions and more through an exploration into Mexican and US-based Latinx artists', writers', and creators' use of the discordant sounds of punk, metal, and rock to give voice to the aesthetic of unbelonging, a rejection of consumerist and nationalist mentalities. Iván A. Ramos argues that racial identity and belonging have historically required legible forms of performance. Sound has been the primary medium that amplifies and is used to assign cultural citizenship and, for Latinx individuals, legibility is essential to music perceived as traditional and authentic to their natiTrade ReviewSound is the ground for Iván Ramos’s brilliant writing on visual art, performance, and subcultures that radiate out from Mexico, Los Angeles, and through the rest of Latina/o America. Ramos’s sonic grounding, actual and conceptual, is far from stable. Records melt, checkpoints are refused, the inauthentic is genuine, geopolitical narratives shake, punk is a Latina/o given rather than a something taken. The castaways of neoliberalism are key protagonists. The illegible artists and audiences and the bootleg tapes that live and play in this indispensable book push Ramos towards transformative theories about performance and aesthetics. Readers will no doubt become forever altered having come to know them intimately through Ramos’s beautiful treatise on unbelonging. -- Alexandra Vazquez, New York UniversityA lucid and theoretically informed account of how listening practices between Mexico and the United States can work in opposition to the national popular and its regimes of affect. Unbelonging sets the record straight on whitewashed accounts of rock and punk that ignore how Latinx subjects took up subcultural spaces and stances. Taking time to ‘feel brown’ beyond the boundaries of race and nation, Iván Ramos delivers up a new and vibrant account of aesthetic dissensus that will forward queer-of-color critique. -- Tavia Amolo Ochieng' Nyong'o, Yale UniversityIn his gloriously cranky yet deeply moving book, the performance-studies scholar Iván A. Ramos invites us to relish in the dissonance of the punk, metal, and other 'inauthentic sounds' bootlegged and bartered in the marketplaces of Mexico City and beyond from the late 1980s to 2015... In the company of Chicana punks, queer performance artists, filmmakers, and disaffected Morrissey fans on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, Ramos gives us the space, time, and fortitude to not belong together. -- Karen Tongson * The Chronicle of Higher Education *
£22.79
New York University Press Averting Catastrophe
Book SynopsisBest-selling author Cass R. Sunstein examines how to avoid worst-case scenariosThe world is increasingly confronted with new challenges related to climate change, globalization, disease, and technology. Governments are faced with having to decide how much risk is worth taking, how much destruction and death can be tolerated, and how much money should be invested in the hopes of avoiding catastrophe. Lacking full information, should decision-makers focus on avoiding the most catastrophic outcomes? When should extreme measures be taken to prevent as much destruction as possible?Averting Catastrophe explores how governments ought to make decisions in times of imminent disaster. Cass R. Sunstein argues that using the maximin rule, which calls for choosing the approach that eliminates the worst of the worst-case scenarios, may be necessary when public officials lack important information, and when the worst-case scenario is too disastrous to contemplate. He underscores this argument by emphTrade Review"Sunstein is unique in knowing about both the nature of risk and uncertainty and having crafted policy to protect us from it. This book tells us what we can do to 'sleep better at night' in an uncertain world. This is wisdom that should be acted on." -- Michael Greenstone, Milton Friedman Distinguished Service Professor of Economics, University of Chicago"If you want to understand how to analyze and avert potential catastrophes of the modern world, from pandemics to climate change, you should start with this brilliant book. Ranging widely and deeply over law, economics, and philosophy, Sunstein explains through examples and principles how societies can deal with the deep uncertainties we face." -- William Nordhaus, Nobel laureate in Economics"A must-read book for anyone with an interest in public policy or personal decision-making in the face of uncertainty. Which makes it a must-read book, period." -- Robert S. Pindyck, Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi Professor in Economics and Finance, Massachusetts Institute of Technology"This is an important book of extraordinary timeliness. At once modest and transformative, Sunstein’s pragmatic recommendations can help policymakers manage the world’s biggest problems—even in the face of catastrophic uncertainty." -- Arden Rowell, co-author, The Psychology of Environmental Law"A must-read if you want the expert guidance of one of the most brilliant minds in American law about how our nation should address its most serious risks, including pandemics, climate change, and terrorist attacks. Cass Sunstein has written a tour-de-force that makes the most vexing problems in decision theory accessible—and enjoyable to read—to a broad audience." -- Richard L. Revesz, Bryce Professor of Law and Dean Emeritus, New York University School of Law"Uncertainty is everywhere, and the list of potential catastrophes seems to grow longer every year. Few are better positioned to shed light into the gloom than Cass Sunstein. Drawing on his deep engagement with a wide range of intellectual disciplines and his years of government experience during the Obama administration, Sunstein demonstrates how clear thinking can help us navigate through difficult times." -- Michael A. Livermore, Edward F. Howrey Professor of Law, University of Virginia
£16.14
New York University Press The Secular Paradox
Book SynopsisChoice Outstanding Academic Title 2023A radically new way of understanding secularism which explains why being secular can seem so strangely religiousFor much of America's rapidly growing secular population, religion is an inescapable source of skepticism and discomfort. It shows up in politics and in holidays, but also in common events like weddings and funerals. In The Secular Paradox, Joseph Blankholm argues that, despite their desire to avoid religion, nonbelievers often seem religious because Christianity influences the culture around them so deeply. Relying on several years of ethnographic research among secular activists and organized nonbelievers in the United States, the volume explores how very secular people are ambivalent toward belief, community, ritual, conversion, and tradition. As they try to embrace what they share, secular people encounter, again and again, that they are becoming too religious. And as they reject religion, thTrade ReviewBy far the best work done on secular movements and secularism. Blankholm’s impressive scope of data and his attention to diversity based on ethnicity, gender, and apostates from non-Christian traditions make this a unique and exceptional contribution to the field. -- Darren Sherkat, Southern Illinois UniversityMasterfully illustrates how the organized secular movement in the US is constantly being negotiated. -- Ryan Cragun, The University of TampaSimultaneously, an incisive examination of American secularity’s paradoxical relationship to `religion,’ its constitutive other, and an expansive ethnography of how secular people live with and in that paradox. Blankholm brilliantly attends to secularity not simply as a space of absence—religion’s remainder—but as a set of ethical, epistemological, and affective commitments—a tradition. . . . A remarkable book and essential reading for those interested in debates about secularism and religion in the United States and beyond. -- Mayanthi Fernando, University of California, Santa CruzThis work enriches understanding of one of the fastest growing segments of the US population, those with no religious affiliation or identity… [T]his study merits the attention of students of American religious culture at all levels. -- C. H. Lippy (emeritus, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga) * CHOICE *...Interesting, thought-provoking, well-researched – and written in a readable, engaging, and captivating style. * Religious Studies Review *Pioneering. The Secular Paradox gives voice to a diverse cast of characters who can represent the increasing diversity of secular communities in the twenty-first-century United States and help to dispel views about secularism’s inherent whiteness and maleness. A must-read for scholars of American religions... sure to influence future scholarship in the field. * American Religion *Blankholm’s writing is praiseworthy… the author clearly articulates complicated paradoxical positions and clarifies murky terms. * Reading Religion *
£62.90
New York University Press The Secular Paradox
Book SynopsisChoice Outstanding Academic Title 2023A radically new way of understanding secularism which explains why being secular can seem so strangely religiousFor much of America's rapidly growing secular population, religion is an inescapable source of skepticism and discomfort. It shows up in politics and in holidays, but also in common events like weddings and funerals. In The Secular Paradox, Joseph Blankholm argues that, despite their desire to avoid religion, nonbelievers often seem religious because Christianity influences the culture around them so deeply. Relying on several years of ethnographic research among secular activists and organized nonbelievers in the United States, the volume explores how very secular people are ambivalent toward belief, community, ritual, conversion, and tradition. As they try to embrace what they share, secular people encounter, again and again, that they are becoming too religious. And as they reject religion, thTrade ReviewBy far the best work done on secular movements and secularism. Blankholm’s impressive scope of data and his attention to diversity based on ethnicity, gender, and apostates from non-Christian traditions make this a unique and exceptional contribution to the field. -- Darren Sherkat, Southern Illinois UniversityMasterfully illustrates how the organized secular movement in the US is constantly being negotiated. -- Ryan Cragun, The University of TampaSimultaneously, an incisive examination of American secularity’s paradoxical relationship to `religion,’ its constitutive other, and an expansive ethnography of how secular people live with and in that paradox. Blankholm brilliantly attends to secularity not simply as a space of absence—religion’s remainder—but as a set of ethical, epistemological, and affective commitments—a tradition. . . . A remarkable book and essential reading for those interested in debates about secularism and religion in the United States and beyond. -- Mayanthi Fernando, University of California, Santa CruzThis work enriches understanding of one of the fastest growing segments of the US population, those with no religious affiliation or identity… [T]his study merits the attention of students of American religious culture at all levels. -- C. H. Lippy (emeritus, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga) * CHOICE *...Interesting, thought-provoking, well-researched – and written in a readable, engaging, and captivating style. * Religious Studies Review *Pioneering. The Secular Paradox gives voice to a diverse cast of characters who can represent the increasing diversity of secular communities in the twenty-first-century United States and help to dispel views about secularism’s inherent whiteness and maleness. A must-read for scholars of American religions... sure to influence future scholarship in the field. * American Religion *Blankholm’s writing is praiseworthy… the author clearly articulates complicated paradoxical positions and clarifies murky terms. * Reading Religion *
£25.19
New York University Press The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America
Book SynopsisAddresses this central question: if race has been settled as a legal or social construction and not as biological fact, why do Asian American artists, authors, and performers continue to scrutinize their body parts?Trade ReviewLee convincingly shows that Asian Americanist critique in science and technology studies and analytic that takes seriously the biological in critical race and ethnic studies is not far-fetched. * Catalyst *[T]he study is provocative and evocative, raising such issues and questions as why Asian American artists (in fiction, theater, poetry, and comedy) are so preoccupied with fragments of 'self.' * Choice *Lees propositional and performative writing style will prod readers in (Asian) American studies, performative studies, and critical race theory to reexamine their scholarly assumptions... * Theatre Journal *Ambitious, original, and immensely generative,The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America challenges us to move outside the paradigms of the racialized body weve relied on in Asian American studies.Lee pushes our thinking in productive new ways to consider more broadly how critical race studies might incorporate new concepts and technologies related to the biological body. -- Josephine Lee,author of Performing Asian America: Race and Ethnicity on the Contemporary StageRachel Lees stunning new book explores contemporary Asian American performance, comedy, written word, and a body exhibit that concern racialized, gendered, militarized body parts. Drawing upon Science and Technology Studies and Asian American Studies, with the aid of transnational femiqueer, critical race, and disability studies, Lee eviscerates what we thought we knew about biopolitics and biosociality. -- Charis Thompson,author of Good Science: The Ethical Choreography of Stem Cell ResearchTable of ContentsContents Corpse Blood Introduction: Parts/Parturition 1 Kidney Lymphocytes 1. How a Critical Biopolitical Studies Lens Alters the Questions We Ask vis-a-vis Race 39 Teeth 2. The Asiatic, Acrobatic, and Aleatory Biologies Feet of Cheng-Chieh Yu's Dance Theater 66 Gamete Vagina 3. Pussy Ballistics and Peristaltic Feminism 97 GI Tract Parasite 4. Everybody's Novel Protist: Chimeracological Chromosome Entanglements in Amitav Ghosh's Fiction 126 Head 5. A Sideways Approach to Mental Disabilities: Incarceration, Kinesthetics, Affect, and Ethics 161 Breasts 6. Allotropic Conclusions: Propositions on Skin Race and the Exquisite Corpse 210 Tissue culture Tail Piece 245 Notes 259 Bibliography 295 Index 313 About the Author 325 An insert of color images follows page 138.
£24.99
New York University Press My Soul Is in Haiti
Book SynopsisIllustrates how devout Haitian Protestant migrants use their religious identities to ground themselves in a place that is hostile to them as migrants, and it also uncovers how their religious faith ties in to their belief in the need to "save" their homeland, as they re-imagine Haiti politically and morally as a Protestant Christian nation.Trade ReviewDr. Bertin M. Louis Jr. has just offered to the world of intelligentsia a remarkable book on the culture of Haitian Protestantism in the Haitian diaspora of the Bahamas. It is, without a doubt, a roadmap for cultural anthropology or ethnography designed for researchers with deep insights, students, and scholars to address religious issues, not only under the lens of inquiry, but with a profound thirst for social justice. * Ethnic and Racial Studies,Clarence St. Hilaire *My Soul is in Haitioffers much for us to seriously contemplate. * Black Theology *[F]or bringing Haitian Protestantism to our attentionand apparently to the attention of Bahamiansand for linking religion to class, race, and transnational variables, the project is a welcome addition to the literature on Latin and Caribbean Christianity. * Anthropology Review Database *A ground breaking study of the evangelical Protestant churches in the Haitian communities of the Bahamas, describing the ways in which these churches provide their congregations with a sense of national and transnational identity. Vital for students of diasporic and transnational studies, anthropologists, historians and sociologists of religion, this book is a comprehensive study likely to be the authoritative source on this topic for years to come. -- Leslie G. Desmangles,Trinity CollegeA ground-breaking study drawing on five years of transnational ethnographic research in the Bahamas, Haiti, and the United States. As a Haitian-American, Louis is cognizant of the subtleties of Haitian culture and the cultural differences between Haitians living in Haiti and Haitians living abroad. A major strength of this book is the authors keen recognition of the importance of boundary maintenance and his insights into native constructions of 'religion,' such as the distinction Haitians make between being Protestant (Pwotestan) and being Christian (Kretyen). -- Stephen D. Glazier,University of Nebraska-LincolnTable of ContentsContents Acknowledgments xi Pronunciation of Haitian Creole Terminology xv Introduction 1 1. Haitian Protestant Culture 19 2. Haitians in the Bahamas 47 3. Pastors, Churches, and Haitian Protestant Transnational Ties 71 4. Haitian Protestant Liturgy 95 5. "The People Who Have Not Converted Yet," 119 Protestant, and Christian Conclusion: Modernity Revisited 143 Notes 153 References 163 Index 169 About the Author 179
£62.90
New York University Press The Smell of Risk
Book SynopsisA timely exploration of how odor seeps into structural inequality Our sense of smell is a uniquely visceraland personalform of experience. As Hsuan L. Hsu points out, smell has long been spurned by Western aesthetics as a lesser sense for its qualities of subjectivity, volatility, and materiality. But it is these very qualities that make olfaction a vital tool for sensing and staging environmental risk and inequality. Unlike the other senses, smell extends across space and reaches into our bodies. Hsu traces how writers, artists, and activists have deployed these embodied, biochemical qualities of smell in their efforts to critique and reshape modernity's olfactory disparities.The Smell of Risk outlines the many ways that our differentiated atmospheres unevenly distribute environmental risk. Reading everything from nineteenth-century detective fiction and naturalist novels to contemporary performance art and memoir, Hsu takes up modernity's differentiated aTrade Review"Hsuan Hsu takes an exceptionally imaginative approach to the relationship between aesthetics and environmental justice. The Smell of Risk contributes significantly to the field of environmental humanities by exploring what has been a largely overlooked aspect of how we construct our environments and structure our social interactions. Hsu demonstrates the co-construction of ‘race’ and ‘environment’ as discursive technologies of state power and shows, in particular, how olfaction delineates the notion of an “environment” and its relation to the unequal distribution of risk. This deeply engaging and insightful work will change the way readers approach their olfactory senses." * Priscilla Wald, author of Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative *"Hsu invites, in fact, urges us to think of olfactory perception beyond individual sensory experience or the well-established mnemonics in larger frames of decolonization, emancipation, liberation, as well as environmental ‘slow violence.’ The Smell of Risk may just make perceivers think, perceive, and feel differently. Hsu’s study then is another significant step forward in the rapid evolution of the sense of smell as a critical tool of cultural analysis" -- Hans J. Rindisbacher * American Literary History *
£23.74
