Stationery and miscellaneous items
John Wiley & Sons Living Indigenous Feminism Stories of
Book Synopsis
£29.66
Liverpool University Press Anthony Benezet Quaker Abolitionist AntiRacist
Book Synopsis
£72.71
Liverpool University Press A Desert between Two Seas A Novel in Stories
£28.79
Liverpool University Press unMothered unTongued Lyric Essays
£29.66
Liverpool University Press My Corpse Inside
£29.66
Ohio University Press Athens and Jerusalem
Book SynopsisFor more than two thousand years, philosophers and theologians have wrestled with the irreconcilable opposition between Greek rationality (Athens) and biblical revelation (Jerusalem).
£31.50
Ohio University Press Robert Mugabe
Book SynopsisFor some, Zimbabwe’s President Mugabe is a liberation hero who confronted white rule and oversaw the radical redistribution of land. For others, he is a murderous dictator who drove his country to poverty. This concise biography, in a highly successful series, reveals the complexity of the man who led Zimbabwe for its first decades of independence.Trade Review“In this sober biography of one of Africa’s longest-serving presidents, Onslow and Plaut provide a brief but comprehensive overview of a controversial leader who’s largely reviled in the West but often revered in Africa.…Written in lucid prose, the informative book is commendable for its balanced assessment of 37 years’ worth of very tumultuous events.” * Publishers Weekly *“An excellent, accessible book on the opaque life and legacy of Robert Mugabe.”“Using paradoxes and ironies, [Onslow and Plaut] skillfully portray the dilemma Mugabe weaved Zimbabwe into: ‘support for democracy, good governance, human rights, and rule of law,’ the authors write, yet brutal repression of political opponents; the dispossession of land from former colonial white farmers, and land redistribution creating a new class of a few top official landowners.…Summing Up: Highly recommended.” * CHOICE Reviews *Praise for the Ohio Short Histories of Africa series: “I am a huge fan of Ohio University Press’s Ohio Short Histories of Africa series. I use them to teach my introductory-level African politics students about oppression, resistance, liberation, and corruption, and I recommend the books to anyone who asks as an affordable and accessible introduction to a wide range of topics in African studies.” * The Washington Post *
£12.99
Ohio University Press Coffee Is Not Forever A Global History of the
Book SynopsisCoffee Is Not Forever assesses the global spread of a dire existential threat—coffee rust—to a crop consumers take for granted. In departing from commodity histories’ usual emphasis on the social and economic, and instead putting ecology at the forefront, Stuart McCook offers the first truly global environmental history of coffee.Trade Review“Exhaustively researched and accessibly written, McCook offers a timely contribution with this forward-looking book, which asks us to consider what social and ecological resilience look like as we advance into an uncertain future. Though formally a work of agricultural history, it will be of use as a detailed reference for researchers outside the discipline, as well as to the particularly curious coffee afcionado.” * Agriculture and Human Values *“McCook makes crucial contributions to a number of related fields that usually don’t intersect: history of science, global history, and commodity studies. His decision to focus on the science of plant disease and the politics and institutions related results in a welcome challenge to the anthropocentrism that too often dominates the study of history. With stunning breadth of research and inquiry, this is a rich and original work.”“Coffee Is Not Forever is top-notch scholarship that provides a rare pan-tropical analysis of the interactions of people, plants, and pathogens in the coffee regions of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. This book will be of immense value to readers interested not only in coffee, but also environmental and commodity histories more broadly. Like all great transnational histories, it is both connected and comparative. And for the latte generation, this book may forever change the way they think about robusta coffee.”“There is an urgent need for books like [this]. Even as people are more attuned than ever before to the grim realities of a pandemic amidst the constant, rapid ricochet of human bodies around the planet, many remain unaware of the epidemics that rage among our most essential companion species—that is, among domesticated crops and livestock. It is possible that zoonotic diseases will garner greater attention thanks to desperate curiosity about the origins of SARS-CoV-2. Meanwhile, plant diseases will go on multiplying, with their sustained discussion unlikely outside agroindustry and agronomy. McCook’s timely study makes clear the consequences of collective blindness to these ever-present epidemics in his globe-spanning, 150-year history of Hemileia vastatrix. That is the fungus responsible for coffee leaf rust, a disease for which there is no cure. The measures that have been, and still are being, taken to keep your morning coffee affordable and palatable in light of the rust might provide as much of a jolt as the java itself.” * Environmental History *
£26.09
Ohio University Press Sports in Africa Past and Present
Book SynopsisThrough the prism of sports and from a range of scholarly perspectives, this anthology offers insight into the varied and shifting experiences of African athletes, fans, communities, and postcolonial states.Trade Review“An extraordinary volume…. Not only is the writing empirically driven, but, more importantly, the theoretic content is grounded in prose that is fresh, vibrant, and something not always associated with what is a university textbook, fascinating. Cleveland, Kaur, and Akindes are to be congratulated for putting together a team that explores complex identities and the dynamic nature of African sport…. Hats off to the Ohio University Press for not only supporting the venture but publishing a book that looks like, and reads like, a classic.” * Journal of Sport History *“A long-overdue project by scholars committed to building African sports studies as a humanities subject. It presents close studies of sports like cycling, surfing, track and field, ultra-marathoning, and weightlifting, which are often neglected in favor of bigger and more popular sports such as soccer, rugby, and cricket. Scholars of social history, nationalism, popular culture, social anthropology, media, and cultural studies will appreciate this book.”“The Sport in Africa collective, active since 2004, has helped kick-start a movement. Here it adds seventeen more topics to the growing corpus of works on African sports history—from surfers in Transkei and women in Nigeria to Kenyan athletes and the football migrations to Europe (happening alongside desperate refugee journeys in the Mediterranean)—showing what a rich field of study sport is becoming.”“Sports in Africa heralds the arrival in sports studies of an empirically rich, theoretically informed, methodologically rigorous, and incisive African-focused genre. The volume demonstrates the centrality and complexity of sport in the daily rhythms and social fabric of life on the continent, across time, and in the formal and informal economies. It challenges longstanding racial, ethnic and cultural stereotypes pertaining to Africans, and dispenses with any notion of fixed and prescribed social and cultural identities.”“This collection of essays opens up the debate on the influences of social history, subaltern studies, and postmodernism in stimulating new research and pedagogical approaches to sport studies in Africa. It offers exemplary studies of mainstream sports (athletics, cricket, football, and rugby) and those on the margins (cycling, surfing, and wrestling) and reflects on the contributions and trajectories of those sporting pasts and their present impacts and meanings across the African continent. A go-to volume for those seeking a solid introduction to the politics, poetics and practices of the fascinating life-worlds of sports in Africa.”
£45.00
Ohio University Press Africanizing Oncology Creativity Crisis and
Book SynopsisCombining methods from African studies, science and technology studies, and medical anthropology, Marissa Mika considers the Uganda Cancer Institute as a microcosm of the Ugandan state and as a lens through which to trace the political, technological, moral, and intellectual aspirations and actions of health care providers and patients.Trade Review“Mika’s lively history shows how Ugandan physician-scientists used cancer research to build oncology care and infrastructure over five decades of labile national politics, pervasive scarcity, and often ephemeral international partnerships. This engaging account illuminates struggles that shaped both global oncology knowledge and the fates of hundreds of thousands of Ugandans facing cancer diagnoses.” -- Claire L. Wendland, author of A Heart for the Work: Journeys through an African Medical School“Based on rich historical and ethnographic research, Africanizing Oncology provides an intimate, and at times harrowing view of the day-to-day activities of care, research, and healing that permitted physicians, researchers, nurses, and patients to survive civil war, structural adjustment, and massive global disparities in health resources to build and sustain an African cancer research institute. The book is a remarkable achievement.” -- Randall M. Packard, author or A History of Global Health: Interventions into the Lives of Other Peoples“In this historically and ethnographically rich book, Marissa Mika shows how African doctors and nurses practice oncology by creating, adapting, and transforming medical infrastructures. Tracing the life of the Uganda Cancer Institute through historical periods of independence, dictatorship, war, structural adjustment, and the HIV pandemic, this powerful book reveals the challenges and opportunities of Africanizing oncology. This is a landmark study on the history—and future—of global oncology.” -- Carlo Caduff, author of The Pandemic Perhaps: Dramatic Events in a Public Culture of Danger“In recounting half a century of research and care at the Uganda Cancer Institute, Marissa Mika tells an unforgettable story of the power of connections and the consequences of their loss. Ugandan physician/researchers and their staff proved the value of therapies because they had made friendships that motivated families to return to Kampala for follow-up, but that knowledge became useless when funders’ priorities changed and international partnerships ended. Mika’s story of UCI shows horrifying wounds—and the possibility of healing—in postindependence Uganda, in global health, and in the way we think about the world.” -- Holly Hanson, author of To Speak and Be Heard: Seeking Good Government in Uganda, ca. 1500–2015
£49.50
MJ - Ohio University Press Moroccan Modernism
Book Synopsis
£26.09
Ohio University Press Hornyheads Madtoms and Darters
Book SynopsisCentral Appalachia hosts a dazzling array of fish species that attracts robust scientific and recreational interests. Stuart A. Welsh draws on the work of early modern naturalists to examine central Appalachian fishes in terms of the food chain, conservation, climate change, and more as he considers these important creatures and their waterways.Trade Review“Stuart A. Welsh has produced an excellent contribution … treating a taxonomically broad subsampling of the diverse Appalachian fish fauna in this book. It affords readers an excellent opportunity to get to know these species and the families they represent in up close and personal detail through user friendly discussions and illustrations.” -- Wayne C. Starnes, coauthor of The Fishes of Tennessee“Several states have field guides to fishes that help identify species. Stuart A. Welsh’s book takes the reader to another level by way of his personal experiences with some of the area’s most fascinating species. This exceptionally readable book will appeal to professional biologists as well as lay naturalists.” -- Thomas K. Pauley, coauthor of Amphibians and Reptiles in West Virginia“With reader friendly stories crafted from his own experiences and published research findings, Stuart A. Welsh helps us peek under the surface. Northern Pike hunt from self-created silt screens; Brook Trout benefit from long-term relationships with eastern hemlock trees; and male Fantail Darters sport a dorsal fin with fleshy knobs, which mimic eggs, which attract females. Welsh’s book will appeal to various curious folks—fishers, paddlers, riffle-sitters—who’ll never look at a stream the same way again.” -- George Constantz, author of Hollows, Peepers, and Highlanders: An Appalachian Mountain Ecology“This book will help the average person understand and appreciate these enigmatic animals via fabulous photos and illustrations, and a mixture of soft and hard science.” -- Daniel Cincotta, fish biologist, West Virginia University and West Virginia Division of Natural Resources
£18.89
MJ - Ohio University Press Another Magic Mountain
Book Synopsis
£26.09
MJ - Ohio University Press Pathos and Power
Book Synopsis
£26.09
MJ - Ohio University Press At the Palaces of Knossos
£16.14
Duke University Press Tarrying with the Negative
Book SynopsisChallenges the contemporary critique of ideology, and in doing so opens the way for a new understanding of social conflict, particularly the recent outbursts of nationalism and ethnic struggle.Trade Review"This new Zizek is as stunning as its predecessors, and breaks new philosophical ground. Not only to Kant and Hegel illuminate Lacan (and vice versa), mass culture and politics illuminate all of them, along with a bonus in an astonishing excursus on opera."—Fredric Jameson“Slavoj Žižek, the Giant of Ljubljana, . . . provides the best intellectual high since Anti-Oedipus.” -- Scott Malcolmson * Voice Literary Supplement *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1 I. Cogito: The Void Called Subject 1. "I or He or It (the Thing) Which Thinks" 9 2. Cogito and the Sexual Difference 45 II. Ergo: The Dialectical Nonsequitur 3. On Radical Evil and Related Matters 83 4. Hegel's "Logic of Essence" as a Theory of Ideology 125 III. Sum: The Loop of Enjoyment 5. "The Wound is Healed Only by the Spear That Smote You" 165 6. Enjoy Your National As Yourself? 200 Notes 239 Index 287
£20.69
Duke University Press Shame and Its Sisters A Silvan Tomkins Reader
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Shame and Its Sisters will have a major impact on the study of culture in the coming years, and on several fronts. It is a significant contribution to the current rethinking of emotion and affect that promises to explore the limits of Freudian and dialectical models of the self, its pleasures, desires, and projects."—W. J. T. Mitchell, Editor, Critical Inquiry"A fascinating, timely, and richly ‘awry’ contribution to recent work on problems of agency, affect, and the nature/culture debate generally. The introduction is superb, exact, and incisive. Shame and Its Sisters will be of real interest to a wide range of readers in the humanities, including history, literature, psychoanalytic theory, work on the problem of the body and the ‘subject,’ systems theory, and more."—Mark Seltzer, Cornell UniversityTable of ContentsShame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins / Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank 1 A Note on the Text 29 1 What Are Affects? 33 2 Interest-Excitement 75 3 Enjoyment-Joy 81 4 Surprise-Startle 107 5 Distress-Anguish 109 6 Shame-Humiliation and Contempt-Disgust 133 7 Script Theory and Nuclear Scripts 179 8 Anger 197 9 Fear-Terror 235 10 Perception: The Body Image and Phantom Limbs 241 Silvan S. Tomkins: A Biographical Sketch / Irving E. Alexander 251 Index 265
£18.89
Duke University Press The Repeating Island
Book Synopsis
£21.59
Duke University Press Experimental Ethnography
Book SynopsisSuitable for visual anthropologists, as well as film scholars interested in experimental and documentary practices, this book focuses on both the avant-garde and visual anthropology. It provides an analyses of more than thirty-five films and videos from the 1890s to the 1990s.Trade Review“The breadth and range of this book is fantastic. Russell tackles many interesting problematics and she does so through an eclectic choice of examples. This will stand out as a major and unique redefinition of the fields of experimental cinema and visual anthropology.”—Ivone Margulies, author of Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday“This is an extremely important and innovative book. Russell brings together two distinct fields from film studies that have previously remained separate—the avant-garde and ethnographic film—and reconstructs their relationship in such a way that both fields are significantly transformed.”—David E. James, author of Power Misses: Essays Across (Un)Popular CultureTable of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Preface xi Introduction to Experimental Ethnography 1. Another Look 2. Surrealist Ethnography Documentary Before Documentary 3. The Body as the Main Attraction 4. Ethnotopias of Early Cinema 5. Playing Primitive The Undisciplined Gaze 6. Zoology, Pornography, Ethnography 7. Framing People: Structural Film Revisited Other Realities 8. Ecstatic Ethnography: Filming Possession Rituals 9. Archival Apocalypse: Found Footage as Ethnography Conclusion 10. Autoethnography: Journeys of the Self Notes Bibliography Filmography Index
£27.90
Duke University Press The Invention of Capitalism
Book SynopsisExamines diaries, letters, and the practical writings of the classical economists to show how Adam Smith and the other classical economists appear to have deliberately obscured the nature of the control of labour and how policies attacking the economic independence of the rural peasantry were essentially conceived to foster primitive accumulation.Trade Review“After reading Michael Perelman's excellent book we see our world in different colors. The origin of market capitalism is the product of strategies pursued to take away from people the conditions for developing alternative ways to live and produce. We also discover that classical political economy has been so instrumental in guiding these strategies. The book leaves us to wonder how the same mechanisms are reproduced today. This critical question pervades the book.”—Massimo De Angelis, University of East London“This study is to be admired for its comprehensiveness, scope, and the amount of unearthing and excavation Perelman provides. The indictment of political economists who addressed themselves to the matter of primitive accumulation is masterful.”—H. T. Wilson, York UniversityTable of ContentsIntroduction: Dark Designs 1. The Enduring Importance of Primitive Accumulation 2. The Theory of Primitive Accumulation 3. Primitive Accumulation and the Game Laws 4. The Social Division of Labor and Household Production 5. Elaborating the Model of Primitive Accumulation 6. The Dawn of Political Economy 7. Sir James Steuart’s Secret History of Primitive Accumulation 8. Adam Smith’s Charming Obfuscation of Class 9. The Revisionist History of Professor Adam Smith 10. Adam Smith and the Ideological Role of the Colonies 11. Benjamin Franklin and the Smithian Ideology of Slavery and Wage Labor 12. The Classics as Cossacks: Classical Political Economy versus the Working Class 13. The Counterattack 14. Notes on Development Conclusion References Index
£22.49
Duke University Press The Other Side of Silence Voices from the
Book SynopsisTrade Review“The Other Side of Silence is without a doubt one of the most important books ever to be written about the Partition of the Indian subcontinent. More than a history, more than a memoir, it is also an extended reflection on narrative form. Official history has always flinched from acknowledging the full extent of the human cost of Partition. Urvashi Butalia shows us why we cannot afford to forget the suffering, the grief, the pain, and the bewilderment that resulted from the division of the subcontinent. [This] is an extraordinary achievement.”—Amitav Ghosh“Selective amnesia and memory are at the root of the relationship between human beings and their history. This book pierces that amnesia, elicits buried memories, and lays the foundations for a more evolved relationship between human beings on this subcontinent and their histories of gendered and communal violence.”—Kavita Punjabi, Telegraph (Calcutta)“This is a magnificent and necessary book, rigorous and compassionate, thought-provoking and moving. Oral history at its best.”—Salman Rushdie“[L]ays bare the passions of fear and hatred that too often drive the India-Pakistan relationship. . . . The raw horror of it all is mitigated by the author’s skillful prose, which draws the reader into the Indian story.” * Foreign Affairs *“Butalia has collected some fascinating material.” -- Akash Kapur * New York Times Book Review *“Butalia is a pioneer in feminist publishing in India. She is especially alert to the presence—and absence—of marginal voices. . . . [T]he study of popular interpretations of violence as well as the persistence of memory makes this book a critical, self-reflective work. It may seem paradoxical, but the book’s freshness comes also from the fact that it examines wounds that have festered for more than fifty years.” -- Amitava Kumar * The Nation *“Butalia’s book is remarkable for the author’s critical analysis of her own experiences as well as of the existing literature, and for her skillful demonstration of how the memory of Partition continues to affect India today.” * Publishers Weekly *“Butalia’s narratives shed light upon the role of religion in shaping identities of families and communitites.” -- Chandra S. Mallampalli * Books & Culture *“Libraries collecting on genocide, migrations, and freedom struggles definitely need this work.” * Library Journal *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix 1. Beginnings 1 2. Blood 21 3. 'Facts' 53 4. Women 85 5. 'Honour' 137 6. Children 195 7. 'Margins' 233 8. Memory 273 Glossary 295 Index 301
£19.79
Duke University Press Wake the Town and Tell the People
Book SynopsisJamaican dancehall has long been one of the most vital and influential cultural and artistic forces within contemporary global music. This title presents a comprehensive view of this musical and cultural phenomenon: its growth and historical role within Jamaican society, its economy of star making, and its technology of production.Trade Review“Dancehall is not just about music, it is about a way of life. Norman Stolzoff clearly understands this. I would tell anyone who wants to get a picture of reggae and the Jamaican people to take a read of Wake the Town and Tell the People-it's worth it. ‘Blessed.’ ”—Beenie Man, reigning king of the dancehall and two-time reggae Grammy nominee for Many Moods of Moses and The Doctor“Norman Stolzoff has gone where many fear to tread - to the very heart of the dancehall milieu in the depths of the Kingston ghetto, emerging with the first full, objective look at this fertile birthing ground of Jamaican music. Wake the Town introduces us to many of the prime figures in DJ culture—producers, promoters, selectors and artists—and traces their history back hundreds of years. It is a remarkable work.”—Roger Steffens, co-author of Bob Marley: Spirit Dancer and Old Fire Sticks: The Autobiography of Bunny Wailer“Stolzoff's comprehensive analysis will unquestionably be an important contribution to the growing field of Latin American/Caribbean popular music studies. But beyond its importance as the ‘first’ study of dancehall, this book is outstanding because of its theoretical sophistication, its comprehensive scope, and its firm grounding in extensive fieldwork among dancehall participants.”—Deborah Pacini-Hernandez, author of Bachata: A Social History of Dominican Popular Music“This is the first sustained study of Jamaican dancehall music and culture in all of its aspects. Everyone interested in the island music, and in popular music in general, will find something useful in this book.”—Andrew Ross, author of The Celebration Chronicles“An admirable attempt to change the terms of the debate engaged in by the foreign journalists and tastemakers who have dominated the discourse on Jamaican music. . . . Stolzoff’s historical analysis of dancehall culture, particularly how it grew out of the gang rivalry sponsored by Jamaica’s two main political parties, effectively maps the socio-political onto the music. . . His fieldwork and reportage of numerous yard dances is a crucial contribution to the literature.” -- Peter Shapiro * The Wire *“An engaging anthropological study of dancehall.” -- Aaron Cohen * DownBeat *“The first comprehensive study of a largely misunderstood and underestimated phenomenon.” * Publishers Weekly *“We are indebted to [Stolzoff] for his time and effort in putting together what must be, essentially, the most academic work on dancehall culture so far. . . . A very interesting and attractive book, it ought to be a watershed for how the music is studied in the future: As being much more than just music and dance and dubplates and deejays, but an intrinsic cultural force which has obviously influenced our society much more than many of us want to admit.” -- Balford Henry * Jamaica Gleaner *“Delivering an illuminating profile of an undeniably infectious form, Stolzoff weaves his strands of interdisciplinary research into a focused depiction of social struggle and ghetto stardom. . . . Wake the Town takes its rightful place at the top of a growing list of hands-on reggae analyses.” -- Jeff Gibson * Bookforum *“Norman Stolzoff seems to be the ideal chronicler. . . . Calling Wake the Town one of the best books written about Jamaican music is of course faint praise. . . . Armchair travelers will be rewarded with a visit to a place armchair travelers almost never go. Not the least of this book’s virtues is its title, which is taken from a tune by U Roy. In like fashion my summary paraphrases King Stitt: ‘No matter what the people say—this book leads the way.’ ” -- Michael Turner * Beat *"An extremely important piece of scholarship and an enormous contribution to studies of popular culture, both in Jamaica and beyond. . . . The first sustained analysis of dancehall culture that I know of, and the first analysis of any kind that is so holistic in its coverage. . . . Impressive. . . . Should generate considerable debate in the field of cultural studies." -- Belinda Edmondson * interventions *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations xi Preface xiii Acknowledgments xxv 1 Dancehall Culture in Jamaica: An Introduction 1 2 "From Way Back When": The Dancehall from Slavery to World War II 20 3 "Talking Blues": The Rise of the Sound System 41 4 "Get Up, Stand Up": The Dancehall in Post-Independence Jamaica 65 5 The Dub Market: The Recording Studio and the Production of Dancehall Culture 115 6 "I'm Like a Gunshot Heading Toward a Target": The Career Trajectory of the Dancehall Entertainer 151 7 "Run Come Inna the Dance": The Dancehall Performance 193 8 The Politics of Dancehall Culture: A Conclusion 227 Notes 249 Bibliography 273 Index 285
£25.19
Duke University Press Haunted Media
Book SynopsisExamines American culture's persistent association of new electronic media - from the invention of the telegraph to the introduction of television and computers - with paranormal or spiritual phenomena.Trade Review“Death, desire and distance are Jeffrey Sconce's companions in this truly spooky journey through the ‘troubling afterlife of modernity.’ His brilliant and beautifully written history of the uncanny powers ascribed to the electronic media is a wonderful catalogue of popular fantasies. But more profoundly it is a symptomatology of media theory too. In fact and fiction alike we are caught up in wild imaginings that seek transcendance in transmission, from the ether to the Internet. Where redemption is sought from the ‘liveness’ of technology, Sconce advises caution. Or, as one of the quirky spirits he unearths implores via radio, ‘bring a halibut!’ ”—John Hartley, Queensland University of Technology“Sconce offers an original and productive examination of the diverse social responses to 150 years of electronic communication. The result is an important and evocative book, notable for both its insights and its engaging style.”—William Boddy, author of Fifties Television: The Industry and Its Critics“This is a powerful, compelling, and historically informed analysis of popular representations of electronic presence. Sconce has a rare ability to write about complex cultural phenomena in a poetic fashion, offering the reader a fascinating counterpart to existing scholarship in this area.”—Michael Curtin, author of Redeeming the Wasteland: Television Documentary and Cold War PoliticsTable of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction Mediums and media The voice from the void Alien ether Static and stasis Simulation and psychosis Notes; Bibliography
£18.89
Duke University Press Complexities
Book SynopsisAsks what is meant by complexity and how it might be handled within knowledge practices without generating a chaos of further complexities.Trade Review“Extremely timely, important, and well-defined, this book is precisely on target in focusing on heterogeneous studies that treat knowledge as local. The types of science and technology discussed are diverse and well-balanced.”—David Stump, coeditor of The Disunity of Science: Boundaries, Contests, and Power"Complexities would be an excellent supplemental text in upper-division undergraduate or graduate courses in logic, philosophy, political science, global human-resource management, or cultural diversity. The real-world nature of the essays and the lack of clear conclusions make the selections in this book an excellent starting point for class discussions and reflective practice exercises. Used effectively, this book should aid students in demonstrating competence in synthesizing, evaluating, and judging the advantages and disadvantages of courses of behavior." -- Cheryl Crozier Garcia * International Social Science Review *"This volume begins to address a theme of increasing importance within sociology. Although it is produced form within the field of science and technology studies, it should have a broader appeal among other social scientists, including those who are interested in social theory, cultural studies, communications, management, and organizational research." -- Anne Gatensby * Contemporary Sociology *Table of ContentsComplexities: An Introduction / Annemarie Mol and John Law Romantic and Baroque Conceptions of Complex Wholes in the Sciences / Chunglin Kwa Which Road to Follow? The Moral Complexity of an “Equipped” Humanity / Laurent Thevenot On Space and Depth / Marilyn Strathern On Hidden Heterogeneities: Complexity, Formalism, and Aircraft Design / John Law In the Middle of the Network / Andrew Barry When Elephants Stand for Competing Philosophies of Nature: Amboseli National Park, Kenya / Charis Thompson Writing and (Re)writing Devices as Tools for Managing Complexity / Michel Callon Cutting Surgeons, Walking Patients: Some Complexities Involved in Comparing / Annemarie Mol The Disposal of Fear: Childhood, Trauma, and Complexity / Nick Lee and Steven D. Brown Contributors Index
£26.59
Duke University Press Silence on the Mountain
Book SynopsisAuthor reconstructs the unwritten, taboo history of the Guatemalan civil war, focusing on the peasants who picked coffee, supported guerrilla movements of the 1970s and 1980s, and suffered the most when the military government retaliated with violence.Trade Review“Silence on the Mountain has the seductive allure and vivid characters of the finest fiction and the penetration of the most elegant journalism. Mr. Wilkinson’s painstaking work has crucial lessons for our government’s future role not only in Latin America but in the entire world. Above all, his book serves literature’s deepest impulse: to bring forth truth out of silence.”—The 2003 pen/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction citation“This is an extraordinary tale, and an extremely well-told one. Written like a modern explorer’s journal, Silence on the Mountain is the account of Daniel Wilkinson’s self-appointed mission to uncover dark secrets in a shady corner of Guatemala. With humility, humor, honesty . . . he has given us a rare and intimate understanding of how this achingly beautiful country became one of the Western Hemisphere’s most brutalized places.”— Jon Lee Anderson, author of Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life“Wilkinson sets out to tell the story of Guatemala’s recently ended thirty-six-year internal war through the secret history of one venerable coffee plantation. The result reads like a novel, narrated by a disarmingly funny, perceptive, deeply humane young American who knows how to wear his courage lightly. You feel as if you are riding with Wilkinson on his beat-up motorcycle up muddy, dangerous jungle trails into the heart of a secretive country just waking up from a long nightmare. . . . A brilliant and important book.”— Francisco Goldman, author of The Long Night of White Chickens"A young human rights lawyer with an eye for detail and the gumption to ride a rickety motorcycle to get to the bottom of a story until now largely untold, Wilkinson has written a book full of grim details about exploitation of coffee pickers, genocidal massacres, and frustrated leftist organizing." -- Clifford Krauss * New York Times Book Review *"The author's style is taut and precise, but it is the Guatemalans themselves who speak with the greatest eloquence." * The New Yorker *“Part travelogue, part historical thriller, and part chronicle of self-awakening, the book does indeed resonate with ‘big picture’ subjects such as terrorism, globalization, human rights, and migration.” -- Alvis Dunn * Hispanic American Historical Review *"[Silence on the Mountain] document[s] unthinkable horror, insisting as we try to turn away that attention must be paid, that what happened there must never happen again, that the past isn't past at all." -- Joanne Omang * Washington Post *"[A] page-turning work of detective nonfiction." -- Diana Nelson Jones * Pittsburgh Post-Gazette *"[C]ombines the probity of a serious historian with the literary instincts of a crime writer . . . peeling back layers of silence and deceit in ways that are reminiscent of what Marcel Ophüls's film The Sorrow and the Pity did for Vichy France." -- Peter Canby * The Nation *"Given the recidivist nature of U.S. policy in Latin America, Wilkinson's book [is] a well-timed reminder of the potentially devastating consequences of our successes." -- Alex Stone * Washington Monthly *"Anyone who knows little or nothing about Guatemala can pick up Silence on the Mountain and be reliably filled in. Students of anthropology will appreciate its textual accessibility. Specialists, too, should not be disappointed and will surely admire the commitment and dedication that went into the book's composition." -- W. George Lovell * American Anthropologist *"Wilkinson's quest for information takes him from the upper to the lower to the middle classes, through the different tiers of Guatemala's dependent export economy, all the way to your morning latte." -- David Stoll * The New Republic *Table of ContentsI. A House Burned The Owner 3 The Student 7 The Battlefield 11 Exhumation 19 II. Ashes Fell Rumor 29 Travelogue 32 Natural History 42 Bildungsroman 48 Revelation 56 Decree 65 III. A Future Was Buried A Dangerous Question 83 The Law That Would Change the World 157 Betrayal 168 Burials 180 IV. And They Were the Eruption The Savages 193 Sacuhum 199 The Guerrillas 217 The Politicians 252 The Terrorist 307 The Defeated 337 The Storytellers 350 List of Names 361 Notes on Sources 362 Selected Bibliography 367 Acknowledgments 372 Index 374
£19.94
Duke University Press Creating the Creole Island
Book SynopsisA historical reconstruction of the making of a slave society in the Indian Ocean.Trade Review“Creating the Creole Island is a riveting portrait of a slave-owning society. Megan Vaughan’s elegant narrative combines rich and ground-breaking historical analysis with acute theorizing of human subjectivity. It will be of compelling interest to anyone concerned with the emergence of our modern ‘creole’ world.”—Michael Lambek, author of The Weight of the Past: Living with History in Mahajanga, Madagascar“Megan Vaughan has given us a vivid portrait of how a society was formed from the mixture of peoples and languages of eighteenth-century Mauritius. Slaves take the initiative here—one of the many new insights that Creating the Creole Island brings to history, literature, and anthropology. And the book is a wonderful read besides.”—Natalie Zemon Davis, author of Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives“Creating the Creole Island offers an exciting and innovative approach to slave history in the eighteenth century. It is an extremely valuable resource for scholars working on slave histories from a variety of disciplinary angles. Its primary objective of historicizing the process of ‘creolisation’ contributes an invaluable dimension to current debates on ethnicity and identity in postcolonial Mauritius.” -- Srilata Ravi * Postcolonial Studies *"[P]owerful set of arguments about what it means to be a slave. . . . [A] compellingly detailed tale. . . . This is an important book of huge interest to Mauritian specialists and historians of the slave trade and slavery elsewhere, as well as scholars interested in questions of gender and identity." -- Clare Anderson * American Anthropologist *"Megan Vaughan's study is a tour de force. . . . A truly splendid and wide-ranging book with ramifications well beyond Mauritius. . . .This is a highly engaging, lively book." * Statement of the Prize Committe for the Heggoy Prize from the French Colonial Historical Society *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Preface xi 1. In the Beginning 1 2. Engineering a Colony, 1735–1767 33 3. Enlightenment Colonialism and Its Limits, 1767–1789 56 4. Roots and Routes: Ethnicity without Origins 91 5. A Baby in the Salt Pans: Mothering Slavery 123 6. Love in the Torrid Zone 152 7. Reputation, Recognition, and Race 178 8. Speaking Slavery: Language and Loss 202 9. Métissage and Revolution 229 10. Sugar and Abolition 253 Notes 277 Works Cited 305 Index 329
£27.90
Duke University Press Social Choreography Ideology as Performance in
Book SynopsisWork links dance and the aesthetics of everyday movement to ideas about social order.Trade Review“Social Choreography is an intelligent, precisely argued new take on longstanding issues regarding the relationship of ideologies and aesthetics, one which invigorates those debates through its encounter with the visual and kinesthetic materiality of dance forms.”—Jane Desmond, editor of Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance“A work of stunning originality and relentless intelligence, Social Choreography restores the performing body to its central place in the narrative of aesthetic modernism and its vexed relationship to politics. Taking his examples from the history of dance, popular as well as elite, and the discourses surrounding it in Europe and America, Andrew Hewitt conducts a master class in non-reductive ideology critique.”—Martin Jay, author of Songs of Experience: Modern European and American Variations on a Universal Theme“Innovative and groundbreaking, Social Choreography is a major contribution to intellectual history and in particular to the history of social theory. It is also a very important contribution to aesthetics where the reemergence of dance significantly reorders the hierarchy of the arts and of the tradition of theorizing the arts.”—Fredric Jameson, Duke UniversityTable of ContentsIntroduction: Social Choreography and the Aesthetic Continuum 1 1. The Body of Marsyas: Aesthetic Socialism and the Physiology of the Sublime 37 2. Stumbling and Legibility: Gesture and the Dialectic of Tact 78 3. "America Makes Me Sick!": Nationalism, Race, Gender, and Hysteria 117 4. The Scandalous Male Icon: Nijinsky and the Queering of Symbolist Aesthetics 156 5. From Women to Girl: Mass Culture and Gender Panic 177 Notes 213 Index 249
£25.19
Duke University Press Phonographies Grooves in Sonic AfroModernity
Book SynopsisCultural study of the effects of sound technologies--from the phonograph to the Walkman--on African American literature, art, and music in the twentieth centuryTrade Review“Phonographies is extraordinary. Its acute, brilliant, and unprecedented attention to technology and its relation to music, literature, and Afro-diasporic subjectivity and citizenship make it one of the most important and significant contributions to black studies, cultural studies, and aesthetic theory in the last ten years. Phonographies demands, and will abundantly repay, the careful attention of its readers and listeners.”—Fred Moten, author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition“A glorious and important contribution to the literatures on music technologies, black music, black writing, and race studies, Phonographies is unique. For the first time, we have a theory that suggests how powerful black culture is in the course of modernity and that accounts for the almost global dominance of black modes of musicality in world cultures since the advent of recorded sound.”—John Corbett, author of Extended Play: Sounding Off from John Cage to Dr. Funkenstein“Exacting, incisive, and stylistically engaging from start to finish, Phonographies is the most far-reaching reconfiguration of the vexed relations between Afrodiasporic modernity, phonography, aurality, and subjectivity published to date. Alexander Weheliye stages a rich set of encounters between DuBois and Ellison, Tricky and Gilroy, Derrida and Armstrong, Glissant and The Fugees in order to open up the entangled topography he terms ‘sonic Afro-modernity.’ In so doing, Weheliye has produced a discursive intervention that is thrilling in its detail, rigorous in its arguments, and profound in its implications. A deeply considered, important volume.”—Kodwo Eshun, author of More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction“In this outstanding book, Alexander G. Weheliye combines sound ‘phono’ and writing ‘graph’ in the classic texts of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and W. E. B Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk to create Phonographies : Grooves in Sonic Afro-modernity. This book is an original examination of sound (often comparing it to visual representations), music, music technologies (from the phonograph to iPods) and disk jockeying. Phonographies includes a multitude of well-researched references to key writers in African American studies, music history, literary criticism and cultural studies, drawing upon the work of Althusser, Derrida, Deleuze, Freud, and Lacan, amongst others, to inform views. . . . [Phonographies is] definitely worth reading more than once; it is a highly significant text for the field of African American Studies.” -- Emma Louise Kilkelly * Journal of American Studies *"Phonographies is often original and challenging . . . strong interdisciplinary connections are made and new insights emerge, and the seamless manner in which he does it startles most of all." * The Wire *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Intro: It’s Beginning to Feel Like . . . 1 1. Hearing Sonic Afro-Modernity 19 2. “I Am I Be”: A Subject of Sonic Afro-Modernity 46 3. In the Mix 73 4. Consuming Sonic Technologies 106 5. Sounding Diasporic Citizenship 145 Outro: Thinking Sound/Sound Thinking (Slipping into the Breaks Remix) 199 Notes 211 Works Cited 257 Index 279
£20.69
Duke University Press Anthropology and Social Theory
Book SynopsisThe award-winning anthropologist Sherry B. Ortner draws on her longstanding interest in theories of cultural practice to rethink key concepts of culture, agency, and subjectivity.Trade Review“An important and especially usable collection by one of the most influential essayists in anthropology, introduced by a lucid and original review of key concepts as they have been applied to the remarkable range of Sherry Ortner’s research achievements. Her response to recent challenges to the idea of culture is alone worth the price of the book.”—George Marcus, University of California, Irvine“At once challenging and admirably accessible, these essays trace the thinking of one of anthropology’s most notable practitioners as she—and her discipline—wrestles with key conundrums facing the late-modern social sciences.”—Jean Comaroff, University of Chicago“This is vintage Ortner. No one else writes anthropological theory so clear, so down-to-earth, or so accessible to non-anthropologists.”—William H. Sewell Jr., author of Logics of History: Social Theory and Social TransformationTable of ContentsIntroduction: Updating Practice Theory 1 Chapter One: Reading America: Preliminary Notes on Class and Culture 19 Chapter Two: Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal 42 Chapter Three: Identities: The Hidden Life of Class 63 Chapter Four: Generation X: Anthropology in a Media-Saturated World 80 Chapter Five: Subjectivity and Cultural Critique 107 Chapter Six: Power and Projects: Reflections on Agency 129 Notes 155 References Cited 167 Index 181
£22.79
Duke University Press Ordinary Affects
Book SynopsisPresents an argument for attention to various dimensions of everyday life and the potential that animates the ordinary. This book shows how ordinary impacts create the subject as a capacity to affect and be affected. It relates the intensities and banalities of common experiences and encounters, and the lingering resonance of passing events.Trade Review“Ordinary Affects works superbly as a challenge to prevailing norms of social and cultural research and as an effective call to surface, to the mundane, and the ordinary. . . . At their best, [these vignettes] are as fascinating as a short story by Raymond Carver, though they show an intellectual lineage with figures like Walter Benjamin, Michel Leiris, and Michael Taussig .” - Craig Campbell, Space and Culture“In this short, insightful book, Kathleen Stewart probes a dizzying range of scenes and structures of ordinary life in America. With keen ethnographic attention to American cultural detail, Stewart exposes the multilayered forces, surges, blockages, and intensities that shape and invent the affective texture of, and complex public feelings pervading, disparate but familiar places and vehicles of the American dreamscape: supermarkets, cars, malls, highways, subdivisions, small towns, motels, railroads, and so on. . . . Stewart contributes great insight for revising theoretical and methodological approaches to ordinary life and culture and, in so doing, provides an overdue and important entry on the meaning and uses of affect for anthropology. The appearance of Ordinary Affects augurs well for new and productive forms of ethnographic inquiry and cultural study.” - David Staples, American Ethnologist“Stewart’s ethnographer’s eye and attention to concrete, lived experience give us an extraordinarily vivid portrayal of America at the end of the twentieth century/dawn of the twenty-first. . . . The power of Ordinary Affects is simply this: it asks us to attend to our own networks, to linger on these moments of tension and communion rather than assimilating them quickly into our own personal, private narratives.” - Megan Savage, The Indiana Review“Rather than simply theorizing about cultural poesis, Stewart performs it. . . . Stewart is a gifted storyteller. Her tales are written in the third person, which alienates the author from herself, creating the requisite critical distance rigorous academic scholarship requires. Equally important, however, this narrative format casts readers in the role of affective ethnographer to Stewart’s extraordinarily ordinary stories, awakening us from the stupor induced by far too much torpid academic prose and engendering a new form of critical intimacy.” - Sara L. Warner, Feminist Theory“This is hardly conventional ethnography. It pushes ethnography to the brink and beyond, scoring high in poetics and resonant voice. Ordinary Affects is to ethnography what slow food is to American cuisine. Savor it.” - Elizabeth L. Krause, Anthropology and Humanism“Ordinary Affects is an extraordinary work of finely observed aspects of everyday life in contemporary America. It is a beautiful book about waking life, being awakened to life, and the fear and desire rippling on the surface of people’s ordinary movements through space. Radical yet familiar, it is a profoundly pedagogical book.”—Lauren Berlant, author of The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship“Anything but ordinary, this book rewrites the social sciences from top to bottom through its bleak and beautiful honesty as to the human condition and the conditional nature of our language and concepts. How the author has been able to step outside of the bubble we call reality so as to render reality is a miracle, yet one we might all aspire to on reading this.”—Michael Taussig, Columbia University“Full of resonating stories, encounters quirky in their unapologetic ordinariness, and murmuring objects, this book takes me into the thick world of the everyday in the U.S.A. Intent on critique or explanation, too many scholars hardly know how to experience, much less think, such worlds, and so regularly give them Big Names like Capitalism and Modernity and Neoliberalism. Ordinary Affects sounds the depths and shallows of intimate, particular worlds crucial to finding our way in the tidal basin of contemporary culture. Here are accounts of lives in plain sight, but only if we cultivate the deceptively hard practices of slow looking and off-stage hearing. Kathleen Stewart touches the marrow of things by nurturing an oblique and unrushed sort of attention, one alert to the bio-luminescence generated in ordinary living taken seriously, without which we are in the dark in politics, philosophy, and cultural theory.”—Donna Haraway, University of California, Santa Cruz“Ordinary Affects works superbly as a challenge to prevailing norms of social and cultural research and as an effective call to surface, to the mundane, and the ordinary. . . . At their best, [these vignettes] are as fascinating as a short story by Raymond Carver, though they show an intellectual lineage with figures like Walter Benjamin, Michel Leiris, and Michael Taussig .” -- Craig Campbell * Space and Culture *“In this short, insightful book, Kathleen Stewart probes a dizzying range of scenes and structures of ordinary life in America. With keen ethnographic attention to American cultural detail, Stewart exposes the multilayered forces, surges, blockages, and intensities that shape and invent the affective texture of, and complex public feelings pervading, disparate but familiar places and vehicles of the American dreamscape: supermarkets, cars, malls, highways, subdivisions, small towns, motels, railroads, and so on. . . . Stewart contributes great insight for revising theoretical and methodological approaches to ordinary life and culture and, in so doing, provides an overdue and important entry on the meaning and uses of affect for anthropology. The appearance of Ordinary Affects augurs well for new and productive forms of ethnographic inquiry and cultural study.” -- David Staples * American Ethnologist *“Rather than simply theorizing about cultural poesis, Stewart performs it. . . . Stewart is a gifted storyteller. Her tales are written in the third person, which alienates the author from herself, creating the requisite critical distance rigorous academic scholarship requires. Equally important, however, this narrative format casts readers in the role of affective ethnographer to Stewart’s extraordinarily ordinary stories, awakening us from the stupor induced by far too much torpid academic prose and engendering a new form of critical intimacy.” -- Sara L. Warner * Feminist Theory *“Stewart’s ethnographer’s eye and attention to concrete, lived experience give us an extraordinarily vivid portrayal of America at the end of the twentieth century/dawn of the twenty-first. . . . The power of Ordinary Affects is simply this: it asks us to attend to our own networks, to linger on these moments of tension and communion rather than assimilating them quickly into our own personal, private narratives.” -- Megan Savage * Indiana Review *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Ordinary Affects 1 References 131
£999.99
Duke University Press Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies
Book SynopsisArgues that the political left has failed to claim its ideological victories and subsequently has enabled a depoliticization of crucially political concerns.Trade Review“Jodi Dean provides an incredibly lucid explanation of what neoliberalism has been both in policy terms and collective fantasies of the relation of markets to freedom. But the really threatening Big Other in this book is not neoliberal ideology, but the failed and flawed leftist will that concedes too much power and unity to neoliberalism. This is a frank polemic that will stimulate many arguments about the past and future of critical theory and democratic politics in the United States.”—Lauren Berlant, author of The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship“Jodi Dean’s new book provides what we have all been waiting for: the authentic theoretical analysis of how ideology functions in today’s global capitalism. Her diagnosis of ‘communicative capitalism’ discloses how our ‘really-existing democracies’ curtail prospects of radical emancipatory politics. Dean demonstrates this status of democracy as a political fantasy not through cheap pseudo-Marxist denunciations, but through a detailed examination of social, symbolic, and libidinal mechanisms and practices. To anyone who continues to dwell in illusions about liberal democracy, one should simply say: ‘Hey, didn’t you read Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies?’”—Slavoj Zizek, Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia“In Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies Jodi Dean pulls few punches in her critique of the American Left, for both its complacency and its limited capacity to (or even lack of awareness of the need to) offer a stand of political resistance to power. . . . Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies is not, however, merely a critique of the US Left; it is also a powerful demolition of its claims for a collective existence.” -- David Chandler * Radical Philosophy *‘[A] provocative examination of contemporary Left politics. . . . The complex ideas of poststructuralist thinkers such as Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Zizek figure prominently in her analysis. As in her earlier work, however, Dean is able to relate the value of such thinkers in understanding contemporary events with unique lucidity and clarity. . . . [A]n important, worthwhile, and entertaining contribution to discussions of radical alternatives to current political realities. Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers, upper-division undergraduate students, and above.” -- R. W. Glover * Choice *“Dean’s [text] is stimulating in its ability to offer an alternative view of how neoliberalism achieved apparent invincibility. The work offers a challenge to leftists to produce not only some new, radical ideas but to unite and be heard once more.” -- Lucy Welsh * Feminist Legal Studies *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction: Post-Politics and Left Victory 1 1. Technology: The Promises of Communicative Capitalism 19 2. Free Trade: The Neoliberal Fantasy 49 3. Democracy: A Knot of Hope and Despair 75 4. Resolve: Speaking of Evil 95 5. Ethics: Left Responsiveness and Retreat 123 6. Certainty: 9/11 Conspiracy Theories and Psychosis 145 Notes 177 Bibliography 195 Index 203
£22.49
Duke University Press Mao Zedong and China in the TwentiethCentury
Book SynopsisDescribes Mao Zedongs life and thought in relation to the Chinese revolution and twentieth-century history.Trade Review“Karl’s history offers readers a chance to see China as Mao might have seen it. She implicitly begs the reader to ask, what might Mao, whose portrait still looks out over Tiananmen Square, have thought of China as it rises today? And perhaps more importantly, does it matter? Given the proliferation of interest and intrigue surrounding Mao Zedong’s life, Karl’s history included, the CCP has done wonders to maintain the authority he created while forsaking the China he imagined.” - Angilee Shah, Zócalo Public Square‘[A] reasonably balanced, clear-headed survey of the Great Helmsman’s career and influence. . . . [I]f I had a class of young students approaching the period for the first time, I’d consider this book a not inappropriate textbook to hand them. And by the same measure it can also be recommended to the educated general reader.” - Bradley Winterton, Taipei Times“Rebecca Karl’s important new biography seeks to contextualize Mao within the history of his time, aiming to restore a degree of sanity in discussing his life and role, warts and all, as the father of modern China; and simultaneously to rescue the history of the Chinese Revolution from its detractors in the West and at home.” - Tariq Ali, New Left Review“Rebecca Karl provokes both China scholars and the general public to reassess the Chairman once again. Karl’s book departs from the tendencies to either depoliticize Mao or sensationalize his private life for popular consumption by recentering contemporary discussions around his public role in making revolution.” - Jeremy Tai, Twentieth-Century China“Unlike many other works, [Karl’s] book blends historical facts with cultural analysis, creating a work that is informative despite its brevity. . . . After bringing Mao’s life-story to a close, the author provides a succinct yet meaningful analysis of his legacies. . . . [T]his is a very useful introduction to the most important leader in modern Chinese history.” - Survival“In this succinct and compact narrative of Mao’s personal and intellectual development, Rebecca E. Karl offers an impressive exposition of the formation and evolution of the theory and practice of the Chinese Revolution. Her analysis of ideological tenets in China's revolutionary movement is convincing and more sophisticated than other narratives of Mao’s life and thought.”—Ban Wang, author of Illuminations from the Past: Trauma, Memory, and History in Modern China“Rebecca E. Karl has written a lively, readable account of Mao’s life and thought, showing how they fit into and affected the twentieth-century world.”—Delia Davin, author of Mao Zedong“Karl’s history offers readers a chance to see China as Mao might have seen it. She implicitly begs the reader to ask, what might Mao, whose portrait still looks out over Tiananmen Square, have thought of China as it rises today? And perhaps more importantly, does it matter? Given the proliferation of interest and intrigue surrounding Mao Zedong’s life, Karl’s history included, the CCP has done wonders to maintain the authority he created while forsaking the China he imagined.” -- Angilee Shah * Zócalo Public Square *“Rebecca Karl provokes both China scholars and the general public to reassess the Chairman once again. Karl’s book departs from the tendencies to either depoliticize Mao or sensationalize his private life for popular consumption by recentering contemporary discussions around his public role in making revolution.” -- Jeremy Tai * Twentieth-Century China *“Rebecca Karl’s important new biography seeks to contextualize Mao within the history of his time, aiming to restore a degree of sanity in discussing his life and role, warts and all, as the father of modern China; and simultaneously to rescue the history of the Chinese Revolution from its detractors in the West and at home.” -- Tariq Ali * New Left Review *“Unlike many other works, [Karl’s] book blends historical facts with cultural analysis, creating a work that is informative despite its brevity. . . . After bringing Mao’s life-story to a close, the author provides a succinct yet meaningful analysis of his legacies. . . . [T]his is a very useful introduction to the most important leader in modern Chinese history.” * Survival *‘[A] reasonably balanced, clear-headed survey of the Great Helmsman’s career and influence. . . . [I]f I had a class of young students approaching the period for the first time, I’d consider this book a not inappropriate textbook to hand them. And by the same measure it can also be recommended to the educated general reader.” -- Bradley Winterton * Taipei Times *Table of ContentsPreface and Acknowledgments 1. China in the World in Mao's Youth 2. From Liberal to Communist, 1912–1921 3. Toward the Peasant Revolution, 1921–1927 4. Establishing Revolutionary Bases: From Jinggangshan to Yan'an, 1928–1935 5. Yan'an, the War of Resistance against Japan, and Civil War, 1935–1949 6. Stabilizing Society and the Transition to Socialism, 1949–1957 7. Great Leap and Restoration, 1958–1965 8. The Cultural Revolution:Politics in Command, 1966–1969 9. The Cultural Revolution: Denouement and the Death of Mao, 1969–1976 10. Reform, Restoration, and the Repudiation of Maoism, 1976–present Notes Bibliography Index
£18.99
Duke University Press On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods
Book SynopsisBuilding on his earlier book We Have Never Been Modern, Bruno Latour develops his argument about the Modern fetishization of facts, or the creation of factishes.Trade Review“Latour is the best scholar in the field with a huge range and fine grasp ofthe literature. . . . Latour can also be a sparkling writer, exploiting his licence as a foreigner to write English with flair and adventure. . . . I admire [Chapter 3] not only because of its brilliance and fresh insights but also because of the courage it must have taken to write it.” - Harry Collins, Metascience“. . . [B]oth thought provoking and potentially transformative. Latour lulls the reader into accompanying him on a quest to rethink objects as acting independently of our belief in them, and through this same belief. He also exemplifies this wonderful goal, proper to anthropology at its best: to displace common sense understanding and its objects, not deconstruct them.” - Julie Kleinman, Anthropological Quarterly“Latour came into view in the 1980s as an uncommonly engaging as well as radical practitioner of the new discipline of science studies.... witty, imaginative, literate and unrelentingly ironic. For some, all this spells something manifestly frivolous and naturally suspect. Others, including many not ordinarily drawn to treatises on science and technology, are attracted by Latour’s style into engaging with ideas they find illuminating and a mode of analysis they can use.” - Barbara Herrnstein Smith, London Review of Books"Eloquent, amusing and fabulously well-informed, Bruno Latour is one of the superstars of French intellectual life…. His recent book On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods shows that Latour remains a great star." - Jonathan Rée, New Humanist“Bruno Latour’s is a joyous and generous science, not a warmongering, invidious one. His unique intellectual trajectory beautifully replicates those strange objects he was the first to fully discern. For his work is eminently suitable to an actor-network treatment; it thrives on associations; it deals in mediations; it articulates heterogeneous modes of existence; it modulates its own regime of enunciation as the truth it describes changes its own conditions of production. What started as a ‘social description of scientific practice’ morphed into a radical redescription of the social at least as much as of science itself, and it bloomed as a daring project of a general anthropology of truth, within which facts and fetishes, divine forces and material forms, art and science, religion and law, all are made to inhabit a virtual plane of coexistence, which we are challengingly invited to bring into actuality as our common world.”—Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Museu Nacional (Rio de Janeiro)“What immense spiritual and intellectual relaxation! With what vivacity and cunning Bruno Latour gets us out of the cage holding us hostage to the mumbo-jumbo of Subjects and Objects all these long years of Western Civ. Out-fetishizing these fetishes, nudging us toward the mastery of non-mastery, he invites us thereby to the sort of thinking needed to remake a failing world.”—Michael Taussig, Columbia University“[B]oth thought provoking and potentially transformative. Latour lulls the reader into accompanying him on a quest to rethink objects as acting independently of our belief in them, and through this same belief. He also exemplifies this wonderful goal, proper to anthropology at its best: to displace common sense understanding and its objects, not deconstruct them.” -- Julie Kleinman * Anthropological Quarterly *“Latour came into view in the 1980s as an uncommonly engaging as well as radical practitioner of the new discipline of science studies.... witty, imaginative, literate and unrelentingly ironic. For some, all this spells something manifestly frivolous and naturally suspect. Others, including many not ordinarily drawn to treatises on science and technology, are attracted by Latour’s style into engaging with ideas they find illuminating and a mode of analysis they can use.” -- Barbara Herrnstein Smith * London Review of Books *“Latour is the best scholar in the field with a huge range and fine grasp ofthe literature. . . . Latour can also be a sparkling writer, exploiting his licence as a foreigner to write English with flair and adventure. . . . I admire [Chapter 3] not only because of its brilliance and fresh insights but also because of the courage it must have taken to write it.” -- Harry Collins * Metascience *"Eloquent, amusing and fabulously well-informed, Bruno Latour is one of the superstars of French intellectual life…. His recent book On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods shows that Latour remains a great star." -- Jonathan Rée * New Humanist *Table of ContentsPreface vii 1. On the Cult of the Factish Gods 1 2. What is Iconoclash? Or Is There a World Beyond the Image Wars? 67 3. "Thou Shalt Not Freeze Frame," Or How Not to Misunderstand the Science and Religion Debate 99 Notes 125 Index 151
£18.99
Duke University Press After Sex On Writing since Queer Theory
Book SynopsisProminent participants in the development of queer theory explore the field in relation to their own intellectual itineraries, reflecting on its accomplishments, limitations, and critical potential.Trade Review“At a moment when many had begun to worry that queer theory was becoming little more than a widespread litany of dogmas and slogans, this volume arrives as a wonderful surprise: not only because it reminds us what a contribution the varied intellectual currents grouped together under that rubric have been making—and for nearly twenty years now—to the renewal of our intellectual life; but also, and more importantly, because it shows to what a degree this theoretical effervescence lives on, and how powerfully productive it still is in all its characteristically marvelous variety.”—Didier Eribon, author of Insult and the Making of the Gay Self“[A] a kaleidoscopic collection that rotates around the personal-is-political-is-personal axis of denormativization. . . . Queer theory, in short, is alive and kicking. Having proliferated, branched out, and, so far, resisted ossification, it provides space for diversity and disagreement. Testifying to this, the contributions to After Sex? make an illuminating and, yes, entertaining read.” -- Sylvia Mieszkowski * GLQ *“[T]he value of After Sex? resides in its unwavering commitment to show how the nuances of queer theory aid in making it a powerful form of scholarship and politics. And this motley crew of interdisciplinary scholars reflects the exact kind of bricolage that Cultural Studies argues is productive. More importantly, this book insists that troubling the lenses through which we see the world is imperative if scholars ever want to make sense of a conjuncture that is so complexly intersectional.” -- Raechel Tiffe * Cultural Studies *“Together, the essays that make up this collection offer an engaging insight into the origins, development, expansiveness and potential problems of queer theory. After Sex? does not provide a straightforward, conclusive answer to its own ambiguous question, but then it would be somewhat queer – or, rather, unqueer – if it did.” * Forum for Modern Language Studies *Table of ContentsIntroduction / Janet Halley and Andrew Parker 1 Genealogies of After Queer Times / Carla Freccero 17 Still After / Elizabeth Freeman 27 After Thoughts / Jonathan Goldberg 34 Glad to Be Unhappy / Joseph Litvak 45 Do You Smoke? Or, Is There Life? After Sex? / Michael Moon 55 Post Sex: On Being Too Slow, Too Stupid, Too Soon / Kate Thomas 66 Affects and the (Anti-)Social Starved / Lauren Berlant 79 Shame on You / Leo Bersani 91 Ever After: History, Negativity, and the Social / Lee Edelman 110 Queering Identities What's Queer about Race? / Richard Thompson Ford 121 Queer Theory Addiction / Neville Hoad 130 The Sense of Watching Tony Sleep / José Esteban Muñoz 142 Oklahobo: Following Craig Womack‘s American Indian and Queer Studies / Bethany Schneider 151 Lesbian and Gay after Queer Public Feelings / Ann Cvetkovich 169 Queers ________ This / Heather Love 180 After Male Sex / Richard Rambuss 192 Neither Freud nor Foucault? Lonely / Michael Cobb 207 When? Where? What? / Michael Lucey 221 Queer Theory: Postmortem / Jeff Nunokawa 245 Disturbing Sexuality / Elizabeth A. Povinelli 257 After Sex?! / Erica Rand 270 After After Sex? Melanie Klein and the Difference Affect Makes / Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick 283 Contibutors 303 Index 307
£26.59
Duke University Press Women War and the Making of Bangladesh
Book SynopsisBangladeshi women recall the sexualized violence of the war of 1971, fought between India and what was then East and West Pakistan.Trade Review“Yasmin Saikia’s book is an important intervention in the discourse around 1971. It examines and demonstrates clearly the brutality of war as experienced by various marginalised groups, especially women, and the ongoing routine violence of the silencing of their voices. Saikia documents women’s voices and highlights their agency and the multiplicities of their role in the conflict.” - Chapati Mystery“Saikia raises the rather pertinent, often forgotten, issue of women getting caught up in the cauldron of war and then, once the battlefield activities are over, being either ignored or deliberately pushed to the fringes of the societal order. Saikia’s comprehension of the history of the 1971 war leaves nothing to chance…. Saikia’s professionalism comes touched with empathy.” - Syed Badrul Ahsan, Asian Affairs“In Yasmin Saikia's groundbreaking and provocative book, Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971, she challenges a number of cherished and inherited "truths" regarding the Bangladesh War of Liberation in 1971…. I commend the author for her careful analysis of militarism as a system and the cultivation of hate within it that gradually dehumanizes the Other and makes violence banal.” - Elora Halim Chowdhury and Devin G. Atallah-Gutierrez, Human Rights Quarterly“[H]ighly readable…. The book is written in a lucid style and the stories told by the women make for compelling reading…. [B]ecause it is a product of an eclectic research methodology that includes rich ethnographic fieldwork alongside more traditional archival sources, the book would serve as a wonderful teaching tool in graduate courses on memory, oral histories, and the making of archives.” - Chitralekha Zutshi, H-Net Reviews“Saikia’s Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971 makes a significant contribution to the war literature by documenting the untold stories and the unaccounted suffering of Bangladeshi women…. [P]erhaps the most significant contribution Saikia’s book makes to the 1971 war literature is that it breaks the exclusive claim by Bengalis on the experience of violence during the war by documenting the experiences of both Bihari and Bengali women as well as women of other ethnic and religious backgrounds…. Saikia’s book is a thought provoking read for scholars and students in the fields of Women and Gender Studies, Peace and Conflict Studies, and South Asian Studies.” - Hannah Sholder, South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal“Saikia lets ordinary people speak for themselves – and in so doing, she humanizes a story that’s usually told as a struggle of nations. Together, she and her interview partners make us think anew about the possibilities for remorse, recovery, and forgiveness.” - Elizabeth Heineman, New Books in Gender Studies Blog“These are compelling lessons to learn and reflect on…. this book is an informative read because it lays the framework for an important historical event that hasn't received its fair share of ink. It also explains these events in the context of the suffering of its victims; their apolitical testimonies a reminder that war has no winners.” - Aparajita Saha-Bubna, Warscapes“[A]n important intervention in the discourse around 1971. It examines and demonstrates clearly the brutality of war as experienced by various marginalised groups, especially women, and the ongoing routine violence of the silencing of their voices.” - Salman Adil Hussain, Dawn.com“[H]ighly readable…. The book is written in a lucid style and the stories told by the women make for compelling reading…. [B]ecause it is a product of an eclectic research methodology that includes rich ethnographic fieldwork alongside more traditional archival sources, the book would serve as a wonderful teaching tool in graduate courses on memory, oral histories, and the making of archives.” -- Chitralekha Zutshi * H-Net Reviews *“In Yasmin Saikia's groundbreaking and provocative book, Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971, she challenges a number of cherished and inherited "truths" regarding the Bangladesh War of Liberation in 1971…. I commend the author for her careful analysis of militarism as a system and the cultivation of hate within it that gradually dehumanizes the Other and makes violence banal.” -- Elora Halim Chowdhury and Devin G. Atallah-Gutierrez * Human Rights Quarterly *“Saikia lets ordinary people speak for themselves – and in so doing, she humanizes a story that’s usually told as a struggle of nations. Together, she and her interview partners make us think anew about the possibilities for remorse, recovery, and forgiveness.” -- Elizabeth Heineman * New Books in Gender Studies *“Saikia raises the rather pertinent, often forgotten, issue of women getting caught up in the cauldron of war and then, once the battlefield activities are over, being either ignored or deliberately pushed to the fringes of the societal order. Saikia’s comprehension of the history of the 1971 war leaves nothing to chance…. Saikia’s professionalism comes touched with empathy.” -- Syed Badrul Ahsan * Asian Affairs *“Saikia’s Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971 makes a significant contribution to the war literature by documenting the untold stories and the unaccounted suffering of Bangladeshi women…. [P]erhaps the most significant contribution Saikia’s book makes to the 1971 war literature is that it breaks the exclusive claim by Bengalis on the experience of violence during the war by documenting the experiences of both Bihari and Bengali women as well as women of other ethnic and religious backgrounds…. Saikia’s book is a thought provoking read for scholars and students in the fields of Women and Gender Studies, Peace and Conflict Studies, and South Asian Studies.” -- Hannah Sholder * South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal *“These are compelling lessons to learn and reflect on…. this book is an informative read because it lays the framework for an important historical event that hasn't received its fair share of ink. It also explains these events in the context of the suffering of its victims; their apolitical testimonies a reminder that war has no winners.” -- Aparajita Saha-Bubna * Warscapes *“Yasmin Saikia’s book is an important intervention in the discourse around 1971. It examines and demonstrates clearly the brutality of war as experienced by various marginalised groups, especially women, and the ongoing routine violence of the silencing of their voices. Saikia documents women’s voices and highlights their agency and the multiplicities of their role in the conflict.” * Chapati Mystery *Table of ContentsPreface ix Acknowledgments xv Glossary of Terms xix Part I. Introducing 1971 1. The Told and Untold Stories of 1971 3 2. Creating the History of 1971 34 Part II. Survivors Speak 3. Victims' Memories 109 4. Women's Services 158 5. Women's War 186 Part III. A New Beginning Postscript: Lessons of Violence 215 Notes 279 References 243 Index 299
£20.69
Duke University Press Quantum Anthropologies
Book SynopsisA leading feminist theorist rethinks deconstruction and its relevance to nature, embodiment, materialism, and science.Trade Review“Vicki Kirby’s Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large has the capacity to influence a wide range of contemporary scholars ranging from the humanities to the natural sciences and back again. Its elegant yet complex title reveals a lot of what the book has to say.” - Iris van der Tuin, Somatechnics“To read Vicki Kirby’s work is to encounter feminist theory as if for the first time—the urgency, impact, and sheer pleasure of feminist politics are being written anew. Quantum Anthropologies deliberates on our most elemental questions (What is the body? What is nature?) and argues brilliantly for ontologies that are systemic patternments of textuality and humanicity. This is a fearless book that will deepen and intensify the kinds of feminist questions that can be asked in the generation ahead.”—Elizabeth A. Wilson, author of Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body“Vicki Kirby is a leading theorist of new materialist approaches to feminism, and Quantum Anthropologies is a work of great significance. It is a theoretically sound and robust challenge to our most deeply held ideas about nature versus culture. Provocative, smart, and invigorating, it is a book to think with, one with far-reaching implications for science studies, cultural studies, and poststructuralist, feminist, queer, political, and social theory.”—Karen Barad, author of Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning“Vicki Kirby’s Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large has the capacity to influence a wide range of contemporary scholars ranging from the humanities to the natural sciences and back again. Its elegant yet complex title reveals a lot of what the book has to say.” -- Iris van der Tuin * Somatechnics *Table of ContentsPreface: The Question of Supplementarity - A Quantum Problematic vii Acknowledgments xiii 1. Anthropology Diffracted: Originary Humanicity 1 2. Just Figures?: Forensic Clairvoyance, Mathematics, and the Language Question 22 3. Enumerating Language: "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics" 49 4. Natural Convers(at)ions: Or, What if Culture Was Really Nature All Along? 68 5. (Con)founding "the Human": Rethinking the Incest taboo 89 6. Culpability and the Double-Cross: Irigaray with Merleau-Ponty 111 Notes 137 Works Cited 155 Index 163
£22.79
Duke University Press Reigning the River
Book SynopsisThis ethnography of a river restoration project in Kathmandu, Nepals capital and one of the fastest-growing cities in Southeast Asia, contributes to the nascent anthropology of urban environments.Trade Review“Anthropologists have just begun to turn their attention to cities in the south and Reigning the River is one of the first detailed ethnographies to effectively grapple with the cultural politics of urban natures. It is an admirable project and will not only be of immense relevance to a wide range of readers interested in questions of urban improvement, development, and livelihood struggles, but it also deserves to be read widely by undergraduate and graduate students of urban studies, environmental studies, anthropology, cultural studies, and South Asian studies. It is a pioneering contribution that is bound to have a lasting impact.” - Shubhra Gururani, American Ethnologist“[A] valuable resource for those with a general interest in urban problems orin Nepal for disciplinary specialists.” - John Whelpton, Asian Anthropology“It certainly does represent a considerable advance in the literature of environmentally conscious humanities research, with powerful general conclusions that can guide both practitioners and academics.” - Paul Brown, Asian Studies Review“Cutting-edge social science has not kept pace with the shift of most of the human population to urban areas. Anne M. Rademacher helps to remedy this deficiency by asking, as one of her informants did of her, ‘What is urban ecology?’ In answer, she shows how urban nature and culture are mutually produced, reinforced, and changed, deftly weaving into her analysis recent political and environmental transformations in Nepal. The result is a pioneering study of the moral and affective dimensions of a twenty-first-century urban environment. It is a model for a new generation of urban studies.”—Michael R. Dove, Yale University“This lucidly written and rigorously argued book is likely to become a major contribution to the anthropology of the Himalayan environment, and to the small but growing literature on urban modernity in Nepal. In the eyes of environmental activists, the sorry state of the Bagmati River is a metaphor for the state of Nepal itself. By elucidating the activists’ critique and their vision for a more ordered and coherent future, Anne M. Rademacher makes a deeply original contribution to political anthropology. This book deserves to be widely read both by students of Himalayan society, culture, and politics and by those who work in the areas of Nepal’s environment, development, and governance. The clarity of the writing makes it especially suitable as an undergraduate text in a range of courses on environment and development, political anthropology, urban anthropology, and South Asian studies.”—Arjun Guneratne, Macalester College“Rademacher provides an engaging ethnographic account of environmental and political transformation in Kathmandu, permeated with abundant historical material and written with a close yet critical understanding of the subject. The book, strong on theoretical references to interdisciplinary debates in social science and in the field of Nepal studies, has made its own important contributions in these fields.” -- Tashi Tsering * Environmental History *“[A] valuable resource for those with a general interest in urban problems or in Nepal for disciplinary specialists.” -- John Whelpton * Asian Anthropology *“Anthropologists have just begun to turn their attention to cities in the south and Reigning the River is one of the first detailed ethnographies to effectively grapple with the cultural politics of urban natures. It is an admirable project and will not only be of immense relevance to a wide range of readers interested in questions of urban improvement, development, and livelihood struggles, but it also deserves to be read widely by undergraduate and graduate students of urban studies, environmental studies, anthropology, cultural studies, and South Asian studies. It is a pioneering contribution that is bound to have a lasting impact.” -- Shubhra Gururani * American Ethnologist *Table of ContentsAbout the Series viii Foreword ix Acknowledgments xiii Introduction. A Riverscape Undone 1 1. Creating Nepal in the Kathmandu Valley 42 2. Knowing the Problem 57 3. War, Emergency, and an Unsettled City 91 4. Emergency Ecology and the Order of Renewal 116 5. Ecologies of Invasion 139 6. Local Rivers, Global Reaches 155 Conclusion. Anticipating Restoration 175 Notes 185 References 211 Index 237
£20.99
Duke University Press Red Tape
Book SynopsisExamining the chronic, widespread poverty in India, the world's fourth largest economy, Akhil Gupta theorizes the relation between the state in India and the poor as one of structural violence.Trade Review"This is a landmark study of bureaucratic practices through which the state is actualized in the lives of the poor in India. Akhil Gupta's theoretical sophistication and the ethnographic depth in this book demonstrate how South Asian studies continues to challenge and shape the direction of social theory. This book is a stunning achievement."—Veena Das, author of Life and Words"This long-awaited book is a masterful achievement that offers a close look at the culture of bureaucracy in India and, through this lens, casts new light on structural violence, liberalization, and the paradox of misery in the midst of explosive economic growth. Akhil Gupta's sensitive analysis of the everyday practices of writing, recording, filing, and reporting at every level of the state in India joins a rich literature on the politics of inscription and marks a brilliant new benchmark for political anthropology in India and beyond."—Arjun Appadurai, author of Fear of Small Numbers"Why has the postcolonial state in India seemed so incapable of improving the life chances of the country's poor? In his brilliant book Red Tape, Akhil Gupta argues that the structural violence inherent in the state operates as a form of biopower in which normal bureaucratic procedures depoliticize the killing of the poor. Whether exploring corruption, literacy, or population policy, Gupta provides an utterly original account of the deadly operations of state power associated with the ascendancy of new industrial classes and of neoliberal practice in contemporary India. A tour de force."—Michael Watts, author of Silent Violence“Akhil Gupta’s Red Tape is one of the most insightful, probing and erudite studies that I have read on the Indian bureaucracy and its failures to significantly alter the destinies of millions of India’s poor. . . . Gupta’s findings are complex, multilayered, illuminating and thoughtful; the reader may not agree with all his conclusions, as I did not, but his work is refreshing for not being reductionist and simplistic, and for challenging many accepted assumptions” -- Harsh Mander * Economic and Political Weekly *“[A] novel exploration of the various bureaucratic structures and institutions that make the poor both voiceless and invisible to decision makers and administrators, from Delhi down to the village. . . . Recommended. Upper-division undergraduate students through professionals.” -- M. J. Frost * Choice *“Gupta asks why India, with a rapidly growing economy and a government plus NGOs that actively conduct poverty alleviation programs, continues to have vast, extremely poor, and socially marginalized populations. He frames this as a question in the production of structural violence, supported by a impressively clear and thoughtful review of the strengths and weaknesses of that term. . . . Rarely is a perspective of systems inequality, and one of complexity and diversity, so effectively synthesized.” -- Josiah Heyman * Anthropological Quarterly *“This is a lucid, powerfully original and rigorously argued book...The strength of Akhil Gupta’s writing springs from his consistent rejection of the axiomatic as well as the incidental.” -- Tarangini Sriraman * Studies in Indian Politics *“Red Tape is an engaging volume. Gupta raises critical questions about the connections between ‘the state’ and poverty, and is able to provide some answers through ethnographic data. . . . [T]he volume can be strongly recommended to scholars studying the ‘state in India’, and poverty and development more generally.” -- Terah Sportel * Progress in Development Studies *“The greatest strength of this book is that its complex theoretical argument connects an easy-to-read narrative that transports the reader to the rural settings in Uttar Pradesh. Hence, its rich content will appeal to a wider audience mainly because it adds to the literature on the culture and politics of the state. Although it specifically relates to fieldwork in rural India, by using Foucault and Agamben, social theorists who have wider appeal, this book will extend its global readership.” -- Rohit Madan * Gender, Place & Culture *“Akhil Gupta’s masterfully crafted book seeks to contribute to our understanding of the persistence of poverty in India despite high rates of growth and numerous public programmes designed to eradicate this malaise. . . . it makes an important contribution to the study of the quotidian practices that constitute the state, the conceptualization of poverty as structural violence, and the manner in which corruption, state inscriptions, and neoliberal governmentality combine to produce the systematic arbitrariness that perpetuates poverty in the country.” -- Indrajit Roy * Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute *“Red Tape is written with matchless clarity and deliberation, and brims with ethnographic insight. More importantly, it is a profoundly moral book that joins outrage with cold-eyed analysis of abject poverty that kills. . . . Akhil Gupta has produced a tour-de-force: an argument that is ambitious, erudite, bold, and, best of all, generative to think with.” -- Vinay Gidwani * Environment and Planning D *“Red Tape is a brave attempt to answer a harrowing question: ‘Why has a state whose proclaimed motive is to foster development failed to help the large number of people who still live in dire poverty?’ (p. 3). . . Gupta’s account of the relationship between written documents and oral accounts, and also statistics and narrative, makes a significant contribution to existing anthropological analysis of the construction of knowledge in bureaucratic settings.” -- Gemma John * PoLAR *“[A] superb interrogation of bureaucracy and poverty in contemporary India. . . .” -- Benjamin Siegel * Contemporary South Asia *“[M]agesterial. . . . Red Tape beautifully and gut-wrenchingly reveals how and why the government regularly fails to deliver on its promise.” -- Sharmila Rudrappa * Contemporary Sociology *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Part One. Introduction 1. Poverty as Biopolitics 3 2. The State and the Politics of Poverty 41 Part Two. Corruption 3. Corruption, Politics, and the Imagined State 75 4. Narratives of Corruption 111 Part Three. Inscription 5. "Let the Train Run on Paper": Bureaucratic Writing as State Practice 141 6. Literacy, Bureaucratic Domination, and Democracy 191 Part Four. Governmentality 7. Population and Neoliberal Governmentality 237 Epilogue 279 Notes 295 References Cited 329 Index 355
£27.90
Duke University Press The Problem with Work
Book SynopsisThe Problem with Work develops a Marxist feminist critique of the structures and ethics of work, as well as a perspective for imagining a life no longer subordinated to them.Trade Review“Finally, a well-reasoned and critical treatise on the nature of work has appeared that grapples with the work ethic and wrestles it into submission.” - The Right to Be Lazy blog“The Problem with Work . . . is bold for several reasons. Not the least of which is for its fundamental argument that work should be understood as a concern of political theory, that work is a matter of power and domination as much as it is productivity and economics. This academic provocation aside, Weeks’ book is bold in taking up the critique of work, in claiming anti-work politics. In doing so it breaks both with the dominant ideology that makes work a testament to one’s moral worth and with the center-left contestation of this ideology that demands more aggressive jobs programs to put people to work.” - Unemployed Negativity blog“[T]his is well worth a read, as Weeks presents a set of imaginative and insightful ideas in a clear and thoroughly argued format.” - Ruth Lorimer, Socialist Review“Faced with the neoliberal fiat that market values now define what is valuable as such, and that now, more than ever, work is the sole aim for which we all must live, Kathi Weeks stares back without blinking and demands something different. She urges readers to insist on less work and more money, and to do so in a self-consciously militant, utopian register. Combining an imaginative critique of neoliberalism’s warp-drive work ethic with a subtle and badly needed recuperation of the utopian as a mode of political theory and action, The Problem with Work makes a vital contribution to feminist theory, Marxist theory, and the growing political-theoretical literature on time and temporality.” - Paul Apostolidis, Theory & Event“Put another way, The Problem with Work ... raise[s] key issues for feminism, including the question of whether capitalism can serve the interests of women today and in the future... Th[is book] should be widely read, discussed, and debated...” - Julie P. Torrant, Signs“The Problem with Work is one of the most exciting and original works of social theory that I have read in a great many years. Kathi Weeks’s argument is daring and extremely well executed, and her book is remarkable for its clarity, compulsive readability, and insightful synthesis of critical social theories. This is a truly wonderful book.”—Judith Grant, author of Fundamental Feminism: Contesting the Core Concepts of Feminist Theory“Kathi Weeks’s excellent book shows us that the project to build a postwork society is a feminist project, one that understands that the real liberation of labor must be the liberation from labor.”—Antonio Negri, author of The Labor of Job: The Biblical Text as a Parable of Human Labor“Less work or better work? Should alienated labor be a focus of political economic critique or is it more important to question the centrality of work to life and productivity to self-worth? Kathi Weeks builds a feminist political theory of work from these questions. The result is a provocative argument that not only sheds new light on second-wave feminism by putting the 1970s demand for wages for housework in dialogue with autonomist Marxism but reminds that tradition of its debts to feminist theory and activism.”—Lisa Disch, University of Michigan“[Weeks] convincingly shows how an imperative to be productive, at work, in the home, school and in life generally (’Five Top Tips for Productive Dating Profiles!’), is central to the way capitalism not only puts us to work but makes us want to be put to work. We think work is right and just and when we imagine another world, even a ‘post-revolutionary world’, we imagine a world of work. Weeks argues that we need to break the hold that work has on our imaginations.” -- Nicholas Beuret * Red Pepper *“The Problem with Work ... raise[s] key issues for feminism, including the question of whether capitalism can serve the interests of women today and in the future... Th[is book] should be widely read, discussed, and debated...” -- Julie P. Torrant * Signs *“There’s no better way to spend the summer months than by thinking about waged labor, which is why I’m currently reading The Problem with Work, an inventive examination of how seemingly reformist measures such as universal basic income and reduced workweeks can be used as stepping stones toward a world beyond the daily grind.” -- Frank Reynolds * The Nation *“The Problem with Work . . . is bold for several reasons. Not the least of which is for its fundamental argument that work should be understood as a concern of political theory, that work is a matter of power and domination as much as it is productivity and economics. This academic provocation aside, Weeks’ book is bold in taking up the critique of work, in claiming anti-work politics. In doing so it breaks both with the dominant ideology that makes work a testament to one’s moral worth and with the center-left contestation of this ideology that demands more aggressive jobs programs to put people to work.” * Unemployed Negativity blog *“[T]his is well worth a read, as Weeks presents a set of imaginative and insightful ideas in a clear and thoroughly argued format.” -- Ruth Lorimer * Socialist Review *“Faced with the neoliberal fiat that market values now define what is valuable as such, and that now, more than ever, work is the sole aim for which we all must live, Kathi Weeks stares back without blinking and demands something different. She urges readers to insist on less work and more money, and to do so in a self-consciously militant, utopian register. Combining an imaginative critique of neoliberalism’s warp-drive work ethic with a subtle and badly needed recuperation of the utopian as a mode of political theory and action, The Problem with Work makes a vital contribution to feminist theory, Marxist theory, and the growing political-theoretical literature on time and temporality.” -- Paul Apostolidis * Theory & Event *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction. The Problem with Work 1 1. Mapping the Work Ethic 37 2. Marxism, Productivism, and the Refusal of Work 79 3. Working Demands: From Wages for Housework to Basic Income 113 4. "Hours for What We Will": Work, Family, and the Demand for Shorter Hours 151 5. The Future Is Now: Utopian Demands and the Temporalities of Hope 175 Epilogue. A Life beyond Work 227 Notes 235 References 255 Index 275
£20.69
Duke University Press The Hermetic Deleuze Philosophy and Spiritual
Book SynopsisIn this book, Joshua Ramey examines the extent to which Gilles Deleuze's ethics, metaphysics, and politics were informed by, and can only be fully understood through, this hermetic tradition.Trade Review“Comprehensive and detailed. . . . [A] beautifully written and well-researched book. . . .” - Dorothea Olkowski, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews“This is a valuable book for Deleuze scholars, philosophy and religious studies students, and scholars who are interested in contemporary Continental philosophy. Highly recommended. Upper-level undergraduates through researchers/faculty.” - D.W. Rothermel, Choice"In this beautiful and daring book on Gilles Deleuze's esotericism, Joshua Ramey initiates us into a spiritual reading of Deleuzian ideas of immanence, founding, becoming, sign, and symbol. The defense of that great unsaid of reason, hermetic heterodoxy, is conveyed with elegance. Through exemplary scholarly study, Ramey seduces us with a dark side to thought. He inducts us into millennia of 'minor' traditions, while transforming them alongside Deleuze's most testing inventions. Rarely has scandalous instruction been so rewarding or rigorous."—James Williams, University of Dundee"This inspired and rigorous engagement with Gilles Deleuze's concept of immanence raises fresh new problems and questions. Joshua Ramey reads Deleuze as a philosopher who both causes thought to happen and inquires how it happens; he philosophizes about philosophizing. As such, Ramey presents Deleuze as a philosophical demiurge, which is both exciting and provoking. This is an important book and a valuable contribution to the field."—Ian Buchanan, editor of the journal Deleuze Studies“Comprehensive and detailed. . . . [A] beautifully written and well-researched book. . . .” -- Dorothea Olkowski * Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews *“This is a valuable book for Deleuze scholars, philosophy and religious studies students, and scholars who are interested in contemporary Continental philosophy. Highly recommended. Upper-level undergraduates through researchers/faculty.” -- D.W. Rothermel * Choice *Table of ContentsList of Abbreviations ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction: Secrets of Immanence 1 1. Philosophical Modernity and Experimental Imperative 11 2. Dark Precursors: The Hermetic Tradition 32 3. The Force of Symbols: Deleuze and the Esoteric Sign 82 4. The Overturning of Platonism 112 5. Becoming Cosmic 148 6. The Politics of Sorcery 171 7. The Future of Belief 200 Coda: Experimental Faith 219 Notes 225 Bibliography 275 Index 283
£20.69
Duke University Press Depression
Book SynopsisAnn Cvetkovich combines memoir and cultural critique in search of ways of writing about depression as a public cultural and political phenomenon rather than as a personal medical pathology.Trade Review"A provocative addition to Ann Cvetkovich's eloquent writings on the archives of public feelings, this book takes depression out of the space of the private into the complex politics of our time. Weaving together memoir, cultural and medical history, and literary and theoretical discussion, Cvetkovich experiments with and reflects on unconventional ways of writing about embodiment, cognition, and affect. Along the way, she offers myriad prescriptions, small and large, on how to cope with the daily effects of depression and how to heal the world."—Marianne Hirsch, author of The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust"Combining cultural critique with nuanced readings of queer aesthetic practices, and mixing theoretical reflections on experience with experiments in memoir, Depression: A Public Feeling delivers not only critical insights but also wisdom. The book offers a model for something like collective or collaborative authorship; framed as a project conceived in concert with a far-flung community of academics, activists, and artists, Depression is a departure from academic business as usual. This is a profoundly inspiring book."—Heather Love, author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History“Aesthetics, anecdotes and evidence against the medical model.” -- Tyler Cowen * New York Times Magazine *“Depression: A Public Feeling… sets out to challenge ‘contemporary medical notions’ of depression ‘that simultaneously relieve one of responsibility (it’s just genes or chemicals) and provide agency (you can fix it by taking a pill)’. . . . In anatomising her ‘lived experience’ of writer’s block, Cvetkovich invites the reader to ask whether, despite the trade-specific terminology, this is still a symptom exclusive to writers. . . . [H]er perceptions are agile.” -- Talitha Stevenson * New Statesman *“Depression succeeds at opening up a public discussion on certain kinds of depression that are often dismissed as trivial, like the stress of academic labour. . . . [C]lear and helpful with a vision for overcoming melancholy through a transformation of everyday life.” -- William Burton * Lambda Literary Review *“[Cvetkovich] has taken some huge risks with Depression. Rather than building a traditional academic argument with research and theory, the book combines stylistically distinct and potentially disparate parts that add up to a highly readable, relatable, radical treatise that provides many points of entry and fresh thinking on one of the most overexamined subjects of the past few decades.” -- Cindy Widner * Austin Chronicle *“At one end, Depression is a call to expand how we frame and engage with depression, and at the other it’s an internal appeal to academia to accept personal experience as a valid source material for scholarship. By melding the personal and the academic, Cvetkovich is creating an important new forum for how we discuss depression. . . . The material is totally fascinating. . . .” -- Nina Lary * Bitch *“Cvetkovich offers us an introduction to thinking critically about depression's causes and its manifestations as well as, perhaps, the localised tactics that are necessary to enable recovery. At the end, she turns rather sweetly to crafting as one reparative habit, partly because of the aesthetic of connectivity that it can stimulate. Knitting yourself out of depression: it's kind of folksy, but I liked it.” -- Sally Munt * Times Higher Education *“The book’s merit is in jolting us out of our habit of thinking about depression as a personal, medical issue, reminding us of the ways in which the rules and roles of society influence our psyches and feelings about ourselves. By taking depression out of the exclusive domain of the therapeutic culture, [Cvetkovich] challenges us to make new connections between the individual’s experience of depression and life within a depressive culture.” -- Irene Javors * Gay & Lesbian Review *“[A]n experiment in connecting personal feelings with social conditions and critical analysis. . . . Cvetkovich finds a variety of ways to utilize the tools of academe to build a shelter from the traumas of academe. It's both funny and oddly endearing to see an academic response to depression that turns it into a field, organizes conferences and protests with special and entertaining dress requirements, recommends cures for writing blocks, and appropriates American anxiety in the interest of getting academic work published.” -- Elaine Showalter * Chronicle Review *“Although she is not the first to consider that institutionalized racism causes depression, Cvetkovich’s take on academia’s ills is unique. . . . Still, Depression is not a pity party. Cvetkovich offers hope to all who fight depression by suggesting that as she has emerged from despair, so can others.” -- Rachel Pepper * Curve *“Cvetkovich draws us into her own encounters with various obstacles and leaves us with the sense that all the insights she has gained have been unexpected gifts—earned through lots of hard work, but still contingent, provisional, uncertain. If you have ever been a struggling academic, you will relate, and you will feel grateful.” -- Aaron Sachs * American Quarterly *"It is important that Cvetkovich is able to balance the personal desire for feeling better alongside a questioning of the investment that exists in both medical and critical social models of depression. Importantly, while this approach never undermines the experience of depression by positioning it only as a construction, it still draws attention to commonplace assumptions about feeling sad, being political and getting better. Cvetkovich weaves her own journal through the critical reading that makes her work so compelling—simultaneously taking seriously, and asking us to question, the more familiar narrative she has just shared." -- Jacqueline Gibbs * Feminist Review *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction 1 Part I. The Depression Journals (A Memoir) Going Down 29 Swimming 43 The Return 62 Reflections: Memoir as Public Feelings Research Method 74 Part II. A Public Feelings Project (A Speculative Essay) 1. Writing Depression: Acedia, History, and Medical Models 85 2. From Dispossession to Radical Self-Possession: Racism and Depression 115 3. The Utopia of Ordinary Habit: Crafting, Creativity, and Spiritual Practice 154 Epilogue 203 Notes 213 Bibliography 243 Illustration Credits 265 Index 267
£20.89
Duke University Press Animacies
Book SynopsisMel Y. Chen draws on studies of sexuality, race, and affect to consider how matter that is considered insensate, immobile, deathly, or otherwise "wrong," animates cultural life in important ways.Trade Review“This work is a bricolage demonstrating the dexterity of cultural studies today in its explorations of the limits of live- liness. Although the work speaks primarily to queer theory and Asian American studies, it will stir anthropologists of multiple subfields.” -- Rheana Salazar Parrenas * American Anthropologist *“To read Mel Chen’s book Animacies is both a challenge and a pleasure … [it] offers critical positions that will be of interest to Asian Americanists.” -- Neel Ahuja * Journal of Asian American Studies *“Chen’s book touches upon many topics in Animacies and provides channels for further investigation and expansion for those who wish to study linguistics, disability studies, race, animal studies, gender, and sexuality studies.” -- Marissa Malady * Feminist Legal Studies *"Animacies provides us with fresh, provocative insights into the queer possibilities of kinship and intimacies with some of the most overlooked forms of material existence. Readers will find much to admire in this book." -- Cynthia Wu * TSQ *" . . . the lucidity of Chen's histories of each of the intersecting fields of study makes these [first] chapters worth reading and teaching. The latter half . . . stands out as innovative work that advances new potentialities for cultural studies sensitive to the multivalent dimensions of relationality." -- Christine Yao * College Literature *“Chen’s prose is animate; it leaps off the page and sparks in the reader both respect in Chen’s outstanding linguistic ability and wonder in the flow of her prose, her mastery of theoretical sources, and the flux of her intense, immense subject. . . . Animacies is a significant addition to disability theory, gender theory, linguistic theory, queer theory, cultural theory, postcolonial studies, and feminist theory, and is the first book, in my mind, to perform a transnational, transhistorical, and interdisciplinary investigation into the concept of animacy. It is a work that would be at home in both the undergraduate and the graduate classroom (certain chapters, at least), and should be read by any scholar of feminist, queer, disability, linguistic, or postcolonial bent. In this book, Chen has perfected the impossible art of writing a book that is, somehow, all things to all people—or at least, it should be. There is something for everyone here. Animacies is a groundbreaking work of interstitial scholarship. . .” -- Erin Kingsley * H-Disability, H-Net Reviews * “Throughout the book, Chen interweaves the topics and implications of society, race, biopolitics, sexuality, disability, and queer studies as it relates to linguistics, animacy, and animacy hierarchy. Chen utilizes an immense amount of examples through pictures, historical events, and theories to cover a large amount of material. Chen’s book touches upon many topics in Animacies and provides channels for further investigation and expansion for those who wish to study linguistics, disability studies, race, animal studies, gender, and sexuality studies.” -- Marissa Malady * Sexuality and Disability *"Animacies is an erudite mapping of the coerciveness of cosmological hierarchies of being, of the ontological classifications that deny life to the people, phenomena, and things that they sort into impossible solitudes." -- Jeffrey Jerome Cohen * GLQ *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Introduction: Animating Animacy 1 Part I * Words 1. Language and Mattering Humans 23 2. Queer Animation 57 Part II * Animals 3. Queer Animality 89 4. Animals, Sex, and Transsubstantiation 127 Part III * Metals 5. Lead's Racial Matters 159 6. Following Mercurial Affect 189 Afterword: The Spill and the Sea 223 Notes 239 Bibliography 261 Index 283
£20.69
Duke University Press Hold It Against Me
Book SynopsisExamining the relationship between emotional intensity and difficulty in works of avant-garde art, Jennifer Doyle seeks to develop a critical language for understanding affectively charged contemporary art.Trade Review“Jennifer Doyle’s Hold It Against Me offers us a powerful and challenging new voice. The difficulty she describes emerges in work that turns to face us. . . .Doyle has opened up a critical and much needed space for this work and these experiences. She demands that we consider the political and historical stakes in ourselves, to embrace what is intimate and fraught — and that is no easy feat.” -- Laura Fried * Los Angeles Review of Books *“Doyle blends scholarly critique with personal experience, producing a deep and broad analysis which is as much a critique of contemporary art criticism as contemporary art.” * Publishers Weekly *“This treatise argues that emotion makes artworks harder, more interesting, more difficult, and yet ultimately more rewarding for their complexity. Though aimed at scholars of performance and visual culture, this densely complex book will reward tenacious readers interested in understanding some of the most moving (and difficult) contemporary art of our time." -- Toro Castaño * Library Journal *“In this rich, thought-provoking, and very readable work of scholarship, Doyle poses questions about works of art that cannot be easily described, that bring complicated personal and political subject matter to the fore, and that often evoke strong emotional reactions in the audiences that view them.” -- Alexis Clements * Hyperallergic *"Doyle’s book is both an endorsement for and an example of what might happen once we venture away from the assurance of that cool scholarly detachment and into the less transparent but perhaps more revealing terrain of affective response. What Doyle discovers in that realm of feelings is not only personal sentiment, but also a complex site where ideology, aesthetics, social convention, and political possibility intersect." -- Catherine Zuromskis * Postmodern Culture *“Doyle captures unnerving moments of unease, anxiety, even extreme pain. These images and Doyle’s compelling discussion of their difficulty stay with the reader long after closing the book’s covers. Perhaps that is what is so successful about Doyle’s study. While the actual works explored are many of them fleeting performances, or done by artists who have by now succumbed to the AIDS virus, or are representations of the dead, they persist. They fight. They move us.” -- Sarah E. Cornish * Rocky Mountain Review *Table of ContentsPreface ix Acknowledgments xxi I. Introducing Difficulty 1 Hard Feelings 5 Patrolling the Border between Art and Politics 9 Vocabulary Shift: From Controversy to Difficulty 15 Difficulty's Audience 21 2. Three Case Studies in Difficulty and the Problem of Affect 28 A Blank: Aliza Shvarts, Untitled (2008) 28 Theater of Cruelty: Thomas Eakins, The Gross Clinic (1875) 39 Touchy Subjects: Ron Athey, Incorruptible Flesh: Dissociative Sparkle (2006) 49 3. Thinking Feeling: Criticism and Emotion 69 What Happened to Feeling? 69 The Difficulty of Sentimentality: Franko B's I Miss You! (2003) 73 The Strange Theatricality of Tears: Nao Bustamante's Neapolitan (2009) 83 Relational Aesthetics and Affective Labor 89 4. Feeling Overdetermined: Identity, Emotion, and History 94 The Difficulty of Identity 94 James Luna's The History of the Luiseño People (Christmas, La Jolla Reservation 1990) (1990–1996, 2009) 98 Difficulty and Ideologies of Emotion 106 Carrie Mae Weems's From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995–1996) 112 Conclusion 126 David Wojnarowicz's Untitled (Hujar Dead) (1988–1989) 126 Notes 147 Bibliography 183 Index 193
£18.89
Duke University Press Toussaint Louverture
Book SynopsisA new critical edition of Toussaint Louverture, the play written by the Trinidadian intellectual and activist C. L. R. James in 1934, performed at London's Westminster Theatre in 1936, and then presumed lost until its rediscovery in 2005.Trade Review“[T]horoughly researched and intelligently prepared. . . .Toussaint Louverture is easily one of the two or three most important publications of C.L.R. James’s work in decades – and the best-edited, by a very large margin.” -- Scott McLemee * Inside Higher Ed *“This present volume . . . contains the play itself among an array of fascinating accompanying texts. These include an enlightening introduction by Høgsbjerg, a series of notices and reviews of the performances, which featured the most renowned black actor of his generation, Paul Robeson, as the Haitian revolutionary leader, plus other writings by James, Robeson and George Padmore, which pitch the play within its vital contemporary context: all in all, a profoundly engaging, original and epochal document.” -- Chris Searle * Race & Class *(Starred Review) “This script is from a bygone age; its value lies not only in its importance as a document of theater history but also as a crucial addition to the canon of works about the Caribbean. This work would be difficult to stage these days (it boasts an especially large cast), but it should not be ignored by groups that can marshal the resources. Historians of the Caribbean will find it essential.” -- Larry Schwartz * Library Journal *“Highly recommended.” -- A.J. Guillaume Jr * Choice *“Why should we pay attention to this long-lost and largely forgotten play? We should do so because it is among the first efforts of one of history’s great anti-colonial voices, wrestling with the distinctive aesthetic quandaries of form and performance, to show that freedom from imperialism is just a phrase if it does not entail direct democracy and universal rights. James was nothing if not ambitious.” -- Robert Spencer * Journal of Postcolonial Writing *“We all owe much to the expert salvage operation Christian Høgsbjerg has performed here. As long as the world wilts with oppression, is awash with crisis, and punctuated by resistance this play, its subject matter, and now this book, will have to be read, watched and pondered on over and over again.” -- Gaverne Bennett * London Socialist Historians Group *"More than any other contemporary writer on James, Christian Høgsbjerg appreciates how provisional and incomplete our understanding of this intellectual agenda has actually been. . . . The publication of James’s foray into theatrical prose is not only a delightful literary event in its own right but provides a welcome opportunity to revisit the historical and intellectual context in which James produced his landmark work of comparative historical analysis, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint Louverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938). " -- Kent Worcester * New Politics *“[T]he many people interested in James, and the many admirers in particular of his The Black Jacobins, will welcome this first publication of his 1934 play. It includes Christian Hogsbjerg’s well researched introduction and annotations, and several other pieces related to the play which form the appendix to this volume.” -- Bridget Brereton * Trinidad Express *"It would be hard to overstate the importance of Christian Høgsbjerg’s new critical edition of C.L.R. James’s Toussaint Louverture.... Publication of Toussaint Louverture is such a resource for all readers. There could be no better work with which to launch the important new C.L.R. James Archives Series, edited by Robert A. Hill for Duke University Press." -- Rachel Douglas * Anthurium *Table of ContentsForeword / Laurent Dubois vii Acknowledgments xi Introduction / Christian Høgsbjerg 1 Editorial Note / Christian Høgsbjerg 41 Author's Note (1936) / C. L. R. James 45 Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History The Complete Playscript (1934) 47 Act II, Scene I, of Toussaint Louverture (1936) 135 The Production and Performance of Toussaint Louverture Notices 155 The Programme (1936) 160 Reviews 164 Appendix "The Intelligence of the Negro" / C. L. R. James 189 "A Century of Freedom" / C. L. R. James 199 "Slavery Today: A Shocking Exposure" / C. L. R. James 206 "I Want Negro Culture" / Paul Robeson 212 "'Civilising' the 'Blacks': Why Britain Needs to Maintain Her African Possessions" / C. L. R. James 214 Letter from George Padmore to Dr. Alain Locke 217 ["The Maverick Club"] / C. L. R. James 218 "A Unique Personality" / C. L. R. James 219 "Paul Robeson" / C. L. R. James 221
£19.94
Duke University Press Biopolitics
Book SynopsisA compilation of the primary texts—by Foucault, Arendt, Agamben, Badiou, and other theorists—that laid the ground for contemporary thinking about biopolitics, or the relations between life and politics.Trade Review“[A]n essential resource for graduate students and those new to the topic of biopolitics as well as a useful tool for the few with specialist knowledge.” -- Diana Stypinska * Sociological Review *"This reader will be a landmark resource as scholarly engagement with biopolitics continues to expand in the coming years. It brings together in a single volume essential texts in the evolution of thinking about the biopolitical in the wake of the formative thought of Foucault and, later, Agamben. In addition, the selections are framed by a wonderfully nuanced and incisive introduction."—Cary Wolfe, author of Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame“This is an indispensable collection, both for how it exposes the limits of Foucault’s thought and for the ways it illuminates the dark junctures of life and the sciences of Aristotle’s ‘master art’ politics.” -- David W. Swain * Kritikon Litterarum * "Biopolitics: A Reader provides a comprehensive overview of this diverse and multidisciplinary field. Editors Timothy Campbell and Adam Sitze demonstrate that biopolitics is not merely an academic fad, but rather, that it marks ‘the intersection, or perhaps reciprocal incorporation, of life and politics.’" -- Jay Daniel Thompson * Somatechnics *“[A] comprehensive resource for newcomers, as well as those already familiar with biopolitics.” -- Rosalind G. Williams * Political Studies Review *Table of ContentsIntroduction. Biopolitics: An Encounter / Timothy Campbell and Adam Sitze 1 1. Right of Death and Power over Life / Michel Foucault 41 2. "Society Must Be Defended," Lecture at the Collége de France, March 17, 1976 / Michel Foucault 61 3. The Perplexities of the Rights of Man / Hannah Arendt 82 4. Selections from The Human Condition / Hannah Arendt 98 5. Introduction to Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life / Giorgio Agamben 134 6. The Politicization of Life / Giorgio Agamben 145 7. Biopolitics and the Rights of Man / Giorgio Agamben 152 8. Necropolitics / Achille Mbembe 161 9. Necro-economics: Adam Smith and Death in the Life of the Universal / Warren Montag 193 10. Biopolitical Production / Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri 215 11. Biopolitics as Event / Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri 237 12. Labor, Action, Intellect / Paolo Virno 245 13. An Equivocal Concept: Biopolitics / Paolo Virno 269 14. The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Constitutions of Self in Immune System Discourse / Donna Haraway 274 15. The Immunological Transformation: On the Way to Thin-Walled "Societies" / Peter Sloterdijk 310 16. Biopolitics / Roberto Esposito 317 17. The Enigma of Biopolitics / Roberto Esposito 350 18. The Difficult Legacy of Michel Foucault / Jacques Rancière 386 19. From Politics to Biopolitics . . . and Back / Slavoj Zizek 391 20. What Is It to Live? / Alain Badiou 412 21. Immanence: A Life / Gilles Deleuze 421 Acknowledgment of Copyright 427 Index 429
£22.79
Duke University Press A View from the Bottom
Book SynopsisRather than using displays of masculinity to counter portrayals of Asian American men as passive and effeminate, Nguyen Tan Hoang develops a concept of bottomhood that opens up political alliances based on risk, vulnerability, and receptiveness.Trade Review"Little or none of the scholarship around the sexual position of the bottom has accurately articulated it as a sexual practice with the capacity to rewrite both shame and vulnerability... [Nguyen] sets himself a part from today’s contemporary queer canon of scholars." -- John Erickson * Lambda Literary Review *“Using tools not of the master's house, Nguyen offers a pioneering study of Asian American gender and sexuality with reverberating tools that transform our theory and praxis.” -- Margaret Rhee * Amerasia Journal *"Communication researchers who are interested in critical racial studies, cultural studies, and queer theory should find [A View from the Bottom] relevant and inspiring." -- Lik Sam Chan * International Journal of Communication *"The book is written with nuance and theoretical sophistication, in a clear and lively style that is at once personable and playful.... A View from the Bottom is certainly well positioned to provoke new conversations—even realignments of boundary—between gay studies and trans studies." -- Helen Hok-Sze Leung * TSQ *"A View from the Bottom... provokes a political recalibration that aligns bottomhood, femininity, and race in tender union.... Nguyen bravely models a praxis of vulnerability that we rarely encounter in academic writing, especially around the fraught and fragile imbrications of race, desire, and power" -- Uri McMillan * GLQ *"Nguyen’s insights allow us to view the bottom as an opportunity for creativity, a position of receptiveness that affords agency and pleasure, and an occasion to build a queer utopic space that offers unbounded social relations with others." -- Christopher B. Patterson * MELUS *"This monograph is a generative work for scholars who center comparative racialization and queer diaspora, as well as gender, sexuality, and media representation more broadly. Nguyen deftly engages numerous conversations in queer studies, film studies, Asian American studies, and queer of color critique." -- Jonathan Branfman * Sexualities *"A View from the Bottom is a critical and insightful read for anyone interested in media studies, particularly for people interested in the performance and representation of sexual and racial minorities." -- Min Joo Lee * Liminalities *“Nguyen’s book is a welcomed effort to deal with the thorny contradictions that arise when scholarship of advocacy meets the unwieldy reality of sexual desire. Future projects dealing with race and sexual representations, particularly those of gay Asian and Asian American subjectivities, must confront this question and reckon with the insights in Nguyen’s study.” -- Hao Jun Tam * Journal of Asian American Studies *
£20.69
Duke University Press Freedom Time
Book Synopsis Freedom Time reconsiders decolonization from the perspectives of Aimé Césaire (Martinique) and Léopold Sédar Senghor (Senegal) who, beginning in 1945, promoted self-determination without state sovereignty. As politicians, public intellectuals, and poets they struggled to transform imperial France into a democratic federation, with former colonies as autonomous members of a transcontinental polity. In so doing, they revitalized past but unrealized political projects and anticipated impossible futures by acting as if they had already arrived. Refusing to reduce colonial emancipation to national independence, they regarded decolonization as an opportunity to remake the world, reconcile peoples, and realize humanity’s potential. Emphasizing the link between politics and aesthetics, Gary Wilder reads Césaire and Senghor as pragmatic utopians, situated humanists, and concrete cosmopolitans whose postwar insights can illuminate current debaTrade Review"Freedom Time is an important book. It is also exceptionally scholarly and extremely readable. Such qualities rarely inhere in a single text. And they are rarely bundled into an analysis so passionate and timely that excavates past attempts at human emancipation in order to reveal new pathways into modernization." -- Massimiliano Tomba * Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology *"Rich, dense, and meticulously researched, Gary Wilder’s book offers nuanced critical reflections on the alternative landscapes of freedom proposed by Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor." -- Kaiama L. Glover * French Studies *"There is an important message here ... for a broad audience, and I sincerely hope that it reaches beyond French Studies, postcolonial, or colonial historical studies. Wilder observes that Césaire, Sédar and their contemporaries in black Caribbean and African thought ‘are rarely included in general considerations of interwar philosophy or postwar social theory’ (9). What Freedom Time does most convincingly is to demonstrate that the social theory studied in European universities is weaker for this omission and that serious engagement with these thinkers is long overdue." -- Lucy Mayblin * Ethnic and Racial Studies *"[A] thoughtful and challenging work on the often maligned Negritude thinkers, poets, and politicians Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor." -- Brett A. Berliner * Callaloo *"[A] tremendous achievement in scope and originality. Readers who wish to think about the nation-state from a deeply historical and theoretically sophisticated perspective will be richly rewarded." -- Anuja Bose * Africa Today *"Freedom Time is an engaging book that combines cultural anthropology, political theory and postcolonial theory and offers the reader a detailed intellectual history of Leopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire between 1945 and 1960." -- Frank Gerits * European Review of History *"Gary Wilder’s Freedom Time constitutes an exciting and significant contribution to the field of nation and nationalism study in that he challenges the claim that decolonisation and self-determination can, and should, only lead to one form of state sovereignty: the nation-state." -- Kristin Hissong * Nations and Nationalism *"Wilder provides us with a provocative retelling of the intellectual and political vision of two luminaries of the 20th century, and he does a great service by recasting our attention to these two authors to provoke reflection on the condition of nationhood and sovereignty in the 21st century. The text is always engaging and at times possesses a lyricism that echoes the poetics of Césaire and Senghor.... This book is a welcome addition, providing a substantial contribution to the field of francophone intellectual history." -- Michael Lambert * Anthropological Quarterly *"Freedom Time is a dynamic treatise deftly upholding the Fanonian and Wynterian imperatives to navigate ongoing processes of decolonization and becoming Human betwixt and between the allure of emancipations masking as freedom." -- Neil Roberts * Theory & Event *"Freedom Time is an impressive, inspiring, necessary work. . . . Wilder's lucid, sensitively textured and impressively well-researched book allows us to rethink the meaning of decolonisation and the conceptual nexus surrounding it." -- Deborah Walker-Morrison * Cultural Studies Review *"Wilder’s reading of Senghor and Césaire is subtle and engaging, and challenges the idea that they were cynical – or naive." -- Musab Younis * London Review of Books *Table of ContentsIndex 373 Preface ix Acknowledgments xv 1. Unthinking France, Rethinking Decolonization 1 2. Situating Cesaire: Antillean Awakening and Global Redemption 17 3. Situating Senghor: African Hospitality and Human Solidarity 49 4. Freedom, Time, Territory 74 5. Departmentalization and the Spirit of Schoelcher 106 6. Federalism and the Future of France 133 7. Antillean Autonomy and the Legacy of Louverture 167 8. African Socialism and the Fate of the World 206 9. Decolonization and Postnational Democracy 241 Chronology 261 Notes 275 Works Cited 333
£22.79
Duke University Press Keywords in Sound
Book SynopsisKeywords in Sound defines the field of sound studies and provides a comprehensive conceptual apparatus for why studying sound matters. Each essay includes the keyword's intellectual history, a discussion of its role in cultural, social and political discourses, and suggestions for possible future research.Trade Review"The apparent strategy of the editors is to form a basic, redefined lexicon and this is nicely accomplished. ... Eventually this interesting and thorough experiment reflects the subtle innate heterogeneity of sound, drawing one of the many possible cultural galaxies around it." -- Aurelio Cianciotta * Neural *"This is an important contribution to the emergent field of sound studies. It will help in both defining the field more fully and in refining its key terms more elaborately." * European Journal of Communication *"For anyone wanting a substantial, if not comprehensive, introduction to the field, Keywords in Sound is the place to start." -- Philip Vandermeer * Notes *Table of ContentsIntroduction / David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny 1 1. Acoustemology / Steven Feld 12 2. Acoustics / Benjamin Steege 22 3. Body / Deborah Kapchan 33 4. Deafness / Mara Mills 45 5. Echo / Mark M. Smith 55 6. Hearing / Jonathan Sterne 65 7. Image / John Mowitt 78 8. Language / David Samuels and Thomas Porcello 87 9. Listening / Tom Rice 99 10. Music / Matt Sakakeeny 112 11. Noise / David Novak 125 12. Phonography / Patrick Feaster 139 13. Radio / Daniel Fisher 151 14. Religion / Charles Hirschkind 165 15. Resonance / Veit Erlmann 175 16. Silence / Ana María Ochoa Gautier 183 17. Space / Andrew J. Eisenberg 193 18. Synthesis / Tara Rodgers 208 19. Transduction / Stefan Helmreich 222 20. Voice / Amanda Weidman 232 Contributors 247 Index 253
£19.79
