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Duke University Press
About Duke University Press
Duke University Press books have long been known for advancing innovative new scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. In our books, our authors have defined new fields (sound studies, transgender studies, etc.), redefined existing fields (anthropology, cultural studies, Latin American studies, African American and African studies, art history, etc.), and explored the rich spaces between fields to reshape the way we think about the world and our connections to it. We take pride in publishing traditionally underrepresented voices in terms of both authors and areas of study, viewpoints that are critical to understanding the diverse, interconnected societies in which we live. Duke books continue to be an essential part of any humanities and social sciences program.
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The Witch Studies Reader
SOMA CHAUDHURI AND JANE WARD, EDITORS
Stories about witches are by their nature stories about the most basic and profound of human experiences—healing, sex, violence, tragedies, aging, death, and encountering the mystery and magic of the unknown. It is no surprise, then, that witches loom large in our cultural imaginations. In academia, studies of witches rarely emerge from scholars who are themselves witches and/or embedded in communities of witchcraft practitioners. The Witch Studies Reader brings together a diverse group of scholars, practitioners, and scholar-practitioners who examine witchcraft from a critical decolonial feminist perspective that decenters Europe and departs from exoticizing and pathologizing writing on witchcraft in the global South. The authors show how witches are keepers of suppressed knowledges, builders of new futures, exemplars of praxis, and theorists in their own right. Throughout, they account for the vastly different national, political-economic, and cultural contexts in which “the witch” is currently being claimed and repudiated. Offering a pathbreaking transnational feminist examination of witches and witchcraft that upends white supremacist, colonial, patriarchal knowledge regimes, this volume brings into being the interdisciplinary field of feminist witch studies.
Soma Chaudhuri is Associate Professor of Sociology at Michigan State University. Jane Ward is Professor of Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
March 2025
520 pages
Gender studies/ Witchcraft
Rights: World
September 2025
232 pages
Memoir/Disability studies
Rights: World
Beautiful Mystery
Life in My Daughter’s World
DANILYN RUTHERFORD
One day, Danilyn Rutherford and her husband Craig noticed that their six-month-old daughter Millie wasn’t making eye contact. Concerned that something was wrong, they took her to her pediatrician and then an optometrist, who then referred them to a neurologist and a team of physical and occupational therapists. Despite being unable to diagnose her condition, it was clear that Millie’s brain was not developing at the rate that it should. At nine months, she had the cognitive ability and motor skills of a three-month-old.
Today, Millie is in her early twenties and has never been able to communicate verbally or through signs. In Beautiful Mystery, Rutherford delves into the puzzle of Millie’s inaccessible mind. She tells the enlightening story of Millie’s journey from disabled child to disabled young woman, demonstrating the challenges of caring for a loved one while attempting to find ways to communicate. Even though Millie cannot communicate, she has a rich social world that is rooted in the people and things her companions and family can see, hear, smell, and feel. She is someone with more to in her world than is immediately evident.
Throughout this heartfelt and moving book, Rutherford shows that to live with Millie is to find personhood and humanity in a space between what we can and cannot know of one another. As Rutherford explores Millie’s cognitive mystery, she begins to wonder if she has ever truly understood any of the people she has loved. Ultimately, Rutherford shows that one does not have to understand someone to love them—a lesson that if we all learned might allow us to live together in a fractured world.
Danilyn Rutherford is President of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. An award-winning anthropologist, she has previously taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the University of Chicago. She is the author of Living in the Stone Age: Reflections on the Origins of a Colonial Fantasy, Laughing at Leviathan: Sovereignty and Audience in West Papua, and Raiding the Land of the Foreigners: The Limits of the Nation on an Indonesian Frontier. Rutherford lives in Santa Cruz, California.
The Personality of Power
A Theory of Fascism for Anti-Fascist Life
BRIAN MASSUMI
“I am the Chosen One!” With this exclamation Donald Trump crowns the national exceptionalism his base upholds with a claim of personal exceptionalism. He leaves no doubt as to the emotional note: “I am your vengeance!” He personifies reaction for the masses. Except, in today’s microsegmented social media environment the “masses” no longer exist. Fascism’s cultural conditions have shifted. In The Personality of Power, Brian Massumi retheorizes the conditions of contemporary fascism through the prism of Trump’s persona. Older theories based on identification of the masses with a charismatic leader no longer hold. Rather, an affective regime of reaction agitates bodies and orients lives at the molecular level. Massumi examines this agitation in relation to race, gender, personhood, and conspiracy thinking. The Personality of Power is a political treatise on fascism and its precursor movements, coupled with a philosophical inquiry into becoming reactionary as a collective process. Massumi calls the very concept of the person into question, asking what collective personhood means concretely. Nothing less than an alternative political logic is needed, turned to the task of thinking collective individuation.
Brian Massumi is a Canadian philosopher and social theorist, and, until recently, Professor of Communication at the University of Montreal. He is the author of many books, including Couplets, Ontopower, The Power at the End of the Economy, and Parables for the Virtual, all also published by Duke University Press.
April 2025
352 pages
Political Theory
Rights: World
September 2025
168 pages
Poetry/Disability studies/Activism Rights: World*
Unfurl
Survivals, Sorrows, and Dreaming
ELI CLARE
A queer disabled love song to trees and beavers, tremors and dreams, Unfurl explores the pulsing core and porous edges of survival, sorrow, and dreaming. Blending poetry and creative nonfiction, emotion and activist thinking, Eli Clare invites us to unfurl ourselves into the lovely multitude of genders beyond the binary of woman and man, the fierceness of street protest, and the long slow time of granite. He sings to aquifers. Wrestles with the aftermath of child abuse and his family’s legacy as white settlers occupying Dakota homelands. He leans into history. Calls the names of the living and the dead. Connects his own tremoring body to a world full of tremors—earthquakes, jackhammers, quaking aspens. Unfurl reveals deep queer kinships between human and more-than-human, sentient and nonsentient. At every juncture, these poems and essays embrace porousness and the power of dreaming. Ultimately, Unfurl is an invitation to rebellion and joy.
Poet, essayist, activist, and community-based social justice educator, Eli Clare is the author of Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure and Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation, both published by Duke University Press, and The Marrow’s Telling: Words in Motion
Interface Frictions
How Digital Debility Reshapes Our Bodies
NETA ALEXANDER
In Interface Frictions, Neta Alexander explores how ubiquitous design features in digital platforms reshape, condition, and break our bodies. She shows that while features such as refresh, playback speed, autoplay, and night mode are convenient, they can lead to “digital debility”—the slow and often invisible ways that technologies may harm human bodies. These features all assume an able-bodied user and at the same time push users to ignore their bodily limitations like the need for rest, nourishment, or movement. Building on the lived experiences of people with disabilities, Alexander explores alternative design solutions that arise from a multisensorial approach to communication. She demonstrates what can be gained from centering the nonaverage user, such as blind people who pioneered ways to control the playback speed of media, and Netflix subscribers with invisible disabilities like PTSD who successfully pushed the company to redesign its previews autoplay feature. Drawing on artworks, video games, and creative hacking by users with disabilities, Alexander challenges our understanding of media consumption, the attention economy, and the digital interface.
Neta Alexander is Assistant Professor of Film and Media at Yale University and coauthor of Failure.
August 2025
240 pages
Technology/Disability studies/Media studies
Rights: World
September 2025
176 pages
Activism/Anti-racism/Peace and Justice studies
Rights: World
October 2025
232 pages
Art/LGBTQ studies
Rights: World
Becoming Trustworthy White Allies
MELANIE S. MORRISON
In Becoming Trustworthy White Allies, long-time antiracist facilitator Melanie S. Morrison outlines the actions white people must undertake to become partners in the work of racial justice. In this collection of essays, lectures, and real-life stories, Morrison addresses how white people can navigate the obstacles to becoming an ally so that they can step up with courage, humility, and consistency to participate in BIPOC-led organizations while helping move other white people to greater antiracist awareness and action. Morrison describes the required steps toward allyship: Moving through shame and guilt, nurturing truth-telling relationships of support and accountability, challenging practices and policies that protect white privilege, moving out of social segregation, working from a place of self-love, and staying on the antiracist journey. Now, as always, it is imperative that white people commit to doing the deep work and learning required to become life-long trustworthy allies.
Melanie S. Morrison was the Founder and Executive Director of Allies for Change, a national network of social justice educators. She is the author of Murder on Shades Mountain: The Legal Lynching of Willie Peterson and the Struggle for Justice in Jim Crow Birmingham, also published by Duke University Press.
Mavericks of Style
The Seventies in Color
URI MCMILLAN
In Mavericks of Style, Uri McMillan tells the story of New York City’s downtown art and fashion scene of the 1970s through the lives and careers of experimental Black and Brown artists. McMillan focuses on model and musician Grace Jones, fashion illustrator Antonio Lopez, fashion designer Stephen Burrows, and their orbit of friends, showing how they restlessly moved across genres and disciplines, transgressing boundaries between the commercial and the avant-garde. Bypassing the exclusive art world and cultivating uniquely personal styles, these artists thrived on friendship and collaboration in their experimental use of bold color, gold lamé, and Instamatic photography. McMillan transports readers to the spaces Jones, Lopez, and Burrows frequented and worked, from hair salons, nondescript artist studios, and buzzy boutiques to funky discos and high fashion runways. By foregrounding their impact on the decade’s aesthetics, McMillan complicates and expands the understanding of these artists, offering a new vision of New York’s art world in sultry, bombastic color.
Uri McMillan is Associate Professor of English and Gender Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance
Land of Famished Beings
West Papuan Theories of Hunger
SOPHIE CHAO
In Land of Famished Beings, Sophie Chao examines how Indigenous Marind communities understand and theorize hunger in lowland West Papua, a place where industrial plantation expansion and settler-colonial violence are radically reconfiguring ecologies, socialities, and identities. Instead of seeing hunger as an individual, biophysical state defined purely in nutritional, quantitative, or human terms, Chao investigates how hunger traverses variably situated humans, animals, plants, institutions, infrastructures, spirits, and sorcerers. When approached through the lens of Indigenous Marind philosophies, practices, and protocols, hunger reveals itself a multiple, more-than-human, and morally imbued modality of being—one whose effects are no less culturally crafted or contested than food and eating. In centering Indigenous feminist theories of hunger, Chao offers new ways of thinking about the relationship between the environment, food, and nourishment in an age of self-consuming capitalist growth. She also considers how Indigenous theories invite anthropologists to reimagine the ethics and politics of ethnographic writing and the responsibilities, hesitations, and compromises that shape anthropological commitments in and beyond the field.
Sophie Chao is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney, author of In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua, and coeditor of The Promise of Multispecies Justice, both also published by Duke University Press.
Slavery and the Invention of Dutch Art CAROLINE FOWLER
In Slavery and the Invention of Dutch Art, Caroline Fowler examines the fundamental role of the transatlantic slave trade in the production and evolution of seventeenth-century Dutch art. Whereas the sixteenth-century image debates in Europe engaged with crises around the representation of divinity, Fowler argues that the rise of the transatlantic slave trade created a visual field of uncertainty around picturing the transformation of life into property. Fowler demonstrates how the emergence of landscape, maritime, and botanical painting were deeply intertwined with slavery’s economic expansion. Moreover, she considers how the development of one of the first art markets was inextricable from the trade in human lives as chattel property. Reading seventeenth-century legal theory, natural history, inventories, and political pamphlets alongside contemporary poetry, theory, and philosophy from Black feminism and the African diaspora, Fowler demonstrates that ideas about property, personhood, and citizenship were central to the oeuvres of artists such as Rembrandt van Rijn, Hercules Segers, Frans Post, Johannes Vermeer, and Maria Sibylla Merian and therefore inescapably within slavery’s grasp.
Caroline Fowler is Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Institute. She is the author of The Art of Paper: From the Holy Land to the Americas and Drawing and the Senses: An Early Modern History
August 2025
272 pages
Anthropology/Food studies/Asian studies
Rights:World
January 2025
176 pages
Art history
Rights: World
Ne me quitte pas
A Song by Jacques Brel and Interpreted by Nina Simone and Others
MAYA ANGELA SMITH
In 1959, Belgian singer-songwriter Jacques Brel wrote and performed “Ne me quitte pas” (Don’t leave me), a visceral and haunting plea for his lover to come back. As a teenager, Maya Angela Smith was so captivated by Nina Simone’s powerful 1965 cover of the song that it inspired her to be a French professor. In Ne me quitte pas, Smith follows the classic song’s long and varied journey, from Brel’s iconic 1966 performance on French television to Simone’s cover to Shirley Bassey’s English-language version (“If You Go Away”) to its contemporary manifestations in popular culture. Throughout, Smith shows that as the song travels across languages, geographies, genres, and generations, it accumulates shifting artistic and cultural significance as each listener creates their own meaning.
Maya Angela Smith is Professor of French in the French and Italian Studies Department at the University of Washington.
Under Pressure
A Song by David Bowie and Queen
MAX BRZEZINSKI
In 1981, David Bowie and Queen both happened to be in Switzerland: They met and made “Under Pressure.” Recorded on a lark, the song broke the path for subsequent pop anthems. In Under Pressure, Max Brzezinski tells the classic track’s story, charting the relationship between pop music, collective politics, and dominant institutions of state, corporations, and civil society. Brzezinski shows that, like all great pop anthems, “Under Pressure” harnesses collective sentiments in order to model new ways of thinking and acting. As we continue to live under the sign of the global oppressive power the song names, analyzes, and attempts to move beyond, we remain, in Bowie and Freddie Mercury’s phrase, under pressure.
Max Brzezinski is the author of Vinyl Age: A Guide to Record Collecting Now
Fernando
A Song by ABBA KAY DICKINSON
When it was released in 1976, ABBA’s song “Fernando” unexpectedly found itself alongside a number of chart-topping dance hits, love song, and holiday singles. In Fernando, Kay Dickinson takes readers across the world, from Sweden and Chile to Australia and Poland, tracing the complicated ways the song could express support with anti-capitalist and Third World liberation struggles while remaining an unrepentant commodity. A song about freedom fighters in Mexico was unlikely to become a pop mega-hit, yet, as Dickinson demonstrates, ABBA’s lucrative, longstanding appeal rests on their ability to bridge contradictions within everyday life. Five decades later, “Fernando’s” rousing calls for freedom continue to resonate with gay liberation movements and other social struggles, demonstrating how a song can both be revolutionary and an icon of global capital.
Kay Dickinson is Programme Convenor for Creative Arts and Industries at the University of Glasgow and author of Supply Chain Cinema: Producing Global Film Workers
Taking Leave
DEBORAH
KAPCHAN
Deborah Kapchan’s Taking Leave is a lyrical memoir that encompasses journeys both inner and outer, physical and spiritual. Taking readers from New York, Jerusalem, and Casablanca to Paris and Abu Dhabi while exploring her Christian fundamentalist childhood, Jewish lineage, and the release she found in Islam, Kapchan examines the extent that we can take leave of who we are to live between categories. She meditates on absence, presence, orientation, and sublimity and escapes her body and senses to weave an existential tale that honors the three traditions that made her, ultimately desiring to take leave of them all. Taking Leave is an urgent plea for antitribalism and a timely treatise for compassionate coexistence in the spaces in-between.
Deborah Kapchan is Professor of Performance Studies at New York University.
September 2025
160 pages
Music Rights: World
September 2025
128 pages
Religion/Memoir Rights: World
September 2025
296 pages
Sound studies/Postcolonialism/Iberian studies
Rights: World
September 2025
360 pages
Latin American History/American studies/ Global Activism
Rights: World
Geographies of the Ear
The Cultural Politics of Sound in Contemporary Barcelona
TANIA GENTIC
In Geographies of the Ear, Tania Gentic examines the language and soundscape of postFranco Barcelona to listen for the remnants of a globalized colonial ear. She theorizes “echoic memory” to understand how sound circulates from the past to the present—and from the neighborhood to the nation to the globe—to trace how sonic practices produce and contest modernity, community identity, and democracy. Focusing on migrant and tourist accents, free radio stations, punk music, drag performances, and anti-gentrification protests, Gentic shows how the underground sounds in Barcelona complicate a modernizing aural imaginary of place. By thinking through the auralities present in literature, fanzines, comic books, documentary films, television and print media, popular music, public protests, and even everyday conversation, Gentic outlines the difficulties of considering the contemporary city as either the product of a monolingual national identity or a lived space easily circumscribed by geographical categories such as North or South, East or West.
Tania Gentic is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Georgetown University and author of The Everyday Atlantic: Time, Knowledge, and Subjectivity in the Twentieth-Century Iberian and Latin American Newspaper Chronicle
A Wide Net of Solidarity
Antiracism and Anti-Imperialism from the Americas to the Globe
ANNE GARLAND MAHLER
This book traces the influence of the Latin American solidarity organization LADLA (Liga Antimperialista de las Américas) on anti-imperialist and anti-extractive struggles from the early twentieth century to the present. Founded in 1925 in Mexico City, LADLA brought together trade unions, agrarian organizations, and artistic groups to fight US imperialism and critique the destruction of communally owned land through the implementation of mono-crop agriculture. Though neglected in recent decades, LADLA was a forerunner of supporting Black and Indigenous-led resistance movements while envisioning this support as part of a hemispheric globalism in which anti-racist struggles in the Americas could connect to global struggles for racial and economic justice. Across the book’s chapters, Anne Garland Mahler delves deep into LADLA’s archive to theorize the ways that political struggle was intertwined with aesthetic practice as a tool to work through questions of racialization, solidarity, and internationalism. Acknowledging LADLA’s great potential as well as its limits, Mahler powerfully illustrates the power of solidarity politics that foreground mutuality across difference.
Anne Garland Mahler is an Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Virginia.
Archival Irruptions
Constructing Religion and Criminalizing Obeah in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica KATHARINE GERBNER
In 1760, following the largest slave revolt in the British Atlantic World, the Afro-Caribbean word “Obeah” entered British colonial law for the first time. In Archival Irruptions, Katharine Gerbner traces how British authorities in Jamaica came to criminalize Obeah, a practice that was variously seen as a healing method, an Africana religion, a science, and ultimately, a form of witchcraft. Drawing on Moravian missionary archives, Gerbner shows that in the years directly preceding its criminalization, for enslaved Africans, Obeah was a prophetic practice tied to healing and death rights. Gerbner theorizes these descriptions of African religious beliefs, rituals, concepts, and traditions as “irruptions”: moments when Africana epistemology breaks the narrative of a European-authored archival document. Through these irruptions, we see European assertions of authority through the lens of Obeah and its practitioners. Moreover, we find that the modern categories of religion are rooted in the histories of slavery, rebellion, and the criminalization of Black religious practices.
Katharine Gerbner is Associate Professor of History at the University of Minnesota and author of Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World.
Clandestinas
Women in the Cuban Revolutionary Underground, 1955–1959 CAROLLEE BENGELSDORF WITH PHOTOGRAPHS CURATED BY SUSAN MEISELAS
In Clandestinas, Carollee Bengelsdorf challenges the silences surrounding women’s participation in the insurrection in Havana during the Cuban Revolution. The official narrative of the revolution emphasizes virtually exclusively the role of the guerrillas in the sierra in defeating the Batista dictatorship, thereby diminishing the centrality of the urban underground. Given that women insurrectionists were overwhelmingly concentrated in the city this inevitably meant that their presence was as well diminished. But even in the urban movements, women are portrayed as secondary, as enablers of the men who do the real fighting. Drawing on fieldwork and in-depth interviews with over thirty former clandestinas, Bengelsdorf surfaces a different narrative. She paints a portrait detailing the lives of women and the actions in which they were involved in the clandestinidad. She briefly examines the trauma each of her interviewees experienced to different degrees both during and after the dictatorship’s downfall. The book includes a visual-essay with photographs curated by Susan Meiselas.
Carollee Bengelsdorf is Professor Emerita of Politics and Critical Social Inquiry at Hampshire College, author of The Problem of Democracy in Cuba: Between Vision and Reality, and coeditor of The Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad Susan Meiselas is a documentary photographer and MacArthur Fellow who has covered human rights issues in Latin America.
September 2025
216 pages
History/Religious studies
Rights: World
October 2025
280 pages
Latin American studies/Feminist studies/ Twentieth-Century Revolutions
Rights: World
January 2025 336 pages
Feminist philosophy/Latinx studies/Visual culture
Rights: World
September 2025
296 pages
History/Architecture/Colonial and postcolonial studies
Rights: World
Carnalities
The Art of Living in Latinidad MARIANA ORTEGA
In Carnalities, Mariana Ortega presents a phenomenological study of aesthetics grounded in the work of primarily Latinx artists. She introduces the idea of carnal aesthetics informed by carnalities, creative practices shaped by the self’s affective attunement to the material, cultural, historical, communal, and spiritual. For Ortega, carnal aesthetics offers a way to think about the affective and bodily experiences of racialized selves. Drawing on Gloria Anzaldúa, Chela Sandoval, José Esteban Muñoz, Alia Al-Saji, Helen Ngo, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Roland Barthes, and others, Ortega examines photographic works on Latinx subjects. She analyzes the photography of Laura Aguilar, Verónica Gabriela Cárdenas, and Susan Meiselas, among others, theorizing photography as a carnal, affective medium that is crucial for processes of self-formation, resistance, and mourning in Latinx life. She ends with an intimate reading of photography through a reflection of her own crossing from Nicaragua to the United States in 1979. Motivated by her experience of loss and exile, Ortega argues for the importance of carnal aesthetics in destabilizing and transforming normative, colonial, and decolonial subjects, imaginaries, and structures.
Mariana Ortega is Associate Professor of Philosophy, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Latina/o Studies at Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self and coeditor of Constructing the Nation: A Race and Nationalism Reader and Theories of the Flesh: Latinx and Latin American Feminisms, Transformation, and Resistance
Concrete Colonialism
Architecture, Urbanism, and the US Imperial Project in the Philippines
DIANA JEAN S. MARTINEZ
During US colonial rule in the Philippines, reinforced concrete was used to the near exclusion of all other building materials. In Concrete Colonialism, Diana Jean S. Martinez examines the motivations for and lasting effects of this forgotten colonial policy. Arguing that the pervasive use of reinforced concrete technologies revolutionized techniques of imperial conquest, Martinez shows how concrete reshaped colonialism as a project that sought durable change through the reformation of environments, colonial society, and racialized biologies. Martinez locates the origins of this material revolution in the development of Chicago, highlighting how building this urban center atop exceptionally challenging geology made it possible to transform diverse global ecologies. She details how the material’s stability, plasticity, strength, and other qualities served the shifting imperatives of the US colonial regime, playing a central role in defending territory, controlling disease, and the construction of monuments to nation and empire. By describing a world irreversibly remade, Martinez urges readers to consider how colonialism persists—in concrete forms—despite claims of its conclusion.
Diana Jean S. Martinez is Assistant Professor of the History of Art and Architecture at Tufts University.
When the Bones Speak
The Living, the Dead, and the Sacrifice of Contemporary Okinawa
CHRISTOPHER T. NELSON
Haunted by the past, ordinary Okinawans struggle to live with the unbearable legacies of war, Japanese nationalism, and American imperialism. They are caught up in a web of people and practices—living and dead, visible and immaterial—that exert powerful forces often beyond their control. In When the Bones Speak, Christopher T. Nelson examines the myriad ways contemporary Okinawans experience, remember, and contest sacrifice. He attends to the voices of those who find their vocation in service to others, from shamans, fortune-tellers, laborers, and artists to dead soldiers, war survivors, anti-war activists, and Christian missionaries. Nelson shows how the memories of past sacrifices, atrocities, and exploitation as well as residual trauma shape modern life in Okinawa and the possibility and hope for creative action grounded in the everyday. Offering new understandings of colonial transformation, wartime violence, and military occupation, Nelson writes from the intersection of temporalities and possibilities, where the hard finality of the past may be broken open to reveal a “not yet” that has always remained just beyond reach.
Christopher T. Nelson is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and author of Dancing with the Dead: Memory, Performance, and Everyday Life in Postwar Okinawa, also published by Duke University Press.
Diaspora Without Displacement
The Coloniality and Promise of Capoeira in Senegal CELINA DE SÁ
Capoeira—a game of combat primarily developed by enslaved West Central Africans—has become an icon of both Brazilian national culture and pride in the country’s diasporic African heritage. Yet the sport remains less accessible in Africa itself, overshadowed in large part by participants in the Global North. In Diaspora Without Displacement, Celina de Sá tells the story of capoeira as it ‘returns’ to the African continent through the creative initiatives of young urban professionals in Senegal. De Sá demonstrates how a new generation of African capoeiristas are taking up their own Afro-diasporic performance tradition, effectively reframing notions of diaspora and race through their social practice. Though capoeira has largely Angolan roots, and the agents of return are typically white Brazilians and Europeans, the West African practitioners de Sá documents nonetheless form an exceptional relationship to capoeira that, in turn, becomes a mode of political and social consciousness. Drawing on ethnographic research in Senegal as well as analyzing a capoeira network across West Africa, de Sá shows how urban West Africans use capoeira to explore the relationship between Blackness, diaspora, and African heritage.
Celina de Sá is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin.
July 2025
304 pages
Anthropology/Asian studies
Rights: World
July 2025
288 pages
Anthropology/African Diaspora
Rights: World
October 2024
304 pages
Contemporary art/Latin American studies Rights: World
Visual Disobedience
Art and Decoloniality in Central America KENCY CORNEJO
In Visual Disobedience, Kency Cornejo traces the emergence of new artistic strategies for Indigenous, feminist, and anticarceral resistance in the wake of torture, disappearance, killings, and US-funded civil wars in Central America. Cornejo reveals a direct line from US intervention to current forms of racial, economic, and gender injustice in the isthmus, connecting this to the criminalization and incarceration of migrants at the US-Mexico border today. Drawing on interviews with Central American artists and curators, she theorizes a form of “visual disobedience” in which art operates in opposition to nation-states, colonialism, and visual coloniality. She counters historical erasure by examining over eighty artworks and highlighting forty artists across the region. Cornejo also rejects the normalized image of the suffering Central American individual by repositioning artists as creative agents of their own realities. With this comprehensive exploration of contemporary Central American art, Cornejo highlights the role of visual disobedience as a strategy of decolonial aesthetics to expose and combat coloniality, heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, empire, and other systems of oppression.
Kency Cornejo is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of New Mexico.
Biennial Boom
Making Contemporary Art Global
PALOMA CHECA-GISMERO
In Biennial Boom, Paloma Checa-Gismero traces an archeology of contemporary art biennials to uncover the processes that prompted these exhibitions to become the global art world’s defining events at the end of the twentieth century. Returning to the early post-Cold War years, Checa-Gismero examines the early iterations of three well-known biennials at the borders of North Atlantic liberalism: the Bienal de La Habana, inSITE, and Manifesta. She draws on archival and oral history fieldwork in Cuba, Mexico, the US/Mexico borderlands, and the Netherlands, showing how these biennials reflected a post-Cold War optimism for a pacified world by which artistic and knowledge production would help mend social, political, and cultural divisions. Checa-Gismero argues that, in reflecting this optimism, biennials facilitated the conversion of subaltern aesthetic genealogies into forms that were legible to a nascent cosmopolitan global elite—all under the pretense of cultural exchange. By outlining how early biennials set the basis for what is now recognized as “global contemporary art,” Checa-Gismero intervenes in previous accounts of the contemporary art world in order to better understand how it became the exclusionary, rarified institution of today.
Paloma Checa-Gismero is Assistant Professor of Art History at Swarthmore College.
From Forest to Steppe
The Russian Art of Building in Wood WILLIAM CRAFT BRUMFIELD
Throughout Russian history, local craftsmen have shown remarkable skill in fashioning wood into items of daily use, from bridges and street paving to carts and boats to household utensils and combs. Russia has the largest forested zone on the planet, so its architecture was also traditionally made from timber. From homes to churches to forts, Russian buildings are almost all, underneath, constructed with logs, often covered by plank siding or by lathing and plaster. In From Forest to Steppe, renowned scholar and photographer William Craft Brumfield offers a panoramic survey of Russia’s centuries-long heritage of wooden architecture. Lavishly illustrated with nearly 400 color photographs, the volume links log-built barns, windmills, houses, and churches in the Far North; Buddhist shrines in the Transbaikal region; and eighteenth-century palaces on the outskirts of Moscow. Brumfield also takes readers to the estate houses of many of Russia’s literary giants, from Chekhov and Tolstoy to Dostoevsky and Pushkin. Spanning thousands of photographed sites, five decades of field work, and seven time zones, Brumfield’s photographs offer compelling evidence of the adaptability of log construction and its ability to transcend class, cultural, and aesthetic boundaries. In the decades since Brumfield began photographing Russian architecture, many of the buildings he has documented have been demolished, abandoned, and left to rot at alarming rates. Brumfield observes a contradiction in contemporary Russia: it acknowledges the cultural importance of wooden buildings yet struggles to find and dedicate the resources and solutions needed to save them. A hymn and elegy to the long Russian practice of building with wood, From Forest to Steppe is an unparalleled look into one of the world’s most singular architectural traditions.
William Craft Brumfield is Professor of Slavic Studies at Tulane University. Brumfield, who began photographing Russia in 1970, is the foremost authority in the West on Russian architecture. He is the author, editor, and photographer of numerous books, including Journeys through the Russian Empire: The Photographic Legacy of Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, Architecture at the End of the Earth: Photographing the Russian North, and Lost Russia: Photographing the Ruins of Russian Architecture, all also published by Duke University Press. Brumfield is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and was a Fellow at the National Humanities Center. In 2002 he was elected to the State Russian Academy of Architecture and Construction Sciences, and in 2006 he was elected to the Russian Academy of Fine Arts. He is also the 2014 recipient of the D. S. Likhachev Prize for Outstanding Contributions to the Preservation of the Cultural Heritage of Russia. In 2019 he was awarded the Russian state Order of Friendship medal—the highest decoration of the Russian Federation given to foreign nationals—for his study and promotion of Russia’s cultural legacy. Brumfield’s photographs of Russian architecture have been exhibited at numerous galleries and museums and are part of the Image Collections at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
June 2025
440 pages
Architecture/Photography
Rights: World
October 2025
328 pages
Asian studies/Anthropology/Fashion Rights: World
Dyeing with the Earth
Textiles, Tradition, and Sustainability in Contemporary Japan
CHARLOTTE LINTON
In Dyeing with the Earth, Charlotte Linton explores the intersection of small-scale traditional craft production with contemporary sustainability practices. Focusing on natural textile dyeing on the southern Japanese island of Amami Ōshima, Linton details the complex relationship between preservation practices, resource extraction, and land access in the production of Oshima tsumugi kimono cloth, which uses the indigenous technique of dorozome (or mud-dyeing). As global interest in sustainable fashion grows, textile manufacturers on Amami have expanded from kimono production to dyeing garments and textiles for high-profile designers. While traditional craft may appear at odds with the large-scale global textile industry, Linton reveals how Amamian producers face similar social, economic, and environmental pressures. Ethical production in fashion, Linton contends, should focus on understanding local, everyday practices that sustain direct relationships between people, place, and the environment rather than relying on short term solutions via new processes or materials. Weaving ethnography, photography, and drawing, Linton underscores the continued relevance of traditional craft and material cultures amid ongoing climate change and biodiversity loss.
Charlotte Linton is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Social Anthropology at All Souls College, University of Oxford.
Brutal Fantasies
September 2025
176 pages
Asian American studies/Asian studies/Cultural studies Rights: World
Imagining North Korea in the Long Cold War CHRISTINE KIM
Christine Kim examines everyday representations and imaginings of North Korea within post-Cold War era scholarly and popular thought. Drawing on defectors’ life writings, media representations, films, and fiction from the last two decades, Kim analyzes powerful affective legacies of cultural fantasies of North Korea. Arguing that understandings of North Korea and diasporic Asia are tied to histories of imperialist expansion, she critiques global knowings of North Korea that work to normalize a post-Cold War order, drawing on the critical energies of Global South projects. In doing so, she aims to resituate power relations that structure North Korea and North America to better comprehend how U.S. imperialism and Cold War logics continue to inform global imaginaries, diasporic relations, and conceptions of the human.
Christine Kim is Associate Professor and editor of the journal Canadian Literature
Ice Geographies
The Colonial Politics of Race and Indigeneity in the Arctic JEN ROSE SMITH
Ice animates the look and feel of climate change. It is melting faster than ever before, causing social upheaval among northern coastal communities and disrupting a more southern, temperate world as sea levels rise. Economic, academic, and activist stakeholders are increasingly focused on the unsettling potential of ice as they plan for a future shaped by rapid transformation. Yet, in Ice Geographies, Jen Rose Smith demonstrates that ice has always been at the center of making sense of the world. Ice as homeland is often at the heart of Arctic and sub-Arctic ontologies, cosmologies, and Native politics. Reflections on ice have also long been a constitutive element of Western political thought, but it often privileges a pristine or empty “nature” stripped of power relations. Smith centers ice to study race and indigeneity by investigating ice relations as sites and sources of analysis that are bound up with colonial and racial formations as well as ice geographies beyond those formations. Smith asks, How is ice a racialized geography and imaginary, and how does it also exceed those frameworks?
Jen Rose Smith is Assistant Professor of American Indian Studies and Geography at the University of Washington.
DeepAesthetics
Computational Experience in a Time of Machine Learning
ANNA MUNSTER
Computation has now been reconfigured by machine learning: those technical processes and operations that yoke together statistics and computer science to create artificial intelligence (AI) by furnishing vast datasets to learn tasks and predict outcomes. In DeepAesthetics, Anna Munster examines the range of more-than-human experiences this transformation has engendered and considers how those experiences can be qualitative as well as quantitative. Drawing on process philosophy, Munster approaches computational experience through its relations and operations. She combines deep learning—the subfield of machine learning that uses neural network architectures—and aesthetics to offer a way to understand the insensible and frequently imperceptible forms of nonlinear and continuously modulating statistical function. Attending to the domains and operations of image production, statistical racialization, AI conversational agents, and critical AI art, Munster analyzes how machine learning is operationally entangled with racialized, neurotypical, and cognitivist modes of producing knowledge and experience. She approaches machine learning as events through which a different sensibility registers, one in which AI is populated by oddness, disjunctions, and surprises, and where artful engagement with machine learning fosters indeterminate futures.
Anna Munster is Professor in the School of Art and Design at the University of New South Wales and author of An Aesthesia of Networks: Conjunctive Experience in Art and Technology and Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics.
May 2025
248 pages
Native and Indigenous studies/ Geography/ Environmental Humanities Rights: World
April 2025
240 pages
Science and technology studies/Media studies
Rights: World
September 2025
248 pages
Feminism/Higher Education/Global studies
Rights: World
August 2025
168 pages
Dance Rights: World
Insurgent Visions
Feminism, Justice, Solidarity
CHANDRA TALPADE MOHANTY
In a current era marked by carceral logics, authoritarianism, and white supremacy, there has never been a greater need for the tools and inspiration that radical feminism provides. In Insurgent Visions, Chandra Talpade Mohanty explores methods of anticapitalist resistance to radically transform everyday life. She presents insurgent feminism—a theory and praxis with which to contest and replace the practices of violence grounded in racialized gender relations. Insurgent feminism unsettles existing power structures in order to enact new relationships and forge new subjectivities, epistemologies, and communities. Drawing on organizing efforts in the US-Mexico borderlands, Palestine/Israel, and Kashmir, as well as on abolitionist and Dalit feminisms, Mohanty contends that the knowledge that emerges from the experiences of marginalized groups who are struggling for economic, racial, and social justice is key for imagining feminist futures. She also turns to the neoliberal landscape of higher education in the United States and the difficulties of instituting transformative antiracist and anti-imperialist feminist knowledge building. Mapping new challenges for radical praxis, Mohanty reconfigures feminist studies while offering a model for decolonial cross-border organizing and solidarity.
Chandra Talpade Mohanty is Chair and Distinguished Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Syracuse University and author of Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, also published by Duke University Press.
Knowing as Moving
Perception, Memory, and Place
SUSAN
LEIGH FOSTER
In Knowing as Moving, Susan Leigh Foster theorizes how the act of moving in and through the world creates the potential for individual and collective bodies to connect. Starting from the assertion that knowing takes place through bodily movement, Foster moves away from the Western philosophical traditions of dance, critiquing the Cartesian mind/body duality and its colonizing politics. She draws on Native and Indigenous studies, ecological cognitive science, disability studies, phenomenology, and new materialism to explore how knowledge is neither static nor storable. Thinking is a physical action and the product of an entire neuromuscular system with its mobile postural and gestural configurations, perceptual systems, and brain activity. Foster outlines how reading, examining, talking, and remembering are all forms of moving and contends that any process of knowing establishes one’s identity and relationality. By focusing on the centrality of bodily movement to thought and self, she contributes a decolonial critique of the study of knowledge and being. In so doing, Foster replaces the Cartesian colonial “I think therefore I am,” with a decolonial “I move and therefore I know.”
Susan Leigh Foster is Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/ Dance at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of, most recently, Valuing Dance: Commodities and Gifts in Motion
Emergent Genders
Living Otherwise in Tokyo's Pink Economies
MICHELLE H. S. HO
In Emergent Genders, Michelle H. S. Ho traces the genders manifesting alongside Japanese popular culture in Akihabara, an area in Tokyo renowned for the fandom and consumption of anime, manga, and games. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in josō and dansō cafe-and-bars, establishments where male-to-female and female-to-male crossdressing is prevalent, Ho shows how their owners, employees, and customers creatively innovate what she calls emergent genders—new practices, categories, and ways of being stemming from the simultaneous fracturing, contestations, and (re)imaginations of older forms of gender and sexual variance in Japan. Such emergent genders initiate new markets for alternative categories of expression and subjectivity to thrive in a popular cultural hub like Akihabara instead of Tokyo’s gay and lesbian neighborhood of Shinjuku Ni-chōme. By rethinking identitarian models of gender and sexuality, reconfiguring the significance of capitalism for trans studies and queer theory, and decentering theoretical frameworks incubated in a predominantly United States academic context, Ho offers new ways of examining how trans and gender nonconforming individuals may survive and flourish under capitalism.
Michelle H. S. Ho is Assistant Professor of Feminist and Queer Cultural Studies at the National University of Singapore.
Oceanic Becoming
The Pacific beneath the Pavements
ROB WILSON
From disappearing coral reefs and ocean acidification to floating great garbage patches, the Pacific Ocean is an ever-present reminder of the Anthropocene. In Oceanic Becoming, Rob Wilson demonstrates that in the midst of the planetary crises the Pacific now faces, it must be understood as interconnected to the other oceans. Wilson frames this interconnection as “Oceania,” reconceiving the world oceans as tied to sites of urban dwelling and life sustenance—from Boston to Brisbane—that are increasingly threatened by late capitalism. Confronting these threats, Wilson argues, requires a project he theorizes as “worlding”—a process of world-making and world-remaking across Oceania that would create new forms of belonging and connection at local, regional, and transnational levels. Wilson shows how Oceania is not just a site of peril but one charged with emergent literary and social formations that can provide the basis for new solidarities, futures, and ecologies.
Rob Wilson is Distinguished Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of, among other books, Reimagining the American Pacific: From South Pacific to Bamboo Ridge and Beyond, also published by Duke University Press, and Be Always Converting, Be Always Converted: An American Poetics
January 2025
280 pages
Gender and Sexuality/Asian studies/Cultural studies
Rights: World
March 2025
240 pages
Cultural studies/Literary studies/Asian studies
Rights: World
August 2025
304 pages
Gender studies/American studies
Rights: World
October 2025
352 pages
Latin American history
Rights: World
Humanity's Ruins
Ethics, Feminism, and Genocidal Humanitarianism
DANIELLE BOUCHARD
In Humanity’s Ruins, Danielle Bouchard examines how genocidal aspirations animate contemporary Western humanitarian projects and discourses. Drawing on anticolonial and antiracist feminist critique, Bouchard argues that humanitarianism has functioned in the Cold War and post-Cold War eras to perpetuate longer-lived, fundamentally racist conceptualizations of humanity’s defining characteristics. She examines the aesthetics of humanitarian texts, which are filled with figures of the wounded, dead, and disappeared—the atomic bomb victim whose only remainder is a shadow imprinted on concrete, the grievously injured Muslim woman, the vanished members of Amazonian “uncontacted” tribes, the dying African—to elucidate how the appearance of these figures reaffirms a genocidal view of humanity that aligns with the continuation of Western imperial warfare. Humanitarian discourses conceive of humanity as a community which, by definition, is under existential threat from some humans who are explicitly or implicitly understood as needing to be eliminated. Bouchard invokes “humanity’s ruins” to expose the genocidal fantasy of a human world in which such threat has been eliminated in the interest of supposedly ensuring humanity’s survival.
Danielle Bouchard is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and author of A Community of Disagreement: Feminism in the University
Modern Peru
A New History
PAULO DRINOT AND ALBERTO VERGARA, EDITORS
Modern Peru: A New History offers a sweeping account of Peru’s history from the wars of independence to the present day. Delving into a history characterized by instability and a series of interrupted national projects, the contributors examine the legacies of Tupac Amaru’s 1780s rebellion and the intense ideological debates between conservatives and liberals about the newly independent nation. They analyze the mid-nineteenth-century guano state, the catastrophic defeat in the War of the Pacific, and the establishment of an exclusionary oligarchic state—the ‘Aristocratic Republic’—based on a diverse export economy. Outlining Peru’s twentieth-century transition from a rural, agrarian society to a primarily urban one, the contributors explore the 1968 coup and its unfulfilled promise of top-down social transformation, which was followed by years of democratic rule marked by internal armed conflict and economic mismanagement. This period culminated in the authoritarian neoliberal revolution of Alberto Fujimori, whose economic and political legacies have, in the new century, resulted in a booming economy, now in abeyance, and a deeply dysfunctional democracy. Accessible and wide-ranging, Modern Peru provides a singularly panoramic perspective on Peru’s history.
Gyanendra Pandey is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of History at Emory University and author of A History of Prejudice: Race, Caste, and Difference in India and the United States, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism, and History in India, and The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India, among other books.
Latin America in Debate
Indigeneity, Development, Dependency, Populism
MARISTELLA SVAMPA
TRANSLATED
BY ALEJANDRO REYES
In Latin America in Debate, eminent Argentine sociologist Maristella Svampa provides a broad and accessible overview of the key political and intellectual debates in Latin American from the early twentieth century to the present. She examines four main topics: the place of Indigenous peoples in postcolonial nation-states; the impact of development on the Latin American political imagination; the impact of being economically dependent within a global capitalist order; and the turn to populism as a particular political response to these various challenges. Svampa traces each debate’s genealogy and contextualizes them over the course of the twentieth century and demonstrates how intellectual and sociological currents have redefined and reshaped them in the twenty-first. Svampa also maps the tensions in each and shows how they influence contemporary Latin American politics. By focusing on Indigeneity, development, dependency, and populism, Svampa provides a clear entry point to understand the most pressing issues confronting Latin America while showcasing how the region’s intellectuals have been thinking about and debating these issues in ways that generate social theory with global implications.
Maristella Svampa is Senior Researcher at Centro de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas de Argentina and the author of Neo-Extractivism in Latin America and numerous other books. Alejandro Reyes is a freelance writer, translator, editor, and the author of several books in Spanish.
Living and Dying in São Paulo
Immigrants, Health, and the Built Environment in Brazil
JEFFREY
LESSER
There is a saying in Brazil: “Mosquitoes are democratic: they bite the rich and the poor alike.” Why then is bad health—from violence to respiratory disease, from malaria to dengue— dispersed unevenly across different social and national groups? In Living and Dying in São Paulo, Jeffrey Lesser focuses on the Bom Retiro neighborhood to explore such questions by examining the competing visions of well-being in Brazil among racialized immigrants and policymakers and health officials. He analyzes the fraught relationship between Bom Retiro residents and the state and health care agencies that have overseen community sanitation efforts since the mid-nineteenth century, drawing out the connected systems of the built environment, public health laws and practices, and citizenship. Lesser employs the concept of “residues” to outline how continuing historical material, legislative, and social legacies structure contemporary daily life and health outcomes in the neighborhood. In so doing, Lesser creates a dialogue between the past and the present, showing how the relationship between culture and disease is both layered and interconnected.
Jeffrey Lesser is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History at Emory University. He is the author of A Discontented Diaspora: Japanese Brazilians and the Meanings of Ethnic Militancy, 1960–1980 and Negotiating National Identity: Immigrants, Minorities, and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil, both published by Duke University Press.
August 2025
424 pages
Latin American studies
Rights: World
April 2025
320 pages
History/Latin American studies/Public health Rights: World
October 2025
176 pages
Anthropology/Social theory
Rights: World
August 2025
384 pages
Religion/Politics/Critical theory
Rights: World
Pierre Bourdieu's Political Economy of Being
GHASSAN HAGE
This work explores the work of late 20th century social theorist Pierre Bourdieu, offering an investigation of Bourdieu’s work as a whole and revitalizing popular and undertheorized aspects of his thinking. Ghassan Hage moves through the empirical existential analytics of Bourdieu’s social theories in order to unpack what Hage calls Bourdieu’s “political economy of being”—a process of producing and distributing ways of living by assigning differential values to how people live or struggle to live. Hage carries the reader through a constellation of key anthropological and sociological concepts that make up this political economy, bringing different insights into Bourdieu’s work—most centrally, that “Being” for Bourdieu can be equated to viable life.
Ghassan Hage is Professor of Anthropology and Social Theory at the University of Melbourne.
Political Theology Reimagined
ALEX DUBILET AND VINCENT W. LLOYD, EDITORS
Political theology has emerged as an enormously energetic, creative way of exploring the complex relationship between religion, politics, and culture around the world. Political Theology Reimagined centers decolonial, Black, queer, feminist, and Marxist modes of critical practice to offer a cutting-edge vision of the field that foregrounds a political theology animated by both a fascination with and suspicion of the secular. Among other topics, contributors explore how religious ideas, practices, and imaginations are inflected by anti-Blackness, patriarchy, and colonial histories, theorize anew the status of secularization narratives, probe the universality and translatability of conceptual abstractions, and experiment with the powers of genealogy and speculation. In short, they grapple with religion and critique in all their complexity, opening new itineraries in political theology by transforming its fundamental theoretical coordinates. Traversing diverse sites, from South Asia to the Middle East to Indigenous North America, and working across diverse scales, from the national to the planetary to the cosmic, this volume models the future of political theology pairing rigorous critique with a commitment to collective liberation.
Alex Dubilet is Assistant Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. Vincent W. Lloyd is Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University.
Prosthetic Memories
Postcolonial Feminisms in a More-Than-Human World HYAESIN YOON
In Prosthetic Memories, Hyaesin Yoon examines the entanglements of humans, animals, and technologies across South Korea and the United States at the turn of the twenty-first century. Interrogating a variety of body-technology interfaces, Yoon outlines an emergent mode of prosthetic memory in which human memory is extended into both machines and animals. Prosthetic memory overflows and provides an alternative to familiar human perception, Western scientific reason, and other senses of knowledge in ways that can foster networks of solidarity, care, and empathy between human and nonhuman subjects. Among other sites and subjects, Yoon examines tongue surgery to correct English pronunciation in Korea, Asian American poetry that engages the human-machine divide, transnational dog cloning, and stem cell research, each of which activates potent postcolonial feminist mnemonics and alliances. In so doing, Yoon narrates the countermemories of racialized, gendered, diasporic, queer, and marginalized human and nonhuman others that work against the violent and isolating biopolitical and neoliberal forces in contemporary society.
Hyaesin Yoon is Associate Professor in the Department of Gender Studies at Central European University.
Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen
NEDA ATANASOSKI AND NASSIM PARVIN, EDITORS
New and emerging technologies, especially ones that infiltrate intimate spaces, relations, homes, and bodies, are often referred to as creepy in media and political discourses. In Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen, Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin introduce a feminist theory of creep that they substantiate through critical engagement with smart homes, smart dust, smart desires, and smart forests toward dreams of feminist futures. Contributing authors further illuminate what is otherwise obscured, assumed, or dismissed in characterizations of technology as creepy or creeping. Considering diverse technologies such as border surveillance and China’s credit system to sexcams and home assistants, the volume’s essays and artworks demonstrate that the potentials and pitfalls of artificial intelligence and digital and robotic technologies cannot be assessed through binaries of seeing/being seen, privacy/surveillance, or harmful/useful. Together, their multifaceted and multimodal approach transcends such binaries, accounting for technological relations that exceed sight to include touch, presence, trust, and diverse modes of collectivity. As such, this volume develops creep as a feminist analytic and creative mode on par with technology’s complex entanglement with intimate, local, and global politics.
Neda Atanasoski is Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland. Nassim Parvin is an Associate Professor in the Information School at the University of Washington.
February 2025
232 pages
Feminist theory/Science and technology studies
Rights: World
May 2025
320 pages
Feminist science and technology studies/ Cultural studies/Design studies
Rights: World
Feminism and the Cinema of Experience
LORI JO MARSO
From popular films like Greta Gerwig’s Barbie (2023) to Chantal Akerman’s avant-garde classic Jeanne Dielman (1975), feminist cinema can provoke discomfort. Ambivalence, stasis, horror, cringe—these and other affects refuse the resolution of feeling good or bad, leaving viewers questioning and disoriented. In Feminism and the Cinema of Experience, Lori Jo Marso examines how filmmakers scramble our senses to open up space for encountering and examining the political conditions of patriarchy, racism, and existential anxiety. Building on Akerman’s cinematic lexicon and Simone de Beauvoir’s phenomenological attention to the lives of girls and women, Marso analyzes film and television by directors ranging from Akerman, Gerwig, Mati Diop, Catherine Breillat, and Joey Soloway to Emerald Fennell, Michaela Coel, Audrey Diwan, Alice Diop, and Julia Ducournau. Through their innovative and intentional uses of camera, sound, editing, and new forms of narrative, these directors use discomfort in order to invite viewers to feel like feminists and to sense the possibility of freedom.
Lori Jo Marso is Doris Zemurray Stone Professor of Modern Literary and Historical Studies, Professor of Political Science, and Director of American Studies at Union College. She is author of Politics with Beauvoir: Freedom in the Encounter and coeditor of W Stands for Women: How the George W. Bush Presidency Shaped a New Politics of Gender, both also published by Duke University Press.
January 2025
240 pages
Music/Media studies/Asian studies
Rights: World excluding Chinese Complex
Remixing Wong Kar-wai
Music, Bricolage, and the Aesthetics of Oblivion
GIORGIO BIANCOROSSO
Like his fellow filmmakers Stanley Kubrick, Quentin Tarantino, and Sofia Coppola, Wong Kar-wai crafts the soundtracks of his films by jettisoning original scores in favor of commercial recordings. In Remixing Wong Kar-wai, Giorgio Biancorosso examines the combinatorial practice at the heart of Wong’s cinema to retheorize musical borrowing, appropriation, and repurposing. Wong’s irrepressible penchant for poaching music from other films—whether old Chinese melodramas, Hollywood blockbusters, or European art films—subsumes familiar music under his own brand of cinema. As Wong combs through musical and cinematic archives and splices disparate music together, exceedingly wellknown music loses its previous associations and acquires an infinite new constellation of meanings in his films. Drawing on Claude Lévi-Strauss’s concept of bricolage, Biancorosso contends that Wong’s borrowing is akin to a practice of creative destruction in which Wong becomes a bricoleur who remixes music at hand to create new and complete, self-sustaining statements. By outlining Wong’s modus operandi of indiscriminate borrowing and remixing, Biancorosso prompts readers to reconsider the significance of transforming preexisting music into new compositions for film and beyond.
Giorgio Biancorosso is Professor of Music at the University of Hong Kong and author of Situated Listening: The Sound of Absorption in Classical Cinema
Speculative Relations
Indigenous Worlding and Repair
JOSEPH M. PIERCE
Indigenous relations are often described in anthropological terms, or as expressions of timeless, unchanging kinship ties. In Speculative Relations, Joseph M. Pierce challenges this view, considering the potential of these relations as a means of repairing the damages of history. Pierce approaches Indigenous art and culture not as objects of study, but through relations committed to reciprocity and care for human and more-than-human beings. Drawing on Cherokee thinking, Indigenous queer theory, literary and cultural studies, and art criticism, he illuminates pathways for understanding and resisting the ongoing damages of colonialism while pointing to future worlds and imaginaries that breathe life into Indigenous thought and practice. Analyzing a range of materials—from photography, literature, and sculpture to film and ethnography—Pierce reveals how speculation, as a form of situated knowledge production, can repair and reimagine the worlds that colonialism sought to destroy. In doing so, Pierce highlights how gestures, poetics, and embodiment can uphold tradition and harness the imaginative power of speculation to create pathways for living in good relations.
Joseph M. Pierce is Associate Professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature at Stony Brook University and author of Argentine Intimacies: Queer Kinship in an Age of Splendor, 1890–1910
Spoiled
Asian American Hostility and the Damage of Repair
SUMMER KIM LEE
Summer Kim Lee juxtaposes the hostility, messiness, and abrasiveness of contemporary Asian American artists and writers with the notion that art can offer a space of healing and repair in the wake of racialized violence. Across works by Catalina Ouyang, Wu Tsang, TJ Shin, Jes Fan, and Ocean Vuong, formlessness and deformation express a refusal to become disciplined, self-possessed Asian subjects. For Kim Lee, the deidealization of acting and being “spoiled” opens up space for another kind of feeling and relating that relinquishes fantasies of power and control. Observing behaviors and affects that are often banished from the social in Asian American aesthetic practice—embarrassment, asociality, appropriation, ravenous eating—Kim Lee rethinks what it means to “feel Asian” and what kind of a politics that might entail. In staying with bad feelings, Kim Lee develops a method of close reading that unsettles what has become a dominant mode of understanding Asian American cultural production.
Summer Kim Lee is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of California, Los Angeles..
August 2025
288 pages
Native and Indigenous studies
Rights: World
October 2025
256 pages
Asian American studies/Performance studies/ Literary studies
Rights: World
September 2025
256 pages
Black Feminist studies/Geography/ Anthropology
Rights: World
November 2025
304 pages
Anthropology/Gender studies/South Asian studies
Rights: World
The Elsewhere Is Black
Ecological Violence and Improvised Life
MARISA SOLOMON
In The Elsewhere Is Black, Marisa Solomon examines how waste is a mundane part of poor Black survival and a condition of settler colonial racial capitalism. Tracing the flow of trash and waste across Black spaces, from Brooklyn’s historically Black Bedford-Stuyvesant to the post-plantation towns of Virginia’s Tidewater, Solomon contends that waste infrastructures concentrate environmental risk in an elsewhere that is routinely Black. Solomon emphasizes that ecological violence is a form of racialized heteropatriarchal environmental control that upholds whiteness as a propertied way of life and criminalizes Black survival. As she points to acute sites of toxicity, Solomon theorizes the relationship between the devaluation of land and Black and more-than-human life to reveal how the risks of poisoning, police violence, dispossession, and poverty hold Black life captive. Locating Black survival as site from which alternative eco-political imaginations spring, she foregrounds how people live and dream amidst waste’s daily accumulation. Solomon opens new ecological horizons to ask: What forms of environmentalism emerge when Black un/freedom has never been distant from waste?
Marisa Solomon is Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University.
The Goddess in the Mirror
An Anthropology of Beauty TULASI SRINIVAS
Tulasi Srinivas ethnographically examines beauty parlors, salons, and spas in Bangalore to ask questions about beauty's dual nature as mundane practice and magical pathway to the divine. Following the everyday lives of women in India, Srinivas investigates how these women live at the confluence of bodies, practices, theologies, capital, and chemicals. From the initial growth of the beauty industry in Bangalore, to conversation between women in the parlor, Srinivas demonstrates how myth permeates beauty’s symbolic, transactional, and affective dimensions. Through a study of beauty’s stance at the edge of the political and social, Srinivas provokes a conversation about beauty as more than a state of being and argues for the importance of a counter-system to dominant masculine and nationalistic narratives.
Tulasi Srinivas is Professor of Anthropology, Religion, and Transnational Studies at the Marlboro Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College.
The Human in Bits
Graphical Computers, Black Abstractions
KRIS COHEN
In The Human in Bits, Kris Cohen examines black abstractionist painting to demonstrate how race and computation are intimately entangled with the personal computer’s graphic user interface. He shows how the personal computer and the graphical field of its screen meant to transform the human by transforming what environments humans were to labor in. It also provided the means for whiteness to tie itself to notions of colorblind meritocracy. Cohen focuses on the post-1960s experiments of black abstractionists Alma Thomas, Jack Whitten, Charles Gaines, and Julie Mehretu, who developed a nonrepresentational approach to blackness that was oriented more toward constraint than human expression. From Gaines’s use of grids to Mehretu’s layering of paint, these artists—in their knowledge that black life had always been conflated with numbers and bits of information—flirted with repetition, systems, and formulas to test other ways of being human. By demonstrating how these artists bypassed the white fear that the human would become interchangeable with data, Cohen reframes modernism and modernist art to account for racialization in computational cultures.
Kris Cohen is Jane Neuberger Goodsell Professor of Art History and Humanities at Reed College and author of Never Alone, Except for Now: Art, Networks, Populations, also published by Duke University Press.
The Book of Politics
China in Theory
MICHAEL DUTTON
In The Book of Politics, Michael Dutton offers an affective theorization of the political and a political theorization of affect. Drawing on Western and Chinese social theory and practice, Dutton rethinks Carl Schmitt’s insistence that the political can be thought of only within the antagonistic pairing of friend and enemy. Dutton shows how the power of the friend/enemy binary must be understood by conceptualizing the political as the channeling, harnessing, and transforming of affective energy flows in relation to that binary. Given this affective nature of politics, Dutton contends that to rethink the political means moving away from a political science toward an art of the political. Such an art highlights fluidity and pulls away from Eurocentric political theory, requiring a conceptualization of the political as global. He juxtaposes ancient Chinese cosmology, medicine, and Maoism against the monuments of early capitalist modernity such as the Crystal Palace and the Eiffel Tower to highlight the differences in political investments and intensities. From the Chinese revolution to the global rise of right-wing movements, Dutton rethinks politics in the contemporary world.
Michael Dutton most recently taught at Beijing Capital Normal University and Goldsmiths, University of London, and is the author of Policing Chinese Politics: A History, also published by Duke University Press, and coauthor of Beijing Time
August 2025
216 pages
Black studies/Art history/Media studies
Rights: World
August 2024
440 pages
Political Theory/Asian Studies
Rights: World
studies/Latinx studies
August 2024
328 pages
Cultural studies/Museum studies
Rights: World
The Politics of Care Work
Puerto Rican Women Organizing for Social Justice
EMMA AMADOR
In The Politics of Care Work, Emma Amador tells the story of Puerto Rican women’s involvement in political activism for social and economic justice in Puerto Rico and the United States throughout the twentieth century. Amador focuses on the experiences and contributions of Puerto Rican social workers, care workers, and caregivers who fought for the compensation of reproductive labor in society and the establishment of social welfare programs. These activists believed conflicts over social reproduction and care work were themselves high-stakes class struggles for women, migrants, and people of color. In Puerto Rico, they organized for women’s rights, socialism, labor standards, and Puerto Rican independence. They continued this work in the United States by advocating for migrant rights, participating in the Civil Rights movement, and joining Puerto Rican-led social movements. Amador shows how their relentless efforts gradually shifted the field of social work toward social justice and community-centered activism. Their profound and enduring impact on Puerto Rican communities underscores the crucial role of Puerto Rican women’s caregiving labor and activism in building and sustaining migrant communities.
Emma Amador is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Connecticut.
The Politics of Collecting
Race and the Aestheticization of Property
EUNSONG KIM
In The Politics of Collecting, Eunsong Kim traces how racial capitalism and colonialism situated the rise of US museum collections and conceptual art forms. Investigating historical legal and property claims, she argues that regimes of expropriation—rather than merit or good taste—are responsible for popular ideas of formal innovation and artistic genius. In doing so, she details how Marcel Duchamp’s canonization has more to do with his patron’s donations to museums than it does the quality of Duchamp’s work, and she uncovers the racialized and financialized logic behind the Archive of New Poetry’s collecting practices. Ranging from the conception of philanthropy devised by the robber barons of the late nineteenth century to ongoing digitization projects, Kim provides a new history of contemporary art that accounts for the complicated entanglement of race, capital, and labor behind storied art institutions and artists. Drawing on history, theory, and economics, Kim challenges received notions of artistic success and talent and calls for a new vision of art beyond the cultural institution.
Eunsong Kim is Associate Professor of English at Northeastern University.
Living On After Failure
Affective Structures of Modern Life
IRVING GOH
In Living On After Failure, Irving Goh dwells with failure and all of its negative affects. Goh does not seek a theorization of failure as something to overcome or turn into a recuperative philosophy or progress narrative. Rather, he engages with the ontological condition of failure as a process of staying with the impasse that failure brings. Drawing on the thought of Berlant, Derrida, Foucault, and Nancy, Goh examines works by contemporary writers like Ottessa Moshfegh, Rachel Cusk, Édouard Levé, Yiyun Li, and Kate Zambreno. He guides readers through stages of reckoning with failure as an immersive impasse: flopping, drifting itself, a dark care of the self, melodrama, and post-scripting. By unsettling the failure/success binary, Goh provides those who cannot shake off their sense of failure or who refuse the narratives of progress or success and their ideologies of grit and resilience, with discursive and affective spaces to attend to their desire to be attached to their failures.
Irving Goh is Professor of Comparative Literature at Emory University and Associate Professor of English at the National University of Singapore, coauthor of The Deconstruction of Sex, also published by Duke University Press, and author of The Reject: Community, Politics, and Religion after the Subject
Transatlantic Disbelonging
Unruliness, Pleasure, and Play in Nigerian Diasporic Women’s Art BIMBOLA AKINBOLA
In Transatlantic Disbelonging, Bimbola Akinbola redirects the focus in diaspora studies from questions of loss and longing to acts of unapologetic self-definition through the study of Nigerian diasporic women artists navigating disparate geographies, allegiances, and identities. Drawing on the work of contemporary visual and performance artists, experimental filmmakers, and writers—including Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Zina Saro-Wiwa, ruby onyinyechi amanze, and Nnedi Okorafor—Akinbola articulates how these artists use their experiences as cultural outsiders to redefine home and national belonging on their own terms. Taking a capacious interdisciplinary approach, she explores how these women employ anti-respectability, taboo, the erotic, and play to challenge oppressive colonial legacies and expectations pertaining to gender and morality. For the artists in this book, their artmaking is a form of homemaking that embraces ambivalence and reinvents alienation as possibility. Theorizing these practices as acts of “disbelonging,” Akinbola radically reimagines diasporic identity formation, illustrating how artists use creative practices to enact and embody belonging and community in expansive ways.
Bimbola Akinbola is Assistant Professor of Performance Studies at Northwestern University.
September 2025
224 pages
Literary studies/Affect theory/Philosophy Rights: World
October 2025
208 pages
African diaspora studies/Visual culture
Rights: World