Creatures of Fashion

JOHN SOLURI

Creatures of Fashion explains how the commodification of furs and fibers provoked transformations in Tierra del Fuego and southern Patagonia, including the destruction of indigenous forager and hunting societies and the acceleration of animal exploitation, as the region was integrated into Argentina and Chile in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Drawing on a vast range of sources, Soluri traces the development of human-animal relationships from the nineteenth-century exploits of interloping sea hunters from the North Atlantic, to the violence-inflected rise of sheep ranching and wool production, to new forms of commercial guanaco and fox hunting, and, ultimately, the rise of “nature-based” tourism in the late twentieth century. Both commodity production and even conservation have relied on achieving ever greater control over the reproduction of animals. By following the movements of furs and fibers from the littorals and grasslands of Tierra del Fuego to the tanneries and textile mills in the North Atlantic, this book explores how the animality of fibers, human labor, and changing technologies and fashion tastes created value in capitalist markets.

Encyclopédie Noire

The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry's Intellectual World

SARAH E. JOHNSON

A lawyer, philosophe, polymath, and enslaver, Médéric-Louis-Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry remains essential to our knowledge of the French Caribbean. His six-volume Loix et Constitutions (1784-1790) and Description de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue (1797-98) continue to provide contemporary scholars with unparalleled insight into legal, social, cultural, and scientific customs of the French Antilles, and his infamous description of the “128 degrees” between black and white racial groups serves as a touchstone for scholars tracing the development of race in the eighteenth-century Americas. But if all roads lead to Moreau, those roads were cut, paved, and maintained by the work of enslaved and free people of color. Their labor amassed wealth that afforded him the leisure to research, think, and write. Their rich intellectual and linguistic cultures were appropriated as fodder for his most applauded works. Treating Moreau as an unreliable center, Sara Johnson surrounds him with the members of his household—French and Afro Caribbean, free and enslaved—that he worked so hard to write out of the public version of his life story. Built out of archival fragments, creative speculation, and audacious intellectual courage, Encyclopédie Noire is a communal biography of the women and men who made Moreau and his world.

Sara E. Johnson is associate professor of Literature of the Americas at the University of California, San Diego. She is also co-director of the Black Studies Project.

December 2023

240 pages

Latin American & Caribbean Studies / Natural History

Rights: World

December 2023

352 pages

Latin American & Caribbean Studies / African & African Diaspora Studies

Rights: World

October 2023

416 pages

Latin American & Caribbean Studies / Political History

Rights: World

Awakening the Ashes

An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution

MARLENE L. DAUT

In this work, Marlene Daut presents an intellectual history of Saint Domingue, the Haitian Revolution, and early nineteenth-century Haiti. Situating Haitian writers, scholars, and political thinkers within the global history of ideas in an era known as the “Age of Revolution,” Daut argues for the recognition of Haiti’s intellectual impact.Daut’s key intervention is that Haitian historical writing was unique due to the sustained concern with the history of slavery and colonialism at the center of the Haitian independence movement. Both impacted by and influencing the increasing professionalization of history as an academic discipline, Haitian thinkers succeeded in building a more comparative and capacious understanding of global intellectual history. While the modern understanding of freedom and equality is often linked to the French Declaration of the Rights of Man or the US Declaration of Independence, Daut suggests that the more immediate reference is what she calls the 1804 Principle—that no human being should ever again be enslaved, an idea promulgated by the Black Haitians who succeeded against all odds in overturning the French empire on the island.

Marlene Daut is professor of French and African Diaspora Studies at Yale University.

Between Two Worlds

ROBIN JUDD

January 2024

352 pages

Jewish Studies / Military History

Rights: World

As the world tried to piece itself back together after World War II, European Jews faced the harrowing task of living with trauma, homelessness, poverty, and other consequences of the Nazi effort to eradicate them. Many Jewish survivors viewed marriage between Jewish brides and Allied military grooms as a way to move forward. Robin Judd, whose grandmother was a concentration camp survivor who married an American soldier after the war, has written the first history of the several hundred European and North African Jewish women who married members of the American, British, and Canadian armed forces following the end of World War II. Drawing on an extensive collection of primary sources including interviews, letters, immigration papers, newspapers, and more, Judd offers an intimate reconstruction of how these unions emerged, developed, and fared, from meeting and courtship to marriage and immigration, and finally to life in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The stories she tells are both restorative and heartbreaking, vividly capturing how the exhilaration of early romance and gratitude of leaving war-torn Europe co-existed, not always smoothly, with survivor guilt, trauma, and the challenges of moving to a new country and into new families.