Fall 2024 Catalog

FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS

Join the Conspiracy

“Never heard of George Demmerle—aka, Prince Crazie? Well, so much the better. Here was a man at the center of a crazy place (the East Village) in a crazy time (the late Sixties), plotting a revolution—while secretly working as an FBI informant. Jonathan Butler recreates it all in vivid, cinematic detail, while adding a whole new chapter to the history of the American Left. Clear your calendar and buckle up for a wild ride.”

—JONATHAN MAHLER, AUTHOR OF LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE BRONX IS BURNING AND A STAFF WRITER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE

Dive into the electrifying tale of a Brooklyn-born patriot turned radical activist, in an era when America was torn by its ideological extremes

In the shadow of recent turmoil, Join the Conspiracy transports readers to a pivotal moment of division and dissent in American history: the late 1960s. Against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and a nation grappling with internal conflict, this compelling narrative follows the life of George

Demmerle, a factory worker whose political odyssey encapsulates the era’s tumultuous spirit. From his roots as a concerned citizen wary of his country’s leftward tilt, Demmerle’s journey takes a dramatic turn as he delves into the heart of radical activism.

Participating in iconic protests from the March on Washington to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Demmerle’s story is a whirlwind of political fervor, embodying the struggle against what was perceived as imperialist war and racial injustice. His transformation is marked by alliances with key figures of the time, including Abbie Hoffman, and an eventual leadership role within an East Coast Black Panther affiliate. Yet, beneath his radical veneer lies a secret: Demmerle is an FBI informant.

Join the Conspiracy reveals Demmerle’s complex role in a society at war with itself, where his deepening involvement with the radical left and a bombing collective forces him to confront his loyalties. The narrative, enriched by a rare trove of period documents, candid photos taken from inside the radical movement, and underground art—more than a hundred of which are included in the book—not only charts Demmerle’s saga but also reflects the broader story of a nation struggling to find its moral compass amidst chaos.

As Demmerle navigates the dangerous waters of political extremism, readers are invited to ponder the price of ideology, the nature of loyalty, and the fine line between activism and betrayal. This book is not just a recounting of historical events but a vibrant portrait of a man and a movement that sought to reshape America.

JONATHAN BUTLER, a Brooklyn-based writer and entrepreneur, has made significant contributions to journalism, local culture, and the arts. His ventures include founding Brownstoner.com, the Brooklyn Flea, and Smorgasburg, all of which have attracted widespread attention and accolades. Featured in top publications like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and New Yorker, he has been honored with awards from the Municipal Art Society, New York Landmarks Conservancy, Brooklyn Historical Society, and others.

Movement

Long War to Take Back

Streets from the Car

“An important and timely book. Gelinas has done a superb job of describing and analyzing major conflicts and decisions regarding mass transit, proposed highway projects, and efforts to improve pedestrian and cycling infrastructure in NYC over the past 75 years.”

—MITCHELL

MOSS, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY

A gripping account of how the automobile has failed NYC and how mass transit and a revitalized streetscape are vital to its post-pandemic recovery

In 1969, as all students of New York City history think they have learned, master builder Robert Moses lost his long battle to urbanist Jane Jacobs over his planned Lower Manhattan Expressway. The ten-lane elevated expressway would slice across SoHo and Little Italy, demolish historic buildings, and displace thousands of families and businesses. Jacobs and her neighbors defeated Moses, and as a result, New York became the only major American city with no interstate highway running through its core. Like many global cities, though, New York spent fifty years during the first half of the twentieth century trying and failing to tame its heavily populated landscape to fit the private automobile. New York has now spent more than fifty years trying to undo those mistakes, wresting back city space for people, not cars.

Movement: New York’s Long War to Take Back Its Streets from the Car chronicles the earlier, less-known battles that preceded the cancellation of the Lower Manhattan Expressway: Jacobs became an example for generations of urban planners, but whose example did Jacobs emulate in an earlier victory that saved Washington Square Park? Moses may serve handily as New York’s uber-villain now, but who, before him, was responsible for destroying a critical part of New York’s transit system?

Written by a well-known urban writer who has focused on New York’s transportation system for more than a decade, author Nicole Gelinas resumes the story where Robert Caro’s landmark The Power Broker ended. Movement explores how, in the half-century leading up to the COVID19 pandemic, New York’s re-embracement of its mass-transit system and a livable streetscape helped save the city. Gelinas tackles the 1970s environmental movement, the 1980s rebuilding of the subways, and more contemporary battles, from Mayor Bloomberg’s push for more pedestrian plazas and bike lanes in the early 2000s, to transportation advocates’ protests to prevent traffic deaths in the Mayor de Blasio era of the 2010s, to the battle against Uber and Lyft to take back New York’s streets from reemerging gridlock over the half-decade leading up to the pandemic.

Introducing a cast of new transportation heroes to rival Jane Jacobs (Shirley Hayes, Hazel Henderson, Richard Ravitch, Nilka Martell) and puncturing the myth of Moses as New York’s anti-hero, Movement explores how New York City has helped redefine what it means to be a global city: not a place that is easy to drive through, but a place where people can take transit, walk, and bike to work, to school, or just for fun.

NICOLE GELINAS is a regular columnist for the New York Post, a regularly quoted source for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal. She has covered New York’s transportation issues for over a decade and is the author of the 2009 book on the global financial crisis, After the Fall: Saving Capitalism from Wall Street and Washington.

Wonder City

How to Reclaim Human-Scale Urban Life

LYNN ELLSWORTH

“Lynn Ellsworth’s Wonder City blows up the myths that underlie the real estate growth machine in New York City and beyond. She makes a passionate activist’s argument for human-centered urban planning and architecture and backs it up with rigorous research and analysis. In the spirit of urbanists from Camillo Sitte to Jane Jacobs, she values human-scale development and historic preservation. She contrasts the powerful role of the real estate industry in shaping the built environment with the docile submission of city and state governments and their urban planners to the growth machine. Her masterful critique of trickle-down housing policies includes a brilliant take-down of economist Edward Glaeser and his use of free market fundamentalism to rationalize failed urban policies in New York City and beyond.”

—TOM ANGOTTI, PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF URBAN POLICY & PLANNING, HUNTER COLLEGE AND THE GRADUATE CENTER, CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

Reimagining our cities for a sustainable and human-centric future

In her groundbreaking book Wonder City, Lynn Ellsworth delves deep into the heart of modern urban life, casting a critical eye on the transformative changes sweeping through cities like New York. This compelling journey into the world of urban development goes beyond the usual narrative, serving as a passionate call to action that encourages readers to actively participate in shaping the future of their cities.

Ellsworth expertly navigates through complex themes such as affordable housing, urban planning, historic preservation, and architecture. With a focus on major cities undergoing significant transformations, Wonder City offers an insightful examination of the challenges and opportunities that define contemporary urban life.

At the core of this engaging narrative is a striking critique of the real estate industry’s influence over urban landscapes. Ellsworth reveals how historic and culturally rich urban settings are increasingly being overshadowed by the rise of impersonal glass towers, a trend she argues is driven by the industry’s grip on politicians and technocrats. This analysis is both eye-opening and unsettling, shedding light on the forces reshaping our urban environments.

Wonder City is more than a critique, however. Ellsworth provides a pragmatic blueprint for revitalizing urban spaces. She champions the need for affordable housing, sustainable urban planning, and architecture that respects and enhances the human experience. Her arguments challenge the prevailing economic theories behind housing supply and question the architectural ideologies that often justify the demolition of historic urban assets.

This book is an essential read for urban planners, policymakers, and anyone interested in the future of urban living. Ellsworth’s clear, accessible insights into complex issues make Wonder City a vital contribution to the discourse on urban development, appealing to a broad audience that cares about the dynamics and future of city life.

LYNN ELLSWORTH is a prominent urban activist and scholar. She is the founder and coordinator of a network of more than a hundred neighborhood groups concerned with the development of New York. She has contributed dozens of op-eds in a variety of publications, given expert testimony at myriad public hearings, and written numerous white papers in the fight to preserve New York’s human scale. Ellsworth is also an economist (PhD University of Wisconsin-Madison, MA Columbia University, and BA from Barnard College).

Too Black to Be French

ISABELLE BONI-CLAVERIE

TRANSLATED BY JOSHUA DAVID JORDAN

FOREWORD BY KAIAMA L. GLOVER

Race & Ethnic Studies | Gender & Sexuality | Memoir

Unraveling the complexities of identity in a world of racial prejudices

Winner, Grand Prize, French Voices Award

In Too Black to Be French, Isabelle Boni-Claverie navigates the complexities of identity, race, and family in a world that constantly questions her belonging. Boni-Claverie’s singular account interweaves the extraordinary life experiences of three generations of her family: her grandfather from Ivory Coast, who married a middle-class white woman from southern France in the 1930s; her biological parents, and her mixed-race aunt and white upper-class uncle who adopted her; as well as her own life as a successful film director and writer faced with abiding stereotypes and discrimination.

Written with humor and aplomb, Boni-Claverie’s narrative examines the enduring effects of France’s colonial past and the deep-seated structural prejudices affecting Black people in a country that prides itself on stories of its hospitality toward African Americans fleeing segregation. Updating this picture to reveal the complexities and challenges of being Black in France where discussion of race is often taboo, Boni-Claverie offers an American readership rare insights into racial dynamics on both sides of the Atlantic.

Too Black to Be French is at once a sociological portrait of France, a multicultural family album, and a transatlantic coming-of-age story. It will appeal to readers eager for a passionate, fresh voice devoted to better understanding the challenges of today’s world and the courage it takes to overcome them. Through vivid storytelling, Boni-Claverie invites readers to traverse a path filled with emotional depth, cultural introspection, and a quest for acceptance.

ISABELLE BONI-CLAVERIE is a French filmmaker, screenwriter, and author. At eighteen, she won second prize for the Young Francophone Writer Award for her first novel, La Grande Dévoreuse. In 2005, Danny Glover asked her to adapt Valérie Tong Cuong’s novel Où je suis into the screenplay Heart of Blackness. She has since written numerous television dramas and series, including the comedy Sex, Okra and Salted Butter (ARTE), Seconde Chance (TF1), Coeur Océan (France 2), and Plus Belle La Vie (France 3), the most watched TV series in France. Two of her first short films, Pour la nuit and Le Génie d’Abou, won international awards. Broadcast for the first time on the Franco-German television channel ARTE in 2015, her documentary Too Black to Be French? was a hit both with audiences and the media and screened internationally.

Twenty-Nine Goodbyes

An Introduction to Chinese Poetry

BILLINGS

“Critically acute and compulsively readable, Twenty-Nine Goodbyes offers an illuminating introduction to Chinese poetry and poetics through the shifting lens of translation. Billings’s ‘cubist collage’ of renderings of a famous parting poem by Li Bai is equally a meditation on the challenges—and the pleasures—of translating the untranslatable, all conveyed in a vibrant, colloquial teacherly voice. Readers will close this book with a sense of parting from a newly found old friend.”

—DAVID DAMROSCH, AUTHOR OF AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 BOOKS

“Timothy Billings’s introduction to Chinese poetry through twenty-nine reinventions of a single Li Bai poem is a tour de force of literary analysis, multilingual erudition, and the blended pleasures and frustrations of reading poetry in translation. This lively, accessible, and often funny introduction will enlighten newcomers and scholars alike.”

—ANNA SHIELDS, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

“More than just an excellent primer in classical Chinese poetry (which it is), Twenty-Nine Goodbyes shows how Chinese poetry and Anglo-American poetic traditions intertwine. Bristling with detail and poetic insight, the book shows what it means to translate between languages and traditions, and more importantly, what it means to make poetry. A gem of a book.”

—MING XIE, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO

“A great and important and very much needed book”

—ERIC HAYOT, AUTHOR OF HUMANIST REASON: A HISTORY. AN ARGUMENT. A PLAN

An engrossing, witty introduction to classical Chinese poetry through twenty-nine translations of a single poem

A primer for those with no previous knowledge of Chinese, this book introduces readers to the fundamentals of classical Chinese poetry through twenty-nine ways of understanding a single poem. “Seeing Off a Friend,” by the great Tang poet Li Bai (701–762), has long been praised for its vividness, subtlety, and poignancy. Anthologizing twenty-nine translations of the poem, Timothy Billings not only introduces the poem’s richness and depth but also the nuanced art of translating Chinese poetry into European languages.

A famous exemplar of “seeing off poetry,” which was common in an empire whose literati were continually on the move, Li’s poem has continued to fascinate readers far removed from its moment of composition, from the Victorians, to Ezra Pound, to contemporary translators from around the world. In talking us through these linguistic crossings, Billings unpacks the intricacies of the lüshi or “regulated verse poem,” a form as pivotal to Chinese literature as the sonnet is to European tradition.

This book promises to transform its readers, step-by-step, into adept interpreters of one of the most significant verse forms in Chinese literary history. Billings’s engaging teaching style, backed by a lightly worn but deep scholarly engagement with Chinese poetry, makes this work an indispensable guide for anyone interested in poetry, translation, or the cultural heritage of China.

TIMOTHY BILLINGS is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Middlebury College, where his expertise spans classical Chinese literature and Shakespeare. Billings has edited and translated three award-winning critical editions that draw upon Chinese sources: Victor Segalen’s Stèles/古今碑錄 (with Christopher Bush); Matteo Ricci’s Essay on Friendship/交友論: One Hundred Maxims for a Chinese Prince; and Ezra Pound’s Cathay 耀. His work bridges the gap between Eastern and Western literary traditions and enriches the study and appreciation of classical Chinese poetry and its influence on global literature.

Gentleman Jigger

A Novel of the Harlem Renaissance

RICHARD BRUCE NUGENT FOREWORD BY ARNOLD RAMPERSAD AFTERWORD BY ROBERT J. CORBER

368 pages, 5-1/2 x 8 9781531508241, Paperback, $22.95 (TP), £19.99

Simultaneous electronic edition available OCTOBER

Literature | African American Studies | LGBTQ Studies

“Features the exhilarating atmosphere of Harlem as the arts and intellectual movement catches fire. . . . It’s shocking in the manner of pre-Code Hollywood.”

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

“One of the period’s few significant lost novels and best satires.”

—DARRYL DICKSON-CARR, STUDIES IN THE NOVEL

Step into the Jazz Age with a riveting novel of queer Black life, set amid the artistic rebellion of the Harlem Renaissance

Gentleman Jigger stands as a landmark novel, celebrated for its candid exploration of Black sexuality set against the dynamic backdrop of the Harlem Renaissance. The story follows Stuartt, a defiantly queer artist, who navigates the complexities of racial and sexual identity in a period of profound cultural upheaval. Originating from a distinguished light-skinned Black family in Washington D.C., Stuartt immerses himself into the burgeoning arts scene of Harlem, where he aligns with the “Niggeratti,” a group of young, rebellious artists and writers. This collective boldly challenges their elders’ conviction that their creative endeavors should be dedicated solely to the advancement of racial equality.

When their rebellion fizzles and they go their separate ways, Stuartt moves downtown to Greenwich Village where he fully indulges in his desires, intertwines with underworld figures, and achieves unexpected fame and fortune. It is also a world that, until his Hollywood debut, assumes that he is white.

Part fictionalized autobiography, part social satire, Gentleman Jigger opens up a whole new dimension not only of the Harlem Renaissance but also of the racial and sexual politics of the Jazz Age.

RICHARD BRUCE NUGENT (1906–1987) was an influential figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Co-founder of the avant-garde magazine FIRE!!, he was a pioneering African American writer, artist, and actor. His work, celebrated for its candid exploration of racial and sexual identity, continues to challenge the conventions of American literature and culture.

ROBERT J. CORBER is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor in American Institutions and Values at Trinity College. He is the author and editor of several books including, most recently, Cold War Femme: Lesbianism, National Identity, and Hollywood Cinema.

NEWINPAPERBACK

Boy with the Bullhorn

A Memoir and History of ACT UP New York

RON GOLDBERG

512 pages, 32 b/w illustrations

9781531508074, Paperback, $22.95 (TP), £19.99 [Hardback available: 9781531500979]

eBook Available SEPTEMBER

Memoir | LGBTQ Studies | History

Winner, “Gold” Independent Publishing Award (IPPY) for LGBTQ+ Nonfiction

Winner, The Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction, 34th Annual Triangle Awards 2023 Lammy Finalist, Gay Memoir/Biography

A coming-of-age memoir of life on the front lines of the AIDS crisis with ACT UP New York

“A fine blend of history and memoir and a useful guidebook for activists.” KIRKUS REVIEWS

“Constructive, emboldening, and necessary reading . . . likely to inspire young queer readers.” BAY AREA REPORTER

“A complete labor of love . . . Goldberg provides a gift of preservation.”

GOTHAM: A BLOG FOR SCHOLARS OF NEW YORK CITY HISTORY

“Political history at its most raw.”

—DAVID FRANCE, AUTHOR OF HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE

“A story about the pleasures, power, and necessity of activism.”

—ALISA SOLOMON, AUTHOR AND JOURNALIST

“Deeply personal, refreshingly modest . . . a marvelous work of living history.”

—BENJAMIN DREYER, NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF DREYER’S ENGLISH

“A challenge to a new generation to take up the struggle.”

—GREGG GONSALVES, YALE SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH

“A lively, richly textured history of ACT UP New York.”

—KENDALL THOMAS

“Combines a coming-of-age narrative with a meticulously documented social history.”

—DEBRA LEVINE, DIRECTOR OF STUDIES IN THEATER, DANCE, & MEDIA, HARVARD UNIVERSITY

“A highly readable, brisk and factually based account . . . with the sustaining role of love, friendship, and even good old fun “

—TIM MURPHY, AUTHOR OF CHRISTODORA AND CORRESPONDENTS

“Goldberg is a brilliant chronicler of one of the most important social and political movements of the last century. . . . a vital contribution to our understanding of that period.”

—MOISÉS KAUFMAN, ARTISTIC DIRECTOR, TECTONIC THEATER PROJECT

“ACT UP New York, the mothership of queer history’s greatest movement, has long deserved a definitive narrative history. Boy with the Bullhorn delivers one beautifully. . . . You’ll want to grab a bullhorn and scream.”

—PETER STALEY, AUTHOR OF NEVER SILENT: ACT UP AND MY LIFE IN ACTIVISM

RON GOLDBERG is a writer and activist. His articles have appeared in OutWeek and POZ magazines, Central Park, and The Visual AIDS Blog. He served as a research associate for filmmaker and journalist David France on his award-winning book How to Survive a Plague and enjoys speaking at high schools and colleges about the history of AIDS and the lessons and legacy of ACT UP.

NEWINPAPERBACK

Cross Bronx A Writing Life

256 pages, 25 b/w illustrations

9781531508067, Paperback, $19.95 (TP), £16.99

[Hardback available: 9781531500948]

“A ripping good story . . . Political junkies will delight.” WALL STREET JOURNAL

“If, as Peter Quinn contends, citizens of the Bronx are funny, earthy, ‘in your face truth tellers’ graced with an underlying dignity, then this delightful memoir is proof positive of Quinn’s credentials as a native son. Cross Bronx is a wry, eloquent, and relentlessly compassionate story of one Irish American life—which means, of course, it’s about us all.”

—ALICE MCDERMOTT

“Master storyteller Peter Quinn takes readers on a beautifully told journey through Bronx byways, political backrooms, and corporate boardrooms. Along the way you’ll meet characters you won’t soon forget, from governors to CEOs, to a charming young woman who beguiled Peter just as surely as this lovely book will beguile you.”

—TERRY GOLWAY, HISTORIAN, AUTHOR, AND JOURNALIST

NEWINPAPERBACK

“Funny and entertaining on every page.”

—PAUL MOSES, AUTHOR OF AN UNLIKELY UNION: THE LOVE-HATE STORY OF NEW YORK’S IRISH AND ITALIANS

“Moving easily back and forth over his upbringing in the Bronx, his career as a court officer, teacher, novelist, and political and corporate speechwriter, slipping in a subtle joke here and a well-deserved jab there, Quinn has a perfect ear and an unfaltering human sympathy. Cross Bronx is a delight.”

—KEVIN BAKER, AUTHOR OF THE FALL OF A GREAT AMERICAN CITY: NEW YORK AND THE URBAN CRISIS OF AFFLUENCE

PETER QUINN is a novelist, political historian, and foremost chronicler of New York City. He is the author of Banished Children of Eve, American Book Award winner; Looking for Jimmy: In Search of Irish America; and a trilogy of historical detective novels—Hour of the Cat, The Man Who Never Returned, and Dry Bones

Winner, Victorian Society in America Book Award

240 pages, 107 b/w illustrations

9781531508050, Paperback, $22.95 (TP), £19.99

[Hardcover available: 9781531501006]

Heaven on the Hudson

Mansions, Monuments, and Marvels of Riverside Park

STEPHANIE AZZARONE WITH PHOTOGRAPHY BY

ROBERT F. RODRIGUEZ

“[Riverside Park], this urban gem and its neighborhood are chronicled in longtime resident Stephanie Azzarone’s Heaven on the Hudson. Her husband, Robert F. Rodriguez, contributed the photographs.”

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

“Azzarone has constructed a scrumptious encomium to much more than merely that elongated swathe of greenery. . . . relates tales both enlivening and horrifying of some of the more interesting people.”

—ANDREW ALPERN, AUTHOR OF POSH PORTALS: ELEGANT ENTRANCES AND INGRATIATING INGRESSES TO APARTMENTS FOR THE AFFLUENT IN NEW YORK CITY

“A fascinating account of the rise, fall, and rise again of Riverside Drive. Deep research and skillful storytelling make this a brisk, lively read.”

—ESTHER CRAIN, AUTHOR OF THE GILDED AGE IN NEW YORK, 1870–1910

“Heaven on the Hudson gives Riverside Drive, one of the world’s great thoroughfares, its due. All the beauty, all the architecture, all the notables, and all the history are offered in one book.”

—JIM MACKIN, AUTHOR OF NOTABLE NEW YORKERS OF MANHATTAN’S UPPER WEST SIDE: BLOOMINGDALE–MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS

“Heaven on the Hudson is both a history and a love letter to the green coast of Manhattan’s Upper West Side.”

—GILBERT TAUBER, EDITOR, OLDSTREETS. COM AND NYCSTREETS.INFO

STEPHANIE AZZARONE is a native New Yorker who has lived on Riverside Drive most of her adult life. A former journalist (freelancer for the New York Times and New York magazine, among others).

ROBERT F. RODRIGUEZ , a photographer with over forty years at the Daily Mail and Gannett, expertly captures New York City.

Young Reds in the Big Apple

The New York Young Pioneers of America, 1923–1934

JACK HODGSON

“This book is a welcome contribution to the research on the relationship between radical, left-wing movements and children. What Hodgson has done is to focus on one of the unique aspects of the Young Pioneers in the US, sponsored by the CPUSA during the 1920s: their belief in the importance of children. Much of the previous work in this area has looked at the relations between red parents and their children. Hodgson takes the Young Pioneers own focus on the autonomous activity and development of the children themselves. He has found very important new sources and has brought to light children’s stories of their own activism.”

—PAUL C. MISHLER, AUTHOR OF RAISING REDS: THE YOUNG PIONEERS, RADICAL SUMMER CAMPS, AND COMMUNIST POLITICAL CULTURE IN THE UNITED STATES

“A compelling analysis of interwar radicalism and the continuation of the Red Scare state. Hodgson offers new insights into young people’s radical beliefs and activism and how these were shaped by a period of continued radical thought and consequent Red Scare state.”

—BRITT HAAS, SIENA COLLEGE

The tale of New York’s Young Reds—a riveting journey through the YPA’s rise and influence

Young Reds in the Big Apple: The New York YPA, 1923–1934 by Jack Hodgson is a compelling historical account that delves into the heart of American communism through the lens of New York City’s Young Pioneers of America (YPA). This meticulously researched book sheds light on a neglected aspect of American history, revealing the intricate details of the YPA’s formation, ideologies, and activities from 1923 to 1934.

Hodgson illustrates the YPA’s journey, from its early days as a branch of the Communist Party USA, intended for youth aged 8–16, to its eventual disbandment. The book explores the organization’s unique structure, ethos, and activities, showcasing how it became a formidable force in New York’s political landscape. He vividly portrays the YPA members’ involvement in public protests, education reform, and their bold stance against prevailing social norms, including racial and gender issues.

The narrative goes beyond mere historical recounting, offering deep insights into the internal dynamics of the YPA, its relationship with the adult Communist Party, and its interactions with other political entities. Hodgson’s analysis of the YPA’s impact on its young members and the broader community is both insightful and thought-provoking.

Young Reds in the Big Apple stands out for its rigorous approach to a controversial subject, avoiding partisanship to provide a balanced view of the YPA’s legacy. This book is not just a historical account; it’s an exploration of youthful activism, political movements, and the complexities of American communism during a pivotal era.

JACK HODGSON , Lecturer in History at the University of Roehampton, London, specializes in American communism and youth movements. His work has been featured in Qualitative Inquiry, New York History, Rethinking History, and the Journal of American Studies. Hodgson is also a recipient of the Ellen Craft Prize from the Scottish Association for the Study of America.

We Charge Genocide!

American Fascism and the Rule of Law

BILL V. MULLEN

240 pages, 6 b/w illustrations 9781531508456, Paperback, $29.95 (AC), £25.99 9781531508449, Hardback, $105.00 (SDT), £94.00

Simultaneous electronic edition available SEPTEMBER

American Studies | History | Race & Ethnic Studies

“With the ever-increasing urgency of responding to racism and fascism today, Bill Mullen shows convincingly how this dyad has worked in conjunction throughout US history, what its main strategies and tactics have been, and how people have risen to resist and rebuff its mechanizations. Meticulously researched and firmly grounded, We Charge Genocide! is a sweeping and riveting account of the past and a radical assessment of the present.”

—DAVID PALUMBO-LIU, AUTHOR OF SPEAKING OUT OF PLACE: GETTING OUR POLITICAL VOICES BACK

“In We Charge Genocide! Bill Mullen carefully explicates legal constructions of American fascism and the persistent cultures of Black anti-fascism from the Civil Rights Congress to Black Lives Matter. Theoretically rich and historically engaging, Mullen recasts the twentieth-century Black radical tradition as an anti-fascist tradition.”

—ALEX LUBIN, PROFESSOR OF AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES AND HISTORY, PENN STATE UNIVERSITY

A revealing exploration of domestic fascism in the United States from the 1930s to the January 6th insurrection in Washington, D.C.

In 1951, the Civil Rights Congress presented to the United Nations We Charge Genocide, a more than two-hundred-page petition that held the United States accountable for genocide against African Americans. This landmark text represented the dawn of Black Lives Matter and is as relevant today as it was then, as evidenced by the rise of white supremacist groups across the nation and the January 6th Capitol riot which disclosed the specter of a fascist revival in the US Tracing this specter to its roots, We Charge Genocide! provides an original interpretation of American fascism as a permanent and longstanding current in US politics dating to the origins of US settler-colonialism.

Picking up where Angela Davis’s 1971 essay, “Political Prisoners, Prisons, and Black Liberation,” left off, We Charge Genocide! reveals how the United States legal system has contributed to the growth of fascist states and fascist movements domestically and internationally. American Studies scholar Bill V. Mullen contends that the preservation of a white supremacist world order—and the prevention of revolutionary threats to that order—structure the discourse and practice of US fascism. He names this fascist modality the “counterrevolution of law” in tribute to the radicals on the American Left, such as George Jackson, Angela Davis, Herbert Marcuse, and the Black Panther Party, who perceived the American state’s destruction of revolutionary groups and ideas as a distinctive form of American fascism. Mullen argues that US law, particularly US “race law,” has been an enabling mechanism for modalities of fascist rule that have locked historic blocs of non-white populations into an iron cage of legal and extralegal violence.

To this end We Charge Genocide! offers a legal historiography of US fascism rooted in law’s capacity to legitimate and sustain racial domination. By recovering the legacy of important organizations, such as the Civil Rights Congress and Black Panther Party, which have both theorized and resisted American legal fascism, Mullen demonstrates how their work and critical theorists like Davis, Marcuse, Jackson, Walter Benjamin, and Ernst Fraenkel illuminate the threat of American legal fascism to its most vulnerable racialized victims of state violence in our time, including gender and transgender violence.

BILL V. MULLEN is Professor Emeritus of American Studies at Purdue University and the author of several books, including The Black Antifascist Tradition (with Jeanelle Hope), and James Baldwin: Living in Fire. He is a member of the organizing collective for USACBI (United States Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel).

Unforgettable Sacrifice

How Black Communities Remembered the Civil War

HILARY N. GREEN FOREWORD BY

EDDA L. FIELDS-BLACK

400 pages, 15 b/w illustrations

9781531508524, Paperback, $35.00 (AC), £29.99 9781531508531, Hardback, $105.00 (SDT), £94.00

Simultaneous electronic edition available

Reconstructing America

FEBRUARY

History | Civil War | Race & Ethnic Studies

Rediscover the Civil War through the voices that refused to be silenced

Unforgettable Sacrifice offers a groundbreaking exploration into the heart of African American memory of the Civil War, challenging conventional narratives and revealing a rich history preserved through oral traditions and communal efforts. Through extensive archival research and stories shared on the porches of African American families, Hilary Green provides a detailed examination of how diverse Black communities across the United States have actively preserved and contested the memory of the Civil War, from the nineteenth century to the present.

By rejecting the reduction of their experiences to mere footnotes in history, African Americans have established a vibrant commemorative culture that respects the complexity of their ancestors’ sacrifices and struggles. From the rural landscapes of Black Pennsylvanians to the heart of emancipated communities in the South, Green connects the narratives of those who not only fought on battlefields but also in the realms of memory and heritage, ensuring their stories of resilience, courage, and patriotism are remembered.

Unforgettable Sacrifice brings to light the untold stories of ordinary African Americans who took extraordinary steps in remembrance and resistance. By refusing to accept diluted narratives and lies, they have ensured the legacy of the Civil War includes the end of slavery, the valor of Black soldiers and civilians, and the ongoing struggle for democracy and full citizenship.

This book is a testament to the enduring power of memory and the steadfast spirit of the African American community. It is an indispensable addition to the libraries of scholars, general readers, and descendant communities alike, offering new perspectives on the lasting impact of the Civil War on American identity and the persistent pursuit of justice and equality.

HILARY N. GREEN is the James B. Duke Professor of Africana Studies at Davidson College. A distinguished scholar, her research explores the intersections of race, memory, and education in the post–Civil War American South. She is the author of Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865–1890, co-author of the NPS-OAH Historic Resource Study of African American Schools in the South, 1865–1900, and co-editor of The Civil War and the Summer of 2020 (Fordham).

Soul Woundedness

Spirituality on the Streets of Seattle

PAUL HOUSTON BLANKENSHIP-LAI

“Soul Woundedness is a heartfelt and moving book about one of the great social crises of our time. It is also an ethnography about the nature and experience of God.”

—T. M. LUHRMANN, AUTHOR OF HOW GOD BECOMES REAL: KINDLING THE PRESENCE OF INVISIBLE OTHERS

“Take this journey with Paul into the lives of our neighbors on the street. He opens himself and us to the inner center of homelessness and our humanity. Through the practice of a deeply loving spirituality, we are invited to share with new understanding in creating caring community. Soul Woundedness should become a classic text in the social sciences and humanities, a staple in religious studies and a basic read in every congregation. Extraordinary, sensitive, revelatory and healing.”

—CRAIG RENNEBOHM, AUTHOR OF SOULS IN THE HANDS OF A TENDER GOD: STORIES OF THE SEARCH FOR HOME AND HEALING ON THE STREETS

A profound exploration into the spiritual beliefs and practices of Seattle’s unhoused youth

Soul Woundedness is an intimate, piercing book about everyday life for young adults living on the streets of Seattle. Based on over five years of research and as a participant-observer, Paul Houston Blankenship-Lai presents the personal experiences of “street kids,” highlighting how their spiritual beliefs and practices offer them comfort, a sense of community, and a feeling of belonging amidst their struggles. They also demonstrate how spirituality on the streets can alienate people from themselves and the world.

Theology | Anthropology | Urban Studies

The stories Blankenship-Lai tells here are about how social wounds go soul deep, and how seemingly antireligious spiritual practices, fashioned in an almost unlivable local world, help people create a life still worth living. By paying deep, sustained attention to what spirituality is like on the streets and what difference it makes, Blankenship-Lai uncovers an important, overlooked dimension in the experience and study of homelessness. They invite us to enter these stories and to question how our own spiritual and otherwise practices can help create “a more loving love.”

Aimed at a diverse audience, Soul Woundedness is a book not merely to educate but to transform. It is particularly relevant for those interested in spirituality’s role in addressing social inequities and underscores the importance of spiritual practices in overcoming adversity and promoting social change, making a compelling case for a world where everyone has a place to call home.

PAUL HOUSTON BLANKENSHIP-LAI is a spiritual companion and Assistant Professor of Spirituality at the Earlham School of Religion, Richmond, Indiana. They have contributed to volumes on spiritual and religious responses to homelessness including Land of Stark Contrasts: Faith-Based Responses to Homelessness (Fordham) and Street Homelessness and Catholic Theological Ethics.

Liberating Spiritualities

Reimagining Faith in the Américas

D. TIRRES

“In this invaluable and novel work of uniquely compassionate scholarship, Christopher Tirres adeptly voices a polyphonic mix of historical context, philosophical and theological analysis, and deeply personal reflections to illuminate profound themes in what he calls a ‘critical theory of spirituality,’ set in an expansive Latin American framework that extends into the US-Mexico borderlands. Liberating Spiritualities shows how Latin American religious thought, out of a tragic history and against great challenges, continues to be propelled by immanence—embracing the quest for social justice, indigenous cosmologies, mestizaje, eco-feminism, and a phenomenology of the sacred, in the project of re-imagining faith, banishing hopelessness, and reclaiming human meaning.”

—JOHN PHILLIP SANTOS, AUTHOR OF PLACES LEFT UNFINISHED AT THE TIME OF CREATION

“Broadening our understanding of spirituality beyond the interior life, Tirres argues persuasively that spirituality is a core feature of human identity and action that involves the whole person. Liberating Spiritualities: Reimagining Faith in the Américas reminds us of the interconnection between spirituality, faith, ethics, and critical thought in light of structural injustice and human suffering. Informed by six liberationist intellectuals, this text offers a much-needed theoretical framework for liberating spiritualities, grounded in concrete history and everyday life in the Americas. Liberating Spiritualities is a critical development in hemispheric theology and philosophy.”

—MICHELLE GONZALEZ MALDONADO, PROVOST AND SENIOR VICE-PRESIDENT FOR ACADEMIC AFFAIRS, THE UNIVERSITY OF SCRANTON

A new perspective on spirituality and social change as seen through the work of six visionary thinkers

In Liberating Spiritualities, Christopher D. Tirres offers an in-depth exploration of spirituality as a catalyst for social transformation, showcasing the profound insights of six distinguished twentiethcentury liberation thinkers from across the Américas. This thought-provoking work examines the contributions of Marxist philosopher José Carlos Mariátegui, renowned educator and philosopher Paulo Freire, innovative constructive theologian Virgilio Elizondo, influential cultural and feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa, activist mujerista theologian and social ethicist Ada María Isasi-Díaz, and groundbreaking ecofeminist theologian Ivone Gebara.

Tirres examines the distinct yet interconnected philosophies of these figures, showcasing their unified critique of colonial Christendom and their deep commitment to the marginalized. He adeptly articulates how their diverse religious and philosophical backgrounds come together in a shared vision of spirituality as a fundamental aspect of human life and intelligence. He further illuminates how these thinkers advocate for spirituality as a non-reductive, life-affirming practice, transcending traditional boundaries and offering an integrated approach to faith, culture, and social justice. Their collective insights form a persuasive case for re-envisioning spirituality as a crucial element in the quest for a more just and compassionate world.

Liberating Spiritualities is not only a tribute to these six influential figures but also a critical reflection on the relevance of their ideas in today’s global context. Tirres’s transdisciplinary study bridges liberationist and pragmatic insights, offering readers a fresh, highly original interpretation of socially engaged spirituality, making this book an essential resource for those seeking to understand the transformative power of spirituality in the pursuit of social justice and human dignity.

CHRISTOPHER D. TIRRES is the Michael J. Buckley Endowed Chair at Santa Clara University and the author of The Aesthetics and Ethics of Faith: A Dialogue Between Liberationist and Pragmatic Thought.

The Lamentations

A Requiem for Queer Suicide

ANDERSON

272 pages, 5 x 8

9781531508289, Paperback, $24.95 (AC), £21.99 9781531508272, Hardback, $88.00 (SDT), £79.00 Simultaneous electronic edition available SEPTEMBER

LGBTQ Studies | Memoir | Cinema & Media Studies

“The Lamentations offers a timely history of the present in a moment of increasing violence against LGBTQ+ people. I was frequently moved to tears by the many stories Anderson gathers here and the tender analysis of the mundane aspects of loss. I know others will be moved as well.”

—LISA DIEDRICH, PROFESSOR OF WOMEN’S, GENDER, AND SEXUALITY STUDIES AT STONY BROOK UNIVERSITY AND THE AUTHOR OF THE BOOKS ILLNESS POLITICS AND HASHTAG ACTIVISM , INDIRECT ACTION, AND TREATMENTS

“Through poetic and poignant prose Anderson fingers the trace of loved ones whose ghosts haunt the pages recounting their passing. This book is a reckoning, a coming to terms with what it means to queer suicide and in that queer(y)ing examine the depth of loss left in its wake. The Lamentations is an archive of queer mourning.”

—E. PATRICK JOHNSON, AUTHOR OF HONEYPOT: BLACK QUEER WOMEN WHO LOVE WOMEN

A moving journey through the shadows of queer suicide and a tribute to lives marked by struggle and beauty

The Lamentations explores the struggles and resilience within the queer community, offering a unique blend of historical analysis and emotional tribute to those affected. Author Patrick Anderson examines the phenomenon of queer suicide across various art forms such as film, theatre, and literature, tracing its evolution from the twentieth century to today.

Anderson brings to light the personal stories of individuals in the queer community who have ended their lives, compiling narratives from sources like newspaper articles, obituaries, and case studies. The book confronts the harsh realities of loneliness, shame, and oppression faced by many LGBTQ+ individuals, providing a poignant reflection on the societal challenges they face.

The Lamentations is more than a meditation on death; it’s a narrative of survival, mourning, and healing. Sharing personal accounts, including the losses of loved ones and friends, Anderson highlights the importance of memory and storytelling in celebrating the vibrancy of queer life amidst the sorrow of loss.

Accessible to a broad readership, the book transcends academic boundaries to address themes of love, loss, and the human spirit. It’s a compelling read for anyone interested in queer studies or anyone seeking to understand human experience through the lens of loss and legacy.

PATRICK ANDERSON is a professor in the departments of Communication, Ethnic Studies, and Critical Gender Studies at the University of California, San Diego, and a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow. His previous books include Violence Performed: Local Roots and Global Routes of Conflict, So Much Wasted: Hunger, Performance, and the Morbidity of Resistance, and Autobiography of a Disease.

Telling the Bees

An Interspecies Monologue

“Insects as a companion species? In Pettman’s engaging and beautifully composed bestiary, writing for animals is writing with animals and composing a monologue that already consists of more than one voice. The COVID years articulate the stretch of time between 2019–2023 into a particularly weighted temporality that comes to feature observations, lists, affects, violence, films, and light. Telling the Bees is a smart, at times bitterly funny, and persistently a contagious read.”

—JUSSI PARIKKA, AUTHOR OF INSECT MEDIA AND OPERATIONAL IMAGES

Could an ancient tradition replace social media? What if we shared our thoughts with the bees, rather than the hive mind of the Internet?

In a bid to wean himself off Facebook and Twitter, media scholar and cultural theorist Dominic Pettman decided to revive an ancient custom. He decided to tell the local bees of his thoughts, theories, musings, and meditations. The result was an apian journal that parses the daily news and the routines of modern life in a more sustained and reflective way than the Pavlovian posts to which we are so addicted.

The account that emerges from Pettman’s regular discussion with the bees forms a compelling portrait of the tumultuous period running from the Fall of 2019 to New Year’s Eve 2022. What began as a reflection on the traumatic effects of an “unprecedented” presidency soon evolved into a real-time response to the equally extraordinary events of the pandemic and its aftermath.

One key concern that emerges from Pettman’s ongoing discussion with the bees is the extent to which, thanks to the alienating effects of neoliberalism, we were already engaged in an advanced form of social distancing long before anyone had heard of COVID. Other key themes include education, human-animal relations, climate change, mediated intimacy, attention ecologies, collective memory, slow violence, the self-fulfilling prophecy that is New York City, the never-ending end of history, and the mundane strategies we share in a bid to forge on, despite the accumulating challenges of the twenty-first century.

Telling the Bees is an invitation to rediscover the art of reflection and a profound meditation on human connection, alienation, and our collective yearning for intimacy in an age of distance. Through what Pettman describes as an “interspecies monologue,” readers are treated to a unique perspective on navigating the complexities of the twenty-first century, inspired by the ingenuity and resilience of our natural cohabitants.

DOMINIC PETTMAN is University Professor of Media and New Humanities at the New School. His publications include Creaturely Love, Sonic Intimacy, Peak Libido, and, with Eugene Thacker, Sad Planets.

Energy Emergency Repair Kit

E.E.R.K. COLLECTIVE

114 pages, 8-1/2 x 6-1/2, 112 color illustrations 9781531508425, Paperback, $16.95 (AC), £14.99 SEPTEMBER

Art & Visual Culture | Environment | Philosophy & Theory

“The Energy Emergency Repair Kit echoes and expands the history of manifestos in calling for radical social change, diagramming potential routes beyond petro-futures by transfiguring the protocols of repair systems into dancing mycelial rituals of care. Poetic in form and content, it calls us to co-create new roots and counter-shoots of compassionate actions for our more-than-human communities of emergence between emergencies.”

—RICARDO DOMINGUEZ, ELECTRONIC DISTURBANCE THEATER

“Pulling the reader into the warp and weft of petro-capitalist eco-devastation, the Energy Emergency Repair Kit offers prompts for attention, reflection, and action in a world where security is impossible, hope is dubious, and new forms of speculation are necessary. A tour-de-force of SF worlding, E.E.R.K. calls for non-innocent modes of reparative care. And it does it all with a wink and a smile.”

—NATALIE LOVELESS, AUTHOR OF HOW TO MAKE ART AT THE END OF THE WORLD: A MANIFESTO FOR RESEARCH-CREATION

A fictional manual to help disrupt today’s all-too-real energy and climate emergencies

The Energy Emergency Repair Kit (E.E.R.K.) is a collaboratively-authored research-creation intervention that explores myriad ecological, cultural, and political resonances of the three concepts named in its title: energy, emergency, and repair. The E.E.R.K combines image, text, and sound to riff on the idea of a repair manual—that staple genre of self-help and self-making—while exploring energy emergency and energy emergence in several entangled registers.

Created collectively by artists, designers, and scholars working and living at various places on Turtle Island, the E.E.R.K. offers a host of situated activities and speculative probes designed to respond to today and tomorrow’s energy emergencies. The kit intermingles diagrammatic designs with instructional convolutions and perplexing protocols that supply non-programmatic yet highly pragmatic means for navigating, communicating, operating, and undoing the investments that have come to overdetermine energetic relations in the past, present, and future. Triggered most immediately by the pandemic moment circa 2020, with its strangely intermittent and inscrutable convolutions of fossil-fueled business-as-usual, the E.E.R.K. reflects and reckons the long-roiling and fully chronic energy emergency orchestrated over several centuries by racial-fossil capitalism’s mass production of injustices.

The E.E.R.K. positions energy as more than just a resource to be exploited and managed, more than an infrastructural obstacle to overcome, more than fuel for the nightmares that lie ahead (or that are, in too many cases, already here). As a generative, multitudinous fabulation, the E.E.R.K. probes energetic networks—the bonds of endeavor; the glow of affection; the pulse of attunement; the drive of subtraction; the charge of uncertainty; the resilience of exhaustion; the obstinacy of making do; the shadow of fossils; the pull of futurity; the zeroes and ones; the force of an otherwise—that, together, seem to compose the circuits of energy emergency now.

The E.E.R.K. COLLECTIVE is a group of artists, designers, and scholars from across Turtle Island. The Collective engages in “decomp poesis,” a creative practice focused on exploring speculative encounters to promote care and repair. By collaborating with a wide array of experts, the Collective embodies a commitment to deviating designs and fostering innovative approaches to energy and environmental challenges.

Stormy Weather

Pagan Cosmologies, Christian Times, Climate Wreckage

WILLIAM E. CONNOLLY 272 pages, 9781531509217, Paperback, $30.00 (SDT), £25.99

“Stormy Weather maps the connections between the civilizational project and its spectacular failure for life on earth. Connolly examines the cosmological origins of this fateful existential blockage in some key figures in our cultural imaginary as well as the cosmological traditions they have erased or marginalized. The confrontation of the western lived metaphysics of time with pre-Christian and extra-Western cosmologies points to alternatives that might allow us to live the future differently.”

—EDUARDO VIVEIROS DE CASTRO, AUTHOR OF CANNIBAL METAPHYSICS

Rethinking time, rewriting destiny—challenging western cosmologies to reimagine our future

Composed as a counter-history of western philosophical and political thought, Stormy Weather explores the role western cosmologies have played in the conquests of paganism in Europe and the Americas, the production of climate wreckage, and the concealment of that wreckage from western humanists and earth scientists until late in the day. A lived cosmology, Connolly says, contains embedded understandings about the beginnings of the earth and the way time unfolds. The text engages the major western cosmologies of Augustine, Descartes, Kant, Tocqueville, together with pagan and minor western orientations that posed challenges to them or could have. Hesiod, Ovid, William Apess, Amazonian and Aztec cosmologies, Catherine Keller’s minor Christianity, James Baldwin, and Michel Serres instigate key responses, often challenging binary logics and the subject/object dichotomy with a world of multiple human and nonhuman subjectivities.

Connolly pursues a conception of time as a multiplicity of intersecting temporalities to come to terms with the vicissitudes of climate destruction and the grandeur of an earth neither highly susceptible to mastery nor designed to harmonize smoothly with humans. The book revisits the “improbable necessity” of a politics of swarming to respond to the ongoing wreckage and potential fascist responses to vast infusions of climate refugees from the south into temperate-zone capitalist states.

Stormy Weather draws on the work of earth scientists, indigenous thinkers, naturalists, humanists, and students of nonwestern cosmologies. Ultimately, Connolly contends that critical intellectuals today must not remain enclosed in disciplinary silos, or even in “the humanities” as currently defined, to do justice to our moment of climate wreckage.

WILLIAM E. CONNOLLY is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. His recent books include Resounding Events: Adventures of an Academic from the Working Class (Fordham), which shared the David Easton Prize, Aspirational Fascism, and Facing the Planetary.

No Matter What

and the Spirit of Planetary Possibility

“In one sense or another, all of Catherine Keller’s books are about everything. The end of all things; the beginning of all things; the excess and entanglement of God, world, and everything that composes them. But even for those familiar with Keller’s everything, No Matter What somehow gives us more: the climate, the quantum, surging nationalisms, Black life, Ukrainian persistence, and the interdetermining breath that makes another way still possible.”

—MARY-JANE RUBENSTEIN, AUTHOR OF ASTROTOPIA: THE DANGEROUS RELIGION OF THE CORPORATE SPACE RACE

“A riveting collection by the leading theologian in the USA today, magisterial in scope, iridescent in style, Keller ranges over matters that matter, theological, ecological, and political, a tour de force on everything from process thought, postmodern theory, and feminism to climate change and the war in Ukraine. Everything we expect from Catherine Keller. This is exactly what theology should look like today.”

—JOHN D. CAPUTO, THOMAS J. WATSON PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF RELIGION, SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY, AND AUTHOR OF WHAT TO BELIEVE? TWELVE BRIEF LESSONS IN RADICAL THEOLOGY

A collection of essays that outline the recent work on ecology, political theology, religion, and philosophy by one of the leading theologians of our age

As we face relentless ecological destruction spiraling around a planet of unconstrained capitalism and democratic failure, what matters most? How do we get our bearings and direct our priorities in such a terrestrial scenario? Species, race, sex, politics, and economics will increasingly come tangled in the catastrophic trajectory of climate change. With a sense of urgency and of possibility, Catherine Keller’s No Matter What reflects multiple trajectories of planetary crisis. They converge from a point of view formed of the political ecologies of a transdisciplinary theological pluralism. In its work an ancient symbolism of apocalypse deconstructs end-of-the-world narratives, Christian and secular, even as any notion of an all-controlling and good God collapses under the force of internal contradiction. In the place of a once-for-all incarnation, the materiality of unbounded intercarnation, of fragile yet animating relations of mattering earth-bodies, comes into focus.

The essays of No Matter What share the preoccupation with matter characteristic of the so-called new materialism. They also root in an older ecotheological tradition, one that has long struggled against the undead legacy of an earth-betraying theology that, with the aid of its white Christian right wing, invests the denigration of matter, its spirit of “no matter,” in limitless commodification. The fragile alternative Keller outlines here embraces—no matter what—the mattering of the life of the Earth and of all its spirited bodies. These essays, struggling against Christian and secular betrayals of the spirited matter of Earth, work to materialize the still possible planetary healing.

CATHERINE KELLER is George T. Cobb Professor of Constructive Theology in The Graduate Division of Religion, Drew University. She works amidst the tangles of ecosocial, pluralist, feminist philosophy of religion, and theology. Her books include The Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming; On the Mystery; Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement; and Political Theology of the Earth: Our Planetary Emergency and the Struggle for a New Public She has co-edited several volumes of the Drew Transdisciplinary Theological Colloquium, most recently Political Theology on Edge: Ruptures of Justice and Belief in the Anthropocene. Her latest monograph is Facing Apocalypse: Climate, Democracy and Other Last Chances.

The City in the Distance

“Written in a tone that is always poetic, at times even lyrical, The City in the Distance is thought-provoking and a pleasure to read. As a philosophical and writerly meditation, a research-creation of sorts, the book invests a place (here the city of Los Angeles) with words and language in order to make it produce its own space and time.”

—VERENA ANDERMATT CONLEY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY

“Nancy’s little book helps us dispel the notion that there is a primordial stability of home to be defended against the disruptions of migration. For Nancy, the life of the city exemplifies the mobility or ‘passing by’ that is characteristic of ‘being with’ as an ontological condition.”

—RAFAEL SÁNCHEZ, GRADUATE INSTITUTE OF GENEVA

Exploring the ever-changing philosophy of city life with Jean-Luc Nancy

In The City in the Distance, Jean-Luc Nancy embarks on nothing less than a philosophy of the city. Drawing on his widely discussed accounts of sense and of the fraught question of community, Nancy views the city as the site of a disposition that is constantly undergoing metamorphoses.

Far from an abstract account, Nancy attends in the most concrete way possible to the workings of a city not typically taken as paradigmatic, Los Angeles. As Jean-Christophe Bailly suggests in his foreword, Nancy joins Walter Benjamin in thinking the city not from an external vantage point, but on its own terms.

JEAN-LUC NANCY (1940–2021) was Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Université de Strasbourg and one of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century’s foremost thinkers of politics, art, and the body. His wide-ranging thought runs through many books, including Being Singular Plural, The Ground of the Image, Corpus, The Disavowed Community, and Sexistence. His book The Intruder was adapted into an acclaimed film by Claire Denis.

JEAN-CHRISTOPHE BAILLY teaches at the École Nationale Supérieure de la Nature et du Paysage, in Blois, France. His books include The Animal Side and The Instant and Its Shadow, as well as many other books and artists’ catalogs in French.

CORY STOCKWELL is Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota. His translations include books by Mariette Navarro and Pascal Bruckner.

Jimmy’s Faith

James

Baldwin, Disidentification,

and the Queer Possibilities of Black Religion

CHRISTOPHER W. HUNT

192 pages

9781531508814, Paperback, $28.00 (SDT), £23.99

9781531508807, Hardback, $98.00 (SDT), £88.00

Simultaneous electronic edition available NOVEMBER

Theology | African American Studies | Queer Theory

“Some discuss Baldwin’s queerness, some his religious background or his criticisms of religiosity; still others separate his queerness from the ‘serious work’ of calling out white supremacy. Jimmy’s Faith refuses these separations, demonstrating that we do not know James Baldwin if we do not consider seriously—and simultaneously—his queerness, his Blackness, and his agnosticism.”

—ASHON CRAWLEY, AUTHOR OF THE LONELY LETTERS AND BLACKPENTECOSTAL BREATH: THE AESTHETICS OF POSSIBILITY

“In Jimmy’s Faith, Christopher Hunt ushers us nearer the molten, challenging, and transfiguring core of Baldwin’s life and art than we’ve been before. Touching with nuance and precision upon several of Baldwin’s most crucial works across genres, these brilliantly intersectional readings do more than reveal, they redeem.”

—ED PAVLIĆ, AUTHOR OF WHO CAN AFFORD TO IMPROVISE? JAMES BALDWIN AND BLACK MUSIC, THE LYRIC AND THE LISTENERS

A novel approach to understanding the work of James Baldwin and its transformative potential

The relationship of James Baldwin’s life and work to Black religion is in many ways complex and confounding. What is he doing through his literary deployment of religious language and symbols?

Despite Baldwin’s disavowal of Christianity in his youth, he continued to engage the symbols and theology of Christianity in works such as The Amen Corner, Just Above My Head, and others. With Jimmy’s Faith, author Christopher W. Hunt shows how Baldwin’s usage of those religious symbols both shifted their meaning and served as a way for him to build his own religious and spiritual vision. Engaging José Esteban Muñoz’s theory of disidentification as a queer practice of imagination and survival, Hunt demonstrates the ways in which James Baldwin disidentifies with and queers Black Christian language and theology throughout his literary corpus.

Baldwin’s vision is one in which queer sexuality signifies the depth of love’s transforming possibilities, the arts serve as the (religious) medium of knitting Black community together, an agnostic and affective mysticism undermines Christian theological discourse, “androgyny” troubles the gender binary, and the Black child signifies the hope for a world made new. In disidentifying with Christian symbols, Jimmy’s Faith reveals how Baldwin imagines both religion and the world “otherwise,” offering a model of how we might do the same for our own communities and ourselves.

CHRISTOPHER W. HUNT is Assistant Professor of Religion at Colorado College.

IN DEFENSE OF SEX

NONBINARY EMBODIMENT AND DESIRE

In Defense of Sex

Nonbinary Embodiment and Desire

CHRISTOPHER BREU

224 pages, 2 b/w illustrations

9781531508777, Paperback, $30.00 (SDT), £25.99 9781531508760, Hardback, $105.00 (SDT), £94.00 Simultaneous electronic edition available NOVEMBER

Gender & Sexuality | LGBTQ Studies | Philosophy & Theory

“As gender categories fabulously expand and multiply, what does, what can, sex mean now? Departing from both sex negativity and the relative lack of attention to the category of sex, Breu articulates a new understanding of sex for the twenty-first century. Ambitiously intermingling several theoretical terrains, Breu forges a position that is nonbinary but also materialist, as he calls for relational collectivities, desire, flourishing, ecological ‘transspecies being,’ and the creation of a transindividual, sexual, bodily commons. This is a bold, inventive, and theoretically capacious vision that grapples with emerging problematics of sex, gender, embodiment, justice, scale, transformation, wild visions, and more.”

—STACY ALAIMO, AUTHOR OF EXPOSED: ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS AND PLEASURES IN POSTHUMAN TIMES

“In Defense of Sex offers a novel, rigorous, creative, and timely intervention. By grounding his theoretical contribution in lived experience and connecting it to those of other multiply marginalized subjects and communities, Breu advances and intertwines scholarly and activist dialogues in vital new ways.”

—DAVID A. RUBIN, AUTHOR OF INTERSEX MATTERS: BIOMEDICAL EMBODIMENT, GENDER REGULATION, AND TRANSNATIONAL ACTIVISM

Examines the need to recenter the category of sex–theorizing sex itself as nonbinary–in contemporary studies of gender and sexuality

Gender has largely replaced sex as a category in critical theory, in progressive cultural circles, and in everyday bureaucratic language. Much of this development has been salutary. Gender has become a crucial site for theorizing trans identifications and embodiments. Yet, without a concomitant theory of sex, gender’s contemporary uses also intersect with late neoliberalism’s emphasis on micro-identities, flexibility, avatar culture, and human capital. Contemporary culture has also grown more ambivalent about sexual desire and its expression. Sex is seen as both ubiquitous and ubiquitously a problem.

In Defense of Sex theorizes sex as both a nonbinary form of embodiment (one that can complement recent trans conceptions of gender as multiple and nonbinary) and a crucial form of social desire. Drawing on intersex and trans theory as well as Marxist theory, feminist new materialism, psychoanalysis, and accounts of the flesh in Black studies, author Christopher Breu argues for a materialist understanding of embodiment and the workings of desire as they structure contemporary culture. Moving from critique to theorizing embodiment, desire, and forms of bioaccumulation, In Defense of Sex concludes by proposing the unabashedly utopian project of building a sexual and embodied commons.

CHRISTOPHER BREU (he/they) is Professor of English at Illinois State University. He is the author of Insistence of the Material: Literature in the Age of Biopolitics and Hard-Boiled Masculinities. He is also co-editor (with Elizabeth A. Hatmaker) of Noir Affect (Fordham).

CHRISTOPHER BREU

On the Colors of Vowels

Thinking through Synesthesia

LIESL YAMAGUCHI

240 pages, 2 color and 19 b/w illustrations 9781531509057, Paperback, $32.00 (SDT), £27.99 9781531509040, Hardback, $110.00 (SDT), £99.00

Simultaneous electronic edition available

Verbal Arts: Studies in Poetics

JANUARY

Literary Studies | Music | Philosophy & Theory

“Liesl Yamaguchi’s beautifully written and carefully argued book investigates the role played by vowel color in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century theories about language, from Indo-European linguistics, to French Symbolist poetics, to the science of acoustics. The idea that the notion of vowel color is crucial for the development of free verse as a modern poetic category is explosive and exciting. With clarity and precision, Yamaguchi zeroes in on one of the most stubbornly nebulous categories in the linguistic and poetic tradition.”

—SARAH POURCIAU, DUKE UNIVERSITY

Discover how vowel colors have shaped modern arts and sciences through the vivid intersection of language and sensation

Treatments of synesthesia in the arts and humanities generally assume a clear distinction between the neurological condition and the literary device. Synesthetes’ descriptions of colors seen in connection with music, for example, are thought to differ fundamentally from common expressions that rely on transpositions across sensory dimensions (“bright vowels”). This has not always been the case. The distinction emerged over the course of the twentieth century, as scientists sought to constitute “synesthesia” as a legitimate object of modern science.

On the Colors of Vowels investigates the ambiguity of visual descriptions of vowels across a wide range of disciplines, casting several landmark texts in a wholly new light. The book traces the migration of sound-color correspondence from its ancient host (music) to its modern one (vowels), investigating the vocalic Klangfarben of Hermann von Helmholtz’s monumental Sensations of Tone, the vowel colors reported in early psychology surveys into audition colorée (colored hearing), the mismatched timbres that form poetry’s condition of possibility in Stéphane Mallarmé’s “Crisis of Verse,” and the vowel-color analogy central to both the universal alphabets of the nineteenth century and the phonological universals of the twentieth. The book’s final chapter turns to an intricately detailed account of vowel-color correspondence by Ferdinand de Saussure, suggesting how the linguist’s sensitivity to vowel coloration may have guided his groundbreaking study of Indo-European vocalism.

Bringing out the diverse ways in which visual conceptions of vowels have inflected the arts and sciences of modernity, On the Colors of Vowels makes it possible to see how discourses of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries crafted the enigma we now readily recognize as “synesthesia.”

LIESL YAMAGUCHI is Assistant Professor of French at the University of California, Berkeley. Her translation of Väinö Linna’s Unknown Soldiers was the first work of Finnish literature to appear with Penguin Classics.

AUDIBLE LOSS

New Music and the Crisis of Memory

ANDREA ZARAFSHON MOORE

Audible Loss

New Music and the Crisis of Memory

ANDREA ZARAFSHON MOORE

256 pages, 2 images and 8 music examples

9781531508692, Paperback, $30.00 (SDT), £25.99 9781531508685, Hardback, $105.00 (SDT), £94.00

Simultaneous electronic edition available FEBRUARY

Music | American Studies | Theater & Performance

“What is the sound of loss? Audible Loss is an innovative and timely intervention in memory studies that engages with the question of how composers, activists, and artists have aimed to make loss audible—whether through the reading of names, through musical memorial compositions, through the marking of silence, or the orchestration of chimes and bells. Moore takes us on a compelling journey into how sound has been a primary medium through which American traumatic events such as AIDS, 9/11, Black Lives Matter, and COVID have been communicated.”

—MARITA STURKEN, AUTHOR OF TERRORISM IN AMERICAN MEMORY: MEMORIALS, MUSEUMS, AND ARCHITECTURE IN THE POST-9/11 ERA

“In Audible Loss, Andrea Zarafshon Moore makes a powerful and persuasive argument for understanding the role that music can play in public memorial culture. Through her breadth of repertoire, pertinent analytical frameworks, and thoughtful attention to contemporary public crises, Moore offers readers both new material and new methods for listening to the memorial arts. Audible Loss is sure to become a landmark contribution to contemporary dialogue about memory culture in the United States, in music studies, and across the disciplines.”

—MARTHA SPRIGGE, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF MUSICOLOGY AT UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA BARBARA, AND AUTHOR OF SOCIALIST LAMENTS: MUSICAL MOURNING IN THE GERMAN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC

An innovative and much-needed critical work on music and memorialization in relation to AIDS, 9/11, and anti-Black violence in America

Music has long served as a powerful medium for communal mourning and remembrance in times of crisis. Audible Loss examines musical responses to three major crises in US society at the turn of the twenty-first century: the AIDS epidemic, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the ongoing conditions of anti-Black violence.

Analyzing a range of works written to commemorate these losses, Andrea Zarafshon Moore explores how contemporary classical music (aka “new music”) frames and narrates these crises, gives voice to grief, imagines other possibilities, and makes loss audible. These crises are read alongside one another to reveal the ways they are mutually imbricated, while also recognizing the sheer commemorative dominance of 9/11 in this century. Attending to broader debates and discourses through which commemoration is always filtered and the ways interpretive consensus has been sought and articulated in both musical and other memorial forms, Moore probes the conventional claims of commemoration, particularly those for the necessity of remembrance to “healing” and the prevention of future crises.

Audible Loss concludes by reflecting on the limits of existing commemorative forms and the possibility, even necessity, of new ones. Taking the COVID-19 pandemic as a case study, it proposes that while memorials of all kinds may provide outlets for collective remembrance and even mourning, their power to forge a sense of collectivity is diminished as public discourse grows more fragmented. Deeply informed yet highly approachable, Audible Loss is a major contribution to the fields of music and memory studies and essential reading for anyone interested in memory culture in the United States today.

ANDREA ZARAFSHON MOORE is Assistant Professor of Music at Smith College.

The Time of the Cannibals On

Conspiracy Theory and Context

ELIZABETH ANNE DAVIS

320 pages, 8 color and 23 b/w illustrations 9781531508852, Paperback, $32.00 (SDT), £27.99 9781531508845, Hardback, $110.00 (SDT), £99.00

Simultaneous electronic edition available Thinking from Elsewhere NOVEMBER

Anthropology | Political Science | Philosophy & Theory

“Elizabeth Davis interrogates our ongoing epistemic breakdowns and offers a startlingly original theorization of conspiracy attunements. This is nothing less than a guidebook on how to think critically and navigate our current post-fact, misinformation-filled media milieu.”

—JOSEPH MASCO, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

“As the pages turn onto each other the brilliance of this book explodes showing that this is a project that brings together the ante- and afterlives of British colonialism in its most sinister form.”

—NENI PANOURGIÁ, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

Uncover the mysterious theft of a Cypriot president’s body and its profound impact on the intersection of conspiracy theories, politics, and culture

In 2009, the body of a former president of the Republic of Cyprus, Tassos Papadopoulos, was stolen from his grave. The Time of the Cannibals reconsiders this history and the public discourse on it to reconsider how we think about conspiracy theory, and specifically, what it means to understand conspiracy theories “in context.”

The months after Papadopoulos’s body was stolen saw intense public speculation in Cyprus, including widespread expressions of sacrilege, along with many false accusations against Cypriots and foreigners positioned as his political antagonists. Davis delves into the public discourse on conspiracy theory in Cyprus that flourished in the aftermath, tracing theories about the grave robbery to theories about the division of Cyprus some thirty-five years earlier, and both to longer histories of imperial and colonial violence.

Along the way, Davis explores cross-contextual connections among Cyprus and other locales, in the form of conspiracy theories as well as political theologies regarding the dead bodies of political leaders. Through critical close readings of academic and journalistic approaches to conspiracy theory, Davis shows that conspiracy theory as an analytic object fails to sustain comparative analysis and defies any general theory of conspiracy theory. What these approaches accomplish instead, she argues, is the perpetuation of ethnocentrism in the guise of contextualization.

The Time of the Cannibals asks what better kind of contextualization this and any “case” call for and proposes the concept of conspiracy attunement: a means of grasping the dialogic contexts in which conspiracy theories work recursively as matters of political and cultural significance in the longue durée

ELIZABETH ANNE DAVIS is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University, where she is affiliated with the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies. She is author of Bad Souls: Madness and Responsibility in Modern Greece, which won the Gregory Bateson Prize, and Artifactual: Forensic and Documentary Knowing.

Cybernetic Capitalism

A Critical Theory of the Incommunicable

“Cybernetic Capitalism works to develop a critical systems theory on the basis of an encounter between the Frankfurt School notion of instrumental reason and the fundamental innovation of Luhmannian systems theory, namely, operational closure. The book shows how we might fix what the author rightly perceives as the flaws in each. With an impressive clarity of conceptual thinking the book makes surprising and exciting connections between a vast number of disparate discourses.”

—MARK B. N. HANSEN, DUKE UNIVERSITY

Examining how cybernetic capitalism reshapes society and provokes the unpredictable in today’s complex economic landscape

This book offers a conceptual interrogation of how capital navigates its cybernetic environment. Taking an immanent perspective, the book develops a unique synthesis between Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory and the critical theory tradition. Overwijk shows how neoliberal capitalism’s version of rationalization depends on the organization and management of society on the basis of cybernetic principles.

Overwijk seeks to update earlier critiques of cybernetic capitalism that stressed the system’s colonization of its environment, its making the entirety of social life communicable. Under today’s cybernetic rationalization, things are radically different. Neoliberal political economy aims to incite the incalculability of the market; platform capitalists venture to capitalize on the unpredictable efforts of their users; and post-Fordist management seeks to encourage the creativity of service workers. As this book uniquely shows, capital no longer aims at total communicability, but instead seeks to provoke and exploit the incommunicability of its environment. In this sense, the book offers an ecological theory of capitalism, laying conceptual the groundwork for understanding the extractivist logic of the Anthropocene.

Cybernetic Capitalism shows how the cultural obsession with incommunicability that animates cybernetic rationalization has taken an irrationalist turn, resurfacing in the mysticism of conspiracy theory and radical-right politics. The book offers a novel and compelling materialist interpretation of today’s paradoxical connections between neoliberal rationalism and radical-right irrationalism.

JAN OVERWIJK is NWO Rubicon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main,

Germany.

A Taytsh Manifesto

Yiddish,

Translation,

and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture

SAUL NOAM ZARITT

240 pages, 1 b/w illustration

9781531509170, Paperback, $35.00 (SDT), £29.99 9781531509163, Hardback, $125.00 (SDT), £112.00 Simultaneous electronic edition available OCTOBER

Jewish Studies | Literary Studies | History

“This provocative book highlights the transnational role of Yiddish over the past hundred years. By emphasizing Yiddish’s translational qualities, Zaritt powerfully reimagines the language outside the terms of ethnonational canon-formation.”

—AMELIA GLASER, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO

Discover how Yiddish transcends cultures and challenges the conventions of Jewish identity through translation

“A Taytsh Manifesto is a fascinating interrogation of literary genealogies as well as a provocative call to new ways of reading Jewish culture. Zaritt’s taytsh reading is dangerous, pushing against the safety of well-established borders between vulgar and respectable, high culture and shund, vernacular and post-vernacular, Jewish and European or American. A Taytsh Manifesto is a bundle of dynamite shoved underneath the foundational mythologies of modern Yiddish culture and the most exciting, thought-provoking book about the present and future of Yiddish in years Rokhl Kafrissen, author of A Brokhe A Blessing

A Taytsh Manifesto calls for a translational paradigm for Yiddish studies and for the study of modern Jewish culture. Saul Noam Zaritt calls for a shift in vocabulary, from Yiddish to taytsh, in order to promote reading strategies that account for the ways texts named as Jewish move between languages and cultures.

Yiddish, a moniker that became dominant only in the early twentieth century, means “Jewish” and thus marks the language with a single identity: of and for a Jewish collective. In contrast, this book calls attention to an earlier and, at one time, more common name for the language: taytsh, which initially means “German.” By using the term taytsh, speakers indicated that they were indeed speaking a Germanic language, a language that was not entirely their own. In time, when the word shifted to a verb, taytshn, it came to mean the act of translation. To write or speak in Yiddish is thus to render into taytsh and inhabit the gap between languages.

A Taytsh Manifesto highlights the cultural porousness that inheres in taytsh and deploys the term as a paradigm that can be applied to a host of modern Jewish cultural formations. The book reads three corpora in modern Yiddish culture through the lens of translation: Yiddish pulp fiction, also known as shund (trash); the genre of the Yiddish monologue as authored by Sholem Aleichem and other prominent Yiddish writers; and the persistence of Yiddish as a language of vulgarity in contemporary US culture. Together these examples help revise current histories of Yiddish while demonstrating the need for new vocabularies to account for the multidirectionality of Jewish culture. A Taytsh Manifesto develops a model for identifying, in Yiddish and beyond, how cultures intertwine, how they become implicated in world systems and empire, and how they might escape such limiting and oppressive structures.

SAUL NOAM ZARITT is Associate Professor of Yiddish literature at Harvard University. He is the author of Jewish American Writing and World Literature: Maybe to Millions, Maybe to Nobody.

Universality and Translation

Sites of Struggle in Philosophy and Politics

GAVIN ARNALL AND KATIE

CHENOWETH,

320 pages, 1 b/w illustration 9781531508579, Paperback, $35.00 (SDT), £29.99 9781531508562, Hardback, $125.00 (SDT), £112.00 Simultaneous electronic edition

EDITORS

“Universality and Translation is a groundbreaking book that reshapes our understanding of universality, offering fresh insights and tools for bridging diverse fields and perspectives. Through thought-provoking essays, it introduces a revolutionary approach to the idea and practice of translation that redefines the very essence of universality. Scholars and students across disciplines, from history to literature, postcolonial studies to political theory, will find invaluable critical insights within this volume.”

—MASSIMILIANO TOMBA, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA CRUZ

Unravel the complex dance between translation and universality in their role in shaping global struggles and liberation

Within contemporary theory, the concepts of translation and universality have frequently been associated with different and even opposed philosophical and political projects: watchwords of either domination or liberation, the erasure of difference or the defense of difference. The universalizing drives of capitalism, colonialism, and other systems of oppression have precipitated widespread suspicion of any appeal to universality. This has led some, in turn, to champion the very notion of universality as antithetical to these systems of oppression. Similarly, recent scholarship has begun to grapple with the fundamental role of translation not only in forging inclusive democratic politics but also, by contrast, in violence, including imperial expansion and global war.

The present volume advocates neither for nor against translation or universality as such. Instead, it attends to their insurmountable ambiguity and equivocity, the tensions and contradictions that are internal to both concepts and that exist between them. Indeed, the wager of this volume is that translation, universality, and their relationship name irreducible yet overlapping sites of struggle for a diverse array of struggles on the Left.

Drawing from multiple intellectual traditions and orientations, with a special emphasis on deconstruction and Marxism, this volume both reveals and participates in a subterranean current of thought committed to theorizing the dynamic, plural, and ultimately inextricable relationship between translation and universality. Its contributors approach this problem in ways that challenge and unsettle dominant trends within translation studies and critical and postcolonial theory, thereby opening new lines of inquiry within and beyond these fields.

CONTRIBUTORS: Ben Conisbee Baer, Barbara Cassin, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Cate Reilly, Peter Thomas, Gavin Walker, Naomi Waltham-Smith, Gary Wilder

GAVIN ARNALL is Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

KATIE CHENOWETH is Associate Professor of French at Princeton University.

The Play of Goodness

Creation, Phenomenology, and Culture

JACOB BENJAMINS

“Clear, coherent, and interesting, The Play of Goodness employs phenomenology to explore the goodness of creation. The book offers a fresh and fruitful conversation with thinkers within and beyond the phenomenological tradition.”

—CHRISTINA M. GSCHWANDTNER, AUTHOR OF WAYS OF LIVING RELIGION: PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS INTO RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

“The Play of Goodness makes an important contribution to continental philosophy and Christian theology. Its central claims are distinctive, and it is written with sensitivity and insight.”

—DAVID NEWHEISER, AUTHOR OF HOPE IN A SECULAR AGE

Rediscover the essence of creation through a nuanced exploration of goodness, where phenomenology meets profound existential truths

One of the enduring claims in the Christian tradition is that creation is good. Given the diversity of experience and the abundance of suffering in the world, however, such an affirmation is not always straightforward. The Play of Goodness provides a phenomenology of creation’s goodness that clarifies the ongoing relevance of the doctrine today. It argues that what is “good” about creation is not synonymous with a confession of faith and does not require an overly optimistic disposition, but instead appears within diverse and often surprising circumstances.

Alongside original contributions to French phenomenology and creation theology, The Play of Goodness counterbalances a tendency in continental philosophy to focus on negative phenomena. By developing the philosophical concept of a prelinguistic experience of goodness, the book identifies a quality of goodness that is integral to the place in which we find ourselves. It also articulates shared points of contact among people in an increasingly polarized world, while demonstrating that distinctly theological concepts do not need to be presented in opposition to secular, agnostic, or atheist perspectives in order to be relevant.

Benjamins develops an account of creation’s goodness that has the potential to animate an abiding affection for one’s place, accentuate our reasons to care for it, and confirm that what happens in our lives is of genuine significance.

JACOB BENJAMINS is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto.

The World War II Bond Campaign

LAWRENCE R. SAMUEL

272 pages, 46 b/w illustrations

9781531509255, Paperback, $35.00 (SDT), £29.99

9781531509248, Hardback, $125.00 (SDT), £112.00

Simultaneous electronic edition available World War II: The Global, Human, and Ethical Dimension FEBRUARY

History | World War II | Race & Ethnic Studies

“Samuel writes engagingly, especially on the African American community, whose participation was not a ‘given’ in those days for good reason.”

LIBRARY JOURNAL

“Samuel offers ample evidence that ethnic Americans and African Americans participated enthusiastically in the war-bond drives . . . [and] some suggestive insights, especially as he traces the civil rights movement back to the war years.”

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

“Interesting observations—most notably on the role of African Americans in the Second World War.”

WASHINGTON MONTHLY

“[An] interesting piece of social history. . . . Scattered throughout this volume are photos rarely seen in any text, which make a positive contribution.”

CHOICE

“Samuel’s principal contribution lies in his careful delineation of the techniques used to promote bond sales and the way in which the bond campaign was received—and often converted into agents of community cohesion—by various segments of society. Particularly striking are his four chapters on bond drives among African Americans.”

JOURNAL OF AMERICAN HISTORY

“As described in Pledging Allegiance [The World War II Bond Campaign], [patriotism] translated into a bond bandwagon that knew no bounds.”

SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE , 2002

How America’s greatest marketing triumph in World War II shaped race, ethnicity, and class in modern America

The World War II Bond Campaign is a history of the World War II bond drive led by the federal government, an effort called the most successful marketing operation in history. By the war’s end, some 85 million Americans had spent $186 billion in an unprecedented outpouring of patriotism that contributed to the military victory and the prosperity of the following decades. The FDR administration used bonds to raise capital to support the war and promote national unity within the context of the nation’s increasingly pluralistic society as the “melting pot” theory was retired. African Americans, Euro-Americans, and labor union members enthusiastically bought bonds to express national loyalty but also to demonstrate racial, ethnic, or class pride, a reflection of their dualistic or “hyphenated” identities.

Drawing on various primary sources, The World War II Bond Campaign illustrates how the Treasury Department’s multicultural marketing strategies tapped into Americans’ aspirations alongside their patriotic impulses. Citizens of all social and economic backgrounds eagerly responded to what can be seen as the selling of America, making the subject an ideal lens to view national identity at a critical moment in the country’s history. The author contends that the drive’s success helped pave the way for the emergence of both the civil rights movement and the vigorous consumer culture of the postwar years.

LAWRENCE R. SAMUEL is an independent scholar based in Miami and New York City. The most recent of his books are Diversity in the United States: A Cultural History of the Past Century; Making Long Island: A History of Growth and the American Dream; Literacy in America: A Cultural History of the Past Century; and The American Teacher: A History.

A Contested Terrain

Freedpeople’s Education in North Carolina During the Civil War and Reconstruction

ANNEMARIE BROSNAN

224 pages, 4 photographs, 1 map, 1 graph, 1 table 9781531509293, Paperback, $30.00 (SDT), £25.99 9781531509286, Hardback, $105.00 (SDT), £94.00

Simultaneous electronic edition available

Reconstructing America

JANUARY

Civil War | African American Studies | Education

“A Contested Terrain stands as a significant addition to the historiography surrounding the education of freedpeople during and after the Civil War. It broadens our comprehension of the profound significance that education held for freed individuals in North Carolina, underscoring their unwavering belief in education’s potential to catalyze transformative change. Beyond its wealth of evidence and eloquent prose, this book is indispensable reading for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of how the endeavors of freedpeople in the initial decades post-emancipation shaped the trajectory of North Carolina’s future.”

—CHRISTOPHER M. SPAN, UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS, URBANA-CHAMPAIGN

A testament to the resilience and determination of Black North Carolinians to achieve educational equality

This book examines the educational experiences of Black North Carolinians during the American Civil War and Reconstruction period, 1861–1877. By highlighting the collaborative efforts that led to the growing network of schools for the formerly enslaved people, it argues that schooling the Freedpeople was a contested terrain, fraught with conflicting visions of Black freedom and the role education should play. Although Black men and women emerged as the driving force behind the educational endeavors of this period, their work was facilitated by Northern aid and missionary societies, the federally-mandated Freedmen’s Bureau, and over 1,400 teachers from various regional and racial backgrounds. Yet the educational landscape was far from uniform, and the individuals and organizations involved had their distinct visions regarding the nature and purpose of Freedpeople’s education.

Through the use of qualitative and quantitative research methods, this book offers new insights into the reasons why Black and white Northerners and Southerners elected to become teachers. By examining their diverse motivations and experiences, it argues that attitudes toward Freedpeople’s education were complex and fluid, defying neat characterization.

Despite mounting obstacles and opposition to their work, Black North Carolinians’ unrelenting quest for education ultimately gave rise to free public schooling for both races, the professionalization of Black teachers, and an extensive network of Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

ANNEMARIE BROSNAN is Associate Professor in the History of Education at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Ireland. Her research interests include African American history in the US South, the Civil War and Reconstruction period, and race and ethnicity in the nineteenth century.

Our Onward March

The Grand Army of the Republic in the Progressive Era

JONATHAN D. NEU

288 pages, 12 b/w illustrations 9781531509019, Paperback, $35.00 (SDT), £29.99 9781531509002, Hardback, $125.00 (SDT), £112.00

Simultaneous electronic edition available

Reconstructing America

FEBRUARY

History | Civil War | Political Science

“Based on painstaking research and written in clear and readable prose, Neu revises what we know about the ‘old soldiers,’ who, rather than fading away after the 1890s, extended the values for which they had fought by becoming Progressive Era reformers in their communities and the nation. Neu convincingly argues that veterans’ forward-looking activism is as much a part of their legacy as their courage and sacrifice.”

—JAMES MARTEN, PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF HISTORY, MARQUETTE UNIVERSITY, AUTHOR OF SING NOT WAR: THE LIVES OF UNION & CONFEDERATE VETERANS IN GILDED AGE AMERICA AND OF AMERICA’S CORPORAL: JAMES TANNER IN WAR AND PEACE

Provides vital new evidence that Union veterans remained stubbornly opposed to the nation’s reconciliationist tendencies and unwilling to surrender the causes for which they fought

Union soldiers’ service to the nation did not end in 1865. Instead, it persisted well into the twentieth century as hundreds of thousands of veterans joined the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) and directed the reform and improvement of their communities through their fraternal membership in thousands of local posts around the country.

In Our Onward March, Jonathan D. Neu shows how Union veterans of the GAR drew on lessons they learned in the Civil War—lessons about broad principles like democracy, freedom, and loyalty—to undertake grassroots civic projects designed to address the rampant social ills and challenging foreign policy issues associated with US modernization. Armed this time with sage wisdom and unwavering principles, they mobilized again to consummate their wartime victory with reform-minded activism on behalf of establishing an even more perfect Union.

Extending the boundaries of America’s post–Civil War era, Neu investigates the GAR during the Progressive era, a period in the organization’s history that scholars have overlooked. Countering stubborn notions that the GAR was merely a pension advocacy group or an insular bastion of sentimental nostalgia, he reveals instead that the organization reached a turning point in 1890, after which it became an active and decentralized civic association whose members worked to instill a commitment to public life, engagement with community issues, and pride in the democracy they had defended as young men.

Anchored by illuminating new source material, including post-minute books and fraternal records, Our Onward March places aging GAR members squarely among the diverse constellation of turn-of-the-century social reformers, using their memory of the Civil War to promote robust, veteran-led civic engagement. By situating Union veterans in this context, we see a more accurate portrait of the GAR post in American culture—as a local center of progressive activism.

JONATHAN D. NEU holds a PhD in history from Carnegie Mellon University and works in publishing. His writings have appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Gettysburg Magazine, Annals of Iowa, and in the volume The War Went On. He lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Vote of Faith

Democracy,

Desire,

and the Turbulent Lives of Priest Politicians

MAYA MAYBLIN

240 pages, 5 b/w illustrations

9781531509095, Paperback, $35.00 (SDT), £29.99 9781531509088, Hardback, $125.00 (SDT), £112.00

Simultaneous electronic edition available Catholic Practice in the Americas

DECEMBER Catholic Studies | Anthropology | Religion

“In this elegantly creative feminist analysis, Mayblin shows how faith, abundance, and virile priestly celibacy animate Catholicism in political forms and foundational ways to the secular Brazilian state, prefiguring a close intertwining rather than a preconceived opposition between politics and religion.”

—VALENTINA NAPOLITANO, AUTHOR OF MIGRANT HEARTS AND THE ATLANTIC RETURN: TRANSNATIONALISM AND THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH

“At the moment when questions on the relation between desire, religion, and politics reappear strongly within social sciences, along comes Vote of Faith as an ethnographically appealing contribution to the topics. In six well-crafted chapters, Mayblin draws a fine-grained portrait of the institutionally enduring, yet turbulent, affair between politics and priesthood, secular power and Catholicism, faith and desire, the pastoral and the political, as incarnated in the person of the priest-mayor in Northeastern Brazil.”

—MARIA JOSÉ DE ABREU, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ANTHROPOLOGY, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, AND AUTHOR OF THE CHARISMATIC GYMNASIUM: BREATH, MEDIA AND RELIGIOUS REVIVALISM IN CONTEMPORARY BRAZIL

A richly cinematic and compelling look at priest-politicians in Brazil and their religious and secular entanglements

What does desire have to reveal about the nature of power? Through a detailed focus on the lives and loves of Catholic priests as they enter the profane world of party politics, Maya Mayblin explores the complex intersection of democracy, patriarchy, and religiosity in Brazil. For over a hundred years, Catholic priests have been running for government office, challenging Brazil’s constitutional separation of church and state and its self-image as a modern, secular nation. Priests find themselves walking a tightrope between religious and secular demands in one of Brazil’s poorest regions. Vote of Faith is a beautifully crafted ethnography based upon decades of fieldwork that tells the story of the ambiguous and frequently transgressive relationship between Catholicism and state governance, a relationship ultimately mediated by kinship, gender, and sexuality.

For the protagonists of Vote of Faith, democracy becomes a sphere in which divine will and human ambition compete with one another, a tension embedded in the vernacular concept of faith. In the Brazilian context, faith signifies a complex set of assumptions about the nature of the world, assumptions derived not just from Christianity, but also from Afro-Brazilian and secular ideas about power, causation, and human agency. In combining ethnographic, theological, and feminist perspectives, Vote of Faith places desiring bodies at the very heart of Catholicism’s complex connection to multiple forms of power and offers provocative new angles on the question of the secular.

The first work by an anthropologist to explore the unique phenomenon of the mayor-priest, this book offers an essential new angle on emerging debates about secularity as the condition of separation of the religious from the political. Brimming with originality, Vote of Faith is required reading for those interested in the gendered and sexual dimensions of the secular, the plasticity of religion, and the fundamental nature of the world’s largest religious institution.

MAYA MAYBLIN is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. Her work explores religion, theology, politics, and gender in Brazil and beyond. She is the author of Gender, Morality and Catholicism in Brazil and co-editor of The Anthropology of Catholicism: A Reader.

Heritage and Its Missions

Contested Meanings and Constructive Appropriations

CRISTÓBAL GNECCO AND ADRIANA SCHMIDT DIAS, EDITORS

224 pages, 20 b/w illustrations

9781531509330, Paperback, $35.00 (SDT), £29.99 9781531509323, Hardback, $125.00 (SDT), £112.00

Simultaneous electronic edition available Catholic Practice in the Americas JANUARY Religion | History | American Studies

“Cristóbal Gnecco and Adriana Dias have gathered a distinguished group of international scholars, providing innovative, sensitive, and provocative insights about the Spanish and Portuguese Catholic Missions in the Americas. Through a critical heritage approach, the volume reveals the plethora of meanings that constitute these memorial landscapes and shows that their persistent physicality has a vivid agency in the present. The book presents a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary perspective and is of interest to a wide range of fields.”

—MARCIA BEZERRA, PROFESSOR OF ARCHAEOLOGY AT THE UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DO PARÁ, BRAZIL

“This is a wonderful collection of essays that takes its place in the exciting, growing field of critical heritage studies. It manages to be both specific in focus and broad in its conceptual range and ambition, powerfully establishing the manner in which heritage acts as a site of contestation negotiated at the point of intersection of multiple claimants and interests. This collection is a ‘must read’ for scholars and students in a range of fields: heritage Studies, but also archaeology, anthropology, history, Indigenous studies, and others.”

—NICK SHEPHERD, AUTHOR OF RETHINKING HERITAGE IN PRECARIOUS TIMES: COLONIALITY, CLIMATE CHANGE, AND COVID-19

Explores how heritage discourses and local publics interact at Catholic mission sites in the southwestern United States, northern Mexico, and the Southern Cone

Interdisciplinary in scope and classed under the name “critical heritage studies,” Heritage and Its Missions makes extensive use of ethnographic perspectives to examine heritage not as a collection of inert things upon which a general historical interest is centered, but as a series of active meanings that have consequences in the social, political, and economic arenas. This approach considers the places of interaction between heritage discourses and local publics as constructed spaces where the very materiality of the social and the political unfolds.

Heritage and Its Missions brings together researchers from several countries interested in the pre-republican Catholic missions in the Americas as heritage. Each essay discusses the past and current heritage meanings applied to a specific mission by national and multicultural states, local Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities, international heritage institutions, and scholars. They then address how heritage actors produce knowledge from their positioned perspectives; how different actors, collectives, communities, and publics relate to them; how heritage representations are deployed and contested as social facts; and how different conceptions of “heritage” collide, collaborate, and intersperse to produce the meanings around which heritage struggles unfold.

CONTRIBUTORS: Deana Dartt, Adriana Schmidt Dias, Cristóbal Gnecco, Lisbeth Haas, Elizabeth Kryder-Reid, Edith Llamas, Charlene Nijmeh, Lee M. Panich, Maximiliano von Thüngen, Guillermo Wilde

CRISTÓBAL GNECCO is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at the Universidad del Cauca and chair of its anthropology program, where he works on the political economy of archaeology, geopolitics of knowledge, discourses on alterity, and ethnographies of heritage.

ADRIANA SCHMIDT DIAS holds an MA in history from the Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul and a PhD in archeology from the University of São Paulo. She is a professor in the Graduate Program in History at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul and professor in the Graduate Program in Social and Cultural Anthropology and Archeology at the Federal University of Pelotas. She has carried out research and published on Brazilian precolonial archaeology, theory and method in archaeology, Indigenous history, and cultural heritage.

The Covenant’s Veil

Ethiopian Orthodox Tradition of Elaboration

ALEXANDRA SELLASSIE ANTOHIN

240 pages, 20 b/w illustrations

9781531508654, Paperback, $35.00 (SDT), £29.99

9781531508647, Hardback, $125.00 (SDT), £112.00

Simultaneous electronic edition available Orthodox Christianity and Contemporary Thought

Anthropology | Religion

“A holistic approach to studying the multi-faceted features of EOTC worship, from the calendric organization to descriptions of lay devotional engagement, The Covenant’s Veil, by the great-great-granddaughter of the last emperor of Ethiopia, attempts to tell a story, albeit indirectly, of finding one’s self in tandem with a scholarly dedication to studying the history and realities of Ethiopian religiosity and the covenant. A gratifying effort!”

—HEWAN SEMON MARYE, JUNIOR PROFESSOR OF ETHIOPIAN STUDIES AT UNIVERSITÄT HAMBURG

An exploration of how contemporary Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity preserves and protects sacred ideas and relationships

“Ethiopia stretches her hand upon God,” the narrative of Sheba and Solomon, the material presence of the Ark of the Covenant in Axum. For Ethiopian Orthodox Christians, these classic understandings of the covenant are prized narratives. For historical and scriptural scholarship, a central focus is to explain the characteristics of Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity as retaining key “Old Testament” qualities to demonstrate a wide chasm with post-Enlightenment, secular societies. By widening the lens of analysis to include a body of knowledge best accessed through Orthodox Christian devotional culture, The Covenant’s Veil offers an interpretation that challenges the reader to adopt a novel understanding of these well-established ideas.

The multiple, complex ways that the covenant idea appears as ideas, idioms, customs, symbols, and articulations in the lifeworld of Ethiopian Orthodox are the starting point for The Covenant’s Veil. Ethiopia’s story of the covenant is a domain of nested reference points that inspires celebrants, through their devotional activities, to expand and elaborate upon a network of meanings. Covenant refractions within Ethiopian Orthodox devotional culture not only demonstrate the established pattern of magnifying spiritual importance through symbolic similes and analogic pairings, but perform a vital function for keeping traditional knowledge alive and current. Detailed ethnographic material arranges devotional activities such as mahaber rituals of communing and processions of tabots on feast days. It describes habits of making vows, presenting oneself at church, and telling stories of saints and their covenants. Thinking about the covenant concept as refracting—the bending motion of points encountering a common surface—is a way to conceive how these reference points reveal a connective thread, what is theorized as an Ethiopian Orthodox method of elaboration. Identifying when and where elaboration of tradition is happening provides an opportunity to demonstrate how Orthodox Christianity is integral to the lives and actions of its faithful. By reframing covenant as expanding beyond Ethiopian religious and political exceptionalism, The Covenant’s Veil provides us with a timely reappraisal of this concept in light of increased social fragmentation and the urgency for negotiating harmony in a country with many forms of diversity.

ALEXANDRA SELLASSIE ANTOHIN is an independent researcher and holds an academic affiliation with the George Washington University. A former Postdoctoral Fellow at the Truman Institute at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the author has published widely on topics related to Orthodox Christianity.

Sonic Icons

Relation, Recognition, and Revival in a Syriac World

SARAH BAKKER KELLOGG

304 pages, 5 b/w illustrations

9781531509132, Paperback, $35.00 (SDT), £29.99 9781531509125, Hardback, $125.00 (SDT), £112.00 Orthodox Christianity and Contemporary Thought NOVEMBER

Religion | Anthropology | Theology

“Sonic Icons offers a most welcome addition to earlier historical and anthropological studies of Syriac Orthodox communities. Sarah Bakker Kellogg takes her starting point in the often-overlooked choir practices of young women that embody all the crucial elements of the moral communal formation that is at the heart of this migrant community. While discussing the complex interactions of sonic iconicity, patriarchy and kinship, she addresses urgent issues of secularism, race, and religion in ways that should resonate far beyond the study of the Syriac Orthodox community in the Netherlands.”

—HELEEN MURRE-VAN DEN BERG, PROFESSOR OF GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY AT RADBOUD UNIVERSITY IN NIJMEGEN AND AUTHOR OF SCRIBES AND SCRIPTURES: THE CHURCH OF THE EAST IN THE EASTERN OTTOMAN PROVINCES (1500–1850)

“Sarah Bakker Kellogg masterfully blends rich storytelling with insightful anthropological investigation in her exploration of the Syriac Orthodox community in the Netherlands. Through vivid portraits and personal narratives, especially those of young women, Bakker Kellogg offers an intimate glimpse into the lives of individuals navigating identity and belonging. Her compelling narrative invites readers into a deeply emotional journey, making it hard to turn the pages without shedding a tear or two.”

—GEORGE A. KIRAZ, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY, INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED STUDY, AND BETH MARDUTHO: THE SYRIAC INSTITUTE

A vivid, artfully crafted, and deeply hopeful account of one community’s struggle to rediscover and reinvent itself after a century of genocidal loss, dispossession, and displacement

To the extent that Middle Eastern Christians register in Euro-American political imaginaries, they are usually invoked to justify Western military intervention into countries like Iraq or Syria, or as an exemption to anti-Islamic immigration policies because of an assumption that their Christianity makes them easily assimilable in the so-called “Judeo-Christian” West.

Using the tools of multisensory ethnography, Sonic Icons uncovers how these views work against the very communities they are meant to benefit. Through long term fieldwork in the Netherlands among Syriac Orthodox Christians—also known as Assyrians, Aramaeans, and Syriacs—Bakker Kellogg reveals how they intertwine religious practice with political activism to save Syriac Christianity from the twin threats of political violence in the Middle East and cultural assimilation in Europe.

In a historical moment when much of their tradition has been forgotten or destroyed, their story of self-discovery is one of survival and reinvention. By reviving the late antique Syriac liturgical tradition known as the Daughters and Sons of the Covenant, they seek a complex form of recognition for what they understand to be the ethical core of Christian kinship in an ethnic as well as in a religious sense, despite living in societies that do not recognize this unhyphenated form of ethnoreligiosity as a politically legitimate mode of public identity.

Drawing on both theological and linguistic understandings of the icon, Sonic Icons rethinks foundational theoretical accounts of ethnicization, racialization, and secularization by examining how kinship gets made, claimed, and named in the global politics of minority recognition. The icon, as a site of communicative and reproductive power, illuminates how these processes are shaped by religious histories of struggle for sovereignty over the reproductive future.

An anthropologist by training, SARAH BAKKER KELLOGG teaches courses on religion, gender, and ethnography at San Francisco State University. As an interdisciplinary and publicly engaged scholar, she bridges North American, European, and Middle Eastern conversations about racism, religious difference, gender, and global migration politics. She has presented and published work on secularism and aesthetics, racism and racialization, and the transnational politics of minority recognition in flagship social science journals like American Ethnologist, Current Anthropology, and Cultural Anthropology.

The Location of Experience

Victorian Women Writers, the Novel, and the Feeling of Living

ADELA PINCH

224 pages, 4 b/w illustrations 9781531508616, Paperback, $32.00 (SDT), £27.99 9781531508609, Hardback, $110.00 (SDT), £79.00

electronic edition available

Studies | Gender & Sexuality

“The relationship between experience and realism, what it means and what it feels like to read fiction: In Adela Pinch’s hands, these longstanding questions come to seem newly strange and newly fascinating. Part of her genius lies in considering how formal problems intersect not just with the experience of reading, but with what we read for: how we think about care, human vulnerability, and our existence in and through others. The Location of Experience will be required—and deeply pleasurable—reading for all who are interested in the novel, the Victorian period, or what ‘counts’ as experience in the first place.”

—RACHEL ABLOW, UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO, SUNY

“This impressive and beautifully written book models a new way of understanding Victorian realism and the enduring compacts it makes with generations of devoted readers. Pinch unfolds a set of arguments linked by a carefully historicized conception of experience: its putative presence or absence as a precondition for imaginative writing; the way family feeling reverberates through narrative choice; the two-way tug of desire and prohibition in the plotting of character trajectories.”

—VANESSA SMITH,

UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY

Exploring crafted realities and reshaping our understanding through Victorian novels

We tend to feel that works of fiction give us special access to lived experience. But how do novels cultivate that feeling? Where exactly does experience reside?

The Location of Experience argues that, paradoxically, novels create experience for us not by bringing reality up close, but by engineering environments in which we feel constrained from acting. By excavating the history of the rise of experience as an important category of Victorian intellectual life, this book reveals how experience was surprisingly tied to emotions of remorse and regret for some of the era’s great women novelists: the Brontës, George Eliot, Margaret Oliphant, and Elizabeth Gaskell. It shows how these writers passed ideas about experience—and experiences themselves—among each other.

Drawing on intellectual history, psychology, and moral philosophy, The Location of Experience shows that, through manipulating the psychological dimensions of fiction’s formal features, Victorian women novelists produced a philosophical account of experience that rivaled and complemented that of the male philosophers of the period.

ADELA PINCH is Professor of English at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen and Thinking about Other People in Nineteenth-Century British Writing.

Joyce Studies Annual 2023–24

KERI WALSH AND CHRISTOPHER GOGWILT, EDITORS

428 pages

9781531509484, Hardback, $65.00 (SDT)

FEBRUARY

An indispensable resource for scholars and students of James Joyce, Joyce Studies Annual gathers essays by foremost scholars and emerging voices in the field.

KERI WALSH is the Director of the Institute of Irish Studies at Fordham University and founder of Fordham’s annual Irish Women Writers Symposium. She is also the editor of James Joyce’s Dubliners, The Letters of Sylvia Beach, and Joyce’s only extant play Exiles.

CHRISTOPHER GOGWILT is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Fordham University. He is the author of The K-Effect: Romanization, Modernism, and the Timing and Spacing of Print Culture; The Passage of Literature: Genealogies of Modernism in Conrad, Rhys, and Pramoedya (winner, Modernist Studies Association Book Prize); The Fiction of Geopolitics: Afterimages of Culture from Wilkie Collins to Alfred Hitchcock; and The Invention of the West: Joseph Conrad and the Double-Mapping of Europe and Empire.

For ordering information, please contact Margaret Noonan at mnoonan@fordham.edu or 646-868-4206.

Brooklyn Is

Southeast of the Island: Travel Notes

James Agee, Preface by Jonathan Lethem

64 pages, 5 x 7

9780823224920, Hardback, $25.95 (HC), £21.99

Whose Middle Ages?

Teachable Moments for an Ill-Used Past Andrew Albin, Mary C. Erler, Thomas O’Donnell, Nicholas L. Paul, and Nina Rowe, Editors

Introduction by David Perry, Afterword by Geraldine Heng

240 pages, 5 x 8, 35 b/w illustrations

9780823285563, Paperback, $22.00 (AC), £18.99 Fordham Series in Medieval Studies

Just City

Growing Up on the Upper West Side When Housing Was a Human Right

Jennifer Baum

272 pages, 37 b/w illustrations

9781531506216, Hardback, $29.95 (HC), £25.99 Empire State Editions

A Ministry of Risk

Writings on Peace and Nonviolence

Edited and with an Introduction by Brad Wolf

Preface by Frida Berrigan

Foreword by Bill Wylie-Kellerman; Afterword by John Dear, S.J.

272 pages, 18 color illustrations

9781531506285, Paperback, $24.95 (TP), £21.99

The Book of Tiny Prayer

Daily Meditations from the Plague Year

Micah Bucey

Foreword by Pádraig Ó Tuama

312 pages, 4 1⁄4 x 7

9780823299225, Paperback, $15.95 (TP), £13.99

Giving an Account of Oneself

Judith Butler

160 Pages

9780823225040, Paperback, $33.00 (SDT), £27.99

Disorderly Men

A novel

Ed Cahill

WINNER, IPPY BOOK AWARDS, LGBTQ+ FICTION

WINNER, 2023 BEST INDIE BOOK AWARD, LGBTQ2 FICTION

SHORT LIST, VCU CABELL FIRST NOVELIST AWARD

320 pages

9781531504441, Hardback, $28.95 (HC), £24.99

Empire State Editions

Postindustrial DIY

Recovering American Rust Belt Icons

Daniel Campo

384 pages, 9 x 9, 102 color and b/w illustrations

9781531504687, Paperback, $24.95 (AC), £21.99

Polis: Fordham Series in Urban Studies

Mortimer and the Witches

A History of Nineteenth-Century

Fortune Tellers

Marie Carter

208 pages, 25 b/w illustrations

9781531506247, Hardback, $29.95 (HC), £25.99

Empire State Editions

Yellow Roses

Stories

Elizabeth Cullinan

Foreword by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell

208 pages

9781531507350, Paperback, $19.95 (TP), £16.99

New York ReLit

Mother of Stories

An Elegy

Alice Dailey

160 pages, 5 1⁄2 x 8 1⁄2, 95 color figures

9781531506476, Paperback, $24.95 (AC), £21.99

Æffect

The Affect and Effect of Artistic Activism

Stephen Duncombe

256 pages, 25 pieces of art and graphics

9781531506513, Paperback, $29.95 (AC), £25.99

Midnight Rambles

H. P. Lovecraft in Gotham

David J. Goodwin

288 pages, 22 b/w illustrations

9781531504410, Hardback, $29.95 (HC), £25.99 Empire State Editions

What Fanon Said

A Philosophical Introduction to His Life and Thought

Lewis R. Gordon

Foreword by Sonia Dayan-Herzbrun, Afterword by Drucilla Cornell

216 pages, 9 b/w illustrations

9780823266098, Paperback, $24.00 (SDT), £20.99 Just Ideas

The Civil War and the Summer of 2020

Hilary N. Green and Andrew L. Slap, Editors

Foreword by Andre E. Johnson

208 pages

9781531505004, Paperback, $25.00 (AC), £21.99 Reconstructing America

Greek

An Intensive Course, 2nd Revised Edition

Hardy Hansen, and Gerald M. Quinn

868 pages, 7 x 10

9780823216635, Paperback, $60.00 (SDT), £54.00

Global Queens

An Urban Mosaic

Joseph Heathcott

208 pages, 10 x 10, 284 color illustrations

9781531504519, Hardback, $34.95 (HC), £29.99 Empire State Editions

Latinx Revolutionary Horizons

Form and Futurity in the Americas

Renee Hudson

288 Pages, 3 b/w illustrations

9781531507190, Paperback, $30.00 (SDT), £25.99

Red Tail Captured, Red Tail Free

Memoirs of a Tuskegee Airman and POW, Revised Edition

Alexander Jefferson, with Lewis H. Carlson

192 pages, 8 1⁄4 x 9 1⁄4, 92 color illustrations

9780823274383, Hardback, $33.00 (HC), £27.99

World War II: The Global, Human, and Ethical Dimension

South Bronx Rising

The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of an American City

Jill Jonnes

481 pages, 5 1⁄2 x 8 1⁄2

9780823221998, Paperback, $44.00 (SDT), £39.00

Queer Callings

Untimely Notes on Names and Desires

Mark D. Jordan

176 pages, 5 x 8

9781531504533, Hardback, $27.95 (AC), £23.99

Mutuality in El Barrio

Stories of the Little Sisters of the Assumption Family Health Service

Carey Kasten and Brenna Moore

Foreword by Norma Benítez Sánchez

192 pages, 23 b/w illustrations

9781531506438, Paperback, $24.95 (AC), £21.99

Empire State Editions

On the High Line

The Definitive Guide

Annik LaFarge

Foreword by Rick Darke

Third Edition, Fully Revised & Updated

224 pages, 110 b/w illustrations

9781531506117, Paperback, $24.95 (TP), £21.99

Empire State Editions

Flesh and Spirit

Confessions of a Young Lord

Felipe Luciano

352 pages, 25 b/w illustrations

9781531504489 Hardback, $34.95 (HC), £29.99

Empire State Editions

The Drinking Curriculum

A Cultural History of Childhood and Alcohol

Elizabeth A. Marshall

176 pages, 20 color and 22 b/w illustrations

9781531505240, Paperback, $25.00 (SDT), £21.99

A Falling-Off Place

The Transformation of Lower Manhattan

Barbara G. Mensch

Foreword by Dan Barry

116 pages, 10 1⁄2 x 11 1⁄4, 94 b/w illustrations

9781531504397, Hardback, $39.95 (HC), £36.00

Empire State Editions

In Praise of Risk

Anne Dufourmantelle

Translated, with an Introduction, by Steven Miller

240 pages

9780823285440, Paperback, $35.00 (SDT), £29.99

Corpus

Jean-Luc Nancy

Translated by Richard A. Rand

208 pages

9780823229628, Paperback, $31.00 (SDT), £26.99

Perspectives in Continental Philosophy

The Intruder

Jean-Luc Nancy

Foreword by Claire Denis

96 pages, 5 x 8, 3 b/w illustrations

9781531506186, Paperback, $19.95 (TP), £16.99

In Gorgeous Display

Poems

Ugochukwu Damian Okpara

76 pages, 5 x 8

9781531504601, Paperback, $16.95 (TP), £14.99

The Popes on Air

The History of Vatican Radio from Its Origins to World War II

Raffaella Perin

288 pages

9781531507152, Paperback, $30.00 (SDT), £25.99

World War II: The Global, Human, and Ethical Dimension

Group Works

Art, Politics, and Collective Ambivalence

Ethan Philbrick

192 pages, 5 x 8, 23 b/w illustrations

9781531502706, Paperback, $25.00 (AC), £21.99

The Routes Not Taken

A Trip Through New York City’s Unbuilt Subway System

Joseph B. Raskin

336 pages, 7 x 10, 100 black and white illustrations

9780823267408, Paperback, $21.95 (TP), £18.99 Empire State Editions

White Reconstruction

Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Genocide

Dylan Rodríguez

256 pages, 6 b/w illustrations

9780823289394, Paperback, $30.00 (SDT), £25.99

An Honest Living

A Memoir of Peculiar Itineraries

Steven Salaita

178 pages

9781531506353, Hardback, $24.95 (HC), £21.99

Confessions of a Young Lord

Hamilton Heights and Sugar Hill

Alexander Hamilton’s Old Harlem Neighborhood Through the Centuries

Davida Siwisa James

434 pages, 128 b/w illustrations

9781531506148, Hardback, $34.95 (HC), £29.99 Empire State Editions

Colorful Palate

A Flavorful Journey Through a Mixed American Experience

Raj Tawney

160 pages, 16 b/w illustrations

9781531504571, Hardback, $24.95 (HC), £21.99 Empire State Editions

Best Minds

How Allen Ginsberg Made Revolutionary Poetry from Madness

Stevan M. Weine

304 pages, 37 b/w illustrations

9781531502669, Hardback, $34.95 (HC), £29.99

Ambush at Central Park

When the IRA Came to New York

Mark Bulik

208 pages, 12 b/w illustrations 9781531502607, Hardback, $24.95 (HC), £21.99 Empire State Editions

The Livable and the Unlivable

Judith Butler and Frédéric Worms

A Conversation Initiated by Arto Charpentier and Laure Barillas

Translated by Zakiya Hanafi

96 pages, 5 x 8

9781531502744, Paperback, $19.95, (AC), £16.99

Power of Gentleness

Meditations on the Risk of Living

Anne Dufourmantelle

Translated by Katherine Payne and Vincent Sallé

Foreword by Catherine Malabou

152 pages, 5 x 7 1⁄2

9780823279609, Paperback, $22.00 (AC), £18.99

Our Laundry, Our Town

My Chinese American Life from Flushing to the Downtown Stage and Beyond

Alvin Eng

212 pages, 5 1⁄2 x 8 1⁄2, 24 b/w illustrations

9781531504830, Paperback, $18.95 (TP), £15.99

Empire State Editions

Conflicts

The Poetics and Politics of Palestine-Israel Liron Mor

288 pages, 10 b/w illustrations

9781531505448, Paperback, $32.00 (SDT), £27.99

Breaking the Bronze Ceiling Women, Memory, and Public Space

Valentina Rozas-Krause and Andrew M. Shanken, Eds.

272 pages, 71 b/w illustrations

9781531506391, Paperback, $29.95 (AC), £25.99

Berkeley Forum in the Humanities

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