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National Myths in the Middle East
Representations, Revisions, and Critiques, Volume 2003
Adina Back
Duke University Press
This issue examines some of the ways in which myths and cultural traditions influence nation building in the Middle East.
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The Gothic Family Romance
Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice, and the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order
Margot Backus
Duke University Press, 1999
Tales of child sacrifice, demon lovers, incestual relations, and returns from the dead are part of English and Irish gothic literature. Such recurring tropes are examined in this pioneering study by Margot Gayle Backus to show how Anglo-Irish gothic works written from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries reflect the destructive effects of imperialism on the children and later descendents of Protestant English settlers in Ireland.
Backus uses contemporary theory, including that of Michel Foucault and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, to analyze texts by authors ranging from Richardson, Swift, Burke, Edgeworth, Stoker, and Wilde to contemporary Irish novelists and playwrights.
By charting the changing relations between the family and the British state, she shows how these authors dramatized a legacy of violence within the family cell and discusses how disturbing themes of child sacrifice and colonial repression are portrayed through irony, satire, “paranoid” fantasy, and gothic romance. In a reconceptualization of the Freudian family romance, Backus argues that the figures of the Anglo-Irish gothic embody the particular residue of childhood experiences within a settler colonial society in which biological reproduction represented an economic and political imperative.
Backus’s bold positioning of the nuclear family at the center of post-Enlightenment class and colonial power relations in England and Ireland will challenge and provoke scholars in the fields of Irish literature and British and postcolonial studies. The book will also interest students and scholars of women’s studies, and it has important implications for understanding contemporary conflicts in Ireland.
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Baltimore Portraits
Amos Badertscher
Duke University Press, 1999
Baltimore Portraits is a unique presentation of photographs by Amos Badertscher. These portraits—many accompanied by poignantly revealing, hand-written narratives about their subjects—represent a sector of Baltimore that has gone largely unnoticed and rarely has been documented. In this volume, the assemblage of images of bar and street people—transvestites, strippers, drug addicts, drag queens, and hustlers—spans a twenty-year period from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s. Badertscher’s arresting and melancholy photographs document a culture that has virtually disappeared due to substance abuse, AIDS, and, often, societal or family neglect.

The photographer’s focus on content rather than on elaborate technique reveals the intensely personal—and, indeed, autobiographical—nature of his portraits. Their simplicity along with the text’s intimacy affects the viewer in ways not easily forgotten. An introduction by Tyler Curtain contextualizes the photographs both within the history of Baltimore and its queer subculture and in relationship to contemporaneous work by photographers Nan Goldin, Robert Mapplethorpe, Cindy Sherman, Duane Michaels, and others. Curtain also positions the underlying concerns of Bardertscher’s art in relation to gay and lesbian cultural politics.

This striking collection of portraits, along with the photographer’s moving text, will impact not only a general audience of photographers and enthusiasts of the art but also those engaged with gay and lesbian studies, queer theory, and cultural studies in general. It is published in association with the Duke University Museum of Art.
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Can Politics Be Thought?
Alain Badiou
Duke University Press, 2018
In Can Politics Be Thought?—published in French in 1985 and appearing here in English for the first time—Alain Badiou offers his most forceful and systematic analysis of the crisis of Marxism. Distinguishing politics as an active mode of thinking from the political as a domain of the State, Badiou argues for the continuation of Marxist politics. In so doing, he shows why we need to recapture the emancipatory hypothesis of Marx's original gesture in order to actualize its radical potential. This volume also includes Badiou's “Of an Obscure Disaster: On the End of the Truth of the State,” in which he rebuts claims of Communism's death after the fall of the Soviet Union.
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The Color Black
Enslavement and Erasure in Iran
Beeta Baghoolizadeh
Duke University Press, 2024
In The Color Black, Beeta Baghoolizadeh traces the twin processes of enslavement and erasure of Black people in Iran during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She illustrates how geopolitical changes and technological advancements in the nineteenth century made enslaved East Africans uniquely visible in their servitude in wealthy and elite Iranian households. During this time, Blackness, Africanness, and enslavement became intertwined—and interchangeable—in Iranian imaginations. After the end of slavery in 1929, the implementation of abolition involved an active process of erasure on a national scale, such that a collective amnesia regarding slavery and racism persists today. The erasure of enslavement resulted in the erasure of Black Iranians as well. Baghoolizadeh draws on photographs, architecture, theater, circus acts, newspapers, films, and more to document how the politics of visibility framed discussions around enslavement and abolition during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this way, Baghoolizadeh makes visible the people and histories that were erased from Iran and its diaspora.
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Migrant Futures
Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times
Aimee Bahng
Duke University Press, 2018
In Migrant Futures Aimee Bahng traces the cultural production of futurity by juxtaposing the practices of speculative finance against those of speculative fiction. While financial speculation creates a future based on predicting and mitigating risk for wealthy elites, the wide range of speculative novels, comics, films, and narratives Bahng examines imagines alternative futures that envision the multiple possibilities that exist beyond capital’s reach. Whether presenting new spatial futures of the US-Mexico borderlands or inventing forms of kinship in Singapore in order to survive in an economy designed for the few, the varied texts Bahng analyzes illuminate how the futurity of speculative finance is experienced by those who find themselves mired in it. At the same time these displaced, undocumented, unbanked, and disavowed characters imagine alternative visions of the future that offer ways to bring forth new political economies, social structures, and subjectivities that exceed the framework of capitalism.
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Shades of Black
Assembling Black Arts in 1980s Britain
David A. Bailey
Duke University Press, 2005
In the 1980s—at the height of Thatcherism and in the wake of civil unrest and rioting in a number of British cities—the Black Arts Movement burst onto the British art scene with breathtaking intensity, changing the nature and perception of British culture irreversibly. This richly illustrated volume presents a history of that movement. It brings together in a lively dialogue leading artists, curators, art historians, and critics, many of whom were actively involved in the Black Arts Movement. Combining cultural theory with anecdote and experience, the contributors debate how the work of the black British artists of the 1980s should be viewed historically. They consider the political, cultural, and artistic developments that sparked the movement even as they explore the extent to which such a diverse body of work can be said to constitute a distinct artistic movement—particularly given that “black” in Britain in the 1980s encompassed those of South Asian, North and sub-Saharan African, and Caribbean descent, referring as much to shared experiences of disenfranchisement as to shades of skin.

In thirteen original essays, the contributors examine the movement in relation to artistic practice, public funding, and the transnational art market and consider its legacy for today’s artists and activists. The volume includes a unique catalog of images, an extensive list of suggested readings, and a descriptive timeline situating the movement vis-à-vis relevant artworks and films, exhibitions, cultural criticism, and political events from 1960 to 2000. A dynamic living archive of conversations, texts, and images, Shades of Black will be an essential resource.

Contributors. Stanley Abe, Jawad Al-Nawab, Rasheed Araeen, David A. Bailey, Adelaide Bannerman, Ian Baucom, Dawoud Bey, Sonia Boyce, Allan deSouza, Jean Fisher, Stuart Hall, Lubaina Himid, Naseem Khan, susan pui san lok, Kobena Mercer, Yong Soon Min, Keith Piper, Zineb Sedira, Gilane Tawadros, Leon Wainwright, Judith Wilson

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Art & Language International
Conceptual Art between Art Worlds
Robert Bailey
Duke University Press, 2016
In Art & Language International Robert Bailey reconstructs the history of the conceptual art collective Art & Language, situating it in a geographical context to rethink its implications for the broader histories of contemporary art. Focusing on its international collaborations with dozens of artists and critics in and outside the collective between 1969 and 1977, Bailey positions Art & Language at the center of a historical shift from Euro-American modernism to a global contemporary art. He documents the collective’s growth and reach, from transatlantic discussions on the nature of conceptual art and the establishment of distinct working groups in New York and England to the collective’s later work in Australia, New Zealand, and Yugoslavia. Bailey also details its publications, associations with political organizations, and the internal power struggles that precipitated its breakdown. Analyzing a wide range of artworks, texts, music, and films, he reveals how Art & Language navigated between art worlds to shape the international profile of conceptual art. Above all, Bailey underscores how the group's rigorous and interdisciplinary work provides a gateway to understanding how conceptual art operates as a mode of thinking that exceeds the visual to shape the philosophical, historical, and political.
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Unfixed
Photography and Decolonial Imagination in West Africa
Jennifer Bajorek
Duke University Press, 2020
In Unfixed Jennifer Bajorek traces the relationship between photography and decolonial political imagination in Francophone west Africa in the years immediately leading up to and following independence from French colonial rule in 1960. Focusing on images created by photographers based in Senegal and Benin, Bajorek draws on formal analyses of images and ethnographic fieldwork with photographers to show how photography not only reflected but also actively contributed to social and political change. The proliferation of photographic imagery—through studio portraiture, bureaucratic ID cards, political reportage and photojournalism, magazines, and more—provided the means for west Africans to express their experiences, shape public and political discourse, and reimagine their world. In delineating how west Africans' embrace of photography was associated with and helped spur the democratization of political participation and the development of labor and liberation movements, Bajorek tells a new history of photography in west Africa—one that theorizes photography's capacity for doing decolonial work.
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Imposing Harmony
Music and Society in Colonial Cuzco
Geoffrey Baker
Duke University Press, 2008
Imposing Harmony is a groundbreaking analysis of the role of music and musicians in the social and political life of colonial Cuzco. Challenging musicology’s cathedral-centered approach to the history of music in colonial Latin America, Geoffrey Baker demonstrates that rather than being dominated by the cathedral, Cuzco’s musical culture was remarkably decentralized. He shows that institutions such as parish churches and monasteries employed indigenous professional musicians, rivaling Cuzco Cathedral in the scale and frequency of the musical performances they staged.

Building on recent scholarship by social historians and urban musicologists and drawing on extensive archival research, Baker highlights European music as a significant vehicle for reproducing and contesting power relations in Cuzco. He examines how Andean communities embraced European music, creating an extraordinary cultural florescence, at the same time that Spanish missionaries used the music as a mechanism of colonialization and control. Uncovering a musical life of considerable and unexpected richness throughout the diocese of Cuzco, Baker describes a musical culture sustained by both Hispanic institutional patrons and the upper strata of indigenous society. Mastery of European music enabled elite Andeans to consolidate their position within the colonial social hierarchy. Indigenous professional musicians distinguished themselves by fulfilling important functions in colonial society, acting as educators, religious leaders, and mediators between the Catholic Church and indigenous communities.

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Buena Vista in the Club
Rap, Reggaetón, and Revolution in Havana
Geoffrey Baker
Duke University Press, 2011
In Buena Vista in the Club, Geoffrey Baker traces the trajectory of the Havana hip hop scene from the late 1980s to the present and analyzes its partial eclipse by reggaetón. While Cuban officials initially rejected rap as “the music of the enemy,” leading figures in the hip hop scene soon convinced certain cultural institutions to accept and then promote rap as part of Cuba’s national culture. Culminating in the creation of the state-run Cuban Rap Agency, this process of “nationalization” drew on the shared ideological roots of hip hop and the Cuban nation and the historical connections between Cubans and African Americans. At the same time, young Havana rappers used hip hop, the music of urban inequality par excellence, to critique the rapid changes occurring in Havana since the early 1990s, when the Soviet Union fell, its subsidy of Cuba ceased, and a tourism-based economy emerged. Baker considers the explosion of reggaetón in the early 2000s as a reflection of the “new materialism” that accompanied the influx of foreign consumer goods and cultural priorities into “sociocapitalist” Havana. Exploring the transnational dimensions of Cuba’s urban music, he examines how foreigners supported and documented Havana’s growing hip hop scene starting in the late 1990s and represented it in print and on film and CD. He argues that the discursive framing of Cuban rap played a crucial part in its success.
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American Literature at 75, Volume 76
Houston A. Baker
Duke University Press
Since its founding in 1929, American Literature has been considered the preeminent journal in its field. In this special issue, which celebrates the landmark seventy-fifth anniversary of the journal, past and present editors assess the contribution the journal has made to literary studies by considering the journal's evolution: how it has departed from, remained loyal to, extended, qualified, rejected, or questioned Hubbell's original agenda.
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Turning South Again
Re-Thinking Modernism/Re-Reading Booker T.
Houston A. Baker
Duke University Press, 2001
In Turning South Again the distinguished and award-winning essayist, poet, and scholar of African American literature Houston A. Baker, Jr. offers a revisionist account of the struggle for black modernism in the United States. With a take on the work of Booker T. Washington and the Tuskegee Institute surprisingly different from that in his earlier book Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, Baker combines historical considerations with psychoanalysis, personal memoir, and whiteness studies to argue that the American South and its regulating institutions—particularly that of incarceration—have always been at the center of the African American experience.
From the holds of slave ships to the peonage of Reconstruction to the contemporary prison system, incarceration has largely defined black life in the United States. Even Washington’s school at Tuskegee, Baker explains, housed and regulated black bodies no longer directly controlled by slave owners. He further implicates Washington by claiming that in enacting his ideas about racial “uplift,” Washington engaged in “mulatto modernism,” a compromised attempt at full citizenship. Combining autobiographical prose, literary criticism, psychoanalytic writing, and, occasionally, blues lyrics and poetry, Baker meditates on the consequences of mulatto modernism for the project of black modernism, which he defines as the achievement of mobile, life-enhancing participation in the public sphere and economic solvency for the majority of African Americans. By including a section about growing up in the South, as well as his recent return to assume a professorship at Duke, Baker contributes further to one of the book’s central concerns: a call to centralize the South in American cultural studies.
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Unsettling Blackness, Volume 72
Houston A. Baker
Duke University Press
This special issue of American Literature transcends the old debates surrounding black expressive culture and reexamines major African American texts through the lenses of modernism, progressivism, architecture, avant-gardism, hybridity, and Continental theory. With this arsenal of critical and theoretical tools, the scholars here declare that the concept of "blackness" is agile and dynamic, both unsettled and unsettling.
Articles in this issue address topics as rich and varied as the friendship between Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison; hybridity, montage, and the avant-garde in the works of Jean Toomer; and the interplay of eugenics and racial uplift in W. E. B. DuBois’s Crisis. One piece explores Langston Hughes’s use of bebop in Montage, and another considers the ways in which James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man challenges assumptions about black music and its relationship to the "classics." The collection moves into a discussion of physical space when Arlene Keizer assesses Carolivia Herron’s Thereafter Johnnie, a novel in which the geography and architecture of Washington, D.C. construct as well as express the slave-owning, patriarchal culture.
Unsettling Blackness would be a valuable addition to the syllabus of any course grappling with the galaxy of issues surrounding African American literature and culture.
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Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture
Lee D. Baker
Duke University Press, 2010
In the late nineteenth century, if ethnologists in the United States recognized African American culture, they often perceived it as something to be overcome and left behind. At the same time, they were committed to salvaging “disappearing” Native American culture by curating objects, narrating practices, and recording languages. In Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture, Lee D. Baker examines theories of race and culture developed by American anthropologists during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth. He investigates the role that ethnologists played in creating a racial politics of culture in which Indians had a culture worthy of preservation and exhibition while African Americans did not.

Baker argues that the concept of culture developed by ethnologists to understand American Indian languages and customs in the nineteenth century formed the basis of the anthropological concept of race eventually used to confront “the Negro problem” in the twentieth century. As he explores the implications of anthropology’s different approaches to African Americans and Native Americans, and the field’s different but overlapping theories of race and culture, Baker delves into the careers of prominent anthropologists and ethnologists, including James Mooney Jr., Frederic W. Putnam, Daniel G. Brinton, and Franz Boas. His analysis takes into account not only scientific societies, journals, museums, and universities, but also the development of sociology in the United States, African American and Native American activists and intellectuals, philanthropy, the media, and government entities from the Bureau of Indian Affairs to the Supreme Court. In Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture, Baker tells how anthropology has both responded to and helped shape ideas about race and culture in the United States, and how its ideas have been appropriated (and misappropriated) to wildly different ends.

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Bhangra and Asian Underground
South Asian Music and the Politics of Belonging in Britain
Falu Bakrania
Duke University Press, 2013
Asian Underground music—a fusion of South Asian genres with western breakbeats created for the dance club scene by DJs and musicians of Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi descent—went mainstream in the U.K. in the late 1990s. Its success was unprecedented: British bhangra, a blend of Punjabi folk music with hip-hop musical elements, was enormously popular among South Asian communities but had yet to become mainstream. For many, the widespread attention to Asian Underground music signaled the emergence of a supposedly new, tolerant, and multicultural Britain that could finally accept South Asians. Interweaving ethnography and theory, Falu Bakrania examines the social life of British Asian musical culture to reveal a more complex and contradictory story of South Asian belonging in Britain. Analyzing the production of bhangra and Asian Underground music by male artists and its consumption by female club-goers, Bakrania shows that gender, sexuality, and class intersected in ways that profoundly shaped how young people interpreted “British” and “Asian” identity and negotiated, sometimes violently, contests about ethnic authenticity, sexual morality, individual expression, and political empowerment.


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Tropical Renditions
Making Musical Scenes in Filipino America
Christine Bacareza Balance
Duke University Press, 2016
In Tropical Renditions Christine Bacareza Balance examines how the performance and reception of post-World War II Filipino and Filipino American popular music provide crucial tools for composing Filipino identities, publics, and politics. To understand this dynamic, Balance advocates for a "disobedient listening" that reveals how Filipino musicians challenge dominant racialized U.S. imperialist tropes of Filipinos as primitive, childlike, derivative, and mimetic. Balance disobediently listens to how the Bay Area turntablist DJ group the Invisibl Skratch Piklz bear the burden of racialized performers in the United States and defy conventions on musical ownership; to karaoke as affective labor, aesthetic expression, and pedagogical instrument; to how writer and performer Jessica Hagedorn's collaborative and improvisational authorial voice signals the importance of migration and place; and how Pinoy indie rock scenes challenge the relationship between race and musical genre by tracing the alternative routes that popular music takes. In each instance Filipino musicians, writers, visual artists, and filmmakers work within and against the legacies of the U.S./Philippine imperial encounter, and in so doing, move beyond preoccupations with authenticity and offer new ways to reimagine tropical places.
 
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Out of Context
Historical Reference and the Representation of Reality in Borges
Daniel Balderston
Duke University Press, 1993
In Jorge Luis Borges's finely wrought, fantastic stories, so filigreed with strange allusions, critics have consistently found little to relate to the external world, to history--in short, to reality. Out of Context corrects this shortsighted view and reveals the very real basis of the Argentine master's purported "irreality." By providing the historical context for some of the writer's best-loved and least understood works, this study also gives us a new sense of Borges's place within the context of contemporary literature.
Through a detailed examination of seven stories, Daniel Balderston shows how Borges's historical and political references, so often misread as part of a literary game, actually open up a much more complex reality than the one made explicit to the reader. Working in tension with the fantastic aspects of Borges' work, these precise references to realities outside the text illuminate relations between literature and history as well as the author's particular understanding of both. In Borges's perspective as it is revealed here, history emerges as an "other" only partially recoverable in narrative form. From what can be recovered, Balderston is able to clarify Borges's position on historical episodes and trends such as colonialism, the Peronist movement, "Western culture," militarism, and the Spanish invasion of the Americas.
Informed by a wide reading of history, a sympathetic use of critical theory, and a deep understanding of Borges's work, this iconoclastic study provides a radical new approach to one of the most celebrated and—until now—hermetic authors of our time.
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Little Man, Little Man
A Story of Childhood
James Baldwin
Duke University Press, 1976
Four-year-old TJ spends his days on his lively Harlem block playing with his best friends WT and Blinky and running errands for neighbors. As he comes of age as a “Little Man” with big dreams, TJ faces a world of grown-up adventures and realities. Baldwin’s only children’s book, Little Man, Little Man celebrates and explores the challenges and joys of black childhood.

Now available for the first time in forty years, this new edition of Little Man, Little Man—which retains the charming original illustrations by French artist Yoran Cazac—includes a foreword by Baldwin’s nephew Tejan "TJ" Karefa-Smart and an afterword by his niece Aisha Karefa-Smart, with an introduction by two Baldwin scholars. In it we not only see life in 1970s Harlem from a black child’s perspective, but we also gain a fuller appreciation of the genius of one of America’s greatest writers.
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Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain
Reading Encounters between Black and Red, 1922-1963
Kate A. Baldwin
Duke University Press, 2002
Examining the significant influence of the Soviet Union on the work of four major African American authors—and on twentieth-century American debates about race—Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain remaps black modernism, revealing the importance of the Soviet experience in the formation of a black transnationalism.
Langston Hughes, W. E. B. Du Bois, Claude McKay, and Paul Robeson each lived or traveled extensively in the Soviet Union between the 1920s and the 1960s, and each reflected on Communism and Soviet life in works that have been largely unavailable, overlooked, or understudied. Kate A. Baldwin takes up these writings, as well as considerable material from Soviet sources—including articles in Pravda and Ogonek, political cartoons, Russian translations of unpublished manuscripts now lost, and mistranslations of major texts—to consider how these writers influenced and were influenced by both Soviet and American culture. Her work demonstrates how the construction of a new Soviet citizen attracted African Americans to the Soviet Union, where they could explore a national identity putatively free of class, gender, and racial biases. While Hughes and McKay later renounced their affiliations with the Soviet Union, Baldwin shows how, in different ways, both Hughes and McKay, as well as Du Bois and Robeson, used their encounters with the U. S. S. R. and Soviet models to rethink the exclusionary practices of citizenship and national belonging in the United States, and to move toward an internationalism that was a dynamic mix of antiracism, anticolonialism, social democracy, and international socialism.
Recovering what Baldwin terms the "Soviet archive of Black America," this book forces a rereading of some of the most important African American writers and of the transnational circuits of black modernism.
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Individual and Community
Variations on a Theme in American Fiction
Kenneth H. Baldwin
Duke University Press, 1975
The contributors to Individual and Community attempt to illuminate aspects of the individual-community relationship. Though different in focus and approach, the essays themselves express a "community" of concern, a concern which includes not just the situations of characters in fictional worlds, but one which touches the relationship of both novelists and reader to a world of words.
The essays are intended to point to the continuity of an important theme in American fiction and to offer insight into the variety of philosophical and literary strategies utilized in significant works of significant authors in dealing with the question of the individual and the community.
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The World Tin Market
Political Pricing and Economic Competition
William L. Baldwin
Duke University Press, 1983
William L. Baldwin argues that while the structure, conduct, and performance of the world tin industry are subject to strongly competitive market forces, major intervention by international governments has exerted a controlling influence over the world tin market for the past sixty years.
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Late Derrida, Volume 106
Ian Balfour
Duke University Press
This special issue of SAQ commemorates and interrogates—with varying measures of appreciation and critique—the late work of the philosopher Jacques Derrida. Resisting simple memorialization of Derrida since his death in 2004, this collection contends that the late work of this prolific theorist remains to be better understood. The contributors explore the peculiar intensity—a combined sense of both patience and urgency—that characterizes Derrida’s late writing, suggestive, among other things, of his preoccupation with mortality, of time running out, and of so many pressing things to be done.

The essays address a wide array of Derrida’s concerns: human rights, justice, religion, the performative, “the gift of death,” mourning, and sovereignty. They often put Derrida’s texts in conjunction with the works of others—Wordsworth, Agamben, Schelling, and Benjamin, to name a few—that resonate with and on occasion resist Derrida’s own thinking and writing. One essay offers a reading of Wordsworth’s elegy “Distressful gift!” as a dialogue with questions posed by Derrida, using as its frame the kind of nonnormative mourning that Derrida advocated, together with a haunting analysis of the character of survival. Other essays look at Derrida’s theory of performativity as advanced in his late works, continuing his emphasis on the power of language, and in general they emulate his vigilance in attending to force and violence everywhere.

Contributors. Ian Balfour, David L. Clark, Mary Jacobus, David E. Johnson, David Lloyd, J. Hillis Miller, Marc Redfield, Rei Terada, Elisabeth Weber


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And Justice for All?
The Claims of Human Rights, Volume 103
Ian Balfour
Duke University Press
Questions of human rights are among the most pressing and intractable matters at this historical moment. If claims to human rights are by definition universal, the formulation, legislation, and implementation of them tend to be significantly less than universal. And Justice for All? a special issue of SAQ, examines the idea and the reality of human rights and their attendant discourses. The essays gathered here—from academics and activists working in law, philosophy, political theory, literature, medicine, and ngos—collectively interrogate these universal claims to human rights and the political justice that may or may not follow from them.

Grappling with the philosophical and theoretical questions at the heart of human rights, these essays take into consideration current political configurations such as sovereignty, genocide, humanitarian intervention, and the neglected domain of cultural rights (the right to a cultural identity). Drawing on Enlightenment thinking about human rights at the same time that they analyze the central concepts at work there—including the “humanity of man” and the nature of rights or of law—the contributors make a necessary intervention in a world system that Enlightenment thinkers could scarcely have envisioned.

Contributors. Etienne Balibar, Rony Brauman, Wendy Brown, Rebecca Comay, Jacques Derrida, Paul Downes, Werner Hamacher, Thomas Keenan, Susan Maslan, Jacques Rancière, Bruce Robbins, Avital Ronell, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Elsa Stamatopoulou, Slavoj Zizek

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Equaliberty
Political Essays
Étienne Balibar
Duke University Press, 2014
First published in French in 2010, Equaliberty brings together essays by Étienne Balibar, one of the preeminent political theorists of our time. The book is organized around equaliberty, a term coined by Balibar to connote the tension between the two ideals of modern democracy: equality (social rights and political representation) and liberty (the freedom citizens have to contest the social contract). He finds the tension between these different kinds of rights to be ingrained in the constitution of the modern nation-state and the contemporary welfare state. At the same time, he seeks to keep rights discourse open, eschewing natural entitlements in favor of a deterritorialized citizenship that could be expanded and invented anew in the age of globalization. Deeply engaged with other thinkers, including Arendt, Rancière, and Laclau, he posits a theory of the polity based on social relations. In Equaliberty Balibar brings both the continental and analytic philosophical traditions to bear on the conflicted relations between humanity and citizenship.
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Reconceptualizations of the African Diaspora, Volume 2009
Erica L. Ball
Duke University Press
This special issue of Radical History Review aims to revitalize African diaspora studies by shifting current emphases within the field. The contributors rethink current understandings of African and diaspora as a dispersal of Africans from the African continent via the Atlantic slave trade and offer reconceptualizations of dominant paradigms, such as home, origins, migrations, politics, blackness, African, Africa, African-descended, and Americanness.

The contributors draw on perspectives from political science, history, cultural studies, art history, anthropology, feminist theory, sexuality and queer studies, and Caribbean and African American studies. The collection addresses transnational discourses of race, gender, and sexuality in African diaspora politics, African diaspora experiences on the African continent, the politics of African-descended peoples in Europe, and creative uses of the discourses of memory and diaspora to support political organizing and local struggles. Essays on Venezuelans, Bolivians, and Mexicans address the status of race in the study of African-descended populations and cultures in Latin America. The issue also includes two essays that showcase African diasporic art and curatorial practices in the United States, the Caribbean, and the United Kingdom.

Contributors: Erica Ball, Anthony Bogues, Lisa Brock, Sara Busdiecker, Prudence Cumberbatch,Jacqueline Francis, Anita González, Amoaba Gooden, Dayo Gore, Laura A. Harris, Christopher J. Lee, Kevin Mumford, Melina Pappademos, Cristóbal Valencia Ramírez, Rochelle Rowe, Theresa Runstedtler, Michelle Ann Stephens, Tyler Stovall, Deborah Thomas, Leon Wainwright, Cadence Wynter, Paul Tiyambe Zeleza

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Called by Stories
Biblical Sagas and Their Challenge for Law
Milner S. Ball
Duke University Press, 2000
Distinguished legal scholar and Presbyterian minister Milner S. Ball examines great sagas and tales from the Bible for the light they shed on the practice of law and on the meaning of a life lived in the legal profession. Scholars and laypersons alike typically think of the law as a discipline dominated by reason and empirical methods. Ball shows that many of the dilemmas and decisions that legal professionals confront are more usefully approached through an experience of narrative in which we come to know ourselves and our actions through stories.
He begins with the story of Moses, who is obliged both to speak for God to the Hebrews and to advocate for the Hebrews before God. What, asks Ball, does Moses’s predicament say to lawyers professionally bound to zealous representation of only one client? In the story of Rachel, Ball finds insights that comprehend the role of tears and emotion in the judicial process. He relates these insights to specific contemporary situations, such as a plant closing and the subsequent movement of jobs to Mexico and legal disputes over the sovereignty of native Hawaiians. In a discussion of “The Gospel According to John,” Ball points out that the writer of this gospel is free simultaneously to be critical of law and to rely extensively on it. Ball uses this narrative to explore the boundaries of free will and independence in lawyering. By venturing into the world of powerful events and biblical characters, Ball enables readers to contest their own expectations and fundamental assumptions.
Employing legal theory, theology, and literary criticism, Called by Stories distills a wisdom in biblical texts that speaks specifically to the working life of legal professionals. As such, it will enrich lovers of narrative and poetry, ethicists, literary and biblical scholars, theologians, lawyers, law students, judges, and others who seek to discern deeper meanings in the texts that have shaped their lives.
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Between Colonialism and Diaspora
Sikh Cultural Formations in an Imperial World
Tony Ballantyne
Duke University Press, 2006
Bringing South Asian and British imperial history together with recent scholarship on transnationalism and postcolonialism, Tony Ballantyne offers a bold reevaluation of constructions of Sikh identity from the late eighteenth century through the early twenty-first. Ballantyne considers Sikh communities and experiences in Punjab, the rest of South Asia, the United Kingdom, and other parts of the world. He charts the shifting, complex, and frequently competing visions of Sikh identity that have been produced in response to the momentous social changes wrought by colonialism and diaspora. In the process, he argues that Sikh studies must expand its scope to take into account not only how Sikhism is figured in religious and political texts but also on the battlefields of Asia and Europe, in the streets of Singapore and Southall, and in the nightclubs of New Delhi and Newcastle.

Constructing an expansive historical archive, Ballantyne draws on film, sculpture, fiction, and Web sites, as well as private papers, government records, journalism, and travel narratives. He proceeds from a critique of recent historiography on the development of Sikhism to an analysis of how Sikh identity changed over the course of the long nineteenth century. Ballantyne goes on to offer a reading of the contested interpretations of the life of Dalip Singh, the last Maharaja of Punjab. He concludes with an exploration of bhangra, a traditional form of Punjabi dance that diasporic artists have transformed into a globally popular music style. Much of bhangra’s recent evolution stems from encounters of the Sikh and Afro-Caribbean communities, particularly in the United Kingdom. Ballantyne contends that such cross-cultural encounters are central in defining Sikh identity both in Punjab and the diaspora.

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Entanglements of Empire
Missionaries, Maori, and the Question of the Body
Tony Ballantyne
Duke University Press, 2015
The first Protestant mission was established in New Zealand in 1814, initiating complex political, cultural, and economic entanglements with Māori. Tony Ballantyne shows how interest in missionary Christianity among influential Māori chiefs had far-reaching consequences for both groups. Deftly reconstructing cross-cultural translations and struggles over such concepts and practices as civilization, work, time and space, and gender, he identifies the physical body as the most contentious site of cultural engagement, with Māori and missionaries struggling over hygiene, tattooing, clothing, and sexual morality. Entanglements of Empire is particularly concerned with how, as a result of their encounters in the classroom, chapel, kitchen, and farmyard, Māori and the English mutually influenced each other’s worldviews. Concluding in 1840 with New Zealand’s formal colonization, this book offers an important contribution to debates over religion and empire.
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Indigenous Textual Cultures
Reading and Writing in the Age of Global Empire
Tony Ballantyne
Duke University Press, 2020
As modern European empires expanded, written language was critical to articulations of imperial authority and justifications of conquest. For imperial administrators and thinkers, the non-literacy of “native” societies demonstrated their primitiveness and inability to change. Yet as the contributors to Indigenous Textual Cultures make clear through cases from the Pacific Islands, Australasia, North America, and Africa, indigenous communities were highly adaptive and created novel, dynamic literary practices that preserved indigenous knowledge traditions. The contributors illustrate how modern literacy operated alongside orality rather than replacing it. Reconstructing multiple traditions of indigenous literacy and textual production, the contributors focus attention on the often hidden, forgotten, neglected, and marginalized cultural innovators who read, wrote, and used texts in endlessly creative ways. This volume demonstrates how the work of these innovators played pivotal roles in reimagining indigenous epistemologies, challenging colonial domination, and envisioning radical new futures.

Contributors. Noelani Arista, Tony Ballantyne, Alban Bensa, Keith Thor Carlson, Evelyn Ellerman, Isabel Hofmeyr, Emma Hunter, Arini Loader, Adrian Muckle, Lachy Paterson, Laura Rademaker, Michael P. J. Reilly, Bruno Saura, Ivy T. Schweitzer, Angela Wanhalla
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A Future History of Water
Andrea Ballestero
Duke University Press, 2019
Based on fieldwork among state officials, NGOs, politicians, and activists in Costa Rica and Brazil, A Future History of Water traces the unspectacular work necessary to make water access a human right and a human right something different from a commodity. Andrea Ballestero shows how these ephemeral distinctions are made through four technolegal devices—formula, index, list and pact. She argues that what is at stake in these devices is not the making of a distinct future but what counts as the future in the first place. A Future History of Water is an ethnographically rich and conceptually charged journey into ant-filled water meters, fantastical water taxonomies, promises captured on slips of paper, and statistical maneuvers that dissolve the human of human rights. Ultimately, Ballestero demonstrates what happens when instead of trying to fix its meaning, we make water’s changing form the precondition of our analyses.
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Experimenting with Ethnography
A Companion to Analysis
Andrea Ballestero
Duke University Press, 2021
Experimenting with Ethnography collects twenty-one essays that open new paths for doing ethnographic analysis. The contributors—who come from a variety of intellectual and methodological traditions—enliven analysis by refusing to take it as an abstract, disembodied exercise. Rather, they frame it as a concrete mode of action and a creative practice. Encompassing topics ranging from language and the body to technology and modes of collaboration, the essays invite readers to focus on the imaginative work that needs to be performed prior to completing an argument. Whether exchanging objects, showing how to use drawn images as a way to analyze data, or working with smartphones, sound recordings, and social media as analytic devices, the contributors explore the deliberate processes for pursuing experimental thinking through ethnography. Practical and broad in theoretical scope, Experimenting with Ethnography is an indispensable companion for all ethnographers.

Contributors. Patricia Alvarez Astacio, Andrea Ballestero, Ivan da Costa Marques, Steffen Dalsgaard, Endre Dányi, Marisol de la Cadena, Marianne de Laet, Carolina Domínguez Guzmán, Rachel Douglas-Jones, Clément Dréano, Joseph Dumit, Melanie Ford Lemus, Elaine Gan, Oliver Human, Alberto Corsín Jiménez, Graham M. Jones, Trine Mygind Korsby, Justine Laurent, James Maguire, George E. Marcus, Annemarie Mol, Sarah Pink, Els Roding, Markus Rudolfi, Ulrike Scholtes, Anthony Stavrianakis, Lucy Suchman, Katie Ulrich, Helen Verran, Else Vogel, Antonia Walford, Karen Waltorp, Laura Watts, Brit Ross Winthereik
 
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Designing Culture
The Technological Imagination at Work
Anne Balsamo
Duke University Press, 2011
The renowned cultural theorist and media designer Anne Balsamo maintains that technology and culture are inseparable; those who engage in technological innovation are designing the cultures of the future. Designing Culture is a call for taking culture seriously in the design and development of innovative technologies. Balsamo contends that the wellspring of technological innovation is the technological imagination, a quality of mind that enables people to think with technology, to transform what is known into what is possible. She describes the technological imagination at work in several multimedia collaborations in which she was involved as a designer or developer. One of these entailed the creation of an interactive documentary for the NGO Forum held in conjunction with the UN World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. (That documentary is included as a DVD in Designing Culture.) Balsamo also recounts the development of the interactive museum exhibit XFR: Experiments in the Future of Reading, created by the group RED (Research in Experimental Documents) at Xerox PARC. She speculates on what it would mean to cultivate imaginations as ingenious in creating new democratic cultural possibilities as they are in creating new kinds of technologies and digital media. Designing Culture is a manifesto for transforming educational programs and developing learning strategies adequate to the task of inspiring culturally attuned technological imaginations.
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Technologies of the Gendered Body
Reading Cyborg Women
Anne Balsamo
Duke University Press, 1996
This book takes the process of "reading the body" into the fields at the forefront of culture—the vast spaces mapped by science and technology—to show that the body in high-tech is as gendered as ever. From female body building to virtual reality, from cosmetic surgery to cyberpunk, from reproductive medicine to public health policies to TV science programs, Anne Balsamo articulates the key issues concerning the status of the body for feminist cultural studies in a postmodern world.
Technologies of the Gendered Body combines close readings of popular texts—such as Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale, the movie Pumping Iron II: The Women, cyberpunk magazines, and mass media—with analyses of medical literature, public policy documents, and specific technological practices. Balsamo describes the ways in which certain biotechnologies are ideologically shaped by gender considerations and other beliefs about race, physical abilities, and economic and legal status. She presents a view of the conceptual system that structures individuals’ access to and participation in these technologies, as well as an overview of individuals’ rights and responsibilities in this sometimes baffling area. Examining the ways in which the body is gendered in its interactions with new technologies of corporeality, Technologies of the Gendered Body counters the claim that in our scientific culture the material body has become obsolete. With ample evidence that the techno-body is always gendered and marked by race, this book sets the stage for a renewed feminist engagement with contemporary technological narratives.
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Palestine America, Volume 102
Mohammed Bamyeh
Duke University Press
In the many decades of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the full complexity of that strife has seldom been heard. This special issue of SAQ seeks to intervene by offering a critique of the Palestinian experience. Mapping the complicated relationship among Palestine, the United States, and Israel, this issue includes critical essays on the politics, culture, literature, and history of the Palestinian people.

Bringing together a diverse group of contributors ranging from Roane Carey of the Nation to scholars in Arab, Jewish, and comparative literary studies, this special issue considers Palestinian gender and identity and their relationship to the conflict with Israel as represented in film, literature, and photography. Essays explore the failed peace process, misrepresentations of the Oslo meetings, the devastating effect of continued Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, and the growing controversy over the call for U.S. military divestment from Israel.

Contributors. Ammiel Alcalay, Amal Amireh, Mohammed Bamyeh, Roane Carey, Thomas W. Lockwood, Lisa Suhair Majaj, Saree Makdisi, Melani McAlister, Brinda J. Mehta, John Michael, Andrew N. Rubin, Kenneth Surin

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Porous Becomings
Anthropological Engagements with Michel Serres
Andreas Bandak
Duke University Press, 2024
One of the foremost intellectuals of his generation, French philosopher of science Michel Serres (1930–2019) broke free from disciplinary dogmas. His reflections on science, culture, technology, art, and religion have proved foundational to scholars across the humanities. The contributors to Porous Becomings bring the inspirational and enigmatic world of Serres to the attention of anthropology. Through ethnographic encounters as diverse as angels and religious conversion in Ethiopia, the percolation of war in Bosnia, and incarcerated bodies crossing the Atlantic, the contributors showcase how Serres’s interrogation of the fundamentals of human existence opens new pathways for anthropological knowledge. Proposing the notion of "porosity" to characterize permeability across boundaries of time, space, literary genre, and academic discipline, they draw on Serres to map the constellations that connect humans, time, technology, and planet Earth. The volume concludes with a conversation between the editors and Vibrant Matter author Jane Bennett.

Contributors. Andreas Bandak, Jane Bennett, Tom Boylston, Steven D. Brown, Matei Candea, Alberto Corsín Jiménez, David Henig, Michael Jackson, Daniel M. Knight, Celia Lowe, Morten Nielsen, Stavroula Pipyrou, Elizabeth Povinelli, Andrew Shryock, Arpad Szakolczai
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Enduring Cancer
Life, Death, and Diagnosis in Delhi
Dwaipayan Banerjee
Duke University Press, 2020
In Enduring Cancer Dwaipayan Banerjee explores the efforts of Delhi's urban poor to create a livable life with cancer as patients and families negotiate an overextended health system unequipped to respond to the disease. Owing to long wait times, most urban poor cancer patients do not receive a diagnosis until it is too late to treat the disease effectively. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the city's largest cancer care NGO and at India's premier public health hospital, Banerjee describes how, for these patients, a cancer diagnosis is often the latest and most serious in a long series of infrastructural failures. In the wake of these failures, Banerjee tracks how the disease then distributes itself across networks of social relations, testing these networks for strength and vulnerability. Banerjee demonstrates how living with and alongside cancer is to be newly awakened to the fragility of social ties, some already made brittle by past histories, and others that are retested for their capacity to support.
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Elementary Aspects of the Political
Histories from the Global South
Prathama Banerjee
Duke University Press, 2020
In Elementary Aspects of the Political Prathama Banerjee moves beyond postcolonial and decolonial critiques of European political philosophy to rethink modern conceptions of "the political" from the perspective of the global South. Drawing on Indian and Bengali practices and philosophies from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Banerjee identifies four elements of the political: the self, action, the idea, and the people. She examines selfhood in light of precolonial Indic traditions of renunciation and realpolitik; action in the constitutive tension between traditional conceptions of karma and modern ideas of labor; the idea of equality as it emerges in the dialectic between spirituality and economics; and people in the friction between the structure of the political party and the atmospherics of fiction and theater. Throughout, Banerjee reasserts the historical specificity of political thought and challenges modern assumptions about the universality, primacy, and self-evidence of the political. In formulating a new theory of the political, Banerjee gestures toward a globally salient political philosophy that displaces prevailing Western notions of the political masquerading as universal.
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Becoming Imperial Citizens
Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire
Sukanya Banerjee
Duke University Press, 2010
In this remarkable account of imperial citizenship, Sukanya Banerjee investigates the ways that Indians formulated notions of citizenship in the British Empire from the late nineteenth century through the early twentieth. Tracing the affective, thematic, and imaginative tropes that underwrote Indian claims to formal equality prior to decolonization, she emphasizes the extralegal life of citizenship: the modes of self-representation it generates even before it is codified and the political claims it triggers because it is deferred. Banerjee theorizes modes of citizenship decoupled from the rights-conferring nation-state; in so doing, she provides a new frame for understanding the colonial subject, who is usually excluded from critical discussions of citizenship.

Interpreting autobiography, fiction, election speeches, economic analyses, parliamentary documents, and government correspondence, Banerjee foregrounds the narrative logic sustaining the unprecedented claims to citizenship advanced by racialized colonial subjects. She focuses on the writings of figures such as Dadabhai Naoroji, known as the first Asian to be elected to the British Parliament; Surendranath Banerjea, among the earliest Indians admitted into the Indian Civil Service; Cornelia Sorabji, the first woman to study law in Oxford and the first woman lawyer in India; and Mohandas K. Gandhi, who lived in South Africa for nearly twenty-one years prior to his involvement in Indian nationalist politics. In her analysis of the unexpected registers through which they carved out a language of formal equality, Banerjee draws extensively from discussions in both late-colonial India and Victorian Britain on political economy, indentured labor, female professionalism, and bureaucratic modernity. Signaling the centrality of these discussions to the formulations of citizenship, Becoming Imperial Citizens discloses a vibrant transnational space of political action and subjecthood, and it sheds new light on the complex mutations of the category of citizenship.

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Democracy's Body
Judson Dance Theatre, 1962–1964
Sally Banes
Duke University Press, 1993
Democracy's Body offers a lively, detailed account of the beginnings of the Judson Dance Theater--a popular center of dance experimentation in New York's Greenwich Village--and its place in the larger history of the avant-garde art scene of the 1960s. JDT started when Robert Dunn, a student of John Cage, offered a dance composition class in Merce Cunningham's studio. The performers--many of whom included some of the most prominent figures in the arts in the early sisties--found a welcome performance home in the Judson Memorial Church in the Village. Sally Banes's account draws on interviews, letters, diaries, films, and reconstructions of dances to paint a portrait of the rich culture of Judson, which was the seedbed for postmodern dance and the first avant-garde movement in dance theater since the modern dance of the 1930s and 1940s. Originally published in 1983, this edition brings back into print a highly regarded work of dance history.
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Greenwich Village 1963
Avant-Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body
Sally Banes
Duke University Press, 1993
The year was 1963 and from Birmingham to Washington, D.C., from Vietnam to the Kremlin to the Berlin Wall, the world was in the throes of political upheaval and historic change. But that same year, in New York's Greenwich Village, another kind of history and a different sort of politics were being made. This was a political history that had nothing to do with states or governments or armies--and had everything to do with art. And this is the story that Sally Banes tells, a year in the life of American culture, a year that would change American life and culture forever. It was in 1963, as Banes's book shows us, that the Sixties really began.
A leading writer on cultural history, Banes draws a vibrant portrait of the artists and performers who gave the 1963 Village its exhilarating force, the avant-garde whose interweaving of public and private life, work and play, art and ordinary experience, began a wholesale reworking of the social and cultural fabric of America. Among these young artists were many who went on to become acknowledged masters in their fields, including Andy Warhol, John Cage, Yoko Ono, Yvonne Rainer, Lanford Wilson, Sam Shepard, Brian de Palma, Harvey Keitel, Kate Millet, and Claes Oldenburg. In live performance--Off-Off Broadway theater, Happenings, Fluxus, and dance--as well as in Pop Art and underground film, we see this generation of artists laying the groundwork for the explosion of the counterculture in the late 1960s and the emergence of postmodernism in the 1970s. Exploring themes of community, freedom, equality, the body, and the absolute, Banes shows us how the Sixties artists, though shaped by a culture of hope and optimism, helped to galvanize a culture of criticism and change. As 1963 came to define the Sixties, so this vivid account of the year will redefine a crucial generation in recent American history.
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Empowered
Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny
Sarah Banet-Weiser
Duke University Press, 2018
In Empowered Sarah Banet-Weiser examines the deeply entwined relationship between popular feminism and popular misogyny as it plays out in advertising, online and multimedia platforms, and nonprofit and commercial campaigns. Examining feminist discourses that emphasize self-confidence, body positivity, and individual achievement alongside violent misogynist phenomena such as revenge porn, toxic geek masculinity, and men's rights movements, Banet-Weiser traces how popular feminism and popular misogyny are co-constituted. From Black Girls Code and the Always #LikeAGirl campaign to GamerGate and the 2016 presidential election, Banet-Weiser shows how popular feminism is met with a misogynistic backlash of mass harassment, assault, and institutional neglect. In so doing, she contends that popular feminism's problematic commitment to visibility limits its potential and collective power.
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Kids Rule!
Nickelodeon and Consumer Citizenship
Sarah Banet-Weiser
Duke University Press, 2007
In Kids Rule! Sarah Banet-Weiser examines the cable network Nickelodeon in order to rethink the relationship between children, media, citizenship, and consumerism. Nickelodeon is arguably the most commercially successful cable network ever. Broadcasting original programs such as Dora the Explorer, SpongeBob SquarePants, and Rugrats (and producing related movies, Web sites, and merchandise), Nickelodeon has worked aggressively to claim and maintain its position as the preeminent creator and distributor of television programs for America’s young children, tweens, and teens. Banet-Weiser argues that a key to its success is its construction of children as citizens within a commercial context. The network’s self-conscious engagement with kids—its creation of a “Nickelodeon Nation” offering choices and empowerment within a world structured by rigid adult rules—combines an appeal to kids’ formidable purchasing power with assertions of their political and cultural power.

Banet-Weiser draws on interviews with nearly fifty children as well as with network professionals; coverage of Nickelodeon in both trade and mass media publications; and analysis of the network’s programs. She provides an overview of the media industry within which Nickelodeon emerged in the early 1980s as well as a detailed investigation of its brand-development strategies. She also explores Nickelodeon’s commitment to “girl power,” its ambivalent stance on multiculturalism and diversity, and its oft-remarked appeal to adult viewers. Banet-Weiser does not condemn commercial culture nor dismiss the opportunities for community and belonging it can facilitate. Rather she contends that in the contemporary media environment, the discourses of political citizenship and commercial citizenship so thoroughly inform one another that they must be analyzed in tandem. Together they play a fundamental role in structuring children’s interactions with television.

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Meeting the Universe Halfway
Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning
Karen Barad
Duke University Press, 2006
Meeting the Universe Halfway is an ambitious book with far-reaching implications for numerous fields in the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. In this volume, Karen Barad, theoretical physicist and feminist theorist, elaborates her theory of agential realism. Offering an account of the world as a whole rather than as composed of separate natural and social realms, agential realism is at once a new epistemology, ontology, and ethics. The starting point for Barad’s analysis is the philosophical framework of quantum physicist Niels Bohr. Barad extends and partially revises Bohr’s philosophical views in light of current scholarship in physics, science studies, and the philosophy of science as well as feminist, poststructuralist, and other critical social theories. In the process, she significantly reworks understandings of space, time, matter, causality, agency, subjectivity, and objectivity.

In an agential realist account, the world is made of entanglements of “social” and “natural” agencies, where the distinction between the two emerges out of specific intra-actions. Intra-activity is an inexhaustible dynamism that configures and reconfigures relations of space-time-matter. In explaining intra-activity, Barad reveals questions about how nature and culture interact and change over time to be fundamentally misguided. And she reframes understanding of the nature of scientific and political practices and their “interrelationship.” Thus she pays particular attention to the responsible practice of science, and she emphasizes changes in the understanding of political practices, critically reworking Judith Butler’s influential theory of performativity. Finally, Barad uses agential realism to produce a new interpretation of quantum physics, demonstrating that agential realism is more than a means of reflecting on science; it can be used to actually do science.

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Phonological Variation and Change in the Dialect of Charleston, South Carolina, Volume 82
Maciej Baranowski
Duke University Press

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Politics by Humans
Research on American Leadership
James David Barber
Duke University Press
James David Barber's research on leadership, particularly the phenomenon of the American presidency, has become legendary for both its insight and wit. Politics by Humans presents some of this most original and seminal products of his scholarship.
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Ethics of Citizenship
Immigration and Group Rights in Germany
William A. Barbieri Jr.
Duke University Press, 1998
Who is to be included in a political community and on what terms? William A. Barbieri Jr. seeks answers to these questions in this exploration of the controversial concept of citizenship rights—a concept directly related to the nature of democracy, equality, and cultural identity. Through an examination of the case of Germany’s settled “guestworkers” and their families, Ethics of Citizenship investigates the pressing problem of political membership in a world marked by increased migration, rising nationalist sentiment, and the ongoing reorganization of states through both peaceful and violent means.
Although some of Germany’s foreign workers have gradually attained a degree of social and economic legitimacy, Barbieri explains how they remain effectively excluded from true German citizenship. Describing how this exclusion has occurred and assessing current attitudes toward political membership in Germany, he argues for a just and democratic policy toward the tax-paying, migrant worker minority, one that would combine the extension of the individual rights of citizenship with the establishment of certain group rights. Through a dissection of ongoing public “membership debates” over issues such as suffrage, dual citizenship, and immigration and refugee policy, Barbieri identifies a range of competing responses to the question of who “belongs” in Germany. After critiquing these views, he proposes an alternative ethic of membership rooted in an account of domination and human rights that seeks to balance individual and group rights within the context of a commitment to democracy and equal citizenship.
Indispensable for scholars of German studies, Ethics of Citizenship also raises questions that will attract moral philosophers, constitutional scholars, and those interested in the continuing, global problems associated with migration.
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Revolution and Disenchantment
Arab Marxism and the Binds of Emancipation
Fadi A. Bardawil
Duke University Press, 2020
The Arab Revolutions that began in 2011 reignited interest in the question of theory and practice, imbuing it with a burning political urgency. In Revolution and Disenchantment Fadi A. Bardawil redescribes for our present how an earlier generation of revolutionaries, the 1960s Arab New Left, addressed this question. Bardawil excavates the long-lost archive of the Marxist organization Socialist Lebanon and its main theorist, Waddah Charara, who articulated answers in their political practice to fundamental issues confronting revolutionaries worldwide: intellectuals as vectors of revolutionary theory; political organizations as mediators of theory and praxis; and nonemancipatory attachments as impediments to revolutionary practice. Drawing on historical and ethnographic methods and moving beyond familiar reception narratives of Marxist thought in the postcolony, Bardawil engages in "fieldwork in theory" that analyzes how theory seduces intellectuals, cultivates sensibilities, and authorizes political practice. Throughout, Bardawil underscores the resonances and tensions between Arab intellectual traditions and Western critical theory and postcolonial theory, deftly placing intellectuals from those traditions into a much-needed conversation.
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Consuming Russia
Popular Culture, Sex, and Society since Gorbachev
Adele Marie Barker
Duke University Press, 1999
With the collapse of the Soviet empire in the late 1980s, the Russian social landscape has undergone its most dramatic changes since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, turning the once bland and monolithic state-run marketplace into a virtual maze of specialty shops—from sushi bars to discotheques and tattoo parlors. In Consuming Russia editor Adele Marie Barker presents the first book-length volume to explore the sweeping cultural transformation taking place in the new Russia.
The contributors examine how the people of Russia reconcile prerevolutionary elite culture—as well as the communist legacy—with the influx of popular influences from the West to build a society that no longer relies on a single dominant discourse and embraces the multiplicities of both public and private Russian life. Barker brings together Russian and American scholars from anthropology, history, literature, political science, sociology, and cultural studies. These experts fuse theoretical analysis with ethnographic research to analyze the rise of popular culture, covering topics as varied as post-Soviet rave culture, rock music, children and advertising, pyramid schemes, tattooing, pets, and spectator sports. They consider detective novels, anecdotes, issues of feminism and queer sexuality, nostalgia, the Russian cinema, and graffiti. Discussions of pornography, religious cults, and the deployment of Soviet ideological symbols as post-Soviet kitsch also help to demonstrate how the rebuilding of Russia’s political and economic infrastructure has been influenced by its citizens’ cultural production and consumption.
This volume will appeal to those engaged with post-Soviet studies, to anyone interested in the state of Russian society, and to readers more generally involved with the study of popular culture.

Contributors.
Adele Marie Barker, Eliot Borenstein, Svetlana Boym, John Bushnell, Nancy Condee, Robert Edelman, Laurie Essig, Julia P. Friedman, Paul W. Goldschmidt, Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, Anna Krylova, Susan Larsen, Catharine Theimer Nepomnyaschy, Theresa Sabonis-Chafee, Tim Scholl, Adam Weiner, Alexei Yurchak, Elizabeth Kristofovich Zelensky
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The Russia Reader
History, Culture, Politics
Adele Marie Barker
Duke University Press, 2010
Letters recording the reactions of ordinary Russians to the Revolution as events unfolded in 1917, an account of the day-to-day scramble to make a living after the end of the Soviet Union, and excerpts from a sixteenth-century manual instructing elite Muscovites on proper household management—The Russia Reader brings these and many other selections together in this introduction to the history, culture, and politics of the world’s largest country, from the earliest written accounts of the Russian people to today. Conveying the texture of everyday life alongside experiences of epic historical events, the book is filled with the voices of men and women, rulers and revolutionaries, peasants, soldiers, literary figures, émigrés, journalists, and scholars. Most of the selections are by Russians, and thirty are translated into English for the first time.

Illustrated with maps, paintings, photographs, posters, and cartoons, The Russia Reader incorporates song lyrics, jokes, anecdotes, and folktales, as well as poems, essays, and fiction by writers including Akhmatova, Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, and Tolstoi. Transcripts from the show trials of major Party figures and an account of how staff at the Lenin Library in Moscow were instructed to interact with foreigners are among the many selections based on personal memoirs and archival materials only recently made available to the public. From a tenth-century emissary’s description of his encounters in Kyivan Rus’, to a scientist’s recollections of her life in a new research city built from scratch in Siberia during the 1950s, to a novelist’s depiction of the decadence of the “New Russians” in the 2000s, The Russia Reader is an extraordinary introduction to a vast and varied country.

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Critically Sovereign
Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies
Joanne Barker
Duke University Press, 2017
Critically Sovereign traces the ways in which gender is inextricably a part of Indigenous politics and U.S. and Canadian imperialism and colonialism. The contributors show how gender, sexuality, and feminism work as co-productive forces of Native American and Indigenous sovereignty, self-determination, and epistemology. Several essays use a range of literary and legal texts to analyze the production of colonial space, the biopolitics of “Indianness,” and the collisions and collusions between queer theory and colonialism within Indigenous studies. Others address the U.S. government’s criminalization of traditional forms of Diné marriage and sexuality, the Iñupiat people's changing conceptions of masculinity as they embrace the processes of globalization, Hawai‘i’s same-sex marriage bill, and stories of Indigenous women falling in love with non-human beings such as animals, plants, and stars. Following the politics of gender, sexuality, and feminism across these diverse historical and cultural contexts, the contributors question and reframe the thinking about Indigenous knowledge, nationhood, citizenship, history, identity, belonging, and the possibilities for a decolonial future.

Contributors. Jodi A. Byrd, Joanne Barker, Jennifer Nez Denetdale, Mishuana Goeman,  J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Melissa K. Nelson, Jessica Bissett Perea, Mark Rifkin
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Native Acts
Law, Recognition, and Cultural Authenticity
Joanne Barker
Duke University Press, 2011
In the United States, Native peoples must be able to demonstrably look and act like the Natives of U.S. national narrations in order to secure their legal rights and standing as Natives. How they choose to navigate these demands and the implications of their choices for Native social formations are the focus of this powerful critique. Joanne Barker contends that the concepts and assumptions of cultural authenticity within Native communities potentially reproduce the very social inequalities and injustices of racism, ethnocentrism, sexism, homophobia, and fundamentalism that define U.S. nationalism and, by extension, Native oppression. She argues that until the hold of these ideologies is genuinely disrupted by Native peoples, the important projects for decolonization and self-determination defining Native movements and cultural revitalization efforts are impossible. These projects fail precisely by reinscribing notions of authenticity that are defined in U.S. nationalism to uphold relations of domination between the United States and Native peoples, as well as within Native social and interpersonal relations. Native Acts is a passionate call for Native peoples to decolonize their own concepts and projects of self-determination.
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State of Fear
Policing a Postcolonial City
Joshua Barker
Duke University Press, 2024
In State of Fear, Joshua Barker reckons with how fear and violence are produced and reproduced through everyday practices of rule and control. Examining the ethnographic and historical genealogies of Indonesian policing, Barker focuses on the city of Bandung, which is permeated by anxieties about security, all in spite of the fact that it’s a relatively safe city according to the data. Drawing from his fieldwork there during the latter years of the authoritarian New Order regime, Barker traces the complex relationship between the state and vigilante groups like neighborhood watch patrols and street gangs. Through interviews with police officers, vigilantes, and street-level toughs, he uncovers a struggle between two visions of social control that continues to animate policing in Indonesia: the modern, bureaucratic approach favored by the state, and a territorial approach that divides the city into fiefdoms overseen by charismatic individuals of authority. Synthesizing insights from in-depth ethnographic, historical, and theoretical work, Barker reveals how authoritarianism can take root not just from the top-down but also the bottom up.
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Financing State and Local Economic Development
Michael Barker
Duke University Press, 1983
The contributors discuss alternative methods of financing state and local economic development, including the role of venture capital in urban development, the role of banking institutions in encouraging the growth of small business, and the place of pension funds in economic growth.
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State Employment Policy in Hard Times
Michael Barker
Duke University Press, 1983
Two hundred years ago, Samuel Johnson observed that a society's level of civilization could be gauged by the manner in which it treated its poor. By that measure, the United States today is steadily losing ground. Whereas the number of officially defined poor dwindled steadily from the enactment of the Great Society programs in the mid-1960s, reaching a low of 24.5 million people in 1978, it has since risen to more than 32 million people. Although the economy continues to generate large numbers of new jobs, the basic unemployment rate continues to rise and current projections show little likelihood of unemployment rates consistently below 10 percent until some time after 1984, if then. In the years to come, the creation of an equitable and workable employment policy will be a major agenda item for politicians and policy makers at the state level, as well as for national leaders.
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State Taxation Policy and Economic Growth
Michael Barker
Duke University Press, 1983
This volume discusses the problems of state governments in coping with contemporary issues of redesigning taxation policies to encourage economic growth.
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Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia
Tani Barlow
Duke University Press, 1997
The essays in Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia challenge the idea that notions of modernity and colonialism are mere imports from the West, and show how colonial modernity has evolved from and into unique forms throughout Asia. Although the modernity of non-European colonies is as indisputable as the colonial core of European modernity, until recently East Asian scholarship has tried to view Asian colonialism through the paradigm of colonial India (for instance), failing to recognize anti-imperialist nationalist impulses within differing Asian countries and regions.
Demonstrating an impatience with social science models of knowledge, the contributors show that binary categories focused on during the Cold War are no longer central to the project of history writing. By bringing together articles previously published in the journal positions: east asia cultures critique, editor Tani Barlow has demonstrated how scholars construct identity and history, providing cultural critics with new ways to think about these concepts—in the context of Asia and beyond.
Chapters address topics such as the making of imperial subjects in Okinawa, politics and the body social in colonial Hong Kong, and the discourse of decolonization and popular memory in South Korea. This is an invaluable collection for students and scholars of Asian studies, postcolonial studies, and anthropology.

Contributors. Charles K. Armstrong, Tani E. Barlow, Fred Y. L. Chiu, Chungmoo Choi, Alan S. Christy, Craig Clunas, James A. Fujii, James L. Hevia, Charles Shiro Inouye, Lydia H. Liu, Miriam Silverberg, Tomiyama Ichiro, Wang Hui

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Gender Politics in Modern China
Writing and Feminism
Tani Barlow
Duke University Press, 1993
Through the lens of modern Chinese literature, Gender Politics in Modern China explores the relationship between gender and modernity, notions of the feminine and masculine, and shifting arguments for gender equality in China.
Ranging from interviews with contemporary writers, to historical accounts of gendered writing in Taiwan and semi-colonial China, to close feminist readings of individual authors, these essays confront the degree to which textual stategies construct notions of gender. Among the specific themes discussed are: how femininity is produced in texts by allocating women to domestic space; the extent to which textual production lies at the base of a changing, historically specific code of the feminine; the extent to which women in modern Chinese societies are products of literary canons; the ways in which the historical processes of gendering have operated in Chinese modernity vis à vis modernity in the West; the representation of feminists as avengers and as westernized women; and the meager recognition of feminism as a serious intellectual current and a large body of theory.
Originally published as a special issue of Modern Chinese Literature (Spring & Fall 1988), this expanded book represents some of the most compelling new work in post-Mao feminist scholarship and will appeal to all those concerned with understanding a revitalized feminism in the Chinese context.

Contributors. Carolyn Brown, Ching-kiu Stephen Chan, Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, Yu-shih Chen, Rey Chow, Randy Kaplan, Richard King, Wolfgang Kubin, Wendy Larson, Lydia Liu, Seung-Yeun Daisy Ng, Jon Solomon, Meng Yue, Wang Zheng

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In the Event of Women
Tani Barlow
Duke University Press, 2021
In the Event of Women outlines the stakes of what Tani Barlow calls “the event of women.” Focusing on the era of the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century's Cultural Revolution, Barlow shows that an event is a politically inspired action to install a newly discovered truth, in this case the mammal origins of human social evolution. Highbrow and lowbrow social theory circulating in Chinese urban print media placed humanity's origin story in relation to commercial capital's modern advertising industry and the conclusion that women's liberation involved selling, buying, and advertising industrial commodities. The political struggle over how the truth of women in China would be performed and understood, Barlow shows, means in part that an event of women was likely global because its truth is vested in biology and physiology. In so doing, she reveals the ways in which historical universals are effected in places where truth claims are not usually sought. This book reconsiders Alain Badiou's concept of the event; particularly the question of whose political moment marks newly discovered truths.
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Intellectuals and Social Movements, part 1, Volume 11
Tani Barlow
Duke University Press

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Marxist Scholarship, Volume 3
Tani Barlow
Duke University Press
This impressive and lucid study displays the widely divergent trajectories of thought that stem from Asian studies and Asian production of Marxisms and, at the same time, exemplifies the New Internationalism in scholarly research. In its accounts of political struggles, cultural resistance, and theoretical strategies, Marxist Scholarship seeks to redress the fading interest in alternatives to global consumerism by rousing the waning spirits of emancipatory thinking. These deliberations take on particular urgency in the present global economic context as the G-7 anxiously await full opening of East Asian markets and investment opportunities.

Although the influence of deconstruction, post-Marxism, and other postmodernist practices is felt in this volume, many of the essays indicate a move to reengage the Marxist legacies. In their complex interactions with topics such as the tradition of Chinese Marxism, the Kwangju Uprising and massacre, the fetishism of cult leaders, and community policing in China, these essays demonstrate the analytical importance of categories such as exploitation, alienation, and violence for any engagement with the politics of knowledge.

Contributors. Bill Brugger, Li Dazhao, Michael Dutton, D. R. Howland, Liu Kang, Rajeswari Mohan, You-me Park, William Pietz, Claudia Pozzana, Sanjay Seth, Gi-Wook Shin, Tomiyama Ichiro, Jing Wang, Gang Yue

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Modern Sex, Volume 2
Tani Barlow
Duke University Press

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The Nationalism Question, Volume 1
Tani Barlow
Duke University Press

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The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism
Tani Barlow
Duke University Press, 2004
The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism is a history of thinking about the subject of women in twentieth-century China. Tani E. Barlow illustrates the theories and conceptual categories that Enlightenment Chinese intellectuals have developed to describe the collectivity of women. Demonstrating how generations of these theorists have engaged with international debates over eugenics, gender, sexuality, and the psyche, Barlow argues that as an Enlightenment project, feminist debate in China is at once Chinese and international. She reads social theory, psychoanalytic thought, literary criticism, ethics, and revolutionary political ideologies to illustrate the range and scope of Chinese feminist theory’s preoccupation with the problem of gender inequality. She reveals how, throughout the cataclysms of colonial modernity, revolutionary modernization, and market socialism, prominent Chinese feminists have gathered up the remainders of the past and formed them into social and ethical arguments, categories, and political positions, ceaselessly reshaping progressive Enlightenment sexual liberation theory.
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Against Preemptive War, Volume 13
Tani Barlow
Duke University Press
In the war on Iraq, the Bush administration has advanced a strategy of preemption—striking in advance of any realized threat. Creating its own reality of war and presenting the destabilization of a supposed threat as a measure of success, preemption allows victories to be declared in advance and justifies violent and unilateral strikes on peoples, on liberties, on perception, and on truth. Against Preemptive War, a special issue of positions: east asia cultures critique, is a call for critical and international opposition to the logic of preemptive war.

Gathering material from politically active scholars, artists, and authors from Europe, Asia, and North America, this collection reflects on the likely fallout from the corruptive U.S. strategy of preemption. In the introduction, the editors criticize the American press for being, with few exceptions, easily if not willingly deceived by the Bush administration’s propaganda regarding weapons of mass destruction. One contributor redefines fascism as a situation in which contradictions are evident but blatantly ignored, one which creates a false sense of cohesion between events. Another argues that U.S. military bases around the world are now maintained not for military defense and quick mobilization but to create a culture of American militarism, noting that troops were sent from the U.S. for the invasion of Iraq rather than from closer bases around the world. Finally, the issue raises a formidable question: how do we end war waged against what might come to pass rather than what actually is?

Contributors. Tani Barlow, Jim Bonk, Josh Brown, Bei Dao, Carolyn Eisenberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Matthew Fryslie, Sue Golding (as johnny de philo), Freda Guttman, Yukiko Hanawa, Harry Harootunian, Sharon Hayashi, Reynaldo C. Ileto, Joy Kogawa, Thomas LaMarre, The Liberal Islam Network, Sumit K. Mandal, Edoarda Masi, Brian Massumi, Anne McKnight, Carel Moiseiwitsch, Alberto Moreiras, Claudia Pozzana, Alessandro Russo, Ukai Satoshi, Laurie Sears, Kuang Xinnian, Marilyn Young

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New Asian Marxisms
Tani Barlow
Duke University Press, 2002
Displaying the particular vitality of the global traditions of Marxism and neomarxism at the beginning of the twenty-first century, New AsianMarxisms collects essays by a diverse group of scholars—historians, political scientists, literary scholars, and sociologists—who offer a range of studies of the Marxist heritage focusing on Korea, Japan, India, and China.

While some of these essays take up key thinkers in Marxist history or draw attention to outstanding problematics, others focus on national literature and discourse in North and South Korea, the "Mao Zedong Fever" of the 1990s, the implications of Li Dazhao's poetry, and the Indian Naxalite movement.  Illustrating the importance of central analytical categories like exploitation, alienation, and violence to studies on the politics of knowledge, contributors confront prevailing global consumerist fantasies
with accounts of political struggle, cultural displacement, and theoretical strategies.

Contributors. Tani E. Barlow, Dai Jinhua, Michael Dutton, D. R. Howland, Marshall Johnson, Liu Kang, You-me Park, William Pietz, Claudia Pozzana, Alessandro Russo, Sanjay Seth, Gi-Wook Shin, Sugiyama Mitsunobu, Jing Wang

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The Myth of Apollo and Daphne from Ovid to Quevedo
Love, Agon, and the Grotesque
Mary E. Barnard
Duke University Press, 1987
The transformation of the myth of Apollo and Daphne in literary treatments from Ovid through the Spanish Golden Age are studied in theme and variation, showing how the protean figures of the myth meant different things to different ages, each age fashioning the lovers in its own image. The Myth of Apollo and Daphne focuses on the themes of love, agon, and the grotesque and their transformations as the writers, through a kind of artificial mythopoeia, invent variants for the tale, altering the ancient model to create their new, distinctive visions.
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Cultivating the Nile
The Everyday Politics of Water in Egypt
Jessica Barnes
Duke University Press, 2014
The waters of the Nile are fundamental to life in Egypt. In this compelling ethnography, Jessica Barnes explores the everyday politics of water: a politics anchored in the mundane yet vital acts of blocking, releasing, channeling, and diverting water. She examines the quotidian practices of farmers, government engineers, and international donors as they interact with the waters of the Nile flowing into and through Egypt. Situating these local practices in relation to broader processes that affect Nile waters, Barnes moves back and forth from farmer to government ministry, from irrigation canal to international water conference. By showing how the waters of the Nile are constantly made and remade as a resource by people in and outside Egypt, she demonstrates the range of political dynamics, social relations, and technological interventions that must be incorporated into understandings of water and its management.
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Staple Security
Bread and Wheat in Egypt
Jessica Barnes
Duke University Press, 2022
Egyptians often say that bread is life; most eat this staple multiple times a day, many relying on the cheap bread subsidized by the government. In Staple Security, Jessica Barnes explores the process of sourcing domestic and foreign wheat for the production of bread and its consumption across urban and rural settings. She traces the anxiety that pervades Egyptian society surrounding the possibility that the nation could run out of wheat or that people might not have enough good bread to eat, and the daily efforts to ensure that this does not happen. With rich ethnographic detail, she takes us into the worlds of cultivating wheat, trading grain, and baking, buying, and eating bread. Linking global flows of grain and a national bread subsidy program with everyday household practices, Barnes theorizes the nexus between food and security, drawing attention to staples and the lengths to which people go to secure their consistent availability and quality.
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Who Killed John Clayton?
Political Violence and the Emergence of the New South, 1861-1893
Kenneth C. Barnes
Duke University Press, 1998
In 1888 a group of armed and masked Democrats stole a ballot box from a small town in Conway County, Arkansas. The box contained most of the county’s black Republican votes, thereby assuring defeat for candidate John Clayton in a close race for the U.S. Congress. Days after he announced he would contest the election, a volley of buckshot ripped through Clayton’s hotel window, killing him instantly. Thus began a yet-to-be-solved, century-old mystery.

More than a description of this particular event, however, Who Killed John Clayton? traces patterns of political violence in this section of the South over a three-decade period. Using vivid courtroom-type detail, Barnes describes how violence was used to define and control the political system in the post-Reconstruction South and how this system in turn produced Jim Crow. Although white Unionists and freed blacks had joined under the banner of the Republican Party and gained the upper hand during Reconstruction, during these last decades of the nineteenth century conservative elites, first organized as the Ku Klux Klan and then as the revived Democratic Party, regained power—via such tactics as murdering political opponents, lynching blacks, and defrauding elections.

This important recounting of the struggle over political power will engage those interested in Southern and American history.

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Media Marathon
A Twentieth-Century Memoir
Erik Barnouw
Duke University Press, 1996
One of the most respected and honored historians of the media, Erik Barnouw has been called a major national resource by The Nation. Norman Corwin dubbed him America’s Gibbon. He is the writer, says critic John Leonard, “from whom the rest of us steal instead of doing our research.” Media history is his subject, and, as this memoir makes so delightfully clear, it has also been Erik Barnouw’s life. Barnouw’s story, told with wit and charm in Media Marathon, is the story of American culture adjusting to the twentieth century, of new media repeatedly displacing the old in a century-long competitive upheaval.
Born in Holland in 1908 and an immigrant to the United States at the age of eleven, Barnouw spent his early working years in an astounding array of occupations—actor and stage manager, lyricist, translator, director, producer, teacher, and union official. This varied background, described here in rich detail, informs his writings about the world in which he moved, specifically regarding the shifting channels of twentieth-century mass communication. Telling his story through a series of personal profiles of the famous, the infamous, and the little known but powerfully influential, Barnouw recounts the events that took him from the vaudeville stage to the Library of Congress, where he became the first chief of its newly formed Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recording Sound Division. Thornton Wilder, Pearl S. Buck, Joshua Logan, Dwight Eisenhower, Lynn Fontanne, Tallulah Bankhead, and Akira Iwasaki—these are among the featured characters in the drama of American media, rendered here in striking close-ups.
From The Hague to retirement in Vermont, with stops in India, Japan, and Russia, Barnouw’s remarkable story gives readers the chance to relive crucial chapters of modern media history—and to relive them with one of that history’s masters as an incomparable guide. A book for those interested in the “mass media,” its evolution, and role in society, Media Marathon will appeal to students, scholars, and general readers alike.
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History from the Bottom Up and the Inside Out
Ethnicity, Race, and Identity in Working-Class History
James R. Barrett
Duke University Press, 2017
In History from the Bottom Up and the Inside Out James R. Barrett rethinks the boundaries of American social and labor history by investigating the ways in which working-class, radical, and immigrant people's personal lives intersected with their activism and religious, racial, ethnic, and class identities. Concerned with carving out space for individuals in the story of the working class, Barrett examines all aspects of individuals' subjective experiences, from their personalities, relationships, and emotions to their health and intellectual pursuits. Barrett's subjects include American communists, "blue-collar cosmopolitans"—such as well-read and well-traveled porters, sailors, and hoboes—and figures in early twentieth-century anarchist subculture. He also details the process of the Americanization of immigrant workers via popular culture and their development of class and racial identities, asking how immigrants learned to think of themselves as white. Throughout, Barrett enriches our understanding of working people’s lives, making it harder to objectify them as nameless cogs operating within social and political movements. In so doing, he works to redefine conceptions of work, migration, and radical politics.
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Conditions of the Present
Selected Essays
Lindon Barrett
Duke University Press, 2018
Conditions of the Present collects essays by the late Lindon Barrett, whose scholarship centers African American literature as a site from which to theorize race and liberation in the United States. Barrett confronts critical blind spots within both academic and popular discourse, offering readings of cultural and literary texts that transcend institutional divides and the gulf between academia and the street. Whether analyzing autobiographies by Lucy Delaney or Langston Hughes, hip-hop eulogies, or the formation of U.S. nationalist discourse, Barrett interrogates the mechanisms that shape social and subjective structures and that grant certain people power while withholding it from others. Deploying Marxist, psychoanalytic, feminist, and queer theories, Barrett explicates the interrelationship of desire and subjection to expose the violence and coercion embedded in narratives of "progress." Ultimately, this collection emphasizes Lindon Barrett's vital and enduring contribution to African American studies.

Contributors. Elizabeth Alexander, Jennifer DeVere Brody, Daphne A. Brooks, Linh U. Hua, Janet Neary, Marlon B. Ross, Robyn Wiegman
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Victorian Jamaica
Tim Barringer
Duke University Press, 2018
Victorian Jamaica explores the extraordinary surviving archive of visual representation and material objects to provide a comprehensive account of Jamaican society during Queen Victoria's reign over the British Empire, from 1837 to 1901. In their analyses of material ranging from photographs of plantation laborers and landscape paintings to cricket team photographs, furniture, and architecture, as well as a wide range of texts, the contributors trace the relationship between black Jamaicans and colonial institutions; contextualize race within ritual and performance; and outline how material and visual culture helped shape the complex politics of colonial society. By narrating Victorian history from a Caribbean perspective, this richly illustrated volume—featuring 270 full-color images—offers a complex and nuanced portrait of Jamaica that expands our understanding of the wider history of the British Empire and Atlantic world during this period.

Contributors. Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Tim Barringer, Anthony Bogues, David Boxer, Patrick Bryan, Steeve O. Buckridge, Julian Cresser, John M. Cross, Petrina Dacres, Belinda Edmondson, Nadia Ellis, Gillian Forrester, Catherine Hall, Gad Heuman, Rivke Jaffe, O'Neil Lawrence, Erica Moiah James, Jan Marsh, Wayne Modest, Daniel T. Neely, Mark Nesbitt, Diana Paton, Elizabeth Pigou-Dennis, Veerle Poupeye, Jennifer Raab, James Robertson, Shani Roper, Faith Smith, Nicole Smythe-Johnson, Dianne M. Stewart, Krista A. Thompson
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Femininity in Flight
A History of Flight Attendants
Kathleen Barry
Duke University Press, 2007
“In her new chic outfit, she looks like anything but a stewardess working. But work she does. Hard, too. And you hardly know it.” So read the text of a 1969 newspaper advertisement for Delta Airlines featuring a picture of a brightly smiling blond stewardess striding confidently down the aisle of an airplane cabin to deliver a meal.

From the moment the first stewardesses took flight in 1930, flight attendants became glamorous icons of femininity. For decades, airlines hired only young, attractive, unmarried white women. They marketed passenger service aloft as an essentially feminine exercise in exuding charm, looking fabulous, and providing comfort. The actual work that flight attendants did—ensuring passenger safety, assuaging fears, serving food and drinks, all while conforming to airlines’ strict rules about appearance—was supposed to appear effortless; the better that stewardesses performed by airline standards, the more hidden were their skills and labor. Yet today flight attendants are acknowledged safety experts; they have their own unions. Gone are the no-marriage rules, the mandates to retire by thirty-two. In Femininity in Flight, Kathleen M. Barry tells the history of flight attendants, tracing the evolution of their glamorized image as ideal women and their activism as trade unionists and feminists.

Barry argues that largely because their glamour obscured their labor, flight attendants unionized in the late 1940s and 1950s to demand recognition and respect as workers and self-styled professionals. In the 1960s and 1970s, flight attendants were one of the first groups to take advantage of new laws prohibiting sex discrimination. Their challenges to airlines’ restrictive employment policies and exploitive marketing practices (involving skimpy uniforms and provocative slogans such as “fly me”) made them high-profile critics of the cultural mystification and economic devaluing of “women’s work.” Barry combines attention to the political economy and technology of the airline industry with perceptive readings of popular culture, newspapers, industry publications, and first-person accounts. In so doing, she provides a potent mix of social and cultural history and a major contribution to the history of women’s work and working women’s activism.

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Crafting Gender
Women and Folk Art in Latin America and the Caribbean
Eli Bartra
Duke University Press, 2003
This volume initiates a gender-based framework for analyzing the folk art of Latin America and the Caribbean. Defined here broadly as the "art of the people" and as having a primarily decorative, rather than utilitarian, purpose, folk art is not solely the province of women, but folk art by women in Latin America has received little sustained attention. Crafting Gender begins to redress this gap in scholarship. From a feminist perspective, the contributors examine not only twentieth-century and contemporary art by women, but also its production, distribution, and consumption. Exploring the roles of women as artists and consumers in specific cultural contexts, they look at a range of artistic forms across Latin America, including Panamanian molas (blouses), Andean weavings, Mexican ceramics, and Mayan hipiles (dresses).

Art historians, anthropologists, and sociologists from Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States discuss artwork from Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Suriname, and Puerto Rico, and many of their essays focus on indigenous artists. They highlight the complex webs of social relations from which folk art emerges. For instance, while several pieces describe the similar creative and technical processes of indigenous pottery-making communities of the Amazon and of mestiza potters in Mexico and Colombia, they also reveal the widely varying functions of the ceramics and meanings of the iconography. Integrating the social, historical, political, geographical, and economic factors that shape folk art in Latin America and the Caribbean, Crafting Gender sheds much-needed light on a rich body of art and the women who create it.


Contributors
Eli Bartra
Ronald J. Duncan
Dolores Juliano
Betty LaDuke
Lourdes Rejón Patrón
Sally Price
María de Jesús Rodríguez-Shadow
Mari Lyn Salvador
Norma Valle
Dorothea Scott Whitten

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Blood, Ink, and Culture
Miseries and Splendors of the Post-Mexican Condition
Roger Bartra
Duke University Press, 2002
Pens and swords, words and blows: for Roger Bartra, the culture of ink and the culture of blood offer two contrasting approaches to the political transformations of our time. In this compilation of essays, Bartra thinks through these transformations by tracing the complex interplay between popular culture, nationalist ideology, civil society, and the state in contemporary Mexico.

Written with verve over a period of twenty years, these essays—most translated into English here for the first time—suggest why Bartra has become one of Latin America’s leading public intellectuals. The essays cover a broad range of topics, from the canonical forms of Mexican culture to the meaning of postnational identity in a globalizing age, from the repercussions of the 1994 Zapatista uprising to the 2000 election of Vicente Fox and the end of the PRI’s seven-decade rule. Across this range of topics, Bartra imparts astute insights into a critical period of transition in Mexican history, stressing throughout the importance of democracy, the complexity of identity, and the vibrancy of the Left. In Blood, Ink, and Culture, he provides a stimulating inside look at political and intellectual life in the southern reaches of North America.

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Plantation Worlds
Maan Barua
Duke University Press, 2024
In Plantation Worlds, Maan Barua interrogates debates on planetary transformations through the histories and ecologies of plantations. Drawing on long-term research spanning fifteen years, Barua presents a unique ethnography attentive to the lives of both people and elephants amidst tea plantations in the Indian state of Assam. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nearly three million people were brought in to Assam’s plantations to work under conditions of indenture. Plantations dramatically altered the region’s landscape, plundered resources, and created fraught worlds for elephants and people. Their extractive logics and colonial legacies prevail as durations, forging the ambit of infrastructures, labor, habitability, and conservation in the present. And yet, as the perspectives of the Adivasi plantation worker community and lifeworlds of elephants show, possibilities for enacting a decolonial imaginary of landscape remain present amid immiseration. From the margins of the global South, Barua offers an alternative grammar for articulating environmental change. In so doing, he prompts a rethinking of multispecies ecologies and how they are structured by colonialism and race.
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An Aqueous Territory
Sailor Geographies and New Granada's Transimperial Greater Caribbean World
Ernesto Bassi
Duke University Press, 2017
In An Aqueous Territory Ernesto Bassi traces the configuration of a geographic space he calls the transimperial Greater Caribbean between 1760 and 1860. Focusing on the Caribbean coast of New Granada (present-day Colombia), Bassi shows that the region's residents did not live their lives bounded by geopolitical borders. Rather, the cross-border activities of sailors, traders, revolutionaries, indigenous peoples, and others reflected their perceptions of the Caribbean as a transimperial space where trade, information, and people circulated, both conforming to and in defiance of imperial regulations. Bassi demonstrates that the islands, continental coasts, and open waters of the transimperial Greater Caribbean constituted a space that was simultaneously Spanish, British, French, Dutch, Danish, Anglo-American, African, and indigenous. Exploring the "lived geographies" of the region's dwellers, Bassi challenges preconceived notions of the existence of discrete imperial spheres and the inevitable emergence of independent nation-states while providing insights into how people envision their own futures and make sense of their place in the world.
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Hindutva as Political Monotheism
Anustup Basu
Duke University Press, 2020
In Hindutva as Political Monotheism, Anustup Basu offers a genealogical study of Hindutva—Hindu right-wing nationalism—to illustrate the significance of Western anthropology and political theory to the idea of India as a Hindu nation. Connecting Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt's notion of political theology to traditional theorems of Hindu sovereignty and nationhood, Basu demonstrates how Western and Indian theorists subsumed a vast array of polytheistic, pantheistic, and henotheistic cults featuring millions of gods into a singular edifice of faith. Basu exposes the purported “Hindu Nation” as itself an orientalist vision by analyzing three crucial moments: European anthropologists’ and Indian intellectuals’ invention of a unified Hinduism during the long nineteenth century; Indian ideologues’ adoption of ethnoreligious nationalism in pursuit of a single Hindu way of life in the twentieth century; and the transformations of this project in the era of finance capital, Bollywood, and new media. Arguing that Hindutva aligns with Enlightenment notions of nationalism, Basu foregrounds its significance not just to Narendra Modi's right-wing, anti-Muslim government but also to mainstream Indian nationalism and its credo of secularism and tolerance.
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Keeping Faith, Losing Faith
Religious Belief and Political Economy, Volume 40
Bradley Bateman
Duke University Press
“Keeping Faith, Losing Faith: Religious Belief and Political Economy” considers the historical and current relationship between religious and economic schools of thought. The volume explores the integration of theology and economics that was prevalent before the twentieth century, the rise of secular neoclassical economic models in the middle of that century, and the recent trend toward examining economic behavior through the prism of religious belief.

Two of the essays examine the antagonism between Christianity and utilitarianism in postrevolutionary French economics and the rising influence of the materialism of the market vis-à-vis the declining authority of the Roman Catholic Church in eighteenth-century Europe. Other topics explored include the work of the great American neoclassicist Frank Knight, the combination of utility analysis and Christian principles among the “clerical economists” in America, and the effect of a crisis of personal faith on the theories of the English philosopher and economist Henry Sidgwick.

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Miriam Hansen
Cinema, Experience, and the Public Sphere
David Bathrick
Duke University Press
This issue is dedicated to the thought and writing of Miriam Hansen, whose contributions broke ground in film history, film theory, and the politics of mass culture and the public sphere.  The collection focuses on the areas in which she was most influential: early cinema, its reception, and the legacy of vernacular modernism, including essays touching on the concept’s impact on contemporary thinking about Russian and Chinese cinemas. The issue also features extensive commentary on Hansen’s pioneering book Cinema and Experience, expanding on the book’s inquiry into the continuing legacy of the Frankfurt School.
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Darkening Mirrors
Imperial Representation in Depression-Era African American Performance
Stephanie Leigh Batiste
Duke University Press, 2012
In Darkening Mirrors, Stephanie Leigh Batiste examines how African Americans participated in U.S. cultural imperialism in Depression-era stage and screen performances. A population treated as second-class citizens at home imagined themselves as empowered, modern U.S. citizens and transnational actors in plays, operas, ballets, and films. Many of these productions, such as the 1938 hits Haiti and The "Swing" Mikado recruited large casts of unknown performers, involving the black community not only as spectators but also as participants. Performances of exoticism, orientalism, and primitivism are inevitably linked to issues of embodiment, including how bodies signify blackness as a cultural, racial, and global category. Whether enacting U.S. imperialism in westerns, dramas, dances, songs, jokes, or comedy sketches, African Americans maintained a national identity that registered a diasporic empowerment and resistance on the global stage. Boldly addressing the contradictions in these performances, Batiste challenges the simplistic notion that the oppressed cannot identify with oppressive modes of power and enact themselves as empowered subjects. Darkening Mirrors adds nuance and depth to the history of African American subject formation and stage and screen performance.
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E.T. Culture
Anthropology in Outerspaces
Debbora Battaglia
Duke University Press, 2005
Anthropologists have long sought to engage and describe foreign or “alien” societies, yet few have considered the fluid communities centered around a shared belief in alien beings and UFO sightings and their effect on popular and expressive culture. Opening up a new frontier for anthropological study, the contributors to E.T. Culture take these communities seriously. They demonstrate that an E.T. orientation toward various forms of visitation—including alien beings, alien technologies, and uncanny visions—engages primary concepts underpinning anthropological research: host and visitor, home and away, subjectivity and objectivity. Taking the point of view of those who commit to sci-fi as sci-fact, contributors to this volume show how discussions and representations of otherworldly beings express concerns about racial and ethnic differences, the anxieties and fascination associated with modern technologies, and alienation from the inner workings of government.

Drawing on social science, science studies, linguistics, popular and expressive culture, and social and intellectual history, the writers of E.T. Culture unsettle the boundaries of science, magic, and religion as well as those of technological and human agency. They consider the ways that sufferers of “unmarked” diseases such as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome come to feel alien to both the “healthy” world and the medical community incapable of treating them; the development of alien languages like Klingon; attempts to formulate a communications technology—such as that created for the spaceship Voyager—that will reach alien beings; the pilgrimage spirit of UFO seekers; the out-of-time experiences of Nobel scientists; the embrace of the alien within Japanese animation and fan culture; and the physical spirituality of the Raëlian religious network.

Contributors. Debbora Battaglia, Richard Doyle, Joseph Dumit, Mizuko Ito, Susan Lepselter, Christopher Roth, David Samuels

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The Orphaned Imagination
Melancholy and Commodity Culture in English Romanticism
Guinn Batten
Duke University Press, 1998
Studies of the English Romantic poets generally portray them either as transcending the workings of capitalism or as working in complicity with an entrepreneurial economy. In The Orphaned Imagination, Guinn Batten challenges standard accounts of Romantic poetry and argues that Wordsworth, Byron, Blake, Shelley, Keats, and Coleridge—each of whom suffered the loss of a father or father-figure at an early age—possessed an orphan’s special insight into the dynamics and aesthetics of commodity culture and its symptomatic melancholia.
Building on the theoretical insights of Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler, Julia Kristeva, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Batten interweaves the discourses of psychoanalysis, economics, biography, sexuality, melancholy, value, and exchange to question accepted ideas of how Romantic poetry works. She asserts that poetic labor is in fact paradigmatic of the kinds of production—and the kinds of desire—that capitalist culture renders invisible. If symbolic exchange, in cash or in words, requires the surrender of a beloved object, if healthy mourning requires an orphan to “work through” emotional loss through the consolation of art or a love for the living, then the rebellious Romantic poet, Batten contends, possessed unique insight into the alternative authority of a poetic language that renounced a culture of denial. Batten urges that scholars move beyond critical approaches condemning allegedly regressive forms of pleasure, recognizing that they, too, are haunted by melancholic attachments to dead poets as they conduct their work.
The Orphaned Imagination will interest anyone concerned with the claims of the English Romantic poets to a distinctive, valuable form of knowledge and those who may wonder about the power of contemporary theory to illuminate a traditional field.


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Afterlives of Romanticism, Volume 102
Ian Baucom
Duke University Press

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Atlantic Genealogies, Volume 100
Ian Baucom
Duke University Press

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History 4° Celsius
Search for a Method in the Age of the Anthropocene
Ian Baucom
Duke University Press, 2020
In History 4° Celsius Ian Baucom continues his inquiries into the place of the Black Atlantic in the making of the modern and postmodern world. Putting black studies into conversation with climate change, Baucom outlines how the ongoing concerns of critical race, diaspora, and postcolonial studies are crucial to understanding the Anthropocene. He draws on materialist and postmaterialist thought, Sartre, and the science of climate change to trace the ways in which evolving political, cultural, and natural history converge to shape a globally destructive force. Identifying the quest for limitless financial gain as the primary driving force behind both the slave trade and the continuing increase in global greenhouse gas emissions, Baucom demonstrates that climate change and the conditions of the Black Atlantic, colonialism, and the postcolony are fundamentally entwined. In so doing, he argues for the necessity of establishing a method of critical exchange between climate science, black studies, and the surrounding theoretical inquiries of humanism and posthumanism.
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Specters of the Atlantic
Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History
Ian Baucom
Duke University Press, 2005
In September 1781, the captain of the British slave ship Zong ordered 133 slaves thrown overboard, enabling the ship’s owners to file an insurance claim for their lost “cargo.” Accounts of this horrific event quickly became a staple of abolitionist discourse on both sides of the Atlantic. Ian Baucom revisits, in unprecedented detail, the Zong atrocity, the ensuing court cases, reactions to the event and trials, and the business and social dealings of the Liverpool merchants who owned the ship. Drawing on the work of an astonishing array of literary and social theorists, including Walter Benjamin, Giovanni Arrighi, Jacques Derrida, and many others, he argues that the tragedy is central not only to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the political and cultural archives of the black Atlantic but also to the history of modern capital and ethics. To apprehend the Zong tragedy, Baucom suggests, is not to come to terms with an isolated atrocity but to encounter a logic of violence key to the unfolding history of Atlantic modernity.

Baucom contends that the massacre and the trials that followed it bring to light an Atlantic cycle of capital accumulation based on speculative finance, an economic cycle that has not yet run its course. The extraordinarily abstract nature of today’s finance capital is the late-eighteenth-century system intensified. Yet, as Baucom highlights, since the late 1700s, this rapacious speculative culture has had detractors. He traces the emergence and development of a counter-discourse he calls melancholy realism through abolitionist and human-rights texts, British romantic poetry, Scottish moral philosophy, and the work of late-twentieth-century literary theorists. In revealing how the Zong tragedy resonates within contemporary financial systems and human-rights discourses, Baucom puts forth a deeply compelling, utterly original theory of history: one that insists that an eighteenth-century atrocity is not past but present within the future we now inhabit.

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Climate Change and the Production of Knowledge
Ian Baucom
Duke University Press, 2017
Though the causes and effects of climate change pervade our everyday lives—the air we breathe, the food we eat, the objects we use—the way the discourse of climate change influences how we make meaning of ourselves and our world is still unexplored. Contributors to this issue bring diverse perspectives to the ways that climate change science and discourse have reshaped the contemporary architecture of knowledge itself: reconstituting intellectual disciplines and artistic practices, redrawing and dissolving boundaries, and reframing how knowledge is represented and disseminated. The contributors address the emergence of global warming discourse in fields like history, journalism, anthropology, and the visual arts; the collaborative study of climate change between the human and material sciences; and the impact of climate change on forms of representation and dissemination in this new interdisciplinary landscape.

Contributors. Ian Baucom, Rosi Braidotti, David Buckland, Matthew Burtner, Noel Castree, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Tom Cohen, Claire Colebrook, Olivia Gray, Willis Jenkins, Catherine Malabou, Matthew Omelsky, Michael Segal, Bently Spang, Gary Tomlinson, Astrid Ulloa, Lucy Wood
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Cool Memories II, 1987-1990
Jean Baudrillard
Duke University Press, 1996
Jean Baudrillard is widely recognized as one of the most important and provocative writers of our age. Variously termed “France’s leading philosopher of postmodernism” and “a sharp-shooting Lone Ranger of the post-Marxist left,” he might also be called our leading philosopher of seduction or of mass culture. Following his acclaimed America and Cool Memories, this book is the third in a series of personal records in hyperreality. Idiosyncratic, outrageous, and brilliantly original, Baudrillard here casts his net widely and combines autobiographical memories with further reflections on America, the crisis of cultural production, new ideas in fiction/theory, and the “verbal fornication” of the postmodern.
In this wide-ranging discussion of events and ideas, Baudrillard moves between poetry and waterfalls, strikes and stealth bombers, Freud and La Cicciolina, shadows and simulacra, deconstruction and the zodiac, Reagan’s smile and Kennedy’s death, the “curse” on South America and the future of the West, the last tango of French intellectual life and the exemplary disappearing act of Italian politics. Writing at the site where the philosophic and the poetic merge, he once again offers us commentary in the form of the riveting insight, the short distillation of reality that establishes its truth with the force of recognition.
Cool Memories II, Baudrillard’s latest commentary on the technopresent and future, an installment of his reflections on the reality of contemporary western culture, will entice all readers concerned with postmodernism and the current state of theory.
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The Search for the Codex Cardona
Arnold Bauer
Duke University Press, 2009
In The Search for the Codex Cardona, Arnold J. Bauer tells the story of his experiences on the trail of a cultural treasure, a Mexican “painted book” that first came into public view at Sotheby’s auction house in London in 1982, nearly four hundred years after it was presumably made by Mexican artists and scribes. On folios of amate paper, the Codex includes two oversized maps and 300 painted illustrations accompanied by text in sixteenth-century paleography. The Codex relates the trajectory of the Nahua people to the founding of the capital of Tenochtitlán and then focuses on the consequences of the Spanish conquest up to the 1550s. If authentic, the Codex Cardona is an invaluable record of early Mexico. Yet there is no clear evidence of its origin, what happened to it after 1560, or even where it is today, after its last known appearance at Christie’s auction house in New York in 1998.

Bauer first saw the Codex Cardona in 1985 in the Crocker Nuclear Laboratory at the University of California, Davis, where scholars from Stanford and the University of California were attempting to establish its authenticity. Allowed to gently lift a few pages of this ancient treasure, Bauer was hooked. By 1986, the Codex had again disappeared from public view. Bauer’s curiosity about the Codex and its whereabouts led him down many forking paths—from California to Seville and Mexico City, to the Firestone Library in Princeton, to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and Christie’s in New York—and it brought him in contact with an international cast of curators, agents, charlatans, and erudite book dealers. The Search for the Codex Cardona is a mystery that touches on issues of cultural patrimony, the workings of the rare books and manuscripts trade, the uncertainty of archives and evidence, and the ephemerality of the past and its remains.

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Visual Archives of Sex
Heike Bauer
Duke University Press, 2021
Contributors to this special issue study the visual histories of sex by examining symbols, images, film, and other visual forms ranging from medieval religious icons to twenty-first-century selfies. They argue that engaging BIPOC, antiracist, queer, and feminist perspectives of the past is vital to understanding the complex historical relationships between sex and visual culture and how these relationships continue to shape sexual lives, bodies, myths, and desires. Essay topics include trans visual archives in Francoist Spain, a visual archive of British escort and nightclub hostess Ruth Ellis, pornography and queer pleasure in East Germany, swimsuit advertisements and “bikini blondes” in the age of the atom bomb, and teaching the history of sexuality with images. This issue also contains a roundtable on curating exhibitions devoted to sex and to queer and trans experience; conversations with historians, artists, and curators who study visual culture and the history of sexuality; and an exploration of the photographic archives of Carol Leigh, a.k.a. Scarlot Harlot.

Contributors. Heike Bauer, Roland Betancourt, Alexis L. Boylan, Topher Campbell, João Florêncio, Kyle Frackman, Javier Fernández Galeano, Sarah Jones, Carol Leigh, Conor McGrady, Ben Miller, Derek Conrad Murray, Lynda Nead, Melina Pappademos, Ashkan Sepahvand, David Serlin, Meg Slater, Katie Sutton, Annette F. Timm, Jennifer Tucker, Jeanne Vaccaro, Sunny Xiang
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The Pragmatic Mind
Explorations in the Psychology of Belief
Mark Bauerlein
Duke University Press, 1997
The Pragmatic Mind is a study of the pragmatism of Emerson, James, and Peirce and its overlooked relevance for the neopragmatism of thinkers like Richard Rorty, Stanley Cavell, Stanley Fish, and Cornel West. Arguing that the "original" pragmatists are too-often cited casually and imprecisely as mere precursors to this contemporary group of American intellectuals, Mark Bauerlein explores the explicit consequences of the earlier group’s work for current debates among and around the neopragmatists.
Bauerlein extracts from Emerson, James, and Peirce an intellectual focus that can be used to advance the broad social and academic reforms that the new pragmatists hail. He claims that, in an effort to repudiate the phony universalism of much contemporary theory, the new generation of theorists has ignored the fact that its visions of pragmatic action are grounded in this "old" school, not just in a way of doing things but also in a way of thinking about things. In other words, despite its inclination to regard psychological questions as irrelevant, Bauerlein shows that the pragmatic method demands a pragmatic mind—that is, a concept of cognition, judgment, habit, and belief. He shows that, in fact, such a concept of mind does exist, in the work of the "old" pragmatists.
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Making Scenes
Reggae, Punk, and Death Metal in 1990s Bali
Emma Baulch
Duke University Press, 2007
In 1996, Emma Baulch went to live in Bali to do research on youth culture. Her chats with young people led her to an enormously popular regular outdoor show dominated by local reggae, punk, and death metal bands. In this rich ethnography, she takes readers inside each scene: hanging out in the death metal scene among unemployed university graduates clad in black T-shirts and ragged jeans; in the punk scene among young men sporting mohawks, leather jackets, and hefty jackboots; and among the remnants of the local reggae scene in Kuta Beach, the island’s most renowned tourist area. Baulch tracks how each music scene arrived and grew in Bali, looking at such influences as the global extreme metal underground, MTV Asia, and the internationalization of Indonesia’s music industry.

Making Scenes is an exploration of the subtle politics of identity that took place within and among these scenes throughout the course of the 1990s. Participants in the different scenes often explained their interest in death metal, punk, or reggae in relation to broader ideas about what it meant to be Balinese, which reflected views about Bali’s tourism industry and the cultural dominance of Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital and largest city. Through dance, dress, claims to public spaces, and onstage performances, participants and enthusiasts reworked “Balinese-ness” by synthesizing global media, ideas of national belonging, and local identity politics. Making Scenes chronicles the creation of subcultures at a historical moment when media globalization and the gradual demise of the authoritarian Suharto regime coincided with revitalized, essentialist formulations of the Balinese self.

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Racially Writing the Republic
Racists, Race Rebels, and Transformations of American Identity
Bruce Baum
Duke University Press, 2009
Racially Writing the Republic investigates the central role of race in the construction and transformation of American national identity from the Revolutionary War era to the height of the civil rights movement. Drawing on political theory, American studies, critical race theory, and gender studies, the contributors to this collection highlight the assumptions of white (and often male) supremacy underlying the thought and actions of major U.S. political and social leaders. At the same time, they examine how nonwhite writers and activists have struggled against racism and for the full realization of America’s political ideals. The essays are arranged chronologically by subject, and, with one exception, each essay is focused on a single figure, from George Washington to James Baldwin.

The contributors analyze Thomas Jefferson’s legacy in light of his sexual relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings; the way that Samuel Gompers, the first president of the American Federation of Labor, rallied his organization against Chinese immigrant workers; and the eugenicist origins of the early-twentieth-century birth-control movement led by Margaret Sanger. They draw attention to the writing of Sarah Winnemucca, a Northern Piute and one of the first published Native American authors; the anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett; the Filipino American writer Carlos Bulosan; and the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, who linked civil rights struggles in the United States to anticolonial efforts abroad. Other figures considered include Alexis de Tocqueville and his traveling companion Gustave de Beaumont, Juan Nepomuceno Cortina (who fought against Anglo American expansion in what is now Texas), Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and W. E. B. Du Bois. In the afterword, George Lipsitz reflects on U.S. racial politics since 1965.

Contributors. Bruce Baum, Cari M. Carpenter, Gary Gerstle, Duchess Harris, Catherine A. Holland, Allan Punzalan Isaac, Laura Janara, Ben Keppel, George Lipsitz, Gwendolyn Mink, Joel Olson, Dorothy Roberts, Patricia A. Schechter, John Kuo Wei Tchen, Jerry Thompson

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The Cultural Logic of Contemporary Capitalism
Nico Baumbach
Duke University Press

In 1984 Fredric Jameson wrote that “everything in our social life—from economic value and state power to practices and to the very structure of the psyche itself—can be said to have become ‘cultural’ in some original and yet untheorized sense.” The essays in this special issue track the status of this claim some thirty years later, inquiring into the relationship of art, aesthetics, and cultural production to political economy today. At a moment when interpretation (including “ideology critique” and “symptomatic reading”) has been variously supplanted by descriptivism, empiricism, and the return of metaphysics, contributors here pursue the possibilities for an engaged cultural criticism that is attentive to form while rejecting a depoliticized formalism. Spanning a wide range of cultural sites—from recent Hollywood cinema to post-broadcast television, manufactured landscape photography, contemporary West African art, and “new materialism” in philosophy—they ask what the “formal tendencies” of contemporary cultural production (including theory itself) can tell us about the cultural logic of contemporary capitalism. The collection includes a new interview with Jameson conducted by the editors.

Contributors: Jennifer Bajorek, Nico Baumbach, Jonathan Beller, Alexander R. Galloway, Fredric Jameson, Sulgi Lie, Alberto Toscano, Amy Villarejo, Damon R. Young, Genevieve Yue
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The Czech Reader
History, Culture, Politics
Jan Bažant
Duke University Press, 2010
The Czech Reader brings together more than 150 primary texts and illustrations to convey the dramatic history of the Czechs, from the emergence of the Czech state in the tenth century, through the creation of Czechoslovakia in 1918 and the Czech Republic in 1993, into the twenty-first century. The Czechs have preserved their language, traditions, and customs, despite their incorporation into the Holy Roman Empire, the Habsburg Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Third Reich, and the Eastern Bloc. Organized chronologically, the selections in The Czech Reader include the letter to the Czech people written by the religious reformer and national hero Jan Hus in 1415, and Charter 77, the fundamental document of an influential anticommunist initiative launched in 1977 in reaction to the arrest of the Plastic People of the Universe, an underground rock band. There is a speech given in 1941 by Reinhard Heydrich, a senior Nazi official and Deputy Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, as well as one written by Václav Havel in 1984 for an occasion abroad, but read by the Czech-born British dramatist Tom Stoppard, since Havel, the dissident playwright and future national leader, was not allowed to leave Czechoslovakia. Among the songs, poems, folklore, fiction, plays, paintings, and photographs of monuments and architectural landmarks are “Let Us Rejoice,” the most famous chorus from Bedřich Smetana’s comic opera The Bartered Bride; a letter the composer Antonín Dvořák sent from New York, where he directed the National Conservatory of Music in the 1890s; a story by Franz Kafka; and an excerpt from Milan Kundera’s The Joke. Intended for travelers, students, and scholars alike, The Czech Reader is a rich introduction to the turbulent history and resilient culture of the Czech people.
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Early Women Stars, Volume 16
Jennifer M. Bean
Duke University Press
This special issue of Camera Obscura, which gathers work from leading feminists in film studies, takes a fresh look at early film and the creative ventures of women performers. While much of the existing scholarship of the silent era focuses on film form and industrial organization, the essays collected here aim to recover women’s roles in the early decades of cinema. They do so in part by considering the ways in which social and ideological economies of the industry contributed to the complex semiotics of film stardom of the period.
Essays focus on figures across the wide international lexicon of stardom, including stunt star Pearl White, iconic French performer Musidora, imported European vamp Pola Negri, pixie heroine Colleen Moore, and Chinese star Xuan Jinglin. Other articles revisit figures, such as Mary Pickford and Greta Garbo, whose stardom appears to be self-evident but proves more complex than previous accounts have suggested. In this collection, early female stars function as a medium through which authors reconceptualize feminist film history and historiography.

Contributors. Jennifer M. Bean, Vicki Callahan, Lucy Fischer, Amelie Hastie, Diane Negra, Gaylyn Studlar, Zhen Zhang

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A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema
Jennifer M. Bean
Duke University Press, 2002
A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema marks a new era of feminist film scholarship. The twenty essays collected here demonstrate how feminist historiographies at once alter and enrich ongoing debates over visuality and identification, authorship, stardom, and nationalist ideologies in cinema and media studies. Drawing extensively on archival research, the collection yields startling accounts of women's multiple roles as early producers, directors, writers, stars, and viewers. It also engages urgent questions about cinema's capacity for presenting a stable visual field, often at the expense of racially, sexually, or class-marked bodies.

While fostering new ways of thinking about film history, A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema illuminates the many questions that the concept of "early cinema" itself raises about the relation of gender to modernism, representation, and technologies of the body. The contributors bring a number of disciplinary frameworks to bear, including not only film studies but also postcolonial studies, dance scholarship, literary analysis, philosophies of the body, and theories regarding modernism and postmodernism.

Reflecting the stimulating diversity of early cinematic styles, technologies, and narrative forms, essays address a range of topics—from the dangerous sexuality of the urban flâneuse to the childlike femininity exemplified by Mary Pickford, from the Shanghai film industry to Italian diva films—looking along the way at birth-control sensation films, French crime serials, "war actualities," and the stylistic influence of art deco. Recurring throughout the volume is the protean figure of the New Woman, alternately garbed as childish tomboy, athletic star, enigmatic vamp, languid diva, working girl, kinetic flapper, and primitive exotic.

Contributors. Constance Balides, Jennifer M. Bean, Kristine Butler, Mary Ann Doane, Lucy Fischer, Jane Gaines, Amelie Hastie, Sumiko Higashi, Lori Landay, Anne Morey, Diane Negra, Catherine Russell, Siobhan B. Somerville, Shelley Stamp, Gaylyn Studlar, Angela Dalle Vacche, Radha Vatsal, Kristen Whissel, Patricia White, Zhang Zhen

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