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Dealing with Medical Malpractice
British and Swedish Experience
Marilynn M. Rosenthal
Duke University Press, 1988
Dealing with Medical Malpractice asks two interrelated questions: What are medical malpractice systems like in other societies, particularly in "publicly owned" health care systems? What is the relationship between professional autonomy of the medical profession and the characteristics of a society's malpractice system? The author's investigations in England and Sweden resulted in a well-researached and carefully analyzed study of approaches to malpractice in these Western industrialized countries. Rosenthal also provides insight into issues of professional autonomy in a system in which physicians are employees of a state health care system.
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The Agamben Effect, Volume 107
Alison Ross
Duke University Press
Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben—whose work has influenced intellectuals in political theory, political philosophy, legal theory, literature, and art—stands among the foremost intellectual figures of the modern era. Engaging with a range of thinkers from Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger to Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou, Agamben considers some of the most pressing issues in recent history and politics. His work explores the relationship between the sovereign state and the politically marginalized Homo Sacer—exiles, refugees, prisoners of war, and others whom the state actively excludes from political participation and full humanity. Further, his critique of the increasing deployment of a “state of exception”—the declaration of a state of emergency that legitimizes the sovereign state’s suspension of law for the public good—as a dominant paradigm for governing has particular power in today’s global political climate.

Infused with the spirit of Agamben’s critical self-reflection, this special issue of SAQ examines his seminal works Homo Sacer (1995), The Open (2002), and State of Exception (2003). Some contributors use Agamben’s work to examine the history of abortion law in the West, the history of slavery, and women’s rights. Others analyze the connections between Agamben’s work and that of his contemporaries, including Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Žižek, and Jean-Luc Nancy. Still other essays identify new points of interdisciplinary communication between some of Agamben’s most provocative ideas and popular twentieth-century writing.

Contributors. Andrew Benjamin, Claire Colebrook, Jean-Philippe Deranty, Penelope Deutscher, Eleanor Kaufman, Adrian Mackenzie, Catherine Mills, Alison Ross, Lee Spinks, Ewa Płonowska Ziarek, Krzysztof Ziarek

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Science Wars
Andrew Ross
Duke University Press, 1996
In the wake of the highly fractious Culture Wars, conservatives in science have launched a backlash against feminist, multiculturalist, and social critics in science studies. Paul Gross and Norman Levitt’s book Higher Superstition, presented as a wake-up call to scientists unaware of the dangers posed by the “science-bashers,” set the shrill tone of this reaction and led to the appearance of a growing number of scare stories about an “antiscience” movement in the op-ed sections of newspapers across the country. Unwilling to be political scapegoats for the decline in the public funding of science and the erosion of the public authority of scientists, many of these critics—natural scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, historians, and scholars in cultural studies and literary studies—have taken the opportunity to respond to the backlash in Science Wars.
At a time when scientific knowledge is systematically whisked out of the domain of education and converted into private capital, the essays in this volume are sharply critical of the conservative defense of a value-free science. They suggest that in a world steeped in nuclear, biogenic, and chemical overdevelopment, those who are skeptical of technology are more than entitled to ask for evidence of rationality in those versions of scientific progress that respond only to the managerial needs of state, corporate, and military elites. Whether uncovering the gender-laden assumptions built into the Western scientific method, redefining the scientific claim to objectivity, showing the relationship between science’s empirical worldview and that of mercantile capitalism, or showing how the powerful language of science exercises its daily cultural authority in our society, the essays in Science Wars announce their own powerful message. Analyzing the antidemocratic tendencies within science and its institutions, they insist on a more accountable relationship between scientists and the communities and environments affected by their research.
Revised and expanded from a recent issue of Social Text, Science Wars will provoke thought and controversy among scholars and general readers interested in science studies and current cultural politics.

Contributors. Stanley Aronowitz, Sarah Franklin, Steve Fuller, Sandra Harding, Roger Hart, N. Katherine Hayles, Ruth Hubbard, Joel Kovel, Les Levidow, George Levine, Richard Levins, Richard C. Lewontin, Michael Lynch, Emily Martin, Dorothy Nelkin, Hilary Rose, Andrew Ross, Sharon Traweek, Langdon Winner

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Masculine Singular
French New Wave Cinema
Kristin Ross
Duke University Press, 2008
Masculine Singular is an original interpretation of French New Wave cinema by one of France’s leading feminist film scholars. While most criticism of the New Wave has concentrated on the filmmakers and their films, Geneviève Sellier focuses on the social and cultural turbulence of the cinema’s formative years, from 1957 to 1962. The New Wave filmmakers were members of a young generation emerging on the French cultural scene, eager to acquire sexual and economic freedom. Almost all of them were men, and they “wrote” in the masculine first-person singular, often using male protagonists as stand-ins for themselves. In their films, they explored relations between men and women, and they expressed ambivalence about the new liberated woman. Sellier argues that gender relations and the construction of sexual identities were the primary subject of New Wave cinema.

Sellier draws on sociological surveys, box office data, and popular magazines of the period, as well as analyses of specific New Wave films. She examines the development of the New Wave movement, its sociocultural and economic context, and the popular and critical reception of such well-known films as Jules et Jim and Hiroshima mon amour. In light of the filmmakers’ focus on gender relations, Sellier reflects on the careers of New Wave’s iconic female stars, including Jeanne Moreau and Brigitte Bardot. Sellier’s thorough exploration of early New Wave cinema culminates in her contention that its principal legacy—the triumph of a certain kind of cinephilic discourse and of an “auteur theory” recognizing the director as artist—came at a steep price: creativity was reduced to a formalist game, and affirmation of New Wave cinema’s modernity was accompanied by an association of creativity with masculinity.

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Sissy Insurgencies
A Racial Anatomy of Unfit Manliness
Marlon B. Ross
Duke University Press, 2022
In Sissy Insurgencies Marlon B. Ross focuses on the figure of the sissy in order to rethink how Americans have imagined, articulated, and negotiated manhood and boyhood from the 1880s to the present. Rather than collapsing sissiness into homosexuality, Ross shows how sissiness constitutes a historically fluid range of gender practices that are expressed as a physical manifestation, discursive epithet, social identity, and political phenomenon. He reconsiders several black leaders, intellectuals, musicians, and athletes within the context of sissiness, from Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, and James Baldwin to Little Richard, Amiri Baraka, and Wilt Chamberlain. Whether examining Washington’s practice of cleaning as an iteration of sissiness, Baldwin’s self-fashioned sissy deportment, or sissiphobia in professional sports and black nationalism, Ross demonstrates that sissiness can be embraced and exploited to conform to American gender norms or disrupt racialized patriarchy. In this way, sissiness constitutes a central element in modern understandings of race and gender.
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Guide to the Hispanic American Historical Review, 1956–1975
Stanley R. Ross
Duke University Press, 1980

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Anthropology, Film Industries, Modularity
Ramyar D. Rossoukh
Duke University Press, 2021
From Bangladesh and Hong Kong to Iran and South Africa, film industries around the world are rapidly growing at a time when new digital technologies are fundamentally changing how films are made and viewed. Larger film industries like Bollywood and Nollywood aim to attain Hollywood's audience and profitability, while smaller, less commercial, and often state-funded enterprises support various cultural and political projects. The contributors to Anthropology, Film Industries, Modularity take an ethnographic and comparative approach to capturing the diversity and growth of global film industries. They outline how modularity—the specialized filmmaking tasks that collectively produce a film—operates as a key feature in every film industry, independent of local context. Whether they are examining the process of dubbing Hollywood films into Hindi, virtual reality filmmaking in South Africa, or on-location shooting in Yemen, the contributors' anthropological methodology brings into relief the universal practices and the local contingencies and deeper cultural realities of film production.

Contributors. Steven C. Caton, Jessica Dickson, Kevin Dwyer, Tejaswini Ganti, Lotte Hoek, Amrita Ibrahim, Sylvia J. Martin, Ramyar D. Rossoukh
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The Encyclopedia of Duke Basketball
John Roth
Duke University Press, 2006
Duke basketball is one of the most celebrated programs in intercollegiate athletics. With fourteen Final Four appearances and three national championships for the men’s teams and four Final Four appearances and five ACC championships for the women’s teams, the Blue Devils have established a worldwide reputation for excellence and have inspired the fierce devotion of generations of fans.

The Encyclopedia of Duke Basketball is the ultimate reference source for true-blue fans, with profiles of great games, classic finishes (both wins and losses), and compelling personalities, including players, coaches, and opponents. While it is filled with a wealth of statistical information, the Encyclopedia goes well beyond the numerical record to deliver insights on people and performances and anecdotes that will surprise even the most seasoned Duke supporter.

The Encyclopedia features:
— A timeline of key events in men’s and women’s basketball history.
— Capsules of the most important men’s and women’s games in the program’s history, including the men’s buzzer-beating overtime win against Kentucky in 1992 and the women’s stunning victory over Tennessee to reach the Final Four in 1999.
— An alphabetical encyclopedia with entries on players from Alaa Abdelnaby to Bill Zimmer and on coaches, customs, opponents, venues, and records.
— Exclusive interviews in which standout players, including Danny Ferry, Mike Gminski, Grant Hill, Christian Laettner, and Jason Williams, recount moments they’ll never forget.
— A statistical record book covering every season through 2005–06.
—130 photographs of Duke basketball history.

A source of entertainment as well as information, this volume will be a great resource for fans hoping to settle arguments, relive favorite games, or simply enjoy hours of pleasurable reading.

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The Creativity Question
Albert Rothenberg
Duke University Press, 1976
Albert Rothenberg, a psychiatrist, and Carl R. Hausman, a philosopher, have prepared a truly comprehensive interdisciplinary book of readings on creativity. This group of selections from the works of writers in psychiatry, philosophy, psychology, psychoanalysis, and education brings together, for the first time, major theoretical works, outstanding empirical findings, and discussions of the definition and nature of creativity.
The organization of The Creativity Question is unique: it illustrates the various approaches and basic assumptions underlying studies of creativity throughout the course of history up to the present time. The main body of selections appears under the categories of descriptions, attempts at explanation, and alternate approaches. As specific orientations to creativity can be traced to particular initiating thinkers and investigators, there is a special chapter on seminal accounts containing selections from the works of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Galton, and Freud. Another chapter includes recent illustrations of special types of exploratory trends: creativity of women, brain research, synectics, extrasensory perception, behaviorism, and creativity computer programming. This organization highlights the tension between strictly scientific accounts and alternative approaches offering new ways of understanding. The editors have provided for the books as a whole and for each chapter explanation and discussion of the basic issues raised by the various approaches to creativity.
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Perversion and the Social Relation
sic IV
Molly Anne Rothenberg
Duke University Press, 2003
The masochist, the voyeur, the sadist, the sodomite, the fetishist, the pedophile, and the necrophiliac all expose hidden but essential elements of the social relation. Arguing that the concept of perversion, usually stigmatized, ought rather to be understood as a necessary stage in the development of all non-psychotic subjects, the essays in Perversion and the Social Relation consider the usefulness of the category of the perverse for exploring how social relations are formed, maintained, and transformed.

By focusing on perversion as a psychic structure rather than as aberrant behavior, the contributors provide an alternative to models of social interpretation based on classical Oedipal models of maturation and desire. At the same time, they critique claims that the perverse is necessarily subversive or liberating. In their lucid introduction, the editors explain that while fixation at the stage of the perverse can result in considerable suffering for the individual and others, perversion motivates social relations by providing pleasure and fulfilling the psychological need to put something in the place of the Father. The contributors draw on a variety of psychoanalytic perspectives—Freudian and Lacanian—as well as anthropology, history, literature, and film. From Slavoj Žižek's meditation on “the politics of masochism” in David Fincher's movie Fight Club through readings of works including William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner, Don DeLillo’s White Noise, and William Burroughs's Cities of the Red Night, the essays collected here illuminate perversion's necessary role in social relations.

Contributors. Michael P. Bibler, Dennis A. Foster, Bruce Fink, Octave Mannoni, E. L. McCallum, James Penney, Molly Anne Rothenberg, Nina Schwartz, Slavoj Žižek

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Becoming Beside Ourselves
The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being
Brian Rotman
Duke University Press, 2008
Becoming Beside Ourselves continues the investigation that the renowned cultural theorist and mathematician Brian Rotman began in his previous books Signifying Nothing and Ad Infinitum...The Ghost in Turing’s Machine: exploring certain signs and the conceptual innovations and subjectivities that they facilitate or foreclose. In Becoming Beside Ourselves, Rotman turns his attention to alphabetic writing or the inscription of spoken language. Contending that all media configure what they mediate, he maintains that alphabetic writing has long served as the West’s dominant cognitive technology. Its logic and limitations have shaped thought and affect from its inception until the present. Now its grip on Western consciousness is giving way to virtual technologies and networked media, which are reconfiguring human subjectivity just as alphabetic texts have done for millennia.

Alphabetic texts do not convey the bodily gestures of human speech: the hesitations, silences, and changes of pitch that infuse spoken language with affect. Rotman suggests that by removing the body from communication, alphabetic texts enable belief in singular, disembodied, authoritative forms of being such as God and the psyche. He argues that while disembodied agencies are credible and real to “lettered selves,” they are increasingly incompatible with selves and subjectivities formed in relation to new virtual technologies and networked media. Digital motion-capture technologies are restoring gesture and even touch to a prominent role in communication. Parallel computing is challenging the linear thought patterns and ideas of singularity facilitated by alphabetic language. Barriers between self and other are breaking down as the networked self is traversed by other selves to become multiple and distributed, formed through many actions and perceptions at once. The digital self is going plural, becoming beside itself.

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The Other Henry James
John Carlos Rowe
Duke University Press, 1998
In The Other Henry James, John Carlos Rowe offers a new vision of Henry James as a social critic whose later works can now be read as rich with homoerotic suggestiveness. Drawing from recent work in queer and feminist theory, Rowe argues that the most fruitful approach to James today is one that ignores the elitist portrait of the formalist master in favor of the writer as a vulnerable critic of his own confused and repressive historical moment.
Rowe traces a particular development in James’s work, showing how in his early writings James criticized women’s rights, same-sex relations, and other social and political trends now identified with modern culture; how he ambivalently explored these aspects of modernity in his writings of the 1880s; and, later, how he increasingly identified with such modernity in his heretofore largely ignored or marginally treated fiction of the 1890s. Building on recent scholarship that has shown James to be more anxious about gender roles, more conflicted, and more marginal a figure than previously thought, Rowe argues that James—through his treatment of women, children, and gays—indicts the values and conventions of the bourgeoisie. He shows how James confronts social changes in gender roles, sexual preferences, national affiliations, and racial and ethnic identifications in such important novels as The American, The Tragic Muse, What Maisie Knew, and In the Cage, and in such neglected short fiction as “The Last of the Valerii,” “The Death of the Lion,” and “The Middle Years.”
Positioning James’s work within an interpretive context that pits the social and political anxieties of his day against the imperatives of an aesthetic ideology, The Other Henry James will engage scholars, students, and teachers of American literature and culture, gay literature, and queer theory.


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Alimentary Tracts
Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial
Parama Roy
Duke University Press, 2010
In Alimentary Tracts Parama Roy argues that who eats and with whom, who starves, and what is rejected as food are questions fundamental to empire, decolonization, and globalization. In crucial ways, she suggests, colonialism reconfigured the sensorium of colonizer and colonized, generating novel experiences of desire, taste, and appetite as well as new technologies of the embodied self. For colonizers, Indian nationalists, diasporic persons, and others in the colonial and postcolonial world orders, the alimentary tract functioned as an important corporeal, psychoaffective, and ethicopolitical contact zone, in which questions of identification, desire, difference, and responsibility were staged.

Interpreting texts that have addressed cooking, dining, taste, hungers, excesses, and aversions in South Asia and its diaspora since the mid-nineteenth century, Roy relates historical events and literary figures to tropes of disgust, abstention, dearth, and appetite. She analyzes the fears of pollution and deprivation conveyed in British accounts of the so-called Mutiny of 1857, complicates understandings of Mohandas K. Gandhi’s vegetarianism, examines the “famine fictions” of the novelist-actor Mahasweta Devi, and reflects on the diasporic cookbooks and screen performances of Madhur Jaffrey. This account of richly visceral global modernity furnishes readers with a new idiom for understanding historical action and cultural transformation.

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Changing the Subject
Feminist and Queer Politics in Neoliberal India
Srila Roy
Duke University Press, 2022
In Changing the Subject Srila Roy maps the rapidly transforming terrain of gender and sexual politics in India under the conditions of global neoliberalism. The consequences of India’s liberalization were paradoxical: the influx of global funds for social development and NGOs signaled the co-optation and depoliticization of struggles for women’s rights, even as they amplified the visibility and vitalization of queer activism. Roy reveals the specificity of activist and NGO work around issues of gender and sexuality through a decade-long ethnography of two West Bengal organizations, one working on lesbian, bisexual, and transgender issues and the other on rural women’s empowerment. Tracing changes in feminist governmentality that were entangled in transnational neoliberalism, Roy shows how historical and highly local feminist currents shaped contemporary queer and nonqueer neoliberal feminisms. The interplay between historic techniques of activist governance and queer feminist governmentality’s focus on changing the self offers a new way of knowing feminism—both as always already co-opted and as a transformative force in the world.
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Beyond Belief
India and the Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism
Srirupa Roy
Duke University Press, 2007
Beyond Belief is a bold rethinking of the formation and consolidation of nation-state ideologies. Analyzing India during the first two decades following its foundation as a sovereign nation-state in 1947, Srirupa Roy explores how nationalists are turned into nationals, subjects into citizens, and the colonial state into a sovereign nation-state. Roy argues that the postcolonial nation-state is consolidated not, as many have asserted, by efforts to imagine a shared cultural community, but rather by the production of a recognizable and authoritative identity for the state. This project—of making the state the entity identified as the nation’s authoritative representative—emphasizes the natural cultural diversity of the nation and upholds the state as the sole unifier or manager of the “naturally” fragmented nation; the state is unified through diversity.

Roy considers several different ways that identification with the Indian nation-state was produced and consolidated during the 1950s and 1960s. She looks at how the Films Division of India, a state-owned documentary and newsreel production agency, allowed national audiences to “see the state”; how the “unity in diversity” formation of nationhood was reinforced in commemorations of India’s annual Republic Day; and how the government produced a policy discourse claiming that scientific development was the ultimate national need and the most pressing priority for the state to address. She also analyzes the fate of the steel towns—industrial townships built to house the workers of nationalized steel plants—which were upheld as the exemplary national spaces of the new India. By prioritizing the role of actual manifestations of and encounters with the state, Roy moves beyond theories of nationalism and state formation based on collective belief.

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Bad Language, Naked Ladies, and Other Threats to the Nation
A Political History of Comic Books in Mexico
Anne Rubenstein
Duke University Press, 1998
In Bad Language, Naked Ladies, and Other Threats to the Nation, Anne Rubenstein examines how comic books—which were overwhelmingly popular but extremely controversial in post-revolutionary Mexico—played an important role in the development of a stable, legitimate state. Studying the relationship of the Mexican state to its civil society from the 1930s to the 1970s through comic books and their producers, readers, and censors, Rubenstein shows how these thrilling tales of adventure—and the debates over them—reveal much about Mexico’s cultural nationalism and government attempts to direct, if not control, social change.
Since their first appearance in 1934, comic books enjoyed wide readership, often serving as a practical guide to life in booming new cities. Conservative protest against the so-called immorality of these publications, of mass media generally, and of Mexican modernity itself, however, led the Mexican government to establish a censorship office that, while having little impact on the content of comic books, succeeded in directing conservative ire away from government policies and toward the Mexican media. Bad Language, Naked Ladies, and Other Threats to the Nation examines the complex dynamics of the politics of censorship occasioned by Mexican comic books, including the conservative political campaigns against them, government and industrial responses to such campaigns, and the publishers’ championing of Mexican nationalism and their efforts to preserve their publishing empires through informal influence over government policies. Rubenstein’s analysis suggests a new Mexican history after the revolution, one in which negotiation over cultural questions replaced open conflict and mass-media narrative helped ensure political stability.
This book will engage readers with an interest in Mexican history, Latin American studies, cultural studies, and popular culture.
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The Queer Games Avant-Garde
How LGBTQ Game Makers Are Reimagining the Medium of Video Games
Bo Ruberg
Duke University Press, 2020
In The Queer Games Avant-Garde, Bonnie Ruberg presents twenty interviews with twenty-two queer video game developers whose radical, experimental, vibrant, and deeply queer work is driving a momentous shift in the medium of video games. Speaking with insight and candor about their creative practices as well as their politics and passions, these influential and innovative game makers tell stories about their lives and inspirations, the challenges they face, and the ways they understand their places within the wider terrain of video game culture. Their insights go beyond typical conversations about LGBTQ representation in video games or how to improve “diversity” in digital media. Instead, they explore queer game-making practices, the politics of queer independent video games, how queerness can be expressed as an aesthetic practice, the influence of feminist art on their work, and the future of queer video games and technology. These engaging conversations offer a portrait of an influential community that is subverting and redefining the medium of video games by placing queerness front and center.

Interviewees:
Ryan Rose Aceae, Avery Alder, Jimmy Andrews, Santo Aveiro-Ojeda, Aevee Bee, Tonia B******, Mattie Brice, Nicky Case, Naomi Clark, Mo Cohen, Heather Flowers, Nina Freeman, Jerome Hagen, Kat Jones, Jess Marcotte, Andi McClure, Llaura McGee, Seanna Musgrave, Liz Ryerson, Elizabeth Sampat, Loren Schmidt, Sarah Schoemann, Dietrich Squinkifer, Kara Stone, Emilia Yang, Robert Yang
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Deviations
A Gayle Rubin Reader
Gayle S. Rubin
Duke University Press, 2012
Deviations is the definitive collection of writing by Gayle S. Rubin, a pioneering theorist and activist in feminist, lesbian and gay, queer, and sexuality studies since the 1970s. Rubin first rose to prominence in 1975 with the publication of “The Traffic in Women,” an essay that had a galvanizing effect on feminist thinking and theory. In another landmark piece, “Thinking Sex,” she examined how certain sexual behaviors are constructed as moral or natural, and others as unnatural. That essay became one of queer theory’s foundational texts. Along with such canonical work, Deviations features less well-known but equally insightful writing on subjects such as lesbian history, the feminist sex wars, the politics of sadomasochism, crusades against prostitution and pornography, and the historical development of sexual knowledge. In the introduction, Rubin traces her intellectual trajectory and discusses the development and reception of some of her most influential essays. Like the book it opens, the introduction highlights the major lines of inquiry pursued for nearly forty years by a singularly important theorist of sex, gender, and culture.
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Decentering the Regime
Ethnicity, Radicalism, and Democracy in Juchitán, Mexico
Jeffrey W. Rubin
Duke University Press, 1997
Since 1989 an indigenous political movement—the Coalition of Workers, Peasants, and Students of the Isthmus (COCEI)—has governed the southern Mexican city of Juchitán. In Decentering the Regime, Jeffrey W. Rubin examines this Zapotec Indian movement and shows how COCEI forged an unprecedented political and cultural path—overcoming oppression in the 1970s to achieve democracy in the 1990s. Rubin traces the history and rise to power of this grassroots movement, and describes a Juchitán that exists in substantial autonomy from the central Mexican government and Mexican nationalism—thereby debunking the notion that a state- and regime-centered approach to power can explain the politics of domination and resistance in Mexico.
Employing an interdisciplinary approach, Rubin shows that the Juchitecos’ ability to organize and sustain a radical political movement grew out of a century-long history of negotiation of political rule. He argues that factors outside the realm of formal politics—such as ethnicity, language, gender, and religion—play an important part in the dynamics of regional political struggles and relationships of power. While offering a detailed view of the Zapotec community and its interactions, Rubin reconceptualizes democracy by considering the question of how meaningful autonomy, self-government, cultural expression, and material well-being can be forged out of violence and repression.
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Sustaining Activism
A Brazilian Women's Movement and a Father-Daughter Collaboration
Jeffrey W. Rubin
Duke University Press, 2013
In 1986, a group of young Brazilian women started a movement to secure economic rights for rural women and transform women's roles in their homes and communities. Together with activists across the country, they built a new democracy in the wake of a military dictatorship. In Sustaining Activism, Jeffrey W. Rubin and Emma Sokoloff-Rubin tell the behind-the-scenes story of this remarkable movement. As a father-daughter team, they describe the challenges of ethnographic research and the way their collaboration gave them a unique window into a fiery struggle for equality.

Starting in 2002, Rubin and Sokoloff-Rubin traveled together to southern Brazil, where they interviewed activists over the course of ten years. Their vivid descriptions of women’s lives reveal the hard work of sustaining a social movement in the years after initial victories, when the political way forward was no longer clear and the goal of remaking gender roles proved more difficult than activists had ever imagined. Highlighting the tensions within the movement about how best to effect change, Sustaining Activism ultimately shows that democracies need social movements in order to improve people’s lives and create a more just society.
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When Forests Run Amok
War and Its Afterlives in Indigenous and Afro-Colombian Territories
Daniel Ruiz-Serna
Duke University Press, 2023
Daniel Ruiz-Serna examines how the devastation caused by war impacts nonhuman inhabitants in the forests and rivers in the traditional lands of Indigenous and Afro-Colombian peoples.
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Slow Disturbance
Infrastructural Mediation on the Settler Colonial Resource Frontier
Rafico Ruiz
Duke University Press, 2021
From the late nineteenth through most of the twentieth century, the evangelical Protestant Grenfell Mission in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, created a network of hospitals, schools, orphanages, stores, and industries with the goal of bringing health and organized society to settler fisherfolk and Indigenous populations. This infrastructure also served to support resource extraction of fisheries off Labrador's coast. In Slow Disturbance Rafico Ruiz engages with the Grenfell Mission to theorize how settler colonialism establishes itself through what he calls infrastructural mediation—the ways in which colonial lifeworlds, subjectivities, and affects come into being through the creation and maintenance of infrastructures. Drawing on archival documents, maps, interviews with municipal officials, teachers, and residents, as well as his field photography, Ruiz shows how the mission's infrastructural mediation—from its attempts to restructure the local economy to the aerial surveying and mapping of the coastline—responded to the colony's environmental conditions in ways that expanded the bounds of the settler frontier. By tracing the mission's history and the mechanisms that enabled its functioning, Ruiz complicates understandings of mediation and infrastructure while expanding current debates surrounding settler colonialism and extractive capitalism.
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Left Turns in Brown Study
Sandra Ruiz
Duke University Press, 2024
In Left Turns in Brown Study Sandra Ruiz offers a poetic-theoretical inquiry into the interlacing forms of study and mourning. Drawing on Black and Brown activism and theory, Ruiz interweaves poetry, memoir, lyrical essay, and vignettes to examine study as an emancipatory practice. Proposing “brown study” as key for understanding how Brownness harbors loss and suffering along with the possibility for more abundant ways of living, Ruiz invites readers to turn left into the sounds, phrases, and principles of anticolonial ways of reading, writing, citing, and listening. In doing so, Ruiz engages with a panoply of hauntings, ghosts, and spectral presences, from deceased teachers, illiterate ancestors, and those lost to unnatural disasters to all those victims of institutional and colonial violence. Study is shared movement and Brownness lives in citation. Conceptual, poetic, and unconventional, this book is crucial for all those who theorize minoritarian literary aesthetics and think through utopia, queer possibility, and the entwinement of forms.
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Virtual Voyages
Cinema and Travel
Jeffrey Ruoff
Duke University Press, 2006
Virtual Voyages illuminates the pivotal role of travelogues within the history of cinema. The travelogue dominated the early cinema period from 1895 to 1905, was central to the consolidation of documentary in the 1910s and 1920s, proliferated in the postwar era of 16mm distribution, and today continues to flourish in IMAX theaters and a host of non-theatrical venues. It is not only the first chapter in the history of documentary but also a key element of ethnographic film, home movies, and fiction films. In this collection, leading film scholars trace the intersection of technology and ideology in representations of travel across a wide variety of cinematic forms. In so doing, they demonstrate how attention to the role of travel imagery in film blurs distinctions between genres and heightens awareness of cinema as a technology for moving through space and time, of cinema itself as a mode of travel.

Some contributors take a broad view of travelogues by examining the colonial and imperial perspectives embodied in early travel films, the sensation of movement that those films evoked, and the role of live presentations such as lectures in our understanding of travelogues. Other essays are focused on specific films, figures, and technologies, including early travelogues encouraging Americans to move to the West; the making and reception of the documentary Grass (1925), shot on location in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran; the role of travel imagery in 1930s Hollywood cinema; the late-twentieth-century 16mm illustrated-lecture industry; and the panoramic possibilities presented by IMAX technologies. Together the essays provide a nuanced appreciation of how, through their representations of travel, filmmakers actively produce the worlds they depict.

Contributors. Rick Altman, Paula Amad, Dana Benelli, Peter J. Bloom, Alison Griffiths, Tom Gunning, Hamid Naficy, Jennifer Lynn Peterson, Lauren Rabinovitz, Jeffrey Ruoff, Alexandra Schneider, Amy J. Staples

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Archiveology
Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices
Catherine Russell
Duke University Press, 2018
In Archiveology Catherine Russell uses the work of Walter Benjamin to explore how the practice of archiveology—the reuse, recycling, appropriation, and borrowing of archival sounds and images by filmmakers—provides ways to imagine the past and the future. Noting how the film archive does not function simply as a place where moving images are preserved, Russell examines a range of films alongside Benjamin's conceptions of memory, document, excavation, and historiography. She shows how city films such as Nicole Védrès's Paris 1900 (1947) and Thom Andersen's Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003) reconstruct notions of urban life and uses Christian Marclay's The Clock (2010) to draw parallels between critical cinephilia and Benjamin's theory of the phantasmagoria. Russell also discusses practices of collecting in archiveological film and rereads films by Joseph Cornell and Rania Stephan to explore an archival practice that dislocates and relocates the female image in film. In so doing, she not only shows how Benjamin's work is as relevant to film theory as ever; she shows how archiveology can awaken artists and audiences to critical forms of history and memory.
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The Cinema of Naruse Mikio
Women and Japanese Modernity
Catherine Russell
Duke University Press, 2008
One of the most prolific and respected directors of Japanese cinema, Naruse Mikio (1905–69) made eighty-nine films between 1930 and 1967. Little, however, has been written about Naruse in English, and much of the writing about him in Japanese has not been translated into English. With The Cinema of Naruse Mikio, Catherine Russell brings deserved critical attention to this under-appreciated director. Besides illuminating Naruse’s contributions to Japanese and world cinema, Russell’s in-depth study of the director sheds new light on the Japanese film industry between the 1930s and the 1960s.

Naruse was a studio-based director, a company man renowned for bringing films in on budget and on time. During his long career, he directed movies in different styles of melodrama while displaying a remarkable continuity of tone. His films were based on a variety of Japanese literary sources and original scripts; almost all of them were set in contemporary Japan. Many were “women’s films.” They had female protagonists, and they depicted women’s passions, disappointments, routines, and living conditions. While neither Naruse or his audiences identified themselves as “feminist,” his films repeatedly foreground, if not challenge, the rigid gender norms of Japanese society. Given the complex historical and critical issues surrounding Naruse’s cinema, a comprehensive study of the director demands an innovative and interdisciplinary approach. Russell draws on the critical reception of Naruse in Japan in addition to the cultural theories of Harry Harootunian, Miriam Hansen, and Walter Benjamin. She shows that Naruse’s movies were key texts of Japanese modernity, both in the ways that they portrayed the changing roles of Japanese women in the public sphere and in their depiction of an urban, industrialized, mass-media-saturated society.

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Experimental Ethnography
The Work of Film in the Age of Video
Catherine Russell
Duke University Press, 1999
Experimental film and ethnographic film have long been considered separate, autonomous practices on the margins of mainstream cinema. By exploring the interplay between the two forms, Catherine Russell throws new light on both the avant-garde and visual anthropology.
Russell provides detailed analyses of more than thirty-five films and videos from the 1890s to the 1990s and discusses a wide range of film and videomakers, including Georges Méliès, Maya Deren, Peter Kubelka, Ray Birdwhistell, Jean Rouch, Su Friedrich, Bill Viola, Kidlat Tahimik, Margaret Mead, Tracey Moffatt, and Chantal Akerman. Arguing that video enables us to see film differently—not as a vanishing culture but as bodies inscripted in technology, Russell maps the slow fade from modernism to postmodern practices. Combining cultural critique with aesthetic analysis, she explores the dynamics of historical interruption, recovery, and reevaluation. As disciplinary boundaries dissolve, Russell contends, ethnography is a means of renewing the avant-gardism of “experimental” film, of mobilizing its play with language and form for historical ends. “Ethnography” likewise becomes an expansive term in which culture is represented from many different and fragmented perspectives.
Original in both its choice of subject and its theoretical and methodological
approaches, Experimental Ethnography will appeal to visual anthropologists, as well as film scholars interested in experimental and documentary practices.
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New Women of the Silent Screen
China, Japan, Hollywood, Volume 20
Catherine Russell
Duke University Press
Examining constructions of gender, nationalism, and modernity in films produced in China and Japan in the 1920s and early 1930s, this special issue of Camera Obscura is the first collection of feminist research on Asian cinema of the silent period. Actresses emerged for the first time in the Asian public sphere in the late 1910s, making the convention of the female impersonator obsolete and giving human faces to the many social transformations of urban modernity. During this period, filmmaking started to establish itself as a product of mass culture that circulated globally, creating conduits of cultural exchange in which the modern New Woman became a principal figure of currency. In the silent cinemas of China, Japan, and Hollywood, where Asian women appeared as key representations of nativist and orientalist ideology, early women stars became the focus for competing discourses of gender and modernity and played a key role in the construction of modern Asian identity.

The collection includes an essay on the actress Pearl White and how the emergence of the New Woman on Asian screens provoked extensive discussions in the media about the norms of gender and femininity. Hollywood orientalism and Asian nationalism converged in the images of Asian American stars Anna May Wong and Tsuru Aoki, who were criticized by both American and Asian constituencies for transgressing cultural norms. Other essays offer a feminist critique of films by the Japanese directors Yasujiro Ozu, Heinosuke Gosho, Kenji Mizoguchi, and Mikio Naruse, whose work often captured the position of women in a patriarchal system. Trapped between the progressive paradigms of the New Woman and traditional expectations of appropriate gender roles, and between competing notions of Asian modernity, Asian women stars of the silent cinema constitute a dynamic site for feminist film research.

Contributors. Weihong Bao, Chika Kinoshita, Sara Ross, Catherine Russell, Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, Yiman Wang

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Cultural Revolution and Revolutionary Culture
Alessandro Russo
Duke University Press, 2020
In Cultural Revolution and Revolutionary Culture, Alessandro Russo presents a dramatic new reading of China's Cultural Revolution as a mass political experiment aimed at thoroughly reexamining the tenets of communism. Russo explores four critical phases of the Cultural Revolution, each with its own reworking of communist political subjectivity: the historical-theatrical “prologue” of 1965; Mao's attempts to shape the Cultural Revolution in 1965 and 1966; the movements and organizing between 1966 and 1968 and the factional divides that ended them; and the mass study campaigns from 1973 to 1976 and the unfinished attempt to evaluate the inadequacies of the political decade that brought the Revolution to a close. Among other topics, Russo shows how the dispute around the play Hai Rui Dismissed from Office was not the result of a Maoist conspiracy, but rather a series of intense and unresolved political and intellectual controversies. He also examines the Shanghai January Storm and the problematic foundation of the short-lived Shanghai Commune. By exploring these and other political-cultural moments of Chinese confrontations with communist principles, Russo overturns conventional wisdom about the Cultural Revolution.
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Points on the Dial
Golden Age Radio beyond the Networks
Alexander Russo
Duke University Press, 2010
The golden age of radio is often recalled as a time when the medium unified the nation, when families gathered around the radios in homes across the country to listen to live, commercially sponsored network broadcasts. In Points on the Dial, Alexander Russo revises our understanding of radio’s past by revealing the hidden histories of production, distribution, and reception practices during this era, which extended from the 1920s into the 1950s. Russo brings to light a tiered broadcasting system with intermingling but distinct national, regional, and local programming forms, sponsorship patterns, and methods of program distribution. Examining a wide range of practices, including regional networking, sound-on-disc transcription, the use of station representatives, spot advertising, and programming aimed at homes with several radios, he not only recasts our understanding of the relationship between national networks and local stations but also charts the development of new ways of listening—often distractedly rather than attentively—that set the stage for radio in the second half of the twentieth century.
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Hard Luck and Heavy Rain
The Ecology of Stories in Southeast Texas
Joseph C. Russo
Duke University Press, 2023
In Hard Luck and Heavy Rain Joseph C. Russo takes readers into the everyday lives of the rural residents of Southeast Texas. He encounters the region as a kind of world enveloped in on itself, existing under a pall of poverty, illness, and oil refinery smoke. His informants’ stories cover a wide swath of experiences, from histories of LGBTQ+ life and the local petrochemical industries to religiosity among health food store employees and the suffering of cancer patients living in the Refinery Belt. Russo frames their hard-luck stories as forms of verbal art and poetic narrative that render the region a mythopoetic landscape that epitomizes the impasse of American late capitalism. He shows that in this severe world, questions of politics and history are not cut and dry, and its denizens are not simply backward victims of circumstances. Russo demonstrates that by challenging classist stereotypes of rural Americans as passive, ignorant, and uneducated, his interlocutors offer significant insight into the contemporary United States.
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Big Ears
Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies
Nichole T. Rustin
Duke University Press, 2008
In jazz circles, players and listeners with “big ears” hear and engage complexity in the moment, as it unfolds. Taking gender as part of the intricate, unpredictable action in jazz culture, this interdisciplinary collection explores the terrain opened up by listening, with big ears, for gender in jazz. Essays range from a reflection on the female boogie-woogie pianists who played at Café Society in New York during the 1930s and 1940s to interpretations of how the jazzman is represented in Dorothy Baker’s novel Young Man with a Horn (1938) and Michael Curtiz’s film adaptation (1950). Taken together, the essays enrich the field of jazz studies by showing how gender dynamics have shaped the production, reception, and criticism of jazz culture.

Scholars of music, ethnomusicology, American studies, literature, anthropology, and cultural studies approach the question of gender in jazz from multiple perspectives. One contributor scrutinizes the tendency of jazz historiography to treat singing as subordinate to the predominantly male domain of instrumental music, while another reflects on her doubly inappropriate position as a female trumpet player and a white jazz musician and scholar. Other essays explore the composer George Russell’s Lydian Chromatic Concept as a critique of mid-twentieth-century discourses of embodiment, madness, and black masculinity; performances of “female hysteria” by Les Diaboliques, a feminist improvising trio; and the BBC radio broadcasts of Ivy Benson and Her Ladies’ Dance Orchestra during the Second World War. By incorporating gender analysis into jazz studies, Big Ears transforms ideas of who counts as a subject of study and even of what counts as jazz.

Contributors: Christina Baade, Jayna Brown, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Monica Hairston, Kristin McGee, Tracy McMullen, Ingrid Monson, Lara Pellegrinelli, Eric Porter, Nichole T. Rustin, Ursel Schlicht, Julie Dawn Smith, Jeffrey Taylor, Sherrie Tucker, João H. Costa Vargas

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The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle
1841, Volume 13
Clyde de L. Ryals
Duke University Press
The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle offer a window onto the lives of two of the Victorian world’s most accomplished, perceptive, and unusual inhabitants. Scottish writer and historian Thomas Carlyle and his wife, Jane Welsh Carlyle, attracted to them a circle of foreign exiles, radicals, feminists, revolutionaries, and major and minor writers from across Europe and the United States. The collection is regarded as one of the finest and most comprehensive literary archives of the nineteenth century.
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The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle
April 1848–March 1849, Volume 23
Clyde de L. Ryals
Duke University Press
The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle offer a window onto the lives of two of the Victorian world’s most accomplished, perceptive, and unusual inhabitants. Scottish writer and historian Thomas Carlyle and his wife, Jane Welsh Carlyle, attracted to them a circle of foreign exiles, radicals, feminists, revolutionaries, and major and minor writers from across Europe and the United States. The collection is regarded as one of the finest and most comprehensive literary archives of the nineteenth century.
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The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle
April–December 1844, Volume 18
Clyde de L. Ryals
Duke University Press
The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle offer a window onto the lives of two of the Victorian world’s most accomplished, perceptive, and unusual inhabitants. Scottish writer and historian Thomas Carlyle and his wife, Jane Welsh Carlyle, attracted to them a circle of foreign exiles, radicals, feminists, revolutionaries, and major and minor writers from across Europe and the United States. The collection is regarded as one of the finest and most comprehensive literary archives of the nineteenth century.
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The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle
April–December 1849: April–December 1849, Volume 24
Clyde de L. Ryals
Duke University Press
The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle offer a window onto the lives of two of the Victorian world’s most accomplished, perceptive, and unusual inhabitants. Scottish writer and historian Thomas Carlyle and his wife, Jane Welsh Carlyle, attracted to them a circle of foreign exiles, radicals, feminists, revolutionaries, and major and minor writers from across Europe and the United States. The collection is regarded as one of the finest and most comprehensive literary archives of the nineteenth century.
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The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle
August 1843–March 1844, Volume 17
Clyde de L. Ryals
Duke University Press
The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle offer a window onto the lives of two of the Victorian world’s most accomplished, perceptive, and unusual inhabitants. Scottish writer and historian Thomas Carlyle and his wife, Jane Welsh Carlyle, attracted to them a circle of foreign exiles, radicals, feminists, revolutionaries, and major and minor writers from across Europe and the United States. The collection is regarded as one of the finest and most comprehensive literary archives of the nineteenth century.
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The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle
August 1846–June 1847, Volume 21
Clyde de L. Ryals
Duke University Press
The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle offer a window onto the lives of two of the Victorian world’s most accomplished, perceptive, and unusual inhabitants. Scottish writer and historian Thomas Carlyle and his wife, Jane Welsh Carlyle, attracted to them a circle of foreign exiles, radicals, feminists, revolutionaries, and major and minor writers from across Europe and the United States. The collection is regarded as one of the finest and most comprehensive literary archives of the nineteenth century.
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The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle
January–December 1850, Volume 25
Clyde de L. Ryals
Duke University Press
The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle offer a window onto the lives of two of the Victorian world’s most accomplished, perceptive, and unusual inhabitants. Scottish writer and historian Thomas Carlyle and his wife, Jane Welsh Carlyle, attracted to them a circle of foreign exiles, radicals, feminists, revolutionaries, and major and minor writers from across Europe and the United States. The collection is regarded as one of the finest and most comprehensive literary archives of the nineteenth century.
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The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle
January–July 1842, Volume 14
Clyde de L. Ryals
Duke University Press
The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle offer a window onto the lives of two of the Victorian world’s most accomplished, perceptive, and unusual inhabitants. Scottish writer and historian Thomas Carlyle and his wife, Jane Welsh Carlyle, attracted to them a circle of foreign exiles, radicals, feminists, revolutionaries, and major and minor writers from across Europe and the United States. The collection is regarded as one of the finest and most comprehensive literary archives of the nineteenth century.
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The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle
January–July 1843, Volume 16
Clyde de L. Ryals
Duke University Press
The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle offer a window onto the lives of two of the Victorian world’s most accomplished, perceptive, and unusual inhabitants. Scottish writer and historian Thomas Carlyle and his wife, Jane Welsh Carlyle, attracted to them a circle of foreign exiles, radicals, feminists, revolutionaries, and major and minor writers from across Europe and the United States. The collection is regarded as one of the finest and most comprehensive literary archives of the nineteenth century.
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The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle
January–September 1845, Volume 19
Clyde de L. Ryals
Duke University Press
The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle offer a window onto the lives of two of the Victorian world’s most accomplished, perceptive, and unusual inhabitants. Scottish writer and historian Thomas Carlyle and his wife, Jane Welsh Carlyle, attracted to them a circle of foreign exiles, radicals, feminists, revolutionaries, and major and minor writers from across Europe and the United States. The collection is regarded as one of the finest and most comprehensive literary archives of the nineteenth century.
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The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle
July 1847–March 1848, Volume 22
Clyde de L. Ryals
Duke University Press
The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle offer a window onto the lives of two of the Victorian world’s most accomplished, perceptive, and unusual inhabitants. Scottish writer and historian Thomas Carlyle and his wife, Jane Welsh Carlyle, attracted to them a circle of foreign exiles, radicals, feminists, revolutionaries, and major and minor writers from across Europe and the United States. The collection is regarded as one of the finest and most comprehensive literary archives of the nineteenth century.
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The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle
July–December 1842, Volume 15
Clyde de L. Ryals
Duke University Press
The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle offer a window onto the lives of two of the Victorian world’s most accomplished, perceptive, and unusual inhabitants. Scottish writer and historian Thomas Carlyle and his wife, Jane Welsh Carlyle, attracted to them a circle of foreign exiles, radicals, feminists, revolutionaries, and major and minor writers from across Europe and the United States. The collection is regarded as one of the finest and most comprehensive literary archives of the nineteenth century.
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The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle
October 1845–July 1846, Volume 20
Clyde de L. Ryals
Duke University Press
The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle offer a window onto the lives of two of the Victorian world’s most accomplished, perceptive, and unusual inhabitants. Scottish writer and historian Thomas Carlyle and his wife, Jane Welsh Carlyle, attracted to them a circle of foreign exiles, radicals, feminists, revolutionaries, and major and minor writers from across Europe and the United States. The collection is regarded as one of the finest and most comprehensive literary archives of the nineteenth century.
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The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle
January–December 1851, Volume 26
Clyde de L. Ryals
Duke University Press
The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle offer a window onto the lives of two of the Victorian world’s most accomplished, perceptive, and unusual inhabitants. Scottish writer and historian Thomas Carlyle and his wife, Jane Welsh Carlyle, attracted to them a circle of foreign exiles, radicals, feminists, revolutionaries, and major and minor writers from across Europe and the United States. The collection is regarded as one of the finest and most comprehensive literary archives of the nineteenth century.
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Modernist Ethics and Posthumanism
Derek Ryan
Duke University Press

From snakes to sheep, from hyenas to moths, from rural landscapes to childhood objects, this special issue examines the role of nonhuman alterity in the ethics of modernism. Drawing on the posthumanist theory of Jacques Derrida, Bruno Latour, Jane Bennett, and others, “Modernist Ethics and Posthumanism” offers original close readings of both canonical and more marginalized modernist figures. The contributors analyze unrecognizable creatures in D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf; indeterminate animals in E. M. Forster; networks of human and nonhuman agents in Rainer Maria Rilke and Woolf; pacifism among people, animals, and things in Samuel Beckett; responsibility and rural environments in Mary Butts; and objects, both lost and found, and the threat of extinction in Elizabeth Bowen. What emerges from these essays is an account of modernist ethics that is embedded in relations between human and nonhuman and that gains its force through experiments in both content and form.

Derek Ryan is lecturer in modernist literature at the University of Kent and the author of Animal Theory: A Critical Introduction. Mark West is a recent PhD graduate of the University of Glasgow.

Contributors: Gabriel Hankins, Laci Mattison, Stephen Ross, Derek Ryan, Jeff Wallace, Sam Wiseman

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