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The Value of Comparison
Peter van der Veer
Duke University Press, 2016
In The Value of Comparison Peter van der Veer makes a compelling case for using comparative approaches in the study of society and for the need to resist the simplified civilization narratives popular in public discourse and some social theory. He takes the quantitative social sciences and the broad social theories they rely on to task for their inability to question Western cultural presuppositions, demonstrating that anthropology's comparative approach provides a better means to understand societies. This capacity stems from anthropology's engagement with diversity, its fragmentary approach to studying social life, and its ability to translate difference between cultures. Through essays on topics as varied as iconoclasm, urban poverty, Muslim immigration, and social exclusion van der Veer highlights the ways that studying the particular and the unique allows for gaining a deeper knowledge of the whole without resorting to simple generalizations that elide and marginalize difference.
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Vampire Nation
Violence as Cultural Imaginary
Tomislav Z. Longinovi
Duke University Press, 2011
Vampire Nation is a nuanced analysis of the cultural and political rhetoric framing ‘the serbs’ as metaphorical vampires in the last decades of the twentieth century, as well as the cultural imaginaries and rhetorical mechanisms that inform nationalist discourses more broadly. Tomislav Z. Longinović points to the Gothic associations of violence, blood, and soil in the writings of many intellectuals and politicians during the 1990s, especially in portrayals by the U.S.-led Western media of ‘the serbs’ as a vampire nation, a bloodsucking parasite on the edge of European civilization.

Interpreting oral and written narratives and visual culture, Longinović traces the early modern invention of ‘the serbs’ and the category’s twentieth-century transformations. He describes the influence of Bram Stoker’s nineteenth-century novel Dracula on perceptions of the Balkan region and reflects on representations of hybrid identities and their violent destruction in the works of the region’s most prominent twentieth-century writers. Concluding on a hopeful note, Longinović considers efforts to imagine a new collective identity in non-nationalist terms. These endeavors include the emigrant Yugoslav writer David Albahari’s Canadian Trilogy and Cyber-Yugoslavia, a mock nation-state with “citizens” in more than thirty countries.

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Vampires, Mummies and Liberals
Bram Stoker and the Politics of Popular Fiction
David Glover
Duke University Press, 1996
Nearly a hundred years after its debut in 1897, Dracula is still one of the most popular of all Gothic narratives, always in print and continually adapted for stage and screen. Paradoxically, David Glover suggests, this very success has obscured the historical conditions and authorial circumstances of the novel’s production. By way of a long overdue return to the novels, short stories, essays, journalism, and correspondence of Bram Stoker, Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals reconstructs the cultural and political world that gave birth to Dracula. To bring Stoker’s life into productive relationship with his writing, Glover offers a reading that locates the author within the changing commercial contours of the late-Victorian public sphere and in which the methods of critical biography are displaced by those of cultural studies.
Glover’s efforts reveal a writer who was more wide-ranging and politically engaged than his current reputation suggests. An Irish Protestant and nationalist, Stoker nonetheless drew his political inspiration from English liberalism at a time of impending crisis, and the tradition’s contradictions and uncertainties haunt his work. At the heart of Stoker’s writing Glover exposes a preoccupation with those sciences and pseudo-sciences—from physiognomy and phrenology to eugenics and sexology—that seemed to cast doubt on the liberal faith in progress. He argues that Dracula should be read as a text torn between the stances of the colonizer and the colonized, unable to accept or reject the racialized images of backwardness that dogged debates about Irish nationhood. As it tracks the phantasmatic form given to questions of character and individuality, race and production, sexuality and gender, across the body of Stoker’s writing, Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals draws a fascinating portrait of an extraordinary transitional figure.
Combining psychoanalysis and cultural theory with detailed historical research, this book will be of interest to scholars of Victorian and Irish fiction and to those concerned with cultural studies and popular culture.
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The Vanguard of the Atlantic World
Creating Modernity, Nation, and Democracy in Nineteenth-Century Latin America
James E. Sanders
Duke University Press, 2014
In the nineteenth century, Latin America was home to the majority of the world's democratic republics. Many historians have dismissed these political experiments as corrupt pantomimes of governments of Western Europe and the United States. Challenging that perspective, James E. Sanders contends that Latin America in this period was a site of genuine political innovation and popular debate reflecting Latin Americans' visions of modernity. Drawing on archival sources in Mexico, Colombia, and Uruguay, Sanders traces the circulation of political discourse and democratic practice among urban elites, rural peasants, European immigrants, slaves, and freed blacks to show how and why ideas of liberty, democracy, and universalism gained widespread purchase across the region, mobilizing political consciousness and solidarity among diverse constituencies. In doing so, Sanders reframes the locus and meaning of political and cultural modernity.
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Vanishing Sands
Losing Beaches to Mining
Orrin H. Pilkey, Norma J. Longo, William J. Neal, Nelson G. Rangel-Buitrago, Keith C. Pilkey, and Hannah L. Hayes
Duke University Press, 2022
In a time of accelerating sea level rise and increasingly intensifying storms, the world’s sandy beaches and dunes have never been more crucial to protecting coastal environments. Yet, in order to meet the demands of large-scale construction projects, sand mining is stripping beaches and dunes, destroying environments, and exploiting labor in the process. The authors of Vanishing Sands track the devastating impact of legal and illegal sand mining over the past twenty years, ranging from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean to South America and the eastern United States. They show how sand mining has reached crisis levels: beach, dune, and river ecosystems are in danger of being lost forever, while organized crime groups use deadly force to protect their illegal mining operations. Calling for immediate and widespread resistance to sand mining, the authors demonstrate that its cessation is paramount for saving not only beaches, dunes, and associated environments but also lives and tourism economies everywhere.
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The Vanishing
Shakespeare, the Subject, and Early Modern Culture
Christopher Pye
Duke University Press, 2000
In The Vanishing Christopher Pye combines psychoanalytic and cultural theory to advance an innovative interpretation of Renaissance history and subjectivity. Locating the emergence of the modern subject in the era’s transition from feudalism to a modern societal state, Pye supports his argument with interpretations of diverse cultural and literary phenomena, including Shakespeare’s Hamlet and King Lear, witchcraft and demonism, anatomy theaters, and the paintings of Michelangelo.
Pye explores the emergence of the early modern subject in terms of a range of subjectivizing mechanisms tied to the birth of a modern conception of history, one that is structured around a spatial and temporal horizon—a vanishing point. He also discusses the distinctly economic character of early modern subjectivity and how this, too, is implicated in our own modern modes of historical understanding. After explaining how the aims of New Historicist and Foucauldian approaches to the Renaissance are inseparably linked to such a historical conception, Pye demonstrates how the early modern subject can be understood in terms of a Lacanian and Zizekian account of the emerging social sphere. By focusing on the Renaissance as a period of remarkable artistic and cultural production, he is able to illustrate his points with discussions of a number of uniquely fascinating topics—for instance, how demonism was intimately related to a significant shift in law and symbolic order and how there existed at the time a “demonic” preoccupation with certain erotic dimensions of the emergent social subject.
Highly sophisticated and elegantly crafted, The Vanishing will be of interest to students of Shakespeare and early modern culture, Renaissance visual art, and cultural and psychoanalytic theory.

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Vanishing Women
Magic, Film, and Feminism
Karen Beckman
Duke University Press, 2003
With the help of mirrors, trap doors, elevators, photographs, and film, women vanish and return in increasingly spectacular ways throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Karen Beckman tracks the proliferation of this elusive figure, the vanishing woman, from her genesis in Victorian stage magic through her development in conjunction with photography and film. Beckman reveals how these new visual technologies projected their anxieties about insubstantiality and reproducibility onto the female body, producing an image of "woman" as utterly unstable and constantly prone to disappearance.

Drawing on cinema studies and psychoanalysis as well as the histories of magic, spiritualism, and photography, Beckman looks at particular instances of female vanishing at specific historical moments—in Victorian magic’s obsessive manipulation of female and colonized bodies, spiritualist photography’s search to capture traces of ghosts, the comings and goings of bodies in early cinema, and Bette Davis’s multiple roles as a fading female star. As Beckman places the vanishing woman in the context of feminism’s discussion of spectacle and subjectivity, she explores not only the problems, but also the political utility of this obstinate figure who hovers endlessly between visible and invisible worlds. Through her readings, Beckman argues that the visibly vanishing woman repeatedly signals the lurking presence of less immediately perceptible psychic and physical erasures, and she contends that this enigmatic figure, so ubiquitous in late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century culture, provides a new space through which to consider the relationships between visibility, gender, and agency.

[more]

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The Veiled Monologues special section, Volume 37
Tom Sellar
Duke University Press

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Venezuela's Bolivarian Democracy
Participation, Politics, and Culture under Chávez
David Smilde and Daniel Hellinger, eds.
Duke University Press, 2011
Venezuela’s Bolivarian Democracy brings together a variety of perspectives on participation and democracy in Venezuela. An interdisciplinary group of contributors focuses on the everyday lives of Venezuelans, examining the forms of participation that have emerged in communal councils, cultural activities, blogs, community media, and several other forums. The essays validate many of the critiques of democracy under Chávez, as well as much of the praise. They show that while government corporatism and clientelism are constant threats, the forms of political and cultural participation discussed are creating new discourses, networks, and organizational spaces—for better and for worse. With open yet critical minds, the contributors seek to analyze Venezuela’s Bolivarian democratic experience through empirical research. In doing so, they reveal a nuanced process, a richer and more complex one than is conveyed in international journalism and scholarship exclusively focused on the words and actions of Hugo Chávez.

Contributors
Carolina Acosta-Alzuru
Julia Buxton
Luis Duno Gottberg
Sujatha Fernandes
María Pilar García-Guadilla
Kirk A. Hawkins
Daniel Hellinger
Michael E. Johnson
Luis E. Lander
Margarita López-Maya
Elizabeth Gackstetter Nichols
Coraly Pagan
Guillermo Rosas
Naomi Schiller
David Smilde
Alejandro Velasco

[more]

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Venezuela's Movimiento al Socialismo
From Guerrilla Defeat to Innovative Politics
Steve Ellner
Duke University Press, 1988
Teodoro Petkoff and the other members of the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) in Venezuela had aroused the ire of the orthodox communist leaders by claiming to be both authentic communists and true nationalists, not bound by the dictates of either the Moscow or Maoist/Beijing wings of the party. To infuriate the traditionalists even further, Petkoff and his associates succeeded in being more than isolated critics, as MAS quickly eclipsed the traditional Venezuelan Communist Party and became that country's leading leftist group.

The author places MAS in its international national, and historical contexts in order to determine the extent to which it is a unique communist party, as it claims to be. He traces the theory of "national democratic revolution, " which MAS rejects, back to Lenin, and discusses the Latin American left's reevaluation of that thesis. Ellner examines the guerrilla movement in Venezuela, the student movement of the late 1960s, and the emergence of the "New Left" in other countries, especially noting their influence on the formation of MAS. He also discusses the group's role in Venezuelan elections and it's relations with the other parties.

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Vertical Empire
The General Resettlement of Indians in the Colonial Andes
Jeremy Ravi Mumford
Duke University Press, 2012
In 1569 the Spanish viceroy Francisco de Toledo ordered more than one million native people of the central Andes to move to newly founded Spanish-style towns called reducciones. This campaign, known as the General Resettlement of Indians, represented a turning point in the history of European colonialism: a state forcing an entire conquered society to change its way of life overnight. But while this radical restructuring destroyed certain aspects of indigenous society, Jeremy Ravi Mumford's Vertical Empire reveals the ways that it preserved others. The campaign drew on colonial ethnographic inquiries into indigenous culture and strengthened the place of native lords in colonial society. In the end, rather than destroying the web of Andean communities, the General Resettlement added another layer to indigenous culture, a culture that the Spaniards glimpsed and that Andeans defended fiercely.
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Vexy Thing
On Gender and Liberation
Imani Perry
Duke University Press, 2018
Even as feminism has become increasingly central to our ideas about institutions, relationships, and everyday life, the term used to diagnose the problem—“patriarchy”—is used so loosely that it has lost its meaning. In Vexy Thing Imani Perry resurrects patriarchy as a target of critique, recentering it to contemporary discussions of feminism through a social and literary analysis of cultural artifacts from the Enlightenment to the present. Drawing on a rich array of sources—from nineteenth-century slavery court cases and historical vignettes to writings by Toni Morrison and Audre Lorde and art by Kara Walker and Wangechi Mutu—Perry shows how the figure of the patriarch emerged as part and parcel of modernity, the nation-state, the Industrial Revolution, and globalization. She also outlines how digital media and technology, neoliberalism, and the security state continue to prop up patriarchy. By exploring the past and present of patriarchy in the world we have inherited and are building for the future, Perry exposes its mechanisms of domination as a necessary precursor to dismantling it.
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Viapolitics
Borders, Migration, and the Power of Locomotion
William Walters, Charles Heller, and Lorenzo Pezzani, editors
Duke University Press, 2021
Vehicles, their infrastructures, and the environments they traverse are fundamental to the movement of migrants and states' attempts to govern them. This volume's contributors use the concept of viapolitics to name and foreground this contested entanglement and examine the politics of migration and bordering across a range of sites. They show how these elements constitute a key site of knowledge and struggle in migratory processes and offer a privileged vantage point from which to interrogate practices of mobility and systems of control in their deeper histories and wider geographic connections. This transdisciplinary group of scholars explores a set of empirically rich and diverse cases: from the Spanish and European authorities' attempts to control migrants' entire trajectories to infrastructures of escort of Indonesian labor migrants; from deportation train cars in the 1920s United States to contemporary stowaways at sea; from illegalized migrants walking across treacherous Alpine mountain passes to aerial geographies of deportation. Throughout, Viapolitics interrogates anew the phenomenon called “migration,” questioning how different forms of contentious mobility are experienced, policed, and contested.

Contributors. Ethan Blue, Maribel Casas-Cortes, Julie Y. Chu, Sebastian Cobarrubias, Glenda Garelli, Charles Heller, Sabine Hess, Bernd Kasparek, Clara Lecadet, Johan Lindquist, Renisa Mawani, Lorenzo Pezzani, Ranabir Samaddar, Amaha Senu, Martina Tazzioli, William Walters
[more]

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Vibrant Matter
A Political Ecology of Things
Jane Bennett
Duke University Press, 2010
In Vibrant Matter the political theorist Jane Bennett, renowned for her work on nature, ethics, and affect, shifts her focus from the human experience of things to things themselves. Bennett argues that political theory needs to do a better job of recognizing the active participation of nonhuman forces in events. Toward that end, she theorizes a “vital materiality” that runs through and across bodies, both human and nonhuman. Bennett explores how political analyses of public events might change were we to acknowledge that agency always emerges as the effect of ad hoc configurations of human and nonhuman forces. She suggests that recognizing that agency is distributed this way, and is not solely the province of humans, might spur the cultivation of a more responsible, ecologically sound politics: a politics less devoted to blaming and condemning individuals than to discerning the web of forces affecting situations and events.

Bennett examines the political and theoretical implications of vital materialism through extended discussions of commonplace things and physical phenomena including stem cells, fish oils, electricity, metal, and trash. She reflects on the vital power of material formations such as landfills, which generate lively streams of chemicals, and omega-3 fatty acids, which can transform brain chemistry and mood. Along the way, she engages with the concepts and claims of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Darwin, Adorno, and Deleuze, disclosing a long history of thinking about vibrant matter in Western philosophy, including attempts by Kant, Bergson, and the embryologist Hans Driesch to name the “vital force” inherent in material forms. Bennett concludes by sketching the contours of a “green materialist” ecophilosophy.

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Vibrator Nation
How Feminist Sex-Toy Stores Changed the Business of Pleasure
Lynn Comella
Duke University Press, 2017
In the 1970s a group of pioneering feminist entrepreneurs launched a movement that ultimately changed the way sex was talked about, had, and enjoyed. Boldly reimagining who sex shops were for and the kinds of spaces they could be, these entrepreneurs opened sex-toy stores like Eve’s Garden, Good Vibrations, and Babeland not just as commercial enterprises, but to provide educational and community resources as well. In Vibrator Nation Lynn Comella tells the fascinating history of how these stores raised sexual consciousness, redefined the adult industry, and changed women's lives. Comella describes a world where sex-positive retailers double as social activists, where products are framed as tools of liberation, and where consumers are willing to pay for the promise of better living—one conversation, vibrator, and orgasm at a time.
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Vichy and the Eternal Feminine
A Contribution to a Political Sociology of Gender
Francine Muel-Dreyfus
Duke University Press, 2001
In this nuanced history of occupied France, Francine Muel-Dreyfus presents a powerful examination of the political and social construction of gender under the Vichy regime. Arguing that the regime used symbolic violence to reshape a liberal culture once based on individual rights into one of deference to hierarchical authority, Muel-Dreyfus shows how Vichy invoked theories of “natural” gender inequality and “eternal” opposition between the masculine and the feminine to justify women’s legal and social subordination, and how these ideologies were incorporated into the French woman’s sense of self.
Drawing on an extensive body of legislative, religious, educational, medical, and literary texts, Muel-Dreyfus examines how the Vichy regime brutally resurrected the gender politics that had been rejected during France’s social struggles in the 1930s. Strikingly, she reveals how this resurrection in turn fed into racial politics: childless women, for instance, and those who had abortions were construed—like Jews—as threats to France’s racial “purity.” With its atendant patterns of social inclusion and exclusion that were deeply rooted in the political and cultural history of the Third Republic, Muel-Dreyfus claims, a pervasive range of gendered metaphors helped to structure the very laws and policies of the Vichy regime.
The French language edition of this book was published in 1996 to wide acclaim. Contributing to theories about the role of gender in political philosophy, to the cultural anthropology of symbolic representation, and to our understanding of the history of fascism, Vichy and the Eternal Feminine will appeal to French, European, and twentieth-century historians; students and scholars of gender and racial studies; political scientists; and anthropologists.


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Victims of the Chilean Miracle
Workers and Neoliberalism in the Pinochet Era, 1973–2002
Peter Winn, ed.
Duke University Press, 2004
Chile was the first major Latin American nation to carry out a complete neoliberal transformation. Its policies—encouraging foreign investment, privatizing public sector companies and services, lowering trade barriers, reducing the size of the state, and embracing the market as a regulator of both the economy and society—produced an economic boom that some have hailed as a “miracle” to be emulated by other Latin American countries. But how have Chile’s millions of workers, whose hard labor and long hours have made the miracle possible, fared under this program? Through empirically grounded historical case studies, this volume examines the human underside of the Chilean economy over the past three decades, delineating the harsh inequities that persist in spite of growth, low inflation, and some decrease in poverty and unemployment.

Implemented in the 1970s at the point of the bayonet and in the shadow of the torture chamber, the neoliberal policies of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship reversed many of the gains in wages, benefits, and working conditions that Chile’s workers had won during decades of struggle and triggered a severe economic crisis. Later refined and softened, Pinochet’s neoliberal model began, finally, to promote economic growth in the mid-1980s, and it was maintained by the center-left governments that followed the restoration of democracy in 1990. Yet, despite significant increases in worker productivity, real wages stagnated, the expected restoration of labor rights faltered, and gaps in income distribution continued to widen. To shed light on this history and these ongoing problems, the contributors look at industries long part of the Chilean economy—including textiles and copper—and industries that have expanded more recently—including fishing, forestry, and agriculture. They not only show how neoliberalism has affected Chile’s labor force in general but also how it has damaged the environment and imposed special burdens on women. Painting a sobering picture of the two Chiles—one increasingly rich, the other still mired in poverty—these essays suggest that the Chilean miracle may not be as miraculous as it seems.

Contributors.
Paul Drake
Volker Frank
Thomas Klubock
Rachel Schurman
Joel Stillerman
Heidi Tinsman
Peter Winn

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Victorian Jamaica
Timothy Barringer and Wayne Modest, editors
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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Victorian Subjects
J. Hillis Miller
Duke University Press, 1991
Written over a thirty-five year period, these essays reflect the changes in J. Hillis Miller’s thinking on Victorian topics, from an early concern with questions of consciousness, form, and intellectual history, to a more recent focus on parable and the development of a deconstructive ethics of reading.
Miller defines the term “Victorian subjects” in more than one sense. The phrase identifies an historical time but also names a concern throughout with subjectivity, consciousness, and selfhood in Victorian literature. The essays show various Victorian subjectivities seeking to ground themselves in their own underlying substance or in some self beneath or beyond the self. But “Victorian subjects” also discusses those who were subject to Queen Victoria, to the reigning ideologies of the time, to historical, social, and material conditions, including the conditions under which literature was written, published, distributed, and consumed.
These essays, taken together, sketch the outlines of ideological assumptions within the period about the self, interpersonal relations, nature, literary form, the social function of literature, and other Victorian subjects.
[more]

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A View from the Bottom
Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation
Nguyen Tan Hoang
Duke University Press, 2014
A View from the Bottom offers a major critical reassessment of male effeminacy and its racialization in visual culture. Examining portrayals of Asian and Asian American men in Hollywood cinema, European art film, gay pornography, and experimental documentary, Nguyen Tan Hoang explores the cultural meanings that accrue to sexual positions. He shows how cultural fantasies around the position of the sexual "bottom" overdetermine and refract the meanings of race, gender, sexuality, and nationality in American culture in ways that both enable and constrain Asian masculinity. Challenging the association of bottoming with passivity and abjection, Nguyen suggests ways of thinking about the bottom position that afford agency and pleasure. A more capacious conception of bottomhood—as a sexual position, a social alliance, an affective bond, and an aesthetic form—has the potential to destabilize sexual, gender, and racial norms, suggesting an ethical mode of relation organized not around dominance and mastery but around the risk of vulnerability and shame. Thus reconceived, bottomhood as a critical category creates new possibilities for arousal, receptiveness, and recognition, and offers a new framework for analyzing sexual representations in cinema as well as understanding their relation to oppositional political projects.
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A View of Venice
Portrait of a Renaissance City
Kristin Love Huffman, editor
Duke University Press, 2024
Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of Venice, a woodcut first printed in the year 1500, presents a bird’s-eye portrait of Venice at its peak as an international hub of trade, art, and culture. An artistic and cartographic masterpiece of the Renaissance, the View depicts Venice as a vibrant, waterborne city interconnected by canals and bridges and filled with ornate buildings, elaborate gardens, and seafaring vessels. The contributors to A View of Venice: Portrait of a Renaissance City draw on a high-resolution digital scan of the over nine-foot-wide composite print to examine the complexities of this extraordinary woodcut and portrayal of early modern Venetian life. The essays show how the View constitutes an advanced material artifact of artistic, humanist, and scientific culture. They also outline the ways the print reveals information about the city’s economic and military power, religious and social infrastructures, and cosmopolitan residents. Featuring methodological advancements in the digital humanities, A View of Venice highlights the reality and myths of a topographically unique, mystical city and its place in the world.

Contributors. Karen-edis Barzman, Andrea Bellieni, Patricia Fortini Brown, Valeria Cafà, Stanley Chojnacki, Tracy E. Cooper, Giada Damen, Julia A. DeLancey, Piero Falchetta, Ludovica Galeazzo, Maartje van Gelder, Jonathan Glixon, Richard Goy, Anna Christine Swartwood House, Kristin Love Huffman, Holly Hurlburt, Claire Judde de Larivière, Blake de Maria, Martina Massaro, Cosimo Monteleone, Monique O’Connell, Mary Pardo, Giorgio Tagliaferro, Saundra Weddle, Bronwen Wilson, Rangsook Yoon
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Vinyl Freak
Love Letters to a Dying Medium
John Corbett
Duke University Press, 2017
From scouring flea markets and eBay to maxing out their credit cards, record collectors will do just about anything to score a long-sought-after album. In Vinyl Freak, music writer, curator, and collector John Corbett burrows deep inside the record fiend’s mind, documenting and reflecting on his decades-long love affair with vinyl. Discussing more than 200 rare and out-of-print LPs, Vinyl Freak is composed in part of Corbett's long-running DownBeat magazine column of the same name, which was devoted to records that had not appeared on CD. In other essays where he combines memoir and criticism, Corbett considers the current vinyl boom, explains why vinyl is his preferred medium, profiles collector subcultures, and recounts his adventures assembling the Alton Abraham Sun Ra Archive, an event so all-consuming that he claims it cured his record-collecting addiction. Perfect for vinyl newbies and veteran crate diggers alike, Vinyl Freak plumbs the motivations that drive Corbett and collectors everywhere.
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Violence and Policing
Madiha Tahir and Shamus Khan, special issue editors
Duke University Press
Contributors to this special issue examine the discourse and practices of policing, providing insights into how policing transforms societal relationships and develops and maintains order. Identifying parallels between police and military power, contributors argue that policing is more than merely the practice of the institution of the police but is the violence work of maintaining a specific social order. Topics covered in the essays include “speculative policing,” which attempts to control not only the present but also uncertain futures; the inextricable relation between anti-Blackness and the violence of the law; the role of police in US politics; French policing of ethno-racial minorities; the relationship between police body cameras and gender equity; and a Brazilian “exceptional prison,” which houses police who have broken the law.

Contributors. Kim Shayo Buchanan, Samira Bueno, Andrew M. Carruthers, Didier Fassin, Ilana Feldman, Phillip Atiba Goff, Jesse A. Goldberg, Rivke Jaffe, Caren Kaplan, Shamus Khan, Andrea Miller, Fatima Mojaddedi, Stuart Schrader, Madiha Tahir, Michelle C. Velasquez-Potts, Graham Denyer Willis
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Violence and Redemption, Volume 15
Candace Vogler and Patchen Markell
Duke University Press
Studying the relationship between liberalism and globalization, this special issue examines discourses and practices of violence and redemption. How do we conceptualize violence and redemption outside the terms that liberalism presents? How have social movements throughout the world responded to or engaged liberal assumptions about what constitutes a violent act? How does the experience of suffering expose the futility of the wish to redeem violence through violence? Focusing on the relationship between redemptive promises and the organization, experience, and effects of violence, these essays study the ways in which ethically charged political ambition, both liberal and nonliberal, sometimes organizes violence and sometimes attempts to heal the breach that comes in its wake.

The essays examine topics such as the socioeconomic crisis in Mexico in the 1980s; continuities between plantation slavery, colonization, and the emergence of independent states as war machines in Africa; the culture of a Palestinian suicide bomber; the architecture of mass rioting and rape in Indonesia; the experience of unredeemed suffering in Herman Melville’s “Shiloh;” and the aggression of Aborigines in Australia.

Contributors. Tim Blackmore, John Borneman, Gillian Cowlishaw, Richard Falk, Ken Graves, Ghassan Hage, Abidin Kusno, Eva Lipman, Claudio Lomnitz, Patchen Markell, Achille Mbembe, Laura Nader, Steven Sampson, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Candace Vogler, Michael Warner, Margaret Werry, Richard Ashby Wilson

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Violence As Obscenity
Limiting the Media's First Amendment Protection
Kevin W. Saunders
Duke University Press, 1996
This timely and accessible volume takes a fresh approach to a question of increasing public concern: whether or not the federal government should regulate media violence. In Violence as Obscenity, Kevin W. Saunders boldly calls into question the assumption that violent material is protected by the First Amendment. Citing a recognized exception to the First Amendment that allows for the regulation of obscene material, he seeks to expand the definition of obscenity to include explicit and offensive depictions of violence.
Saunders examines the public debate on media violence, the arguments of professional and public interest groups urging governmental action, and the media and the ACLU’s desire for self-regulation. Citing research that links violence in the media to actual violence, Saunders argues that a present danger to public safety may be reduced by invoking the existing law on obscenity. Reviewing the justifications of that law, he finds that not only is the legal history relied on by the Supreme Court inadequate to distinguish violence from sex, but also many of the justifications apply more forcefully to instances of violence than to sexually explicit material that has been ruled obscene. Saunders also examines the actions that Congress, states, and municipalities have taken to regulate media violence as well as the legal limitations imposed on such regulations by the First Amendment protections given to speech and the press. In discussing the current operation of the obscenity exception and confronting the issue of censorship, he advocates adapting to the regulation of violent material the doctrine of variable obscenity, which applies a different standard for material aimed at youth, and the doctrine of indecency, which allows for federal regulation of broadcast material.
Cogently and passionately argued, Violence as Obscenity will attract scholars of American constitutional law and mass communication, and general readers moved by current debates about media violence, regulation, and censorship.
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Violence in a Time of Liberation
Murder and Ethnicity at a South African Gold Mine, 1994
Donald L. Donham
Duke University Press, 2011
How can we account for the apparent increase in ethnic violence across the globe? Donald L. Donham develops a methodology for understanding violence that shows why this question needs to be recast. He examines an incident that occurred at a South African gold mine at the moment of the 1994 elections that brought apartheid to a close. Black workers ganged up on the Zulus among them, killing two and injuring many more. While nearly everyone came to characterize the conflict as “ethnic,” Donham argues that heightened ethnic identity was more an outcome of the violence than its cause. Based on his careful reconstruction of events, he contends that the violence was not motivated by hatred of an ethnic other. It emerged, rather, in ironic ways, as capitalist managers gave up apartheid tactics and as black union activists took up strategies that departed from their stated values. National liberation, as it actually occurred, was gritty, contradictory, and incomplete. Given unusual access to the mine, Donham comes to this conclusion based on participant observation, review of extensive records, and interviews conducted over the course of a decade. Violence in a Time of Liberation is a kind of murder mystery that reveals not only who did it but also the ways that narratives of violence, taken up by various media, create ethnic violence after the fact.
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Violence of Democracy
Interparty Conflict in South India
Ruchi Chaturvedi
Duke University Press, 2023
In Violence of Democracy Ruchi Chaturvedi tracks the rise of India’s divisive politics through close examination of decades-long confrontations in Kerala between members of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and supporters of the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh and the Bharatiya Janata Party. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and extensive archival research, Chaturvedi investigates the unique character of the conflict between the party left and the Hindu right. This conflict, she shows, defies explanations centering religious, caste, or ideological differences. It offers instead new ways of understanding how quotidian political competition can produce antagonistic majoritarian communities. Rival political parties mobilize practices of disbursing care and aggressive masculinity in their struggle for electoral and popular power, a process intensified by a criminal justice system that reproduces rather than mitigating violence. Chaturvedi traces these dynamics from the late colonial period to the early 2000s, illuminating the broader relationships between democratic life, divisiveness, and majoritarianism.
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Violence, the Body, and the South, Volume 73
Houston A. Baker Jr. and Dana D. Nelson, eds.
Duke University Press
Violence, the Body, and “The South” is a boldly innovative contribution to a new Southern Studies, which provides a model of collaborative, intergenerational, interracial, interdisciplinary scholarship. This special issue of American Literature challenges the traditional division of the United States between “North” and “South,” revealing that the complexities of violence and pleasure, representation and illusion, innocence and guilt, gender and race exist in infinitely inflected combination in the Americas, not simply in the “South.”
This collection represents first-rate examples of gender, critical race, genre, and material culture studies. Topics ranging from epistemological and authorial rebellions marking Frederick Douglass’s Narrative and Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition to the twentieth-century labors of writers, such as Francisco Goldman and Helena María Viramontes, who work to make visible the complexities of “North” and “South” with respect to subordinated Latino/a bodies. William Faulkner is revisited in an essay on the internalization of “race” in Light in August. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and In the Heat of the Night are analyzed in a framework of homopolitical desire. Genre and regional studies combine in an energetic essay resituating Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl with respect to “Northern” fiction.

Contributors. Houston A. Baker Jr., Jeannine DeLombard, Laura Doyle, Jennifer Rae Greeson, Andrea Levine, Dana D. Nelson, Ana Patricia Rodríguez, Bryan Wagner

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Violence Work
State Power and the Limits of Police
Micol Seigel
Duke University Press, 2018
In Violence Work Micol Seigel offers a new theorization of the quintessential incarnation of state power: the police. Foregrounding the interdependence of policing, the state, and global capital, Seigel redefines policing as “violence work,” showing how it is shaped by its role of channeling state violence. She traces this dynamic by examining the formation, demise, and aftermath of the U.S. State Department's Office of Public Safety (OPS), which between 1962 and 1974 specialized in training police forces internationally. Officially a civilian agency, the OPS grew and operated in military and counterinsurgency realms in ways that transgressed the borders that are meant to contain the police within civilian, public, and local spheres. Tracing the career paths of OPS agents after their agency closed, Seigel shows how police practices writ large are rooted in violence—especially against people of color, the poor, and working people—and how understanding police as a civilian, public, and local institution legitimizes state violence while preserving the myth of state benevolence.
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Violent Democracies in Latin America
Enrique Desmond Arias and Daniel M. Goldstein, eds.
Duke University Press, 2010
Despite recent political movements to establish democratic rule in Latin American countries, much of the region still suffers from pervasive violence. From vigilantism, to human rights violations, to police corruption, violence persists. It is perpetrated by state-sanctioned armies, guerillas, gangs, drug traffickers, and local community groups seeking self-protection. The everyday presence of violence contrasts starkly with governmental efforts to extend civil, political, and legal rights to all citizens, and it is invoked as evidence of the failure of Latin American countries to achieve true democracy. The contributors to this collection take the more nuanced view that violence is not a social aberration or the result of institutional failure; instead, it is intimately linked to the institutions and policies of economic liberalization and democratization.

The contributors—anthropologists, political scientists, sociologists, and historians—explore how individuals and institutions in Latin American democracies, from the rural regions of Colombia and the Dominican Republic to the urban centers of Brazil and Mexico, use violence to impose and contest notions of order, rights, citizenship, and justice. They describe the lived realities of citizens and reveal the historical foundations of the violence that Latin America suffers today. One contributor examines the tightly woven relationship between violent individuals and state officials in Colombia, while another contextualizes violence in Rio de Janeiro within the transnational political economy of drug trafficking. By advancing the discussion of democratic Latin American regimes beyond the usual binary of success and failure, this collection suggests more sophisticated ways of understanding the challenges posed by violence, and of developing new frameworks for guaranteeing human rights in Latin America.

Contributors: Enrique Desmond Arias, Javier Auyero, Lilian Bobea, Diane E. Davis, Robert Gay, Daniel M. Goldstein, Mary Roldán, Todd Landman, Ruth Stanley, María Clemencia Ramírez

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Violent Intimacies
The Trans Everyday and the Making of an Urban World
Asli Zengin
Duke University Press, 2024
In Violent Intimacies, Aslı Zengin traces how trans people in Turkey creatively negotiate and resist everyday cisheteronormative violence. Drawing on the history and ethnography of the trans communal life in Istanbul, Zengin develops an understanding of cisheteronormative violence that expands beyond sex, gender and sexuality. She shows how cisheteronormativity forms a connective tissue among neoliberal governmentality, biopolitical and necropolitical regimes, nationalist religiosity and authoritarian management of social difference. As much as trans people are shaped by these processes, they also transform them in intimate ways. Transness in Turkey provides an insightful site for developing new perspectives on statecraft, securitization and surveillance, family and kin-making, urban geography, and political life. Zengin offers the concept of violent intimacies to theorize this entangled world of the trans everyday where violence and intimacy are co-constitutive. Violent intimacies emerge from trans people’s everyday interactions with the police, religious and medical institutions, street life, family and kinship, and trans femicides and funerals. The dynamic of violent intimacies prompts new understandings of violence and intimacy and the world-making struggles of trans people in a Middle Eastern context.
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Violent Utopia
Dispossession and Black Restoration in Tulsa
Jovan Scott Lewis
Duke University Press, 2022
In Violent Utopia Jovan Scott Lewis retells the history and afterlife of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, from the post-Reconstruction migration of Black people to Oklahoma Indian Territory to contemporary efforts to rebuild Black prosperity. He focuses on how the massacre in Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood—colloquially known as Black Wall Street—curtailed the freedom built there. Rather than framing the massacre as a one-off event, Lewis places it in a larger historical and social context of widespread patterns of anti-Black racism, segregation, and dispossession in Tulsa and beyond. He shows how the processes that led to the massacre, subsequent urban renewal, and intergenerational poverty shored up by nonprofits constitute a form of continuous slow violence. Now, in their attempts to redevelop resources for self-determination, Black Tulsans must reconcile a double inheritance: the massacre’s violence and the historical freedom and prosperity that Greenwood represented. Their future is tied to their geography, which is the foundation from which they will repair and fulfill Greenwood’s promise.
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Virgin Mary and the Neutrino
Reality in Trouble
Isabelle Stengers
Duke University Press, 2023
In Virgin Mary and the Neutrino, first published in French in 2006 and here appearing in English for the first time, Isabelle Stengers experiments with the possibility of addressing modern practices not as a block but through their divergence from each other. Drawing on thinkers ranging from John Dewey to Gilles Deleuze, she develops what she calls an “ecology of practices” into a capacious and heterogeneous perspective that is inclusive of cultural and political forces but not reducible to them. Stengers first advocates for an approach to sciences that would emphasize the way each should be situated by the kind of relationships demanded by what it attempts to address. This approach turns away from the disabling scientific/nonscientific binary—like the opposition between the neutrino and the Virgin Mary. An ecology of practices instead stimulates an appetite for thinking reality not as an arbiter but as what we can relate to through the generation of diverging concerns and obligations.
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Virtual Americas
Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary
Paul Giles
Duke University Press, 2002
Arguing that limited nationalist perspectives have circumscribed the critical scope of American Studies scholarship, Virtual Americas advocates a comparative criticism that illuminates the work of well-known literary figures by defamiliarizing it—placing it in unfamiliar contexts. Paul Giles looks at a number of canonical nineteenth- and twentieth-century American writers by focusing on their interactions with British culture. He demonstrates how American authors from Herman Melville to Thomas Pynchon have been compulsively drawn to negotiate with British culture so that their nationalist agendas have emerged, paradoxically, through transatlantic dialogues. Virtual Americas ultimately suggests that conceptions of national identity in both the United States and Britain have emerged through engagement with—and, often, deliberate exclusion of—ideas and imagery emanating from across the Atlantic.

Throughout Virtual Americas Giles focuses on specific examples of transatlantic cultural interactions such as Frederick Douglass’s experiences and reputation in England; Herman Melville’s satirizing fictions of U.S. and British nationalism; and Vladimir Nabokov’s critique of European high culture and American popular culture in Lolita. He also reverses his perspective, looking at the representation of San Francisco in the work of British-born poet Thom Gunn and Sylvia Plath’s poetic responses to England. Giles develops his theory about the need to defamiliarize the study of American literature by considering the cultural legacy of Surrealism as an alternative genealogy for American Studies and by examining the transatlantic dimensions of writers such as Henry James and Robert Frost in the context of Surrealism.

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Virtual Hallyu
Korean Cinema of the Global Era
Kyung Hyun Kim
Duke University Press, 2011
“[T]his fine book . . . . enlarges our vision of one of the great national cinematic flowerings of the last decade.”—Martin Scorsese, from the foreword

In the late 1990s, South Korean film and other cultural products, broadly known as hallyu (Korean wave), gained unprecedented international popularity. Korean films earned an all-time high of $60.3 million in Japan in 2005, and they outperformed their Hollywood competitors at Korean box offices. In Virtual Hallyu, Kyung Hyun Kim reflects on the precariousness of Korean cinema’s success over the past decade. Arguing that state film policies and socioeconomic factors cannot fully explain cinema’s true potentiality, Kim draws on Deleuze’s concept of the virtual—according to which past and present and truth and falsehood coexist—to analyze the temporal anxieties and cinematic ironies embedded in screen figures such as a made-in-the-USA aquatic monster (The Host), a postmodern Chosun-era wizard (Jeon Woo-chi), a schizo man-child (Oasis), a weepy North Korean terrorist (Typhoon), a salary man turned vengeful fighting machine (Oldboy), and a sick nationalist (the repatriated colonial-era film Spring of Korean Peninsula). Kim maintains that the full significance of hallyu can only be understood by exposing the implicit and explicit ideologies of protonationalism and capitalism that, along with Korea’s ambiguous post-democratization and neoliberalism, are etched against the celluloid surfaces.

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Virtual Memory
Time-Based Art and the Dream of Digitality
Homay King
Duke University Press, 2015
In Virtual Memory, Homay King traces the concept of the virtual through the philosophical works of Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, and Giorgio Agamben to offer a new framework for thinking about film, video, and time-based contemporary art. Detaching the virtual from its contemporary associations with digitality, technology, simulation, and speed, King shows that using its original meaning—which denotes a potential on the cusp of becoming—provides the means to reveal the "analog" elements in contemporary digital art. Through a queer reading of the life and work of mathematician Alan Turing, and analyses of artists who use digital technologies such as Christian Marclay, Agnès Varda, and Victor Burgin, King destabilizes the analog/digital binary. By treating the virtual as the expression of powers of potential and change and of historical contingency, King explains how these artists transcend distinctions between disembodiment and materiality, abstraction and tangibility, and the unworldly and the earth-bound. In so doing, she shows how their art speaks to durational and limit-bound experience more than contemporary understandings of the virtual and digital would suggest.
 
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Virtual Migration
The Programming of Globalization
A. Aneesh
Duke University Press, 2006
Workers in India program software applications, transcribe medical dictation online, chase credit card debtors, and sell mobile phones, diet pills, and mortgages for companies based in other countries around the world. While their skills and labor migrate abroad, these workers remain Indian citizens, living and working in India. A. Aneesh calls this phenomenon “virtual migration,” and in this groundbreaking study he examines the emerging “transnational virtual space” where labor and vast quantities of code and data cross national boundaries, but the workers themselves do not. Through an analysis of the work of computer programmers in India working for the American software industry, Aneesh argues that the programming code connecting globally dispersed workers through data servers and computer screens is the key organizing structure behind the growing phenomenon of virtual migration. This “rule of code,” he contends, is a crucial and underexplored aspect of globalization.

Aneesh draws on the sociology of science, social theory, and research on migration to illuminate the practical and theoretical ramifications of virtual migration. He combines these insights with his extensive ethnographic research in offices in three locations in India—in Delhi, Gurgaon, and Noida—and one in New Jersey. Aneesh contrasts virtual migration with “body shopping,” the more familiar practice of physically bringing programmers from other countries to work on site, in this case, bringing them from India to New Jersey. A significant contribution to the social theory of globalization, Virtual Migration maps the expanding transnational space where globalization is enacted via computer programming code.

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Virtual Pedophilia
Sex Offender Profiling and U.S. Security Culture
Gillian Harkins
Duke University Press, 2020
In Virtual Pedophilia Gillian Harkins traces how by the end of the twentieth century the pedophile as a social outcast evolved into its contemporary appearance as a virtually normal white male. The pedophile's alleged racial and gender normativity was treated as an exception to dominant racialized modes of criminal or diagnostic profiling. The pedophile was instead profiled as a virtual figure, a potential threat made visible only when information was transformed into predictive image. The virtual pedophile was everywhere and nowhere, slipping through day-to-day life undetected until people learned how to arm themselves with the right combination of visually predictive information. Drawing on television, movies, and documentaries such as Law and Order: SVU, To Catch a Predator, Mystic River, and Capturing the Friedmans, Harkins shows how diverse U.S. audiences have been conscripted and trained to be lay detectives who should always be on the lookout for the pedophile as virtual predator. In this way, the perceived threat of the pedophile legitimated increased surveillance and ramped-up legal strictures that expanded the security apparatus of the carceral state.
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Virtual Voyages
Cinema and Travel
Jeffrey Ruoff, ed.
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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Virtual War and Magical Death
Technologies and Imaginaries for Terror and Killing
Neil L. Whitehead and Sverker Finnström, eds.
Duke University Press, 2013
Virtual War and Magical Death is a provocative examination of the relations between anthropology and contemporary global war. Several arguments unite the collected essays, which are based on ethnographic research in varied locations, including Guatemala, Uganda, and Tanzania, as well as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and the United States. Foremost is the contention that modern high-tech warfare—as it is practiced and represented by the military, the media, and civilians—is analogous to rituals of magic and sorcery. Technologies of "virtual warfare," such as high-altitude bombing, remote drone attacks, night-vision goggles, and even music videoes and computer games that simulate battle, reproduce the imaginative worlds and subjective experiences of witchcraft, magic, and assault sorcery long studied by cultural anthropologists.

Another significant focus of the collection is the U.S. military's exploitation of ethnographic research, particularly through its controversial Human Terrain Systems (HTS) Program, which embeds anthropologists as cultural experts in military units. Several pieces address the ethical dilemmas that HTS and other counterinsurgency projects pose for anthropologists. Other essays reveal the relatively small scale of those programs in relation to the military's broader use of, and ambitions for, social scientific data.

Contributors
. Robertson Allen, Brian Ferguson, Sverker Finnström, Roberto J. González, David H. Price, Antonius Robben, Victoria Sanford, Jeffrey Sluka, Koen Stroeken, Matthew Sumera, Neil L. Whitehead

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Virtuous Vice
Homoeroticism and the Public Sphere
Eric O. Clarke
Duke University Press, 2000
In this daring study of queer life and the public sphere, Eric O. Clarke examines the effects of inclusion within public culture. Departing from studies that emphasize homophobia and its mechanisms of exclusion, Virtuous Vice details how mainstream efforts to represent queers affirmatively continually fall short of full democratic enfranchisement. Clarke draws on contemporary writings along with late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English and European cultural history to investigate how concepts of value, representation, and homoeroticism have interacted and circulated in the West since the Enlightenment.
Examining the role of eroticism in citizenship and why only normalizing
constructions of homosexuality enable inclusion, Clarke reconsiders the work of Habermas and Foucault in relation to contemporary visibility politics, Kant’s moral and political theory, Marx’s analysis of value, and the sexualized dynamics of the Victorian cultural public sphere. The juxtaposition of Habermas with Foucault reveals the surprising value of reading the former in the context of queer politics and the usefulness of the theory of the public sphere for understanding contemporary identity politics and the visibility politics of the 1990s. Examining how a host of nonsexual factors impinge historically upon the constitution of sexual identities and practices, Clarke negotiates the relation between questions of publicity and categories of value. Discussions of television sitcoms (such as Ellen), marketing techniques, authenticity, and literary culture add to this daring analysis of visibility politics.
As a critique of the claim that equal representation of gays and lesbians necessarily constitutes progress, this significant intervention into social theory will find enthusiastic readers in the fields of Victorian, cultural, literary, and gay and lesbian studies, as well as other fields engaged with categories of identity.
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Virulent Zones
Animal Disease and Global Health at China's Pandemic Epicenter
Lyle Fearnley
Duke University Press, 2020
Scientists have identified southern China as a likely epicenter for viral pandemics, a place where new viruses emerge out of intensively farmed landscapes and human--animal interactions. In Virulent Zones, Lyle Fearnley documents the global plans to stop the next influenza pandemic at its source, accompanying virologists and veterinarians as they track lethal viruses to China's largest freshwater lake, Poyang Lake. Revealing how scientific research and expert agency operate outside the laboratory, he shows that the search for origins is less a linear process of discovery than a constant displacement toward new questions about cause and context. As scientists strive to understand the environments from which the influenza virus emerges, the unexpected scale of duck farming systems and unusual practices such as breeding wild geese unsettle research objects, push scientific inquiry in new directions, and throw expert authority into question. Drawing on fieldwork with global health scientists, state-employed veterinarians, and poultry farmers in Beijing and at Poyang Lake, Fearnley situates the production of ecological facts about disease emergence inside the shifting cultural landscapes of agrarian change and the geopolitics of global health.
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The Virus Touch
Theorizing Epidemic Media
Bishnupriya Ghosh
Duke University Press, 2023
In The Virus Touch Bishnupriya Ghosh argues that media are central to understanding emergent relations between viruses, humans, and nonhuman life. Writing in the shadow of the HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 global pandemics, Ghosh theorizes “epidemic media” to show how epidemics are mediated in images, numbers, and movements through the processes of reading test results and tracking infection and mortality rates. Scientific, artistic, and activist epidemic media that make multispecies relations sensible and manageable eschew anthropocentric survival strategies and instead recast global public health crises as biological, social, and ecological catastrophes, pushing us toward a multispecies politics of health. Ghosh trains her analytic gaze on these mediations as expressed in the collection and analysis of blood samples as a form of viral media; the geospatialization of data that track viral hosts like wild primates; and the use of multisensory images to trace fluctuations in viral mutations. Studying how epidemic media inscribe, store, and transmit multispecies relations attunes us to the anthropogenic drivers of pathogenicity like deforestation or illegal wildlife trading and the vulnerabilities accruing from diseases that arise from socioeconomic inequities and biopolitical neglect.
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The Visceral Logics of Decolonization
Neetu Khanna
Duke University Press, 2020
In The Visceral Logics of Decolonization Neetu Khanna rethinks the project of decolonization by exploring a knotted set of relations between embodied experience and political feeling that she conceptualizes as the visceral. Khanna focuses on the work of the Progressive Writers' Association (PWA)—a Marxist anticolonial literary group active in India between the 1930s and 1950s—to show how anticolonial literature is a staging ground for exploring racialized emotion and revolutionary feeling. Among others, Khanna examines novels by Mulk Raj Anand, Ahmed Ali, and Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, as well as the feminist writing of Rashid Jahan and Ismat Chughtai, who each center the somatic life of the body as a fundamental site of colonial subjugation. In this way, decolonial action comes not solely from mental transformation, but from a reconstitution of the sensorial nodes of the body. The visceral, Khanna contends, therefore becomes a critical dimension of Marxist theories of revolutionary consciousness. In tracing the contours of the visceral's role in decolonial literature and politics, Khanna bridges affect and postcolonial theory in new and provocative ways.
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Visible Histories, Disappearing Women
Producing Muslim Womanhood in Late Colonial Bengal
Mahua Sarkar
Duke University Press, 2008
In Visible Histories, Disappearing Women, Mahua Sarkar examines how Muslim women in colonial Bengal came to be more marginalized than Hindu women in nationalist discourse and subsequent historical accounts. She also considers how their near-invisibility except as victims has underpinned the construction of the ideal citizen-subject in late colonial India. Through critical engagements with significant feminist and postcolonial scholarship, Sarkar maps out when and where Muslim women enter into the written history of colonial Bengal. She argues that the nation-centeredness of history as a discipline and the intellectual politics of liberal feminism have together contributed to the production of Muslim women as the oppressed, mute, and invisible “other” of the normative modern Indian subject.

Drawing on extensive archival research and oral histories of Muslim women who lived in Calcutta and Dhaka in the first half of the twentieth century, Sarkar traces Muslim women as they surface and disappear in colonial, Hindu nationalist, and liberal Muslim writings, as well as in the memories of Muslim women themselves. The oral accounts provide both a rich source of information about the social fabric of urban Bengal during the final years of colonial rule and a glimpse of the kind of negotiations with stereotypes that even relatively privileged, middle-class Muslim women are still frequently obliged to make in India today. Sarkar concludes with some reflections on the complex links between past constructions of Muslim women, current representations, and the violence against them in contemporary India.

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Vision and Textuality
Stephen Melville and Bill Readings, eds.
Duke University Press, 1995
The influence of contemporary literary theory on art history is increasingly evident, but there is little or no agreement about the nature and consequence of this new intersection of the visual and the textual. Vision and Textuality brings together essays by many of the most influential scholars in the field—both young and more established writers from the United States, England, and France—to address the emergent terms and practices of contemporary art history.
With essays by Rosalind Krauss, Hal Foster, Norman Bryson, Victor Burgin, Martin Jay, Louis Marin, Thomas Crow, Griselda Pollock, and others, the volume is organized into sections devoted to the discipline of art history, the implications of semiotics, the new cultural history of art, and the impact of psychoanalysis. The works discussed in these essays range from Rembrandt’s Danae to Jorge Immendorf’s Café Deutschland, from Vauxhall Gardens to Max Ernst, and from the Imagines of Philostratus to William Godwin’s novel Caleb Williams. Each section is preceded by a short introduction that offers further contexts for considering the essays that follow, while the editors’ general introduction presents an overall exploration of the relation between vision and textuality in a variety of both institutional and theoretical contexts. Among other issues, it examines the relevance of aesthetics, the current concern with modernism and postmodernism, and the possible development of new disciplinary formations in the humanities.

Contributors. Mieke Bal, John Bender, Norman Bryson, Victor Burgin, Thomas Crow, Peter de Bolla, Hal Foster, Michael Holly, Martin Jay, Rosalind Krauss, Françoise Lucbert, Louis Martin, Stephen Melville, Griselda Pollock, Bill Readings, Irit Rogoff, Bennet Schaber, John Tagg

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Visionary Pragmatism
Radical and Ecological Democracy in Neoliberal Times
Romand Coles
Duke University Press, 2016
As neoliberal capitalism destroys democracy, commonwealth, and planetary ecology, the need for radically rethinking and generating transformative responses to these catastrophes is greater than ever. Given that, Romand Coles presents an invigorating new mode of scholarship and political practice he calls "visionary pragmatism." Coles explores the profound interrelationships among everyday micropractices of grassroots politics and pedagogy, institutional transformation, and political protest through polyfocal lenses of political and social theory, neuroscience research, complex systems theory, and narratives of his cutting-edge action research. Visionary Pragmatism offers a theory of revolutionary cooptation that, in part, selectively employs practices and strategies of the dominant order to radically alter the coordinates of power and possibility. Underscoring the potential, vitality, and power of emerging democratic practices to change the world, Visionary Pragmatism's simultaneous theoretical rigor and grounding in actual political and ecological practices provokes and inspires new ways of cocreating knowledge and action in dark times. 
 
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Visions of Beirut
The Urban Life of Media Infrastructure
Hatim El-Hibri
Duke University Press, 2021
In Visions of Beirut Hatim El-Hibri explores how the creation and circulation of images have shaped the urban spaces and cultural imaginaries of Beirut. Drawing on fieldwork and texts ranging from maps, urban plans, and aerial photographs to live television and drone-camera footage, El-Hibri traces how the technologies and media infrastructure that visualize the city are used to consolidate or destabilize regimes of power. Throughout the twentieth century, colonial, economic, and military mapping projects helped produce and govern Beirut's spaces. In the 1990s, the imagery of its post-civil war downtown reconstruction cast Beirut as a site of financial investment in ways that obscured its ongoing crises. During and following the 2006 Israel/Hizbullah war, Hizbullah's use of live television broadcasts of fighting and protests along with its construction of a war memorial museum at a former secret military bunker demonstrate the tension between visualizing space and the practices of concealment. Outlining how Beirut's urban space and public life intertwine with images and infrastructure, El-Hibri interrogates how media embody and exacerbate the region's political fault lines.
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Visions of the Emerald City
Modernity, Tradition, and the Formation of Porfirian Oaxaca, Mexico
Mark Overmyer-Velázquez
Duke University Press, 2006
Visions of the Emerald City is an absorbing historical analysis of how Mexicans living in Oaxaca City experienced “modernity” during the lengthy “Order and Progress” dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (1876–1911). Renowned as the Emerald City (for its many buildings made of green cantera stone), Oaxaca City was not only the economic, political, and cultural capital of the state of Oaxaca but also a vital commercial hub for all of southern Mexico. As such, it was a showcase for many of Díaz’s modernizing and state-building projects. Drawing on in-depth research in archives in Oaxaca, Mexico City, and the United States, Mark Overmyer-Velázquez describes how Oaxacans, both elites and commoners, crafted and manipulated practices of tradition and modernity to define themselves and their city as integral parts of a modern Mexico.

Incorporating a nuanced understanding of visual culture into his analysis, Overmyer-Velázquez shows how ideas of modernity figured in Oaxacans’ ideologies of class, race, gender, sexuality, and religion and how they were expressed in Oaxaca City’s streets, plazas, buildings, newspapers, and public rituals. He pays particular attention to the roles of national and regional elites, the Catholic church, and popular groups—such as Oaxaca City’s madams and prostitutes—in shaping the discourses and practices of modernity. At the same time, he illuminates the dynamic interplay between these groups. Ultimately, this well-illustrated history provides insight into provincial life in pre-Revolutionary Mexico and challenges any easy distinctions between the center and the periphery or modernity and tradition.

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Visitation
The Conjure Work of Black Feminist Avant-Garde Cinema
Jennifer DeClue
Duke University Press, 2022
In Visitation, Jennifer DeClue shows how Black feminist avant-garde filmmakers draw from historical archives in order to visualize and reckon with violence suffered by Black women in the United States. DeClue argues that these filmmakers—including Kara Walker, Kara Lynch, Tourmaline, and Ja’Tovia Gary—create spaces of mourning and reckoning rather than voyeurism and pornotropy. Through their use of editing, performance, and cinematic experimentation, these filmmakers intervene in the production of Blackness and activate new ways of seeing Black women and telling their stories. Theorizing these films as a form of conjure work, DeClue shows how these filmmakers raise the specters of Black women from the past and invite them to reveal history from their point of view. In so doing, Black feminist avant-garde filmmakers channel spirits that haunt archives and create cinematic arenas for witnessing Black women battling for survival during pivotal and exceedingly violent moments in US history.

Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient
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Visual Archives of Sex
Heike Bauer, Melina Pappademos, Katie Sutton, and Jennifer Tucker, special issue editors
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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Visual Cultures of Japanese Imperialism, Volume 8
Gennifer Weisenfeld, ed.
Duke University Press
Under pressure of cultural colonization from the West and expanding an imperialist force and cultural colonizer within Asia, Japan occupied a unique space on the international landscape in the years from the beginning of the Meiji Period to the Pacific War. This special issue of positions examines the integral role that visual culture played both in representing and constituting this imperial reality.
The articles, contributed by scholars in the fields of art history, cultural history, and Japanese literature, address the interactions between Japan, the West, and the rest of Asia. Costumes, architecture, tourism propaganda, pottery, and a host of other sources provide the raw materials for Visual Cultures of Japanese Imperialism, and the incisive essays built from these sources will change readers’ understanding of the visual culture(s) of imperialism.

Contributors. Kim Brandt, Leo Ching, Carol Ann Christ, Christine Guth, Jordan Sand, Gennifer Weisenfeld, Cherie Wendelken

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Visual Disobedience
Art and Decoloniality in Central America
Kency Cornejo
Duke University Press, 2024
In Visual Disobedience, Kency Cornejo traces the emergence of new artistic strategies for Indigenous, feminist, and anticarceral resistance in the wake of torture, disappearance, killings, and US-funded civil wars in Central America. Cornejo reveals a direct line from US intervention to current forms of racial, economic, and gender injustice in the isthmus, connecting this to the criminalization and incarceration of migrants at the US-Mexico border today. Drawing on interviews with Central American artists and curators, she theorizes a form of “visual disobedience” in which art operates in opposition to nation-states, colonialism, and visual coloniality. She counters historical erasure by examining over eighty artworks and highlighting forty artists across the region. Cornejo also rejects the normalized image of the suffering Central American individual by repositioning artists as creative agents of their own realities. With this a comprehensive exploration of contemporary Central American art, Cornejo highlights the role of visual disobedience as a strategy of decolonial aesthetics to expose and combat coloniality, heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, empire, and other systems of oppression.
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Visual Occupations
Violence and Visibility in a Conflict Zone
Gil Z. Hochberg
Duke University Press, 2015
In Visual Occupations Gil Z. Hochberg shows how the Israeli Occupation of Palestine is driven by the unequal access to visual rights, or the right to control what can be seen, how, and from which position. Israel maintains this unequal balance by erasing the history and denying the existence of Palestinians, and by carefully concealing its own militarization. Israeli surveillance of Palestinians, combined with the militarized gaze of Israeli soldiers at places like roadside checkpoints, also serve as tools of dominance. Hochberg analyzes various works by Palestinian and Israeli artists, among them Elia Suleiman, Rula Halawani, Sharif Waked, Ari Folman, and Larry Abramson, whose films, art, and photography challenge the inequity of visual rights by altering, queering, and manipulating dominant modes of representing the conflict. These artists' creation of new ways of seeing—such as the refusal of Palestinian filmmakers and photographers to show Palestinian suffering or the Israeli artists' exposure of state manipulated Israeli blindness —offers a crucial gateway, Hochberg suggests, for overcoming and undoing Israel's militarized dominance and political oppression of Palestinians.
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Visual Pedagogy
Media Cultures in and beyond the Classroom
Brian Goldfarb
Duke University Press, 2002
In classrooms, museums, health clinics and beyond, the educational uses of visual media have proliferated over the past fifty years. Film, video, television, and digital media have been integral to the development of new pedagogical theories and practices, globalization processes, and identity and community formation. Yet, Brian Goldfarb argues, the educational roles of visual technologies have not been fully understood or appreciated. He contends that in order to understand the intersections of new media and learning, we need to recognize the sweeping scope of the technologically infused visual pedagogy—both in and outside the classroom. From Samoa to the United States mainland to Africa and Brazil, from museums to city streets, Visual Pedagogy explores the educational applications of visual media in different institutional settings during the past half century.

Looking beyond the popular media texts and mainstream classroom technologies that are the objects of most analyses of media and education, Goldfarb encourages readers to see a range of media subcultures as pedagogical tools. The projects he analyzes include media produced by AIDS/HIV advocacy groups and social services agencies for classroom use in the 1990s; documentary and fictional cinemas of West Africa used by the French government and then by those resisting it; museum exhibitions; and TV Anhembi, a municipally sponsored collaboration between the television industry and community-based videographers in São Paolo, Brazil.

Combining media studies, pedagogical theory, and art history, and including an appendix of visual media resources and ideas about the most productive ways to utilize visual technologies for educational purposes, Visual Pedagogy will be useful to educators, administrators, and activists.

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Visual Time
The Image in History
Keith Moxey
Duke University Press, 2013
Visual Time offers a rare consideration of the idea of time in art history. Non-Western art histories currently have an unprecedented prominence in the discipline. To what extent are their artistic narratives commensurate with those told about Western art? Does time run at the same speed in all places? Keith Moxey argues that the discipline of art history has been too attached to interpreting works of art based on a teleological categorization—demonstrating how each work influences the next as part of a linear sequence—which he sees as tied to Western notions of modernity. In contrast, he emphasizes how the experience of viewing art creates its own aesthetic time, where the viewer is entranced by the work itself rather than what it represents about the historical moment when it was created. Moxey discusses the art, and writing about the art, of modern and contemporary artists, such as Gerard Sekoto, Thomas Demand, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Cindy Sherman, as well as the sixteenth-century figures Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Albrecht Dürer, Matthias Grünewald, and Hans Holbein. In the process, he addresses the phenomenological turn in the study of the image, its application to the understanding of particular artists, the ways verisimilitude eludes time in both the past and the present, and the role of time in nationalist accounts of the past.
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Visualizing Fascism
The Twentieth-Century Rise of the Global Right
Julia Adeney Thomas and Geoff Eley, editors
Duke University Press, 2020
Visualizing Fascism argues that fascism was not merely a domestic menace in a few European nations, but arose as a genuinely global phenomenon in the early twentieth century. Contributors use visual materials to explore fascism's populist appeal in settings around the world, including China, Japan, South Africa, Slovakia, and Spain. This visual strategy allows readers to see the transnational rise of the right as it fed off the agitated energies of modernity and mobilized shared political and aesthetic tropes. This volume also considers the postwar aftermath as antifascist art forms were depoliticized and repurposed in the West. More commonly, analyses of fascism focus on Italy and Germany alone and on institutions like fascist parties, but that approach truncates our understanding of the way fascism was indebted to colonialism and internationalism with all their attendant grievances and aspirations. Using photography, graphic arts, architecture, monuments, and film—rather than written documents alone—produces a portable concept of fascism, useful for grappling with the upsurge of the global right a century ago—and today.

Contributors. Nadya Bair, Paul D. Barclay, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Maggie Clinton, Geoff Eley, Lutz Koepnick, Ethan Mark, Bertrand Metton, Lorena Rizzo, Julia Adeney Thomas, Claire Zimmerman
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Vital Decomposition
Soil Practitioners and Life Politics
Kristina M. Lyons
Duke University Press, 2020
In Colombia, decades of social and armed conflict and the US-led war on drugs have created a seemingly untenable situation for scientists and rural communities as they attempt to care for forests and grow non-illicit crops. In Vital Decomposition Kristina M. Lyons presents an ethnography of human-soil relations. She follows state soil scientists and peasants across labs, greenhouses, forests, and farms and attends to the struggles and collaborations between farmers, agrarian movements, state officials, and scientists over the meanings of peace, productivity, rural development, and sustainability in Colombia. In particular, Lyons examines the practices and philosophies of rural farmers who value the decomposing layers of leaves, which make the soils that sustain life in the Amazon, and shows how the study and stewardship of the soil point to alternative frameworks for living and dying. In outlining the life-making processes that compose and decompose into soil, Lyons theorizes how life can thrive in the face of the violence, criminalization, and poisoning produced by militarized, growth-oriented development.
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A Vital Frontier
Water Insurgencies in Europe
Andrea Muehlebach
Duke University Press, 2023
In A Vital Frontier Andrea Muehlebach examines the work of activists across Europe as they organize to preserve water as a commons and public good in the face of privatization. Traversing social, political, legal, and hydrological terrains, Muehlebach situates water as a political fault line at the frontiers of financialization, showing how the seemingly relentless expansion of capital into public utilities is being challenged by an equally relentless and often successful insurgence of political organizing. Drawing on ethnographic research, Muehlebach presents water protests as a vital politics that comprises popular referenda, barricades in the streets, huge demonstrations, the burning of utility bills, and legal disputes over transparency and contracts. As Muehlebach documents, Europe’s water activists articulate their own values of democracy and just price, raising far-reaching political questions about private versus common property and financing, liberal democracy, sovereignty, legality, and collective infrastructural responsibility in the face of financialization and commodification. Muehlebach shows that water-rights activists can successfully resist financial markets by exposing the commodification of water as the theft of life itself.
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Vocabulary of Soviet Society and Culture
A Selected Guide to Russian Words, Idioms, and Expressions of the Post-Stalin Era, 1953–1991
Irina H. Corten
Duke University Press, 1992
Irina H. Corten's Vocabulary of Soviet Society and Culture is an experiment in what Soviet scholars call lingvostranovedenie—the study of a country and its culture through the peculiarities of its language. Not a conventional dictionary, Corten's lexicon is selective, offering a broad sampling of culturally significant words in the areas of politics, ideology, the economy, education, arts and letters, social problems and everyday life as well as language associated with the personalities and activities of individual Soviet leaders.
The entries are listed alphabetically in English transliteration followed by the Cyrillic, although readers familiar with Russian may prefer to use the Cyrillic alphabet listing included in this volume. In each entry, the author provides a succinct but full explanation of the term and, whenever possible, cross-references to other entries, authentic examples of its use, and samples of relevant Soviet jokes. A reader may approach the lexicon either sequentially or with the aid of a subject thesaurus that divides the material into specific topics. A listing of complementary sources of reference appears in a useful bibliography.
With this fascinating lexicon of "Sovietisms," Corten provides an invaluable and easily accessible medium for those general readers and scholars of the Russian language and Soviet culture interested in understanding contemporary Soviet life.

Selected entries from the Vocabulary of Soviet Society and Culture

Anekdótchik (anekdótchitsa) (cyrillic spelling) (n.)
1: A person who tells jokes (anekdoty); 2: coll. since the late Stalin era, a person arrested and given a prison sentence for the telling of political jokes. The phenomenon indicates the important role of the political joke in Soviet culture and, specifically, in the dissident movement. See iazychnik; sident.

The following jokes were popular during the Brezhnev era:
1. "Comrade Brezhnev, what is your hobby?"
"Collecting jokes about myself."
"And how many have you collected so far?"
"Two and a half labor camps."
2. Question: What is a marked-down joke?
Answer: A joke which, under Stalin, got you ten years in a labor camp, and now gets you only five.

egoístiki (cyrillic) (n.; pl.). Lit., little egotists; coll. since the 1970s referring to headsets worn by music lovers, especially teenage fans of rock music. The idea is that, by wearing headsets, one shuts out the world and becomes indifferent to everything except oneself.

zhrál'nia (cyrillic) (n.). Der. zhrat', to gorge, devour (vulg.); coll. since the 1970s denoting an eating establishment with inexpensive and often bad-tasting food. In the late 1980s, the term also has been applied to new fast-food restaurants which have been built in Soviet cities by Western concerns, for example, McDonald's. See amerikanka; stekliashka; stoiachka.

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The Voice and Its Doubles
Media and Music in Northern Australia
Daniel Fisher
Duke University Press, 2016
Beginning in the early 1980s Aboriginal Australians found in music, radio, and filmic media a means to make themselves heard across the country and to insert themselves into the center of Australian political life. In The Voice and Its Doubles Daniel Fisher analyzes the great success of this endeavor, asking what is at stake in the sounds of such media for Aboriginal Australians. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in northern Australia, Fisher describes the close proximity of musical media, shifting forms of governmental intervention, and those public expressions of intimacy and kinship that suffuse Aboriginal Australian social life. Today’s Aboriginal media include genres of country music and hip-hop; radio requests and broadcast speech; visual graphs of a digital audio timeline; as well as the statistical media of audience research and the discursive and numerical figures of state audits and cultural policy formation. In each of these diverse instances the mediatized voice has become a site for overlapping and at times discordant forms of political, expressive, and institutional creativity. 
 
 
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The Voice in the Headphones
David Grubbs
Duke University Press, 2020
The voice in the headphones says, “you’re rolling” . . .

The Voice in the Headphones is an experiment in music writing in the form of a long poem centered on the culture of the recording studio. It describes in intricate, prismatic detail one marathon day in a recording studio during which an unnamed musician struggles to complete a film soundtrack. The book extends the form of Grubbs's previous volume Now that the audience is assembled, sharing its goal of musicalizing the language of writing about music. Mulling the insight that “studio is the absence of pushback”—now that no audience is assembled—The Voice in the Headphones details one musician's strategies for applying the requisite pressure to the proceedings, for making it count. The Voice in the Headphones is both a literary work and a meditation on sound recording, delivered at a moment in which the commercial recording studio shades into oblivion. It draws upon Grubbs's own history of several decades as a recording artist, and its location could be described as every studio in which he has set foot.
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Voluminous States
Sovereignty, Materiality, and the Territorial Imagination
Franck Billé
Duke University Press, 2020
From the Arctic to the South China Sea, states are vying to secure sovereign rights over vast maritime stretches, undersea continental plates, shifting ice flows, airspace, and the subsoil. Conceiving of sovereign space as volume rather than area, the contributors to Voluminous States explore how such a conception reveals and underscores the three-dimensional nature of modern territorial governance. In case studies ranging from the United States, Europe, and the Himalayas to Hong Kong, Korea, and Bangladesh, the contributors outline how states are using airspace surveillance, maritime patrols, and subterranean monitoring to gain and exercise sovereignty over three-dimensional space. Whether examining how militaries are digging tunnels to create new theaters of operations, the impacts of climate change on borders, or the relation between borders and nonhuman ecologies, they demonstrate that a three-dimensional approach to studying borders is imperative for gaining a fuller understanding of sovereignty.

Contributors. Debbora Battaglia, Franck Billé, Wayne Chambliss, Jason Cons, Hilary Cunningham (Scharper), Klaus Dodds, Elizabeth Cullen Dunn, Gastón Gordillo, Sarah Green, Tina Harris, Caroline Humphrey, Marcel LaFlamme, Lisa Sang Mi Min, Aihwa Ong, Clancy Wilmott, Jerry Zee
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The Vortex
A Novel
José Eustasio Rivera
Duke University Press, 2018
Published in 1924 and widely acknowledged as a major work of twentieth-century Latin American literature, José Eustasio Rivera's The Vortex follows the harrowing adventures of the young poet Arturo Cova and his lover Alicia as they flee Bogotá and head into the wild and woolly backcountry of Colombia. After being separated from Alicia, Arturo leaves the high plains for the jungle, where he witnesses firsthand the horrid conditions of those forced or tricked into tapping rubber trees. A story populated by con men, rubber barons, and the unrelenting landscape, The Vortex is both a denunciation of the sensational human-rights abuses that took place during the Amazonian rubber boom and one of the most famous renderings of the natural environment in Latin American literary history.
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Vulgar Beauty
Acting Chinese in the Global Sensorium
Mila Zuo
Duke University Press, 2022
In Vulgar Beauty Mila Zuo offers a new theorization of cinematic feminine beauty by showing how mediated encounters with Chinese film and popular culture stars produce feelings of Chineseness. To illustrate this, Zuo uses the vulgar as an analytic to trace how racial, gendered, and cultural identity is imagined and produced through affect. She frames the vulgar as a characteristic that is experienced through the Chinese concept of weidao, or flavor, in which bitter, salty, pungent, sweet, and sour performances of beauty produce non-Western forms of sexualized and racialized femininity. Analyzing contemporary film and media ranging from actress Gong Li’s post-Mao movies of the late 1980s and 1990s to Joan Chen’s performance in Twin Peaks to Ali Wong’s stand-up comedy specials, Zuo shows how vulgar beauty disrupts Western and colonial notions of beauty. Vulgar beauty, then, becomes the taste of difference. By demonstrating how Chinese feminine beauty becomes a cinematic invention invested in forms of affective racialization, Zuo makes a critical reconsideration of aesthetic theory.
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Vulnerability in Resistance
Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay, editors
Duke University Press, 2016
Vulnerability and resistance have often been seen as opposites, with the assumption that vulnerability requires protection and the strengthening of paternalistic power at the expense of collective resistance. Focusing on political movements and cultural practices in different global locations, including Turkey, Palestine, France, and the former Yugoslavia, the contributors to Vulnerability in Resistance articulate an understanding of the role of vulnerability in practices of resistance. They consider how vulnerability is constructed, invoked, and mobilized within neoliberal discourse, the politics of war, resistance to authoritarian and securitarian power, in LGBTQI struggles, and in the resistance to occupation and colonial violence. The essays  offer a feminist account of political agency by exploring occupy movements and street politics, informal groups at checkpoints and barricades, practices of self-defense, hunger strikes, transgressive enactments of solidarity and mourning, infrastructural mobilizations, and aesthetic and erotic interventions into public space that mobilize memory and expose forms of power. Pointing to possible strategies for a feminist politics of transversal engagements and suggesting a politics of bodily resistance that does not disavow forms of vulnerability, the contributors develop a new conception of embodiment and sociality within fields of contemporary power.

Contributors. Meltem Ahiska, Athena Athanasiou, Sarah Bracke, Judith Butler, Elsa Dorlin, Başak Ertür, Zeynep Gambetti, Rema Hammami, Marianne Hirsch, Elena Loizidou, Leticia Sabsay, Nükhet Sirman, Elena Tzelepis
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