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Fly-Fishing
Christopher Schaberg
Duke University Press, 2023
In Fly-Fishing, Christopher Schaberg ponders his lifetime pursuit of the widely mythologized art of fly-fishing. From the Michigan lakeshore where he learned to fish to casting flies in a New Orleans bayou, Schaberg sketches landscapes and fish habitats and shows how fly-fishing allows him to think about coexisting with other species. It offers Schaberg a much-needed source of humility, social isolation, connection with nature, and a reminder of environmental degradation. Rather than centering fishing on trophies, conquest, and travel, he advocates for a “small-fishing” that values catching the diminutive fish near one’s home. Introspective and personal, Fly-Fishing demonstrates how Schaberg’s obsession indelibly shapes how he understands and lives in the wider world.
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Flying Saucers Rock 'n' Roll
Conversations with Unjustly Obscure Rock 'n' Soul Eccentrics
Jake Austen, ed.
Duke University Press, 2011
For nearly twenty years, the much-beloved music magazine Roctober has featured work by some of the best underground cartoonists, exhaustive examinations of made-up genres such as “robot rock,” and an ongoing exploration of everything Sammy Davis Jr. ever sang, said, or did. But the heart of the magazine has always been the lengthy conversations with overlooked or forgotten artists. Flying Saucers Rock ’n’ Roll gathers the most compelling of these interviews. Eccentric, important artists—including the rockabilly icon Billy Lee Riley, the jazz musician and activist Oscar Brown Jr., the “Outlaw Country” singer David Allan Coe, and the pioneer rock ’n’ roll group the Treniers—give the most in-depth interviews of their lengthy careers. Obscure musicians, such as the Armenian-language novelty artist Guy Chookoorian and the frustrated interstellar glam act Zolar X, reveal fascinating lives lived at rock’s margins. Roctober’s legendarily dedicated writers convey telling anecdotes in the fervent, captivating prose that has long been appreciated by music enthusiasts. Along with the entertaining interviews, Flying Saucers Rock ’n’ Roll features more than sixty images from the pages of Roctober and ten illustrations created for the book by the underground rock ’n’ roll artist King Merinuk.

Contributors
Steve Albini
Ben Austen
Jake Austen
John Battles
Bosco
Ken Burke
Mike Maltese
King Merinuk
Ken Mottet
Jonathan Poletti
James Porter
"Colonel" Dan Sorenson
Jacqueline Stewart

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The Fold
From Your Body to the Cosmos
Laura U. Marks
Duke University Press, 2024
In The Fold, Laura U. Marks offers a practical philosophy and aesthetic theory for living in an infinitely connected cosmos. Drawing on the theories of Leibniz, Glissant, Deleuze, and theoretical physicist David Bohm—who each conceive of the universe as being folded in on itself in myriad ways—Marks contends that the folds of the cosmos are entirely constituted of living beings. From humans to sandwiches to software to stars, every entity is alive and occupies its own private enclosure inside the cosmos. Through analyses of fiction, documentary and experimental movies, interactive media, and everyday situations, Marks outlines embodied methods for detecting and augmenting the connections between each living entity and the cosmos. She shows that by affectively mediating with the ever-shifting folded relations within the cosmos, it is possible to build “soul-assemblages” that challenge information capitalism, colonialism, and other power structures and develop new connections with the infinite. With this guide for living within the enfolded and unfolding cosmos, Marks teaches readers to richly apprehend the world and to trace the processes of becoming that are immanent within the fold.
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Food and France
What Food Studies Can Teach Us about History
Erica J. Peters and Bertram M. Gordon, editors
Duke University Press

This special issue offers a broad range of social and cultural insights into the history of French gastronomy. At a moment when French cuisine no longer dominates the world of fine dining, the history of French food has drawn increasing attention in the academic world. The contributors address topics spanning the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, such as coffee’s relationship to slavery and exoticism; the promotion of terroir to an aspiring middle class; the contrast between the romanticized images of Parisian shop girls and their efforts to survive on street food in the early twentieth century; the "standard meal" imagined by nineteenth-century nutritionists and the divergent reality of meager lunches for the working class; and the inequitable experience of wartime deprivation. The articles in this issue both model how the study of the culture of food can ground our understanding of France’s place in the world and illuminate questions of nationalism, global networks, gender, race, ethnicity, and class.

Contributors: Martin Bruegel, Bertram M. Gordon, Julia Landweber, Philippe Meyzie, Kenneth Mouré, Erica J. Peters, Patricia A. Tilburg
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Food and Work in the Americas
Susan Levine and Steve Striffler, special issue editors
Duke University Press
This special issue challenges historians to think about food and labor by considering how not only producing but acquiring, preparing, eating, and enjoying food are central to working-class life and capitalist transformation. Its essays bring labor history into closer conversation with the interdisciplinary perspectives of food studies to explore how broadly and deeply food experiences and working lives shape one another. Contributors trace this relationship through a series of case studies from across the Americas, including discussions of Native American life during the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, African American food workers in the early twentieth century, Puerto Rican sugarcane workers under US imperialism, and the politics of fair trade.

Susan Levine is Professor of History and Director of the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author of School Lunch Politics: The Surprising History of America’s Favorite Welfare Program. Steve Striffler is the Doris Zemurray Stone Chair in Latin American Studies and Professor of Anthropology at the University of New Orleans. He is the author of In the Shadows of State and Capital: The United Fruit Company, Popular Struggle, and Agrarian Restructuring in Ecuador, 19001995, also published by Duke University Press.

Contributors: William Bauer, Sarah Besky, Sandy Brown, Rachel Herrmann, Felicia Kornbluh, Susan Levine, Sarah Lyon, Vanessa May, April Merleaux, Liesl Orenic, Sara Ries, Steve Striffler
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Food, Farms, and Solidarity
French Farmers Challenge Industrial Agriculture and Genetically Modified Crops
Chaia Heller
Duke University Press, 2012
The Confédération Paysanne, one of France's largest farmers' unions, has successfully fought against genetically modified organisms (GMOs), but unlike other allied movements, theirs has been led by producers rather than consumers. In Food, Farms, and Solidarity, Chaia Heller analyzes the group's complex strategies and campaigns, including a call for a Europe-wide ban on GM crops and hormone-treated beef, and a protest staged at a McDonald's. Her study of the Confédération Paysanne shows the challenges small farms face in a postindustrial agricultural world. Heller also reveals how the language the union uses to argue against GMOs encompasses more than the risks they pose; emphasizing solidarity has allowed farmers to focus on food as a cultural practice and align themselves with other workers. Heller's examination of the Confédération Paysanne's commitment to a vision of alter-globalization, the idea of substantive alternatives to neoliberal globalization, demonstrates how ecological and social justice can be restored in the world.
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A Fool for Christmas
A Tale by Allan Gurganus
Allan Gurganus
Duke University Press
During the Christmas season, mall pet store manager Vernon Ricketts splits his time between selling irresistible puppies and kittens festooned with holiday bows and shielding the mall's loiterers from its over-zealous manager, “Terminator” Vanderlip. Just days before Christmas, Vernon notices a small, bedraggled girl in a worn overcoat desperately trying to blend into the mall's background. Sensing she's a runaway in trouble, Vernon feels obliged to help. His kindness and their chance encounter will produce a Christmas miracle that becomes a legend as it changes lives.

Allan Gurganus’s “A Fool for Christmas” first charmed audiences when he read it on NPR’s “All Things Considered” in 2004. It appears here in print for the first time.

The publication of “A Fool for Christmas” is a partnership between Duke University Libraries (which acquired Gurganus's archives in 2018), Horse & Buggy Press, and Duke University Press.
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For a Liberatory Politics of Home
Michele Lancione
Duke University Press, 2023
In For a Liberatory Politics of Home, Michele Lancione questions accepted understandings of home and homelessness to offer a radical proposition: homelessness cannot be solved without dismantling current understandings of home. Conventionally, home is framed as a place of security and belonging, while its loss defines what it means to be homeless. On the basis of this binary, a whole industry of policy interventions, knowledge production, and organizing fails to provide solutions to homelessness but perpetuates violent and precarious forms of inhabitation. Drawing on his research and activism around housing in Europe, Lancione attends to the interlocking crises of home and homelessness by recentering the political charge of precarious dwelling. It is there, if often in unannounced ways, that a profound struggle for a differential kind of homing signals multiple possibilities to transcend the violences of home/homelessness. In advancing a new approach to work with the politics of inhabitation, Lancione provides a critique of current practices and offers a transformative vision for a renewed, liberatory politics of home.
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For a Pragmatics of the Useless
Erin Manning
Duke University Press, 2020
What has a use in the future, unforeseeably, is radically useless now. What has an effect now is not necessarily useful if it falls through the gaps. In For a Pragmatics of the Useless Erin Manning examines what falls outside the purview of already-known functions and established standards of value, not for want of potential but for carrying an excess of it. The figures are various: the infrathin, the artful, proprioceptive tactility, neurodiversity, black life. It is around the latter two that a central refrain echoes: "All black life is neurodiverse life." This is not an equation, but an "approximation of proximity." Manning shows how neurotypicality and whiteness combine to form a normative baseline for existence. Blackness and neurodiversity "schizz" around the baseline, uselessly, pragmatically, figuring a more-than of life living. Manning, in dialogue with Félix Guattari and drawing on the black radical tradition's accounts of black life and the aesthetics of black sociality, proposes a "schizoanalysis" of the more-than, charting a panoply of techniques for other ways of living and learning.
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For Emplacement
Political Ontology in Two Acts
Mario Blaser
Duke University Press, 2025

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For the City Yet to Come
Changing African Life in Four Cities
AbdouMaliq Simone
Duke University Press, 2004
Among government officials, urban planners, and development workers, Africa’s burgeoning metropolises are frequently understood as failed cities, unable to provide even basic services. Whatever resourcefulness does exist is regarded as only temporary compensation for fundamental failure. In For the City Yet to Come, AbdouMaliq Simone argues that by overlooking all that does work in Africa’s cities, this perspective forecloses opportunities to capitalize on existing informal economies and structures in development efforts within Africa and to apply lessons drawn from them to rapidly growing urban areas around the world. Simone contends that Africa’s cities do work on some level and to the extent that they do, they function largely through fluid, makeshift collective actions running parallel to proliferating decentralized local authorities, small-scale enterprises, and community associations.

Drawing on his nearly fifteen years of work in African cities—as an activist, teacher, development worker, researcher, and advisor to ngos and local governments—Simone provides a series of case studies illuminating the provisional networks through which most of Africa’s urban dwellers procure basic goods and services. He examines informal economies and social networks in Pikine, a large suburb of Dakar, Senegal; in Winterveld, a neighborhood on the edge of Pretoria, South Africa; in Douala, Cameroon; and among Africans seeking work in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He contextualizes these particular cases through an analysis of the broad social, economic, and historical conditions that created present-day urban Africa. For the City Yet to Come is a powerful argument that any serious attempt to reinvent African urban centers must acknowledge the particular history of these cities and incorporate the local knowledge reflected in already existing informal urban economic and social systems.

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For the Record
On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India
Anjali Arondekar
Duke University Press, 2009
Anjali Arondekar considers the relationship between sexuality and the colonial archive by posing the following questions: Why does sexuality (still) seek its truth in the historical archive? What are the spatial and temporal logics that compel such a return? And conversely, what kind of “archive” does such a recuperative hermeneutics produce? Rather than render sexuality’s relationship to the colonial archive through the preferred lens of historical invisibility (which would presume that there is something about sexuality that is lost or silent and needs to “come out”), Arondekar engages sexuality’s recursive traces within the colonial archive against and through our very desire for access.

The logic and the interpretive resources of For the Record arise out of two entangled and minoritized historiographies: one in South Asian studies and the other in queer/sexuality studies. Focusing on late colonial India, Arondekar examines the spectacularization of sexuality in anthropology, law, literature, and pornography from 1843 until 1920. By turning to materials and/or locations that are familiar to most scholars of queer and subaltern studies, Arondekar considers sexuality at the center of the colonial archive rather than at its margins. Each chapter addresses a form of archival loss, troped either in a language of disappearance or paucity, simulacrum or detritus: from Richard Burton’s missing report on male brothels in Karáchi (1845) to a failed sodomy prosecution in Northern India, Queen Empress v. Khairati (1884), and from the ubiquitous India-rubber dildos found in colonial pornography of the mid-to-late nineteenth century to the archival detritus of Kipling’s stories about the Indian Mutiny of 1857.

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The Force of Witness
Contra Feminicide
Rosa-Linda Fregoso
Duke University Press, 2023
In The Force of Witness Rosa-Linda Fregoso examines the contra feminicide movement in Mexico and other feminist efforts to eradicate gender violence. Drawing on interviews, art, documentaries, and her years of activism, Fregoso traces the micro and macro scales of misogyny and the patterns of state complicity with gender violence. She shows how different forms of witnessing—from activist-mothers’ bearing witness to the memories of their daughters and expert witnesses in court cases to communal witnessing and a scholar-activist-citizen witnessing her own actions—are key to resisting feminicidal violence. Fregoso situates these forms of witness in the histories, contexts, structures, bodies, and intersectional struggles they emerge from. By outlining the complexities of feminicidal violence in relation to witnessing processes, Fregoso challenges the notion of witness as an individual or autonomous subject inscribed solely in the legal or religious arenas. Rather, she theorizes witness as a force of collectivity and a constellation of multiple social locations and intersectional practices that work together to abolish feminicidal violence.
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Foreign Front
Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany
Quinn Slobodian
Duke University Press, 2012
It is often asserted that West German New Leftists "discovered the Third World" in the pivotal decade of the 1960s. Quinn Slobodian upsets that storyline by beginning with individuals from the Third World themselves: students from Africa, Asia, and Latin America who arrived on West German campuses in large numbers in the early 1960s. They were the first to mobilize German youth in protest against acts of state violence and injustice perpetrated beyond Europe and North America. The activism of the foreign students served as a model for West German students, catalyzing social movements and influencing modes of opposition to the Vietnam War. In turn, the West Germans offered the international students solidarity and safe spaces for their dissident engagements. This collaboration helped the West German students to develop a more nuanced, empathetic understanding of the Third World, not just as a site of suffering, poverty, and violence, but also as the home of politicized individuals with the capacity and will to speak in their own names.
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Foreign in a Domestic Sense
Puerto Rico, American Expansion, and the Constitution
Christina Duffy Burnett and Burke Marshall, eds.
Duke University Press, 2001
In this groundbreaking study of American imperialism, leading legal scholars address the problem of the U.S. territories. Foreign in a Domestic Sense will redefine the boundaries of constitutional scholarship.
More than four million U.S. citizens currently live in five “unincorporated” U.S. territories. The inhabitants of these vestiges of an American empire are denied full representation in Congress and cannot vote in presidential elections. Focusing on Puerto Rico, the largest and most populous of the territories, Foreign in a Domestic Sense sheds much-needed light on the United States’ unfinished colonial experiment and its legacy of racially rooted imperialism, while insisting on the centrality of these “marginal” regions in any serious treatment of American constitutional history. For one hundred years, Puerto Ricans have struggled to define their place in a nation that neither wants them nor wants to let them go. They are caught in a debate too politicized to yield meaningful answers. Meanwhile, doubts concerning the constitutionality of keeping colonies have languished on the margins of mainstream scholarship, overlooked by scholars outside the island and ignored by the nation at large.
This book does more than simply fill a glaring omission in the study of race, cultural identity, and the Constitution; it also makes a crucial contribution to the study of American federalism, serves as a foundation for substantive debate on Puerto Rico’s status, and meets an urgent need for dialogue on territorial status between the mainlandd and the territories.

Contributors. José Julián Álvarez González, Roberto Aponte Toro, Christina Duffy Burnett, José A. Cabranes, Sanford Levinson, Burke Marshall, Gerald L. Neuman, Angel R. Oquendo, Juan Perea, Efrén Rivera Ramos, Rogers M. Smith, E. Robert Statham Jr., Brook Thomas, Richard Thornburgh, Juan R. Torruella, José Trías Monge, Mark Tushnet, Mark Weiner

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A Foreign Policy in Transition
Moscow’s Retreat from Central America and the Carribbean, 1985–1992
Jan S. Adams
Duke University Press, 1992
During his years of leadership in the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev initiated revolutionary changes in that country's foreign and domestic policies. A Foreign Policy in Transition charts the changing Soviet policies toward Central America and the Caribbean during the Gorbachev years, examines the effects of these policies on individual countries, and looks to the role that Russia and the other Soviet-successor states will play in this region in the 1990s.
Jan S. Adams analyzes the factors shaping Gorbachev's foreign policy in Central America by surveying Soviet political views old and new, by describing Gorbachev's bold restructuring of the Soviet foreign policy establishment, and by assessing the implications of his policy of perestroika. A series of country studies demonstrates how changes in Soviet policies and domestic and economic circumstances contributed to significant shifts in the internal conditions and external relations of the Central American and Caribbean nations. Adams discusses in detail such topics as the reduction of Soviet military and economic aid to the region and pressures exerted by Moscow on client states to effect the settlement of regional conflicts by political rather than military means.
The author concludes by speculating about which trends in foreign policy by Russia and other Soviet-successor states toward Central America and the Caribbean may persist in the post-Soviet period, discussing as the implications of these changes for future U.S. policy in the region.
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A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb
Amitava Kumar
Duke University Press, 2010
Part reportage and part protest, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb is an inquiry into the cultural logic and global repercussions of the war on terror. At its center are two men convicted in U.S. courts on terrorism-related charges: Hemant Lakhani, a seventy-year-old tried for attempting to sell a fake missile to an FBI informant, and Shahawar Matin Siraj, baited by the New York Police Department into a conspiracy to bomb a subway. Lakhani and Siraj were caught through questionable sting operations involving paid informants; both men received lengthy jail sentences. Their convictions were celebrated as major victories in the war on terror. In Amitava Kumar’s riveting account of their cases, Lakhani and Siraj emerge as epic bunglers, and the U.S. government as the creator of terror suspects to prosecute. Kumar analyzed the trial transcripts and media coverage, and he interviewed Lakhani, Siraj, their families, and their lawyers. Juxtaposing such stories of entrapment in the United States with narratives from India, another site of multiple terror attacks and state crackdowns, Kumar explores the harrowing experiences of ordinary people entangled in the war on terror. He also considers the fierce critiques of post-9/11 surveillance and security regimes by soldiers and torture victims, as well as artists and writers, including Coco Fusco, Paul Shambroom, and Arundhati Roy.
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Forensic Media
Reconstructing Accidents in Accelerated Modernity
Greg Siegel
Duke University Press, 2014
In Forensic Media, Greg Siegel considers how photographic, electronic, and digital media have been used to record and reconstruct accidents, particularly high-speed crashes and catastrophes. Focusing in turn on the birth of the field of forensic engineering, Charles Babbage's invention of a "self-registering apparatus" for railroad trains, flight-data and cockpit voice recorders ("black boxes"), the science of automobile crash-testing, and various accident-reconstruction techniques and technologies, Siegel shows how "forensic media" work to transmute disruptive chance occurrences into reassuring narratives of causal succession. Through historical and philosophical analyses, he demonstrates that forensic media are as much technologies of cultural imagination as they are instruments of scientific inscription, as imbued with ideological fantasies as they are compelled by institutional rationales. By rethinking the historical links and cultural relays between accidents and forensics, Siegel sheds new light on the corresponding connections between media, technology, and modernity.
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Forest History Museums of the World
Kathryn A. Fahl
Duke University Press

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Forest Lost
Producing Green Capitalism in the Brazilian Amazon
Maron E. Greenleaf
Duke University Press, 2024
Forest Lost is an ethnography of forest carbon offsets and the wider effort to make the living rainforest valuable in the Brazilian Amazon. Unlike other forest commodities, forest carbon offsets do not involve resource extraction; instead, they require keeping carbon in place through forest protection. Maron Greenleaf explores forest carbon offsets to understand green capitalism—the use of capitalist logics and practices to mitigate environmental damage. She traces cultural, environmental, governmental, material, and multispecies relations involved in making forest carbon valuable and how forest carbon’s commodification in the Amazon turned it into a source of redistributable public environmental wealth. At the same time, Greenleaf shows how making forest carbon monetarily valuable created an unexpected set of uneven, contingent, and contested social and political relations. While forest carbon in the Amazon demonstrates that green capitalism can be socially inclusive, it also shows that green capitalism can reinforce the marginalization it purportedly seeks to combat. By outlining these complex relations and tensions, Greenleaf elucidates broader efforts to create a capitalism suited to the Anthropocene and those efforts’ alluring promises and vexing failures.
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A Forgetful Nation
On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the United States
Ali Behdad
Duke University Press, 2005
In A Forgetful Nation, the renowned postcolonialism scholar Ali Behdad turns his attention to the United States. Offering a timely critique of immigration and nationalism, Behdad takes on an idea central to American national mythology: that the United States is “a nation of immigrants,” welcoming and generous to foreigners. He argues that Americans’ treatment of immigrants and foreigners has long fluctuated between hospitality and hostility, and that this deep-seated ambivalence is fundamental to the construction of national identity. Building on the insights of Freud, Nietzsche, Foucault, and Derrida, he develops a theory of the historical amnesia that enables the United States to disavow a past and present built on the exclusion of others.

Behdad shows how political, cultural, and legal texts have articulated American anxiety about immigration from the Federalist period to the present day. He reads texts both well-known—J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer, Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass—and lesser-known—such as the writings of nineteenth-century nativists and of public health officials at Ellis Island. In the process, he highlights what is obscured by narratives and texts celebrating the United States as an open-armed haven for everyone: the country’s violent beginnings, including its conquest of Native Americans, brutal exploitation of enslaved Africans, and colonialist annexation of French and Mexican territories; a recurring and fierce strand of nativism; the need for a docile labor force; and the harsh discipline meted out to immigrant “aliens” today, particularly along the Mexican border.

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Forgotten Readers
Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies
Elizabeth McHenry
Duke University Press, 2002
Over the past decade the popularity of black writers including E. Lynn Harris and Terry McMillan has been hailed as an indication that an active African American reading public has come into being. Yet this is not a new trend; there is a vibrant history of African American literacy, literary associations, and book clubs. Forgotten Readers reveals that neglected past, looking at the reading practices of free blacks in the antebellum north and among African Americans following the Civil War. It places the black upper and middle classes within American literary history, illustrating how they used reading and literary conversation as a means to assert their civic identities and intervene in the political and literary cultures of the United States from which they were otherwise excluded.

Forgotten Readers expands our definition of literacy and urges us to think of literature as broadly as it was conceived of in the nineteenth century. Elizabeth McHenry delves into archival sources, including the records of past literary societies and the unpublished writings of their members. She examines particular literary associations, including the Saturday Nighters of Washington, D.C., whose members included Jean Toomer and Georgia Douglas Johnson. She shows how black literary societies developed, their relationship to the black press, and the ways that African American women’s clubs—which flourished during the 1890s—encouraged literary activity. In an epilogue, McHenry connects this rich tradition of African American interest in books, reading, and literary conversation to contemporary literary phenomena such as Oprah Winfrey’s book club.

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Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia
Tani E. Barlow, ed.
Duke University Press, 1997
The essays in Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia challenge the idea that notions of modernity and colonialism are mere imports from the West, and show how colonial modernity has evolved from and into unique forms throughout Asia. Although the modernity of non-European colonies is as indisputable as the colonial core of European modernity, until recently East Asian scholarship has tried to view Asian colonialism through the paradigm of colonial India (for instance), failing to recognize anti-imperialist nationalist impulses within differing Asian countries and regions.
Demonstrating an impatience with social science models of knowledge, the contributors show that binary categories focused on during the Cold War are no longer central to the project of history writing. By bringing together articles previously published in the journal positions: east asia cultures critique, editor Tani Barlow has demonstrated how scholars construct identity and history, providing cultural critics with new ways to think about these concepts—in the context of Asia and beyond.
Chapters address topics such as the making of imperial subjects in Okinawa, politics and the body social in colonial Hong Kong, and the discourse of decolonization and popular memory in South Korea. This is an invaluable collection for students and scholars of Asian studies, postcolonial studies, and anthropology.

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

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Formations of United States Colonialism
Alyosha Goldstein
Duke University Press, 2014
Bridging the multiple histories and present-day iterations of U.S. settler colonialism in North America and its overseas imperialism in the Caribbean and the Pacific, the essays in this groundbreaking volume underscore the United States as a fluctuating constellation of geopolitical entities marked by overlapping and variable practices of colonization. By rethinking the intertwined experiences of Native Americans, Puerto Ricans, Chamorros, Filipinos, Hawaiians, Samoans, and others subjected to U.S. imperial rule, the contributors consider how the diversity of settler claims, territorial annexations, overseas occupations, and circuits of slavery and labor—along with their attendant forms of jurisprudence, racialization, and militarism—both facilitate and delimit the conditions of colonial dispossession. Drawing on the insights of critical indigenous and ethnic studies, postcolonial theory, critical geography, ethnography, and social history, this volume emphasizes the significance of U.S. colonialisms as a vital analytic framework for understanding how and why the United States is what it is today.

Contributors. Julian Aguon, Joanne Barker, Berenika Byszewski, Jennifer Nez Denetdale, Augusto Espiritu, Alyosha Goldstein, J. K?haulani Kauanui, Barbara Krauthamer, Lorena Oropeza, Vicente L. Rafael, Dean Itsuji Saranillio, Lanny Thompson, Lisa Uperesa, Manu Vimalassery
 
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Forms of Knowledge in Early Modern Asia
Explorations in the Intellectual History of India and Tibet, 1500-1800
Sheldon Pollock, ed.
Duke University Press, 2011
In the past two decades, scholars have transformed our understanding of the interactions between India and the West since the consolidation of British power on the subcontinent around 1800. While acknowledging the merits of this scholarship, Sheldon Pollock argues that knowing how colonialism changed South Asian cultures, particularly how Western modes of thought became dominant, requires knowing what was there to be changed. Yet little is known about the history of knowledge and imagination in late precolonial South Asia, about what systematic forms of thought existed, how they worked, or who produced them. This pioneering collection of essays helps to rectify this situation by addressing the ways thinkers in India and Tibet responded to a rapidly changing world in the three centuries prior to 1800. Contributors examine new forms of communication and conceptions of power that developed across the subcontinent; changing modes of literary consciousness, practices, and institutions in north India; unprecedented engagements in comparative religion, autobiography, and ethnography in the Indo-Persian sphere; and new directions in disciplinarity, medicine, and geography in Tibet. Taken together, the essays in Forms of Knowledge in Early Modern Asia inaugurate the exploration of a particularly complex intellectual terrain, while gesturing toward distinctive forms of non-Western modernity.

Contributors. Muzaffar Alam, Imre Bangha, Aditya Behl, Allison Busch, Sumit Guha, Janet Gyatso, Matthew T. Kapstein, Françoise Mallison, Sheldon Pollock, Velcheru Narayana Rao, Kurtis R. Schaeffer, Sunil Sharma, David Shulman, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi

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The Forms of the Affects
Eugenie Brinkema
Duke University Press, 2014
What is the relationship between a cinematic grid of color and that most visceral of negative affects, disgust? How might anxiety be a matter of an interrupted horizontal line, or grief a figure of blazing light?

Offering a bold corrective to the emphasis on embodiment and experience in recent affect theory, Eugenie Brinkema develops a novel mode of criticism that locates the forms of particular affects within the specific details of cinematic and textual construction. Through close readings of works by Roland Barthes, Hollis Frampton, Sigmund Freud, Peter Greenaway, Michael Haneke, Alfred Hitchcock, Søren Kierkegaard, and David Lynch, Brinkema shows that deep attention to form, structure, and aesthetics enables a fundamental rethinking of the study of sensation. In the process, she delves into concepts as diverse as putrescence in French gastronomy, the role of the tear in philosophies of emotion, Nietzschean joy as a wild aesthetic of repetition, and the psychoanalytic theory of embarrassment. Above all, this provocative work is a call to harness the vitality of the affective turn for a renewed exploration of the possibilities of cinematic form.

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Foucault's Discipline
The Politics of Subjectivity
John S. Ransom
Duke University Press, 1997
In Foucault’s Discipline, John S. Ransom extracts a distinctive vision of the political world—and oppositional possibilities within it—from the welter of disparate topics and projects Michel Foucault pursued over his lifetime. Uniquely, Ransom presents Foucault as a political theorist in the tradition of Weber and Nietzsche, and specifically examines Foucault’s work in relation to the political tradition of liberalism and the Frankfurt School. By concentrating primarily on Discipline and Punish and the later Foucauldian texts, Ransom provides a fresh interpretation of this controversial philosopher’s perspectives on concepts such as freedom, right, truth, and power.
Foucault’s Discipline demonstrates how Foucault’s valorization of descriptive critique over prescriptive plans of action can be applied to the decisively altered political landscape of the end of this millennium. By reconstructing the philosopher’s arguments concerning the significance of disciplinary institutions, biopower, subjectivity, and forms of resistance in modern society, Ransom shows how Foucault has provided a different way of looking at and responding to contemporary models of government—in short, a new depiction of the political world.
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Foundations of World Order
The Legalist Approach to International Relations, 1898–1922
Francis Anthony Boyle
Duke University Press, 1999
In Foundations of World Order Francis Anthony Boyle provides the first historically comprehensive analysis of U.S. foreign policy regarding international law and organizations. Examining the period from the Spanish American War to the establishment of the League of Nations and the Permanent Court of International Justice, Boyle argues that the international legal framework created at the beginning of the twentieth century not only influenced the course of American foreign policy but also provided the foundation upon which relations among states were built.
Although both the League of Nations and the Permanent Court of International Justice were rejected by the U.S. Senate, Boyle shows how the early governance of these institutions—precursors, respectively, to the United Nations and the International Court of Justice—informed later efforts to reduce and regulate transnational threats and the use of military force. Delving into such topics as the United States and its initial stance of neutrality in World War I and its imperial policy toward Latin America and the Caribbean, Boyle offers detailed readings of the relevant treaties, tribunals, and conferences, and assesses the political actors involved. Taking up the legalist point of view, he discusses the codification of customary international law, the obligatory arbitration of international disputes, and the creation of a new regime for the settlement of such disputes.
Boyle has provided in Foundations of World Order a compelling portrait of the relationship between political power and law, and of the impact of these forces on U.S. diplomacy. This volume will serve as a valuable resource to students, scholars, and practitioners of international law; it will also be of great interest to historians and political scientists engaged with issues of U.S. foreign policy and diplomatic history.
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Foundlings
Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion before Stonewall
Christopher Nealon
Duke University Press, 2001
What is it like to “feel historical”? In Foundlings Christopher Nealon analyzes texts produced by American gay men and lesbians in the first half of the twentieth century—poems by Hart Crane, novels by Willa Cather, gay male physique magazines, and lesbian pulp fiction. Nealon brings these diverse works together by highlighting a coming-of-age narrative he calls “foundling”—a term for queer disaffiliation from and desire for family, nation, and history.
The young runaways in Cather’s novels, the way critics conflated Crane’s homosexual body with his verse, the suggestive poses and utopian captions of muscle magazines, and Beebo Brinker, the aging butch heroine from Ann Bannon’s pulp novels—all embody for Nealon the uncertain space between two models of lesbian and gay sexuality. The “inversion” model dominant in the first half of the century held that homosexuals are souls of one gender trapped in the body of another, while the more contemporary “ethnic” model refers to the existence of a distinct and collective culture among gay men and lesbians. Nealon’s unique readings, however, reveal a constant movement between these two discursive poles, and not, as is widely theorized, a linear progress from one to the other.
This startlingly original study will interest those working on gay and lesbian studies, American literature and culture, and twentieth-century history.
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Four Decades On
Vietnam, the United States, and the Legacies of the Second Indochina War
Scott Laderman and Edwin A. Martini, eds.
Duke University Press, 2013
In Four Decades On, historians, anthropologists, and literary critics examine the legacies of the Second Indochina War, or what most Americans call the Vietnam War, nearly forty years after the United States finally left Vietnam. They address matters such as the daunting tasks facing the Vietnamese at the war's end—including rebuilding a nation and consolidating a socialist revolution while fending off China and the Khmer Rouge—and "the Vietnam syndrome," the cynical, frustrated, and pessimistic sense that colored America's views of the rest of the world after its humiliating defeat in Vietnam. The contributors provide unexpected perspectives on Agent Orange, the POW/MIA controversies, the commercial trade relationship between the United States and Vietnam, and representations of the war and its aftermath produced by artists, particularly writers. They show how the war has continued to affect not only international relations but also the everyday lives of millions of people around the world. Most of the contributors take up matters in the United States, Vietnam, or both nations, while several utilize transnational analytic frameworks, recognizing that the war's legacies shape and are shaped by dynamics that transcend the two countries.

Contributors
. Alex Bloom, Diane Niblack Fox, H. Bruce Franklin, Walter Hixson, Heonik Kwon, Scott Laderman, Mariam B. Lam, Ngo Vinh Long, Edwin A. Martini, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Christina Schwenkel, Charles Waugh
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Fractal Repair
Queer Histories of Modern Jamaica
Matthew Chin
Duke University Press, 2024
In Fractal Repair, Matthew Chin investigates queerness in Jamaica from early colonial occupation to the present, critically responding to the island’s global reputation for extreme homophobia and anti-queer violence. Chin advances a theory and method of queer fractals to bring together genealogies of queer and Caribbean formation. Fractals—a kind of geometry in which patterns repeat but never exactly in the same way—make visible shifting accounts of Caribbean queerness in terms of race, gender, and sexual alterity. Drawing on this fractal orientation, Chin assembles and analyzes multigenre archives, ranging from mid-twentieth-century social science studies of the Caribbean to Jamaica’s National Dance Theatre Company to HIV/AIDS organizations, to write reparative histories of queerness. Chin’s proposal of a fractal politics of repair invests in the horizon of difference that repetition materializes, and it extends reparations discourses intent on overcoming the past and calculating economic compensation for survivors of violence.
 
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Fractivism
Corporate Bodies and Chemical Bonds
Sara Ann Wylie
Duke University Press, 2018
From flammable tap water and sick livestock to the recent onset of hundreds of earthquakes in Oklahoma, the impact of fracking in the United States is far-reaching and deeply felt. In Fractivism Sara Ann Wylie traces the history of fracking and the ways scientists and everyday people are coming together to hold accountable an industry that has managed to evade regulation. Beginning her story in Colorado, Wylie shows how nonprofits, landowners, and community organizers are creating novel digital platforms and databases to track unconventional oil and gas well development and document fracking's environmental and human health impacts. These platforms model alternative approaches for academic and grassroots engagement with the government and the fossil fuel industry. A call to action, Fractivism outlines a way forward for not just the fifteen million Americans who live within a mile of an unconventional oil or gas well, but for the planet as a whole.
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A Fragile Inheritance
Radical Stakes in Contemporary Indian Art
Saloni Mathur
Duke University Press, 2019
In A Fragile Inheritance Saloni Mathur investigates the work of two seminal figures from the global South: the New Delhi-based critic and curator Geeta Kapur and contemporary multimedia artist Vivan Sundaram. Examining their written and visual works over the past fifty years, Mathur illuminates how her protagonists’ political and aesthetic commitments intersect and foreground uncertainty, difficulty, conflict, and contradiction. This book presents new understandings of the culture and politics of decolonization and the role of non-Western aesthetic avant-gardes within the discourses of contemporary art. Through skillful interpretation of Sundaram's and Kapur’s practices, Mathur demonstrates how received notions of mainstream art history may be investigated and subjected to creative redefinition. Her scholarly methodology offers an impassioned model of critical aesthetics and advances a radical understanding of art and politics in our time.
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The Fragility of Things
Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism
William E. Connolly
Duke University Press, 2013
In The Fragility of Things, eminent theorist William E. Connolly focuses on several self-organizing ecologies that help to constitute our world. These interacting geological, biological, and climate systems, some of which harbor creative capacities, are depreciated by that brand of neoliberalism that confines self-organization to economic markets and equates the latter with impersonal rationality. Neoliberal practice thus fails to address the fragilities it exacerbates. Engaging a diverse range of thinkers, from Friedrich Hayek, Michel Foucault, Hesiod, and Immanuel Kant to Voltaire, Terrence Deacon, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Alfred North Whitehead, Connolly brings the sense of fragility alive as he rethinks the idea of freedom. Urging the Left not to abandon the state but to reclaim it, he also explores scales of politics below and beyond the state. The contemporary response to fragility requires a militant pluralist assemblage composed of those sharing affinities of spirituality across differences of creed, class, gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity.
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Fragmented Memories
Struggling to be Tai-Ahom in India
Yasmin Saikia
Duke University Press, 2004
Fragmented Memories is a beautifully rendered exploration of how, during the 1990s, socially and economically marginalized people in the northeastern Indian state of Assam sought to produce a past on which to base a distinctive contemporary identity recognized within late-twentieth-century India. Yasmin Saikia describes how groups of Assamese identified themselves as Tai-Ahom—a people with a glorious past stretching back to the invasion of what is now Assam by Ahom warriors in the thirteenth century. In her account of the 1990s Tai-Ahom identity movement, Saikia considers the problem of competing identities in India, the significance of place and culture, and the outcome of the memory-building project of the Tai-Ahom.

Assamese herself, Saikia lived in several different Tai-Ahom villages between 1994 and 1996. She spoke with political activists, intellectuals, militant leaders, shamans, and students and observed and participated in Tai-Ahom religious, social, and political events. She read Tai-Ahom sacred texts and did archival research—looking at colonial documents and government reports—in Calcutta, New Delhi, and London. In Fragmented Memories, Saikia reveals the different narratives relating to the Tai-Ahom as told by the postcolonial Indian government, British colonists, and various texts reaching back to the thirteenth century. She shows how Tai-Ahom identity is practiced in Assam and also in Thailand. Revealing how the “dead” history of Tai-Ahom has been transformed into living memory to demand rights of citizenship, Fragmented Memories is a landmark history told from the periphery of the Indian nation.

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Fragments of a Golden Age
The Politics of Culture in Mexico Since 1940
Gilbert M. Joseph, Anne Rubenstein, and Eric Zolov, eds.
Duke University Press, 2001
During the twentieth century the Mexican government invested in the creation and promotion of a national culture more aggressively than any other state in the western hemisphere. Fragments of a Golden Age provides a comprehensive cultural history of the vibrant Mexico that emerged after 1940. Agreeing that the politics of culture and its production, dissemination, and reception constitute one of the keys to understanding this period of Mexican history, the volume’s contributors—historians, popular writers, anthropologists, artists, and cultural critics—weigh in on a wealth of topics from music, tourism, television, and sports to theatre, unions, art, and magazines.
Each essay in its own way addresses the fragmentation of a cultural consensus that prevailed during the “golden age” of post–revolutionary prosperity, a time when the state was still successfully bolstering its power with narratives of modernization and shared community. Combining detailed case studies—both urban and rural—with larger discussions of political, economic, and cultural phenomena, the contributors take on such topics as the golden age of Mexican cinema, the death of Pedro Infante as a political spectacle, the 1951 “caravan of hunger,” professional wrestling, rock music, and soap operas.
Fragments of a Golden Age will fill a particular gap for students of modern Mexico, Latin American studies, cultural studies, political economy, and twentieth century history, as well as to others concerned with rethinking the cultural dimensions of nationalism, imperialism, and modernization.

Contributors. Steven J. Bachelor, Quetzil E. Castañeda, Seth Fein, Alison Greene, Omar Hernández, Jis & Trino, Gilbert M. Joseph, Heather Levi, Rubén Martínez, Emile McAnany, John Mraz, Jeffrey M. Pilcher, Elena Poniatowska, Anne Rubenstein, Alex Saragoza, Arthur Schmidt, Mary Kay Vaughan, Eric Zolov

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Fragments of Truth
Residential Schools and the Challenge of Reconciliation in Canada
Naomi Angel. Edited by Dylan Robinson and Jamie Berthe.
Duke University Press, 2022
In 2008, the Canadian government established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to review the history of the residential school system, a brutal colonial project that killed and injured many Indigenous children and left a legacy of trauma and pain. In Fragments of Truth Naomi Angel analyzes the visual culture of reconciliation and memory in relation to this complex and painful history. In her analyses of archival photographs from the residential school system, representations of the schools in popular media and literature, and testimonies from TRC proceedings, Angel traces how the TRC served as a mechanism through which memory, trauma, and visuality became apparent. She shows how many Indigenous communities were able to use the TRC process as a way to claim agency over their memories of the schools. Bringing to light the ongoing costs of transforming settler states into modern nations, Angel demonstrates how the TRC offers a unique optic through which to survey the long history of colonial oppression of Canada’s Indigenous populations.
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Framed
Women in Law and Film
Orit Kamir
Duke University Press, 2006
Some women attack and harm men who abuse them. Social norms, law, and films all participate in framing these occurrences, guiding us in understanding and judging them. How do social, legal, and cinematic conventions and mechanisms combine to lead us to condemn these women or exonerate them? What is it, exactly, that they teach us to find such women guilty or innocent of, and how do they do so?

Through innovative readings of a dozen movies made between 1928 and 2001 in Europe, Japan, and the United States, Orit Kamir shows that in representing “gender crimes,” feature films have constructed a cinematic jurisprudence, training audiences worldwide in patterns of judgment of women (and men) in such situations. Offering a novel formulation of the emerging field of law and film, Kamir combines basic legal concepts—murder, rape, provocation, insanity, and self-defense—with narratology, social science methodologies, and film studies.

Framed not only offers a unique study of law and film but also points toward new directions in feminist thought. Shedding light on central feminist themes such as victimization and agency, multiculturalism, and postmodernism, Kamir outlines a feminist cinematic legal critique, a perspective from which to evaluate the “cinematic legalism” that indoctrinates and disciplines audiences around the world. Bringing an original perspective to feminist analysis, she demonstrates that the distinction between honor and dignity has crucial implications for how societies construct women, their social status, and their legal rights. In Framed, she outlines a dignity-oriented, honor-sensitive feminist approach to law and film.

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France and Islam, Volume 30
Patricia Lorcin and Paula Sanders
Duke University Press

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France at the Polls, 1981 and 1986
Howard R. Penniman, ed.
Duke University Press, 1988
At the Polls is a series of national election studies prepared by the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy and Research. Books in the series include volumes on some thirty national democratic elections around the world. Distinguished foreign and American scholars have contributed to the studies.
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The Frank C. Brown Collection of NC Folklore
Vol. II: Folk Ballads from North Carolina
Frank C. Brown
Duke University Press
Frank C. Brown organized the North Carolina Folklore Society in 1913. Both Dr. Brown and the Society collected stores from individuals—Brown through his classes at Duke University and through his summer expeditions in the North Carolina mountains, and the Society by interviewing its members—and also levied on the previous collections made by friends and members of the Society. The result was a large mass of texts and notes assembled over a period of nearly forty years and covering every aspect of local tradition.
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The Frank C. Brown Collection of NC Folklore
Vol. V: The Music of the Folk Songs
Frank C. Brown
Duke University Press, 1970
Frank C. Brown organized the North Carolina Folklore Society in 1913. Both Dr. Brown and the Society collected stores from individuals—Brown through his classes at Duke University and through his summer expeditions in the North Carolina mountains, and the Society by interviewing its members—and also levied on the previous collections made by friends and members of the Society. The result was a large mass of texts and notes assembled over a period of nearly forty years and covering every aspect of local tradition.
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The Frank C. Brown Collection of NC Folklore
Vol. VI: Popular Beliefs and Superstitions from North Carolina, pt. 1
Frank C. Brown
Duke University Press
Frank C. Brown organized the North Carolina Folklore Society in 1913. Both Dr. Brown and the Society collected stores from individuals—Brown through his classes at Duke University and through his summer expeditions in the North Carolina mountains, and the Society by interviewing its members—and also levied on the previous collections made by friends and members of the Society. The result was a large mass of texts and notes assembled over a period of nearly forty years and covering every aspect of local tradition.
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The Frank C. Brown Collection of NC Folklore
Vol. VII: Popular Beliefs and Superstitions from North Carolina, pt. 2
Frank C. Brown
Duke University Press, 1970
Frank C. Brown organized the North Carolina Folklore Society in 1913. Both Dr. Brown and the Society collected stores from individuals—Brown through his classes at Duke University and through his summer expeditions in the North Carolina mountains, and the Society by interviewing its members—and also levied on the previous collections made by friends and members of the Society. The result was a large mass of texts and notes assembled over a period of nearly forty years and covering every aspect of local tradition. members of the Society. The result was a large mass of texts and notes assembled over a period of nearly forty years and covering every aspect of local tradition.
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Franklin Evans, or The Inebriate
A Tale of the Times
Walt Whitman
Duke University Press, 2007
Not many people know that Walt Whitman—arguably the preeminent American poet of the nineteenth century—began his literary career as a novelist. Franklin Evans, or The Inebriate: A Tale of the Times was his first and only novel. Published in 1842, during a period of widespread temperance activity, it became Whitman’s most popular work during his lifetime, selling some twenty thousand copies.

The novel tells the rags-to-riches story of Franklin Evans, an innocent young man from the Long Island countryside who seeks his fortune in New York City. Corrupted by music halls, theaters, and above all taverns, he gradually becomes a drunkard. Until the very end of the tale, Evans’s efforts to abstain fail, and each time he resumes drinking, another series of misadventures ensues. Along the way, Evans encounters a world of mores and conventions rapidly changing in response to the vicissitudes of slavery, investment capital, urban mass culture, and fervent reform. Although Evans finally signs a temperance pledge, his sobriety remains haunted by the often contradictory and unsettling changes in antebellum American culture.

The editors’ substantial introduction situates Franklin Evans in relation to Whitman’s life and career, mid-nineteenth-century American print culture, and many of the developments and institutions the novel depicts, including urbanization, immigration, slavery, the temperance movement, and new understandings of class, race, gender, and sexuality. This edition includes a short temperance story Whitman published at about the same time as he did Franklin Evans, the surviving fragment of what appears to be another unfinished temperance novel by Whitman, and a temperance speech Abraham Lincoln gave the same year that Franklin Evans was published.

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Frederic Manning
An Unfinished Life
Jonathan L. Marwil
Duke University Press, 1988
In January 1930 Her Privates We appeared in London, advertised as "a record of experience on the Somme and Ancre fronts in 1916" from the pen of "Private 10922, a well known man of letters, already distinguished in another kind of literature." Reviewers praised the novel as the most accurate and moving portrayal yet rendered of the common soldier, and the work quickly became a bestseller. Shortly thereafter the author was revealed as Frederic Manning, a reclusive and little-known author of narrative poetry, philosophical dialogues, and works on Epicurus. An early contributor to Criterion, Manning enjoyed considerable esteem among his peers—T. E. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot, among others.
How did a classical and noncommercial author come to write a grittily realistic war novel? Manning fled from the attendant publicity, avoiding the limelight assiduously and successfully. Marwil's search for the answer to this riddle and for the details of his life (in some ways the search is as interesting and revealing as the results) and his account of Manning's life and work reveal a great deal of the intellectual and social world of Edwardian and Georgian England.
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The Free Economy and the Strong State
Andrew Gamble
Duke University Press, 1988
A new politics emerged in the 1970s in response to the world recession, the exhaustion of Fordism (the theory, traced to Henry Ford, that well-paid industrial workers fuel continuous capitalist growth), and the breakdown of American hegemony. Thatcherism, one expression of this new politics, acquired its distinctive characteristics through the exceptional and deep-seated crisis of state authority that developed in Britain in the mid-1970s.

By 1987, the Conservatives under Thatcher's leadership had won their third successive election victory over a divided opposition and enjoyed a degree of political and ideological dominance that led many commentators to speak of the end of the socialist era and the emergence of a new consensus in Britain. A new word—Thatcherism—had entered the political lexicon. It has come to signify a broad-ranging and distinctive program aimed at promoting economic recovery through the privatization of public enterprise and restoring the authority of the state. The Free Economy and the Strong State explores the roots of Thatcherism and its relationship to the Conservative tradition, to the economic liberal ideology of the New Right, and to the "new politics" which emerged from the recession and crisis of the world order in the mid 1970s.

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Free Speech, The People's Darling Privilege
Struggles for Freedom of Expression in American History
Michael Kent Curtis
Duke University Press, 2000
Modern ideas about the protection of free speech in the United States did not originate in twentieth-century Supreme Court cases, as many have thought. Free Speech, “The People’s Darling Privilege” refutes this misconception by examining popular struggles for free speech that stretch back through American history. Michael Kent Curtis focuses on struggles in which ordinary and extraordinary people, men and women, black and white, demanded and fought for freedom of speech during the period from 1791—when the Bill of Rights and its First Amendment bound only the federal government to protect free expression—to 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment sought to extend this mandate to the states. A review chapter is also included to bring the story up to date.
Curtis analyzes three crucial political struggles: the controversy that surrounded the 1798 Sedition Act, which raised the question of whether criticism of elected officials would be protected speech; the battle against slavery, which raised the question of whether Americans would be free to criticize a great moral, social, and political evil; and the controversy over anti-war speech during the Civil War. Many speech issues raised by these controversies were ultimately decided outside the judicial arena—in Congress, in state legislatures, and, perhaps most importantly, in public discussion and debate. Curtis maintains that modern proposals for changing free speech doctrine can usefully be examined in the light of this often ignored history. This broader history shows the crucial effect that politicians, activists, ordinary citizens—and later the courts—have had on the American understanding of free speech.
Filling a gap in legal history, this enlightening, richly researched historical investigation will be valuable for students and scholars of law, U.S. history, and political science, as well as for general readers interested in civil liberties and free speech.
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Freedom and Tenure in the Academy
William W. Van Alstyne, ed.
Duke University Press, 1993
Questions of academic freedom--from hate speech to the tenure structure—continue to be of great urgency and perennial debate in American higher education. Originally published as a special issue of Law and Contemporary Problems (Summer 1990), this volume draws together leading scholars of law, philosophy, and higher education to offer a fresh assessment of the founding principles of academic freedom and to define this crucial topic for the 1990s.
The original 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, which has been influential in determining institutional practices for the last half century, has required continual redefinition since its initial declaration. The volume begins with two overview articles: the most complete examination of the 1940 Statement ever provided (shedding light on some of its most troublesome clauses) and a historical review of the extent to which academic freedom has been accepted into domestic constitutional law. Subsequent articles address a range of issues related to academic freedom: the relationship between tenure and academic freedom; tenure and labor law; ideology and faculty selection; freedom of expression and the arts on campus; the boundaries defining hate speech and offensive expression; the clash between institutional and individual claims of academic freedom; and the practices of religious colleges in the United States.

Contributors. Ralph S. Brown, Matthew W. Finkin, Jordan E. Kurland, Michael W. McConnell, Walter P. Metzger, Robert M. O'Neil, David M. Rabban, Rodney A, Smolla, Janet Sinder, Judith Jarvis Thomson, William W. Van Alstyne

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Freedom in Entangled Worlds
West Papua and the Architecture of Global Power
Eben Kirksey
Duke University Press, 2012
Eben Kirksey first went to West Papua, the Indonesian-controlled half of New Guinea, as an exchange student in 1998. His later study of West Papua's resistance to the Indonesian occupiers and the forces of globalization morphed as he discovered that collaboration, rather than resistance, was the primary strategy of this dynamic social movement. Accompanying indigenous activists to Washington, London, and the offices of the oil giant BP, Kirksey saw the revolutionaries' knack for getting inside institutions of power and building coalitions with unlikely allies, including many Indonesians. He discovered that the West Papuans' pragmatic activism was based on visions of dramatic transformations on coming horizons, of a future in which they would give away their natural resources in grand humanitarian gestures, rather than watch their homeland be drained of timber, gold, copper, and natural gas. During a lengthy, brutal occupation, West Papuans have harbored a messianic spirit and channeled it in surprising directions. Kirksey studied West Papua's movement for freedom while a broad-based popular uprising gained traction from 1998 until 2008. Blending ethnographic research with indigenous parables, historical accounts, and narratives of his own experiences, he argues that seeking freedom in entangled worlds requires negotiating complex interdependencies.
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Freedom Not Yet
Liberation and the Next World Order
Kenneth Surin
Duke University Press, 2009
The neoliberal project in the West has created an increasingly polarized and impoverished world, to the point that the vast majority of its citizens require liberation from their present socioeconomic circumstances. The marxist theorist Kenneth Surin contends that innovation and change at the level of the political must occur in order to achieve this liberation, and for this endeavor marxist theory and philosophy are indispensable. In Freedom Not Yet, Surin analyzes the nature of our current global economic system, particularly with regard to the plight of less developed countries, and he discusses the possibilities of creating new political subjects necessary to establish and sustain a liberated world.

Surin begins by examining the current regime of accumulation—the global domination of financial markets over traditional industrial economies—which is used as an instrument for the subordination and dependency of poorer nations. He then moves to the constitution of subjectivity, or the way humans are produced as social beings, which he casts as the key arena in which struggles against dispossession occur. Surin critically engages with the major philosophical positions that have been posed as models of liberation, including Derrida’s notion of reciprocity between a subject and its other, a reinvigorated militancy in political reorientation based on the thinking of Badiou and Zizek, the nomad politics of Deleuze and Guattari, and the politics of the multitude suggested by Hardt and Negri. Finally, Surin specifies the material conditions needed for liberation from the economic, political, and social failures of our current system. Seeking to illuminate a route to a better life for the world’s poorer populations, Surin investigates the philosophical possibilities for a marxist or neo-marxist concept of liberation from capitalist exploitation and the regimes of power that support it.

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Freedom Time
Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World
Gary Wilder
Duke University Press, 2015
Freedom Time reconsiders decolonization from the perspectives of Aimé Césaire (Martinique) and Léopold Sédar Senghor (Senegal) who, beginning in 1945, promoted self-determination without state sovereignty. As politicians, public intellectuals, and poets they struggled to transform imperial France into a democratic federation, with former colonies as autonomous members of a transcontinental polity. In so doing, they revitalized past but unrealized political projects and anticipated impossible futures by acting as if they had already arrived. Refusing to reduce colonial emancipation to national independence, they regarded decolonization as an opportunity to remake the world, reconcile peoples, and realize humanity’s potential. Emphasizing the link between politics and aesthetics, Gary Wilder reads Césaire and Senghor as pragmatic utopians, situated humanists, and concrete cosmopolitans whose postwar insights can illuminate current debates about self-management, postnational politics, and planetary solidarity. Freedom Time invites scholars to decolonize intellectual history and globalize critical theory, to analyze the temporal dimensions of political life, and to question the territorialist assumptions of contemporary historiography.
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Freedom with Violence
Race, Sexuality, and the US State
Chandan Reddy
Duke University Press, 2011
In Freedom with Violence, Chandan Reddy develops a new paradigm for understanding race, sexuality, and national citizenship. He examines a crucial contradiction at the heart of modernity: the nation-state’s claim to provide freedom from violence depends on its systematic deployment of violence against peoples perceived as nonnormative and irrational. Reddy argues that the modern liberal state is organized as a “counterviolence” to race even as, and precisely because, race persists as the condition of possibility for the modern subject. Rejecting liberal notions of modernity as freedom from violence or revolutionary ideas of freedom through violence, Reddy contends that liberal modernity is a structure for authorizing state violence. Contemporary neoliberal societies link freedom to the notion of legitimate (state) violence and produce narratives of liberty that tie rights and citizenship to institutionalized violence. To counter these formulations, Reddy proposes an alternative politics of knowledge grounded in queer of color critique and critical ethnic studies. He uses issues that include asylum law and the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy to illustrate this major rethinking of the terms of liberal modernity.
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Freedom without Permission
Bodies and Space in the Arab Revolutions
Frances S. Hasso and Zakia Salime, editors
Duke University Press, 2016
As the 2011 uprisings in North Africa reverberated across the Middle East, a diverse cross section of women and girls publicly disputed gender and sexual norms in novel, unauthorized, and often shocking ways. In a series of case studies ranging from Tunisia's 14 January Revolution to the Taksim Gezi Park protests in Istanbul, the contributors to Freedom without Permission reveal the centrality of the intersections between body, gender, sexuality, and space to these groundbreaking events. Essays include discussions of the blogs written by young women in Egypt, the Women2Drive campaign in Saudi Arabia, the reintegration of women into the public sphere in Yemen, the sexualization of female protesters encamped at Bahrain's Pearl Roundabout, and the embodied, performative, and artistic spaces of Morocco's 20 February Movement. Conceiving of revolution as affective, embodied, spatialized, and aesthetic forms of upheaval and transgression, the contributors show how women activists imagined, inhabited, and deployed new spatial arrangements that undermined the public-private divisions of spaces, bodies, and social relations, continuously transforming them through symbolic and embodied transgressions. 

Contributors. Lamia Benyoussef, Susanne Dahlgren, Karina Eileraas, Susana Galan, Banu Gökariksel, Frances S. Hasso, Sonali Pahwa, Zakia Salime
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Freedom's Empire
Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640-1940
Laura Doyle
Duke University Press, 2007
In this pathbreaking work of scholarship, Laura Doyle reveals the central, formative role of race in the development of a transnational, English-language literature over three centuries. Identifying a recurring freedom plot organized around an Atlantic Ocean crossing, Doyle shows how this plot structures the texts of both African-Atlantic and Anglo-Atlantic writers and how it takes shape by way of submerged intertextual exchanges between the two traditions. For Anglo-Atlantic writers, Doyle locates the origins of this narrative in the seventeenth century. She argues that members of Parliament, religious refugees, and new Atlantic merchants together generated a racial rhetoric by which the English fashioned themselves as a “native,” “freedom-loving,” “Anglo-Saxon” people struggling against a tyrannical foreign king. Stories of a near ruinous yet triumphant Atlantic passage to freedom came to provide the narrative expression of this heroic Anglo-Saxon identity—in novels, memoirs, pamphlets, and national histories. At the same time, as Doyle traces through figures such as Friday in Robinson Crusoe, and through gothic and seduction narratives of ruin and captivity, these texts covertly register, distort, or appropriate the black Atlantic experience. African-Atlantic authors seize back the freedom plot, placing their agency at the origin of both their own and whites’ survival on the Atlantic. They also shrewdly expose the ways that their narratives have been “framed” by the Anglo-Atlantic tradition, even though their labor has provided the enabling condition for that tradition.

Doyle brings together authors often separated by nation, race, and period, including Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, Olaudah Equiano, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Wilson, Pauline Hopkins, George Eliot, and Nella Larsen. In so doing, she reassesses the strategies of early women novelists, reinterprets the significance of rape and incest in the novel, and measures the power of race in the modern English-language imagination.

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The French Atlantic Triangle
Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade
Christopher L. Miller
Duke University Press, 2008
The French slave trade forced more than one million Africans across the Atlantic to the islands of the Caribbean. It enabled France to establish Saint-Domingue, the single richest colony on earth, and it connected France, Africa, and the Caribbean permanently. Yet the impact of the slave trade on the cultures of France and its colonies has received surprisingly little attention. Until recently, France had not publicly acknowledged its history as a major slave-trading power. The distinguished scholar Christopher L. Miller proposes a thorough assessment of the French slave trade and its cultural ramifications, in a broad, circum-Atlantic inquiry. This magisterial work is the first comprehensive examination of the French Atlantic slave trade and its consequences as represented in the history, literature, and film of France and its former colonies in Africa and the Caribbean.

Miller offers a historical introduction to the cultural and economic dynamics of the French slave trade, and he shows how Enlightenment thinkers such as Montesquieu and Voltaire mused about the enslavement of Africans, while Rousseau ignored it. He follows the twists and turns of attitude regarding the slave trade through the works of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century French writers, including Olympe de Gouges, Madame de Staël, Madame de Duras, Prosper Mérimée, and Eugène Sue. For these authors, the slave trade was variously an object of sentiment, a moral conundrum, or an entertaining high-seas “adventure.” Turning to twentieth-century literature and film, Miller describes how artists from Africa and the Caribbean—including the writers Aimé Césaire, Maryse Condé, and Edouard Glissant, and the filmmakers Ousmane Sembene, Guy Deslauriers, and Roger Gnoan M’Bala—have confronted the aftermath of France’s slave trade, attempting to bridge the gaps between silence and disclosure, forgetfulness and memory.

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French History in the Visual Sphere, Volume 26
Daniel Sherman and Mary D. Sheriff
Duke University Press

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The French Writers' War, 1940-1953
Gisèle Sapiro
Duke University Press, 2014
The French Writers' War, 1940–1953, is a remarkably thorough account of French writers and literary institutions from the beginning of the German Occupation through France's passage of amnesty laws in the early 1950s. To understand how the Occupation affected French literary production as a whole, Gisèle Sapiro uses Pierre Bourdieu's notion of the "literary field." Sapiro surveyed the career trajectories and literary and political positions of 185 writers. She found that writers' stances in relation to the Vichy regime are best explained in terms of institutional and structural factors, rather than ideology. Examining four major French literary institutions, from the conservative French Academy to the Comité national des écrivains, a group formed in 1941 to resist the Occupation, she chronicles the institutions' histories before turning to the ways that they influenced writers' political positions. Sapiro shows how significant institutions and individuals within France's literary field exacerbated their loss of independence or found ways of resisting during the war and Occupation, as well as how they were perceived after Liberation.
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Frescobaldi Studies
Alexander Silbiger, ed.
Duke University Press, 1987
Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583–1643) occupies a special place in the history of music as the first significant European composer who concentrated his major creative efforts into the realm of instrumental music. In this collection of papers based on the Quadricentennial Frescobaldi Studies Conference, sixteen American and European specialists examine important aspects of the life and works of this composer and of his role in the creation of a new musical language of the Baroque.
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Friendship and Literature
Spirit and Form
Ronald A. Sharp
Duke University Press, 1986

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Friendship, Volume 97
Peter Murphy
Duke University Press
After the culture wars of the past two decades, a turn toward a more constructive and convivial social analysis and critique is occurring today. Along with such themes as cosmopolitanism and ethical politics, the idea of friendship has emerged as central to this new constructivism. Lying at the intersections of ethics and politics as well as eroticism and companionship, friendship involves the personal and the public, sacrifice and joy, need and choice, spirit and body. While giving pleasure, it can also make great moral demands on us all.
While friendship was often discussed by the ancients, moderns have had much less to say on the topic. Leading us into a dialogue with the ancients, the contributors offer a series of far-reaching encounters. Nietzsche debates the meaning of friendship with Socrates; Horatio fulfills the ancient desideratum of the “true friend” in telling Hamlet’s story; and philia becomes the core of a radical ethic through a reconstruction of Marx’s Epicurean ideals. Friendship is also analyzed as the model of a non-narcissistic psychology, on the one hand, and of a “mafia of idealists”—the French Resistance—on the other. Moreover, milieus of friendship are revealed as a unique crucible of creativity for the Benjamin-Bloch cohort in 1920s southern Italy, for Wittgenstein and his Cambridge followers in the 1930s, and for American jazz musicians of the 1950s.

Contributors. Dwight Allman, Fabio Ciaramelli, Marios Constantinou, John Ely, Agnes Heller, Clara Gibson Maxwell (with Ornette Coleman), Peter Murphy, Louis Ruprecht Jr., Jean-Pierre Vernant

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From a Nation Torn
Decolonizing Art and Representation in France, 1945-1962
Hannah Feldman
Duke University Press, 2014
From a Nation Torn provides a powerful critique of art history's understanding of French modernism and the historical circumstances that shaped its production and reception. Within art history, the aesthetic practices and theories that emerged in France from the late 1940s into the 1960s are demarcated as postwar. Yet it was during these very decades that France fought a protracted series of wars to maintain its far-flung colonial empire. Given that French modernism was created during, rather than after, war, Hannah Feldman argues that its interpretation must incorporate the tumultuous "decades of decolonization"and their profound influence on visual and public culture. Focusing on the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962) and the historical continuities it presented with the experience of the Second World War, Feldman highlights decolonization's formative effects on art and related theories of representation, both political and aesthetic. Ultimately, From a Nation Torn constitutes a profound exploration of how certain populations and events are rendered invisible and their omission naturalized within histories of modernity.
 
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From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt
Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South 1938–1980
Bruce J. Schulman
Duke University Press, 1994
From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt investigates the effects of federal policy on the American South from 1938 until 1980 and charts the close relationship between federal efforts to reform the South and the evolution of activist government in the modern United States. Decrying the South’s economic backwardness and political conservatism, the Roosevelt Administration launched a series of programs to reorder the Southern economy in the 1930s. After 1950, however, the social welfare state had been replaced by the national security state as the South’s principal benefactor. Bruce J. Schulman contrasts the diminished role of national welfare initiatives in the postwar South with the expansion of military and defense-related programs. He analyzes the contributions of these growth-oriented programs to the South’s remarkable economic expansion, to the development of American liberalism, and to the excruciating limits of Sunbelt prosperity, ultimately relating these developments to southern politics and race relations. By linking the history of the South with the history of national public policy, Schulman unites two issues that dominate the domestic history of postwar America—the emergence of the Sunbelt and the expansion of federal power over the nation’s economic and social life. A forcefully argued work, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt, originally published in 1991(Oxford University Press), will be an important guide to students and scholars of federal policy and modern Southern history.
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From Cuba, Volume 29
John Beverley, ed.
Duke University Press
Most speculation about the future of Cuba rests on positions Cuban émigrés in the United States, Latin America, and Europe have advanced. In contrast, From Cuba represents a diverse collection by Cuban artists and intellectuals who have retained primary identification with or residence in Cuba. The island nation embodies a point of unresolved friction within the new world order. On the one hand, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the project of the Revolution faces what seems to be an insurmountable impasse; on the other hand, Cuba resists returning to the capitalist fold like a prodigal son.

Featuring essays, poetry, art, performance texts, song lyrics, and writing from members of the generation of the Revolution to younger writers and artists of the nineties, this collection explores themes such as the crisis of the project of the Revolution in an era of the decline of socialism, the Cuban literary diaspora, resistance and freedom, and Cuban identity in the nineties. From Cuba expands upon and challenges the traditional ways in which scholars think about Cuba’s political past and future prospects.

Contributors. Carlos Aguilera, Haroldo Dilla Alfonso, Miguel Barnet, Tania Bruguera, Michael Chanan, Antonio Fernandez, Ambrosio Fornet, Tomas Gutierrez Alea, Fernando Martínez Heredia, Rafael Hernandez, Fina Garcia Marruz, Nancy Morejón, Geraredo Mosquera, Magaly Muguericia, Desiderio Navarro, Margarita Mateo Palmer, Omar Perez, Antonio José Ponte, Raúl Rivero, Reina Maria Rodriguez, José Prats Sariol, Cintio Vitier

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From East Germans to Germans?
The New Postcommunist Elites
Jennifer A. Yoder
Duke University Press, 1999
In 1990 Germany launched an experiment to transplant democracy into a formerly communist country, effectively dismantling the system of the German Democratic Republic and rebuilding it in the likeness of the democratic Federal Republic of Germany. From East Germans to Germans? examines the role of the first generation of democratically elected political elites in the former GDR’s transition to democracy.
Although the quick transplant of a ready-made democratic system supported by West German financial backing and expertise provided benefits, problems arose for the development of postcommunist political leadership and for the growth of mass support for the democratic system. Jennifer A. Yoder analyzes the implications of the transition process for democratic legitimation and integration. Based on field research in East Germany that included interviews with parliamentarians, her study addresses issues such as culture, identity, and the lack of continuity between the old and new political elites. Although the availability of West German role models, together with pressure to conform, allowed the process of decommunization to occur much faster than elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the cultural differences between east and west are more extensive and complex than previously assumed. Unification has also been followed by a reinvigoration of regional interests. Yoder shows how some political elites have adopted western German patterns, while others openly criticize many of the practices and policies originating in Bonn and present themselves as democratic alternatives and advocates for East German interests in the new Germany. Indeed, for many East Germans, these new regional elites are regarded as the only representatives of their interests in the western-dominated political system.
Providing insight into elite-building at a time of transition and a valuable alternative to the “institutions versus culture” debate found in traditional analyses of political change, this book will interest political scientists and students and scholars of European politics and German studies.
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From Enlightenment to Revolution
Eric Voegelin
Duke University Press

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From Fanatics to Folk
Brazilian Millenarianism and Popular Culture
Patricia R. Pessar
Duke University Press, 2004
From Fanatics to Folk rejects conventional understandings of Brazilian millenarianism as exceptional and self-defeating. Considering millenarianism over the long sweep of Brazilian history, Patricia R. Pessar shows it to have been both dominant discourse and popular culture—at different times the inspiration for colonial conquest, for backlanders’ resistance to a modernizing church and state, and for the nostalgic appropriation by today’s elites in pursuit of “traditional” folklore and “authentic” expressions of faith. Pessar focuses on Santa Brígida, a Northeast Brazilian millenarian movement begun in the 1930s. She examines the movement from its founding by Pedro Batista—initially disparaged as a charlatan by the backland elite and later celebrated as a modernizer, patriot, and benefactor—through the contemporary struggles of its followers to maintain their transgressive religious beliefs in the face of increased attention from politicians, clergy, journalists, filmmakers, researchers, and museum curators.

Pessar combines cultural history spanning the colonial period to the present; comparative case studies of the Canudos, Contestado, Juazeiro, and Santa Brígida movements; and three decades of ethnographic research in the Brazilian Northeast. Highlighting the involvement of a broad range of individuals and institutions, the cross-fertilization between movements, contestation and accommodation vis-à-vis the church and state, and matters of spirituality and faith, From Fanatics to Folk reveals Brazilian millenarianism as long-enduring and constantly in flux.

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From Interwar Pluralism to Postwar Neoclassicism, Volume 30
Mary S. Morgan and Malcolm Rutherford, eds.
Duke University Press
From Interwar Pluralism to Postwar Neoclassicism seeks to change assumptions about American economics during the transformative period between the world wars.
The twelve essays by respected economists and historians collected here take a precise look at the mechanisms that brought about the shift from pluralism to neoclassicism in American economics. They discuss such topics as the demise of the Social Gospel Movement, the role of general education and graduate study in Chicago economics, the Sherman Antitrust Act, the transformation of economics through a survey of journal articles, and changes in American monetary thought.

Contributors. Roger E. Backhouse, Márcia L. Balisciano, Bradley W. Bateman, Jeff Biddle, Ross B. Emmett, Crauford D. W. Goodwin, D. Wade Hands, Anne Mayhew, Steven G. Medema, Perry Mehrling, Philip Mirowski, Mary S. Morgan, Malcolm Rutherford, E. Roy Weintraub

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From Migrants to Refugees
The Politics of Aid along the Tanzania-Rwanda Border
Jill Rosenthal
Duke University Press, 2023
In From Migrants to Refugees Jill Rosenthal tells the history of how Rwandan migrants in a Tanzanian border district became considered either citizens or refugees as nation-state boundaries solidified in the wake of decolonization. Outlining the process by which people who have long lived and circulated across the Rwanda-Tanzania border came to have a national identity, Rosenthal reveals humanitarian aid’s central role in the ideological processes of decolonization and nation building. From precolonial histories to the first Rwandan refugee camps during decolonization in the 1960s to the massive refugee camps in the 1990s, Rosenthal highlights the way that this area became a testing ground for novel forms of transnational aid to refugees that had global implications. As local and national actors, refugees, and international officials all attempted to control the lives and futures of refugee groups, they contested the authority of the nation-state and the international refugee regime. This history, Rosenthal demonstrates, illuminates how tensions between state and international actors divided people who share a common history, culture, and language across national borders.
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From Modern Production to Imagined Primitive
The Social World of Coffee from Papua New Guinea
Paige West
Duke University Press, 2012
In this vivid ethnography, Paige West tracks coffee as it moves from producers in Papua New Guinea to consumers around the world. She illuminates the social lives of the people who produce coffee, and those who process, distribute, market, and consume it. The Gimi peoples, who grow coffee in Papua New Guinea's highlands, are eager to expand their business and social relationships with the buyers who come to their highland villages, as well as with the people working in Goroka, where much of Papua New Guinea's coffee is processed; at the port of Lae, where it is exported; and in Hamburg, Sydney, and London, where it is distributed and consumed. This rich social world is disrupted by neoliberal development strategies, which impose prescriptive regimes of governmentality that are often at odds with Melanesian ways of being in, and relating to, the world. The Gimi are misrepresented in the specialty coffee market, which relies on images of primitivity and poverty to sell coffee. By implying that the "backwardness" of Papua New Guineans impedes economic development, these images obscure the structural relations and global political economy that actually cause poverty in Papua New Guinea.
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From Popular Medicine to Medical Populism
Doctors, Healers, and Public Power in Costa Rica, 1800–1940
Steven Palmer
Duke University Press, 2003
From Popular Medicine to Medical Populism presents the history of medical practice in Costa Rica from the late colonial era—when none of the fifty thousand inhabitants had access to a titled physician, pharmacist, or midwife—to the 1940s, when the figure of the qualified medical doctor was part of everyday life for many of Costa Rica’s nearly one million citizens. It is the first book to chronicle the history of all healers, both professional and popular, in a Latin American country during the national period.
Steven Palmer breaks with the view of popular and professional medicine as polar opposites—where popular medicine is seen as representative of the authentic local community and as synonymous with oral tradition and religious and magical beliefs and professional medicine as advancing neocolonial interests through the work of secular, trained academicians. Arguing that there was significant and formative overlap between these two forms of medicine, Palmer shows that the relationship between practitioners of each was marked by coexistence, complementarity, and dialogue as often as it was by rivalry. Palmer explains that while the professionalization of medical practice was intricately connected to the nation-building process, the Costa Rican state never consistently displayed an interest in suppressing the practice of popular medicine. In fact, it persistently found both tacit and explicit ways to allow untitled healers to practice. Using empirical and archival research to bring people (such as the famous healer or curandero Professor Carlos Carbell), events, and institutions (including the Rockefeller Foundation) to life, From Popular Medicine to Medical Populism demonstrates that it was through everyday acts of negotiation among agents of the state, medical professionals, and popular practitioners that the contours of Costa Rica’s modern, heterogeneous health care system were established.
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From Postwar to Postmodern, Art in Japan, 1945-1989
Primary Documents
Doryun Chong, Michio Hayashi, Kenji Kajiya, and Fumihiko Sumitomo, eds.
Duke University Press
A trove of primary source materials, From Postwar to Postmodern, Art in Japan 1945–1989 is an invaluable scholarly resource for readers who wish to explore the fascinating subject of avant-garde art in postwar Japan. In this comprehensive anthology, an array of key documents, artist manifestos, critical essays, and roundtable discussions are translated into English for the first time. The pieces cover a broad range of artistic mediums—including photography, film, performance, architecture, and design—and illuminate their various points of convergence in the Japanese context.

The collection is organized chronologically and thematically to highlight significant movements, works, and artistic phenomena, such as the pioneering artist collectives Gutai and Hi Red Center, the influential photography periodical Provoke, and the emergence of video art in the 1980s. Interspersed throughout the volume are more than twenty newly commissioned texts by contemporary scholars. Including Bert Winther-Tamaki on art and the Occupation and Reiko Tomii on the Yomiuri Independent Exhibition, these pieces supplement and provide a historical framework for the primary source materials. From Postwar to Postmodern, Art in Japan 1945–1989 offers an unprecedented look at over four decades of Japanese art—both as it unfolded and as it is seen from the perspective of the present day.

Publication of The Museum of Modern Art

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From Revolutionaries to Citizens
Antimilitarism in France, 1870–1914
Paul B. Miller
Duke University Press, 2002
From Revolutionaries to Citizens is the first comprehensive account of the most important antiwar campaign prior to World War I: the antimilitarism of the French Left. Covering the views and actions of socialists, trade unionists, and anarchists from the time of France’s defeat by Prussia in 1870 to the outbreak of hostilities with Germany in 1914, Paul B. Miller tackles a fundamental question of prewar historiography: how did the most antimilitarist culture and society in Europe come to accept and even support war in 1914?

Although more general accounts of the Left’s “failure” to halt international war in August 1914 focus on its lack of unity or the decline of trade unionism, Miller contends that these explanations barely scratch the surface when it comes to interpreting the Left’s overwhelming acceptance of the war. By embedding his cultural analysis of antimilitarist propaganda into the larger political and diplomatic history of prewar Europe, he reveals the Left’s seemingly sudden transformation “from revolutionaries to citizens” as less a failure of resolve than a confession of commonality with the broader ideals of republican France. Examining sources ranging from police files and court records to German and British foreign office memos, Miller emphasizes the success of antimilitarism as a rallying cry against social and political inequities on behalf of ordinary citizens. Despite their keen awareness of the bloodletting that awaited Europe, he claims, antimilitarists ultimately accepted the war with Germany for the same reason they had pursued their own struggle within France: to address injustices and defend the rights of citizens in a democratic society.

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From Russia with Code
Programming Migrations in Post-Soviet Times
Mario Biagioli and Vincent Antonin Lepinay, editors
Duke University Press, 2019
While Russian computer scientists are notorious for their interference in the 2016 US presidential election, they are ubiquitous on Wall Street and coveted by international IT firms and often perceive themselves as the present manifestation of the past glory of Soviet scientific prowess. Drawing on over three hundred in-depth interviews, the contributors to From Russia with Code trace the practices, education, careers, networks, migrations, and lives of Russian IT professionals at home and abroad, showing how they function as key figures in the tense political and ideological environment of technological innovation in post-Soviet Russia. Among other topics, they analyze coders' creation of both transnational communities and local networks of political activists; Moscow's use of IT funding to control peripheral regions; brain drain and the experiences of coders living abroad in the United Kingdom, United States, Israel, and Finland; and the possible meanings of Russian computing systems in a heterogeneous nation and industry. Highlighting the centrality of computer scientists to post-Soviet economic mobilization in Russia, the contributors offer new insights into the difficulties through which a new entrepreneurial culture emerges in a rapidly changing world.

Contributors. Irina Antoschyuk, Mario Biagioli, Ksenia Ermoshina, Marina Fedorova, Andrey Indukaev, Alina Kontareva, Diana Kurkovsky, Vincent Lépinay, Alexandra Masalskaya, Daria Savchenko, Liubava Shatokhina, Alexandra Simonova, Ksenia Tatarchenko, Zinaida Vasilyeva, Dimitrii Zhikharevich
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From Silver to Cocaine
Latin American Commodity Chains and the Building of the World Economy, 1500–2000
Steven Topik, Carlos Marichal, and Zephyr Frank, eds.
Duke University Press, 2006
Demonstrating that globalization is a centuries-old phenomenon, From Silver to Cocaine examines the commodity chains that have connected producers in Latin America with consumers around the world for five hundred years. In clear, accessible essays, historians from Latin America, England, and the United States trace the paths of many of Latin America’s most important exports: coffee, bananas, rubber, sugar, tobacco, silver, henequen (fiber), fertilizers, cacao, cocaine, indigo, and cochineal (insects used to make dye). Each contributor follows a specific commodity from its inception, through its development and transport, to its final destination in the hands of consumers. The essays are arranged in chronological order, according to when the production of a particular commodity became significant to Latin America’s economy. Some—such as silver, sugar, and tobacco—were actively produced and traded in the sixteenth century; others—such as bananas and rubber—only at the end of the nineteenth century; and cocaine only in the twentieth.

By focusing on changing patterns of production and consumption over time, the contributors reconstruct complex webs of relationships and economic processes, highlighting Latin America’s central and interactive place in the world economy. They show how changes in coffee consumption habits, clothing fashions, drug usage, or tire technologies in Europe, Asia, and the Americas reverberate through Latin American commodity chains in profound ways. The social and economic outcomes of the continent’s export experience have been mixed. By analyzing the dynamics of a wide range of commodities over a five-hundred-year period, From Silver to Cocaine highlights this diversity at the same time that it provides a basis for comparison and points to new ways of doing global history.

Contributors. Marcelo Bucheli, Horacio Crespo, Zephyr Frank, Paul Gootenberg, Robert Greenhill, Mary Ann Mahony, Carlos Marichal, David McCreery, Rory Miller, Aldo Musacchio, Laura Nater, Ian Read, Mario Samper, Steven Topik, Allen Wells

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From the Grassroots to the Supreme Court
Brown v. Board of Education and American Democracy
Peter F. Lau, ed.
Duke University Press, 2004
Perhaps more than any other Supreme Court ruling, Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 decision declaring the segregation of public schools unconstitutional, highlighted both the possibilities and the limitations of American democracy. This collection of sixteen original essays by historians and legal scholars takes the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Brown to reconsider the history and legacy of that landmark decision. From the Grassroots to the Supreme Court juxtaposes oral histories and legal analysis to provide a nuanced look at how men and women understood Brown and sought to make the decision meaningful in their own lives.

The contributors illuminate the breadth of developments that led to Brown, from the parallel struggles for social justice among African Americans in the South and Mexican, Asian, and Native Americans in the West during the late nineteenth century to the political and legal strategies implemented by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp) in the twentieth century. Describing the decision’s impact on local communities, essayists explore the conflict among African Americans over the implementation of Brown in Atlanta’s public schools as well as understandings of the ruling and its relevance among Puerto Rican migrants in New York City. Assessing the legacy of Brown today, contributors analyze its influence on contemporary law, African American thought, and educational opportunities for minority children.

Contributors
Tomiko Brown-Nagin
Davison M. Douglas
Raymond Gavins
Laurie B. Green
Christina Greene
Blair L. M. Kelley
Michael J. Klarman
Peter F. Lau
Madeleine E. Lopez
Waldo E. Martin Jr.
Vicki L. Ruiz
Christopher Schmidt
Larissa M. Smith
Patricia Sullivan
Kara Miles Turner
Mark V. Tushnet

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From the House to the Streets
The Cuban Woman's Movement for Legal Reform, 1898-1940
K. Lynn Stoner
Duke University Press, 1991
From the House to the Streets is the first study on feminists and the feminist movement in Cuba between 1902 and 1940. In the four decades following its independence form Spain in 1898, Cuba adopted the most progressive legislation for women in the western hemisphere. K. Lynn Stoner explains how a small group of women and men helped to shape broad legal reforms: she describes their campaigns, the version of feminism they adopted with all its contradictions, and contrasts it to the model of feminism North Americans were transporting to Cuba.
Stoner draws on rich primary sources—texts, personal letters, journal essays, radio broadcasts, memoirs from women’s congresses—which allow these women to speak in their own voices. In reconstructing the mentalité of Cuban feminists, who came primarily from a privileged social status, Stoner shows how feminism drew from traditional notions of femininity and a rejection of gender equality to advance a cause that assumed women’s expanded roles were necessary for social progress. She also examines the values of the progressive male politicians who supported feminists and worked to change Cuban laws.
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From the Margins
Historical Anthropology and Its Futures
Brian Keith Axel, ed.
Duke University Press, 2002
Historical anthropology: critical exchange between two decidedly distinct disciplines or innovative mode of knowledge production? As this volume’s title suggests, the essays Brian Keith Axel has gathered in From the Margins seek to challenge the limits of discrete disciplinary epistemologies and conventions, gesturing instead toward a transdisciplinary understanding of the emerging relations between archive and field.
In original articles encompassing a wide range of geographic and temporal locations, eminent scholars contest some of the primary preconceptions of their fields. The contributors tackle such topics as the paradoxical nature of American Civil War monuments, the figure of the “New Christian” in early seventeenth-century Peru, the implications of statistics for ethnography, and contemporary South Africa's “occult economies.” That anthropology and history have their provenance in—and have been complicit with—colonial formations is perhaps commonplace knowledge. But what is rarely examined is the specific manner in which colonial processes imbue and threaten the celebratory ideals of postcolonial reason or the enlightenment of today’s liberal practices in the social sciences and humanities.
By elaborating this critique, From the Margins offers diverse and powerful models that explore the intersections of historically specific local practices with processes of a world historical order. As such, the collection will not only prove valuable reading for anthropologists and historians, but also for scholars in colonial, postcolonial, and globalization studies.

Contributors.
Talal Asad, Brian Keith Axel, Bernard S. Cohn, Jean Comaroff, John L. Comaroff, Nicholas B. Dirks, Irene Silverblatt, Paul A. Silverstein, Teri Silvio, Ann Laura Stoler, Michel-Rolph Trouillot
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From the Revolution to the Maquiladoras
Gender, Labor, and Globalization in Nicaragua
Jennifer Bickham Mendez
Duke University Press, 2005
From the Revolution to the Maquiladoras is a major contribution to the study of globalization, labor, and women’s movements. Jennifer Bickham Mendez presents a detailed ethnographic account of the Nicaraguan Working and Unemployed Women’s Movement, “María Elena Cuadra” (mec), which emerged as an autonomous organization in 1994. Most of its efforts revolve around organizing women workers in Nicaragua’s free trade zones and working to improve conditions in maquiladora factories. Mendez examines the structural and cultural elements of mec in order to demonstrate how globalization affects grassroots advocacy for social and economic justice. She argues that globalization has created opportunities for new forms of organizing among those local populations that suffer its effects and that mec, which has forged vital links with transnational feminist and labor groups, exemplifies the possibilities—and pitfalls—of this new type of organizing.

Mendez draws on interviews with leaders and program participants, including maquiladora workers; her participant observation while she worked as a volunteer within the organization; and analysis of the public statements, speeches, and texts written by mec members. She provides a sense of the day-to-day operations of the group as well as its strategies. By exploring the tension between mec and transnational feminist, labor, and solidarity networks, she illustrates how mec women’s outlooks are shaped by both their revolutionary roots within the Sandinista regime and their exposure to global discourses of human rights and citizenship. The complexities of the women’s labor movement analyzed in From the Revolution to the Maquiladoras speak to social and economic justice movements in the many locales around the world.

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From the Tricontinental to the Global South
Race, Radicalism, and Transnational Solidarity
Anne Garland Mahler
Duke University Press, 2018
In From the Tricontinental to the Global South Anne Garland Mahler traces the history and intellectual legacy of the understudied global justice movement called the Tricontinental—an alliance of liberation struggles from eighty-two countries, founded in Havana in 1966. Focusing on racial violence and inequality, the Tricontinental's critique of global capitalist exploitation has influenced historical radical thought, contemporary social movements such as the World Social Forum and Black Lives Matter, and a Global South political imaginary. The movement's discourse, which circulated in four languages, also found its way into radical artistic practices, like Cuban revolutionary film and Nuyorican literature. While recent social movements have revived Tricontinentalism's ideologies and aesthetics, they have largely abandoned its roots in black internationalism and its contribution to a global struggle for racial justice. In response to this fractured appropriation of Tricontinentalism, Mahler ultimately argues that a renewed engagement with black internationalist thought could be vital to the future of transnational political resistance.
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From Two Republics to One Divided
Contradictions of Postcolonial Nationmaking in Andean Peru
Mark Thurner
Duke University Press, 2001
From Two Republics to One Divided examines Peru’s troubled transition from colonial viceroyalty to postcolonial republic from the local perspective of Andean peasant politics. Thurner’s reading of the Andean peasantry’s engagement and disengagement with the postcolonial state challenges long-standing interpretations of Peruvian and modern Latin American history and casts a critical eye toward Creole and Eurocentric ideas about citizenship and nationalism.
Working within an innovative and panoramic historical and linguistic framework, Thurner examines the paradoxes of a resurgent Andean peasant republicanism during the mid-1800s and provides a critical revision of the meaning of republican Peru’s bloodiest peasant insurgency, the Atusparia Uprising of 1885. Displacing ahistorical and nationalist readings of Inka or Andean continuity, and undermining the long-held notion that the colonial legacy is the dominant historical force shaping contemporary Andean reality, Thurner suggests that in Peru, the postcolonial legacy of Latin America’s nation-founding nineteenth century transfigured, and ultimately reinvented, the colonial legacy in its own image.
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From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park
Activism, Culture, and American Studies
Paul Lauter
Duke University Press, 2001
Paul Lauter, an icon of American Studies who has been a primary agent in its transformation and its chief ambassador abroad, offers a wide-ranging collection of essays that demonstrate and reflect on this important and often highly politicized discipline. While American Studies was formerly seen as a wholly subsidiary academic program that loosely combined the study of American history, literature, and art, From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park reveals the evolution of an independent, highly interdisciplinary program with distinctive subjects, methods, and goals that are much different than the traditional academic departments that nurtured it.
With anecdote peppered discussions ranging from specific literary texts and movies to the future of higher education and the efficacy of unions, From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park entertains even as it offers a twenty-first century account of how and why Americanists at home and abroad now do what they do. Drawing on his forty-five years of teaching and research as well as his experience as a political activist and a cultural radical, Lauter shows how a multifaceted increase in the United States’ global dominion has infused a particular political urgency into American Studies. With its military and economic influence, its cultural and linguistic reach, the United States is—for better or for worse—too formidable and potent not to be understood clearly and critically.
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From Washington to Moscow
US-Soviet Relations and the Collapse of the USSR
Louis Sell
Duke University Press, 2016
When the United States and the Soviet Union signed the first Strategic Arms Limitation Talks accords in 1972 it was generally seen as the point at which the USSR achieved parity with the United States. Less than twenty years later the Soviet Union had collapsed, confounding experts who never expected it to happen during their lifetimes. In From Washington to Moscow veteran US Foreign Service officer Louis Sell traces the history of US–Soviet relations between 1972 and 1991 and explains why the Cold War came to an abrupt end. Drawing heavily on archival sources and memoirs—many in Russian—as well as his own experiences, Sell vividly describes events from the perspectives of American and Soviet participants. He attributes the USSR's fall not to one specific cause but to a combination of the Soviet system's inherent weaknesses, mistakes by Mikhail Gorbachev, and challenges by Ronald Reagan and other US leaders. He shows how the USSR's rapid and humiliating collapse and the inability of the West and Russia to find a way to cooperate respectfully and collegially helped set the foundation for Vladimir Putin’s rise.
 
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Frontiers of Capital
Ethnographic Reflections on the New Economy
Melissa S. Fisher and Greg Downey, eds.
Duke University Press, 2006
With the NASDAQ having lost 70 percent of its value, the giddy, optimistic belief in perpetual growth that accompanied the economic boom of the 1990s had fizzled by 2002. Yet the advances in information and communication technology, management and production techniques, and global integration that spurred the “New Economy” of the 1990s had triggered profound and lasting changes. Frontiers of Capital brings together ethnographies exploring how cultural practices and social relations have been altered by the radical economic and technological innovations of the New Economy. The contributors, most of whom are anthropologists, investigate changes in the practices and interactions of futures traders, Chinese entrepreneurs, residents of French housing projects, women working on Wall Street, cable television programmers, and others.

Some contributors highlight how expedited flows of information allow business professionals to develop new knowledge practices. They analyze dynamics ranging from the decision-making processes of the Federal Reserve Board to the legal maneuvering necessary to buttress a nascent Japanese market in over-the-counter derivatives. Others focus on the social consequences of globalization and new modes of communication, evaluating the introduction of new information technologies into African communities and the collaborative practices of open-source computer programmers. Together the essays suggest that social relations, rather than becoming less relevant in the high-tech age, have become more important than ever. This finding dovetails with the thinking of many corporations, which increasingly employ anthropologists to study and explain the “local” cultural practices of their own workers and consumers. Frontiers of Capital signals the wide-ranging role of anthropology in explaining the social and cultural contours of the New Economy.

Contributors. Jean Comaroff, John L. Comaroff, Greg Downey, Melissa S. Fisher, Douglas R. Holmes, George E. Marcus, Siobhán O’Mahony, Aihwa Ong, Annelise Riles, Saskia Sassen, Paul A. Silverstein, AbdouMaliq Simone, Neil Smith, Caitlin Zaloom

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The Fruit Machine
Twenty Years of Writings on Queer Cinema
Thomas Waugh
Duke University Press, 2000
For more than twenty years, film critic, teacher, activist, and fan Thomas Waugh has been writing about queer movies. As a member of the Jump Cut collective and contributor to the Toronto-based gay newspaper the Body Politic, he emerged in the late 1970s as a pioneer in gay film theory and criticism, and over the next two decades solidified his reputation as one of the most important and influential gay film critics. The Fruit Machine—a collection of Waugh’s reviews and articles originally published in gay community tabloids, academic journals, and anthologies—charts the emergence and maturation of Waugh’s critical sensibilities while lending an important historical perspective to the growth of film theory and criticism as well as queer moviemaking.
In this wide-ranging anthology Waugh touches on some of the great films of the gay canon, from Taxi zum Klo to Kiss of the Spider Woman. He also discusses obscure guilty pleasures like Born a Man . . . Let Me Die a Woman, unexpectedly rich movies like Porky’s and Caligula, filmmakers such as Fassbinder and Eisenstein, and film personalities from Montgomery Clift to Patty Duke. Emerging from the gay liberation movement of the 1970s, Waugh traverses crises from censorship to AIDS, tackling mainstream potboilers along with art movies, documentaries, and avant-garde erotic videos. In these personal perspectives on the evolving cinematic landscape, his words oscillate from anger and passion to wry wit and irony. With fifty-nine rare film stills and personal photographs and an introduction by celebrated gay filmmaker John Greyson, this volume demonstrates that the movie camera has been the fruit machine par excellence.

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Fruitful Sites
Garden Culture in Ming Dynasty China
Craig Clunas
Duke University Press, 1996
Gardens are sites that can be at one and the same time admired works of art and valuable pieces of real estate. As the first account in English to be wholly based on contemporary Chinese sources, this innovative, beautifully illustrated book grounds the practices of garden-making in Ming dynasty China (1368–1644) firmly in the social and cultural history of the day.
Who owned Ming gardens? Who visited them? How were they represented in words, in paintings, and in visual culture generally, and what meanings did these representations hold at different levels of Chinese society? How did the discourse of gardens intersect with other discourses such as those of aesthetics, agronomy, geomancy, and botany? By examining the gardens of the city of Suzhou from a number of different angles, Craig Clunas provides a rich picture of a complex cultural phenomenon—one that was of crucial importance to the self-fashioning of the Ming elite.
Drawing on a wide range of recent work in cultural theory, the author provides for the first time a historical and materialist account of Chinese garden culture, and replaces broad generalizations and orientalist fantasy with a convincing picture of the garden’s role in social life. Fruitful Sites will appeal to all students of China’s cultural history, to students of garden history from any part of the world, to art historians, and to readers engaged in Asian and cultural studies.
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Fugitive Life
The Queer Politics of the Prison State
Stephen Dillon
Duke University Press, 2018
During the 1970s in the United States, hundreds of feminist, queer, and antiracist activists were imprisoned or became fugitives as they fought the changing contours of U.S. imperialism, global capitalism, and a repressive racial state. In Fugitive Life Stephen Dillon examines these activists' communiqués, films, memoirs, prison writing, and poetry to highlight the centrality of gender and sexuality to a mode of racialized power called the neoliberal-carceral state. Drawing on writings by Angela Davis, the George Jackson Brigade, Assata Shakur, the Weather Underground, and others, Dillon shows how these activists were among the first to theorize and make visible the links between conservative "law and order" rhetoric, free market ideology, incarceration, sexism, and the continued legacies of slavery. Dillon theorizes these prisoners and fugitives as queer figures who occupied a unique position from which to highlight how neoliberalism depended upon racialized mass incarceration. In so doing, he articulates a vision of fugitive freedom in which the work of these activists becomes foundational to undoing the reign of the neoliberal-carceral state.
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Fugitive Modernities
Kisama and the Politics of Freedom
Jessica A. Krug
Duke University Press, 2018
During the early seventeenth century, Kisama emerged in West Central Africa (present-day Angola) as communities and an identity for those fleeing expanding states and the violence of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The fugitives mounted effective resistance to European colonialism despite—or because of—the absence of centralized authority or a common language. In Fugitive Modernities Jessica A. Krug offers a continent- and century-spanning narrative exploring Kisama's intellectual, political, and social histories. Those who became Kisama forged a transnational reputation for resistance, and by refusing to organize their society around warrior identities, they created viable social and political lives beyond the bounds of states and the ruthless market economy of slavery. Krug follows the idea of Kisama to the Americas, where fugitives in the New Kingdom of Grenada (present-day Colombia) and Brazil used it as a means of articulating politics in fugitive slave communities. By tracing the movement of African ideas, rather than African bodies, Krug models new methods for grappling with politics and the past, while showing how the history of Kisama and its legacy as a global symbol of resistance that has evaded state capture offers essential lessons for those working to build new and just societies.
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Fugitive Time
Global Aesthetics and the Black Beyond
Matthew Omelsky
Duke University Press, 2023
In Fugitive Time, Matthew Omelsky theorizes the embodied experience of time in twentieth- and twenty-first-century black artforms from across the world. Through the lens of time, he charts the sensations and coursing thoughts that accompany desires for freedom as they appear in the work of artists as varied as Toni Morrison, Yvonne Vera, Aimé Césaire, and Issa Samb. “Fugitive time” names a distinct utopian desire directed at the anticipated moment when the body and mind have been unburdened of the violence that has consumed black life globally for centuries, bringing with it a new form of being. Omelsky shows how fugitive time is not about attaining this transcendent release but is instead about sustaining the idea of it as an ecstatic social gathering. From the desire for ethereal queer worlds in the Black Audio Film Collective’s Twilight City to Sun Ra’s transformation of nineteenth-century scientific racism into an insurgent fugitive aesthetic, Omelsky shows how fugitive time evolves and how it remains a dominant form of imagining freedom in global black cultural expression.
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Full Metal Apache
Transactions Between Cyberpunk Japan and Avant-Pop America
Takayuki Tatsumi
Duke University Press, 2006
Takayuki Tatsumi is one of Japan’s leading cultural critics, renowned for his work on American literature and culture. With his encyclopedic knowledge and fan’s love of both Japanese and American art and literature, he is perhaps uniquely well situated to offer this study of the dynamic crosscurrents between the avant-gardes and pop cultures of Japan and the United States. In Full Metal Apache, Tatsumi looks at the work of artists from both sides of the Pacific: fiction writers and poets, folklorists and filmmakers, anime artists, playwrights, musicians, manga creators, and performance artists. Tatsumi shows how, over the past twenty years or so, writers and artists have openly and exuberantly appropriated materials drawn from East and West, from sources both high and low, challenging and unraveling the stereotypical images Japan and America have of one another.

Full Metal Apache introduces English-language readers to a vast array of Japanese writers and performers and considers their work in relation to the output of William Gibson, Thomas Pynchon, H. G. Wells, Jack London, J. G. Ballard, and other Westerners. Tatsumi moves from the poetics of metafiction to the complex career of Madame Butterfly stories and from the role of the Anglo-American Lafcadio Hearn in promoting Japanese folklore within Japan during the nineteenth century to the Japanese monster Godzilla as an embodiment of both Japanese and Western ideas about the Other. Along the way, Tatsumi develops original arguments about the self-fashioning of “Japanoids” in the globalist age, the philosophy of “creative masochism” inherent within postwar Japanese culture, and the psychology of “Mikadophilia” indispensable for the construction of a cyborg identity. Tatsumi’s exploration of the interplay between Japanese and American cultural productions is as electric, ebullient, and provocative as the texts and performances he analyzes.

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Fungible Life
Experiment in the Asian City of Life
Aihwa Ong
Duke University Press, 2016
In Fungible Life Aihwa Ong explores the dynamic world of cutting-edge bioscience research, offering critical insights into the complex ways Asian bioscientific worlds and cosmopolitan sciences are entangled in a tropical environment brimming with the threat of emergent diseases. At biomedical centers in Singapore and China scientists map genetic variants, disease risks, and biomarkers, mobilizing ethnicized "Asian" bodies and health data for genomic research. Their differentiation between Chinese, Indian, and Malay DNA makes fungible Singapore's ethnic-stratified databases that come to "represent" majority populations in Asia. By deploying genomic science as a public good, researchers reconfigure the relationships between objects, peoples, and spaces, thus rendering "Asia" itself as a shifting entity. In Ong's analysis, Asia emerges as a richly layered mode of entanglements, where the population's genetic pasts, anxieties and hopes, shared genetic weaknesses, and embattled genetic futures intersect. Furthermore, her illustration of the contrasting methods and goals of the Biopolis biomedical center in Singapore and BGI Genomics in China raises questions about the future direction of cosmopolitan science in Asia and beyond.
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A Future History of Water
Andrea Ballestero
Duke University Press, 2019
Based on fieldwork among state officials, NGOs, politicians, and activists in Costa Rica and Brazil, A Future History of Water traces the unspectacular work necessary to make water access a human right and a human right something different from a commodity. Andrea Ballestero shows how these ephemeral distinctions are made through four technolegal devices—formula, index, list and pact. She argues that what is at stake in these devices is not the making of a distinct future but what counts as the future in the first place. A Future History of Water is an ethnographically rich and conceptually charged journey into ant-filled water meters, fantastical water taxonomies, promises captured on slips of paper, and statistical maneuvers that dissolve the human of human rights. Ultimately, Ballestero demonstrates what happens when instead of trying to fix its meaning, we make water’s changing form the precondition of our analyses.
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The Future of Fallout, and Other Episodes in Radioactive World-Making
Joseph Masco
Duke University Press, 2020
In The Future of Fallout, and Other Episodes in Radioactive World-Making Joseph Masco examines the strange American intimacy with and commitment to existential danger. Tracking the simultaneous production of nuclear emergency and climate disruption since 1945, he focuses on the psychosocial accommodations as well as the technological revolutions that have produced these linked planetary-scale disasters. Masco assesses the memory practices, visual culture, concepts of danger, and toxic practices that, in combination, have generated a U.S. national security culture that promises ever more safety and comfort in everyday life but does so only by generating and deferring a vast range of violences into the collective future. Interrogating how this existential lag (i.e., the material and conceptual fallout of the twentieth century in the form of nuclear weapons and petrochemical capitalism) informs life in the twenty-first century, Masco identifies key moments when other futures were still possible and seeks to activate an alternative, postnational security political imaginary in support of collective life today.
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The Future of Medical Education
William G. Anlyan, M.D.
Duke University Press, 1973
The major recommendations and chapters of The Future of Moral Education can be divided into three categories: expansion of medical education's scope and responsibilities, basic conditions for progress in medical education, and medial education and the nation's health. The contributors all recognize their obligation to medical education's future as a societal endeavor to serve the nation's health needs.
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The Future of National Urban Policy
Marshall Kaplan, ed.
Duke University Press, 1989
The Future of National Urban Policy brings together scholars, policymakers, and journalists to explore the condition of America's cities. The authors focus on policies of the previous five presidential administrations to examine the history of urban policy and offer suggestions for its future. Individual chapters address a variety of topics, including housing, employment, education, the infrastructure of cities, and public policy.
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FUTURE/PRESENT
Arts in a Changing America
Daniela Alvarez, Roberta Uno, and Elizabeth M. Webb, editors
Duke University Press, 2024
FUTURE/PRESENT brings together a vast collection of writers, artists, activists, and academics working at the forefront of today’s most pressing struggles for cultural equity and racial justice in a demographically changing America. The volume builds upon five years of national organizing by Arts in a Changing America, an artist-led initiative that challenges structural racism by centering people of color who are leading innovation at the nexus of arts production, community benefit, and social change. FUTURE/PRESENT includes a range of essays and criticism, visual and performance art, artist manifestos, interviews, poetry, and reflections on community practice. Throughout, contributors examine issues of placekeeping and belonging, migration and diasporas, the carceral state, renegotiating relationships with land, ancestral knowledge as radical futurity, and shifting paradigms of inequity. Foregrounding the powerful resilience of communities of color, FUTURE/PRESENT advances the role of artists as first responders to injustices, creative stewards in the cohesion and health of communities, and innovative strategists for equity.

Selected contributors. Dahlak Brathwaite, adrienne maree brown, Jeff Chang, Tameca Cole, Ofelia Esparza, Antoine Hunter, Nobuko Miyamoto, Wendy Red Star, Spel, Jose Antonio Vargas, Carrie Mae Weems, Hinaleimoana Kwai Kong Wong-Kalu
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Futureproof
Security Aesthetics and the Management of Life
D. Asher Ghertner, Daniel M. Goldstein, and Hudson McFann, editors
Duke University Press, 2020
Security is a defining characteristic of our age and the driving force behind the management of collective political, economic, and social life. Directed at safeguarding society against future peril, security is often thought of as the hard infrastructures and invisible technologies assumed to deliver it: walls, turnstiles, CCTV cameras, digital encryption, and the like. The contributors to Futureproof redirect this focus, showing how security is a sensory domain shaped by affect and image as much as rules and rationalities. They examine security as it is lived and felt in domains as varied as real estate listings, active-shooter drills, border crossings, landslide maps, gang graffiti, and museum exhibits to theorize how security regimes are expressed through aesthetic forms. Taking a global perspective with studies ranging from Jamaica to Jakarta and Colombia to the U.S.-Mexico border, Futureproof expands our understanding of the security practices, infrastructures, and technologies that pervade everyday life.

Contributors. Victoria Bernal, Jon Horne Carter, Alexandra Demshock, Zaire Z. Dinzey-Flores, Didier Fassin, D. Asher Ghertner, Daniel M. Goldstein, Rachel Hall, Rivke Jaffe, Ieva Jusionyte, Catherine Lutz, Alejandra Leal Martínez, Hudson McFann, Limor Samimian-Darash, AbdouMaliq Simone, Austin Zeiderman
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The Futures of American Studies
Donald E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman, eds.
Duke University Press, 2002
Originating as a proponent of U.S. exceptionalism during the Cold War, American Studies has now reinvented itself, vigorously critiquing various kinds of critical hegemony and launching innovative interdisciplinary endeavors. The Futures of American Studies considers the field today and provides important deliberations on what it might yet become. Essays by both prominent and emerging scholars provide theoretically engaging analyses of the postnational impulse of current scholarship, the field's historical relationship to social movements, the status of theory, the state of higher education in the United States, and the impact of ethnic and gender studies on area studies. They also investigate the influence of poststructuralism, postcolonial studies, sexuality studies, and cultural studies on U.S. nationalist—and antinationalist—discourses. No single overriding paradigm dominates the anthology. Instead, the articles enter into a lively and challenging dialogue with one another. A major assessment of the state of the field, The Futures of American Studies is necessary reading for American Studies scholars.

Contributors. Lindon Barrett, Nancy Bentley, Gillian Brown, Russ Castronovo, Eric Cheyfitz, Michael Denning, Winfried Fluck, Carl Gutierrez-Jones, Dana Heller, Amy Kaplan, Paul Lauter, Günter H. Lenz, George Lipsitz, Lisa Lowe, Walter Benn Michaels, José Estaban Muñoz, Dana D. Nelson, Ricardo L. Ortiz, Janice Radway, John Carlos Rowe, William V. Spanos

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