front cover of Three Napoleonic Battles
Three Napoleonic Battles
Harold T. Parker
Duke University Press, 1983
This narrative account of three Napoleonic battles adheres rather closely to the Aristotelian configuration of evolving tragedy. The historian succeeds in presenting herein events and character not only in historical reality but also in unities employed by the artist or tragedian. For a beginning of this lively, military story, Harold T. Parker chooses a portrayal of Napoleon at the height of his power, the battle of Friedland. The middle episode is concerned with Napoleon in his first serious personal check, the battle of Aspern-Essling. To complete the unity and to conclude the tragic progression, the author resurveys the episode of Napoleon's final defeat at the battle of Waterloo.
[more]

front cover of Tijuana Dreaming
Tijuana Dreaming
Life and Art at the Global Border
Josh Kun and Fiamma Montezemolo, eds.
Duke University Press, 2012
Tijuana Dreaming is an unprecedented introduction to the arts, culture, politics, and economics of contemporary Tijuana, Mexico. With many pieces translated from Spanish for the first time, the anthology features contributions by prominent scholars, journalists, bloggers, novelists, poets, curators, and photographers from Tijuana and greater Mexico. They explore urban planning in light of Tijuana's unique infrastructural, demographic, and environmental challenges. They delve into its musical countercultures, architectural ruins, cinema, and emergence as a hot spot on the international art scene. One contributor examines fictional representations of Tijuana's past as a Prohibition-era "city of sin" for U.S. pleasure seekers. Another reflects on the city's recent struggles with kidnappings and drug violence. In an interview, Néstor García Canclini revisits ideas that he advanced in Culturas híbridas (1990), his watershed book about Latin America and cultural hybridity. Taken together, the selections present a kaleidoscopic portrait of a major border city in the age of globalization.

Contributors. Tito Alegría, Humberto Félix Berumen, Roberto Castillo Udiarte, Iain Chambers, Luis Humberto Crosthwaite, Teddy Cruz, Ejival, Tarek Elhaik, Guillermo Fadanelli, Néstor García Canclini, Ingrid Hernández, Jennifer Insley-Pruitt, Kathryn Kopinak, Josh Kun, Jesse Lerner, Fiamma Montezemolo, Rene Peralta, Rafa Saavedra, Lucía Sanromán, Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez, Heriberto Yépez

[more]

front cover of Time and the Erotic in Horace's Odes
Time and the Erotic in Horace's Odes
Ronnie Ancona
Duke University Press, 1994
In Horace’s Odes love cannot last. Is the poet unromantic, as some critics claim? Is he merely realistic? Or is he, as Ronnie Ancona contends, relating the erotic to time in a more complex and interesting way than either of these positions allows? Rejecting both the notion that Horace fails as a love poet because he undermines the romantic ideal that love conquers time and the notion that he succeeds becauses he eschews illusions about love’s ability to endure, this book challenges the assumption that temporality must inevitably pose a threat to the erotic. The author argues that temporality, understood as the contingency the male poet/lover wants to but cannot control, explains why love "fails" in Horace’s Odes.
Drawing on contemporary theory, including recent work in feminist criticism, Ancona provides close readings of fourteen odes, which are presented in English translation as well as in Latin. Through a discussion of the poet’s use of various temporal devices—the temporal adverb, seasonal imagery, and the lover or beloved’s own temporality—she shows how Horace makes time dominate the erotic context and, further, how the version of love that appears in his poems is characterized by the lover’s desire to control the beloved. The romantic ideal of a timeless love, apparently rejected by the poet, emerges here instead as an underlying element of the poet’s portrayal of the erotic. In a critique of the predominant modes of recent Horatian scholarship on the love odes, Ancona offers an alternative view that takes into account the male gender of the lover and its effect on the structure of desire in the poems. By doing so, she advances a broader project in recent classical studies that aims to include discussion of features of classical literature, such as sexuality and gender, which have previously escaped critical attention.
Addressing aspects of Horace as a love poet—especially the dynamics of gender relations—that critics have tended to ignore, this book articulates his version of love as something not to be championed or condemned but rather to be seen as challengingly problematic. Of primary interest to classicists, it will also engage the attention of scholars and teachers in the humanities with specializations in gender, sexuality, lyric poetry, or feminist theory.
[more]

front cover of Time Binds
Time Binds
Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories
Elizabeth Freeman
Duke University Press, 2010
Time Binds is a powerful argument that temporal and sexual dissonance are intertwined, and that the writing of history can be both embodied and erotic. Challenging queer theory’s recent emphasis on loss and trauma, Elizabeth Freeman foregrounds bodily pleasure in the experience and representation of time as she interprets an eclectic archive of queer literature, film, video, and art. She examines work by visual artists who emerged in a commodified, “postfeminist,” and “postgay” world. Yet they do not fully accept the dissipation of political and critical power implied by the idea that various political and social battles have been won and are now consigned to the past. By privileging temporal gaps and narrative detours in their work, these artists suggest ways of putting the past into meaningful, transformative relation with the present. Such “queer asynchronies” provide opportunities for rethinking historical consciousness in erotic terms, thereby countering the methods of traditional and Marxist historiography. Central to Freeman’s argument are the concepts of chrononormativity, the use of time to organize individual human bodies toward maximum productivity; temporal drag, the visceral pull of the past on the supposedly revolutionary present; and erotohistoriography, the conscious use of the body as a channel for and means of understanding the past. Time Binds emphasizes the critique of temporality and history as crucial to queer politics.
[more]

front cover of A Time for Tea
A Time for Tea
Women, Labor, and Post/Colonial Politics on an Indian Plantation
Piya Chatterjee
Duke University Press, 2001
In this creative, ethnographic, and historical critique of labor practices on an Indian plantation, Piya Chatterjee provides a sophisticated examination of the production, consumption, and circulation of tea. A Time for Tea reveals how the female tea-pluckers seen in advertisements—picturesque women in mist-shrouded fields—came to symbolize the heart of colonialism in India. Chatterjee exposes how this image has distracted from terrible working conditions, low wages, and coercive labor practices enforced by the patronage system.
Allowing personal, scholarly, and artistic voices to speak in turn and in tandem, Chatterjee discusses the fetishization of women who labor under colonial, postcolonial, and now neofeudal conditions. In telling the overarching story of commodity and empire, A Time for Tea demonstrates that at the heart of these narratives of travel, conquest, and settlement are compelling stories of women workers. While exploring the global and political dimensions of local practices of gendered labor, Chatterjee also reflects on the privileges and paradoxes of her own “decolonization” as a Third World feminist anthropologist. The book concludes with an extended reflection on the cultures of hierarchy, power, and difference in the plantation’s villages. It explores the overlapping processes by which gender, caste, and ethnicity constitute the interlocked patronage system of villages and their fields of labor. The tropes of coercion, consent, and resistance are threaded through the discussion.
A Time for Tea will appeal to anthropologists and historians, South Asianists, and those interested in colonialism, postcolonialism, labor studies, and comparative or international feminism.

Designated a John Hope Franklin Center book by the John Hope Franklin Seminar Group on Race, Religion, and Globalization.

[more]

front cover of The Time of Liberty
The Time of Liberty
Popular Political Culture in Oaxaca, 1750–1850
Peter Guardino
Duke University Press, 2005
Between 1750 and 1850 Spanish American politics underwent a dramatic cultural shift as monarchist colonies gave way to independent states based at least nominally on popular sovereignty and republican citizenship. In The Time of Liberty, Peter Guardino explores the participation of subalterns in this grand transformation. He focuses on Mexico, comparing local politics in two parts of Oaxaca: the mestizo, urban Oaxaca City and the rural villages of nearby Villa Alta, where the population was mostly indigenous. Guardino challenges traditional assumptions that poverty and isolation alienated rural peasants from the political process. He shows that peasants and other subalterns were conscious and complex actors in political and ideological struggles and that popular politics played an important role in national politics in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Guardino makes extensive use of archival materials, including judicial transcripts and newspaper accounts, to illuminate the dramatic contrasts between the local politics of the city and of the countryside, describing in detail how both sets of citizens spoke and acted politically. He contends that although it was the elites who initiated the national change to republicanism, the transition took root only when engaged by subalterns. He convincingly argues that various aspects of the new political paradigms found adherents among even some of the most isolated segments of society and that any subsequent failure of electoral politics was due to an absence of pluralism rather than a lack of widespread political participation.

[more]

front cover of A Time of One's Own
A Time of One's Own
Histories of Feminism in Contemporary Art
Catherine Grant
Duke University Press, 2022
In A Time of One’s Own Catherine Grant examines how contemporary feminist artists are turning to broad histories of feminism ranging from political organizing and artworks from the 1970s to queer art and activism in the 1990s. Exploring artworks from 2002 to 2017 by artists including Sharon Hayes, Mary Kelly, Allyson Mitchell, Deirdre Logue, Lubaina Himid, Pauline Boudry, and Renate Lorenz, Grant maps a revival of feminism that takes up the creative and political implications of forging feminist communities across time and space. Grant characterizes these artists’ engagement with feminism as a fannish, autodidactic, and collective form of learning from history. This fandom of feminism allows artists to build relationships with previous feminist ideas, artworks, and communities that reject a generational model and embrace aspects of feminism that might be seen as embarrassing, queer, or anachronistic. Accounting for the growing interest in feminist art, politics, and ideas across generations, Grant demonstrates that for many contemporary feminist artists, the present moment can only be understood through an embodied engagement with history in which feminist pasts are reinhabited and reimagined.
[more]

logo for Duke University Press
A Time of Youth
San Francisco, 1966–1967
William Gedney
Duke University Press, 2021
A year before 1967's famed Summer of Love, documentary photographer William Gedney set out for San Francisco on a Guggenheim Fellowship to record “aspects of our culture which I believe significant and which I hope will become, in time, part of the visual record of American history.” A Time of Youth brings together eighty-seven of the more than two thousand photographs Gedney took in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood between October 1966 and January 1967. In these photographs Gedney documents the restless and intertwined lives of the disenchanted youth who flocked to what became the epicenter of 1960s counterculture. Gedney lived among these young people in their communal homes, where he captured the intimate and varied contours of everyday life: solitude and companionship, joyous celebration and somber quiet, cramped rooms and spacious parks, recreation and contemplation. In these images Gedney presents a portrait of a San Francisco counterculture that complicates popular depictions of late 1960s youth as carefree flower children. The book also includes facsimiles of handwritten descriptions of the scenes Gedney photographed, his thoughts on organizing the book, and other ephemera.
[more]

logo for Duke University Press
Time Out of Joint
The Queer and the Customary in Africa
Kirk Fiereck, Neville Hoad, and Danai Mupotsa, special issue editors
Duke University Press
Contributors to this special issue investigate how queer theory might change when African texts, experiences, and concepts are placed front and center rather than treated as examples or case studies. The authors consider what the concept of customary does to the dialectic of tradition and modernity that is at the heart of much Africanist scholarship. Can queer theoretical texts travel beyond the North Atlantic world that made them without reproducing imperial ways of knowing? Can there be an African queer theory? In posing these questions, the authors encourage readers to consider queerness from and within Africa, exploring what African customary forms of gender and sexuality might do to the anti-normativity of queer theory and how presumptions within Euro-American queer scholarship contribute to Afro-pessimist and/or Afro-optimist scholarship.

Contributors. Cal (Crystal) Biruk, Laura Edmondson, Kirk Fiereck, Neville Hoad, Phoebe Kisubi, Keguro Macharia, Danai Mupotsa, Edgar Nabutanyi, Eddie Ombagi, Ruth Ramsden-Karelse
[more]

front cover of Time Travels
Time Travels
Feminism, Nature, Power
Elizabeth Grosz
Duke University Press, 2005
Recently the distinguished feminist theorist Elizabeth Grosz has turned her critical acumen toward rethinking time and duration. Time Travels brings her trailblazing essays together to show how reconceptualizing temporality transforms and revitalizes key scholarly and political projects. In these essays, Grosz demonstrates how imagining different relations between the past, present, and future alters understandings of social and scientific projects ranging from theories of justice to evolutionary biology, and she explores the radical implications of the reordering of these projects for feminist, queer, and critical race theories.

Grosz’s reflections on how rethinking time might generate new understandings of nature, culture, subjectivity, and politics are wide ranging. She moves from a compelling argument that Charles Darwin’s notion of biological and cultural evolution can potentially benefit feminist, queer, and antiracist agendas to an exploration of modern jurisprudence’s reliance on the notion that justice is only immanent in the future and thus is always beyond reach. She examines Henri Bergson’s philosophy of duration in light of the writings of Gilles Deleuze, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and William James, and she discusses issues of sexual difference, identity, pleasure, and desire in relation to the thought of Deleuze, Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and Luce Irigaray. Together these essays demonstrate the broad scope and applicability of Grosz’s thinking about time as an undertheorized but uniquely productive force.

[more]

front cover of Time-Fetishes
Time-Fetishes
The Secret History of Eternal Recurrence
Ned Lukacher
Duke University Press, 1999
For over two and a half millennia human beings have attempted to invent strategies to “discover” the truth of time, to determine whether time is infinite, whether eternity is the infinite duration of a continuous present, or whether it too rises and falls with the cycles of universal creation and destruction. Time-Fetishes recounts the history of a tradition that runs counter to the dominant tradition in Western metaphysics, which has sought to purify eternity of its temporal character. From the pre-Socratics to Ovid and Plotinus, and from Shakespeare to Hegel, Schelling, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida, Time-Fetishes traces the secret tradition of the idea of eternal recurrence and situates it as the grounding thought of Western philosophy and literature.
The thinkers in this counter-history of the eternal return lingered long enough on the question of time to learn how to resist separating eternity from time, and how to reflect on the possible identity of time and eternity as a way of resisting all prior metaphysical determinations. Drawing out the implications of Nietzsche’s reinvention of the doctrine of return, Lukacher ranges across a broad spectrum of ancient and modern thinkers. Shakespeare’s role in this history as the “poet of time” is particularly significant, for not only does Shakespeare reactivate the pre-Christian arguments of eternal return, he regards them, and all arguments and images concerning the essence of time and Being, from an inimitably ironic perspective.
As he makes transitions from literature to philosophy and psychoanalysis, Lukacher displays a theoretical imagination and historical vision that bring to the forefront a host of pre- and post-Christian texts in order to decipher in them an encounter with the thought of eternal recurrence that has been too long buried under layers of rigid metaphysical interpretation.


[more]

front cover of The Times Were Strange and Stirring
The Times Were Strange and Stirring
Methodist Preachers and the Crisis of Emancipation
Reginald F. Hildebrand
Duke University Press, 1995
With the conclusion of the Civil War, the beginnings of Reconstruction, and the realities of emancipation, former slaves were confronted with the possibility of freedom and, with it, a new way of life. In The Times Were Strange and Stirring, Reginald F. Hildebrand examines the role of the Methodist Church in the process of emancipation—and in shaping a new world at a unique moment in American, African American, and Methodist history.
Hildebrand explores the ideas and ideals of missionaries from several branches of Methodism—the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, and the northern-based Methodist Episcopal Church—and the significant and highly charged battle waged between them over the challenge and meaning of freedom. He traces the various strategies and goals pursued by these competing visions and develops a typology of some of the ways in which emancipation was approached and understood.
Focusing on individual church leaders such as Lucius H. Holsey, Richard Harvey Cain, and Gilbert Haven, and with the benefit of extensive research in church archives and newspapers, Hildebrand tells the dramatic and sometimes moving story of how missionaries labored to organize their denominations in the black South, and of how they were overwhelmed at times by the struggles of freedom.
[more]

front cover of Tissue Economies
Tissue Economies
Blood, Organs, and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism
Catherine Waldby and Robert Mitchell
Duke University Press, 2006
As new medical technologies are developed, more and more human tissues—such as skin, bones, heart valves, embryos, and stem cell lines—are stored and distributed for therapeutic and research purposes. The accelerating circulation of human tissue fragments raises profound social and ethical concerns related to who donates or sells bodily tissue, who receives it, and who profits—or does not—from the transaction. Catherine Waldby and Robert Mitchell survey the rapidly expanding economies of exchange in human tissue, explaining the complex questions raised and suggesting likely developments. Comparing contemporary tissue economies in the United Kingdom and United States, they explore and complicate the distinction that has dominated practice and policy for several decades: the distinction between tissue as a gift to be exchanged in a transaction separate from the commercial market and tissue as a commodity to be traded for profit.

Waldby and Mitchell pull together a prodigious amount of research—involving policy reports and scientific papers, operating manuals, legal decisions, interviews, journalism, and Congressional testimony—to offer a series of case studies based on particular forms of tissue exchange. They examine the effect of threats of contamination—from HIV and other pathogens—on blood banks’ understandings of the gift/commodity relationship; the growth of autologous economies, in which individuals bank their tissues for their own use; the creation of the United Kingdom’s Stem Cell bank, which facilitates the donation of embryos for stem cell development; and the legal and financial repercussions of designating some tissues “hospital waste.” They also consider the impact of different models of biotechnology patents on tissue economies and the relationship between experimental therapies to regenerate damaged or degenerated tissues and calls for a legal, for-profit market in organs. Ultimately, Waldby and Mitchell conclude that scientific technologies, the globalization of tissue exchange, and recent anthropological, sociological, and legal thinking have blurred any strict line separating donations from the incursion of market values into tissue economies.

[more]

front cover of Tito, Mihailovic, and the Allies
Tito, Mihailovic, and the Allies
Walter R. Roberts
Duke University Press, 1987
This new edition contains a new foreword by the author.
[more]

front cover of To Be Nsala's Daughter
To Be Nsala's Daughter
Decomposing the Colonial Gaze
Chérie N. Rivers
Duke University Press, 2023
In To Be Nsala’s Daughter, Chérie N. Rivers shows how colonial systems of normalized violence condition the way we see and, through collaboration with contemporary Congolese artists, imagines ways we might learn to see differently. Rivers focuses on a photograph of a Congolese man, Nsala, looking at the disembodied hand and foot of his daughter, which were removed as punishment for his failure to deliver the requisite amount of rubber in King Léopold’s Congo. This photograph, taken by British missionary Alice Seeley Harris, featured prominently in abolitionist campaigns to end colonial atrocities in Central Africa in the early twentieth century. But in addition to exposing the visible violence of colonialism, Rivers argues, this photograph also exposes the invisible—and continued—violence of the colonial gaze. With a poetic, personal collage of stories and images, To Be Nsala’s Daughter traces the past and present of the colonial gaze both in Congo and in the author’s lived experience as a mixed-race Black woman in the United States.
[more]

front cover of To Delight and Instruct
To Delight and Instruct
Celebrating Ten Years of Pedagogy, Volume 10
Jennifer L. Holberg and Marcy Taylor, eds.
Duke University Press
This issue considers the sustainability of English studies and of the humanities as a whole in the context of shrinking budgets and job opportunities and of shifting resources. Exploring topics from academic freedom and globalization to digitization, diversity, and the value of a humanities-based education, “To Delight and Instruct” reexamines the work of the English professor and calls for a reassessment of the priorities and means that undergird it.

Contributors examine the faculty’s fundamental responsibilities to classroom teaching, the university, and the community. Attending to the relationship between changing technologies and literacy in a global environment, the issue not only argues for a reassertion and reimagining of the humanities in the contemporary university but, perhaps as important, helps articulate a way forward.

Contributors: Michael Bérubé, Martin Bickman, Marc Bousquet, Elizabeth Brockman, Sheila T. Cavanagh, Danielle Nicole DeVoss, Patricia Donahue, Gerald Graff, Donald E. Hall, Gail E. Hawisher, Jennifer L. Holberg, Colin Jager, Paul Lauter, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Julie Lindquist, Harriet Kramer Linkin, Mark C. Long, Donald G. Marshall, Richard E. Miller, James Phelan, Mariolina Rizzi Salvatori, Robert Scholes, Cynthia L. Selfe, Marcy Taylor

[more]

front cover of To Die in this Way
To Die in this Way
Nicaraguan Indians and the Myth of Mestizaje, 1880-1965
Jeffrey L. Gould
Duke University Press, 1998
Challenging the widely held belief that Nicaragua has been ethnically homogeneous since the nineteenth century, To Die in This Way reveals the continued existence and importance of an officially “forgotten” indigenous culture. Jeffrey L. Gould argues that mestizaje—a cultural homogeneity that has been hailed as a cornerstone of Nicaraguan national identity—involved a decades-long process of myth building.

Through interviews with indigenous peoples and records of the elite discourse that suppressed the expression of cultural differences and rationalized the destruction of Indian communities, Gould tells a story of cultural loss. Land expropriation and coerced labor led to cultural alienation that shamed the indigenous population into shedding their language, religion, and dress. Beginning with the 1870s, Gould historicizes the forces that prompted a collective movement away from a strong identification with indigenous cultural heritage to an “acceptance” of a national mixed-race identity.

By recovering a significant part of Nicaraguan history that has been excised from the national memory, To Die in This Way critiques the enterprise of third world nation-building and thus marks an important step in the study of Latin American culture and history that will also interest anthropologists and students of social and cultural historians.

[more]

front cover of To Live and Die
To Live and Die
Collected Stories of the Civil War, 1861–1876
Kathleen Diffley, ed.
Duke University Press, 2002
Even before the first cannonballs were fired at Fort Sumter, American writers were trying to make creative sense of the War Between the States. These thirty-one stories were culled from hundreds that circulated in popular magazines between 1861 and the celebration of the American centennial in 1876. Arranged to echo the sequence of the unfolding drama of the war and Reconstruction, together these short stories constitute an “inadvertent novel,” a collective narrative about a domestic crisis that was still ongoing as the stories were being written and published.
The authors, who include Louisa May Alcott and Mark Twain, depict the horrors of the battlefield, the suffering in prison camps and field hospitals, and the privations of the home front. In these pages, bushwhackers carry the war to out-of-the-way homesteads, spies work households from the inside, journeying paymasters rely on the kindness of border women, and soldiers turn out to be girls. The stories are populated with nurses, officers, speculators, preachers, slaves, and black troops, and they take place in cities, along the frontier, and on battlefields from Shiloh to Gettysburg.
The book opens with a prewar vigilante attack on the Underground Railroad and a Kansas parson in Henry King’s “The Cabin at Pharoah’s Ford” and concludes with an ex-slave recalling the loss of her remaining son in Twain’s “A True Story.” In between are stories written by both women and men that were published in magazines from the South and West as well as the culturally dominant Northeast. Wartime wood engravings highlight the text. Kathleen Diffley’s introduction provides literary and historical background, and her commentary introduces readers to magazine authors as well as the deepening disruptions of a country at war.
Just as they did for nineteenth-century readers, these stories will bring the war home to contemporary readers, giving shape to a crisis that rocked the nation then and continues to haunt it now.
[more]

front cover of To Make Negro Literature
To Make Negro Literature
Writing, Literary Practice, and African American Authorship
Elizabeth McHenry
Duke University Press, 2021
In To Make Negro Literature Elizabeth McHenry traces African American authorship in the decade following the 1896 legalization of segregation. She shifts critical focus from the published texts of acclaimed writers to unfamiliar practitioners whose works reflect the unsettledness of African American letters in this period. Analyzing literary projects that were unpublished, unsuccessful, or only partially achieved, McHenry recovers a hidden genealogy of Black literature as having emerged tentatively, laboriously, and unevenly. She locates this history in books sold by subscription, in lists and bibliographies of African American authors and books assembled at the turn of the century, in the act of ghostwriting, and in manuscripts submitted to publishers for consideration and the letters of introduction that accompanied them. By attending to these sites and prioritizing overlooked archives, McHenry reveals a radically different literary landscape, revising concepts of Black authorship and offering a fresh account of the development of “Negro literature” focused on the never published, the barely read, and the unconventional.
[more]

front cover of To Rise in Darkness
To Rise in Darkness
Revolution, Repression, and Memory in El Salvador, 1920–1932
Jeffrey L. Gould, Aldo A. Lauria-Santiago
Duke University Press, 2008
To Rise in Darkness offers a new perspective on a defining moment in modern Central American history. In January 1932 thousands of indigenous and ladino (non-Indian) rural laborers, provoked by electoral fraud and the repression of strikes, rose up and took control of several municipalities in central and western El Salvador. Within days the military and civilian militias retook the towns and executed thousands of people, most of whom were indigenous. This event, known as la Matanza (the massacre), has received relatively little scholarly attention. In To Rise in Darkness, Jeffrey L. Gould and Aldo A. Lauria-Santiago investigate memories of the massacre and its long-term cultural and political consequences.

Gould conducted more than two hundred interviews with survivors of la Matanza and their descendants. He and Lauria-Santiago combine individual accounts with documentary sources from archives in El Salvador, Guatemala, Washington, London, and Moscow. They describe the political, economic, and cultural landscape of El Salvador during the 1920s and early 1930s, and offer a detailed narrative of the uprising and massacre. The authors challenge the prevailing idea that the Communist organizers of the uprising and the rural Indians who participated in it were two distinct groups. Gould and Lauria-Santiago demonstrate that many Communist militants were themselves rural Indians, some of whom had been union activists on the coffee plantations for several years prior to the rebellion. Moreover, by meticulously documenting local variations in class relations, ethnic identity, and political commitment, the authors show that those groups considered “Indian” in western El Salvador were far from homogeneous. The united revolutionary movement of January 1932 emerged out of significant cultural difference and conflict.

[more]

front cover of Together, Somehow
Together, Somehow
Music, Affect, and Intimacy on the Dancefloor
Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta
Duke University Press, 2023
In Together, Somehow, Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta examines how people find ways to get along and share a dancefloor, a vibe, and a sound. Drawing on time spent in the minimal techno and house music subscenes in Chicago, Paris, and Berlin as the first decade of the new millennium came to a close, Garcia-Mispireta explains this bonding in terms of what he calls stranger-intimacy: the kind of warmth, sharing, and vulnerability between people that happens surprisingly often at popular electronic dance music parties. He shows how affect lubricates the connections between music and the dancers. Intense shared senses of sound and touch help support a feeling of belonging to a larger social world. However, as Garcia-Mispireta points out, this sense of belonging can be vague, fluid, and may hide exclusions and injustices. By showing how sharing a dancefloor involves feeling, touch, sound, sexuality, and subculture, Garcia-Mispireta rethinks intimacy and belonging through dancing crowds and the utopian vision of throbbing dancefloors.
[more]

front cover of Tokens of Exchange
Tokens of Exchange
The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations
Lydia H. Liu, ed.
Duke University Press, 1999
The problem of translation has become increasingly central to critical reflections on modernity and its universalizing processes. Approaching translation as a symbolic and material exchange among peoples and civilizations—and not as a purely linguistic or literary matter, the essays in Tokens of Exchange focus on China and its interactions with the West to historicize an economy of translation. Rejecting the familiar regional approach to non-Western societies, contributors contend that “national histories” and “world history” must be read with absolute attention to the types of epistemological translatability that have been constructed among the various languages and cultures in modern times.
By studying the production and circulation of meaning as value in areas including history, religion, language, law, visual art, music, and pedagogy, essays consider exchanges between Jesuit and Protestant missionaries and the Chinese between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries and focus on the interchanges occasioned by the spread of capitalism and imperialism. Concentrating on ideological reciprocity and nonreciprocity in science, medicine, and cultural pathologies, contributors also posit that such exchanges often lead to racialized and essentialized ideas about culture, sexuality, and nation. The collection turns to the role of language itself as a site of the universalization of knowledge in its contemplation of such processes as the invention of Basic English and the global teaching of the English language. By focusing on the moments wherein meaning-value is exchanged in the translation from one language to another, the essays highlight the circulation of the global in the local as they address the role played by historical translation in the universalizing processes of modernity and globalization.
The collection will engage students and scholars of global cultural processes, Chinese studies, world history, literary studies, history of science, and anthropology, as well as cultural and postcolonial studies.

Contributors. Jianhua Chen, Nancy Chen, Alexis Dudden Eastwood, Roger Hart, Larissa Heinrich, James Hevia, Andrew F. Jones, Wan Shun Eva Lam, Lydia H. Liu, Deborah T. L. Sang, Haun Saussy, Q. S. Tong, Qiong Zhang

[more]

front cover of Tomorrowing
Tomorrowing
Terry Bisson
Duke University Press, 2024
For twenty years, Terry Bisson published a regular “This Month in History” column in the science fiction magazine Locus. Tomorrowing collects these two decades of memorable events---four per month---each set in a totally different imaginary yet possible, inevitable yet avoidable future. From the first AI president to the first dog on Mars to the funeral of Earth’s last glacier, these stories are speculative SF at its most (and least) serious. Collected as a series for the first time, Tomorrowing will amuse, alarm, intrigue, entertain, and like all good science fiction, make readers think. Bisson’s short stories have won every major award in science fiction, including the Hugo and the Nebula, but never, ever anything for this series.
[more]

front cover of Tony Allen
Tony Allen
An Autobiography of the Master Drummer of Afrobeat
Tony Allen, with Michael E. Veal
Duke University Press, 2013
Tony Allen is the autobiography of legendary Nigerian drummer Tony Allen, the rhythmic engine of Fela Kuti's Afrobeat. Conversational, inviting, and packed with telling anecdotes, Allen's memoir is based on hundreds of hours of interviews with the musician and scholar Michael E. Veal. It spans Allen's early years and career playing highlife music in Lagos; his fifteen years with Fela, from 1964 until 1979; his struggles to form his own bands in Nigeria; and his emigration to France.

Allen embraced the drum set, rather than African handheld drums, early in his career, when drum kits were relatively rare in Africa. His story conveys a love of his craft along with the specifics of his practice. It also provides invaluable firsthand accounts of the explosive creativity in postcolonial African music, and the personal and artistic dynamics in Fela's Koola Lobitos and Africa 70, two of the greatest bands to ever play African music.

[more]

logo for Duke University Press
Torts
Donald H. Beskind
Duke University Press, 2016

front cover of Torts
Torts
Doctrine and Process
Donald H. Beskind and Doriane Lambelet Coleman
Duke University Press, 2018
In Torts: Doctrine and Process, Donald H. Beskind and Doriane Lambelet Coleman draw on their experience as academics and practitioners to offer a rigorous first-year course that covers intentional torts, negligence, and strict liability, and that meets the highest intellectual and analytical capabilities of today’s law students. Modeling the sophisticated modern practice setting, the cases and materials are designed primarily for extraction learning: their doctrinal context is clear, but the rules are generally derived from careful reading and analysis. This doctrinal approach frames classroom discussions about topical issues in the law and normative, economic, and theoretical arguments about rule choices and legal strategy. The text is also designed to build students’ legal method skills, including honing their abilities to synthesize disparate material, to develop and distinguish between argument and evidence, and to work at the juncture of the substantive “black letter” law of torts and the rules of civil procedure that govern the litigation process. The principal materials are complemented by “notes and questions” and “problems” based on past exams, together providing the basis for this focused introduction to torts and to the law generally.
[more]

front cover of Total Speech
Total Speech
An Integrational Linguistic Approach to Language
Michael Toolan
Duke University Press, 1996
Units, rules, codes, systems: this is how most linguists study language. Integrationalists such as Michael Toolan, however, focus instead on how language functions in seamless tandem with the rest of human activity. In Total Speech, Toolan provides a clear and comprehensive account of integrationalism, a major new theory of language that declines to accept that text and context, language and world, are distinct and stable categories. At the same time, Toolan extends the integrationalist argument and calls for a radical change in contemporary theorizing about language and communication.
In every foundational area of linguistics—from literal meaning and metaphor to the nature of repetition to the status of linguistic rules—Toolan advances fascinating and provocative criticisms of received linguistic assumptions. Drawing inspiration from the writings of language theorist Roy Harris, Toolan brings the integrationalist perspective to bear on legal cases, the reception of Salman Rushdie, poetry, and the language of children. Toolan demonstrates that the embeddedness of language and the situation-sensitive mutability of meaning reveal language as a tool for re-fashioning and renewal.
Total Speech breaks free of standard linguistics’ fascinated attraction with “cognitive blueprints” and quasi-algorithmic processing to characterize language anew. Toolan’s reflections on the essence of language, including his important discussion of intention, have strong implications for students and scholars of discourse analysis, literature, the law, anthropology, philosophy of language, communication theory, and cognitive science, as well as linguistics.


[more]

front cover of Touching Feeling
Touching Feeling
Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Duke University Press, 2003
A pioneer in queer theory and literary studies, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick brings together for the first time in Touching Feeling her most powerful explorations of emotion and expression. In essays that show how her groundbreaking work in queer theory has developed into a deep interest in affect, Sedgwick offers what she calls "tools and techniques for nondualistic thought," in the process touching and transforming such theoretical discourses as psychoanalysis, speech-act theory, Western Buddhism, and the Foucauldian "hermeneutics of suspicion."

In prose sometimes somber, often high-spirited, and always accessible and moving, Touching Feeling interrogates—through virtuoso readings of works by Henry James, J. L. Austin, Judith Butler, the psychologist Silvan Tomkins and others—emotion in many forms. What links the work of teaching to the experience of illness? How can shame become an engine for queer politics, performance, and pleasure? Is sexuality more like an affect or a drive? Is paranoia the only realistic epistemology for modern intellectuals? Ultimately, Sedgwick's unfashionable commitment to the truth of happiness propels a book as open-hearted as it is intellectually daring.

[more]

front cover of Tough Love
Tough Love
Amazon Encounters in the English Renaissance
Kathryn Schwarz
Duke University Press, 2000
In Tough Love Kathryn Schwarz takes up a range of literary, historical, and theoretical texts in order to examine the relationship between Amazon myth and the social conventions that governed gender and sexuality during the early modern period. Imagined as embodiments of female masculinity, amazonian figures stimulated both homoerotic and heteroerotic response, and Schwarz shows that their appearance in narratives disrupted assumptions concerning identity, gender, domesticity, and desire.
Despite seeming to function as signs for what is outside the social—the alien, the exotic, the other—Amazons in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts were often represented in conventionally domestic roles, as mothers and lovers, wives and queens, Schwarz demonstrates. She traces this pattern in works by Shakespeare, Spenser, Sidney, Raleigh, and Jonson, as well as in such materials as conduct manuals, explorers’ accounts, court spectacles, and political tracts. Through readings of these texts, Schwarz shows that the Amazon myth provided a language both for setting forth and for challenging the terms of social logic. In representations of Amazon encounters, she argues, homosocial bonds became indistinguishable from heterosexual desires, masculine agency attached itself as logically to women as it did to men, and sexual difference was made nearly impossible to sustain or define. Schwarz’s analysis unveils the Amazon as a theoretical term, one that illuminates the tensions and paradoxes through which ideologies of the domestic take shape.
Tough Love contributes to the ongoing discussion of gendered identity and sexual desire in the early modern period. It will interest students of queer theory, cultural studies, early modern history, feminism, and literature.
[more]

front cover of Tourist Distractions
Tourist Distractions
Traveling and Feeling in Transnational Hallyu Cinema
Youngmin Choe
Duke University Press, 2016
In Tourist Distractions Youngmin Choe uses hallyu (Korean-wave) cinema as a lens to examine the relationships among tourism and travel, economics, politics, and history in contemporary East Asia. Focusing on films born of transnational collaboration and its networks, Choe shows how the integration of the tourist imaginary into hallyu cinema points to the region's evolving transnational politics and the ways Korea negotiates its colonial and Cold War past with East Asia's neoliberal present. Hallyu cinema's popularity has inspired scores of international tourists to visit hallyu movie sets, filming sites, and theme parks. This tourism helps ease regional political differences; reimagine South Korea's relationships with North Korea, China, and Japan; and blur the lines between history, memory, affect, and consumerism. It also provides distractions from state-sponsored narratives and forges new emotional and economic bonds that foster community and cooperation throughout East Asia. By attending to the tourist imaginary at work in hallyu cinema, Choe helps us to better understand the complexities, anxieties, and tensions of East Asia's new affective economy as well as Korea's shifting culture industry, its relation to its past, and its role in a rapidly changing region. 
 
[more]

front cover of Tourists of History
Tourists of History
Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero
Marita Sturken
Duke University Press, 2007
In Tourists of History, the cultural critic Marita Sturken argues that over the past two decades, Americans have responded to national trauma through consumerism, kitsch sentiment, and tourist practices in ways that reveal a tenacious investment in the idea of America’s innocence. Sturken investigates the consumerism that followed from the September 11th attacks; the contentious, ongoing debates about memorials and celebrity-architect designed buildings at Ground Zero; and two outcomes of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City: the Oklahoma City National Memorial and the execution of Timothy McVeigh.

Sturken contends that a consumer culture of comfort objects such as World Trade Center snow globes, FDNY teddy bears, and Oklahoma City Memorial t-shirts and branded water, as well as reenactments of traumatic events in memorial and architectural designs, enables a national tendency to see U.S. culture as distant from both history and world politics. A kitsch comfort culture contributes to a “tourist” relationship to history: Americans can feel good about visiting and buying souvenirs at sites of national mourning without having to engage with the economic, social, and political causes of the violent events. While arguing for the importance of remembering tragic losses of life, Sturken is urging attention to a dangerous confluence—of memory, tourism, consumerism, paranoia, security, and kitsch—that promulgates fear to sell safety, offers prepackaged emotion at the expense of critical thought, contains alternative politics, and facilitates public acquiescence in the federal government’s repressive measures at home and its aggressive political and military policies abroad.

[more]

front cover of Tours of Vietnam
Tours of Vietnam
War, Travel Guides, and Memory
Scott Laderman
Duke University Press, 2009
In Tours of Vietnam, Scott Laderman demonstrates how tourist literature has shaped Americans’ understanding of Vietnam and projections of United States power since the mid-twentieth century. Laderman analyzes portrayals of Vietnam’s land, history, culture, economy, and people in travel narratives, U.S. military guides, and tourist guidebooks, pamphlets, and brochures. Whether implying that Vietnamese women were in need of saving by “manly” American military power or celebrating the neoliberal reforms Vietnam implemented in the 1980s, ostensibly neutral guides have repeatedly represented events, particularly those related to the Vietnam War, in ways that favor the global ambitions of the United States.

Tracing a history of ideological assertions embedded in travel discourse, Laderman analyzes the use of tourism in the Republic of Vietnam as a form of Cold War cultural diplomacy by a fledgling state that, according to one pamphlet published by the Vietnamese tourism authorities, was joining the “family of free nations.” He chronicles the evolution of the Defense Department pocket guides to Vietnam, the first of which, published in 1963, promoted military service in Southeast Asia by touting the exciting opportunities offered by Vietnam to sightsee, swim, hunt, and water-ski. Laderman points out that, despite historians’ ongoing and well-documented uncertainty about the facts of the 1968 “Hue Massacre” during the National Liberation Front’s occupation of the former imperial capital, the incident often appears in English-language guidebooks as a settled narrative of revolutionary Vietnamese atrocity. And turning to the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, he notes that, while most contemporary accounts concede that the United States perpetrated gruesome acts of violence in Vietnam, many tourists and travel writers still dismiss the museum’s display of that record as little more than “propaganda.”

[more]

front cover of Toussaint Louverture
Toussaint Louverture
The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History; A Play in Three Acts
C. L. R. James Edited and Introduced by Christian Høgsbjerg
Duke University Press, 2013
In 1934 C. L. R. James, the widely known Trinidadian intellectual, writer, and political activist, wrote the play Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History, which was presumed lost until the rediscovery of a draft copy in 2005. The play's production, performed in 1936 at London's Westminster Theatre with a cast including the American star Paul Robeson, marked the first time black professional actors starred on the British stage in a play written by a black playwright. This edition includes the program, photographs, and reviews from that production, a contextual introduction and editorial notes on the play by Christian Høgsbjerg, and selected essays and letters by James and others. In Toussaint Louverture, James demonstrates the full tragedy and heroism of Louverture by showing how the Haitian revolutionary leader is caught in a dramatic conflict arising from the contradiction between the barbaric realities of New World slavery and the modern ideals of the Enlightenment. In his portrayal of the Haitian Revolution, James aspired to vindicate black accomplishments in the face of racism and to support the struggle for self-government in his native Caribbean. Toussaint Louverture is an indispensable companion work to The Black Jacobins (1938), James's classic account of Haiti's revolutionary struggle for liberation.
[more]

logo for Duke University Press
Toward a History of Applied Economics
2000 Supplement, Volume 32
Jeff E. Biddle and Roger Backhouse, editors
Duke University Press
Histories of economic thought have generally focused on the development of economic theory, notably value and distribution. The activity of applying economic theory to the understanding of particular situations and the solution of specific problems, though a part of the work of economists for several generations, has received relatively little attention from historians of economics. Toward a History of Applied Economics explores such themes as changes in the historical conception of applied economics and its relationship to the “core” of economic theory, the emergence and decline of applied fields, and issues of applying general theoretical tools and concepts to real-world problems.

This is the 2000 supplement to the journal History of Political Economy. All 2000 subscribers will receive a copy of this book as part of their annual subscription.

[more]

logo for Duke University Press
Toward a History of Game Theory, Volume 24
E. Roy Weintraub, ed.
Duke University Press
During the 1940s "game theory" emerged from the fields of mathematics and economics to provide a revolutionary new method of analysis. Today game theory provides a language for discussing conflict and cooperation not only for economists, but also for business analysts, sociologists, war planners, international relations theorists, and evolutionary biologists. Toward a History of Game Theory offers the first history of the development, reception, and dissemination of this crucial theory.

Drawing on interviews with original members of the game theory community and on the Morgenstern diaries, the first section of the book examines early work in game theory. It focuses on the groundbreaking role of the von Neumann-Morgenstern collaborative work, The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944). The second section recounts the reception of this new theory, revealing just how game theory made its way into the literatures of the time and thus became known among relevant communities of scholars. The contributors explore how game theory became a wedge in opening up the social sciences to mathematical tools and use the personal recollections of scholars who taught at Michigan and Princeton in the late 1940s to show why the theory captivated those practitioners now considered to be "giants" in the field. The final section traces the flow of the ideas of game theory into political science, operations research, and experimental economics.

Contributors. Mary Ann Dimand, Robert W. Dimand, Robert J. Leonard, Philip Mirowski, Angela M. O'Rand, Howard Raiffa, Urs Rellstab, Robin E. Rider, William H. Riker, Andrew Schotter, Martin Shubik, Vernon L. Smith

[more]

front cover of Toward Camden
Toward Camden
Mercy Romero
Duke University Press, 2021
In Toward Camden, Mercy Romero writes about the relationships that make and sustain the largely African American and Puerto Rican Cramer Hill neighborhood in New Jersey where she grew up. She walks the city and writes outdoors to think about the collapse and transformation of property. She revisits lost and empty houses—her family's house, the Walt Whitman House, and the landscape of a vacant lot. Throughout, Romero engages with the aesthetics of fragment and ruin; her writing juts against idioms of redevelopment. She resists narratives of the city that are inextricable from crime and decline and witnesses everyday lives lived at the intersection of spatial and Puerto Rican diasporic memory. Toward Camden travels between what official reports say and what the city's vacant lots withhold.

Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient
[more]

front cover of Tracking Europe
Tracking Europe
Mobility, Diaspora, and the Politics of Location
Ginette Verstraete
Duke University Press, 2009
Tracking Europe is a bold interdisciplinary critique of claims regarding the free movement of goods, people, services, and capital throughout Europe. Ginette Verstraete interrogates European discourses on unlimited movement for everyone and a utopian unity-in-diversity in light of contemporary social practices, cultural theories, historical texts, media representations, and critical art projects. Arguing against the persistent myth of borderless travel, Verstraete shows the discourses on Europe to be caught in an irresolvable contradiction on a conceptual level and in deeply unsettling asymmetries on a performative level. She asks why the age-old notion of Europe as a borderless space of mobility goes hand-in-hand with the at times violent containment and displacement of people.

In demystifying the old and new Europe across a multiplicity of texts, images, media, and cultural practices in various times and locations, Verstraete lays bare a territorial persistence in the European imaginary, one which has been differently tied up with the politics of inclusion and exclusion. Tracking Europe moves from policy papers, cultural tourism, and migration to philosophies of cosmopolitanism, nineteenth-century travel guides, electronic surveillance at the border, virtual pilgrimages to Spain, and artistic interventions in the Balkan region. It is a sustained attempt to situate current developments in Europe within a complex matrix of tourism, migration, and border control, as well as history, poststructuralist theory, and critical media and art projects.

[more]

front cover of Trading Futures
Trading Futures
A Theological Critique of Financialized Capitalism
Filipe Maia
Duke University Press, 2022
The discourse of financialized capitalism tries to create a future predictable enough to manage risk for the wealthy, to shape the future into a profit-making site that constrains and privatizes the sense of what’s possible. Here, people’s hopes and meaning-making energies are policed through the burden of debt. In Trading Futures Filipe Maia offers a theological reflection on hope and the future, calling for escape routes from the debt economy. Drawing on Marxism, continental philosophy, and Latin American liberation theology, Maia provides a critical portrayal of financialization as a death-dealing mechanism that colonizes the future in its own image. Maia elaborates a Christian eschatology of liberation that offers a subversive mode of imagining future possibilities. He shows how the Christian vocabulary of hope can offer a way to critique the hegemony of financialized capitalism, propelling us in the direction of a just future that financial discourse cannot manage or control.
[more]

front cover of Trading Roles
Trading Roles
Gender, Ethnicity, and the Urban Economy in Colonial Potosí
Jane E. Mangan
Duke University Press, 2005
Located in the heart of the Andes, Potosí was arguably the most important urban center in the Western Hemisphere during the colonial era. It was internationally famous for its abundant silver mines and regionally infamous for its labor draft. Set in this context of opulence and oppression associated with the silver trade, Trading Roles emphasizes daily life in the city’s streets, markets, and taverns. As Jane E. Mangan shows, food and drink transactions emerged as the most common site of interaction for Potosinos of different ethnic and class backgrounds. Within two decades of Potosí’s founding in the 1540s, the majority of the city’s inhabitants no longer produced food or alcohol for themselves; they purchased these items. Mangan presents a vibrant social history of colonial Potosí through an investigation of everyday commerce during the city’s economic heyday, between the discovery of silver in 1545 and the waning of production in the late seventeenth century.

Drawing on wills and dowries, judicial cases, town council records, and royal decrees, Mangan brings alive the bustle of trade in Potosí. She examines quotidian economic transactions in light of social custom, ethnicity, and gender, illuminating negotiations over vendor locations, kinship ties that sustained urban trade through the course of silver booms and busts, and credit practices that developed to mitigate the pressures of the market economy. Mangan argues that trade exchanges functioned as sites to negotiate identities within this colonial multiethnic society. Throughout the study, she demonstrates how women and indigenous peoples played essential roles in Potosí’s economy through the commercial transactions she describes so vividly.

[more]

front cover of Traffic in Asian Women
Traffic in Asian Women
Laura Hyan Yi Kang
Duke University Press, 2020
In Traffic in Asian Women Laura Hyun Yi Kang demonstrates that the figure of "Asian women" functions as an analytic with which to understand the emergence, decline, and permutation of U.S. power/knowledge at the nexus of capitalism, state power, global governance, and knowledge production throughout the twentieth century. Kang analyzes the establishment, suppression, forgetting, and illegibility of the Japanese military "comfort system" (1932–1945) within that broader geohistorical arc. Although many have upheld the "comfort women" case as exemplary of both the past violation and the contemporary empowerment of Asian women, Kang argues that it has profoundly destabilized the imaginary unity and conceptual demarcation of the category. Kang traces how "Asian women" have been alternately distinguished and effaced as subjects of the traffic in women, sexual slavery, and violence against women. She also explores how specific modes of redress and justice were determined by several overlapping geopolitical and economic changes ranging from U.S.-guided movements of capital across Asia and the end of the Cold War to the emergence of new media technologies that facilitated the global circulation of "comfort women" stories.
[more]

front cover of Trafficking in Antiblackness
Trafficking in Antiblackness
Modern-Day Slavery, White Indemnity, and Racial Justice
Lyndsey P. Beutin
Duke University Press, 2023
In Trafficking in Antiblackness Lyndsey P. Beutin analyzes how campaigns to end human trafficking—often described as “modern-day slavery”—invoke the memory of transatlantic slavery to support positions ultimately grounded in antiblackness. Drawing on contemporary antitrafficking visual culture and media discourse, she shows how a constellation of media, philanthropic, NGO, and government actors invested in ending human trafficking repurpose the history of transatlantic slavery and abolition in ways that undermine contemporary struggles for racial justice and slavery reparations. The recurring narratives, images, and figures such as “slavery in Africa,” “Arab slave traders,” and “Black incapacity for self-governance” discursively turn Black people across the diaspora into the enslavers of the past and present in place of white Americans and Europeans. Doing so, Beutin contends, creates a rhetorical defense against being held liable for slavery’s dispossessions and violence. Despite these implications, Beutin demonstrates that antitrafficking discourse remains popular and politically useful for former slaving nations and their racial beneficiaries because it refashions historic justifications for white supremacy into today’s abolition of slavery.
[more]

front cover of Trafficking
Trafficking
Narcoculture in Mexico and the United States
Hector Amaya
Duke University Press, 2020
In Trafficking Hector Amaya examines how the dramatic escalation of drug violence in Mexico in 2008 prompted new forms of participation in public culture in Mexico and the United States. He contends that, by becoming a site of national and transnational debate about the role of the state, this violence altered the modes publicness could take, transforming assumptions about freedom of expression and the rules of public participation. Amaya examines the practices of narcocorrido musicians who take advantage of digital production and distribution technologies to escape Mexican censors and to share music across the US-Mexico border, as well as anonymous bloggers whose coverage of trafficking and violence from a place of relative safety made them public heroes. These new forms of being in the public sphere, Amaya demonstrates, evolved to exceed the bounds of the state and traditional media sources, signaling the inadequacy of democratic theories of freedom and publicness to understand how violence shapes public discourse.
[more]

logo for Duke University Press
Tragic Muse
Rachel of the Comédie-Française
Rachel M. Brownstein
Duke University Press, 1995
The great nineteenth-century tragedienne known simply as Rachel was the first dramatic actress to achieve international fame. Composing her own persona with the same brilliance and passion she demonstrated on stage, she virtually invented the role of "star." Rumors of her extravagant life offstage delighted the audiences who flocked to theaters in Boston and Paris, London and Moscow, to see her perform in the tragedies of Racine and Corneille. In Tragic Muse, Rachel M. Brownstein reveals the life of la grande Rachel and explores—at the boundary of biography, fiction, and cultural history—the connections between this self-dramatizing woman and her image.
Born to itinerant Jewish peddlers in 1821, Rachel arrived on the Paris stage at the age of fifteen. She became both a symbol of her culture’s highest art and a clue to its values and obsessions. Fascinated with all things Napoleonic, she was the mother of Napoleon’s grandson and the lover of many men connected to the emperor. Her story—the rise from humble beginnings to queen of the French state theater—echoes and parodies Napoleon’s own. She decisively controlled her career, her time, and finances despite the actions and claims of managers, suitors, and lovers. A woman of exceptional charisma, Rachel embodied contradiction and paradox. She captured the attention of her time and was memorialized in the works of Matthew Arnold, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Henry James.
Richly illustrated with portraits, photographs, and caricatures, Tragic Muse combines brilliant literary analysis and exceptional historical research. With great skill and acuity, Rachel M. Brownstein presents Rachel—her brief intense life and the image that was both self-fashioned and, outliving her, fashioned by others. First published by Knopf (1993), this book will attract a broad audience interested in matters as wide ranging as the construction of character, the cult of celebrity, women’s lives, and Jewish history. It will also be of enduring interest to readers concerned with nineteenth-century French culture, history, literature, theater, and Romanticism. Tragic Muse won the 1993 George Freedley Award presented by the Theater Library Association.
[more]

front cover of Tranimalities
Tranimalities
Eva S. Hayward and Jami Weinstein, special issue editors
Duke University Press
If the critical import of this issue of TSQ, “Tranimalities,” can be narrowed to a single focal point, it is that the human/nonhuman distinction is inextricably tied to questions of gender and sexual difference. Issue editors Eva Hayward and Jami Weinstein, along with the authors whose work they have selected for inclusion, collectively argue that to be human has meant taking a position in relation to sexual difference and becoming gendered (the English& it, for example, has no personhood, as opposed to he and& she), while to be forcibly ungendered or to become transgendered renders one's humanness precarious. It can result in one's status being moved toward the not-quite-human, the inhuman, the “mere” animal, or even toward death, toward a purportedly inanimate “gross materiality.” The editors' exquisite introduction, the feature articles, and much of the content in the journal's recurring sections (including Harlan Weaver's contribution to the New Media section, Paige Johnson's film analysis and Anthony Wagner's artist statement in Arts and Culture, and M. Dale Booth's essay on recent scholarship in the Book Review section) all explore the non/human in relation to transgender at an unprecedented level of detail and theoretical sophistication. They plumb philosophical depths that bring transgender studies into conversation with some of the most fundamental questions we can ask about ourselves and the cosmos we experience, and in doing so they help realize the potential originally envisioned for this journal and for the field.
[more]

front cover of Trans Exploits
Trans Exploits
Trans of Color Cultures and Technologies in Movement
Jian Neo Chen
Duke University Press, 2019
In Trans Exploits Jian Neo Chen explores the cultural practices created by trans and gender-nonconforming artists and activists of color. They argue for a radical rethinking of the policies and technologies of racial gendering and assimilative social programming that have divided LGBT communities and communities of color along the lines of gender, sexuality, class, immigration status, and ability. Focusing on performance, film/video, literature, digital media, and other forms of cultural expression and activism that track the displaced emergences of trans people of color, Chen highlights the complex and varied responses by trans communities to their social dispossession. Through these responses, trans of color cultural workers such as performance artist Yozmit, writer Janet Mock, and organizer Jennicet Gutiérrez challenge dominating perceptions and institutions that kill, confine, police, and discipline trans people.
[more]

front cover of Trans- Political Economy
Trans- Political Economy
Dan Irving and Vek Lewis, special issue editors
Duke University Press

This issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, “Trans-Political Economy,” edited by Dan Irving and Vek Lewis, addresses how capitalism differentially and unequally affects trans and sex/gender-diverse people across the globe. “We all, from our different social and political locations, become implicated in those architectures through our everyday interactions with a variety of coordinated and contradictory institutions and rationalities that order our lives across different local and global geopolitical spaces and scales,” write Lewis and Irving. The editors of and contributors to this issue reveal how the narrowly constructed objects of trans studies and political economy (such as gender, labor, class, and economy) have been complicit in the necropolitical devaluation of trans lives and existing strategies crafted for trans survival. Topics include trans visibility and commodity culture; trans credit reporting; the growing population of T-girls, trans women truckers; trans street-based sex workers; the system of sex/gender identification for trans asylum seekers in South Africa; and waria affective labor in Indonesia. There is also a roundtable deconstructing trans* political economy.

The Arts & Culture section of this issue features a review of season 7 of RuPaul's Drag Race in relation to certain political-economic elements of the drag industry as well as an in-depth look at the representation of transgender lives on film, specifically in Dallas Buyers Club.

[more]

front cover of Trans Pornography
Trans Pornography
Sophie Pezzutto and Lynn Comella, special issue editors
Duke University Press, 2020
For many people, trans or not, pornography is the first point of contact with trans identities, communities, and subcultures. Always a popular niche, demand for trans pornography has significantly risen in recent years. No longer the domain of a handful of small studios, trans porn is now produced by transnational porn empires and is becoming a staple of commercial pornography production. To date, trans studies has not effectively engaged with the topic of trans porn, while pornography scholarship has largely neglected it as a genre of significance. The contributors to this issue—a mix of scholars and industry insiders—fill that gap and provide an overview of this emerging area of inquiry. Articles include an examination of trans micropornography (user-made remixes shared among fans), a history of two pioneers of mainstream trans pornography, and a photo-essay of portraits by Rae Threat.

Contributors
Skylar Adams, Carolyn Bronstein, Lynn Comella, Korra Del Rio, Sly Fawkes, Aster Gilbert, RL Goldberg, Laura Horak, Valentina Mia, Geoffrey H. Nicholson, Sophie Pezzutto, Matt Richardson, Whitney Strub, Rae Threat
[more]

logo for Duke University Press
Trans Studies en las Americas
Claudia Sofia Garriga-López, Cole Rizki, and Juana María Rodríguez, special issue editors
Duke University Press
Shifting the geopolitics of trans studies, travesti theory is a Latinx American body of work with an extensive transregional history. As a particular body politics, travesti identification is not only a sexed, gendered, classed, and racialized form of relation, but a critical mode and an epistemology. Throughout the Américas, trans and travesti studies take a multiplicity of forms: scholarly work that engages identitarian and anti-identitarian analytical frameworks as well as interventions into state practices, cultural production, and strategic activist actions. These multiple critical approaches—both travesti and trans—are regionally inflected by the flows of people, ideas, technologies, and resources that shape the hemisphere, opening up space to explore the productive tensions and expansive possibilities within this body of work.

This special issue of TSQ prompts a conversation between trans and travesti studies scholars working across the Américas to investigate how shifts in cultural practices, aesthetics, geographies, and languages enliven theories of politics, subjectivity, and embodiment. Contributors to this issue offer a hemispheric perspective on trans and travesti issues to the Anglophone academy, expand transgender studies to engage geopolitical connections, and bring interdisciplinary approaches to topics ranging from policy to cultural production. This issue is an unprecedented English-language collection by Latin American and Latinx scholars on trans and travesti issues.

Contributors. Lino Arruda, Daniel Coleman, Cynthia Citlallin Delgado, El Colectivo del Archivo de la Memoria Trans, Juan Carlos Garrido, Claudia Sofía Garriga-López, Bernadine Hernández, Hillary Hiner, Denilson Lopes, Andrés Lopez, Cole Rizki, Juana María Rodríguez, Oli Rodriguez, Marcia Lucia Machuca Rose, Martín de Mauro Rucovsky, Dora Silva Santana, Susy Shock, Sayak Valencia
[more]

front cover of Trans-Americanity
Trans-Americanity
Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico
José David Saldívar
Duke University Press, 2012
A founder of U.S.-Mexico border studies, José David Saldívar is a leading figure in efforts to expand the scope of American studies. In Trans-Americanity, he advances that critical project by arguing for a transnational, antinational, and "outernational" paradigm for American studies. Saldívar urges Americanists to adopt a world-system scale of analysis. "Americanity as a Concept," an essay by the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano and Immanuel Wallerstein, the architect of world-systems analysis, serves as a theoretical touchstone for Trans-Americanity. In conversation not only with Quijano and Wallerstein, but also with the theorists Gloria Anzaldúa, John Beverley, Ranajit Guha, Walter D. Mignolo, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Saldívar explores questions of the subaltern and the coloniality of power, emphasizing their location within postcolonial studies. Analyzing the work of José Martí, Sandra Cisneros, Toni Morrison, Arundhati Roy, and many other writers, he addresses concerns such as the "unspeakable" in subalternized African American, U.S. Latino and Latina, Cuban, and South Asian literature; the rhetorical form of postcolonial narratives; and constructions of subalternized identities. In Trans-Americanity, Saldívar demonstrates and makes the case for Americanist critique based on a globalized study of the Américas.
[more]

front cover of Transatlantic Fascism
Transatlantic Fascism
Ideology, Violence, and the Sacred in Argentina and Italy, 1919-1945
Federico Finchelstein
Duke University Press, 2010
In Transatlantic Fascism, Federico Finchelstein traces the intellectual and cultural connections between Argentine and Italian fascisms, showing how fascism circulates transnationally. From the early 1920s well into the Second World War, Mussolini tried to export Italian fascism to Argentina, the “most Italian” country outside of Italy. (Nearly half the country’s population was of Italian descent.) Drawing on extensive archival research on both sides of the Atlantic, Finchelstein examines Italy’s efforts to promote fascism in Argentina by distributing bribes, sending emissaries, and disseminating propaganda through film, radio, and print. He investigates how Argentina’s political culture was in turn transformed as Italian fascism was appropriated, reinterpreted, and resisted by the state and the mainstream press, as well as by the Left, the Right, and the radical Right.

As Finchelstein explains, nacionalismo, the right-wing ideology that developed in Argentina, was not the wholesale imitation of Italian fascism that Mussolini wished it to be. Argentine nacionalistas conflated Catholicism and fascism, making the bold claim that their movement had a central place in God’s designs for their country. Finchelstein explores the fraught efforts of nationalistas to develop a “sacred” ideological doctrine and political program, and he scrutinizes their debates about Nazism, the Spanish Civil War, imperialism, anti-Semitism, and anticommunism. Transatlantic Fascism shows how right-wing groups constructed a distinctive Argentine fascism by appropriating some elements of the Italian model and rejecting others. It reveals the specifically local ways that a global ideology such as fascism crossed national borders.

[more]

logo for Duke University Press
Transatlantic Gender Crossings
Anne Emmanuelle Berger and Éric Fassin, special issue editors
Duke University Press, 2016
A special issue of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies

As much as French feminism influenced the establishment of women’s studies in U.S. universities, so has U.S. gender and queer theory marked the French intellectual and academic landscape. For this reason, gender and sexuality studies have been bound up from the beginning with specific intractable questions of internationalization. Has internationalization contributed to an “Americanization” of the field, or has it allowed for different ways of understanding the connections between the local and the global, the center and the periphery? And how might institutionalization and internationalization affect our thinking about the political and theoretical intersections between gender and sexuality or between sex and race? Contributors from Europe and the United States consider theoretical, political, and institutional questions raised by the transatlantic exchange of feminist theories over four decades.

Contributors
Anne Emmanuelle Berger, Éric Fassin, Delphine Gardey, Clare Hemmings, Ranjana Khanna, Griselda Pollock, Tuija Pulkkinen, Elizabeth Weed
[more]

logo for Duke University Press
Transatlantic Theory Transfer
Missed Encounters?
Andreas Huyssen and Anson Rabinbach, special issue editors
Duke University Press, 2017
This issue explores how intellectual theories migrate from Germany to the United States, asking what makes one theory compatible with and successful in the new society while others have little impact. Avoiding the obvious successes (from Marx to the Frankfurt School) and failures (authors whose translated works have had no effect on intellectual life in the United States), contributors investigate complicated cases in which the US reception was not particularly intense. The examples of Hans Blumenberg, Friedrich Kittler, Reinhardt Koselleck, Siegfried Kracauer, Niklas Luhmann, Alexander Mitscherlich, and Gershom Scholem prompt questions about the importance of clear translations, the effects of the publishing business on dissemination, the transformations that theoretical work undergoes as it moves from its original contexts to new ones, and the role of disciplines and interdisciplinarity in shaping a theory's reception.

Contributors. Yaacob Dweck, Philipp Felsch, Paul Fleming, Dagmar Herzog, Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, Andreas Huyssen, Martin Jay, Anna Kinder, Joe Paul Kroll, Anson Rabinbach, William Rasch, Johannes von Moltke, Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, Robert Zwarg
[more]

front cover of Transborder Lives
Transborder Lives
Indigenous Oaxacans in Mexico, California, and Oregon
Lynn Stephen
Duke University Press, 2007
Lynn Stephen’s innovative ethnography follows indigenous Mexicans from two towns in the state of Oaxaca—the Mixtec community of San Agustín Atenango and the Zapotec community of Teotitlán del Valle—who periodically leave their homes in Mexico for extended periods of work in California and Oregon. Demonstrating that the line separating Mexico and the United States is only one among the many borders that these migrants repeatedly cross (including national, regional, cultural, ethnic, and class borders and divisions), Stephen advocates an ethnographic framework focused on transborder, rather than transnational, lives. Yet she does not disregard the state: She assesses the impact migration has had on local systems of government in both Mexico and the United States as well as the abilities of states to police and affect transborder communities.

Stephen weaves the personal histories and narratives of indigenous transborder migrants together with explorations of the larger structures that affect their lives. Taking into account U.S. immigration policies and the demands of both commercial agriculture and the service sectors, she chronicles how migrants experience and remember low-wage work in agriculture, landscaping, and childcare and how gender relations in Oaxaca and the United States are reconfigured by migration. She looks at the ways that racial and ethnic hierarchies inherited from the colonial era—hierarchies that debase Mexico’s indigenous groups—are reproduced within heterogeneous Mexican populations in the United States. Stephen provides case studies of four grass-roots organizations in which Mixtec migrants are involved, and she considers specific uses of digital technology by transborder communities. Ultimately Stephen demonstrates that transborder migrants are reshaping notions of territory and politics by developing creative models of governance, education, and economic development as well as ways of maintaining their cultures and languages across geographic distances.

[more]

front cover of Transcendentalist Hermeneutics
Transcendentalist Hermeneutics
Institutional Authority and the Higher Criticism of the Bible
Richard A. Grusin
Duke University Press, 1991
American literary historians have viewed Ralph Waldo Emerson’s resignation from the Unitarian ministry in 1832 in favor of a literary career as emblematic of a main current in American literature. That current is directed toward the possession of a self that is independent and fundamentally opposed to the “accoutrements of society and civilization” and expresses a Transcendentalist antipathy toward all institutionalized forms of religious observance.
In the ongoing revision of American literary history, this traditional reading of the supposed anti-institutionalism of the Transcendentalists has been duly detailed and continually supported. Richard A. Grusin challenges both traditional and revisionist interpretations with detailed contextual studies of the hermeneutics of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Theodore Parker. Informed by the past two decades of critical theory, Grusin examines the influence of the higher criticism of the Bible—which focuses on authorship, date, place of origin, circumstances of composition, and the historical credibility of biblical writings—on these writers. The author argues that the Transcendentalist appeal to the authority of the “self” is not an appeal to a source of authority independent of institutions, but to an authority fundamentally innate.
[more]

front cover of Transcending Blackness
Transcending Blackness
From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial
Ralina L. Joseph
Duke University Press, 2012
Representations of multiracial Americans, especially those with one black and one white parent, appear everywhere in contemporary culture, from reality shows to presidential politics. Some depict multiracial individuals as mired in painful confusion; others equate them with progress, as the embodiment of a postracial utopia. In Transcending Blackness, Ralina L. Joseph critiques both depictions as being rooted in—and still defined by—the racist notion that blackness is a deficit that must be overcome.

Analyzing emblematic representations of multiracial figures in popular culture—Jennifer Beals's character in the The L Word; the protagonist in Danny Senza's novel Caucasia; the title character in the independent film Mixing Nia; and contestants in a controversial episode of the reality show America's Next Top Model, who had to "switch ethnicities" for a photo shoot—Joseph identifies the persistence of two widespread stereotypes about mixed-race African Americans, those of "new millennium mulattas" and "exceptional multiracials." The former inscribes multiracial African Americans as tragic figures whose blackness predestines them for misfortune; the latter rewards mixed-race African Americans for successfully erasing their blackness. Addressing questions of authenticity, sexuality, and privilege, Transcending Blackness refutes the idea that race no longer matters in American society.

[more]

front cover of Trans*Cultural Production
Trans*Cultural Production
Julian B. Carter, David J. Getsy, and Trish Salah, special issue editors
Duke University Press
The editors of this issue have selected essays that document the wide range of contemporary trans cultural production, including work not only on literature but also on photography, film, architecture, dance, theater, performance art, new media, and curation. These essays offer the field of transgender studies a useful point of departure for the ongoing and potentially vast undertaking of trans cultural criticism and the interpretation of trans cultural production.
[more]

logo for Duke University Press
Trans/Feminisms
Susan Stryker and Talia M. Bettcher, special issue editors
Duke University Press

This special double issue of TSQ goes beyond the simplistic dichotomy between an exclusionary transphobic feminism and an inclusive trans-affirming feminism. Exploring the ways in which trans issues are addressed within feminist and women’s organizations and social movements around the world, contributors ask how trans, genderqueer, and nonbinary issues are related to feminist movements today, what kind of work is currently undertaken in the name of trans/feminism, what new paradigms and visions are emerging, and what questions still need to be taken up. Central to this special issue is the recognition that trans/feminist politics cannot restrict itself to the domain of gender alone.

This issue features numerous shorter works that represent the diversity of trans/feminist practices and problematics and, in addition to original research articles, includes theory, reports, manifestos, opinion pieces, reviews, and creative/artistic productions, as well as republished key documents of trans/feminist history and international scholarship.

Contributors: Miriam Abelson, Sara Ahmed, Aitzole Araneta, Alexandre Baril, Marie-Hélène/Sam Bourcier, micha cárdenas, Daniel Chávez, Jeanne Córdova, Pedro J. DiPietro, Lucía Egaña, A. Finn Enke, Karine Espineira, Sandra Fernández, Simon D. Fisher, Tania Hammidi, Christoph Hanssmann, Emma Louise Heaney, Hailey Kaas, Cael Keegan, Faris Khan, Yana Kirey-Sitnikova, Terence Kumpf, Riki Lane, Helen Hok-Sze Leung, Claudia Sofia Garriga López, Tommi Avicolli Mecca, L. Leigh Ann van der Merwe, Scott Morgensen, Marcio Jose Ornat, Ruin S. M. Pae, José Quiroga, Naomi Scheman, Joseli Maria Silva, reese simpkins, Miriam Solá, Sandy Stone, Stefania Voli, Rinaldo Walcott, Lori Watson, Cristan Williams, Shana Ye, Asli Zengin
[more]

front cover of The Transformation of Chinese Socialism
The Transformation of Chinese Socialism
Chun Lin
Duke University Press, 2006
In this significant contribution to both political theory and China studies, Lin Chun provides a critical assessment of the scope and limits of socialist experiments in China, analyzing their development since the victory of the Chinese communist revolution in 1949 and reflecting on the country’s likely paths into the future. Lin suggests that China’s twentieth-century trajectory be grasped in terms of the collective search by its people for a modern alternative to colonial modernity, bureaucratic socialism, and capitalist subordination. Evaluating contending interpretations of the formation and transformation of Chinese socialism in the contemporary conditions of global capitalism, Lin argues that the post-Mao reform model must be remade.
[more]

front cover of Trans*formational Pedagogies
Trans*formational Pedagogies
Z. Nicolazzo, Susan B. Marine, and Francisco J. Galarte, special issue editors
Duke University Press
With this special issue on “Trans*formational Pedagogies,” guest editors Z Nicolazzo, Susan B. Marine, and Francisco J. Galarte redress such absences and argue that explicit attention to the institutional contexts of formal educational activities should be central to trans studies in the moment of its increasingly rapid institutionalization. The collection of essays they offer here range from an examination of how teachers renaturalize the gender binary in classroom practices, to a study documenting the privileging of masculine norms of embodiment among trans men in college, to a dialogue between two trans teachers in Spain about their approaches to trans* pedagogy in public school classrooms. The articles make visible the reproduction of gender normativity in most educational settings and point to the transformative potential of education for dismantling such unthinking “genderism.”
[more]

logo for Duke University Press
Transforming American Medicine
A Twenty-Year Retrospective on The Social Transformation of American Medicine, Volume 29
Keith Wailoo, Timothy Stoltzfus Jost, and Mark Schlesinger, eds.
Duke University Press
"I am especially grateful for these nineteen essays . . . because they are so substantial. . . . This collection has proved to be neither a funeral pyre nor a festschrift [for The Social Transformation of American Medicine], and it has taught me much about the subject and the reception of my work that I did not know."
—Paul Starr, excerpted from his conclusion in "Transforming American Medicine: A Twenty-Year Retrospective on The Social Transformation of American Medicine"

Paul Starr’s Controversial Vision
In the early 1980s, as America stood at a crossroads—between New Deal liberalism and the conservatism of "the Reagan Revolution"—so too did American medicine and health care. Engaging this critical moment, Paul Starr’s The Social Transformation of American Medicine stimulated scholars across the disciplines to take stock of medicine’s historical and future trajectories. Starr’s analysis of American health care and medicine, undertaken in the context of broad contemporary societal, political, and cultural forces, earned him the Pulitzer and Bancroft Prizes, as well as garnering enduring public acclaim. Indeed, twenty years after its publication, The Social Transformation of American Medicine is now a standard in disciplines from health law to political science and history.

Despite its undeniable import, Starr’s book still provokes argument and strong reaction on all sides, and the question that has puzzled readers since the grand synthesis appeared remains: whether to praise or to criticize it. According to historian Keith Wailoo, health lawyer Timothy Stoltzfus Jost, and political economist Mark Schlesinger, coeditors of "Transforming American Medicine: A Twenty-Year Retrospective on The Social Transformation of American Medicine," a new special double issue of the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, the answer appears to be to do both.

How Does the Vision Hold Up?
Rife with criticism, praise, and in-depth analysis of Starr’s work, this lengthy special issue brings together scholars from many disciplines to offer a comprehensive assessment of the life, the times, the promise, the problems, and the paradoxes of The Social Transformation of American Medicine. Contributors think critically about the problem of the grand narrative, about why doctors and health lawyers loved the book, about why historians reacted to it with ambivalence, about why its themes resonated as they did, and finally about how the political and policy landscape of health care has shifted in the last two decades. Additionally, the issue includes an extensive précis of salient parts of The Social Transformation of American Medicine and concludes with a contentious essay in which Starr himself responds to some of the criticism leveled at him in the preceding pages.

With American medicine and health care now at another crossroads—a relentless rise in medical spending on one side, and a persistent sense that Americans are not getting good value for their health care dollar on the other—the issues that Starr originally highlighted (the rise of medical authority and the elaborate dance among doctors, the state, and the corporation) are still of vital importance. "Transforming American Medicine: A Twenty-Year Retrospective on The Social Transformation of American Medicine" vigorously continues the discussion of medicine’s past, present, and future that Starr’s book set in motion.

Contributors. Gloria J. Bazzoli, Lawrence P. Casalino, Stefan Gildemeiste

[more]

front cover of Transforming the Frontier
Transforming the Frontier
Peace Parks and the Politics of Neoliberal Conservation in Southern Africa
Bram Büscher
Duke University Press, 2013
International peace parks—transnational conservation areas established and managed by two or more countries—have become a popular way of protecting biodiversity while promoting international cooperation and regional development. In Transforming the Frontier, Bram Büscher shows how cross-border conservation neatly reflects the neoliberal political economy in which it developed.

Based on extensive research in southern Africa with the Maloti-Drakensberg Transfrontier Conservation and Development Project, Büscher explains how the successful promotion of transfrontier conservation as a "win-win" solution happens not only in spite of troubling contradictions and problems, but indeed because of them. This is what he refers to as the "politics of neoliberal conservation," which receives its strength from effectively combining strategies of consensus, antipolitics, and marketing. Drawing on long-term, multilevel ethnographic research, Büscher argues that transfrontier conservation projects are not as concerned with on-the-ground development as they are purported to be. Instead, they are reframing environmental protection and sustainable development to fit an increasingly contradictory world order.

[more]

front cover of Transforming the Public Sphere
Transforming the Public Sphere
The Dutch National Exhibition of Women’s Labor in 1898
Maria Grever and Berteke Waaldijk
Duke University Press, 2004
In 1898, the year Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands was inaugurated, five hundred women organized an enormous public exhibition showcasing women’s contributions to Dutch society as workers in a strikingly broad array of professions. The National Exhibition of Women’s Labor, held in The Hague, was attended by more than ninety thousand visitors. Maria Grever and Berteke Waaldijk consider the exhibition in the international contexts of women’s history, visual culture, and imperialism.

A comprehensive social history, Transforming the Public Sphere describes the planning and construction of the Exhibition of Women’s Labor and the event itself—the sights, the sounds, and the smells—as well as the role of exhibitions in late-nineteenth-century public culture. The authors discuss how the 1898 exhibition displayed the range and variety of women’s economic, intellectual, and artistic roles in Dutch culture, including their participation in such traditionally male professions as engineering, diamond-cutting, and printing and publishing. They examine how people and goods from the Dutch colonies were represented, most notably in an extensive open-air replica of a “Javanese village.” Grever and Waaldijk reveal the tensions the exhibition highlighted: between women of different economic classes; between the goal of equal rights for women and the display of imperial subjects and spoils; and between socialists and feminists, who competed fiercely with one another for working women’s support. Transforming the Public Sphere explores an event that served as the dress rehearsal for advances in women’s public participation during the twentieth century.

[more]

logo for Duke University Press
The Transgender Issue, Volume 4
Susan Stryker
Duke University Press
This special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies presents essays that each adopt a methodologically distinctive analysis of a particular concern in transgender studies. Taken together, these pieces demonstrate the wide-ranging and sometimes antagonistic viewpoints of scholars and activists pursuing different political and intellectual goals.

Essays include a documentation of how readers of mass-circulation print media became aware of new medical possibilities for the surgical and hormonal alteration of sex characteristics and began agitating for them; a challenge from feminist theorists to transgender movement activists to avoid repeating the mistakes of previous feminist, gay, and lesbian political mobilizations; a critique of the overreliance on discursive analysis in much current transgender scholarship; and paired essays exploring the so-called Butch/FTM Border Wars from either side of that divide. There are also pieces that focus on intersex activism, the bioethics of gender dysphoria management, and the mobilization of transgender advocacy organizations.
Considering perceptions of queer embodiment past and present, these essays explore the sweeping changes in professional and popular attitudes regarding the transgender community and the issues that affect it. The timeliness of this issue as well as the diversity of its viewpoints makes it a significant contribution to the growing body of transgender literature.

Contributors. Cheryl Chase, Patricia Elliot, Judith Halberstam, C. Jacob Hale, Joanne Meyerowitz, James Lindeman Nelson, Katrina Roen, Henry Rubin, Susan Stryker

[more]

front cover of Transgressions of Reading
Transgressions of Reading
Narrative Engagement as Exile and Return
Robert D. Newman
Duke University Press, 1992
It is often claimed that we know ourselves and the world through narratives. In this book, Robert D. Newman portrays narrative engagement as a process grounded in psychoanalytic theory to explain how readers (or listeners or viewers) manage to engage with specific narratives and derive from them a personal experience.
Newman describes this psychodrama of narrative engagement as that of exile and return, an experience in which narrative becomes a type of homeland, beckoning and elusive, endlessly defining and disrupting the borders of a reader's identity. Within this paradigm, he considers a fascinating variety of narrative texts: from the Jim Jones episode in Guyana to Freud's repression of personal history in his story of Moses; from a surrealistic collage novel by Max Ernst to the horror films of Alfred Hitchcock; from the works of James Joyce, Ariel Dorfman, Milan Kundera, and D. M. Thomas to the tales of abjection in pornography.
Transgressions of Reading is itself an engaging work, as interesting for its provocative readings of particular works as for its theoretical insights. It will appeal to readers from all fields in which narrative plays a crucial role, in the study of film and art, modern and contemporary literature, popular culture, and feminist, psychoanalytic, and reader response theory.
[more]

front cover of Trans*historicities
Trans*historicities
Leah DeVun and Zeb Tortorici, special issue editors
Duke University Press, 2018
This issue offers a theoretical and methodological imagining of what constitutes trans* before the advent of the terms that scholars generally look to for the formation of modern conceptions of gender, sex, and sexuality. What might we find if we look for trans* before trans*? While some historians have rejected the category of transgender to speak of experiences before the mid-twentieth century, others have laid claim to those living gender-non-conforming lives before our contemporary era. By using the concept of trans*historicity, this volume draws together trans* studies, historical inquiry, and queer temporality while also emphasizing the historical specificity and variability of gendered systems of embodiment in different time periods. Essay topics include a queer analysis of medieval European saints, discussions of a nineteenth-century Russian religious sect, an exploration of a third gender in early modern Japanese art, a reclamation of Ojibwe and Plains Cree Two-Spirit language, and biopolitical genealogies and filmic representations of transsexuality. The issue also features a roundtable discussion on trans*historicities and an interview with the creators of the 2015 film Deseos. Critiquing both progressive teleologies and the idea of sex or gender as a timeless tradition, this issue articulates our own desires for trans history, trans*historicities, and queerly temporal forms of historical narration.

Contributors. Kadji Amin, M. W. Bychowski, Fernanda Carvajal, Howard Chiang, Leah DeVun, Julian Gill-Peterson, Jack Halberstam, Asato Ikeda, Jacob Lau, Kathleen P. Long, Maya Mikdashi, Robert Mills, Carlos Motta, Marcia Ochoa, Kai Pyle, C. Riley Snorton, Zeb Tortorici, Jennifer Louise Wilson
[more]

front cover of Trans-in-Asia, Asia-in-Trans
Trans-in-Asia, Asia-in-Trans
Howard Chiang, Todd A. Henry, and Helen Hok-Sze Leung, special issue editors
Duke University Press
Since the late twentieth century, scholars and activists have begun to take stock of the deep histories and politically engaged nature of trans* cultures across the diverse societies of “Asia.” Much of this groundbreaking work has cautioned against immediate assumptions about the universality of transgender experiences, while heeding the significant influence of colonial histories, cultural imperialism, Cold War dynamics, economic integration, and migration practices in shaping local categories of queerness, discourses of rights, as well as the political, social, and medical management of gender variance and non-normative sexualities. This growing body of work on Asia joins trans* scholarship and activism across the world that has similarly sought to de-universalize and de-colonize the category of “trans.”
[more]

front cover of Translating Blackness
Translating Blackness
Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspective
Lorgia García Peña
Duke University Press, 2022
In Translating Blackness Lorgia García Peña considers Black Latinidad in a global perspective in order to chart colonialism as an ongoing sociopolitical force. Drawing from archives and cultural productions from the United States, the Caribbean, and Europe, García Peña argues that Black Latinidad is a social, cultural, and political formation—rather than solely a site of identity—through which we can understand both oppression and resistance. She takes up the intellectual and political genealogy of Black Latinidad in the works of Frederick Douglass, Gregorio Luperón, and Arthur Schomburg. She also considers the lives of Black Latina women living in the diaspora, such as Black Dominicana guerrillas who migrated throughout the diaspora after the 1965 civil war and Black immigrant and second-generation women like Mercedes Frías and Milagros Guzmán organizing in Italy with other oppressed communities. In demonstrating that analyses of Black Latinidad must include Latinx people and cultures throughout the diaspora, García Peña shows how the vaivén—or, coming and going—at the heart of migrant life reveals that the nation is not a sufficient rubric from which to understand human lived experiences.
[more]

front cover of Translating Empire
Translating Empire
Jose Marti, Migrant Latino Subjects, and American Modernities
Laura Lomas
Duke University Press, 2008
In Translating Empire, Laura Lomas uncovers how late nineteenth-century Latino migrant writers developed a prescient critique of U.S. imperialism, one that prefigures many of the concerns about empire, race, and postcolonial subjectivity animating American studies today. During the 1880s and early 1890s, the Cuban journalist, poet, and revolutionary José Martí and other Latino migrants living in New York City translated North American literary and cultural texts into Spanish. Lomas reads the canonical literature and popular culture of the United States in the Gilded Age through the eyes of Martí and his fellow editors, activists, orators, and poets. In doing so, she reveals how, in the process of translating Anglo-American culture into a Latino-American idiom, the Latino migrant writers invented a modernist aesthetics to criticize U.S. expansionism and expose Anglo stereotypes of Latin Americans.

Lomas challenges longstanding conceptions about Martí through readings of neglected texts and reinterpretations of his major essays. Against the customary view that emphasizes his strong identification with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, the author demonstrates that over several years, Martí actually distanced himself from Emerson’s ideas and conveyed alarm at Whitman’s expansionist politics. She questions the association of Martí with pan-Americanism, pointing out that in the 1880s, the Cuban journalist warned against foreign geopolitical influence imposed through ostensibly friendly meetings and the promotion of hemispheric peace and “free” trade. Lomas finds Martí undermining racialized and sexualized representations of America in his interpretations of Buffalo Bill and other rituals of westward expansion, in his self-published translation of Helen Hunt Jackson’s popular romance novel Ramona, and in his comments on writing that stereotyped Latino/a Americans as inherently unfit for self-government. With Translating Empire, Lomas recasts the contemporary practice of American studies in light of Martí’s late-nineteenth-century radical decolonizing project.

[more]

front cover of Translating Time
Translating Time
Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique
Bliss Cua Lim
Duke University Press, 2009
Under modernity, time is regarded as linear and measurable by clocks and calendars. Despite the historicity of clock-time itself, the modern concept of time is considered universal and culturally neutral. What Walter Benjamin called “homogeneous, empty time” founds the modern notions of progress and a uniform global present in which the past and other forms of time consciousness are seen as superseded.

In Translating Time, Bliss Cua Lim argues that fantastic cinema depicts the coexistence of other modes of being alongside and within the modern present, disclosing multiple “immiscible temporalities” that strain against the modern concept of homogeneous time. In this wide-ranging study—encompassing Asian American video (On Cannibalism), ghost films from the New Cinema movements of Hong Kong and the Philippines (Rouge, Itim, Haplos), Hollywood remakes of Asian horror films (Ju-on, The Grudge, A Tale of Two Sisters) and a Filipino horror film cycle on monstrous viscera suckers (Aswang)—Lim conceptualizes the fantastic as a form of temporal translation. The fantastic translates supernatural agency in secular terms while also exposing an untranslatable remainder, thereby undermining the fantasy of a singular national time and emphasizing shifting temporalities of transnational reception.

Lim interweaves scholarship on visuality with postcolonial historiography. She draws on Henri Bergson’s understanding of cinema as both implicated in homogeneous time and central to its critique, as well as on postcolonial thought linking the ideology of progress to imperialist expansion. At stake in this project are more ethical forms of understanding time that refuse to domesticate difference as anachronism. While supernaturalism is often disparaged as a vestige of primitive or superstitious thought, Lim suggests an alternative interpretation of the fantastic as a mode of resistance to the ascendancy of homogeneous time and a starting-point for more ethical temporal imaginings.

[more]

front cover of Translating Transgender
Translating Transgender
David Gramling and Aniruddha Dutta, special issue editors
Duke University Press
This issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly calls for multilingual and translational critique. Few primary and secondary texts about transgender lives and ideas have been translated from language to language in any formal way over the centuries. This is an important problem for transgender studies in the coming decades because an Anglophone disciplinary and discursive disposition will continue to lead policy makers, public intellectuals, and academics to fall back on ethnocentric and monolingual frameworks and resources.
[more]

front cover of Translation in a Global Market, Volume 13
Translation in a Global Market, Volume 13
Emily Apter, ed.
Duke University Press
What is the impact of globalization on texts and media? To what extent do artists and writers consciously or unconsciously build translatability into their work? Translation in a Global Market addresses these questions as well as the problems that may arise from a global market in cultural and aesthetic forms. For instance, what does a global market that increasingly rewards translation-friendly works that cross linguistic and cultural boundaries mean for publishing in non-Western languages? What are the politics of an emergent internationalized aesthetic that privileges metropolitan over vernacular genres? And why do specific cultural objects arrive and circulate in various public spheres? The essays in this volume critically investigate these questions without assuming that these objects were destined to arrive in those public spheres.
Translation in a Global Market assembles contributors from several academic disciplines as well as visual artists for a closer look at the formation of an international canon and at the kinds of texts that gain international visibility. The essays urge a shift in emphasis from global literacy—which implies the use of a standard language and a preference for translatability in texts—to transnational literacy, which places minority and diaspora literatures in direct conversation with each other rather than with Paris, London, or New York.

Contributors. Dina Al-Kassim, Emily Apter, Timothy Brennan, Elena Climent, Maryse Condé, Michael Eng, Renée Green, Rainer Ganahl, Sarah M. Hudgins, Michael North, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

[more]

front cover of Translocalities/Translocalidades
Translocalities/Translocalidades
Feminist Politics of Translation in the Latin/a Américas
Sonia E. Alvarez, Claudia de Lima Costa, Verónica Feliu, Rebecca J. Hester, Norma Klahn, and Millie Thayer, eds.
Duke University Press, 2014
Translocalities/Translocalidades is a path-breaking collection of essays on Latin American, Caribbean, and United States–based Latina feminisms and their multiple translations and cross-pollinations. The contributors come from countries throughout the Américas and are based in diverse disciplines, including media studies, literature, Chicana/o studies, and political science. Together, they advocate a hemispheric politics based on the knowledge that today, many sorts of Latin/o-americanidades—Afro, queer, indigenous, feminist, and so on—are constructed through processes of translocation. Latinidad in the South, North and Caribbean "middle" of the Américas, is constituted out of the intersections of the intensified cross-border, transcultural, and translocal flows that characterize contemporary transmigration throughout the hemisphere, from La Paz to Buenos Aires to Chicago and back again. Rather than immigrating and assimilating, many people in the Latin/a Américas increasingly move back and forth between localities, between historically situated and culturally specific, though increasingly porous, places, across multiple borders, and not just between nations. The contributors deem these multidirectional crossings and movements, and the positionalities engendered, translocalities/translocalidades.

Contributors. Sonia E. Alvarez, Kiran Asher, Victoria (Vicky) M. Bañales, Marisa Belausteguigoitia Rius, Maylei Blackwell, Cruz C. Bueno, Pascha Bueno-Hansen, Mirangela Buggs, Teresa Carrillo, Claudia de Lima Costa, Isabel Espinal, Verónica Feliu, Macarena Gómez-Barris, Rebecca J. Hester, Norma Klahn, Agustín Lao-Montes, Suzana Maia, Márgara Millán, Adriana Piscitelli, Ana Rebeca Prada, Ester R. Shapiro, Simone Pereira Schmidt, Millie Thayer
[more]

front cover of Transnational Adoption, Volume 21
Transnational Adoption, Volume 21
Toby Alice Volkman and Cindi Katz, eds.
Duke University Press
What are the implications of the massive movement of children from poor nations to the affluent West? How is adoption made possible by globalizing forces, facilitated by new media technologies such as the Internet, and inflected by the cultural politics of multiculturalism?

In this special issue, scholars—several of whom are adoptive parents—from a variety of disciplines focus on the culture and politics of transnational adoption, exploring relationships between the sending and receiving nations. Until the mid-1970s, adoptive families were pressured to forget the child’s past and birth culture and to create “as if” biological families. Since then, the culture of adoption has moved dramatically toward openness, generating preoccupations with origins and loss, as well as new kinds of border-crossing movements such as orphanage visits, homeland journeys, and culture camps established by sending nations now eager to embrace the adoptees. This collection of essays examines the complex interplay of race, culture, identity, kinship, and belonging in this contemporary form of family building.

Contributors. Lisa Cartwright, Claudia Fonseca, Cindi Katz, Eleana Kim, Toby Alice Volkman, Barbara Yngvesson

[more]

front cover of Transnational America
Transnational America
Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms
Inderpal Grewal
Duke University Press, 2005
In Transnational America, Inderpal Grewal examines how the circulation of people, goods, social movements, and rights discourses during the 1990s created transnational subjects shaped by a global American culture. Rather than simply frame the United States as an imperialist nation-state that imposes unilateral political power in the world, Grewal analyzes how the concept of “America” functions as a nationalist discourse beyond the boundaries of the United States by disseminating an ideal of democratic citizenship through consumer practices. She develops her argument by focusing on South Asians in India and the United States.

Grewal combines a postcolonial perspective with social and cultural theory to argue that contemporary notions of gender, race, class, and nationality are linked to earlier histories of colonization. Through an analysis of Mattel’s sales of Barbie dolls in India, she discusses the consumption of American products by middle-class Indian women newly empowered with financial means created by India’s market liberalization. Considering the fate of asylum-seekers, Grewal looks at how a global feminism in which female refugees are figured as human rights victims emerged from a distinctly Western perspective. She reveals in the work of three novelists who emigrated from India to the United States—Bharati Mukherjee, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, and Amitav Ghosh—a concept of Americanness linked to cosmopolitanism. In Transnational America Grewal makes a powerful, nuanced case that the United States must be understood—and studied—as a dynamic entity produced and transformed both within and far beyond its territorial boundaries.

[more]

front cover of Transnational Black Studies, Volume 2003
Transnational Black Studies, Volume 2003
Lisa Brock , Robin D. G. Kelley, and Karen Sotiropoulos, eds.
Duke University Press
From its inception, black studies has been transnational. Pioneering intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois, George Washington Williams, Anna Julia Cooper, Nicolas Guillen, C. L. R. James, Oliver Cox, and Zora Neale Hurston shared a transnational sensibility shaped by the antiracist and anti-imperialist politics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In recent years, however, much scholarship regarding blackness has been presented under the rubric of pan-Africanism or the African diaspora, terms that imply an inquiry solely into what it means to be “of Africa.” Increasingly, in an era of globalization and postcolonialism, such terms have become insufficient for capturing what it means to be black in a global context. Transnational black studies—an interdisciplinary arena of knowledge rooted in political struggle—has reemerged to rectify this discursive insufficiency in contemporary scholarship.

The essays, interviews, and reviews in this special issue of Radical History Review represent the best of the new of this very old tradition of transnational black studies. One contributor explores how “racial citizenship”—the idea of belonging and solidarity across the black world, developed as a result of knowledge formed out of transnational linkages—is employed by Cubans of color fighting against racial discrimination in public spaces in Havana. Another, by outlining a research agenda for the study of African slavery in the Middle East and South Asia, reminds us that the Africa diaspora is global. In a discussion of a paradigm shift from the national to the global, yet another author makes a singular contribution to this collection by locating new spaces for identity formation “in transit.”

Contributors. Martha Biondi, Anthony Bogues, Ashley Dawson, James Early, Mary F. E. Ebeling, Kevin Gaines, Van Gosse, Frank A. Guridy, Joseph E. Harris, Douglas M. Haynes, Joseph Heathcott, Harvey Neptune, Michelle Stephens

[more]

front cover of Transnational Feminist Itineraries
Transnational Feminist Itineraries
Situating Theory and Activist Practice
Ashwini Tambe and Millie Thayer, editors
Duke University Press, 2021
Transnational Feminist Itineraries brings together scholars and activists from multiple continents to demonstrate the ongoing importance of transnational feminist theory in challenging neoliberal globalization and the rise of authoritarian nationalisms around the world. The contributors illuminate transnational feminism's unique constellation of elements: its specific mode of thinking across scales, its historical understanding of identity categories, and its expansive imagining of solidarity based on difference rather than similarity. Contesting the idea that transnational feminism works in opposition to other approaches—especially intersectional and decolonial feminisms—this volume instead argues for their complementarity. Throughout, the contributors call for reaching across social, ideological, and geographical boundaries to better confront the growing reach of nationalism, authoritarianism, and religious and economic fundamentalism.

Contributors. Mary Bernstein, Isabel Maria Cortesão Casimiro, Rafael de la Dehesa, Carmen L. Diaz Alba, Inderpal Grewal, Cricket Keating, Amy Lind, Laura L. Lovett, Kathryn Moeller, Nancy A. Naples, Jennifer C. Nash, Amrita Pande, Srila Roy, Cara K. Snyder, Ashwini Tambe, Millie Thayer, Catarina Casimiro Trindade
[more]

front cover of Transnational Sport
Transnational Sport
Gender, Media, and Global Korea
Rachael Miyung Joo
Duke University Press, 2012
Based on ethnographic research in Seoul and Los Angeles, Transnational Sport tells how sports shape experiences of global Koreanness, and how those experiences are affected by national cultures. Rachael Miyung Joo focuses on superstar Korean athletes and sporting events produced for transnational media consumption. She explains how Korean athletes who achieve success on the world stage represent a powerful, globalized Korea for Koreans within the country and those in the diaspora. Celebrity Korean women athletes are highly visible in the Ladies Professional Golf Association. In the media, these young golfers are represented as daughters to be protected within the patriarchal Korean family and as hypersexualized Asian women with commercial appeal. Meanwhile, the hard-muscled bodies of male athletes, such as Korean baseball and soccer players, symbolize Korean masculine dominance in the global capitalist arena. Turning from particular athletes to a mega-event, Joo discusses the 2002 FIFA World Cup Korea/Japan, a watershed moment in recent Korean history. New ideas of global Koreanness coalesced around this momentous event. Women and youth assumed newly prominent roles in Korean culture, and, Joo suggests, new models of public culture emerged as thousands of individuals were joined by a shared purpose.
[more]

front cover of Transpacific Femininities
Transpacific Femininities
The Making of the Modern Filipina
Denise Cruz
Duke University Press, 2012
In this groundbreaking study, Denise Cruz investigates the importance of the figure she terms the "transpacific Filipina" to Philippine nationalism, women's suffrage, and constructions of modernity. Her analysis illuminates connections between the rise in the number of Philippine works produced in English and the emergence of new social classes of transpacific women during the early to mid-twentieth century.

Through a careful study of multiple texts produced by Filipina and Filipino writers in the Philippines and the United States—including novels and short stories, newspaper and magazine articles, conduct manuals, and editorial cartoons—Cruz provides a new archive and fresh perspectives for understanding Philippine literature and culture. She demonstrates that the modern Filipina did not emerge as a simple byproduct of American and Spanish colonial regimes, but rather was the result of political, economic, and cultural interactions among the Philippines, Spain, the United States, and Japan. Cruz shows how the complex interplay of feminism, nationalism, empire, and modernity helped to shape, and were shaped by, conceptions of the transpacific Filipina.
[more]

front cover of Transparency and Conspiracy
Transparency and Conspiracy
Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order
Harry G. West and Todd Sanders, eds.
Duke University Press, 2003
Transparency has, in recent years, become a watchword for good governance. Policymakers and analysts alike evaluate political and economic institutions—courts, corporations, nation-states—according to the transparency of their operating procedures. With the dawn of the New World Order and the “mutual veil dropping” of the post–Cold War era, many have asserted that power in our contemporary world is more transparent than ever. Yet from the perspective of the relatively less privileged, the operation of power often appears opaque and unpredictable. Through vivid ethnographic analyses, Transparency and Conspiracy examines a vast range of expressions of the popular suspicion of power—including forms of shamanism, sorcery, conspiracy theory, and urban legends—illuminating them as ways of making sense of the world in the midst of tumultuous and uneven processes of modernization.

In this collection leading anthropologists reveal the variations and commonalities in conspiratorial thinking or occult cosmologies around the globe—in Korea, Tanzania, Mozambique, New York City, Indonesia, Mongolia, Nigeria, and Orange County, California. The contributors chronicle how people express profound suspicions of the United Nations, the state, political parties, police, courts, international financial institutions, banks, traders and shopkeepers, media, churches, intellectuals, and the wealthy. Rather than focusing on the veracity of these convictions, Transparency and Conspiracy investigates who believes what and why. It makes a compelling argument against the dismissal of conspiracy theories and occult cosmologies as antimodern, irrational oversimplifications, showing how these beliefs render the world more complex by calling attention to its contradictions and proposing alternative ways of understanding it.

Contributors.
Misty Bastian, Karen McCarthy Brown, Jean Comaroff, John Comaroff, Susan Harding, Daniel Hellinger, Caroline Humphrey, Laurel Kendall, Todd Sanders, Albert Schrauwers, Kathleen Stewart, Harry G. West

[more]

front cover of The Transparent Traveler
The Transparent Traveler
The Performance and Culture of Airport Security
Rachel Hall
Duke University Press, 2015
At the airport we line up, remove our shoes, empty our pockets, and hold still for three seconds in the body scanner. Deemed safe, we put ourselves back together and are free to buy the beverage we were prohibited from taking through security. In The Transparent Traveler Rachel Hall explains how the familiar routines of airport security choreograph passenger behavior to create submissive and docile travelers. The cultural performance of contemporary security practices mobilizes what Hall calls the "aesthetics of transparency." To appear transparent, a passenger must perform innocence and display a willingness to open their body to routine inspection and analysis. Those who cannot—whether because of race, immigration and citizenship status, disability, age, or religion—are deemed opaque, presumed to be a threat, and subject to search and detention. Analyzing everything from airport architecture, photography, and computer-generated imagery to full-body scanners and TSA behavior detection techniques, Hall theorizes the transparent traveler as the embodiment of a cultural ideal of submission to surveillance. 
 
[more]

logo for Duke University Press
Transpsychoanalytics
Sheila L. Cavanagh, special issue editor
Duke University Press, 2017
While psychoanalysis has traditionally been at odds with transgender issues, a growing body of revisionist psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice has begun to tease out the trans-affirming potential of the field. This issue features essays that highlight this potential by simultaneously critiquing and working within the boundaries of psychoanalytic concepts and theories guiding clinical work. Featuring a range of clinicians and scholars, this issue centers on questions pertaining to trans* experience, desire, difference, otherness, identification, loss, mourning, and embodiment. The contributors explore these questions through topics like bathroom bans, ethics, popular culture, and the Freudian couch. By setting up this dialogue between psychosocial studies and trans* cultural studies, this revisionist work may radically transform psychoanalytic theory and practice.

Contributors. Sheila L. Cavanagh, Chris Coffman, Elena Dalla Torre, Kate Foord, Patricia Gherovici, Oren Gozlan, Griffin Hansbury, Jordon Osserman, Amy Ray Stewart, Simon van der Weele
[more]

front cover of Trans-Status Subjects
Trans-Status Subjects
Gender in the Globalization of South and Southeast Asia
Sonita Sarker and Esha Niyogi De, eds.
Duke University Press, 2002
A Thai foodseller on the streets of Bangkok, a cyclo driver in a Vietnamese village, a Pahari migrant laborer in the Himalayas, a Parsi-Christian professional social worker shuttling back and forth between London and Calcutta—Trans-Status Subjects examines how these and other South and Southeast Asians affect and are affected by globalization. While much work has focused on the changes wrought by globalization—describing how people maintain foundations or are permanently destabilized—this collection theorizes the complex ways individuals negotiate their identities and create alliances in the midst of both stability and instability, as what the editors call trans-status subjects. Using gender paradigms, historical time, and geographic space as driving analytic concerns, the essays gathered here consider the various ways South and Southeast Asians both perpetuate and resist various hierarchies despite unequal mobilities within economic, social, cultural, and political contexts.

The contributors—including literary and film theorists, geographers, historians, sociologists, and anthropologists—show how the dominant colonial powers prefigured the ideologies of gender and sexuality that neocolonial nation-states have later refigured; investigate economic and artistic production; and explore labor, capital, and social change. The essays cover a range of locales—including Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, Borneo, Indonesia, and the United States. In investigating issues of power, mobility, memory, and solidarity in recent eras of globalization, the contributors—scholars and activists from South Asia, Southeast Asia, England, Australia, Canada, and the United States—illuminate various facets of the new concept of trans-status subjects.

Trans-Status Subjects carves out a new area of inquiry at the intersection of feminisim and critical geography, as well as globalization, postcolonial, and cultural studies.

Contributors. Anannya Bhattacharjee, Esha Niyogi De, Karen Gaul, Ketu Katrak, Karen Leonard, Philippa Levine, Kathryn McMahon, Andrew McRae, Susan Morgan, Nihal Perera, Sonita Sarker, Jael Silliman, Sylvia Tiwon, Gisele Yasmeen

[more]

front cover of The Trauma Mantras
The Trauma Mantras
A Memoir in Prose Poems
Adrie Kusserow
Duke University Press, 2024
The Trauma Mantras is a memoir by medical anthropologist, teacher, and writer Adrie Kusserow, who has worked with refugees and humanitarian projects in Bhutan, Nepal, India, Uganda, South Sudan, and the United States. It is a memoir of witness and humility and, ultimately, a way to critique and gain a fresh perspective on Western approaches to the self, suffering, and healing. Kusserow interrogates the way American culture prizes a psychologized individualism, the supposed fragility of the self. In relentlessly questioning the Western tribe of individualism with a hunger to bust out of such narrow confines, she hints at the importance of widening the American self. As she delves into humanity’s numerous social and political ills, she does not let herself off the hook, reflecting rigorously on her own position and commitments. Kusserow travels the world in these poetic meditations, exploring the desperate fictions that “East” and “West” still cling to about each other, the stories we tell about ourselves and obsessively weave from the dominant cultural meanings that surround us.
[more]

front cover of Travel & See
Travel & See
Black Diaspora Art Practices since the 1980s
Kobena Mercer
Duke University Press, 2016
Over the years, Kobena Mercer has critically illuminated the visual innovations of African American and black British artists. In Travel & See he presents a diasporic model of criticism that gives close attention to aesthetic strategies while tracing the shifting political and cultural contexts in which black visual art circulates. In eighteen essays, which cover the period from 1992 to 2012 and discuss such leading artists as Isaac Julien, Renée Green, Kerry James Marshall, and Yinka Shonibare, Mercer provides nothing less than a counternarrative of global contemporary art that reveals how the “dialogical principle” of cross-cultural interaction not only has transformed commonplace perceptions of blackness today but challenges us to rethink the entangled history of modernism as well.
 
 
[more]

front cover of Traveling from New Spain to Mexico
Traveling from New Spain to Mexico
Mapping Practices of Nineteenth-Century Mexico
Magali M. Carrera
Duke University Press, 2011
Antonio García Cubas’s Carta general of 1857, the first published map of the independent Mexican nation-state, represented the country’s geographic coordinates in precise detail. The respected geographer and cartographer made mapping Mexico his life’s work. Combining insights from the history of cartography and visual culture studies, Magali M. Carrera explains how García Cubas fabricated credible and inspiring nationalist visual narratives for a rising sovereign nation by linking old and new visual strategies.

From the sixteenth century until the early nineteenth, Europeans had envisioned New Spain (colonial Mexico) in texts, maps, and other images. In the first decades of the 1800s, ideas about Mexican, rather than Spanish, national character and identity began to cohere in written and illustrated narratives produced by foreign travelers. During the nineteenth century, technologies and processes of visual reproduction expanded to include lithography, daguerreotype, and photography. New methods of display—such as albums, museums, exhibitions, and world fairs—signaled new ideas about spectatorship. García Cubas participated in this emerging visual culture as he reconfigured geographic and cultural imagery culled from previous mapping practices and travel writing. In works such as the Atlas geográfico (1858) and the Atlas pintoresco é historico (1885), he presented independent Mexico to Mexican citizens and the world.

[more]

front cover of Traveling Heavy
Traveling Heavy
A Memoir in between Journeys
Ruth Behar
Duke University Press, 2013
Traveling Heavy is a deeply moving, unconventional memoir by the master storyteller and cultural anthropologist Ruth Behar. Through evocative stories, she portrays her life as an immigrant child and later, as an adult woman who loves to travel but is terrified of boarding a plane. With an open heart, she writes about her Yiddish-Sephardic-Cuban-American family, as well as the strangers who show her kindness as she makes her way through the world. Compassionate, curious, and unafraid to reveal her failings, Behar embraces the unexpected insights and adventures of travel, whether those be learning that she longed to become a mother after being accused of giving the evil eye to a baby in rural Mexico, or going on a zany pilgrimage to the Behar World Summit in the Spanish town of Béjar.

Behar calls herself an anthropologist who specializes in homesickness. Repeatedly returning to her homeland of Cuba, unwilling to utter her last goodbye, she is obsessed by the question of why we leave home to find home. For those of us who travel heavy with our own baggage, Behar is an indispensable guide, full of grace and hope, in the perpetual search for connection that defines our humanity.

[more]

front cover of Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa
Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa
Mungo Park
Duke University Press, 2000
Mungo Park’s Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa has long been regarded as a classic of African travel literature. In fulfilling his mission to find the Niger River and in documenting its potential as an inland waterway for trade, Park was significant in opening Africa to European economic interests. His modest, low-key heroism made it possible for the British public to imagine themselves as a welcomed force in Africa. As a tale of adventure and survival, it has inspired the imaginations of readers since its first publication in 1799 and writers from Wordsworth and Melville to Conrad, Hemingway, and T. Coreghessan Boyle have acknowledged the influence of Park’s narrative on their work.
Unlike the large expeditions that followed him, Park traveled only with native guides or alone. Without much of an idea of where he was going, he relied entirely on local people for food, shelter, and directions throughout his eventful eighteen month journey. While his warm reaction to the people he met made him famous as a sentimental traveler, his chronicle also provides a rare written record of the lives of ordinary people in West Africa before European intervention. His accounts of war, politics, and the spread of Islam, as well as his constant confrontations with slavery as practiced in eighteenth-century West Africa, are as valuable today as they were in 1799. In preparing this new edition, editor Kate Ferguson Marsters presents the complete text and includes reproductions of all the original maps and illustrations.
Park’s narrative serves as a crucial text in relation to scholarship on the history of slavery, colonial enterprise, and nineteenth-century imperialism. The availability of this full edition will give a new generation of readers access to a travel narrative that has inspired other readers and writers over two centuries and will enliven scholarly discussion in many fields.
[more]

front cover of Treasured Possessions
Treasured Possessions
Indigenous Interventions into Cultural and Intellectual Property
Haidy Geismar
Duke University Press, 2013
What happens when ritual practitioners from a small Pacific nation make an intellectual property claim to bungee jumping? When a German company successfully sues to defend its trademark of a Māori name? Or when UNESCO deems ephemeral sand drawings to be "intangible cultural heritage"? In Treasured Possessions, Haidy Geismar examines how global forms of cultural and intellectual property are being redefined by everyday people and policymakers in two markedly different Pacific nations. The New Hebrides, a small archipelago in Melanesia managed jointly by Britain and France until 1980, is now the independent nation-state of Vanuatu, with a population that is more than 95 percent indigenous. New Zealand, by contrast, is a settler state and former British colony that engages with its entangled Polynesian and British heritage through an ethos of "biculturalism" that is meant to involve an indigenous population of just 15 percent. Alternative notions of property, resources, and heritage—informed by distinct national histories—are emerging in both countries. These property claims are advanced in national and international settings, but they emanate from specific communities and cultural landscapes, and they are grounded in an awareness of ancestral power and inheritance. They reveal intellectual and cultural property to be not only legal constructs but also powerful ways of asserting indigenous identities and sovereignties.
[more]

front cover of The Treatment
The Treatment
The Story of Those Who Died in the Cincinnati Radiation Tests
Martha Stephens
Duke University Press, 2002
The Treatment is the story of one tragedy of medical research that stretched over eleven years and affected the lives of hundreds of people in an Ohio city. Thirty years ago the author, then an assistant professor of English, acquired a large set of little-known medical papers at her university. These documents told a grotesque story. Cancer patients coming to the public hospital on her campus were being swept into secret experiments for the U.S. military; they were being irradiated over their whole bodies as if they were soldiers in nuclear war. Of the ninety women and men exposed to this treatment, twenty-one died within a month of their radiations.
Martha Stephens’s report on these deaths led to the halting of the tests, but local papers did not print her charges, and for many years people in Cincinnati had no way of knowing that lethal experiments had taken place there. In 1994 other military tests were brought to light, and a yellowed copy of Stephens’s original report was delivered to a television newsroom. In Ohio, major publicity ensued—at long last—and reached around the world. Stephens uncovered the names of the victims, and a legal action was filed against thirteen researchers and their institutions. A federal judge compared the deeds of the doctors to the medical crimes of the Nazis during World War II and refused to dismiss the researchers from the suit. After many bitter disputes in court, they agreed to settle the case with the families of those they had afflicted. In 1999 a memorial plaque was raised in a yard of the hospital.
Who were these doctors and why had they done as they did? Who were the people whose lives they took? Who was the reporter who could not forget the story, the young attorney who first developed the case, the judge who issued the historic ruling against the doctors? This is Stephens’s moving account of all that transpired in these lives and her own during this epic battle between medicine and human rights.
[more]

front cover of Trespasses
Trespasses
Selected Writings
Masao Miyoshi
Duke University Press, 2010
Trespasses presents key writings of the Tokyo-born literary scholar Masao Miyoshi, one of the most important postwar intellectuals to link culture with politics and a remarkable critical voice within the academy. For more than four decades, Miyoshi worked outside the mainstream, trespassing into new fields, making previously unseen connections, and upending naive assumptions. With an impeccable sense of when a topic or discussion had lost its critical momentum, he moved on to the next question, and then the next after that, taking on matters of literary form, cross-cultural relations, globalization, art and architecture, the corporatization of the university, and the threat of ecological disaster. Trespasses reveals the tremendous range of Miyoshi’s thought and interests, shows how his thinking transformed over time, and highlights his recurring concerns.

This volume brings together eleven selections of Miyoshi’s previously published writing, a major new essay, a critical introduction to his life and work, and an interview in which Miyoshi reflects on the trajectory of his thought and the institutional history of modern Japan studies. In the new essay, “Literary Elaborations,” he provides a masterful overview of the nature of the contemporary university, closing with a call for a global environmental protection studies that would radically reconfigure academic disciplines and merge the hard sciences with the humanities and the social sciences. In the other, chronologically arranged selections, Miyoshi addresses cross-culture relations between Japan and the United States, English literary studies in Japan, and Japan studies in the U.S., as well as the organization of urban space and the integrity of art and architecture in aggressively marketed-oriented environments. Trespasses is an invaluable introduction to the work of a fearless cultural critic.

[more]

front cover of The Tribute of Blood
The Tribute of Blood
Army, Honor, Race, and Nation in Brazil, 1864–1945
Peter M. Beattie
Duke University Press, 2001
In The Tribute of Blood Peter M. Beattie analyzes the transformation of army recruitment and service in Brazil between 1864 and 1945, using this history of common soldiers to examine nation building and the social history of Latin America’s largest nation. Tracing the army’s reliance on coercive recruitment to fill its lower ranks, Beattie shows how enlisted service became associated with criminality, perversion, and dishonor, as nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Brazilian officials rounded up the “dishonorable” poor—including petty criminals, vagrants, and “sodomites”—and forced them to serve as soldiers.
Beattie looks through sociological, anthropological, and historical lenses to analyze archival sources such as court-martial cases, parliamentary debates, published reports, and the memoirs and correspondence of soldiers and officers. Combining these materials with a colorful array of less traditional sources—such as song lyrics, slang, grammatical evidence, and tattoo analysis—he reveals how the need to reform military recruitment with a conscription lottery became increasingly apparent in the wake of the Paraguayan War of 1865–1870 and again during World War I. Because this crucial reform required more than changing the army’s institutional roles and the conditions of service, The Tribute of Blood is ultimately the story of how entrenched conceptions of manhood, honor, race, citizenship, and nation were transformed throughout Brazil.
Those interested in social, military, and South American history, state building and national identity, and the sociology of the poor will be enriched by this pathbreaking study.
[more]

front cover of Tropes, Parables, and Performatives
Tropes, Parables, and Performatives
J. Hillis Miller
Duke University Press, 1991
Tropes, Parables, Performatives collects J. Hillis Miller’s essays on seven major twentieth-century authors: Lawrence, Kafka, Stevens, Williams, Woolf, Hardy, and Conrad. For all their evident differences, these essays from early to late explore a single intuition about literature, which may be framed by three words: “trope,” “parable,” and “performative.”
Throughout these essays Miller is fascinated with the tropological dimension of literary language, with the way figures of speech turn aside the telling of a story or the presentation of a literary theme. The exploration of this turning leads to the recognition that all works of literature are parabolic, “thrown beside” their real meaning. They tell one story but call forth something else.
Miller further agrees that all parables are fundamentally performative. They do not merely name something or give knowledge, but rather use words to make something happen, to get the reader from here to there. Each essay here attempts to formulate what, in a given case, the reader perfomatively enters by way of parabolic trope.
[more]

front cover of Tropical Aesthetics of Black Modernism
Tropical Aesthetics of Black Modernism
Samantha A. Noël
Duke University Press, 2021
In Tropical Aesthetics of Black Modernism, Samantha A. Noël investigates how Black Caribbean and American artists of the early twentieth century responded to and challenged colonial and other white-dominant regimes through tropicalist representation. With depictions of tropical scenery and landscapes situated throughout the African diaspora, performances staged in tropical settings, and bodily expressions of tropicality during Carnival, artists such as Aaron Douglas, Wifredo Lam, Josephine Baker, and Maya Angelou developed what Noël calls “tropical aesthetics”—using art to name and reclaim spaces of Black sovereignty. As a unifying element in the Caribbean modern art movement and the Harlem Renaissance, tropical aesthetics became a way for visual artists and performers to express their sense of belonging to and rootedness in a place. Tropical aesthetics, Noël contends, became central to these artists’ identities and creative processes while enabling them to craft alternative Black diasporic histories. In outlining the centrality of tropical aesthetics in the artistic and cultural practices of Black modernist art, Noël recasts understandings of African diasporic art.
[more]

front cover of Tropical Freedom
Tropical Freedom
Climate, Settler Colonialism, and Black Exclusion in the Age of Emancipation
Ikuko Asaka
Duke University Press, 2017
In Tropical Freedom Ikuko Asaka engages in a hemispheric examination of the intersection of emancipation and settler colonialism in North America. Asaka shows how from the late eighteenth century through Reconstruction, emancipation efforts in the United States and present-day Canada were accompanied by attempts to relocate freed blacks to tropical regions, as black bodies were deemed to be more physiologically compatible with tropical climates. This logic conceived of freedom as a racially segregated condition based upon geography and climate. Regardless of whether freed people became tenant farmers in Sierra Leone or plantation laborers throughout the Caribbean, their relocation would provide whites with a monopoly over the benefits of settling indigenous land in temperate zones throughout North America. At the same time, black activists and intellectuals contested these geographic-based controls by developing alternative discourses on race and the environment. By tracing these negotiations of the transnational racialization of freedom, Asaka demonstrates the importance of considering settler colonialism and black freedom together while complicating the prevailing frames through which the intertwined histories of British and U.S. emancipation and colonialism have been understood.
[more]

logo for Duke University Press
Tropical Multiculturalism
A Comparative History of Race in Brazilian Cinema and Culture
Robert Stam
Duke University Press, 1997
Tropical Multiculturalism provides a major study of race in Brazilian culture through the most complete critical analysis of Brazilian cinema in any language. Focusing on representations of multicultural themes involving Euro- and Afro-Brazilians, other immigrants, and indigenous peoples in the rich tradition of Brazilian fictional feature film, Robert Stam puts Brazilian culture at the center of a wide-ranging analysis of race, representation, history, and film. Drawing parallels between the histories of colonialism, slavery, and immigration in Brazil and the United States, he also contends that questions of ethnic and racial representations are best viewed within the larger context of a comparative analysis of racially plural societies.
Stam examines the broad historical and cultural links that connect Brazil and the United States before considering multicultural imagery in Brazilian film as it has changed from the silent era to the present. His analysis moves through the comic chanchadas of the 1930s and 1940s, to the Hollywood-style films from Sao Paulo in the 1950s, and the diverse phases of Cinema Novo beginning in the 1960s. He explores a wealth of subjects, including the submerged "blackness" of Carmen Miranda, the anti-racist agenda of Orson Welles’s never-released Brazilian film It’s All True, the international background behind Black Orpheus, the career of Grande Otelo (Brazil’s greatest black film star), the allegorical "cannibalistic" films like How Tasty Was My Frenchman, and "indigenous media"—the attempt by Brazilian "indians" to use camcorders and VCRs for their own cultural and political purposes. Tropical Multiculturalism is simultaneously a history of Brazilian cinema from the standpoint of race, a history of Brazil itself through its cinematic representations, a comparative study of racial formations in Brazil and the United States, and a theorized analysis of racialized representations.
[more]

front cover of Tropical Renditions
Tropical Renditions
Making Musical Scenes in Filipino America
Christine Bacareza Balance
Duke University Press, 2016
In Tropical Renditions Christine Bacareza Balance examines how the performance and reception of post-World War II Filipino and Filipino American popular music provide crucial tools for composing Filipino identities, publics, and politics. To understand this dynamic, Balance advocates for a "disobedient listening" that reveals how Filipino musicians challenge dominant racialized U.S. imperialist tropes of Filipinos as primitive, childlike, derivative, and mimetic. Balance disobediently listens to how the Bay Area turntablist DJ group the Invisibl Skratch Piklz bear the burden of racialized performers in the United States and defy conventions on musical ownership; to karaoke as affective labor, aesthetic expression, and pedagogical instrument; to how writer and performer Jessica Hagedorn's collaborative and improvisational authorial voice signals the importance of migration and place; and how Pinoy indie rock scenes challenge the relationship between race and musical genre by tracing the alternative routes that popular music takes. In each instance Filipino musicians, writers, visual artists, and filmmakers work within and against the legacies of the U.S./Philippine imperial encounter, and in so doing, move beyond preoccupations with authenticity and offer new ways to reimagine tropical places.
 
[more]

front cover of Tropical Riffs
Tropical Riffs
Latin America and the Politics of Jazz
Jason Borge
Duke University Press, 2018
In Tropical Riffs Jason Borge traces how jazz helped forge modern identities and national imaginaries in Latin America during the mid-twentieth century. Across Latin America jazz functioned as a conduit through which debates about race, sexuality, nation, technology, and modernity raged in newspapers, magazines, literature, and film. For Latin American audiences, critics, and intellectuals—who often understood jazz to stem from social conditions similar to their own—the profound penetration into the fabric of everyday life of musicians like Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, and Charlie Parker represented the promises of modernity while simultaneously posing a threat to local and national identities. Brazilian antijazz rhetoric branded jazz as a problematic challenge to samba and emblematic of Americanization. In Argentina jazz catalyzed discussions about musical authenticity, race, and national culture, especially in relation to tango. And in Cuba, the widespread popularity of Chano Pozo and Dámaso Pérez Prado popularity challenged the United States' monopoly on jazz. Outlining these hemispheric flows of ideas, bodies, and music, Borge elucidates how "America's art form" was, and remains, a transnational project and a collective idea.
[more]

front cover of Tropical Zion
Tropical Zion
General Trujillo, FDR, and the Jews of Sosúa
Allen Wells
Duke University Press, 2009
Seven hundred and fifty Jewish refugees fled Nazi Germany and founded the agricultural settlement of Sosúa in the Dominican Republic, then ruled by one of Latin America’s most repressive dictators, General Rafael Trujillo. In Tropical Zion, Allen Wells, a distinguished historian and the son of a Sosúa settler, tells the compelling story of General Trujillo, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and those fortunate pioneers who founded a successful employee-owned dairy cooperative on the north shore of the island.

Why did a dictator admit these desperate refugees when so few nations would accept those fleeing fascism? Eager to mollify international critics after his army had massacred 15,000 unarmed Haitians, Trujillo sent representatives to Évian, France, in July, 1938 for a conference on refugees from Nazism. Proposed by FDR to deflect criticism from his administration’s restrictive immigration policies, the Évian Conference proved an abject failure. The Dominican Republic was the only nation that agreed to open its doors. Obsessed with stemming the tide of Haitian migration across his nation’s border, the opportunistic Trujillo sought to “whiten” the Dominican populace, welcoming Jewish refugees who were themselves subject to racist scorn in Europe.

The Roosevelt administration sanctioned the Sosúa colony. Since the United States did not accept Jewish refugees in significant numbers, it encouraged Latin America to do so. That prodding, paired with FDR’s overriding preoccupation with fighting fascism, strengthened U.S. relations with Latin American dictatorships for decades to come. Meanwhile, as Jewish organizations worked to get Jews out of Europe, discussions about the fate of worldwide Jewry exposed fault lines between Zionists and Non-Zionists. Throughout his discussion of these broad dynamics, Wells weaves vivid narratives about the founding of Sosúa, the original settlers and their families, and the life of the unconventional beach-front colony.

[more]

front cover of Tropicopolitans
Tropicopolitans
Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804
Srinivas Aravamudan
Duke University Press, 1999
In Tropicopolitans Srinivas Aravamudan reconstructs the colonial imagination of the eighteenth century. By exploring representations of peoples and cultures subjected to colonial discourse, he makes a case for the agency—or the capacity to resist domination—of those oppressed. Aravamudan’s analysis of texts that accompanied European commercial and imperial expansion from the Glorious Revolution through the French Revolution reveals the development of anticolonial consciousness prior to the nineteenth century.
“Tropicalization” is the central metaphor of this analysis, a term that incorporates both the construction of various dynamic tropes by which the colonized are viewed and the site of the study, primarily the tropics. Tropicopolitans, then, are those people who bear and resist the representations of colonialist discourse. In readings that expose new relationships between literary representation and colonialism in the eighteenth century, Aravamudan considers such texts as Behn’s Oroonoko, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Captain Singleton, Addison’s Cato, and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and The Drapier’s Letters. He extends his argument to include analyses of Johnson’s Rasselas, Beckford’s Vathek, Montagu’s travel letters, Equiano’s autobiography, Burke’s political and aesthetic writings, and Abbé de Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes. Offering a radical approach to literary history, this study provides new mechanisms for understanding the development of anticolonial agency.
Introducing eighteenth-century studies to a postcolonial hermeneutics, Tropicopolitans will interest scholars engaged in postcolonial studies, eighteenth-century literature, and literary theory.


[more]

logo for Duke University Press
Troubadours, Trumpeters, Troubled Makers
Lyricism, Nationalism, and Hybridity in China and Its Others
Gregory B. Lee
Duke University Press, 1996
How have the lyrics of poets and songwriters, traditionally voices of protest against domination and exploitation in Chinese society, responded to the forces of cultural imperialism and nationalistic ideology that have accompanied the modernization of Chinese society in the last half of this century. Gregory B. Lee suggests that the response can be seen in a proliferation of hybrid lyric forms and cultures—from both within China and beyond—and that China’s "culture of lyricism" contributes in powerful, significant, and often resistant ways to the nation’s sense of itself and its encounter with modernity.
Lee’s broad definition of lyric includes the work of poets, amateur versifiers, and all manner of popular songwriters, and his inclusive sense of nation refers to all Chinese communities regardless of geographic location. Whether examining the globalized consumption of satellite-broadcast pop music or the heroic efforts of little-known poets on the margins of the Chinese diaspora, he finds a questioning and contesting of both the Orientalist construction of a mythic monolithic China invented by the West and the Chinese obsession with ideas of authenticity and purity of nationhood. Lee explores the lyrical transgression of these ideological boundaries in China, in the Chinese communities of America and Britain, and in other marginalized communities, before using the examples of Hong Kong and other non-nationalistic sites to discuss the creative possibilities of hybrid cultures and societies.
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter