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During the drafting of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, Thomas Jefferson and enslaved valet Robert Hemmings spent several months at 700 Market Street in Philadelphia. The editors and contributors to Declaration House reflect on the history of this site and illuminate the entangled legacy of freedom and enslavement at the core of our nation’s founding. They expand our history by revisiting and mapping this historic place in the city and nation, past and present, as a way to tend to our democracy today.

At the center of the book is artist Sonya Clark’s revelatory public artwork “The Descendants of Monticello,” a multichannel video installation created in collaboration with Hemmings’ collateral descendants and others who are related to the hundreds of people enslaved at Monticello. Interviews and essays about the project and the site consider history, memory, and the founding of our country. Like Clark’s project, Declaration House asks the timely question, "What does the Declaration of Independence mean to us today?"

Contributors: Niya Bates, Kerry Bickford, Paul Buchanan, Sonya Clark, Andrew M. Davenport, Kai Davis, Husnaa Haajarah Hashim, J. Calvin Jefferson Sr., Jabari Jefferson, Jane Kamensky, Matthew Kenyatta, Salamishah Tillet, Gayle Jessup White, Auriana Woods, and the editors

Decolonial Becoming reimagines decolonization by centering questions of Indigeneity, disability, and the settler diaspora in modern Korea from the 1930s to the present. Jeong Eun Annabel We traces the ways that South Korean military and economic practices in the Pacific have functioned as a subempire of US settler colonialism and how South Korea’s nationalist ideology of monoethnicity as Indigeneity under US and Japanese occupations has come at the expense of myriad Indigenous and disabled peoples. Arguing that Korea must grapple with its place in this transpacific colonial order, We challenges the binary of mobility as freedom and immobility as unfreedom through what she calls “decolonial becoming,” a polyrhythmic theory of dialectics in which immobility is a condition of occupation as well as a critical site of relationality. She places Asian, diasporic, and transpacific theories and literatures of decolonization in conversation with Caribbean and Latin American decolonial thought and Native and Indigenous studies to show how immobility can offer a means of unlearning settler colonial logics.

Decolonial Care examines the relationship between the legacies of colonialism and the dynamics of caregiving that have emerged from the French Caribbean. Through a variety of media, including novels, graphic narratives, and curatorial discourse, this book explores four key contexts at the intersection of care and colonialism: care-focused gender roles, domestic service, nurturing human life and environments, and curation as caring. Decolonial Care argues that to imagine caregiving in the context of the French Caribbean means reckoning with intrinsically uncaring practices inherited from colonial rule that show disregard for human life and environments. Putting in dialogue postcolonial studies and care studies, this book elucidates how caring and uncaring have been historically shaped by colonialism, showing how media and narratives about the French Caribbean document the damaging impact of colonialism but also help develop decolonial approaches to care that sustain human life and livable environments.

A bold inquiry into media imaginaries and imaginaries-work as tools of decolonial resistance, worldmaking, and collective futurity.

Decolonial Media Imaginaries (DMI) begins from the basic premise that imaginaries play a crucial role in articulating and elaborating identity, community, and solidarity—particularly through their function in the collaborative shaping of ways of life and living. Historically, however, such imaginaries have been structured by the imperatives of colonialism, capitalism, and global neoliberal expansion. Through the prism of contemporary decolonial politics, the book aims to decenter enduring imaginaries rooted in colonial, capitalist, and neoliberal fantasies about what constitutes the good life, in favor of centering decolonial imaginaries that redraw the lines of possibility surrounding emancipatory futures for human and more-than-human worlds.

DMI presents a concise overview of the terrain prepared by decolonial thinkers (broadly conceived) to foreground the strategies, tools, tactics, and praxis that may be useful in bringing decolonial futures more closely within reach. This wide-ranging work explores ideas surrounding spectacle and display, corporatized technological fantasy, energy infrastructure, community-centered storytelling, pedagogical reparations, artworld decolonial praxis, and Black and Indigenous media futures. The book offers a speculative yet theoretically engaged discussion of how imaginaries-work contributes to a vital redrawing of shared futures grounded in justice, relationality, and collective flourishing.
 

Examining the power of testimonios in illuminating political injustice in Latin America from the Cold War to the present.

During the Cold War, testimonio emerged as a powerful genre of political nonfiction in Latin America. Artists created first-person narratives of censorship and state violence, highlighting broader circumstances of oppression carried out by local right-wing oligarchies in collusion with the US empire. Decolonial Witnessing explores the continuing vitality of testimonio in the twenty-first century, as it has evolved into narratives contesting neoliberal dispossession and disposability.

Considering the cultural work of Ana Castillo, Regina José Galindo, Jayro Bustamante, Alberto Ledesma, Javier Zamora, Lila Downs, and others, Guadalupe Escobar shows how artists, authors, musicians, and filmmakers are using testimonial narratives to identify and resist the architecture of post–Cold War militarized democracy. Contemporary testimonios center migrant children, torture abolitionists, Indigenous land defenders—figures whose perspectives and, indeed, presence disrupt dominant paradigms of citizenship. Cast against the law, their stories—their memories—constitute a critical optic on the construction of belonging. In these acts of bearing witness, Escobar locates the possibility of a new, counterhegemonic political imagination.

Groundbreaking interdisciplinary insights into gender studies in Andean Latin America, addressing transformative societal shifts and anti-genderism.

The collection Decolonising Andean Identities presents ground-breaking work from scholars carrying out social science research in and from Andean Latin America. It addresses themes of central importance to contemporary perspectives on interdisciplinary gender studies and politics in societies undergoing significant social transformation, by bringing together several in-depth ethnographic accounts and a diverse range of methodologies that will appeal to a wide audience. Taken together, its essays offer insights into the transformative role of gender in Latin America, providing the first academic collection of scholarship to give critical context for the rise of anti-genderism in the Andes.

Decolonising Andean Identities aims to develop the field of decolonial gender studies by showcasing interdisciplinary work at the forefront of scholarship. It draws on international expertise through its diverse contributors, including predominately Latin American scholars. In this way, it addresses the urgent need to broaden the perspectives on gender and gender-based activism in Latin America beyond the Southern Cone and Mexico, so that scholars can bring the region as a whole into dialogue with global scholarship.
 

As the first comprehensive volume to explore the impact of empire on Afghanistan’s past and present, Decolonizing Afghanistan marks a decolonial turn in Afghanistan and American studies. Featuring new and often sidelined ground-up perspectives, this collection examines how Afghan communities have subverted, resisted, and participated in colonial projects from the early twentieth century to the present, with a particular focus on the US intervention that began in 2001. Contributors interrogate the relationship between knowledge and power to analyze how narratives about Afghanistan have framed and legitimated imperial governance. Topics span the contradictions and consequences of the US “Forever” War, the rise of private security contracting, the deployment of biometric and surveillance technologies, the politics of US and Taliban countermedia operations, the evolution of gender discourses, and the mobilization of Afghan Americans and “Afghan culture,” among others. Throughout, contributors draw important connections and insights to ongoing global anticolonial struggles and offer paths to decolonial futures.

Contributors. Matthieu Aikins, Dawood Azami, Purnima Bose, Paula Chakravartty, Robert D. Crews, Marya Hannun, Ali Karimi, Nivi Manchanda, Sabauon Nasseri, Tausif Noor, Wazhmah Osman, Hosai Qasmi, Zohra Saed, Gazelle Samizay, Morwari Zafar, Helena Zeweri

Latinx hypersexualized lovers or kingpin predators pulsate from our TVs, smartphones, and Hollywood movie screens. Tweets from the executive office brand Latinxs as bad-hombre hordes and marauding rapists and traffickers. A-list Anglo historical figures like Billy the Kid haunt us with their toxic masculinities. These are the themes creatively explored by the eighteen contributors in Decolonizing Latinx Masculinities.

Together they explore how legacies of colonization and capitalist exploitation and oppression have created toxic forms of masculinity that continue to suffocate our existence as Latinxs. And while the authors seek to identify all cultural phenomena that collectively create reductive, destructive, and toxic constructions of masculinity that traffic in misogyny and homophobia, they also uncover the many spaces—such as Xicanx-Indígena languages, resistant food cultures, music performances, and queer Latinx rodeo practices—where Latinx communities can and do exhale healing masculinities.

With unity of heart and mind, the creative and the scholarly, Decolonizing Latinx Masculinities opens wide its arms to all non-binary, decolonial masculinities today to grow a stronger, resilient, and more compassionate new generation of Latinxs tomorrow.

Contributors
Arturo J. Aldama
Frederick Luis Aldama
T. Jackie Cuevas
Gabriel S. Estrada
Wayne Freeman
Jonathan D. Gomez
Ellie D. Hernández
Alberto Ledesma
Jennie Luna
Sergio A. Macías
Laura Malaver
Paloma Martinez-Cruz
L. Pancho McFarland
William Orchard
Alejandra Benita Portillos
John-Michael Rivera
Francisco E. Robles
Lisa Sánchez González
Kristie Soares
Nicholas Villanueva Jr.

 

From the beginning, the superhero genre has revolved around narratives of transformation. Through traumatic experiences, physical disabilities evolve into super strength and invulnerability; mental disabilities grant telekinesis and foresight. Characters considered “outsiders” are tasked with lead roles in saving the world. All of these attributes appeal to the marginalized fan. Yet, the default fan is often assumed to be white, Anglo-American, and able-bodied.

Decolonizing Media Fandom focuses on the globally diverse fan base of a massively popular Western text: the Marvel superhero universe. Drawing on fanworks from Archive of Our Own, a survey spanning sixteen countries, and one-on-one interviews with Marvel fans who identify as non-white and/or having a disability, Divya Garg examines the strengths and limitations of fandom from the perspective of those who are often relegated to the margins.
 

Early Andean historiography reveals a subaltern history of indigenous gender and sexuality that saw masculinity and femininity not as essential absolutes. Third-gender ritualists, Ipas, mediated between the masculine and feminine spheres of culture in important ceremonies and were recorded in fragments of myths and transcribed oral accounts. Ritual performance by cross-dressed men symbolically created a third space of mediation that invoked the mythic androgyne of the pre-Hispanic Andes. The missionaries and civil authorities colonizing the Andes deemed these performances transgressive and sodomitical.

In this book, Michael J. Horswell examines alternative gender and sexuality in the colonial Andean world, and uses the concept of the third gender to reconsider some fundamental paradigms of Andean culture. By deconstructing what literary tropes of sexuality reveal about Andean pre-Hispanic and colonial indigenous culture, he provides an alternative history and interpretation of the much-maligned aboriginal subjects the Spanish often referred to as "sodomites." Horswell traces the origin of the dominant tropes of masculinist sexuality from canonical medieval texts to early modern Spanish secular and moralist literature produced in the context of material persecution of effeminates and sodomites in Spain. These values traveled to the Andes and were used as powerful rhetorical weapons in the struggle to justify the conquest of the Incas.

Decolonizing “Prehistory” combines a critical investigation of the documentation of the American deep past with perspectives from Indigenous traditional knowledges and attention to ongoing systems of intellectual colonialism. Bringing together experts from American studies, archaeology, anthropology, legal studies, history, and literary studies, this interdisciplinary volume offers essential information about the complexity and ambivalence of colonial encounters with Indigenous peoples in North America, and their impact on American scientific discourse. The chapters in this book reveal how anthropology, archaeology, and cultural heritage have shaped the collective ideological construction of Indigenous cultures, while actively empowering the voices that disrupt conventional tropes and narratives of “prehistory.”

Constructions of America’s ancient past—or the invention of American “prehistory”—occur in national and international political frameworks, which are characterized by struggles over racial and ethnic identities, access to resources and environmental stewardship, the commodification of culture for touristic purposes, and the exploitation of Indigenous knowledges and histories by industries ranging from education to film and fashion. The past’s ongoing appeal reveals the relevance of these narratives to current-day concerns about individual and collective identities and pursuits of sovereignty and self-determination, as well as to questions of the origin—and destiny—of humanity. Decolonizing “Prehistory” critically examines and challenges the paradoxical role that modern scholarship plays in adding legitimacy to, but also delegitimizing, contemporary colonialist practices.

Contributors: Rick Budhwa, Keith Thor Carlson, Kirsten Matoy Carlson, Jessica Christie, Philip J. Deloria, Melissa Gniadek, Annette Kolodny, Gesa Mackenthun, Christen Mucher, Naxaxalhts’i (aka Sonny McHalsie), Jeff Oliver, Mathieu Picas, Daniel Lord Smail, Coll Thrush

 

A philosophical critique of modern communication theories.

Situated at the intersection of current debates regarding meaning and representation, Deconstructing Communication casts doubt on the seeming innocence of the activity of communication. Using poststructuralist literary theory and philosophy, Briankle G. Chang argues that modern communication theories fail to provide an adequate explanation for how communication is possible.

Through a detailed examination of the basis of the idea of communication-with its semantic core of “commonality” or the transcendence of difference-Chang argues against the tendency of theorists to value understanding over misunderstanding, clarity over ambiguity, order over disorder. To this end the author revisits the thought of Derrida and considers deconstruction in general. Specifically, he uses the critique of the phenomenological tradition emerging from poststructuralism to clarify the commitments and assumptions inherent in models of communication. Chang then discusses the contributions of Husserl, particularly regarding the interconnections between concepts, metaphors, and rhetoric. He develops the strategy of deconstruction through a comparative analysis of Heidegger and Derrida, ultimately linking communication theory to the general question of philosophical reason. Chang concludes with a set of key questions about theory formation in the field, questions that elucidate the future direction for critical reflection in the philosophy of communication. A seminal work in communication theory, Deconstructing Communication will serve as the guiding framework for a constructive debate about the future direction of the field.

Bringing together political science and cultural memory studies, Popovic examines the much-discussed phenomenon of Yugonostalgia. Drawing on qualitative research, ethnography, and life-narrative interviews with political actors from across the entire political spectrum and belonging to the generation of the last pioneers (those born between 1974 and 1982) in three (post)Yugoslav countries—Croatia, Serbia, and Slovenia—this book disentangles the commonly merged concepts of Yugonostalgia as a practice and (post)Yugoslavism as an identity. The book argues that while generational positionality strengthens (post)Yugoslavism, and political positionality determines the use of Yugonostalgia for private or political purposes, the (post)Yugoslav memory narratives of the last pioneers provide an important insight into new and unexplored political imaginaries of the (post)Yugoslav space.

From the avant-garde design of the Islamic Cultural Center in New York City to the simplicity of the Dar al-Islam Mosque in Abiquiu, New Mexico, the American mosque takes many forms of visual and architectural expression. The absence of a single, authoritative model and the plurality of design nuances reflect the heterogeneity of the American Muslim community itself, which embodies a whole spectrum of ethnic origins, traditions, and religious practices.

In this book, Akel Ismail Kahera explores the history and theory of Muslim religious aesthetics in the United States since 1950. Using a notion of deconstruction based on the concepts of "jamal" (beauty), "subject," and "object" found in the writings of Ibn Arabi (d. 1240), he interprets the forms and meanings of several American mosques from across the country. His analysis contributes to three debates within the formulation of a Muslim aesthetics in North America—first, over the meaning, purpose, and function of visual religious expression; second, over the spatial and visual affinities between American and non-American mosques, including the Prophet's mosque at Madinah, Arabia; and third, over the relevance of culture, place, and identity to the making of contemporary religious expression in North America.

What does it mean to be a Nashvillian? A Black Nashvillian? A white Nashvillian? What does it mean to be an organizer, an ally, an elected official, an agent for change? Deep Dish Conversations began as a running online interview series in which host Jerome Moore sits down over pizza with Nashville leaders and community members to talk about the past, present, and future of the city and what it means to live here. The result is honest conversation about racism, housing, policing, poverty, and more in a safe, brave, person-to-person environment that allows for disagreement.

This book is a curated collection of the most striking interviews from the first few seasons of the series, with a foreword by Dr. Sekou Franklin, an introduction by Moore, and contextual introductions to each interviewee. Figures like Judge Sheila Calloway, comedian Josh Black, anti-racism speaker Tim Wise, organizer Jorge Salles Diaz, and many more explore their wide-ranging perspectives on social change in a city in the midst of massive demographic and ideological shifts.

For anyone in any twenty-first-century city, Deep Dish Conversations offers a lot to think about—and a lot of ways to think about it.

England’s famed Lake District—best known as the place of inspiration for the Wordsworths, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and other Romantic-era writers—is the locus of this pioneering study, which implements and critiques a new approach to literary analysis in the digital age. Deploying innovative methods from literary studies, corpus linguistics, historical geography, and geographical information science, Deep Mapping the Literary Lake District combines close readings of a body of writing about the region from 1622-1900 with distant approaches to textual analysis. This path-breaking volume exemplifies interdisciplinarity, demonstrating how digital humanities methodologies and geospatial tools can enhance our appreciation of a region whose topography has been long recognized as fundamental to the shape of the poetry and prose produced within it.

The preoccupation with “depth” and its relevance to cinema and media studies

For decades the concept of depth has been central to critical thinking in numerous humanities-based disciplines, legitimizing certain modes of inquiry over others. Deep Mediations examines why and how this is, as scholars today navigate the legacy of depth models of thought and vision, particularly in light of the “surface turn” and as these models impinge on the realms of cinema and media studies.

The collection’s eighteen essays seek to understand the decisive but evolving fixation on depth by considering the term’s use across a range of conversations as well as its status in relation to critical methodologies and the current mediascape. Engaging contemporary debates about new computing technologies, the environment, history, identity, affect, audio/visual culture, and the limits and politics of human perception, Deep Mediations is a timely interrogation of depth’s ongoing importance within the humanities. 

Contributors: Laurel Ahnert; Taylor Arnold, U of Richmond; Erika Balsom, King’s College London; Brooke Belisle, Stony Brook University; Jinhee Choi, King’s College London; Jennifer Fay, Vanderbilt U; Lisa Han, UC Santa Barbara; Jean Ma, Stanford U; Shaka McGlotten, Purchase College-SUNY; Susanna Paasonen, U of Turku, Finland; Jussi Parikka, U of Southampton; Alessandra Raengo, Georgia State U; Pooja Rangan, Amherst College; Katherine Rochester, VIA Art Fund in Boston; Karl Schoonover, University of Warwick (UK); Jordan Schonig, Michigan State U; John Paul Stadler, North Carolina State U; Nicole Starosielski, New York U; Lauren Tilton, U of Richmond.

As seen in the movie Origins, a classic examination of the lived realities of American racism, now with a new foreword from Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson.
 
First published in 1941, Deep South is a landmark work of anthropology, documenting in startling and nuanced detail the everyday realities of American racism. Living undercover in Depression-era Mississippi—not revealing their scholarly project or even their association with one another—groundbreaking Black scholar Allison Davis and his White co-authors, Burleigh and Mary Gardner, delivered an unprecedented examination of how race shaped nearly every aspect of twentieth-century life in the United States. Their analysis notably revealed the importance of caste and class to Black and White worldviews, and they anatomized the many ways those views are constructed, solidified, and reinforced.
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This reissue of the 1965 abridged edition, with a new foreword from Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson—who acknowledges the book’s profound importance to her own work—proves that Deep South remains as relevant as ever, a crucial work on the concept of caste and how it continues to inform the myriad varieties of American inequality.
 

In the spring and summer of 1927, the Mississippi River and its tributaries flooded from Cairo, Illinois to New Orleans, Louisiana, and the Gulf of Mexico, tearing through seven states, sometimes spreading out to nearly one hundred miles across. Pete Daniel’s Deep’n as It Come, available again in a new format, chronicles the worst flood in the history of the South and re-creates, with extraordinary immediacy, the Mississippi River’s devastating assault on property and lives.
 
Daniel weaves his narrative with newspaper and firsthand accounts, interviews and survivors, official reports, and over 140 contemporary photographs. The story of the common refugee who suffered most of the effects of the flood emerges alongside the details of the massive rescue and relief operation—one of the largest ever mounted in the United States. The title, Deep’n as It Come, is a phrase from Cora Lee Campbell’s early description of he approaching water, which, Daniel writes, “moved at a pace of some fourteen miles per day,” and in its movement and sound, “had the eeriness of a full eclipse of t he sun, unsettling, chilling.”
 
“The contradictions of sorrow and humor. . . death and salvation, despair and hope, calm and panic—all reveal the human dimension” in this compassionate and unforgettable portrait of common people confronting a great natural disaster.

Computation has now been reconfigured by machine learning: those technical processes and operations that yoke together statistics and computer science to create artificial intelligence (AI) by furnishing vast datasets to learn tasks and predict outcomes. In DeepAesthetics, Anna Munster examines the range of more-than-human experiences this transformation has engendered and considers how those experiences can be qualitative as well as quantitative. Drawing on process philosophy, Munster approaches computational experience through its relations and operations. She combines deep learning—the subfield of machine learning that uses neural network architectures—and aesthetics to offer a way to understand the insensible and frequently imperceptible forms of nonlinear and continuously modulating statistical function. Attending to the domains and operations of image production, statistical racialization, AI conversational agents, and critical AI art, Munster analyzes how machine learning is operationally entangled with racialized, neurotypical, and cognitivist modes of producing knowledge and experience. She approaches machine learning as events through which a different sensibility registers, one in which AI is populated by oddness, disjunctions, and surprises, and where artful engagement with machine learning fosters indeterminate futures.

The emotional, epic story of James “Cornbread” Harris—a self-proclaimed “blessed dude” and one of Minneapolis’s most influential musicians

From the heart of the Minnesota blues comes the story of James “Cornbread” Harris Jr., the songwriter, pianist, and consummate bluesman whose seventy years making music helped to shape the Minneapolis Sound. “I am a blessed dude,” Cornbread tells Andrea Swensson, taking us along on his musical journey from a first “gig” entertaining his fellow soldiers during World War II to his subsequent years playing music for audiences across Minnesota. Following Cornbread’s extraordinary life story, Deeper Blues is a unique history of Minnesota music that evolves into a heartfelt tale of reconciliation and forgiveness, all to the tune of the legendary musician’s signature sound.

Cornbread’s career started in the 1950s, when he played with the Augie Garcia Quintet and cowrote their hit “Hi Ho Silver.” A tireless entertainer, he has been performing live ever since, influencing an entire generation of musicians credited with putting Minneapolis on the map in the 1980s—including his long-estranged son, Grammy-winning Rock and Roll Hall of Famer James “Jimmy Jam” Harris III. Going beyond the music, Deeper Blues turns toward family, atonement, and peace when Cornbread reunites with Jimmy Jam after a five-decade separation and they perform together on stage.

Through conversations with Cornbread, Jimmy Jam, and many others, Swensson reveals a story of perseverance and unfailing grace, a firsthand account of making music in the face of racism and segregation, and a hard-won acceptance of the personal sacrifices that are often required when dedicating one’s life to making music. As the man himself says, “All of my hardships ended up to be blessings.”

A rich mix of present-day anecdotes and historical vignettes, animated by voices from Cornbread’s life and the Twin Cities music scene, underscored by the bluesman’s original lyrics of heartache and hope, and featuring never-before-seen photographs of Cornbread and Jimmy Jam, Deeper Blues tells a singular story—one imprinted on the history, heart, and soul of the Minneapolis Sound.

How underwater mediation has transformed deep-sea spaces into resource-rich frontiers
 

Green energy technologies such as windmills, solar panels, and electric vehicles may soon depend on material found at the seabed. How did a space once imagined to be empty and unfathomable come to be thought of as a treasure trove of resources? Lisa Yin Han traces how contemporary developments in underwater sensing and imaging materially and imaginatively transmogrify the ocean bottom into a resource frontier capable of sustaining a digitally connected global future.

 

Set against the backdrop of climate change, energy transition, and the expansion of industrial offshore extractions, Deepwater Alchemy looks at oceanic media and its representation of the seabed in terms of valuable resources. From high-tech simulations to laboratories and archives that collect and analyze sediments, Han explores the media technologies that survey, visualize, and condition the possibility for industrial resource extraction, introducing the concept of extractive mediation to describe the conflations between resource prospecting and undersea knowledge production. Moving away from anthropocentric frameworks, she argues that we must equalize access to deep ocean mediation and include the submerged perspectives of multispecies communities.

 

From the proliferation of petroleum seismology to environmental-impact research on seabed mining to the development of internet-enabled seafloor observatories, Deepwater Alchemy shows us that deepwater mediation is entangled in existential hopes and fears for our planetary future. As the ocean bottom becomes increasingly accessible to people, Han prompts us to ask not whether we can tame the seafloor, but, rather, why and for whom are we taming it?