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Can social theories forge new paths into an uncertain future?

The future has become increasingly difficult to imagine. We might be able to predict a few events, but imagining how looming disasters will coincide is simultaneously necessary and impossible. Drawing on speculative fiction and social theory, Theory for the World to Come is the beginning of a conversation about theories that move beyond nihilistic conceptions of the capitalism-caused Anthropocene and toward generative bodies of thought that provoke creative ways of thinking about the world ahead. Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer draws on such authors as Kim Stanley Robinson and Octavia Butler, and engages with afrofuturism, indigenous speculative fiction, and films from the 1970s and ’80s to help think differently about the future and its possibilities.

Forerunners: Ideas First
Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead

One ghost, infinite echoes—where memory, myth, and identity collide.

There Is Only One Ghost in the World follows the fragmented meditations of a multilayered voice, an intimate witness to our times that delicately and bluntly reveals the best and the worst in all of us. It is a kaleidoscopic investigation into the loneliness of modern American life as well as family relationships, exploring the truths and lies that families tell one another, and why, with empathy, sorrow, and humility. We travel from the oil-slicked beaches of California and the alleys of New Orleans to the steps of the Capitol. Here: the raw nerves of gender and identity. Here: the lessons of heartbreak. Here: true myths, fake news, and old rumors. Here: the legacies of art and incisors of seasons. Incompletable Venn diagrams, sibling porn stars, addiction and climate change, shootings and stolen x-rays, the lyrics of disco and the taxonomy of slot machines, steel monoliths and 99-cent stores, last meals and unearthed mummies. There Is Only One Ghost in the World is a book about what happened just before you woke up, and what happened just after. And what happened next.
 

Documents how initial Mapuche-Spanish alliances were built and how they were destroyed by increasingly powerful slave-trading elites operating like organized crime families

The history of Spanish presence in the Americas is usually viewed as a one-sided conquest. In This Incurable Evil: Mapuche Resistance to Spanish Enslavement, 1598–1687, Eugene C. Berger provides a major corrective in the case of Chile. For example, in the south, indigenous populations were persistent in their resistance against Spanish settlement. By the end of the sixteenth century, Spanish aspirations to conquer the entire Pacific Coast were dashed at least twice by armed resistance from the Mapuche peoples. By 1600, the Mapuche had killed two Spanish governors and occupied more than a dozen Spanish towns. Chile’s colonial future was quite uncertain.

As Berger documents, for much of the seventeenth century it seemed that there could be peace along the Spanish-Mapuche frontier. Through trade, intermarriage, and even mutual distrust of Dutch and English pirates, the Mapuche and the Spanish began to construct a colonial entente. However, this growing alliance was obliterated by the “incurable evil,” an ever-expanding enslavement of Mapuches, and one which prompted a new generation of Mapuche resistance. This trade saw Mapuche rivals, neutrals, and even friends placed in irons and forced to board ships in Valdivia and Concepción or to march northward along the Andes. The Mapuche labored in the gold mines of La Serena, in urban workshops in Lima, in the silver mines of Potosí, or on the thousands of haciendas in between and would never return to their homes. With this tragic betrayal, Chile was left a more corrupt, violent, and polarized place, which would cause deep wounds for centuries.
 

In this pair of essays, award-winning journalists Hrvoje Šimičević and Barbara Matejčić expose the turn in Croatia’s political trends, showing how “moderate” pro-European governments have opened the floodgates for far-right radicalism and fascism to transition from the societal fringes into the mainstream. Šimičević weaves these histories around a chilling turning point: a Thompson concert in which hundreds of thousands chanted the Ustaše salute. Matejčić then reveals the civic response and defiant resistance to the politics of fear and escalating attacks against Serbians and other minorities. At the heart of these texts is a struggle over the meaning of Croatia itself: will it belong to the loudest voices or to all who live there?

U ova dva eseja, nagrađivani novinari Hrvoje Šimičević i Barbara Matejčić opisuju političke promjene u Hrvatskoj, pokazujući kako su samozvane umjerene proeuropske vlade imale ključnu ulogu u pomicanju fašizma i krajnje desnog radikalizma s društvenih rubova u političku srednju struju. Šimičević plete povijest te pojave oko jezive prekretnice: Thompsonovog koncerta na kojem su stotine tisuća posjetitelja izvikivale ustaški pozdrav. Matejčić zatim prikazuje odgovor građana i prkosan otpor politici straha i eskalaciji napada na Srbe i druge manjine. U srži ovih tekstova leži borba za značenje Hrvatske: hoće li zemlja pripadati onima koji najglasnije viču ili svima koji u njoj žive?

A multidisciplinary account showing how ancient notions of sympathy changed ways of thinking about interconnectedness.

When we hear the word sympathy today, we tend to imagine the emotional bond between people. But for centuries, sympathy just as commonly brought to mind interdependencies between plants, rocks, and celestial bodies. It explained why magnets attract iron, how the stars influence human destiny, and why one trembles when one is afraid. It implicated human beings in a complex network of loves (sympathies) and hates (antipathies). The ancient notion of sympathy led to ways of thinking about community even beyond the boundaries of the human that continue to influence how we think about life, society, and Nature today.

This book offers the first comprehensive account of ancient sympathy, spanning the fifth century BCE to the third century CE. Tracing connections across works of philosophy, natural history, cosmology, medicine, and literature, Brooke Holmes argues that how people thought about sympathetic communities played a crucial role in shaping the idea of Nature as a webbed, well-ordered whole in the Hellenistic and Roman Imperial Mediterranean. From the scale of the organism to that of the cosmos, this book interrogates the ancient history of a protoecological, antimechanistic conception of Nature, proposing the richly textured thought-world of sympathy as a resource for rethinking and reimagining human and nonhuman communities, the stories we tell about the classical world, and the political and theoretical stakes of vital materialisms.

Winner, A Choice Outstanding Academic Book

From 1964 until 1985, Brazil was ruled by a military regime that sanctioned the systematic use of torture in dealing with its political opponents. The catalog of what went on during that grim period was originally published in Portuguese as Brasil: Nunca Mais (Brazil: Never Again) in 1985.

The volume was based on the official documentation kept by the very military that perpetrated the horrific acts. These extensive documents include military court proceedings of actual trials, secretly photocopied by lawyers associated with the Catholic Church and analyzed by a team of researchers. Their daring project—known as BNM for Brasil: Nunca Mais—compiled more than 2,700 pages of testimony by political prisoners documenting close to three hundred forms of torture.

The BNM project proves conclusively that torture was an essential part of the military justice system and that judicial authorities were clearly aware of the use of torture to extract confessions. Still, it took more than a decade after the publication of Brasil: Nunca Mais for the armed forces to admit publicly that such torture had ever taken place. Torture in Brazil, the English version of the book re-edited here, serves as a timely reminder of the role of Brazil's military in past repression.

Half a century after the Holocaust, on European soil, Bosnian Serbs orchestrated a system of concentration camps where they subjected their Bosniak Muslim and Bosnian Croat neighbors to torture, abuse, and killing. Foreign journalists exposed the horrors of the camps in the summer of 1992, sparking worldwide outrage. This exposure, however, did not stop the mass atrocities. Hikmet Karčić shows that the use of camps and detention facilities has been a ubiquitous practice in countless wars and genocides in order to achieve the wartime objectives of perpetrators. Although camps have been used for different strategic purposes, their essential functions are always the same: to inflict torture and lasting trauma on the victims.

Torture, Humiliate, Kill develops the author’s collective traumatization theory, which contends that the concentration camps set up by the Bosnian Serb authorities had the primary purpose of inflicting collective trauma on the non-Serb population of Bosnia and Herzegovina. This collective traumatization consisted of excessive use of torture, sexual abuse, humiliation, and killing. The physical and psychological suffering imposed by these methods were seen as a quick and efficient means to establish the Serb “living space.” Karčić argues that this trauma was deliberately intended to deter non-Serbs from ever returning to their pre-war homes. The book centers on multiple examples of experiences at concentration camps in four towns operated by Bosnian Serbs during the war: Prijedor, Bijeljina, Višegrad, and Bileća. Chosen according to their political and geographical position, Karčić demonstrates that these camps were used as tools for the ethno-religious genocidal campaign against non-Serbs. Torture, Humiliate, Kill is a thorough and definitive resource for understanding the function and operation of camps during the Bosnian genocide.

The 2006 United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UN CRPD) is the first human rights treaty to explicitly acknowledge the right to education for persons with disabilities. In order to realize this right, the convention’s Article 24 mandates state parties to ensure inclusive education systems that overcome outright exclusion as well as segregation in special education settings. Despite this major global policy change to tackle the discriminations persons with disabilities face in education, this has yet to take effect in most school systems worldwide.

Focusing on the factors undermining the realization of disability rights in education, Julia Biermann probes current meanings of inclusive education in two contrasting yet equally challenged state parties to the UN CRPD: Nigeria, whose school system overtly excludes disabled children, and Germany, where this group primarily learns in special schools. In both countries, policy actors aim to realize the right to inclusive education by segregating students with disabilities into special education settings. In Nigeria, this demand arises from the glaring lack of such a system. In Germany, conversely, from its extraordinary long-term institutionalization. This act of diverting from the principles embodied in Article 24 is based on the steadfast and shared belief that school systems, which place students into special education, have an innate advantage in realizing the right to education for persons with disabilities. Accordingly, inclusion emerges to be an evolutionary and linear process of educational expansion that depends on institutionalized special education, not a right of persons with disabilities to be realized in local schools on an equal basis with others. This book proposes a refined human rights model of disability in education that shifts the analytical focus toward the global politics of formal mass schooling as a space where discrimination is sustained.

In recent years, celebrities from George Clooney to Bono to Angelina Jolie have attempted to play an increasingly important role in global politics. Celebrity activism is an ever-growing, internationally visible phenomenon—yet the impact of these high-profile humanitarians on public awareness, government support, and mobilization of resources remains under-researched. Bringing together a diverse group of contributors from media studies and public diplomacy, Transnational Celebrity Activism in Global Politics aims to fill that void with a new interdisciplinary framework for the analysis of celebrity activism in international relations.

John Wright's collection of interviews and stories about Ralph Stanley puts readers around a campfire at a bluegrass festival while old-timers weave yarns far into the night. Told by those who create, produce, stage, love, and virtually live for old-time mountain music, these tales come from the longtime coworkers, sidemen, promoters, friends, and others in the orbit of the music legend. The storytellers include a scholar who knew Stanley from the early days, the housewife who ran the Stanley Brothers Fan Club, and a souvenir seller for whom the discovery of Stanley's music was almost a religious experience.

Wright also uses these invaluable oral histories as a foundation to describe and evaluate Stanley's long career with the Clinch Mountain Boys and the development of his music after the death of his brother Carter. An appendix covers Ralph's prolific recording activity through the mid-1990s, including a breathtaking forty-five albums compromising more than 550 songs and tunes.

Assemblies of rectangular stone pillars, or stelae, fill the plazas and courts of ancient Maya cities throughout the lowlands of southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and western Honduras. Mute testimony to state rituals that linked the king's power to rule with the rhythms and renewal of time, the stelae document the ritual acts of rulers who sacrificed, danced, and experienced visionary ecstasy in connection with celebrations marking the end of major calendrical cycles. The kings' portraits are carved in relief on the main surfaces of the stones, deifying them as incarnations of the mythical trees of life.

Based on a thorough analysis of the imagery and inscriptions of seven stelae erected in the Great Plaza at Copan, Honduras, by the Classic Period ruler "18-Rabbit-God K," this ambitious study argues that stelae were erected not only to support a ruler's temporal claims to power but more importantly to express the fundamental connection in Maya worldview between rulership and the cosmology inherent in their vision of cyclical time. After an overview of the archaeology and history of Copan and the reign and monuments of "18-Rabbit-God K," Elizabeth Newsome interprets the iconography and inscriptions on the stelae, illustrating the way they fulfilled a coordinated vision of the king's ceremonial role in Copan's period-ending rites. She also links their imagery to key Maya concepts about the origin of the universe, expressed in the cosmologies and mythic lore of ancient and living Maya peoples.