The Weekly Read is Probing Arts and Emergent Forms of Life, a new book by Michael M. J. Fischer. Examining the work of key Southeast and East Asian artists, Fischer calls for a new anthropology of the arts that attends to the materialities and technologies of the world as it exists today. Gabriele Schwab says, “His grasp of the diverse cultural scenes he considers is superb and, to the best of my knowledge, unique in its breadth.” Read this fascinating book now for free!
The Weekly Read is a weekly feature in which we highlight articles, books, and chapters that are freely available online. You’ll be able to find a link to the selection here on the blog as well as on our social media channels. Enjoy The Weekly Read, and check back next week for something new to read for free.
Our authors have in-person and virtual events around the world this month. Hope you can attend some of them!
June 4, 4 pm CEST: Lindsey A. Freeman, author of Running, appears in person at Hopscotch Reading Room. Kurfürstenstraße 14b, Hinterhof (Parterre, rechts), Berlin
June 7, 3 pm BST: Srila Roy, author of Changing the Subject is joined by Shuvatri Dasgupta for an online conversation supported by the University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies.
June 8, 1 pm BST: The University of Birmingham Centre for the Study of North America hosts an online talk by Leigh Claire La Berge, author of Marx for Cats.
June 13, 6 pm CEST: Evren Savci, author of Queer in Translation, gives an in-person talk and is joined for discussion by Esra Sarıoğlu and Sinan Birdal at Humboldt University. Unter den Linden 6, Room 1066e, 10099 Berlin
June 18, 5 pm EDT: Cisco Bradley, author of The Williamsburg Avant-Garde is joined by mystery musical guests at an in-person reading and performance at Diamond Hollow Books. Refreshments served, Admission is Free with a suggested donation to support the shop and the artists. Diamond Hollow Books 72 Main Street, Andes, New York
June 19, 4 pm CEST: Hi′ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart, author of Cooling the Tropics, gives an online talk sponsored by The Greenhouse.
June 22, 9:30 pm EDT: The Red Room at KGB Bar presents “Writing the Circus,” an in-person book launch event and variety performance celebrating art and culture on the fringe featuring Stewart Sinclair, author of Juggling. 5 East 4th Street New York City
June 24, 6:30 pm PDT: Stewart Sinclair, author of Juggling reads from his book and offers juggling tips and practice at an interactive in-person event at Bart’s Books. 302 West Matilija Street, Ojai, California
Anne Allison is is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. In her new book Being Dead Otherwise, she examines the emergence of new death practices surrounding grieving, burial, and ritual in Japan as the old custom of family-based graves and mortuary care is coming undone. In this guest post she considers how her research intersects with the new film Plan 75. You can save 30% on Being Dead Otherwisewith coupon E23ALLSN.
Premiering at the Cannes Festival last May, released then in Japan, and hitting the US now where Netflix will be streaming it soon, Plan 75 is a dystopic film about a state-sponsored plan that signs up over-75 seniors to be voluntarily euthanized. The story is set in a near-future Japan where its current high aging/low fertility demographics have progressed.
Already a “mass death society” where deaths exceed births every year, Japan’s national coffers are strained in subsidizing health costs for the elderly (at 28.9% of the population, due to rise to 40% by 2040, and with the longest life expectancy in the world). But it was the historically record low birthrate and population decline of 2022 that led Prime Minister Fumio Kishida to declare earlier this year that the country was in crisis: “on the brink of not being able of maintain social functions” (Yeung & Ogura 2023). With ever fewer births, Japan’s capacity to replace its workers and citizens as they die off is severely at risk—what prompted Kishida to propose more policies to incentivize childbirth (none of which have previously worked). But in the film, the demographic challenges facing the country are pinned on the escalating elderly population alone. And the solution proposed is to start eliminating them—a killing deemed to be a sacrifice for the well-being of the nation as a whole.
The premise of Plan 75 is that seniors will sign up for this themselves. In return for having their mortuary plans taken care of and receiving a small “fun” allowance to spend before death, those who do so are particularly likely to be socially and financially precarious—why they are also susceptible to the warm chats given them by the cadre of young workers employed to implement Plan 75. This is the case with 78-year-old Michi (played by veteran actress Chieko Baisho) who, once losing her job as a hotel cleaner and having no family, savings, or alternative way-to-live, signs up quite matter-of-factly as if such an ending is less dreary than expedient and banal. With chilling precision, this is how director Chie Hayakawa crafts her dystopic vision of a future death-plan by Japan for its aging society: efficient termination of senior citizens on government expense, winding up, as we learn by the film’s end, as waste in a garbage bin rather than being honorably, if collectively, buried as had been the promise when signing up for Plan 75.
Plan 75 envisions a necropolitical solution to Japan’s “problem” of the rise of aging seniors: get them to sign up for pre-terminal death. But, for those in the rest of world following Japan’s trend in high aging/low birthrate demographics (such as China, Korea, Italy, Spain), the country has other models for what to do with aging seniors who live long past productivity and increasingly on their own without the sociological network (of family, marriage, neighborhood) that once took care of them. Rather than shipping them off to die, this is using death-planning itself as an activity, a mission, even moral investment by which aging seniors spend time—perhaps in the company of fellow “grave-friends”—taking care of their final affairs.
This is one dimension of the ending landscape I discovered when conducting ethnographic fieldwork between 2013 and 2019 on changing mortuary trends in Japan. What was once conventional—family-based deathcare and burial in ancestral graves, often in temple cemeteries in the countryside long tied to the family line—is no longer practical or available for an increasing number of Japanese today. But, in lieu of a family grave or the prospect of having no place to go at all (and becoming abandoned as a “disconnected soul”—the worrisome fate of the “lonely dead, a rising phenomenon and at play in Plan 75 as well), alternatives are emerging that give more agency, but also responsibility, to the to-be-deceased herself. Rather than relying upon familial others to do so at the time of death or run the risk of having no one to be cared by at all, what is becoming increasingly popular is the trend of seizen seiri: handling one’s ending affairs ahead of time.
In what has arisen since the start of the twenty-first century as a cascade of new initiatives, businesses, and products catering to the ending needs of the more socially solo or “family-less” dead in Japan (Suzuki and Mori 2018), individuals are now incentivized to “freely choose” and customize their own ending plans. And the choices, but also tasks to perform, are endless. As I learned from attending workshops, information sessions, and get-togethers at everything from public community centers and civic lecture series to alternative burial societies and one-stop funeral facilities, the energy as well as time and sometimes money that is expended in these pursuits can be considerable. Over hours, with a slowness at odds to the expedience at work in Plan 75, these activities would be devoted to laying out the details of a great range of ending matters: inheritance, living wills, various interment plans, getting rid of one’s belongings, erasure of digital data, paying final bills.
And what surprised me, at first at least, was how animated these events would often be, and how lively so many of the participants—who included not only the elderly or middle-aged but sometimes younger people in their 20’s and 30’s as well. Advance death-planning as an art-form and craft, it also generated what I took to be a sense of meaning, purpose, and relationality among those so actively pursuing this work. And not all of this is high end, catering to the neoliberal sensibilities, and purse strings, of the privileged. At community centers and budget businesses (and also a few community and civic endeavors that cost nothing at all), shūkatsu (ending activity) can be rather cheap with funerals and interment options far more affordable than the typical family grave.
Plan 75 starts by replaying the scene of the 2016 Sagamihara killings when a former employee of a care home for the disabled broke in and stabbed 19 people to death, claiming this was a mercy killing for the nation by eliminating such “useless” citizens. In the film, and now armed with a gun, the killer here has embarked upon his plan to handle the problem of the elderly whom, by a logic of (re)productivity, he deems to be useless as well. That, in the story to follow, it is precisely at the point of losing her job that the protagonist Michi signs up for Plan 75 is telling—she has now lost her place in a world dictated by capitalist value and worth. And unwilling to register for welfare as somehow deficiency on her part, there is nothing left to do but die.
But for the post-productive seniors I met actively pursuing their ending plans in Japan, I sensed something quite different about their attitude towards both death and themselves, as being post- job (and possibly post-family as well). An engagement, even vitality, around final planning that generated something positive—about the subject doing it, the sociality that could sometimes be formed, and even the endpoint about death itself. Shifting a calculus by which only productivity determines “usefulness,” the active embrace of advance ending planning is a very different response to the rise of elderly (both in numbers and lifespan) than that posed by Plan 75.
Suzuki Iwayumi, and Mori Kenji, eds. 2018. Gendainihon no sōsō toha hakasei: Ienakijidai no shisha. [Contemporary Japan’s grave and funeral system: the whereabouts of the dead in an era without family.] Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kokubun.
Legendary rock and roll icon Tina Turner passed away this week. In her honor, we have made Chapter 8 of Maureen Mahon’s book Black Diamond Queens free to read through June 30, 2023. “Tina Turner’s Right to Rock” details Turner’s incredible rise to superstardom in the 1980s when she was in her forties.
You can also hear Maureen Mahon discuss Tina Turner’s legacy on NPR’s Morning Edition.
The Weekly Read is a weekly feature in which we highlight articles, books, and chapters that are freely available online. You’ll be able to find a link to the selection here on the blog as well as on our social media channels. Enjoy The Weekly Read, and check back next week for something new to read for free.
We look forward to meeting authors, editors, and friends of the Press in person at the 2023 LASA conference! Gisela Fosado is joining you in person in Vancouver. Visit booth AB03/AB04 in the exhibit hall or our conference landing page to browse the latest books and journals in Latin American studies. You can find our complete Latin American studies list on our website.
Use coupon code LASA23 to save 40% on books and journal issues when you order on our website through June 30, 2023. Customers in the UK and Europe can order books with this code from our UK partner, Combined Academic Publishers.
Duke University Press is excited to announce our new Spotify profile, which features playlists to accompany our new music books. Each playlist was created by the book’s author, and features songs either discussed in the book or related to it in some way. From contemporary R&B to jazz to the Grateful Dead to Peruvian punk, these playlists have something for every musical taste. Our collection of playlists will expand with each new music book we publish. So head on over to our profile, give us a follow, and check out these fun and informative playlists.
Jonathan Leal may be the first Duke University Press author to promote his book with his own music. This playlist features his new song “we reach into the undefined” which he recorded with Brandon Guerra. In addition to his own song, he included a set of classic bebop tracks from legends like Thelonious Monk, Mary Lou Williams, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie.
John Brackett selected this epic set of live Grateful Dead performances that encompass nearly the band’s entire career, from their legendary concert at Cornell University in 1977 to shows at the Fillmore West and Fillmore East to London.
Alexander Weheliye picked a set of classic R&B, soul, and hip hop from the last forty years, featuring tracks from Mary J. Blige, Dionne Warwick, D’Angelo, Prince, Destiny’s Child, Rihanna, and the book’s title track, Jodeci’s “Feenin’”.
This is a collection of tracks featuring the composer, pianist, and bandleader Horace Tapscott, whose Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra was central to creating a community of African American artists, musicians, dancers, and writers in South Central Los Angeles.
Our second Grateful Dead inspired playlist features a mix of live performances from the Dead with the band’s contemporaries like Pink Floyd and the Velvet Underground, who each used extended improvisation to create a new style of rock music.
Dog Ditties
This playlist accompanies Eric Weisbard’s book Hound Dog, one of our newest books in our Singles series. From Big Mama Thornton’s original rendition of “Hound Dog” to Elvis’ version to other dog-related songs from The Stooges, Soccer Mommy, and others, this playlist shows how rock and popular music have reckoned with the legacy of Thornton and Elvis.
Gavin Butt selected a clutch of tracks from classic British New Wave bands Soft Cell, Scritti Politti, Gang of Four, Mekons, and others.
Peruvian Punk
Ten hard hitting punk tracks from Peru to accompany Shane Green’s book Punk and Revolution. Any punk aficionado, or really any music fan who likes their rock loud, fast, and hard hitting will love this set.
A selection of Latin Jazz, Bossa Nova, and Tango classics from Stan Getz, Astor Piazzolla, Dave Brubeck, and others to accompany Jason Borge’s book Thttps://www.dukeupress.edu/tropical-riffsropical Riffs: Latin America and the Politics of Jazz.
“Marquis and I “met” virtually five or so years ago. A friend of mine shared a paper of Marquis’s on blackness, presuming I would like it because Marquis took up some of Fred Moten’s ideas, of which I am incredibly fond, on blackness and fugitivity. I then wrote Marquis thanking them for writing the essay, and Marquis, as is their wont, was like, “Oh, what’s up? You like Moten, too? We should talk more.” And so we did. And that is our beginning. It is also our present. Marquis and I just talk. We have deep phone conversations for hours on end. We send each other half-random essay-length texts with our newest ideas, knowing that the other person will receive and consider it with care: that is, with the archives of black study in mind and with black feminism at work.”
Andrew Cutrone is a PhD candidate in sociology and a Graduate Affiliate of the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice at the University of Texas–Austin. He writes and studies black critical theory and abolition politics. His work appears in Social Text, and is forthcoming in South Atlantic Quarterly.
liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studiesseeks to carve out a place for aesthetic theory and the most radical agenda of Black studies to come together in productive ways, with the goal of attending to the aesthetic work of blackness and the political work of form. Articles are published under a Creative Commons license (BY-NC-ND) and are open immediately upon publication.
The Weekly Read is a weekly feature in which we highlight articles, books, and chapters that are freely available online. You’ll be able to find a link to the selection here on the blog as well as on our social media channels. Enjoy The Weekly Read, and check back next week for something new to read for free.
We’re excited to unveil our Fall 2023 catalog, which is jam packed with great new books and journals in a wide variety of disciplines.
The cover of the catalog is derived from the cover of Nimrods: a fake-punk self-hurt anti-memoir by Kawika Guillermo. In poetry and prose, Guillermo chronicles the agonizing absurdities of being a newly minted professor (and overtired father) hired to teach in a Social Justice Institute while haunted by the inner ghosts of patriarchy, racial pessimism, and imperial arrogance.
We feature two moving new memoirs this fall. In The Girl in the Yellow Poncho, Kristal Brent Zook shares her coming-of-age tale about what it means to be biracial in America where she grapples with in-betweenness, family trauma, and the profound power of atonement and faith to heal a broken family. And in A Part of the Heart Can’t Be Eaten, award-winning author, sex educator, filmmaker, and podcast host Tristan Taormino reveals how her radical sexuality and unconventional career grew out of an extraordinary queer father-daughter relationship.
We continue to bring you fascinating new titles in popular music. This fall brings two new books in the Singles series, edited by Emily J. Lordi and Joshua Clover: Hound Dog by Eric Weisbard and Old Town Road by Chris Molanphy. Each book in the series examines a different popular song. We also launch a new series, Studies in the Grateful Dead, edited by Nicholas Meriwether, with two new titles. Get Shown the Light by Michael Kaler and Live Dead by John Brackett. R&B fans will want to pick up Feenin by Alexander Ghedi Weheliye.
For jazz fans, we’re excited to be bringing The Dark Tree by Steven L. Isoardi back into print. And in Dreams in Double Time, Jonathan Leal examines how the musical revolution of bebop opened up new futures for racialized and minoritized communities.
If techno is more your vibe, check out Together, Somehow by Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta, which examines the techno and house music sub-scenes in Chicago, Paris, and Berlin.
Our art titles this fall include FUTURE/PRESENT: Arts in a Changing America, which brings together a vast collection of writers, artists, activists, and academics working at the forefront of today’s most pressing struggles for cultural equity and racial justice in a demographically changing America. In A Nimble Arc, Emilie Boone considers James Van Der Zee’s photographic work over the course of the twentieth century. We also offer two new books from Grant Kester, The Sovereign Self and Beyond the Sovereign Self; Citizens of Photography, edited by Christopher Pinney with The Photo Demos Collective; and A View of Venice, edited by Kristin Love Huffman, in which contributors analyze Jacopo de’ Barbari’s early modern woodcut View of Venice.
Our Black studies list continues to be cutting-edge and must-read. In The Anarchy of Black Religion, J. Kameron Carter examines the philosophical, theological, and religious history that animates our times to theorize religion as a central feature of settler colonialism and racial capitalism. Sharon Patricia Holland writes about the human animal divide through a Black studies lens in An Other. The contributors to The Black Geographic explore the theoretical innovations of Black Geographies scholarship and how it approaches Blackness as historically and spatially situated. Look also for How to Lose the Hounds by Celeste Winston, Black Enlightenment by Surya Parekh, Fugitive Time by Matthew Omelsky, Stay Black and Die by I. Augustus Durham, and Black, Quare, and Then to Where by jennifer susanne leath.
Two other books offer new perspectives in urban studies. In Police and the Empire City, Matthew Guariglia tells the history of the New York Police to show how its origins were built upon and inseparably entwined with the history of race, ethnicity, and whiteness in the United States. And in The City after Property, Sara Safransky uses the example of Detroit to examine how postindustrial decline generates new forms of urban land politics.
Theory titles to watch out for include Marx for Cats by Leigh Claire La Berge, which shows how cats have been central to both the consolidation of capitalism as well as some of its fiercest critics. If you teach, you’ll definitely want to check out The Affect Theory Reader 2, edited by Gregory J. Seigworth and Carolyn Pedwell, a follow-up to our bestselling 2010 book The Affect Theory Reader. In Intoxicated, Mel Y. Chen explores how the mutual entanglements of race, imperialism and disability take form as a racialized and marginalized intoxicated subject. Anjali Arondekar refuses the historical common sense that archival loss is foundational to a subaltern history of sexuality in Abundance. And we are pleased to bring Isabelle Stengers’s Virgin Mary and the Neutrino, first published in French in 2006, into English for the first time.
We also offer a few titles about the environment and our changing planet. In A Book of Waves, Stefan Helmreich examines ocean waves as forms of media that carry ecological, geopolitical, and climatological news about our planet. In Residual Governance, Gabrielle Hecht dives into the wastes of gold and uranium mining in South Africa. Alice Mah examines the changing nature of the petrochemical industry Petrochemical Planet. And in The Pulse of the Earth Adam Bobbette tells the story of how modern theories of the earth emerged from the slopes of Indonesia’s volcanoes.
We are also very pleased to introduce Monsoon: Journal of the Indian Ocean Rim, a new interdisciplinary journal publishing original and innovative research that analyzes the cultural, historical, and political circumstances that have shaped—and currently affect—the coastal societies of the Indian Ocean.
There’s so much more in the catalog! Download it now and find new titles in anthropology, Asian studies, history, Latin American studies, film and media studies, gender studies and more.
“Frauds, fakers, charlatans, and hypocrites: the plays of Molière are replete with colorful characters who rarely, if ever, are exactly who they profess to be. Indeed, in the interplay between “true” (dévots, intellects, gentlemen, lovers, or ill people) and “false” (swindlers, précieuses, social climbers, or Don Juans), the audience is made to delight in the art of the con, to chuckle at the skewering of a poor dupe, or to cheer for the just reprimand of an unscrupulous rake. Deception and epistemological ambiguity are the fodder for comedic delight.”
For almost fifty years Theater has been the most informative, serious, and imaginative American journal available to readers interested in contemporary theater and performance. It has been the first publisher of pathbreaking plays from artists as diverse as Romeo Castellucci, Guillermo Calderón, Richard Foreman, W. David Hancock, Peter Handke, Elfriede Jelinek, Sarah Kane, Toshiki Okada, and Suzan-Lori Parks. Theater has also featured lively polemics and essays by dramatists including Dario Fo, Heiner Müller, and Mac Wellman. Special issues have covered site-specific performance, digital dramaturgies, contemporary Brazilian drama, theater and social change, new Polish directing, and the curation of performance.
Published on behalf of the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale/Yale Repertory Theatre. Tom Sellar, editor
The Weekly Read is a weekly feature in which we highlight articles, books, and chapters that are freely available online. You’ll be able to find a link to the selection here on the blog as well as on our social media channels. Enjoy The Weekly Read, and check back next week for something new to read for free.
We look forward to meeting authors, editors, and friends of the Press in person at the 2023 NAISA conference! Courtney Berger is joining you in person in Toronto, and you can browse our latest Native and Indigenous studies books and journal issues in the exhibit hall or on our conference landing page. You can find our complete Native and Indigenous studies list on our website.
Use coupon code NAISA23 to save 40% on books and journal issues when you order on our website through June 30, 2023. Customers in the UK and Europe can order books with this code from our UK partner, Combined Academic Publishers.
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