New Books in May

It’s the end of the semester! Celebrate the start of summer with some of the great new titles we have coming out in May.

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.

A Primer for Teaching Indian Ocean World History by Edward A. Alpers and Thomas F. McDow is a guide for college and high school educators who are teaching Indian Ocean histories for the first time or who want to reinvigorate their courses.

In The Ethnographer’s Way, Kristin Peterson and Valerie Olson guide students and scholars through the process of turning an initial idea into an in-depth research project.

The contributors to Feminism against Cisness, edited by Emma Heaney, showcase the future of feminist historical, theoretical, and political thought freed from the conceptual strictures of cisness: the fallacy that assigned sex determines sexed experience.

Duke University: The First One Hundred Years by Carolyn Gerber presents a visual and narrative history of Duke University from its naming in 1924 to the celebration of its Centennial in 2024.

In Geologic Life, Kathryn Yusoff examines the history of geology as a discipline to theorize how race and racialization emerged from Western production of geologic knowledge.

The tenth edition of Developments in Russian Politics, edited by Henry E. Hale, Juliet Johnson, and Tomila V. Lankina, offers critical discussion of contemporary Russian politics and its fundamental principles and covers established topics such as executive leadership, parties and elections as well as newer issues of national identity, protest, and Russia and Greater Eurasia.

Consisting of fourteen original essays by both distinguished and new voices, Unsettling Queer Anthropology, edited by Margot Weiss, foregrounds both the brilliance of anthropological approaches to queer and trans life and the ways queer critique can reorient and transform anthropology.

In Apartheid Remains, Sharad Chari explores how people handle the remains of segregation and apartheid in South Africa as witnessed through portals in an industrial-residential landscape in the Indian Ocean city of Durban. 

In Secularism as Misdirection, Nivedita Menon traces how the discourse of secularism hyper-visualizes women and religion as a means of obscuring forms of capitalist, racialized, caste, and anti-minoritarian violence throughout the global South.

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International Jazz Day

Happy International Jazz Day! To celebrate, we are highlighting a few of our new and recent titles on all things jazz.

In At the Vanguard of Vinyl, Darren Mueller examines how the advent of the long-playing record (LP) in 1948 revolutionized the recording and production of jazz in the 1950s. Mueller demonstrates that the LP emerges as a medium of sound and culture that maps onto the more expansive sonic terrain of Black modernity in the 1950s.

In Dreams in Double Time Jonathan Leal examines how the musical revolution of bebop opened up new futures for racialized and minoritized communities. Bebop’s complexity and radicality, Leal contends, made it possible for those who grappled daily with state-sanctioned violence to challenge a racially supremacist, imperial nation, all while hearing and making the world anew.

In the early 1960s, pianist Horace Tapscott returned to his home in Los Angeles to found the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, a community arts group that focused on providing community-oriented jazz and jazz training. In The Dark Tree, Steven L. Isoardi draws on one hundred in-depth interviews with the Arkestra’s participants to tell the history of the important and largely overlooked community arts movement of Black Los Angeles. 

In Soundscapes of Liberation, Celeste Day Moore traces the popularization of African American music in postwar France, where it signaled new forms of power and protest. Moore surveys a wide range of musical genres, soundscapes, and media, and in every context, individual intermediaries such as educators, producers, writers, and radio deejays imbued African American music with new meaning, value, and political power.

Despite the fact that most of jazz’s major innovators and performers have been African American, the overwhelming majority of jazz journalists, critics, and authors have been and continue to be white men. Ain’t But a Few of Us, edited by Willard Jenkins, presents over two dozen candid dialogues with black jazz critics and journalists ranging from Greg Tate, Farah Jasmine Griffin, and Robin D. G. Kelley to Tammy Kernodle, Ron Welburn, and John Murph. 

Soundworks is Anthony Reed’s term for that material and conceptual labor of experimental sound practice framed by the institutions of the culture industry and shifting historical contexts. In this work, Reed shows that to grasp black sound as a radical philosophical and aesthetic insurgence requires attending to it as the product of material, technical, sensual, and ideological processes. 

You can save 30% on these titles and any others that catch your eye with coupon code SAVE30.

Poem of the Week

Our final poem of the week is “Everything Always Distracts” from Fat Art, Thin Art by the late Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Originally published in 1994, we’re thrilled to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of this book.

Oh Eve, help me erase those nastily scenic
afternoons with the goddamned objects
in the goddamned motel room, with both your and my

goddamned beauty; with me-your beloved-
grim, baffled, jaunty, looking
(as they say of gynecologists) in the pink,

which to us means the folded tissue of blood,
and you, dear naked girl, with the disposal of
this red explanatory lapful:

that’s not our love, which is pure voice
and also a steady touch in an inky room,
making a grown man want to think

his eyesight is a costly adult disease.
Your voice, mooded and languid under my voice,
too soft, not quite continuous, not quite

your own in the penetrated dark
touching and instructing my uncertain one, which is
more simply the riddled voice of sexual desire

and, afterwards, of unsleeping tristesse
reminds me a little of the touch of writing
to the reading it inhabits, trying to sustain.

(I know you think I’m being fancy, or just flat.
Wait, though, I’ve got more for you.) If
it finally happens, if we discover

a night we can spend together, a night to make good
what so far is only the raging sift of the detail
of impatient arousal, it won’t be more

our own than other nights. Everything always distracts,

A great friend of Duke University Press, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1950-2009) was Distinguished Professor of English, CUNY Graduate Center. Her many other publications with us include The Weather in Proust, Touching, Feeling, Tendencies, Novel Gazing, and Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader (coedited with Adam Frank), and articles in a number of our journals.

Earth Day Reads

Happy Earth Day! In celebration of environmental protection, we’re pleased to highlight some of our most recent titles in environmental studies.

In Escaping Nature, Orrin H. Pilkey and his coauthors offer concrete suggestions for how to respond to the threats posed by global climate change that involve adapting to a hotter world through technological innovations, behavioral changes, nature-based solutions, political changes, and education.

In Camera Geologica Siobhan Angus tells the history of photography through the minerals upon which the medium depends. Angus places nineteenth-century photography in dialogue with digital photography and its own entangled economies of extraction, demonstrating the importance of understanding photography’s complicity in the economic, geopolitical, and social systems that order the world.

In How the Earth Feels Dana Luciano examines the impacts of the new science of geology on nineteenth-century US culture. By tracing geology’s relationship with biopower, Luciano illuminates how imagined connections with the earth shaped American dynamics of power, race, and colonization.

Well before climate change became a global concern, nuclear testing brought about untimely death, widespread diseases, forced migration, and irreparable destruction to the shores of Oceania. In The Ocean on Fire, Anaïs Maurer analyzes the Pacific literature that incriminates the environmental racism behind radioactive skies and rising seas. 

In Immeasurable Weather Sara J. Grossman explores how weather data collection has been central to the larger project of settler colonialism in the United States. Throughout, Grossman shows that weather science reproduced the natural world as something to be measured, owned, and exploited. 

In Residual Governance, Gabrielle Hecht dives into the wastes of gold and uranium mining in South Africa to explore how communities, experts, and artists fight for infrastructural and environmental justice.

Salar Mameni historicizes the popularization of the scientific notion of the Anthropocene alongside the emergence of the global war on terror in Terracene. Mameni theorizes the Terracene as an epoch marked by a convergence of racialized militarism and environmental destruction. 

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, showing that the origin of the earth sciences emerged from a fusion of Western and non-Western cosmology, theology, anthropology, and geology.

In Subterranean Matters, Andrea Marston examines the ongoing history of Bolivian mining cooperatives, an economic formation that has been a central and contested feature of Bolivian politics and economy.

Can we have a wild ocean whose survival is reliant upon technology? In Oceaning, Adam Fish answers this question through eight stories of piloting drones to stop the killing of porpoises, sharks, and seabirds and to check the vitality of whales, seals, turtles, and coral reefs.

Drawing on research from high-level industry meetings, petrochemical plant tours, and polluted communities in the United States, China, and Europe, in Petrochemical Planet Alice Mah examines the changing nature of the petrochemical industry as it faces the existential threats of climate change and environmental activism.

And lastly, our journal Environmental Humanities publishes outstanding, open-access scholarship that draws humanities disciplines into conversation with each other, and with the natural and social sciences, around significant environmental issues. Start reading here or sign up for email alerts when new issues are published.

Q&A with Margaret Price

Margaret Price is Associate Professor of English at Ohio State University and author of Crip Spacetime, which intervenes in the competitive, productivity-focused realm of academia by sharing the everyday experiences of disabled academics.

When I think about access in academia, I often start from my own experiences. I work from the minoritized position of a disabled, genderqueer faculty member, but also from the privileged position of a white faculty member with tenure. I arrived at Ohio State in 2016, after having taught at a liberal-arts school, Spelman College, for twelve years. Spelman is a small, private, historically Black college for women; Ohio State is a gigantic, public, predominantly white research university. To say that change was a shock is an understatement. I had an extremely difficult transition, and yet, what exactly made it difficult was hard for me to figure out for quite some time.

This book began with your own experiences as a disabled academic. What is it about those experiences that necessitated the writing of this book?

During my hiring process at Ohio State, I talked candidly about my disabilities. I continued to talk about them after I arrived on campus. Yet at no point did anyone ask me about my access needs, either through formal or informal channels. The atmosphere wasn’t at all unwelcoming or hostile—rather, I was often told, “Just let us know if you need anything.” I felt generally deeply welcome, and specifically deeply unclear on exactly what form this welcoming might take, especially if I were in need of something other than targeted advice (“here’s how to use the printer”) or general goodwill (“we are glad you’re here”).

Unfortunately, the support I had wasn’t enough to get me through that first semester as I attempted to navigate dozens of doctor’s appointments with new caregivers, figure out OSU’s health-care infrastructure, and manage my increasing debilitation. Four months after my arrival, one of my doctors sent me to the emergency room in an ambulance, and after several days in the hospital and yet more meds, I was sent home.

Shortly thereafter, I went to see the ADA Coordinator at OSU, Scott Lissner. The agenda of our meeting was not my own accommodations; in fact, I didn’t even know, at that point, that he was the person in charge of faculty accommodations at OSU. All I knew was that I desperately needed help and was afraid to admit it. When Scott asked me how I was doing, I burst into tears and said something like, “I don’t know what to do, I am failing at my job.” It was a tremendous stroke of luck—and again, privilege—that Scott is not only such a kind person, but also happened to be the one responsible for assisting faculty with disabilities. He helped me figure out what accommodations I needed, and began putting them in place right then and there.

What’s most striking to me about this story is not that I fell through the cracks of the many services available at Ohio State. That happens all the time. What really strikes me is that a person could hardly have been better resourced, or more knowledgeable, about disability in higher education, than me. (I literally wrote the book on it.) Furthermore, I had already been teaching at colleges and universities for over twenty years; I am tenured, white, speak English as my first language, and am familiar with the landscape of academia; and at the time I went to see Scott, I had just been enthusiastically recruited into my job. And yet, there I was, trying to struggle through, and failing. The failure I was experiencing wasn’t any particular person’s “fault.” It emerged through the system I was in—and that I was part of.

Your book argues that the current system in place to achieve equal access in the academy – individual accommodations — doesn’t work. Can you describe what individual accommodations are, and why they don’t work?

An individual accommodation is designed to provide a fix for a problem. So this system imagines disability as the problem, with accommodation as the fix. For example, if a student processes information at a different speed than most of their peers, then the accommodation system imagines the student’s processing speed as a problem, with the “fix” as extra time to complete assignments or exams. While that can sometimes be effective, of course many issues arise with the problem / fix model. For example, it can be difficult or expensive to prove one’s disability exists; it can be difficult to actually arrange the accommodations; and so on.

However, Crip Spacetime argues that there’s a more fundamental issue at work, too. Accommodation implies (and, in everyday academic life, almost always requires) the ability to say, “I can tell you what I’m going to need—in an hour, in a week, next semester.” Thus, disabled people historically have tended to trade on whatever predictability we can muster—or masquerade—to gain access, often citing “rights” as we’ve done so. Unfortunately, identifying our needs and insisting on the “right” to have those needs met has also enabled the creation of a dividing line between those whose needs are stable enough, predictable enough, to benefit from the protections of institutionally sponsored accommodation—and those whose are not.

So in effect, no matter how well designed, well funded, and compassionate a system of accommodation might be, it will always create that two-tier effect. The more-privileged tier will be able to predict and articulate their needs well enough to implement accommodations. The less-privileged tier will not. And that less-privileged tier—those of us with disabilities that aren’t as predictable, or aren’t as (apparently) easily explained, or perhaps aren’t even regarded as disabilities at all—are much less likely to be able to survive in academe, either as students or as employees.

What would a better system for supporting access look like?

A better system for access would begin from the assumption that the community or group working toward access is working collectively, and is accountable to one another. Of course, that doesn’t always happen, especially in a competitive and productivity-driven world like academe. Thus, one of the big questions that Crip Spacetime left me with is, “What does collective accountability in academe—or in any institutional context look like?” I’m still working on that question.

In your book, you introduce the titular idea of “crip spacetime.” What is crip spacetime, and how does it manifest in academia?

Crip spacetime is a kind of reality that a person (or animal, or object) inhabits. When you are in, or a part of, crip spacetime, you have a visceral sense of the costs, geographies, temporalities, and relations that come with being disabled. It’s more all-encompassing than just having a particular point of view. It’s the actual reality you’re living in. A rough analogy might be putting on a VR headset and a full VR suit—it swallows up all other perception. But you can’t remove crip spacetime the way you can a VR suit.

You don’t have to be disabled to exist in—or be able to perceive and understand—crip spacetime. The close friends and family members of disabled people often have a strong, visceral understanding of this reality. Also, being disabled doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily perceive crip spacetime the way I describe it in the book. You may experience very little sense of difference from being disabled; in which case, your reality likely doesn’t include the sense of cost, time, space, and relationality that crip spacetime does.

One of the hallmarks of crip spacetime is that it can be very hard to understand from a different reality. For example, a person who has been living in crip spacetime may have very little patience left for conversations about why the elevator doesn’t work. They may shout or start to cry as soon as it happens. From a non-crip-spacetime reality, that reaction doesn’t make any sense. It seems to be coming out of nowhere. But that’s because the person in crip spacetime knows, both in terms of past experience and in terms of ability to predict the likely future, that a broken elevator means frustration, humiliation, wasted time, fruitless arguments, and a general sense that no one particularly cares. In this way, it’s similar to other kinds of minoritized realities: emotions or concerns that don’t seem “logical” or “warranted” from a more privileged reality.

How did you navigate weaving your personal experience with research and theoretical work when writing Crip Spacetime?

I’ve been a creative writer since I was a kid, and I earned an MFA before my PhD. Writing from my own experience—in poetry, fiction, and especially in nonfiction—has always felt more natural to me than pretty much any other medium, including talking out loud. So for me as an academic writer, the question has always been how to include enough markers of “academic” writing so that my work is recognizable to readers as research in addition to being recognizable as creative writing. The two have always seemed to go hand-in-hand to me.

Many of my fellow creative/academic writers have provided brilliant examples of how to weave together personal and academic writing. Some of my favorites include Jo Hsu, Moya Bailey, Ellen Samuels, and Jay Dolmage. I especially like to study the forms these writers use—how they weave in interludes or short chapters, how they write poetry as well as prose, and how they use online as well as print-based forms to express their experiences.

What should other academics reading this book take away in terms of how they can best support their disabled colleagues and students?

If we understand “disability” and “access” as relational and emergent, then we need to accept that enacting access in specific circumstances will require different moves in different circumstances. You may already know a great deal about universal design, or models of disability, or being disabled—and all of these are useful things to know. But bear in mind that there’s always more to learn.

At the same time, there are some general ideas that folks can educate themselves about. These are not rules; they’re more like conversation starters, or questions to explore. Here are a few places to look for those conversations: The National Center for College Students with Disabilities, including their resources for faculty and instructors; The Disability Visibility Project, including their podcast series; Disability, Opportunities, Internetworking, and Technology (DO-IT) at the University of Washington; The Composing Access Project from the Conference on College Composition and Communication.

Finally, I’d recommend that folks recognize that, while asking questions and participating in dialogues is a great way to learn, move forward with care. Don’t waylay a colleague and ask them about their disability when they’re not expecting it. And don’t assume you’re entitled to someone else’s story or expertise.

Instead, ask if they’re up for that conversation. And take opportunities to educate yourself. Attend a disability-studies talk online or at your own university / college / workplace. Browse the articles in disability-studies journals. Follow up with people who do offer to engage in conversation. There’s no checklist for the “right” way to support access. As I say when I give talks, “Access is all our work.”

Crip Spacetime is available in an open access edition, or you can save 30% on the paperback with coupon E24PRICE.

Poem of the Week

Our third poem of the week this April is “Opening” by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Dub: Finding Ceremony, in which “Opening” is published, takes inspiration from theorist Sylvia Wynter, dub poetry, and ocean life to offer a catalog of possible methods for remembering, healing, listening, and living otherwise.

if you gathered them they would be everyone.

gather them.

recognize in them your jawline, your wet eyes, your long-fingered
hands, seeking what but this multitude. if you gathered them they
would not fit on this island. they would spill back into the ocean
whence they came. when you gather them they will have fins and
claws and names you do not know.

gather them anyway.

some will look you in the eye, some are too microscopic to see. if you
don’t gather them all you will never be free. if you gathered them you
could not hold them, scold them, demand back what you think is
lost. gather them today or your soul is the cost. gather the ones who
sold and who bought and who tossed overboard. gather the erstwhile
children in the name of the lord. gather the unclaimed fathers, the
ones with guns and with swords. gather them up. with your hands.
with your relationship to land. with your chin set. you are not done
yet. you never will.

gather them more. gather them still.

they will unfound you and surround you unfind you and unwind you
travel to you unravel through your own needle. gather the thread.
collect your dead.

put yourself in the center and draw them in. stand where you standing which is not under and not over. you. not gonna get over it. and
where you stand is not always standing either, is it? sometimes quicksand sometimes bended knee, very often that cross-legged thing you
do, sitting on the floor or hugging your own legs like they were people. be where you are and draw them to you. you might need to move
your hands, one of those legs or a book from blocking your heart.
that would be a good start. put your arms out like if you were floating in water. daughter. they know where to find you.

this is what we did. we put everything where it needed to go. we
knew about need by intuition. we knew about need by experience.
we knew about need by not needing what we thought we needed. we
needed you to know something else. so this is what we did. we knotted up our knowing with our needing. we kneaded back our needing
into notthisnotthennotagain and we knew the net of our needing,
the need of our knowing would wander and would wait. we knew it
like we knew salt. we knew it like we knew bait. we know it like we
know you. don’t hesitate.

first, the sound. you hear it even if no one else does. even if you wake
and already don’t remember. second, the seconds. you feel the up-tick
in your heart bringing you back into time. third, the rise. as if you are
pulled vertical across the floor and before you know it you have taken
several steps. it is a minute or so before you are you as you know you.
in the rising you could be any of us.

save the top of your head for the water. don’t let the nonsense burn it
out. cleanse with salt and coolness. thousands of years ago it was a
spout. place your head in places worthy. place your hands over your
heart. bless yourself with generations. that’s a start.

what the coral said:
breathe. breathe. breathe. sing. let that water move within you. let it
be you. let your every cilia dance you into healing. let the warm salt
water brighten you. your tears. sleep. and when you dream of working, sleep again. sleep until you dream of floating. dream until your
edges soft. dream until you birth yourself in water singing with the
bones of all your lost. dream until you breathe not from your mouth,
not from your nose but through your hair and through your skin.
dream until you claim the ocean. breathe until you feel no need to
swim. breathe until your dreams flow out your brain. breathe and let
them in your heart. breathe and we will call you again. that’s a start.

there are very few things that you must do. this is one. this will show
you the others. there is a difference between assignment and need.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a poet, independent scholar, and activist. She is the author of Dub, Spill, and M Archive, all published by Duke University Press. Alexis is a 2023 Windham-Campbell Prize Winner in Poetry. She was a 2020-2021 National Humanities Center Fellow, funded by the Founders Award, and is a 2022 National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellow.

Poem of the Week

Happy National Poetry Month! To celebrate, we’ll be featuring a weekly poem here on the blog. First up is “Through My Imperfect Mouth and Life and Way, XIV i,” from Dionne Brand’s From Language to Light On (1997), republished in Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems.

XIV i

I know you don’t like poems, especially mine
and especially since mine never get told when
you need them, and I know that I live some
inner life that thinks it’s living outside but
isn’t and only wakes up when something knocks
too hard and when something is gone as if gazing
up the road I miss the bus and wave a poem at
its shadow. But bus and shadow exist all the same
and I’ll send you more poems even if they arrive
late. What stops us from meeting at this place
and imagining ourselves big as the world and broad
enough to take it in and grow ancient is fear and
our carelessness, and standing in the thrall
of the wicked place we live in and not seeing
a way out all the time and never clearly all at once
and not at the same time and abandoning each other
to chance and small decisions, but if I ever thought
that I could never recover the thought struggling
to live through my imperfect mouth and life and way,
if I thought that I could do nothing about the world
then . . . well, and we’ve hung on to old hurts as if
that was all there was and as if no amount of sadness
would be enough for our old, insistent,
not becoming selves; and as if sadness should not end,
so for this I’ll send you more poems even if they
only wave and even if I only look up late to see
your shadow rushing by.

Dionne Brand is the author of numerous volumes of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, including Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems.  The Blue Clerk, also published by Duke University Press, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and won the Trillium Book Award. Her other poetry collections have won the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Trillium Book Award, and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. From 2009 to 2012 Brand served as Toronto’s Poet Laureate.

New Books in April

April showers bring plenty of opportunities to curl up inside with a new book. Check out the great new titles we have coming out this month!

In The Art of Remembering art historian and curator Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw engages in the process of “rememory”—the recovery of facts and narratives of African American creativity and self-representation that have been purposefully set aside, actively ignored, and disremembered.

In The Fold, Laura U. Marks offers a practical philosophy and aesthetic theory for living in an infinitely connected cosmos. With this guide for living within the enfolded and unfolding cosmos, Marks teaches readers to richly apprehend the world and to trace the processes of becoming that are immanent within the fold.

Incommunicable by Charles L. Briggs examines the long-standing presumptions that medical discourse translates easily across geographic, racial, and class boundaries.

Bombarded with the equivalent of one Hiroshima bomb a day for half a century, Pacific people have long been subjected to man-made cataclysm. In The Ocean on Fire, Anaïs Maurer analyzes the Pacific literature that incriminates the environmental racism behind radioactive skies and rising seas. 

In Third Worlds Within, Daniel Widener expands conceptions of the struggle for racial justice by reframing antiracist movements in the United States in a broader internationalist context.

The contributors to Psychiatric Contours, edited Nancy Rose Hunt and Hubertus Büschel, investigate new histories of psychiatry, derangement, and agitated subjectivities in colonial and decolonizing Africa.

In Crip Spacetime, Margaret Price intervenes in the competitive, productivity-focused realm of academia by sharing the everyday experiences of disabled academics. Price boldly calls for the university to move away from individualized models of accommodation and toward a new system of collective accountability and care.

In The Theological Metaphors of Marx, Enrique Dussel provides a groundbreaking combination of Marxology, theology, and ethical theory. Marx’s thought, impact, and influence cannot be fully understood without Dussel’s historic reinterpretation of the theological origins and implications of Marx’s critiques of political economy and politics. Translated by Camilo Pérez-Bustillo, the book includes a foreword by Eduardo Mendieta.

The Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano is widely considered to be a foundational figure of the decolonial perspective grounded in three basic concepts: coloniality, coloniality of power, and the colonial matrix of power. Aníbal Quijano, edited by Walter D. Mignolo, Rita Segato, and Catherine E. Walsh, is not simply an introduction to Quijano’s work; it achieves one of his unfulfilled goals: to write a book that contains his main hypotheses, concepts, and arguments. 

In Making Value, Timothy D. Taylor examines how people’s conceptions of value inform and shape their production and consumption of music. Drawing on anthropological value theory, Taylor theorizes music’s economic and noneconomic forms of value both ethnographically and historically.

Made in Asia/America, edited by Christopher B. Patterson and Tara Fickle, explores the key role video games play within the race makings of Asia/America. Its fourteen critical essays on games examine the historical entanglements of games, Asia, and America, and reveal the ways games offer new modes of imagining imperial violence, racial difference, and coalition.

The contributors to Situation Critical argue for the continued importance of critique to early American studies, pushing back against both reductivist neo-empiricism and so-called postcritique. Bringing together a diverse group of essays, editors Max Cavitch and Brian Connolly demonstrate that critique is about acknowledging that we are never simply writing better or worse accounts of the past, but accounts of the present as well. 

Yan Lianke is a world-renowned author of novels, short stories, and essays whose provocative and nuanced writing explores the reality of everyday life in contemporary China. Encapsulating his perspectives on life, writing, and literary history, Sound and Silence includes an introduction by translator Carlos Rojas and an afterword by Yan.

In Against Extraction Matt Hooley traces a modern tradition of Ojibwe invention in Minneapolis and St. Paul from the mid-nineteenth century to the present as that tradition emerges in response to the cultural legacies of US colonialism. 

Katherine Brewer Ball explores the American fascination with the escape story in The Only Way Out. Drawing on Black studies, queer theory, and performance studies, she examines a range of works, and throughout, escape emerges as a story not of individuality but of collectivity and entanglement.

In Disability Worlds, Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp’s conversations with diverse New Yorkers reveal the bureaucratic constraints and paradoxes established in response to the disability rights movement, as well as the remarkable creativity of disabled people and their allies who are opening pathways into both disability justice and disability futures.

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Celebrating International Women’s Day

Today is International Women’s Day, a day to recognize the achievements of women globally. This year’s theme is Inspire Inclusion: highlighting the importance of diversity and empowerment in all aspects of society. We’re excited to share recent books and journals from Duke University Press that align with this mission and celebrate women around the world and throughout history.

Fire Dreams is an innovative collaboration between the New Orleans-based Black feminist collective Women With a Vision and Laura McTighe, who work in community to build a social movement ethnography of the organization’s post-arson rebirth. Fire Dreams is a vital toolkit for grassroots organizers, activist-scholars, and all those who dream to make the world otherwise.

In Archive of Tongues Moon Charania explores feminine dispossession and the brown diaspora through a reflection on the life of her mother. Drawing on her mother’s memories and stories of migration, violence, sexuality, queerness, domesticity, and the intimate economies of everyday life, Charania conceptualizes her mother’s tongue as an object of theory and an archive of brown intimate life.

Revolutionary Feminists tells the story of the radical women’s liberation movement in Seattle in the 1960s and 1970s from the perspective of a founding member, Barbara Winslow. Reflecting on the Seattle movement’s accomplishments and shortcomings, Winslow offers a model for contemporary feminist activism.

In Puta Life, Juana María Rodríguez probes the ways that sexual labor and Latina sexuality become visual phenomena. Highlighting the criminalization and stigmatization that surrounds sex work, she lingers on those traces of felt possibility that might inspire more ethical forms of relation and care.

Claudia Calirman examines sixty years of visual art by prominent and emerging Brazilian women artists from the 1960s to the present in Dissident Practices, covering the period from the military dictatorship to the return to democracy in the mid-1980s, the social changes of the 2000s, the rise of the Right in the late-2010s, and the recent development of an overtly feminist art practice.

Mendings tells an intimate story about family, selfhood, and the love and loss lodged in garments. In this narrative about making meaning of brokenness and grief, Megan Sweeney reflects on her childhood entanglement with her mother, her loss-filled relationship with her alcoholic father, and her attachment to the clothes that have mended her as she has mended them.

Reckoning with Restorative Justice by Leanne Trapedo Sims examines the experiences of incarcerated Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander women at the Women’s Community Correctional Center, the only women’s prison in the state of Hawai‘i.

In Gendered Fortunes, Zeynep K. Korkman examines Turkey’s commercial fortunetelling cafés where secular Muslim women and LGBTIQ individuals navigate the precarities of twenty-first-century life.

You may also be interested in these journals in feminist and women’s studies:

Camera Obscura provides a forum for scholarship and debate on feminism, culture, and media studies. It explores areas such as the conjunctions of gender, race, class, and sexuality with audiovisual culture; new histories and theories of film, television, video, and digital media; and politically engaged approaches to a range of media practices.

Meridians, an interdisciplinary feminist journal, features scholarship and creative work by and about women of color in U.S. and international contexts. It engages the complexity of debates around feminism, race, and transnationalism in a dialogue across ethnic, national, and disciplinary boundaries.

The Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies advances the fields of Middle East gender, sexuality, and women’s studies through the contributions of academics, artists, and activists from around the globe working in the interpretive social sciences and humanities.

differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies highlights interdisciplinary, theoretical debates that address the ways concepts and categories of difference—notably but not exclusively gender—operate within culture. It first appeared in 1989 at the moment of a critical encounter—a head-on collision, one might say—of theories of difference (primarily Continental) and the politics of diversity (primarily American).

New Books in March

As Spring approaches, stock up on new books! Check out our great new titles coming out in March.

Fire Dreams by Laura McTighe is a social movement ethnography created with Women With A Vision, a New Orleans-based Black feminist collective that has fought for racial justice, reproductive justice, abolition feminism, and climate justice in marginalized communities for thirty-five years.

In a new translation of A History of Argentina, originally published in Spanish in 2020, Ezequiel Adamovsky presents over five hundred years of Argentine economic, political, social, and cultural history.

In Utopia of the Uniform, Tanja Petrović draws on memories and material effects of dozens of Yugoslav People’s Army conscripts to show how their experience of military service points to futures, forms of collectivity, and relations between the state and the individual different from those that prevailed in the post-Yugoslav reality.

In Unspooled, Rob Drew traces how a lowly, hissy format that began life in office dictation machines and cheap portable players came to be regarded as a token of intimate expression through music and a source of cultural capital. Listen to the playlist for the book on Spotify.

Matthew Chin investigates queerness in Jamaica from early colonial occupation to the present in Fractal Repair, critically responding to the island’s global reputation for extreme homophobia and anti-queer violence. 

In Silicon Valley Imperialism, Erin McElroy maps the processes of gentrification, racial dispossession, and economic predation that drove the development of Silicon Valley in the San Francisco Bay Area and how that logic has become manifest in postsocialist Romania. 

Mimi Khúc revolutionizes how we understand mental health in dear elia. In an intimate series of letters, she bears witness to Asian American unwellness up close and invites readers to recognize in it the shapes and sources of their own unwellness. 

In Shooting for Change, Jung Joon Lee examines postwar Korean photography across multiple genres and practices, including vernacular, art, documentary, and archival photography. 

Camera Geologica by Siobhan Angus tells the history of photography through the minerals upon which the medium depends. 

 In Escaping Nature, Orrin H. Pilkey and his coauthors offer concrete suggestions for how to respond to the threats posed by global climate change.

During World War I, thousands of young African men conscripted to fight for France and Britain were captured and held as prisoners of war in Germany, where their stories and songs were recorded and archived by German linguists. In Knowing by Ear, Anette Hoffmann demonstrates that listening to these acoustic recordings as historical sources, rather than linguistic samples, opens up possibilities for new historical perspectives and the formation of alternate archival practices and knowledge production. 

In The Prestes Column, Jacob Blanc offers a new interpretation of the legendary rebellion, in which a band of rebel officers and soldiers marched fifteen thousand miles through the vast interior regions of Brazil between 1924 and 1927.

In At the Vanguard of Vinyl, Darren Mueller examines how the advent of the long-playing record (LP) in 1948 revolutionized the recording and production of jazz in the 1950s. 

Mu, 49 Marks of Abolition is both a loving homage to and a playful subversion of political inheritances and the unsayable beyond law. Sora Y. Han’s poetic meditations on freedom struggle come alive in the empty spaces between words, letters, and pictograms spanning her many languages—English, Korean, Chinese, jazz, law, and poetry.

In The Color Black, Beeta Baghoolizadeh traces the twin processes of enslavement and erasure of Black people in Iran during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

With In the Land of the Unreal, Lisa Messeri navigates the intersection of place, technology, and social change to show that technology alone cannot upend systemic forces attached to gender and race.

One of the foremost intellectuals of his generation, French philosopher of science Michel Serres (1930–2019) broke free from disciplinary dogmas. The contributors to Porous Becomings, edited by Andreas Bandak and Daniel M. Knight, bring the inspirational and enigmatic world of Serres to the attention of anthropology. 

In The Cybernetic Border, Iván Chaar López argues that the United States uses a combination of drone, surveillance, and informational technologies to protect the US-Mexico border in ways that mark border crossers as racialized others that must be policed.

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