Celebrating International Women’s Day

Today is International Women’s Day, a day to celebrate the achievements of women globally. This year’s theme is #EmbraceEquity: going beyond equality to create an inclusive world. We’re excited to share recent books and journals from Duke University Press that align with this mission and commemorate women around the world and throughout history. March is also Women’s History Month, so you can keep the celebration going with these books all month long!

In honor of March being Women’s History Month, Feminism in Coalition by Liza Taylor kicks off our list with a nod to the past. Taylor examines how U.S. women of color feminists’ coalition collective politics of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s is an indispensable resource to contemporary political theory, feminist studies, and intersectional social justice activism.

Legacies of War shifts the stage to the Andes as Kimberly Theidon draws on ethnographic research in post-conflict Peru and Columbia to examine the lives of children born of wartime rape and the impact of violence on human and more-than-human lives, bodies, and ecologies.  

Genevieve Alva Clutario’s Beauty Regimes blends American and Southeast Asia Studies in tracing how beauty and fashion in the Philippines shaped the intertwined projects of imperial expansion and modern nation building during the turbulent transition between Spanish, US, and Japanese empires

Changing the Subject by Srila Roy traces the impact of neoliberalism on gender and sexuality rights movements in the Global South, highlighting queer and feminist activism in India.

In Dancer’s Voice, Rumya Sree Putcha uses the figure of the Indian classical dancer to explore the complex dynamics of contemporary transnational Indian womanhood.

AnaLouise Keating’s Anzaldúan Theory Handbook delves into Chicanx and Latinx Studies in providing a comprehensive investigation of the foundational theories, methods, and philosophies of Gloria E. Anzaldúa.

Throughout a book-length poem, Simone White considers the dynamics of contemporary black feminist life, attesting to the narrative complexities of writing and living as a black woman and artist in or, on being the other woman.

The contributors to Reframing Todd Haynes, edited by Theresa L. Geller and Julia Leyda, blend media studies and women’s studies by reassessing the film and television work of award-winning independent filmmaker Todd Haynes in light of his longstanding feminist commitments and his exceptional position as a director of women’s films.

Catherine Grant in Time of One’s Own examines how contemporary feminist artists such as Sharon Hayes, Mary Kelly, Allyson Mitchell, Deirdre Logue, Lubaina Himid, Pauline Boudry, and Renate Lorenz are turning to the history of feminism in the twenty-first century as a way to understand the present moment.

Lives of Jessie Sampter by Sarah Imhoff tells of the queer, disabled, Zionist writer Jessie Sampter (1883-1938), whose body and life did not match typical Zionist ideals and serves as an example of the complex relationships between the body, queerness, disability, religion, and nationalism.

The contributors to Re-Understanding Media, edited by Sarah Sharma and Rianka Singh, advance a feminist version of Marshall McLuhan’s key text, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, repurposing his insight that “the medium is the message” for feminist ends.

Kelli Moore’s Legal Spectatorship traces the political origins of the concept of domestic violence through visual culture in the United States, showing how it is rooted in the archive of slavery.

Also, don’t miss these special issues of journals in feminist and women’s studies:

“Black Feminism in the Caribbean and the United States: Representation, Rebellion, Radicalism, and Reckoning,” a special issue of Meridians, “Class and Consent,” a special issue of Labor edited by Christopher Phelps, “Gendered Struggles over the Medical Profession in the Middle East and North Africa, 1880-1990,” a special issue of Journal of the Middle East Women’s Studies edited by Liat Kozma and Nicole Khayat, and “Feminist Mournings,” a special issue of Meridians edited by Kimberly Juanita Brown and Jyoti Puri.  

Fall Awards

We would like to celebrate our many authors who have earned various awards and honors for their books since July 2022. Congratulations to all of them!

Cajetan Iheka’s African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics won the African Studies Association Book Prize (Herskovits Prize) from the African Studies Association, the ASLE Awards in Ecocriticism and Environmental Creative Writing from the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, and the Harold & Margaret Sprout Award from the Environmental Studies Section of the International Studies Association. African Ecomedia also received an Honorable Mention for the ASAP Book Prize from The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present and was selected as a finalist for the Bethwell A. Ogot Book Prize from the African Studies Association.

Joshua Grace’s African Motors: Technology, Gender, and the History of Development was also selected as a finalist for the Bethwell A. Ogot Book Prize from the African Studies Association. 

Vanessa Díaz’s Manufacturing Celebrity: Latino Paparazzi and Women Reporters in Hollywood won the ALLA Book Award from the Association for Latina and Latino Anthropology section of the American Anthropological Association.

Brigitte Fielder’s Relative Races: Genealogies of Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-Century America won the Bela Kornitzer Award for Nonfiction. 

Hagar Kotef’s The Colonizing Self: Or, Home and Homelessness in Israel/Palestine won the C. B. Macpherson Prize from the Canadian Political Science Association. 

Noah Tamarkin’s Genetic Afterlives: Black Jewish Indigeneity in South Africa won the Jordan Schnitzer Book Awards from the Association for Jewish Studies. Genetic Afterlives also received an Honorable Mention for the Diana Forsythe Prize from the Society for the Anthropology of Work Section of the American Anthropological Association and Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing. 

Anna Arabindan-Kesson’s Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World was selected as a finalist for the Robert L. Shep Ethnic Textiles Book Award from Textile Society of America. 

Jennifer L. Morgan’s Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic was named co-winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize from the Gilder Lehrman Center. 

Kregg Hetherington’s The Government of Beans: Regulating Life in the Age of Monocrops won the Rachel Carson Prize from the Society for Social Studies of Science. Eva Haifa Giraud’s What Comes after Entanglement?: Activism, Anthropocentrism, and an Ethics of Exclusion was selected as a finalist and Max Liboiron’s Pollution Is Colonialism received an Honorable Mention for the same award. 

Micha Cárdenas’s Poetic Operations: Trans of Color Art in Digital Media and Rana M. Jaleel’s The Work of Rape were named co-winners for the Gloria E. Anzaldúa Prize from the National Women’s Studies Association. Jennifer C. Nash’s Birthing Black Mothers received an Honorable Mention for the same award.

Celeste Day Moore’s Soundscapes of Liberation: African American Music in Postwar France won the ARSC Award for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research from the Association for Recorded Sound Collections. Soundscapes of Liberation was also selected as a finalist for the American Library in Paris Award. 

Christina Schwenkel’s Building Socialism: The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam won the E. Ohnuki-Tierney Book Award for Historical Anthropology from the American Anthropological Association. 

Jessica A. Schwartz’s Radiation Sounds: Marshallese Music and Nuclear Silences was named co-winner for the Edie Turner First Book Prize in Ethnographic Writing from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology section of the American Anthropological Association.. 

Michael K. Bourdaghs, Paola Iovene, and Kaley Mason’s Sound Alignments: Popular Music in Asia’s Cold Wars won the Ellen Koskoff Edited Volume Prize for the Society for Ethnomusicology. 

Jorell A. Meléndez-Badillo’s The Lettered Barriada: Workers, Archival Power, and the Politics of Knowledge in Puerto Rico won the Frank Bonilla Book Award from the Puerto Rican Studies Association. 

Vanessa Freije’s Citizens of Scandal: Journalism, Secrecy, and the Politics of Reckoning in Mexico received an Honorable Mention for LASA Mexico Best Book in the Social Sciences Prize from the Latin American Studies Association Mexico Social Sciences Section.

Elizabeth McHenry’s To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice, and African American Authorship won the SHARP DeLong Book History Prize from the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing. To Make Negro Literature also received an Honorable Mention for the William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the Modern Language Association. 

Farzaneh Hemmasi’s Tehrangeles Dreaming: Intimacy and Imagination in Southern California’s Iranian Pop Music won the Hamid Naficy Book Award from the Association for Iranian Studies.

Joseph Pugliese’s Biopolitics of the More-Than-Human: Forensic Ecologies of Violence was selected as a finalist for the IHR/ ASU Transdisciplinary Humanities Book Award  from the Institute for Humanities Research/ Arizona State University. 

Hatim El-Hibri’s Visions of Beirut: The Urban Life of Media Infrastructure won The Jane Jacobs Urban Communication Book Award from the Urban Communication Foundation/ National Communication Association. 

Kevin Quashie’s Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being won the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association. Black Aliveness also won the Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism from the Poetry Foundation.

Rachel Zolf’s No One’s Witness: A Monstrous Poetics was selected as a finalist for the Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism from the Poetry Foundation. 

Valerie Cassel Oliver’s exhibition catalog The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse won the Mary Ellen LoPresti Award from the Art Libraries Society of North America Southeast Chapter.

Amy Holdsworth’s On Living with Television won MeCCSA Monograph of the Year from the media, communication and cultural studies association.  

La Marr Jurelle Bruce’s How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity won the MLA Prize for a First Book from the Modern Language Association. Laurence Coderre’s Newborn Socialist Things: Materiality in Maoist China received an Honorable Mention for the same award. 

Juan Herrera’s Cartographic Memory: Social Movement Activism and the Production of Space won the National Association for Ethnic Studies Outstanding Book Award from the National Association for Ethnic Studies. 

Eric Weisbard’s Songbooks: The Literature of American Popular Music was named co-winner for the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award from Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, New York University’s Clive Davis Institute, and The Pop Conference.  

Jill Jarvis’s Decolonizing Memory: Algeria and the Politics of Testimony won the Scaglione Prize for French & Francophone Studies from the Modern Language Association. 

Todd Meyers’s All That Was Not Her was selected as a finalist for the Victor Turner Prize from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology/ American Anthropological Association. Melinda Hinkson’s See How We Roll: Enduring Exile between Desert and Urban Australia received an Honorable Mention for the same award.

World Photography Day

Today is World Photography Day—an international celebration and recognition of photography’s history, art, craft, and science. Join in the festivities by checking out some of our new, upcoming, and recent titles on photography.

A Time of Youth by William Gedney brings together 89 of the more than 200 photographs he took in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood between October 1966 and January 1967, documenting the restless and intertwined lives of the disenchanted youth who flocked to what became the epicenter of 1960s counterculture. Edited by Lisa McCarty, the book also features an essay by Philip Gefter.

Nicole Erin Morse’s new book Selfie Aesthetics blends trans studies and visual culture by examining how women feminine artists use selfies and self-representational art to explore how selfies produce politically meaningful encounters between creators and viewers in ways that envision trans feminist futures.

Warring Visions by Thy Phu explores photographs produced by dispersed communities throughout Vietnam and the Vietnamese diaspora, both during and after the Vietnam War, to understandings of how war is waged, experienced, and resolved.

Showing how empire continues to haunt South Asian American visual cultures, Bakirathi Mani examines the visual and affective relationships between South Asian diasporic viewers, artists, and photographic representations of immigrant subjects in Unseeing Empire.

In the forthcoming title Wake Up, This is Joburg, writer Tanya Zack and photographer Mark Lewis offer a stunning portrait of Johannesburg and personal stories of its residents, showing how its urban transformation occurs not in a series of dramatic, wide-scale changes but in the everyday lives, actions, and dreams of individuals.

Allison Moore’s recent book Embodying Relation examines the tensions between the local and the global in the art photography movement that blossomed in Bamko, Mali, in the 1990s, showing contemporary Malian photography to be a rich example of Western notions of art meeting traditional cultural precepts to forge new artistic forms, practices, and communities.

Showing how photography both reflected and actively contributed to social and political change, Unfixed by Jennifer Bajorek traces the relationship between photography and decolonial politics in Francophone west Africa in the years immediately leading up to and following the independence from French colonial rule in 1960.

Those interested in European studies and architecture may enjoy William Craft Brumfield’s recent book Journeys through the Russian Empire. The lavishly illustrated volume documents Russia’s architectural, artistic, and cultural heritage while juxtaposing the hundreds of full-color images of Russian architecture and landscapes taken by early-twentieth-century photographer Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky with those of contemporary photographer and scholar William Craft Brumfield.

Photographic Returns by Shawn Michelle Smith engages with photography by Sally Mann, Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, and others to trace how historical moments come to be known photographically and the ways in which the past continues to inhabit, punctuate, and transform the present through the photographic medium.

Sarah Eckhart’s Working Together, which accompanies an exhibition of the photography of Virginia artist Louis Draper and other members of the Kamoinge Workshop, now at the Getty Museum, includes more than 140 photographs by fourteen of the early members of the Workshop.

Also, check out Trans Asia Photography, an open-access journal devoted to the interdisciplinary exploration of historic and contemporary photography from Asia and across the Asian diaspora.

Be sure to learn about our new titles in photography.  Sign up for our e-mail newsletters, and get notifications of new titles in your preferred disciplines as well as discounts and other news.

Q&A with Kimberly Theidon

Kimberly Theidon is Henry J. Leir Professor of International Humanitarian Studies at Tufts University and author of Intimate Enemies: Violence and Reconciliation in Peru. In her new book, Legacies of War, Theidon draws on ethnographic research in Peru and Columbia to examine the lives of children born of wartime rape and the impact of violence on human and more-than-human lives, bodies, and ecologies.

You begin your book with a mention that you started writing it during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. This spring, the United States and Europe have been preoccupied with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, while military conflicts around the world, like Yemen and Afghanistan continue. How did you find yourself relating to events like these while writing your book? Has that changed now that the book has been published?

Legacies of War is ethnographically grounded in Colombia and Peru. Having a deep sense of local histories and struggles—as well as the practices of care and hope that animate individual and collective life—is a cornerstone of anthropology, but place-based knowledge is not place-bound. Ethnography informs theory and analysis, which in turns allows me to speak to issues that resonate in other regions. You ask about Ukraine: this morning I opened the New York Times to a story on war, famine, and the purposeful destruction of crops. Starving people out, disrupting their economic livelihoods—the paramilitaries used similar strategies in Urabá, Colombia. Starving and displacing people is not an unforeseen consequence of war: it is a deliberate strategy used time and again. I argue for “connecting the dots” in my book to reveal techniques of violence that are repeatedly deployed yet are made to appear random and far removed from one another. The underlying and shared logics matter.

You discuss how ambiguous and over-determined the English phrase “children born of war” is. How difficult is it to study and address this issue when the words being used—especially by prominent policy-makers, media members, and scholars—are so effective at concealing the harsh reality faced by children born of wartime sexual assault?

“Children born of war” —or CBOW in policy documents—obscures specificity. CBOW lacks an agent or a perpetrator, and war itself does not impregnate anyone. The language of policy documents may not be the language that allows us to think clearly in our research. Research categories demand greater precision. An anthropologist wants details about age, gender, race, religion, nationality, culture; in short, a researcher needs to incorporate intersectionality into her questions, her categories, and her analysis. The failure to incorporate other identity markers evokes “the danger of a single story.” As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie eloquently argues, “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.” In this book, I share numerous stories, some of rejection and pain, others of love and care.

As for “concealing the harsh reality of children born of wartime sexual assault”? There is more at stake in concealment and silences. I suspect that one reason children born of wartime rape were and have, to some extent, remained invisible on the international agenda is because there is no reasonable way to discuss this issue from a “survivor centered” perspective without addressing women’s right to abortion—a woman’s right to refuse to lend her body to nine months of reproductive labor. The UN’s Women Peace and Security Agenda, for all of its good intentions and accomplishments, is a framework that placates those for whom a more feminist agenda would be unpalatable. “Mainstreaming gender” can be a double-entendre, as the feminist critique of policy is mainstreamed into an agenda that does not threaten the status quo of powerful countries or interest groups—a move that may obscure the fact that women and their children (especially their fetuses) may be located within competing rights regimes. One cannot finesse away these competing rights. This calls for an explicitly feminist peace-building and post conflict reconstruction agenda, understood to include a full range of sexual and reproductive rights, including access to safe and affordable abortions.

How did you incorporate ideas from the environmental humanities such as theories of entanglement in your work, and why?

I was troubled by the tendency to place the heavy lifting of reproductive labor on the shoulders of women, which leads to reproductive governance more readily than reproductive justice. Uterine myopia is a problem, which is why I focus on the multiple environments in which conception, pregnancy and childbirth unfold—environments that may lie far beyond the control of any one woman, of any one person. From toxic chemicals to land mines, from rivers tinged with blood to angry mountains, the goal was to capture the multiple environments and actors that play a role in “distributed reproduction”— environments and actors that may in turn suffer various forms of reproductive violence. An open-ness to the world and its capacity to “get under our skin” allowed me to draw connections between indigenous epistemologies, situated biologies, and the burgeoning field of epigenetics. I questioned what is involved in “discovering” that our bodies bear life’s signature upon them—or “discovering” that we share this world with more-than-human kin. The trope of discovery follows a particular history of modernity, settler colonialism and capitalism: it is erected on the erasure of indigenous and Native American peoples, their ways of life and their theories about the world and the place of human beings in it. If there is to be a way forward on this planet, it will require moving beyond human exceptionalism and its devastating consequences.

You write about how heavily this research and these stories of trauma and survival have weighed on you. Yet, you also mention that you “found solace” while writing the book (vii). How did you navigate the emotional challenges of writing about children born from sexual assault?

In my research, I have explored what people say they suffer from and how they attempt to set things right. This has required me to hold present both suffering and resilience, and to help my readers imagine what it is that permits people to get up in the morning and believe—despite all evidence to the contrary—that there might be a better day ahead of them and a future for their children. This still remains the most enduring memory of my fieldwork. When I close my eyes, I recall moments doubled over laughing, dancing until we could no longer stand up, children running into my room and piling on my bed, singing until the candles burned down and there were only stars streaming through the cracks in my corrugated aluminum roof. I remember more than endurance. There were also moments of joy that stretched into hours that in turn became days. Even in the midst of violence, life is not only tragic.

I have come to think of writing as a pharmakon, as both poison and remedy. Writing plunges many of us back into the field, yet also offers us a way out, and a way to fulfill the enormous responsibility we feel to the questions we have posed and to the people with whom we have worked. Many of us were sent home with the exhortation to “tell people out there what you’ve seen so they will do something about it.” ¹ Writing is one way we honor that charge. It is one way we amplify voices demanding justice.

Finally, I have loved my research, and certainly loved writing this book. I hope readers can feel that we amplify voices demanding justice.

Read the introduction to Legacies of War for free on our website and save 30% on the paperback with coupon E22THDON.

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¹ The charge to carry a message to some imagined “international community” — imagined as moral, caring and disposed to action if only provided with the necessary knowledge — can be a painful fiction. For example, see Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania, Liisa Malkki, University of Chicago Press, 1995.

New Books in August

Summer may sadly be coming to a close, but there is still time to get in a few more summer reads. Don’t miss the great new titles we have coming out this August!

Simone White combines poetry, essay, personal narrative, and critical theory in the book-length poem or, on being the other woman, which considers the dynamics of contemporary black feminist life and attests to the narrative complexities of writing and living as a black woman and artist. If you’re in Los Angeles, you can catch the launch for White’s book at the Poetic Research Bureau on August 13.

In Consuelo Jimenez Underwood, editors Laura E. Pérez and Ann Marie Leimer bring works from numerous contributors together to examine the artistic practices of Consuelo Jimenez Underwood, whose innovative art and urgent engagement with a range of pressing contemporary issues mark her as one of the most vital artists of our time.

The Politics of Vibration by Marcus Boon may appeal to music lovers in its exploration of music as a material practice of vibration that emerges from a politics of vibration, and which constructs a vibrational space of individual and collective transformation.

For those interested in reading about other forms of art like photography, Lynn Spigel’s TV Snapshots studies historical snapshots of people posing in front of their television sets in the 1950s through the early 1970s to show how TV snapshots were a popular photographic practice through which people visualized their lives in an increasingly mediated culture. Read the recent great review of TV Snapshots in the New York Review of Books and catch Lynn Spigel’s virtual talk on August 25.

In Work Requirements Todd Carmody explores how the nineteenth-century American idea that work is inherently meaningful was reinforced and tasked to those who lived on the margins and needed assistance.

In Queer Kinship, editors Tyler Bradway and Elizabeth Freeman, along with numerous other contributors, assert the importance of queer kinship to queer and trans theory and to kinship theory by attending to the centrality of indigeneity, race, and colonialism in kinship.

Marquis Bey weaves trans studies, African American studies, and American studies together in Cistem Failure by mediating on the antagonistic relationship between blackness and cisgender and showing that cisgender as a category cannot capture how people depart from gender alignment and its coding as white.

Rage and Carnage in the Name of God by Abiodun Alao examines the emergence of a culture of religious violence in post-independence Nigeria, locating it in the forced coming together of disparate ethnic groups under colonial rule.

Expanding the scope to West Africa, author Robyn d’Avignon recounts the region’s centuries-old indigenous gold mining industries and its shared practices, prohibitions, and cosmological engagements in A Ritual Geology.

Suzanne Gordon, Steve Early, and Jasper Craven’s Our Veterans offer a glimpse into the physical, emotional, social, economic, and psychological impact of military service and the problems that veterans face when they return to civilian life. The editors will be participating in numerous events on both the east and west coasts throughout the fall. Check their website for all the details.

Unsettled Borders by Felicity Amaya Schaeffer brings readers across time and space to trace the scientific and technological development of militarized surveillance at the US-Mexico border, while also examining the efforts of Native peoples in continuing ancestral practices in the face of ecological and social violence.

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Spring Awards

We would like to celebrate our many authors who have earned various awards and honors for their books since January 2022. Congratulations to all of them!

Jennifer L. Morgan’s Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic won the Mary Jurich Nickliss Prize in US Women’s and/or Gender History from the Organization of American Historians.

Naminata Diabate’s Naked Agency: Genital Cursing and Biopolitics in Africa and Monica Popescu’s At Penpoint: African Literatures, Postcolonial Studies, and the Cold War were named co-winners of the African Literature Association First Book Award.

Bret Gustafson’s Bolivia in the Age of Gas won the Bryce Wood Book Award from the Latin American Studies Association.

Amalia Leguizamón’s Seeds of Power: Environmental Injustice and Genetically Modified Soybeans in Argentina won the Allan Schnaiberg Outstanding Publication Award from the Environment & Technology Section and the American Sociological Association. Seeds of Power also won the Global Development Studies Book Award from the International Studies Association.

Celeste Day Moore’s Soundscapes of Liberation: African American Music in Postwar France won the Gilbert Chinard Book Prize from the Society for French Historical Studies.

Nicole Charles’s Suspicion: Vaccines, Hesitancy, and the Affective Politics of Protection in Barbados was named co-winner of the Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Book Prize from the Caribbean Studies Association.

Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu’s Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam received the R.R. Hawkins award from the Association of American Publishers, as well as the PROSE Award for Excellence in the Humanities in the World History category.

Anthony B. Pinn’s Interplay of Things: Religion, Art, and Presence Together was received a Gold Medal in the religion category of the Independent Publisher Book Awards.

Max Liboiron’s Pollution Is Colonialism won the Labriola Center American Indian National Book Award from the Labriola Center.

Eric Zolov’s The Last Good Neighbor: Mexico in the Global Sixties won the María Elena Martínez Book Prize in Mexican History from the Conference on Latin American History.

Gil Z. Hochberg’s Becoming Palestine: Toward an Archival Imagination of the Future won the René Wellek Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association.

Joanne Rappaport’s Cowards Don’t Make History: Orlando Fals Borda and the Origins of Participatory Action Research won the Michael Jiménez Award from the Latin American Studies Association Colombia Section.

Eric Weisbard’s Songbooks: The Literature of American Popular Music was been named co-winner of the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, New York University’s Clive Davis Institute and The Pop Conference.

Elizabeth McHenry’s To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice, and African American Authorship won the DeLong Book History Prize from the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing.

Disability Pride Month Reads

Happy Disability Pride Month! As we celebrate the 1990 passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, we’re proud to share some of our recent and forthcoming titles that focus on disability studies and histories. 

Black Disability Politics by Sami Schalk explores how issues of disability have been and continue to be central to Black activism from the 1970s to the present by drawing on rich archives from the Black Panther Party and the National Black Women’s Health Project. It’s available for pre-order now.

In How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind, La Marr Jurelle Bruce ponders the presence of “madness” in black literature, music, and performance since the early twentieth century, showing how artists ranging from Kendrick Lamar to Nina Simone activate madness as content, form, aesthetic, strategy, philosophy, and energy in an enduring black radical tradition.

Todd Carmody’s Work Requirements outlines how disability itself became a tool of social discipline by exploring how the idea that work is inherently meaningful was reinforced and tasked to those who lived on the margins and needed assistance during nineteenth-century America.

Observing that trans studies was founded on a split from and disavowal of madness, illness, and disability, Cameron Awkward-Rich’s The Terrible We argues for and models a trans criticism that works against this disavowal. It can be pre-ordered now.

Long Term weaves LGBTQ and disability studies by using the tension between popular embrace and legalization of same-sex marriage and the queer critique of homonormativity as an opportunity to examine the myriad forms of queer commitment and their durational aspect. The essay collection is written by numerous contributors, edited by Scott Herring and Lee Wallace and includes a preface by E. Patrick Johnson.

Sarah Imhoff’s The Lives of Jessie Sampter tells the story of the queer, disabled, Zionist writer Jessie Sampter (1883-1938), whose body and life did not match typical Zionist ideals—thus serving as an example of the complex relationships between the body, queerness, disability, religion, and nationalism.

Jonathan Sterne offers a sweeping cultural study and theorization of impairment, in which experience is understood from the standpoint of a subject that is not fully able to account for itself in Diminished Faculties.

In On Living with Television, Amy Holdsworth blends media and disability studies by recounting her life with television to trace how the medium shapes everyday activities, our relationships with others, and our sense of time. 

In “Disability Dramaturgies,” a special issue of Theater (52:2), disabled practitioners and scholars explore how strategies of care—long cultivated and practiced by disabled artists and the creative communities around them—might speak to the present moment. This special issue is edited by Madeline Charne and Tom Sellar and will be freely available in full for three months.

New Books in July

No matter where or how you choose to escape the summer heat, we have you covered. Check out the great new titles coming out this July.

For those looking to learn more about international relations and globalization, Neferti X. M. Tadiar’s Remaindered Life offers readers a new vocabulary and framework for examining the relationship between global capitalism and permanent imperial war.

Drawing on ethnographic research in postconflict Peru and Colombia, Kimberly Theidon examines the lives of children born of wartime rape and impact of violence on human and more-than-human lives, bodies, and ecologies in Legacies of War.

Students of the World by Pedro Monaville follows the inspiring footsteps of a generation of Congolese student activists whose work became central to national politics and broader decolonization movements following Congo’s independence.  

Felicity Amaya Schaeffer paints a story of resistance in Unsettled Borders by tracing Native people’s efforts to continue ancestral practices in the face of ecological and social violence at the militarized US-Mexico border.

If you are interested in reading about the relationship between nature and human society, Making Peace with Nature by Eleana J. Kim reveals the inseparable link between biodiversity, scientific practices and geopolitical, capitalist, and ecological dynamics found in South Korea’s Demilitarized Zone.

In the Skin of the City by António Tomás weaves sociology, urban studies, anthropology, and African studies to illustrate the transformation of Luanda’s capital Angola through continual redefinition and negotiation of its physical and social boundaries.

History lovers may like Penny M. Von Eschen’s Paradoxes of Nostalgia, which examines the cold war’s lingering shadows and how nostalgia for stability fuels US-led militarism and the rise of international xenophobia, right wing nationalism, and authoritarianism.

As high school and college history teachers begin to plan for the next school year, A Primer for Teaching Digital History by Jennifer Guiliano offers a practical guide for teachers new to digital history, while providing experienced instructors with the tools to reinvigorate their pedagogy.

Never miss a new book! Sign up for our e-mail newsletters, and get notifications of new titles in your preferred disciplines as well as discounts and other news.

Author Events in July

From symposiums and workshops to musical performances and book parties, Duke Press authors have exciting events scheduled throughout the month of July. We hope you can catch one.

July 1, 7pm CEST:  CRC 1171 Affective Societies Freie Universität Berlin hosts an in-person book party for Omar Kasmani, author of Queer Companions at SAVVY Contemporary, Reinickendorfer Straße 17 in Berlin.

July 2, 1pm EDT: Eric Stanley, author of Atmospheres of Violence, is in conversation in person with Jamie Grace at Red Emma’s Bookstore Coffeehouse in Baltimore. 

July 4, 1:30-7:30 pm, CEST: Omar Kasmani, author of Queer Companions, and Juana María Rodríguez, author of the forthcoming book Puta Life, participate in an in-person workshop on new work in queer studies at Leuphana University of Lüneburg.

July 6, 1pm EDT: Film Quarterly sponsors the “Page Views Live” webinar featuring a conversation between Page Views editor Bruno Guaraná and Lindsey B. Green-Simms about her new book, Queer African Cinemas.

July 7, 1:30-3:00 pm, WEST: António Tomás, author of In the Skin of the City, will speak at the Iberian Conference on African Studies in Lisbon.

July 7, 7pm EDT: Eric Stanley, author of Atmospheres of Violence, joins Eli Coston and Travis Williams for an in-person conversation at Small Friend Records and Books in Richmond.

July 9, 7 pm EDT: David Grubbs will read from his new book Good night the pleasure was ours and also do a solo guitar performance at Unnameable Books in Brooklyn.

July 15, 11 am BST: Affect and Social Media/University of East London present a special Preview Symposium for the forthcoming publication of The Affect Theory Reader II, edited by Gregory Seigworth and Carolyn Pedwell. We hope it will be out in Fall 2023.

July 28, 3 pm AEST: The University of Queensland School of Social Science sponsors an online talk by Sophie Chao, author of In the Shadow of the Palms.