Rooting Justice in Forest Worlds: A Proposal for the International Day of Forests, a Guest Post by Daniel Ruiz-Serna

“Interaction with forests is not a choice. Only how we interact with them is.”

Forests have been around way before humankind. They master life and thought. How much do they know about time and the stars? Or about geometry and chemistry? What about grief and joy? We should ask them, just as many forest dwellers, human and otherwise, have been doing for millennia. We, humans, still need to learn to hear and understand the forests’ answers. Today, March 21, is the observance of the International Day of Forests, a date instituted by the United Nations only eleven years ago. The theme for 2023, “Forests and Health,” is a reminder of how our collective well-being, our flourishing, is deeply rooted and entangled with the fate of these sylvan landscapes—a fate increasingly compromised on account of rapacious economic systems, predatory policies, volatile infrastructures, and armed interests.

Although most of us would associate forests with wilderness and rural places, forests contribute a great deal to the health of urban populations and industrialized societies. A recent report from the Food and Agriculture Organization made that link very explicit[1]. And a tiny virus that jumped from wild animals to human hosts in 2019 and that has provoked more than 6.5 million deaths worldwide is a reminder of that entangled relationship. Interaction with forests is not a choice. Only how we interact with them is. In fact, it is only by virtue of that interaction that we cultivate our humanness.

Consider the following word: naku. It belongs to the Sapara language, the mother tongue of a small number of individuals that compose the Indigenous Sapara nation living in the Amazon, on Ecuador’s eastern border with Peru. Naku might roughly be translated as forest, that sylvan world that surrounds, welcomes, and nourishes this and the about 400 Indigenous nations that call the Amazon rainforest their home. But, unlike the source of natural resources and environmental services that the FAO describes in the aforementioned report, naku describes a profusion of sentient beings (some of animal and vegetal form, others made of more intangible but not less real components) with whom people share different degrees of intellectual, bodily, and spiritual connections. The world, hold different Sapara leaders, is naku, is forest;[2] and to know the world, with all its ferocity and kindness, is fundamentally to engage in meaningful relations with the myriad beings that forests harbor. One cultivates one’s own humanness in the company of these sylvan worlds, as a guest of forests, not as a master of them.

What happens when these relations are severely hindered by war? That is the question that drove my ethnographic inquiry in Bajo Atrato, a region located in the forestlands located on the northwestern Colombian Pacific coast. I saw how armed conflict is an experience wherein suffering extends beyond the people, provoking a form of collective harm that is embodied by the other-than-human beings and the sentient places that compose the traditional territories of Indigenous and Afro-Colombian peoples. Trees heavily pocked from gunfire; rivers that became floating cemeteries of trees; spiritual protectors of game that decided to keep animals out of the reach of people; snakes capable of injecting into their victims’ wounds a poison that pollutes the land that warlords had transformed into oil palm plantations; evil beings that, after having been released by powerful shamans in their attempt to protect communities from the raids carried out by armies, are now wreaking havoc, drowning people and devouring their noses and their fingers. These are some of the afterlives of war, and they have triggered a kind of ecological violence that cannot be easily tackled with the language of human rights and environmental degradation.

War, just like everyday human life, is always a multispecies effort. War, at least as it has been waged in the forests of Colombia, challenges assumptions regarding selfhood, bodies, the elements of life, and the distinctiveness of humans. And given that armed conflict compromises the web of relations through which people and different sentient beings weave their lives together, it also compels us to explore what justice means and how it can be achieved in regions where colonialism, state violence, and militarism have entangled human and nonhuman lives and shown their shared vulnerability. On the International Day of Forests, we should recall that when forests are harmed, when they run amok because of our destructive actions, not only is human health at stake, but the fate of the world itself is jeopardized, because without forests, our world will not simply be poorer. Our world will not be a world at all.

Daniel Ruiz-Serna is Lecturer of Anthropology at Dawson College, and author of When Forests Run Amok: War and Its Afterlives in Indigenous and Afro-Colombian Territories, published by Duke University Press. Read the introduction to his book for free and save 50% with coupon code SPRING23 now through April 17.

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[1] See FAO. 2020. Forests for human health and well-being – Strengthening the forest–health–nutrition nexus. Forestry Working Paper No. 18. Rome. Available on https://www.fao.org/3/cb1468en/cb1468en.pdf

[2] See Declaración Kamungishi. Available on https://rebelion.org/hogar-de-la-selva-para-el-continuo-renacer/

New Books in March

Spring is fast approaching and what better time to take up a new hobby! May we suggest the new Practices series, edited by Margret Grebowicz, to guide you in your new pursuits. Check out the four titles launching the series and all our other great new books in March.

From the northern Michigan lakeshore where he learned to fish as a child to casting flies in a New Orleans bayou, Christopher Schaberg ponders his lifetime pursuit of the widely mythologized art of Fly-Fishing.

In Running, former college track athlete Lindsey A. Freeman presents a feminist and queer handbook of running in which she considers what it means to run as a visibly queer person while exploring how running puts us in contact with ourselves and others.

McKenzie Wark takes readers into the undisclosed locations of New York’s thriving queer rave scene in Raving, showing how raving to techno is an art and technique at which queer and trans bodies might be particularly adept, but which is for anyone who lets the beat seduce them.

In Juggling, Stewart Sinclair explores the 4,000 year history, culture, and practice of juggling as seen through his life as a juggler, showing how it provides joy as well as a respite from difficulties during hard times. 

In The Latinx Guide to Graduate School Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales and Magdalena L. Barrera provide prospective and current Latinx graduate students in the humanities and social sciences fields with a roadmap for surviving and thriving in advanced degree programs.

Michelle Castañeda lays bare the criminalization of race enacted every day in U.S. immigration courts and detention centers in order to reimagine alternatives to the deportation regimes in Disappearing Rooms.

Rosa-Linda Fregoso examines the contra feminicide movement in Mexico and other feminist efforts to eradicate gender violence in The Force of Witness, theorizing the notion of witness as a force of collectivity and a constellation of multiple social locations and intersectional practices that work together to abolish feminicidal violence.

In Being Dead Otherwise, Anne Allison 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.

Genevieve Alva Clutario traces 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 in Beauty Regimes.

Arseli Dokumacı draws on ethnographic work with differently disabled people whose ingenuity, labor, and artfulness allows them to achieve seemingly simple tasks like lifting a glass of water or taking clothes off in Activist Affordances.

The contributors to Crip Genealogies, edited by Mel Y. Chen, Alison Kafer, Eunjung Kim, and Julie Avril Minich, reorient the field of disability studies by centering the work of transnational feminism, queer of color critique, and trans scholarship and activism. 

In Riotous Deathscapes, Hugo ka Canham examines the practices of amaMpondo people of South Africa to theorize their strategies of resilience and survival in the face of centuries of abandonment, trauma, antiblackness, and death.

Monique Moultrie collects oral histories of Black lesbian religious leaders in the United States to show how their authenticity, social justice awareness, spirituality, and collaborative leadership make them models of womanist ethical leadership in Hidden Histories.

In Envisioning African Intersex, Amanda Lock Swarr debunks the centuries old claim “hermaphroditism” and intersex are disproportionately common among black South Africans by interrogating how contemporary intersex medicine its indivisibility from colonial ideologies and scientific racism.

In Trafficking in Antiblackness, Lyndsey P. Beutin analyzes how campaigns to end human trafficking—often described as “modern-day slavery”—invoke the memory of transatlantic slavery to support political agendas based in antiblackness.

Sherry B. Ortner explores how the nonprofit film production company Brave New Films deploys documentary film’s commitment to truth and realism to cultivate progressive political activism in Screening Social Justice.

Carol Vernallis examines short form audiovisual media—from TikTok mashups to Beyoncé’s Lemonade—to offer techniques for understanding digital media in The Media Swirl.

Arc of Interference, edited by João Biehl and Vincanne Adams, revisits the vital and core insights of medical anthropology in light of contemporary planetary and social crises, showing how the field provides central practices for understanding, interfering in, and refashioning a world full of mounting dilemmas.

Faith Smith examines everyday voices in Jamaica and Trinidad during the “quiet period” between the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion and World War I in the British Caribbean’s history to discern sentiments about empire and nationhood in Strolling in the Ruins.

In The Prescription-to-Prison Pipeline Michelle Smirnova argues that the ongoing opioid drug epidemic is the result of an endless cycle in which suffering is medicalized and drug use is criminalized.

The contributors to The Social Sciences in the Looking Glass, edited by Didier Fassin and George Steinmetz, outline the present transformations of the social sciences, explore their connections with critical humanities, analyze the challenges of alternate paradigms, and interrogate recent endeavors to move beyond the human. 

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World Anthropology Day

Happy World Anthropology Day! Duke University Press joins the American Anthropological Association to celebrate the research and achievements of anthropologists around the world. Here are some of the new and recent titles that showcase the current directions of the field. We hope that you read and recommend these works, and perhaps bring them into your classrooms!

Sophie Chao examines the multispecies entanglements of oil palm plantations in West Papua, Indonesia in In the Shadow of the Palms, showing how Indigenous Marind communities understand and navigate the social, political, and environmental demands of the oil palm plant.

In The Small Matter of Suing Chevron, Suzana Sawyer traces Ecuador’s lawsuit against the Chevron corporation for the environmental devastation resulting from its oil drilling practices, showing how distinct legal truths were relationally composed of, with, and through crude oil.

Eleana J. Kim shows how a closer examination of the Demilitarized Zone area in South Korea reveals that the area’s biodiversity is inseparable from scientific practices and geopolitical, capitalist, and ecological dynamics in Making Peace with Nature.

In Gridiron Capital, Lisa Uperesa charts the cultural, historical, and social dynamics that have made American football so central to Samoan culture.

Robyn d’Avignon tells the history of West Africa’s centuries-old indigenous gold mining industries and its shared practices, prohibitions, and cosmological engagements in A Ritual Geology.

In The People’s Hotel, Katherine Sobering recounts the history of the Hotel Bauen, an iconic luxury hotel in Buenos Aires, detailing its twenty-first-century transformation from a privately owned business into a worker cooperative—one where decisions were made democratically, jobs were rotated, and all members were paid equally.

Harris Solomon takes readers into the trauma ward of one of Mumbai’s busiest public hospitals in Lifelines, narrating the stories of the patients, providers, families, and frontline workers who experience and treat traumatic injury from traffic .

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.

In Hard Luck and Heavy Rain, Joseph C. Russo takes readers into the everyday lives of the rural residents of southeast Texas, showing how their hard-luck stories render the region a mythopoetic landscape that epitomizes the impasse of American late capitalism.

Michael Degani explores how electricity and its piracy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, has become a key site for urban Tanzanians to enact, experience, and debate their social contract with the state in The City Electric.

In Staple Security, Jessica Barnes explores the central role that bread and wheat play in Egyptian daily life as well as the anxieties surrounding the possibility that the nation could run out these staples.

Drawing on fieldwork in a Chinese toxicology lab that studies the influence of toxins on male reproductive and developmental health, Janelle Lamoreaux investigates how epigenetic research conceptualizes and configures environments in Infertile Environments.

In River Life and the Upspring of Nature, Naveeda Khan examines the relationship between nature and culture through the study of the everyday existence of chauras—the people who live on sandbars within the Jamuna River in Bangladesh—to show how nature configures daily life.

Cori Hayden explores how consumer access to generic drugs has transformed public health care and the politics of pharmaceuticals in the global South in The Spectacular Generic.

In Ruderal City, Bettina Stoetzer traces the more-than-human relationships between people, plants, and animals in contemporary Berlin, showing how Berlin’s “urban nature” becomes a key site in which notions of citizenship and belonging as well as racialized, gendered, and classed inequalities become apparent.

Vincanne Adams takes the complex chemical glyphosate—the active ingredient in Roundup and pervasive agricultural herbicide—to explore the formation of contested knowledge in Glyphosate and the Swirl.

In Unknowing and the Everyday, Seema Golestaneh examines how Sufi mystical experience in Iran and the idea of unknowing—the idea that it is ultimately impossible to fully understand the divine—shapes contemporary life.

Check out our full list of anthropology titles, and sign up here to be notified of new books, special discounts, and more. Share your love of anthropology on social media with the hashtag #AnthroDay today.

New Books in February

Stay warm and comfy this February by curling up with a good book. Take a look at our many new titles coming out this month!

In Death’s Futurity, Sampada Aranke analyzes posters, photographs, journalism, and films that focus on the murders of three Black Panther Party members to examine the importance of representations of death to Black liberation.

Lucia Hulsether explores twentieth and twenty-first century movements from fair trade initiatives and microfinance programs to venture fund pledges to invest in racial equity, showing how these movements fail to achieve their goals in Capitalist Humanitarianism.

In Between Banat, Mejdulene Bernard Shomali examines homoeroticism and nonnormative sexualities between Arab women in transnational Arab literature, art, and film to show how women, femmes, and nonbinary people disrupt stereotypical and Orientalist representations of the “Arab woman.”

In Kids on the Street Joseph Plaster explores the informal support networks that enabled abandoned and runaway queer youth to survive in tenderloin districts across the United States. 

In Unkowing and the Everyday, Seema Golestaneh examines how Sufi mystical experience in Iran and the idea of unknowing—the idea that it is ultimately impossible to fully understand the divine—shapes contemporary life.

Catherine E. Walsh examines social struggles for survival in societies deeply marked by the systemic violence of coloniality to identify practices that may cultivate the possibility of living otherwise in Rising Up, Living On.

The contributors to Eating beside Ourselves, edited by Heather Paxson, examine eating as a site of transfer and transformation that create thresholds for human and nonhuman relations.

Drawing on memoir, creative writing, theoretical analysis, and ethnography in Santo Domingo, Havana, and New Jersey, Carlos Ulises Decena examines transnational black Caribbean immigrant queer life and spirit in Circuits of the Sacred.

The contributors to Sovereignty Unhinged, edited by Deborah A. Thomas and Joseph Masco, theorize sovereignty beyond the typical understandings of action, control, and the nation-state, considering it from the perspective of how it is lived and enacted in everyday practice and how it reflects people’s aspirations for new futures.

Spirit in the Land, edited by Trevor Schoonmaker, accompanies the art exhibition of the same name at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. The exhibition, which runs February 16 to July 9, examines today’s urgent ecological concerns from a cultural perspective, demonstrating how intricately our identities and natural environments are intertwined.

When Forests Run Amok by Daniel Ruiz-Serna follows the afterlives of war, showing how they affect the variety of human and nonhuman beings that compose the region of Bajo Atrato: the traditional land of Indigenous and Afro-Colombian peoples.

In Letterpress Revolution, Kathy E. Ferguson explores the importance of anarchist letterpress printers and presses, whose printed materials galvanized anarchist movements across the United States and Great Britain from the late nineteenth century to 1940s.

Examining the 2002 pogrom in which Hindu mobs attached Muslims in the west Indian state of Gujuarat, Moyukh Chatterjee examines how political violence against minorities catalyzes radical changes in law, public culture, and power in Composing Violence.

In The Briny South Nienke Boer examines the legal and literary narratives of enslaved, indentured, and imprisoned individuals crossing the Indian Ocean to analyze the formation of racialized identities in the imperial world. 

In Crip Colony, Sony Coráñez Bolton examines the racial politics of disability, mestizaje, and sexuality in the Philippines, showing how heteronormative, able-bodied, and able-minded mixed-race Filipinos offered a model and path for assimilation into the US empire.

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New Books in January

New year, new books! Check out the great new titles we have coming out in January:

In 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, widescale changes but in the everyday lives, actions, and dreams of individuals.

Chérie N. Rivers shows how colonial systems of normalized violence condition the way we see and, through collaboration with contemporary Congolese artists, imagines ways we might learn to see differently in To Be Nsala’s Daughter.

In Code, Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan traces the shared intellectual and political history of computer scientists, cyberneticists, anthropologists, linguists, and theorists across the humanities as they developed a communication and computational-based theory that grasped culture and society in terms of codes.

Lee Edelman offers a sweeping theorization of queerness as one of the many names for the void around and against which the social order takes shape in Bad Education.

Jennifer Lynn Kelly explores the significance of contemporary solidarity tourism in Palestine/Israel in Invited to Witness, showing how such tourism functions both as political strategy and emergent industry.

In River Life and the Upspring of Nature, Naveeda Khan examines the relationship between nature and culture through the study of the everyday existence of chauras, the people who live on the chars (sandbars) within the Jamuna River in Bangladesh.

Drawing on fieldwork in a Chinese toxicology lab that studies the influence of toxins on male reproductive and developmental health, Janelle Lamoreaux investigates how epigenetic research conceptualizes and configures environments in Infertile Environments.

In On Learning to Heal, Ed Cohen draws on his experience living with Crohn’s disease—a chronic, incurable condition that nearly killed him—to explore how modern Western medicine’s turn from an “art of healing” toward a “science of medicine” impacts all whose lives are touched by illness.

Joseph C. Russo takes readers into the everyday lives of the rural residents of southeast Texas in Hard Luck and Heavy Rain, showing how their hard-luck stories render the region a mythopoetic landscape that epitomizes the impasse of American late capitalism.

Josen Masangkay Diaz interrogates the distinct forms of Filipino American subjectivity that materialized from the relationship between the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship and Cold War US anticommunism in Postcolonial Configurations.

In The Spectacular Generic, Cori Hayden explores how consumer access to generic drugs has transformed public health care and the politics of pharmaceuticals in the global South.

Petrus Liu challenges key premises of classic queer theory and Marxism in The Specter of Materialism, turning to an analysis of the Beijing Consensus—global capitalism’s latest mutation—to develop a new theory of the political economy of sexuality.

In Uncomfortable Television, Hunter Hargraves examines how postmillennial television made its audiences find pleasure through discomfort, showing that televisual unease trains audiences to survive under late capitalism, which demands that individuals accept a certain amount of discomfort, dread, and irritation into their everyday lives.

Lara Langer Cohen excavates the long history of the underground in nineteenth-century US literature in Going Underground, showing how these formations of the underground can inspire new forms of political resistance.

Travelling from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean to South America and the eastern United States, the authors of Vanishing Sands, Orrin H. Pilkey, Norma J. Longo, William J. Neal, Nelson G. Rangel-Buitrago, Keith C. Pilkey, and Hannah L. Hayes, track the devastating environmental, social, and economic impact of legal and illegal sand mining over the past twenty years.

Vincanne Adams takes the complex chemical glyphosate—the active ingredient in Roundup and a pervasive agricultural herbicide—to explore the formation of contested knowledge in Glyphosate and the Swirl.

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New Books in December

As the weather cools and the holiday season approaches, treat yourself to one of our great new December titles!

In On Paradox, Elizabeth S. Anker contends that the faith in the logic of paradox has been the watermark of left intellectualism since the second half of the twentieth century, showing how paradox generates the very exclusions it critiques and undercuts theory’s commitment to social justice.

Piro Rexhepi explores the overlapping postsocialist and postcolonial border regimes in the Balkans that are designed to protect whiteness and exclude Muslim, Roma, and migrant communities in White Enclosures.

The contributors to Turning Archival, edited by Daniel Marshall and Zeb Tortorici, trace the rise of “the archive” as an object of historical desire and study within queer studies and examine how it fosters historical imagination and knowledge.

In Feltness, Stephanie Springgay considers socially engaged art as a practice of research-creation that germinates a radical pedagogy she calls feltness—a set of intimate practices of creating art based on touch, affect, relationality, love, and responsibility.

Ain’t But a Few of Us, edited by Willard Jenkins, presents over two dozen candid dialogues with Black jazz critics and journalists who discuss the barriers to access for Black jazz critics and how they contend with the world of jazz writing dominated by white men.

In Poverty and Wealth in East Africa, Rhiannon Stephens offers a conceptual history of how people living in eastern Uganda have sustained and changed their ways of thinking about wealth and poverty over the past two thousand years.

Examining a wide range of photography from across the global South, the contributors to Cold War Camera, edited by Thy Phu, Erina Duganne, and Andrea Noble, explore the visual mediation of the Cold War, illuminating how photography shaped how it was prosecuted and experienced.

In Memory Construction and the Politics of Time in Neoliberal South Korea, Namhee Lee explores how social memory and neoliberal governance in post-1987 South Korea have disavowed the revolutionary politics of the past.

Through close readings of slave narratives, scrapbooks, travel illustration, documentary film and photography, as well as collage, craft, and sculpture, Jasmine Nichole Cobb explores Black hair as a visual material through which to reimagine the sensual experience of Blackness in New Growth.

The contributors to New World Orderings, edited by Lisa Rofel and Carlos Rojas, demonstrate that China’s twenty-first-century rise occurs not only through economics and state politics, but equally through its relationships and interactions with the Global South.

Focusing on his personal day to day experiences of the “shelter-in-place” period during the first months of the coronavirus pandemic, Alberto Moreiras offers a meditation on intellectual life and the nature of thought under the suspension of time and conditions of isolation in Uncanny Rest.

In Ruderal City, Bettina Stoetzer traces the more-than-human relationships between people, plants, and animals in contemporary Berlin, showing how Berlin’s “urban nature” becomes a key site in which notions of citizenship and belonging as well as racialized, gendered, and classed inequalities become apparent.

Veit Erlmann examines the role of copyright law in post-apartheid South Africa and its impact on the South African music industry in Lion’s Share, showing how copyright is inextricably entwined with race, popular music, postcolonial governance, indigenous rights, and the struggle to create a more equitable society.

Rumya Sree Putcha uses the figure of the Indian classical dancer to explore the complex dynamics of contemporary transnational Indian womanhood in The Dancer′s Voice.

In Feminism in Coalition Liza Taylor examines how U.S. women of color feminists’ coalitional collective politics of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s is an indispensable resource to contemporary political theory, feminist studies, and intersectional social justice activism.

Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart charts the social history of ice in Hawaiʻi in Cooling the Tropics, showing how ice and refrigeration underpinned settler colonial ideas about race, environment, and the senses.

The contributors to Siting Postcoloniality, edited by Pheng Cheah and Caroline S. Hau, reevaluate the notion of the postcolonial by focusing on the Sino-sphere—the region of East and Southeast Asia that has been significantly shaped by relations with China throughout history.

Rupal Oza follows the social life of rape in rural northwest India to reveal how rape is a language through which issues ranging from caste to justice to land are contested in Semiotics of Rape.

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New Books in November

It’s a new month, with a new batch of great releases! Check out the books we have coming out this November.

The contributors to The Pandemic Divide, edited by Gwendolyn L. Wright, Lucas Hubbard, and William A. Darity, analyze and explain the myriad racial disparities that came to the forefront of the COVID-19 pandemic while highlighting what steps could have been taken to mitigate its impact.

In This Flame Within, Manijeh Moradian revises conventional histories of Iranian migration to the United States as a post-1979 phenomenon characterized by the flight of pro-Shah Iranians from the Islamic Republic and recounts the experiences of Iranian foreign students who joined a global movement against US imperialism during the 1960s and 1970s.

When the Smoke Cleared contains poetry written by incarcerated poets in Attica Prison and journal entries and poetry by editor Celes Tisdale, who led poetry workshops following the uprising there in 1971.

Capturing the magnificence and mastery of today’s most accomplished NBA players while paying homage to the devotion of the countless congregants in the global church of pickup basketball, Thomas Beller charts the game’s inexorable gravitational hold on those who love it in Lost in the Game. If you’re in New York City, join us for a writerly discussion of basketball featuring Beller and Alexander Wolff, author of Big Game, Small World, on November 15.

In Surface Relations, Vivian L. Huang retheorizes the stereotype of inscrutability as a queer aesthetic strategy within contemporary Asian American cultural life.

Stephen C. Finley offers a new look at the religious practices and discourses of the Nation of Islam in In and Out of This World, showing how the group and its leaders used multiple religious and esoteric symbols to locate black bodies as sites of religious meaning.

Biko Mandela Gray offers a philosophical eulogy for Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Tamir Rice, Alton Sterling, and Sandra Bland that attests to their irreducible significance in the face of unremitting police brutality in Black Life Matter.

Michael Degani explores how electricity and its piracy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, has become a key site for urban Tanzanians to enact, experience, and debate their social contract with the state in The City Electric.

In The Pivot, Robert J. Bliwise charts the impact of the pandemic at Duke University, as the university tried to manage in an environment of constant challenge and frustrating unpredictability. Bliwise will join a panel of Duke faculty to discuss teaching in the pandemic at the Duke University library on November 7.

Lisa E. Bloom considers the way artists, filmmakers, and activists in the Arctic and Antarctic use their art to illustrate our current environmental crises and to reconstruct public understanding of them in Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics. Bloom will give a talk about her book at Konst/ig Books in Stockholm on November 15.

In Visitation, Jennifer DeClue examines Black feminist avant-garde films from filmmakers including Kara Walker, Tourmaline, and Ja’Tovia Gary that visualize violence suffered by Black women in the United States.

Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore Kerr—two scholars deeply embedded in the HIV response—present the history, present, and future of AIDS through thirteen short conversations in We Are Having This Conversation Now. Juhasz and Kerr are planning an online event with Bureau of General Services, Queer Division on November 15 and an online event hosted by Charis Books on November 17.

Observing that trans studies was founded on a split from and disavowal of madness, illness, and disability, Cameron Awkward-Rich argues for and models a trans criticism that works against this disavowal in The Terrible We.

In Feeling Media, Miryam Sas explores the potentialities and limitations of media theory and media art in Japan, showing how artists and theorists reframe ideas about collectivity, community, and connectivity. Sas will appear in person at Aix Marseille University tomorrow, November 2, to discuss her book.

Lex Morgan Lancaster traces the formal and material innovations of contemporary queer and feminist artists in Dragging Away, showing how they use abstraction as a queering tactic for social and political ends.

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New Books in October

Fall is in full swing, so curl up with a hot drink, a cozy sweater, and a new book! Check out our October releases.

Memories of a Gay Catholic Boyhood is John D’Emilio’s coming-of-age story in which he takes readers from his working-class Bronx neighborhood and Columbia University to New York’s hidden gay male subculture and the political and social upheavals of the late 1960s. You can catch John D’Emilio discussing his book at the Calandra Italian American Institute in New York City later this month.

Exploring her attraction to tininess and the stories of those who share it, Barbara Browning offers a series of charming short essays that plumb what it means to ponder the minuscule in The Miniaturists.

Gavin Butt tells the story of the post-punk scene in the northern English city of Leeds in No Machos or Pop Stars, showing how bands ranging from Gang of Four, Soft Cell, and Delta 5 to Mekons, Scritti Politti, and Fad Gadget drew on their university art school education to push the boundaries of pop music. Butt will launch his book at an exciting event in Leeds this month, featuring performances by Scritti Politti and The Mekons77.

In Fragments of Truth, Naomi Angel analyzes the visual culture of reconciliation and memory in relation to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that Canada established in 2008 to review the history of the Indian Residential School system, a brutal colonial project that killed and injured many Indigenous children.

Drawing on the archives of the Black Panther Party and the National Black Women’s Health Project, Sami Schalk explores how issues of disability have been and continue to be central to Black activism from the 1970s to the present in Black Disability Politics. Schalk launches her book at an event at the Ford Foundation in New York City on October 26.

In Changing the Subject, Srila Roy traces the impact of neoliberalism on gender and sexuality rights movements in the Global South through queer and feminist activism in India. Roy is speaking about her book at The New School and Columbia University later this month.

Filipe Maia offers a theological reflection on hope and the future in the context of financialized capitalism in Trading Futures, arguing that the Christian vocabulary of hope can provide the means to build a future beyond the strictures of capitalism.

Coming from the worlds of cultural anthropology, geography, philosophy, science fiction, poetry, and fine art, editors Sophie Chao, Karin Bolender, and Eben Kirksey and the contributors to this volume of The Promise of Multispecies Justice consider the possibility for multispecies justice and speculate on the forms it would take. The authors have developed a multimedia website where you can learn more about this collection.

In Health in Ruins, César Ernesto Abadía-Barrero assesses neoliberalism’s devastating effects on a public hospital in Colombia and how health care workers resisted defunding.

Jovan Scott Lewis retells the history and afterlife of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre and its century-long legacy of dispossession in Violent Utopia, placing it in a larger historical and social context of widespread anti-Black racism and segregation in Tulsa and beyond.

In a new revised and expanded twentieth anniversary edition of his classic book Big Game, Small World, sportswriter Alexander Wolff travels the globe in search of what basketball can tell us about the world, and what the world can tell us about the game.

AnaLouise Keating provides a comprehensive investigation of the foundational theories, methods, and philosophies of Gloria E. Anzaldúa in The Anzaldúan Theory Handbook.

Nomenclature collects eight volumes of Dionne Brand’s poetry published between 1983 and 2010, as well as a new long poem, the titular Nomenclature for the time being.

In Obeah, Orisa, and Religious Identity in Trinidad, Volume I, Obeah, Tracey E. Hucks traces the history of the repression of Obeah practitioners in colonial Trinidad.

And in Obeah, Orisa, and Religious Identity in Trinidad, Volume II, Orisa, Dianne M. Stewart analyzes the sacred poetics, religious imagination, and African heritage of Yoruba-Orisa devotees in Trinidad from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.

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Author Events in October

This October, check out some of the many opportunities to see our authors at online and in-person events around the world. Be sure to note the local time zone for each event.

October 3, 7 pm EDT: Shannen Dee Williams, author of Subversive Habits, presents an in-person talk based on her book at Mount Saint Mary’s College. Kaplan Family Library and Learning Center, 330 Powell Ave., Newburgh, NY.

October 4, 5 pm  EDT: Neferti X.M. Tadiar, author of Remaindered Life, speaks in-person at Duke University as part of the Gender Studies Now event series, East Duke Parlors, 1304 Campus Drive, Durham, NC.

October 4, 3:30 pm MDT: Joseph Pugliese, author of Biopolitics of the More-Than-Human, gives the 2022 IHR Book Award Lecture online.

October 5, 12pm PDT: Andrea Ballestero and Brit Ross, coeditors of Experimenting with Ethnography, host a virtual event celebrating the first anniversary of their book’s publication. The event features commentary by Marilyn Strathern, Dawn Nafus, and Nikhil Anand, along with a panel of two of the book’s contributors, Patricia Alvarez Astacio and Tone Walford. This event is co-sponsored by the Ethnography Studio, the Levan Institute for the Humanities, and the Center on Science, Technology, and Public Life at USC.

October 5, 4:15 EDT: Heather Davis, author of Plastic Matter, gives a talk called “Ambivalent Repair” hosted by the Program for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality at John Hopkins University.

October 6, 7pm EDT: Kaysha Corinealdi, author of Panama in Black, will be in conversation with Ariana A. Curtis in a virtual event hosted by Cafe con Libros.

October 6, 7 pm PDT: Richard T. Rodríguez, author of A Kiss across the Ocean, reads from his book in-person at Fabulosa Books. 489 Castro Street, San Francisco.

October 10, 6 pm PDT: Elisabeth Anker, author of Ugly Freedoms, speaks in-person at Reed College. Eliot Hall 314, 3203 Southeast Woodstock Boulevard, Portland, OR.

October 11, 11:15 am CEST: Breathing Aesthetics author Jean-Thomas Tremblay lectures in-person about his book at the University of Copenhagen. Læderstræde 20, Lecture Hall, Copenhagen.

October 11, 7 pm PDT: Vicente L. Rafael, author of The Sovereign Trickster, joins Moon-Ho Jung to discuss colonialism, empire, late-stage capitalism, and more at an in-person event at Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 Tenth Avenue, Seattle, WA.

October 12, 12 pm PDT: Suzanne Gordon and Steve Early, authors of Our Veterans, speak in-person at the Rotary Club of Napa. 2840 Soscol Avenue, Napa, CA.

October 12, 12 pm PDT: Elisabeth Anker, author of Ugly Freedoms, speaks in-person at the University of Washington. Petersen Room, 4th floor of Allen Library, 4000 15th Ave NE, Seattle, WA.

October 13, 5 pm EDT: Elisabeth Anker speaks about her book Ugly Freedoms in-person at Whitman College. Kimball Theatre in Hunter Conservatory, 324 Boyer Ave., Walla Walla, WA.

October 17, 5 pm EDT: Matt Brim, author of Poor Queer Studies, gives the annual Queer Theory Lecture in person at Duke University. East Duke Pink Parlor, East Duke Bldg, 112 Campus Dr, Durham, NC.

October 18, 7 pm EDT: NYU’s Department of Performance Studies sponsors a book launch for Barbara Browning’s The Miniaturists. Room 612, PS Studio, NYU, New York City.

October 18, 5 pm EDT: Ricky Rodriguez, author of A Kiss across the Ocean, is in virtual conversation with Alexandra Vazquez, author of The Florida Room, as part of the IASPM-US Popular Music Books in Process series.

October 19, 3:30 pm PDT: Juan Herrera, author of Cartographic Memory, gives an in-person talk entitled “Social Movement Activism and the Production of Space” sponsored by the University of California Berkeley Department of Geography.  575 McCone Hall, Berkeley.

October 20, 4 pm EDT: Elisabeth Anker, author of Ugly Freedoms, speaks in-person at Hamilton College.

October 20, 4-5:30pm EDT: micha cárdenas, author of Poetic Operations, will give an online book talk as part of the Fall 2022 Humanities Forum hosted by UMBC’s Dresher Center for the Humanities.

October 20, 6 pm EDT: John D’Emilio, author of Memories of a Gay Catholic Boyhood, speaks at an in-person event at the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute in New York City. Pre-registration is required.

October 21, 3:30 pm CDT: Darren Byler, author of Terror Capitalism, speaks in-person at the University of Chicago Center for East Asian Studies. Joseph Regenstein Library, Room 122, 1100 E. 57th St. Chicago.

October 24, 6 pm EDT: Srila Roy, author of Changing the Subject, speaks in-person at The New School Sociology Colloquium. Wolff Conference Room, 6 E 16 St, New York City.

October 25, 7 pm GMT: Diana Paton and Matthew Smith, editors of The Jamaica Reader, give an in-person talk at Millennium Gallery, 48 Arundel Gate, Sheffield City Centre, Sheffield. Tickets are £7 in advance and £8 at the door.

October 25-27: The Samuel DuBois Cook Center at Duke University hosts a conference inspired by the book The Pandemic Divide, edited by Gwendolyn L. Wright, Lucas Hubbard, and William A. Darity. Washington Duke Inn & Golf Club 3001 Cameron Boulevard Durham, NC.

October 25, 5-6pm CDT: Jean-Thomas Tremblay, author of Breathing Aesthetics, hosts a virtual event with the Seminary Co-Op Bookstore. They will be joined in conversation by Jennifer Scappatone.

October 26, 11 am EDT: Sami Schalk launches her new book Black Disability Politics at the Ford Foundation, 320 E 43rd St, New York City.

October 27, 4 pm EDT: Vicente L. Rafael, author of The Sovereign Trickster, gives an online lecture entitled “How Revolutionary was the Philippine Revolution?” as part of the Philippines Lecture Series at Harvard University.

October 27, 4:10 pm EDT: Srila Roy, author of Changing the Subject, speaks in-person at Columbia University. 208 Knox Hall, 606 West 122nd Street, New York.

October 27, 5:45 pm CET: Heather Davis, author of Plastic Matter, gives a keynote address titled “Petro-modernity as Pleasure and Threat” at the Swiss Design Network Research Summit in Switzerland.

October 28, 7:30 pm GMT: The bands Scritti Politti and The Mekons77 play at The Brudenell in Leeds to support Gavin Butt’s new book No Machos or Pop Stars. Tickets are £20 in advance.

New Books in September

Summer’s almost over, and the new semester is here! Kick off the academic season with some of our exciting new titles.

Shortly before passing away last summer, Lauren Berlant finished On the Inconvenience of Other People, and Erica Rand has now shepherded the manuscript through the publishing process. In this book Berlant continues to explore our affective engagement with the world, focusing on the encounter with and the desire for the bother of other people and objects, showing that to be driven toward attachment is to desire to be inconvenienced. The book’s experiments in thought and writing cement Berlant’s status as one of the most inventive and influential thinkers of our time.

Maurice O. Wallace explores the sonic character of Martin Luther King Jr.’s voice and how a mixture of architecture, acoustics, sound technology, and gospel influenced it in King’s Vibrato.

In Breaks in the Air, John Klaess tells the story of rap’s emergence on New York City’s airwaves by examining how artists and broadcasters adapted hip hop’s performance culture to radio.

The contributors to Colonial Racial Capitalism, edited by Susan Koshy, Lisa Marie Cacho, Jodi A. Byrd, and Brian Jordan Jefferson, demonstrate the co-constitution and entanglement of slavery and colonialism from the conquest of the New World through industrial capitalism to contemporary financial capitalism.

In Anarchist Prophets, James R. Martel juxtaposes anarchism with what he calls archism—a centralized and hierarchical political form based in ancient Greek and Hebrew prophetic traditions—in order to theorize the potential for a radical democratic politics.

We are excited to announce a revised and updated edition of The Mexico Reader from editors Gilbert M. Joseph and Timothy J. Henderson for your courses and travels. It provides an expansive and comprehensive guide to the many varied histories and cultures of Mexico, from pre-Columbian times to the twenty-first century.

In The People’s Hotel, Katherine Sobering recounts the history of the Hotel Bauen, an iconic luxury hotel in Buenos Aires, detailing its twenty-first-century transformation from a privately owned business into a worker cooperative—one where decisions were made democratically, jobs were rotated, and all members were paid equally.

In Lifelines, Harris Solomon takes readers into the trauma ward of one of Mumbai’s busiest public hospitals, narrating the stories of the patients, providers, families, and frontline workers who experience and treat traumatic injury from traffic .

Kaysha Corinealdi traces the multigenerational activism of Afro-Caribbean Panamanians as they forged diasporic communities in Panama and the United States throughout the twentieth century in Panama in Black.

In Breathing Aesthetics, Jean-Thomas Tremblay examines the prominence of breathing in responses to contemporary crises within literature, film, and performance cultures, showing how breathing has emerged as a medium through which biopolitical and necropolitical forces are increasingly exercised and experienced.

Melding memoir with cultural criticism, A Kiss Across the Ocean by Richard T. Rodríguez examines the relationship between British post-punk musicians like Siouxsie and the Banshees, Adam Ant, and Pet Shop Boys and their Latinx audiences in the United States since the 1980s. If you’re in the LA area, you can catch Rodríguez at Vroman’s Bookstore on September 8 and at a launch party in Santa Ana on September 17.

In Genres of Listening, Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas explains how psychoanalytic listening practices have expanded beyond the clinical setting to influence everyday social interactions in Buenos Aires. Marsilli-Vargas will be doing an online event for the book on September 29.

Jessica Barnes explores the central role that bread and wheat play in Egyptian daily life as well as the anxieties surrounding the possibility that the nation could run out these staples in Staple Security.

In Crisis Vision, Torin Monahan explores a range of critical surveillance art to theorize the racializing dimensions of contemporary surveillance.

In Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, Minh-Ha T. Pham examines the practice of social media users monitoring the fashion market for the appearance of fake knock-off fashion, design theft, and plagiarism, showing how it is critically important to the development of global fashion.

Muriam Haleh Davis provides a history of racial capitalism in Markets of Civilization, showing how Islam became a racial category that shaped economic development in colonial and postcolonial Algeria.

Junot Díaz by José David Saldívar offers a critical examination of Junot Díaz, showing how his influences converged in his fiction and how his work radically changed the course of US Latinx literature and created a new way of viewing the decolonial world.

Drawing from archives and cultural productions from the United States, the Caribbean, and Europe, Translating Blackness by Lorgia García Peña considers Black Latinidad in a global perspective in order to chart colonialism as an ongoing sociopolitical force. García Peña has events at CUNY, NYU, Tufts, and the University of Toledo in September as well as a reading at WordUp Bookstore in New York City.

In Feels Right, Kemi Adeyemi examines how Black queer women use the queer dance floor to articulate relationships to themselves, the Black queer community, and gentrifying neighborhoods in Chicago.

Catherine Grant examines how contemporary feminist artists such as Sharon Hayes, Mary Kelly, Allyson Mitchell, Deirdre Logue, Lubaina Himid, and 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 in A Time of One’s Own.

In Cartographic Memory, Juan Herrera maps 1960s Chicano Movement activism in the Latinx neighborhood of Fruitvale in Oakland, California, showing how activists there constructed a politics forged through productions of space.

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