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 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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New Titles for Hispanic Heritage Month

Hispanic Heritage Month which takes place September 15-October 15, celebrates the generations of Hispanic Americans who have positively influenced and enriched our nation and society.

Today, September 26, is Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s birthday, so it’s a fitting day to share our new titles in Latinx studies, including The Anzaldúan Theory Handbook, by AnaLouise Keating. Through archival research and close readings of Anzaldúa’s unpublished and published writings, Keating offers a biographical-intellectual sketch of Anzaldúa, investigates her writing process and theory-making methods, and excavates her archival manuscripts. The book also includes extensive definitions, genealogies, and explorations of eighteen key Anzaldúan theories as well as an annotated bibliography of hundreds of Anzaldúa’s unpublished manuscripts.

In A Kiss across the Ocean, Richard T. Rodríguez examines the relationship between British post-punk musicians and their Latinx audiences in the United States since the 1980s. Melding memoir with cultural criticism, Rodríguez spotlights a host of influential bands and performers including Siouxsie and the Banshees, Adam Ant, Bauhaus, Soft Cell, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and Pet Shop Boys. 

The contributors to Consuelo Jimenez Underwood: Art, Weaving, Vision, edited by Laura E. Pérez and Ann Marie Leimer, examine the artistic practice of artist 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.

In The Florida Room, Alexandra T. Vazquez listens to the music and history of Miami to explore the city’s sonic cultures and its material and social realities. She transforms the “Florida room”—an actual architectural phenomenon—into a vibrant spatial imaginary for Miami’s musical cultures and everyday life.

Drawing from archives and cultural productions from the United States, the Caribbean, and Europe, in Translating Blackness: Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspective, Lorgia García Peña considers Black Latinidad in a global perspective in order to chart colonialism as an ongoing sociopolitical force.

In Junot Díaz: On the Half-Life of Love, José David Saldívar offers a critical examination of one of the leading American writers of his generation. He explores Díaz’s imaginative work and the diasporic and immigrant world he inhabits, showing how his influences converged in his fiction and how his writing—especially his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao—radically changed the course of US Latinx literature and created a new way of viewing the decolonial world.

Scales of Captivity: Racial Capitalism and the Latinx Child by Mary Pat Brady traces the figure of the captive and cast-off child over 150 years of Latinx/Chicanx literature as a critique of colonial modernity and the forms of confinement that underpin racialized citizenship.

In Unsettled Borders: The Militarized Science of Surveillance on Sacred Indigenous Land,  Felicity Amaya Schaeffer examines the ongoing settler colonial war over the US-Mexico border from the perspective of Apache, Tohono O’odham, and Maya who fight to protect their sacred land. 

Juan Herrera maps 1960s Chicano movement activism in the Latinx neighborhood of Fruitvale in Oakland in Cartographic Memory: Social Movement Activism and the Production of Space. From Chicano-inspired street murals to the architecture of restaurants and shops, Herrera shows how Fruitvale’s communities and spaces serve as a palpable, living record of movement politics and achievements.

In Toward Camden, Mercy Romero writes about the relationships that make and sustain the largely African American and Puerto Rican Cramer Hill neighborhood in New Jersey where she grew up. She resists narratives of the city that are inextricable from crime and decline and witnesses everyday lives lived at the intersection of spatial and Puerto Rican diasporic memory.

In The Lettered Barriada: Workers, Archival Power, and the Politics of Knowledge in Puerto Rico, Jorell A. Meléndez-Badillo tells the story of how a cluster of self-educated workers burst into Puerto Rico’s world of letters and navigated the colonial polity that emerged out of the 1898 US occupation. They did so by asserting themselves as citizens, producers of their own historical narratives, and learned minds.

Check out all our great titles in Chicanx and Latinx studies here.

Introducing the Second Edition of The Mexico Reader

We are very excited that the second edition of our bestselling book The Mexico Reader is now available. In today’s guest post, editors Gilbert M. Joseph and Timothy J. Henderson reflect on the process of editing the new edition and explain what’s new and what’s been removed. We hope you’ll adopt the new edition for your courses or, if you’re traveling to Mexico soon, pick up a copy for yourself.

The first edition of The Mexico Reader was extremely well received by both scholars and the general reading public. In preparing the second edition, we were determined to maintain the elements that accounted for the first edition’s success while making the volume more inclusive and bringing it up to date. We dropped a few of the pieces from the earlier edition, some because they had become dated, others because the cost of the publishing rights had become prohibitive. We shortened some pieces for the same reasons, and also to keep an already hefty volume from becoming morbidly obese. We did new translations of a few pieces because the earlier translations were too expensive and/or because we felt they could be improved upon. And finally, we expanded our commitment to include riveting photos and other visual images, as well as evocative passages from contemporary poems and corridos (ballads).

We also sought to give greater attention to issues of ethnicity, race and gender. These are clearly complex topics everywhere, and certainly—perhaps especially—in Mexico. We therefore added some pieces that we hope will help readers to grasp at least a bit of that complexity. To add to our understanding of Pre-Columbian cosmologies and attitudes towards animals and the environment, we commissioned historian Andrés Bustamante Agudelo and archaeologist Israel Elizalde Méndez’s piece on Aztec Emperor Montezuma’s “Zoo.” A couple of entries (Alexander von Humboldt, Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, and a gallery of images of contemporary mobilizations in the state of Guerrero) consider the contributions of Afro-Mexicans, a group that was largely absent from the first edition. We have also added some pieces that we hope will help readers better appreciate the challenges faced by Mexican—often Indigenous—women and gender non-conforming Mexicans (Gloria Anzaldúa, Marcela García on the movie Roma, Gabriela Cano on a transgender soldier in the Zapatista ranks, Gabriela Soto Laveaga on the career of an extraordinary traditional healer and the critical role that Indigenous midwives and medical practitioners have played during the Covid-19 pandemic). And while the first edition did feature an expansive view of “Mexicanidad”—one that included Mexicans living outside of Mexico as well as non-Mexicans in Mexico—we have added some pieces that expand and deepen that theme. These include an analysis of the mid-19^th-century Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Gloria Anzaldúa on the transgressive and gendered role of language in notions of Mexicanness, Enrique Valencia’s polemical border ballad for the undocumented, “Somos Más Americanos”/ “We Are More American,” and Jorge Ramos’ op ed in the time of COVID, “Should I Die Abroad, Bring Me Back to Mexico.”.

The issue of immigration has long loomed large in relations between Mexico and the United States, and it was by no means neglected in the first edition of the reader. But the second edition was completed almost entirely during the presidency of Donald Trump, whose ferocious nativism—even at a time when Mexican immigration to the United States was near an all-time low—forced some reconsideration of the issue. Trump and his allies charged that the border was in a state of perpetual crisis and that the United States must build a mighty wall to hermetically seal it away from the threats posed by its southern neighbors. While we have strived to present a variety of perspectives in this book, and to avoid trumpeting our own views, we felt it necessary to push back against the torrents of misinformation, disinformation, and extreme rhetoric emanating from the Trump White House. We have, therefore, unapologetically included some pieces that tend to subvert the Trumpist narrative on immigration (Timothy Henderson on historical notions of a “Wetback Invasion” and incisive reporting on immigration and deportation by award-winning journalists Julia Preston and Sonia Nazario).

The first edition of The Mexico Reader appeared in 2002, and much has happened in Mexico since then. We have therefore added a new section titled “From the Perfect Dictatorship to an Imperfect Democracy,” which is introduced by a detailed narrative of Mexican affairs over the last two decades.  When the first edition of The Mexico Reader appeared, the North American Free Trade Agreement had been in effect for less than a decade. As the second edition appears, the agreement is nearly thirty years old and has a new name (the “United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA), but it remains controversial. We have included a pair of sharply conflicting views of the agreement’s impact (by U.S. economist Mark Weisbrot and former Mexican president Vicente Fox). Likewise, in 2002, Mexico’s democracy was in its infancy. The nation’s experiences since that time bear out Wayne Cornelius’s prediction that the transition to a full democratic system would be “protracted and highly uneven,” but his assurance that this transition would “advance steadily to completion” may have been a bit overly optimistic. Corruption in government and law enforcement; a troubled relationship with the rule of law; the increased violence, brazenness, and impunity of criminal cartels, and the sometimes-reckless populism of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the epoch’s most prominent political figure—all have placed tremendous strains on Mexico’s democratizing efforts, as the new selections by John Gibler, Ioan Grillo, López Obrador, and Denise Dresser make painfully clear.  Mexico’s nascent democracy has repeatedly been pushed to—and beyond—its breaking point. The human toll has been horrific, but as we also show, it has not been borne by civil society with resignation.  

We sincerely hope that educators, students, travelers, and general readers will find the new edition of The Mexico Reader engaging and enlightening. Both of us find Mexico to be a complex and endlessly fascinating country, and we are aware that no one book—not even one as corpulent as this one—can really do it justice. Sadly, if folks form their impression of Mexico from its irregular mention in the polarizing U.S. media and political arena, they will inevitably conclude that it is a dark and dangerous place. We have tried to counter that impression by presenting a well-rounded and nuanced picture, providing a new generation of readers with a solid introduction to the country’s many wonders and many challenges.

Gilbert M. Joseph is Farnam Professor Emeritus of History and International Studies at Yale University and author, coauthor, and editor of many books, including Mexico’s Once and Future Revolution: Social Upheaval and the Challenge of Rule since the Late Nineteenth Century, also published by Duke University Press.

Timothy J. Henderson was a Distinguished Research Professor of History at Auburn University at Montgomery before retiring in 2021. He is the author of several books on Mexican history.

The Mexico Reader is available now for 30% off with coupon E22MEXIC.

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 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.

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New Books in June

Summer is almost here! Kick off the new season with some of the great new titles we have coming out in June.

Perfect for vacation reading, Shola von Reinhold’s decadent queer literary debut LOTE immerses readers in the pursuit of aesthetics and beauty, while interrogating the removal and obscuring of Black figures from history.

Examining the reception of evolutionary biology, the 1925 Scopes Trial, and the New Atheist movement of the 2000s, Donovan O. Schaefer theorizes the relationship between thinking and feeling by challenging the conventional wisdom that they are separate in Wild Experiment.

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

Thulani Davis provides a sweeping rethinking of Reconstruction in The Emancipation Circuit, tracing how the four million people newly freed from bondage created political organizations and connections that mobilized communities across the South.

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.

In Discovering Fiction, eminent Chinese novelist Yan Lianke offers insights into his views on literature and realism, the major works that inspired him, and his theories of writing.

The contributors to Grammars of the Urban Ground, edited by Ash Amin and Michele Lancione, develop a new conceptual framework and vocabulary for capturing the complex, ever-shifting, and interactive processes that shape contemporary cities.

In Myriad Intimacies, Lata Mani oscillates between poetry and prose, genre and form, register and voice, and secular and sacred to meditate on the ways in which everyone and everything exists in mutually constitutive interrelations.

Working at the intersection of urban theory, Black studies, and decolonial and Islamic thought, AbdouMaliq Simone offers a new theorization of the interface of the urban and the political in The Surrounds.

Sophie Chao examines the multispecies entanglements of oil palm plantations in West Papua, Indonesia in her new book 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.

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.

Gisela Fosado’s Sale Recommendations

Our Spring Sale continues for two more weeks. If you’re looking for suggestions for what to buy, check out Editorial Director Gisela Fosado’s recommendations. Use coupon SPRING22 to save 50% on these and all in-stock titles.

With the Latin American Studies Association conference wrapped up last weekend, I thought I’d recommend a dozen of our most important brand new books (published within the past 6 months) in Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx studies.

Troillot Remixed: The Michel-Rolph Trouillot Reader edited by Yarimar Bonilla, Greg Beckett, Mayanthi L. Fernando.
“By the sheer force of his example, he invited us to recognize not only the irreducible complexity of the Caribbean as a horizon of inquiry but also the intellectual duty to take up the challenge of reinventing the categories through which we apprehend and engage this complexity. Trouillot Remixed offers us a thematically distilled selection of his work that will provoke us to appreciate his contribution in fresh and unexpected ways.” — David Scott, Columbia University

Planetary Longings by Mary Louise Pratt
“These brilliant essays bring cultural theory to life. Mary Louise Pratt thinks across the Americas, drawing us into a repertoire that every American should grasp. To decolonize the postcolonial legacy, she shows us how to think generously and rigorously as well as politically.” — Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, coeditor of Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene

The Florida Room by Alexandra T. Vazquez
“Alexandra T. Vazquez’s bold, brilliant, and refreshingly unconventional meditatin on sonic placemaking in Florida is fearless and groundbreaking. Compressing the deep, wide, and volatile politics and poetics of the global South into a focused exploration of the “Sunshine State,” The Florida Room reminds readers of what daring, innovative, and challenging theory looks and sounds like. This luminous book opens up our notions of what counts as theory as well as who gets identified as theorists.” — Daphne A. Brooks, author of Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound

Scales of Captivity: Racial Capitalism and the Latinx Child by Mary Pat Brady
“Mary Pat Brady has written a multilayered, bracing study with deep historical roots and startling contemporary resonance. She reanimates questions of citizenship and exclusion at the heart of Chicanx/Latinx studies, while simultaneously uncovering the inextricability of childhood, queer politics, and acts of witnessing.” — Richard T. Rodríguez, author of Next of Kin: The Family in Chicano/a Cultural Politics

Loss and Wonder at the World’s End by Laura A. Ogden
“In its freshness of vision, its first-person mode of presentation, its openheartedness, and its scattering of materials in delicate montages, Loss and Wonder at the World’s End is such fun to read. Laura A. Ogden’s persistent view of history throughout the text as multivalent, dense, and mysterious is wonderful.” — Michael T. Taussig, author of Mastery of Non-mastery in the Age of Meltdown

Suspicion: Vaccines, Hesitancy, and the Affective Politics of Protection in Barbados by Nicole Charles
“Suspicion is a compellingly written and superlatively theorized ethnography of public health, affect, and the persistence of racism in the Caribbean. Nicole Charles uses suspicion to understand the logic behind Black parents’ decisions about whether to give their children vaccines, showing that their decisions are rooted not in ignorance and irrationality but within long histories of racial and sexual injury as well as hierarchies related to race, class, color, education, and authority.” — Deborah A. Thomas, author of Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair

Stories That Make History: Mexico through Elena Poniatowska’s Crónicas by Lynn Stephen
“The fortuitous pairing of perhaps Mexico’s most beloved, enduring, and influential writer with one of its most prolific and accomplished international scholars of social and cultural movements gives rise to an extraordinary collaboration. This engrossing volume will be required reading for anyone seriously interested in Mexican journalism and literature, history and history-making, and the formation of social memory.” — Gilbert M. Joseph, coeditor of The Mexico Reader: History, Culture, Politics

Unintended Lessons of Revolution by Tanalís Padilla
“This book transcends the constricted scope of a narrow institutional study to throw new light on a series of larger questions concerning Mexico’s legacy of revolution, its failed rural policies, and the explosion of unrest among rural teachers and activists. It is a pleasure to read.” — Brooke Larson, author of Trials of Nation Making: Liberalism, Race, and Ethnicity in the Andes, 1810–1910

Workers Like All the Rest of Them: Domestic Service and the Rights of Labor in Twentieth-Century Chile by Elizabeth Q. Hutchison
“Presenting a series of timely, important, and often surprising arguments, Workers Like All the Rest of Them will find an audience among Chileanists, historians of gender and labor, as well as social science scholars interested in domestic work around the world.” — Nara B. Milanich, author of Paternity: The Elusive Quest for the Father

The Lettered Barriada: Workers, Archival Power, and the Politics of Knowledge in Puerto Rico by Jorell A. Meléndez-Badillo
“Jorell A. Meléndez-Badillo’s focus on the ‘politics of knowledge production’ explodes our understanding of the internecine struggles within the early Puerto Rican Left and the politics of race and gender in the construction of radical social movements in Puerto Rico.” — Eileen J. Findlay, author of We Are Left without a Father Here: Masculinity, Domesticity, and Migration in Postwar Puerto Rico

The Nature of Space by Milton Santos, translated by Brenda Baletti
“Milton Santos was one of the most important Black thinkers in the Americas writing in the last four decades, one of the most important Brazilian intellectuals of all time, and one of the most cited and noteworthy geographers in Latin America. This extremely important translation subverts our tendencies to ignore scholarship being produced in the global South and marks a key step in decolonizing thought in US academe.” — Keisha-Khan Y. Perry, author of Black Women against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil

Cocaine: From Coca Fields to the Streets, edited by Enrique Desmond Arias and Thomas Grisaffi
“Through its attention to both the transnational cocaine commodity chain and the locally specific moral economies that have developed along it, Cocaine presents an innovative and urgent perspective. This highly original and engaging volume makes significant contributions to studies of crime, governance, economics, and Latin American studies.” — Rivke Jaffe, author of Concrete Jungles: Urban Pollution and the Politics of Difference in the Caribbean

Finally, if you haven’t checked out the 2022 Bryce Wood Award honorees, now is the perfect time to pick up a copy of the books that won or were honorable mentions for LASA’s top prize, Bret Gustafson’s Bolivia in the Age of Gas and Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador by Thea Riofrancos.  Huge congratulations to Bret and Thea!

New Books in March

Need something to read over Spring Break? Check out our amazing titles coming out this March!

In Bigger Than Life, Mary Ann Doane examines how the scalar operations of cinema, especially those of the close-up, disturb and reconfigure the spectator’s sense of place, space, and orientation. Doane traces the history of scalar transformations from early cinema to the contemporary use of digital technology.

In Poetic Operations, artist and theorist micha cárdenas considers contemporary digital media, artwork, and poetry in order to articulate trans of color strategies for safety and survival. Drawing on decolonial theory, women of color feminism, media theory, and queer of color critique, cárdenas develops a method she calls algorithmic analysis.

In Intimate Eating, Anita Mannur examines how notions of the culinary can create new forms of kinship, intimacy, and social and political belonging. Drawing on critical ethnic studies and queer studies, Mannur traces the ways in which people of color, queer people, and other marginalized subjects create and sustain this belonging through the formation of “intimate eating publics.”

In Warring Visions, Thy Phu explores photography from dispersed communities throughout Vietnam and the Vietnamese diaspora, both during and after the Vietnam War, to complicate narratives of conflict and memory. While the visual history of the Vietnam War has been dominated by American media, Phu turns to photographs circulated by the Vietnamese themselves.

In Familial Undercurrents, Afsaneh Najmabadi uncovers her family’s complex experiences of polygamous marriage to tell a larger story of the transformations of notions of love, marriage, and family life in mid-twentieth-century Iran.

In Racist Love, Leslie Bow traces the ways in which Asian Americans become objects of anxiety and desire. Conceptualizing these feelings as “racist love,” she explores how race is abstracted and then projected onto Asianized objects.

Throughout Atlantis, an Autoanthropology, Nathaniel Tarn captures this multiplicity and reaches for the uncertainties of a life lived in a dizzying array of times, cultures, and environments. Drawing on his practice as an anthropologist, he takes himself as a subject of study, examining the shape of a life devoted to the study of the whole of human culture.

In Workers Like All the Rest of Them, Elizabeth Quay Hutchison recounts the long struggle for domestic workers’ recognition and rights in Chile across the twentieth century. Hutchison traces the legal and social history of domestic workers and their rights, outlining their transition from slavery to servitude.

In Earworm and Event, Eldritch Priest questions the nature of the imagination in contemporary culture through the phenomenon of the earworm. Through a series of meditations on music, animal mentality, abstraction, and metaphor, Priest uses the earworm and the states of daydreaming, mind-wandering, and delusion it can produce to outline how music is something that is felt as thought rather than listened to.

In Scales of Captivity, Mary Pat Brady traces the figure of the captive or cast-off child in Latinx and Chicanx literature and art between chattel slavery’s final years and the mass deportations of the twenty-first century. She shows how Latinx expressive practices expose how every rescaling of economic and military power requires new modalities of capture, new ways to bracket and hedge life.

In Queer African Cinemas, Lindsey B. Green-Simms examines films produced by and about queer Africans in the first two decades of the twenty-first century in an environment of increasing antiqueer violence, efforts to criminalize homosexuality, and other state-sanctioned homophobia.

In Living Worth, Stefan Ecks draws on ethnographic research on depression and antidepressant usage in India to develop a new theory of value. Framing depressive disorder as a problem of value, Ecks traces the myriad ways antidepressants come to have value, from their ability to help make one’s life worth living to the wealth they generate in the multibillion-dollar global pharmaceutical market.

In The Florida Room, Alexandra T. Vazquez listens to the music and history of Miami to offer a lush story of place and people, movement and memory, dispossession and survival. She transforms the “Florida room”—an actual architectural phenomenon—into a vibrant spatial imaginary for Miami’s musical cultures and everyday life.

In Plastic Matter, Heather Davis traces plastic’s relations to geology, media, biology, and race to show how matter itself has come to be understood as pliable, disposable, and consumable. The invention and widespread use of plastic, Davis contends, reveals the dominance of the Western orientation to matter and its assumption that matter exists to be endlessly manipulated and controlled by humans.

In Lesbian Potentiality and Feminist Media in the 1970s, Rox Samer explores how 1970s feminists took up the figure of the lesbian in broad attempts to reimagine gender and sexuality. Samer turns to feminist film, video, and science fiction literature, offering a historiographical concept called “lesbian potentiality”—a way of thinking beyond what the lesbian was, in favor of how the lesbian signified what could have come to be.

The contributors to Reframing Todd Haynes, edited by Theresa L. Geller and Julia Leyda, reassess his work in light of his long-standing feminist commitments and his exceptional career as a director of women’s films. They present multiple perspectives on Haynes’s film and television work and on his role as an artist-activist who draws on academic theorizations of gender and cinema.

In Vulgar Beauty, Mila Zuo offers a new theorization of cinematic feminine beauty by showing how mediated encounters with Chinese film and popular culture stars produce feelings of Chineseness. To illustrate this, Zuo uses the vulgar as an analytic to trace how racial, gendered, and cultural identity is imagined and produced through affect.

Jia Zhangke on Jia Zhangke is an extended dialogue between film scholar Michael Berry and the internationally acclaimed Chinese filmmaker. Drawing from extensive interviews and public talks, this volume offers a portrait of Jia’s life, art, and approach to filmmaking.

In this new edition of Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution, C. L. R. James tells the history of the socialist revolution led by Kwame Nkrumah, the first president and prime minister of Ghana.

In Climatic Media, Yuriko Furuhata traces climate engineering from the early twentieth century to the present, emphasizing the legacies of Japan’s empire building and its Cold War alliance with the United States.

China in the World by Ban Wang traces the shifting concept of the Chinese state from the late nineteenth century to the present, showing how the Confucian notion of tianxia—“all under heaven”—influences China’s dedication to contributing to and exchanging with a common world.

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New Books in November

Fall in love with our new November releases!

In Multisituated, Kaushik Sunder Rajan proposes a reconceptualization of ethnography as a multisituated practice that speaks to the myriad communities of accountability and the demands of doing and teaching anthropology in the twenty-first century.

In See How We Roll, Melinda Hinkson follows the experiences of Nungarrayi, a Warlpiri woman from the central Australian desert, as she struggles to establish a new life for herself in the city of Adelaide.

Tani Barlow’s In the Event of Women outlines the stakes of what she calls “the event of women” in China—the discovery of the truth that women are the reproductive equivalent of men. This book reconsiders Alain Badiou’s concept of the event; particularly the question of whose political moment marks newly discovered truths.

In At the Limits of Cure, Bharat Jayram Venkat draws on historical and ethnographic research on tuberculosis in India, exploring what it means to be cured and what it means for a cure to be partial, temporary, or selectively effective.

The contributors to Cocaine, edited by Enrique Desmond Arias and Thomas Grisaffi, analyze the contemporary production, transit, and consumption of cocaine throughout Latin America and the illicit economy’s entanglement with local communities.

In Disaffected, Xine Yao explores the racial and sexual politics of unfeeling—affects such as coldness, insensitivity and sexual frigidity that are not recognized as feeling—as a means of survival and refusal for people of color and queer people in nineteenth-century America.

In Stories That Make History, Lynn Stephen examines the writing of Elena Poniatowska, showing how it shaped Mexican political discourse and provides a unique way of understanding contemporary Mexican history, politics, and culture.

In The Lettered Barriada, Jorell A. Meléndez-Badillo tells the story of how a cluster of self-educated workers burst into Puerto Rico’s world of letters in the aftermath of the 1898 US occupation, showing how they produced, negotiated, and deployed powerful discourses that eventually shaped Puerto Rico’s national mythology.

Edited by Charlotte Brunsdon, Writings on Media collects Stuart Hall’s most important work on the media, reaffirming reaffirms his stature as an innovative media theorist while demonstrating the continuing relevance of his methods of analysis.

The contributors to Anthropology, Film Industries, Modularity, edited by Ramyar D. Rossoukh and Steven C. Caton, take an anthropological and comparative approach to capturing the diversity and growth of global film industries, bringing into relief common film production practices as well as the local contingencies and deeper cultural realities at work in every film industry.

In Hegemonic Mimicry, Kyung Hyun Kim considers the recent global success of Korean popular culture—the Korean wave of pop music, cinema, and television also known as hallyu—from a transnational and transcultural perspective.

 

Matthew H. Brown’s Indirect Subjects explores the connections between Nigeria’s booming film industry, state television, and colonial legacies that together involve spectators in global capitalism while denying them its privileges.

 

 

In Loss and Wonder at the World’s End, Laura A. Ogden considers a wide range of people, animal, and objects together as a way to catalog the ways environmental change and colonial history are entangled in the Fuegian Archipelago of southernmost Chile and Argentina.

 

The contributors to Decay, edited by Ghassan Hage, attend to the processes and experiences of symbolic and material forms of decay in a variety of sociopolitical contexts across the globe.

 

In Radiation Sounds, Jessica A. Schwartz examines the seventy-five years of Marshallese music developed in response to the United States’ nuclear weapons testing on their homeland, showing how Marshallese singing practices make heard the harmful effects of US nuclear violence.

 

Drawing on literature along with the visual and performing arts, Anthony B. Pinn’s Interplay of Things theorizes religion as a technology for interrogating human experiences understanding the ways in which things are always involved in processes of exchange and interplay.