We’re delighted to announce that the inaugural issue of QTR: A Journal of Trans and Queer Studies in Religion is now available! QTR is an open-access journal, published twice a year, dedicated to expanding both scholarly and public knowledge about the rich and complex connections between religion, gender, and sexuality.
Co-edited by Joseph Marchal and Melissa Wilcox, the journal features cutting-edge scholarship at the intersections of queer studies, trans studies, and religious studies, and aims to expand the depth and reach of what trans and queer studies in religion is becoming. QTR demonstrates the relevance of various modes of gender, sexuality, and embodiment wherever one might find religious people, practices, or ideas.
In the inaugural issue of QTR, contributors examine the current state of the queer and trans religious studies field. Through methodological reflections and leading-edge research, the authors cover topics that include queer world-making among Orthodox Jewish gays and lesbians in Israel; the religious lives of Latina and Black trans activists Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson; the importance of engaging trans and queer studies in religion during a time of anti-trans and anti-queer legislation; nonsecular transfeminism in Turkey; and the role of Jewishness in John Boswell’s historiography. Vew the full Table of Contents.
“It’s true that some have used religious argumentation to target queer and trans people, and that many are traumatized by religious narratives. But it’s equally true that many queer and trans people are religious and find community and affirmation in religions.
There’s an assumption that to be religious is to be hostile to thinking about gender and sexuality and specifically thinking about queer and trans people. It’s just so clear that when we think about gender and sexuality and religion, the world needs better, more informed knowledge about those things.”
Dr. Joseph Marchal
In Conversation The editors, along with contributors to issue 1:1, participated in a conversation hosted by the American Academy of Religion on May 14th. View the conversation in it’s entirety, here.
The Editors Joseph Marchal (co-editor) is a professor of religious studies and women’s and gender studies at Ball State University. They are the author, editor, or co-editor of more than ten books, including Appalling Bodies: Queer Figures Before and After Paul’s Letters and Sexual Disorientations: Queer Temporalities, Affects, Theologies; and two forthcoming collections: on trans biblical interpretation, and the politics of respectability in Black, womanist, and queer approaches. They are also currently serving as chair of the Society of Biblical Literature’s first-ever committee for LGBTIQ+ scholars and scholarship.
Melissa Wilcox (co-editor) is a professor and Holstein Family and Community Chair of Religious Studies at the University of California, Riverside, where Dr. Wilcox organizes the annual UCR Conference on Queer and Trans Studies in Religion and the Holstein Dissertation Fellowship. A specialist in the study of gender, sexuality, and religion in the Global North/Global West, Dr. Wilcox has authored or edited seven books, including most recently Queer Nuns: Religion, Activism, and Serious Parody; Queer Religiosities: An Introduction to Queer and Transgender Studies in Religion; and Religion, the Body, and Sexuality. Dr. Wilcox’s current research is on religion and spirituality as sites of healing in queer, trans, and BIPOC leather and kink communities.
Articles in QTR are published under a Creative Commons license (BY-NC-ND) and are open immediately upon publication. Authors are not charged any fees for publication and retain copyright and full publishing rights without restrictions in their articles. Readers may use the full text of articles as described in the license.
QTR would like to give special thanks to Duke University Press and the Henry Luce Foundation for making the publishing and production of this journal possible.
Lauren M. E. Goodlad is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University as well as a faculty affiliate of the Center for Cultural Analysis (CCA), the Rutgers British Studies Center, and the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science. Goodlad is the editor and co-founder of the new online-only interdisciplinary journal Critical AI published by Duke University Press. The premiere issue, a special double issue titled Data Worlds, was published in October 2023. A new issue, on the topic of large language models, “generative AI,” and the rise of chatbots will be out this spring.
“AI”, or artificial intelligence, seems to have become a catchall term for almost any computer-assisted task. Briefly, how would you describe Critical AI‘s definition of AI amidst this diverse usage?
The best answer I can give to that question is in the editor’s introduction to the journal, “Humanities in the Loop.”
But for now, let’s just say that “AI” has never been rigorously defined as an object of research, not least because “intelligence” is and continues to be an under-defined term—for humans as well as machines. Since the term’s coinage in the 1950s, “AI” research has cycled through several approaches but—and this is crucial—until recently most people understood it largely as a theme for science fiction. That’s one of the reasons that the marketers of commercial “AI” love the term: it’s magical, “woo,” and conveys the sense that ordinary people shouldn’t even bother trying to figure it out.
In actuality, the type of “AI” we’re hearing most about—chatbots for generating text and images—is nothing like the sentient robots of science fiction. Once you recognize that you’re contending with the statistical modeling of huge data sets (much of it scraped from the internet without consent, and often in violation of copyright) you’re positioned to grasp the technology with relative ease. Though it’s not magic, it is powerful sleight of hand through which the creative and communicative expression of the many—centuries of it in fact!—becomes a lucrative and exploitable resource for the few.
This introduces complexities of a very different kind; the kind that humanists and interpretive social scientists are accustomed to tackling: a concentrated political economy dominated by monopolistic corporations; a flawed technology that was not designed for its current usages (and relies on low-paid human labor at industrial scale to make it look smarter than it is); tremendous and non-transparent expenditure of resources; proprietary claims for scientific progress that cannot be verified by independent experts; and unaccountable biases and harms to individuals and the public at large. All of it obscured by self-aggrandizing hype and relentless lobbying.
You are a professor of English with a specialty in 19th-century and Victorian literature. Yet you have devoted many years to studying automated technologies and are now leading a Rutgers initiative on AI topics while editing Critical AI. What is it about AI that you find compelling?
So many things! First, as a scholar of Victorian literature and culture, I’m aware that some of the statistical mainstays that drive today’s technologies were developed more than a hundred years ago. In fact, what’s today called linear regression (what readers might think of as bell curve thinking) originated in the work of Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin who was interested in “anthropometrics” and coined the term “eugenics.”
I also love interdisciplinary challenges. Bringing together folks in computer science, media studies, information science, digital humanities, and technology policy and law–with their colleagues in humanities, arts, and social science disciplines is always intellectually stimulating. But at this particular conjuncture, it’s also become socially urgent. What is conventionally thought of as a “two cultures” divide between “STEM” and interpretive disciplines has become a serious obstacle to important cultural, political, aesthetic, and onto-epistemic understanding. We need to get past it!
When people consider “artificial intelligence” they may not immediately think of art, literature, and philosophy. What are the critical contributions that humanities scholars can bring to issues of AI?
To me that question seems almost limitless–and very important as well.
AI enthusiasts like to think of the technology as “disruptive” but seldom specify the goals behind that disruption. A critical perspective encourages thinking about whose goals count and why. Instead of assuming a new technology always ushers in “progress,” a critical perspective asks: progress of what kind, for whom, and with what effects? Very often, AI systems are sold as “solutions,” but without any clear sense of the problem they are aiming to solve.
The fact is that what goes by the name of AI is usually data-driven predictive analytics. Many of these predictions are notoriously biased against particular people, places, cultures, or practices that are either excluded from or marginalized in the datasets used for training AI systems: a classic case of “garbage in/garbage out.”
But it’s also important to know that the systems behind “generative AI”—usually large language models—were designed to provide best guesses for simple tasks in machine transcription and translation; they are probabilistic mimics that have no mechanism for providing an accurate account of the source of their own information (which is buried deep in the training data), and no human-like understanding of what the images and texts that they’re generating mean to a human viewer or reader.
Chatbots are not search engines (that provide accurate links to their data sources) and are not curated databases (that are designed to deliver accurate information). The “kluges” that combine chatbots with search engines are poorly engineered for reasons we discuss in the upcoming issue of Critical AI.
Interdisciplinary attention to these problems enables us to better articulate what’s at stake in exploiting human annotators to make these systems seem more “Intelligent.” Clearly, the corporations vying to develop and dominate what they perceive as a hugely lucrative market are exploiting the ELIZA effect: the long-recognized tendency for people to project human status onto any system capable of outputting what seems to be sensible language—a problem first observed in the 1960s! So the point isn’t that some bots might be useful for some tasks; it’s that these demonstrably deceptive and unreliable bots are now deliberately marketed as more intelligent, useful, and human-like than they actually are.
As the many recent Super Bowl ads touting the possibilities of AI demonstrated, “AI” is now, broadly speaking, a technology that is being developed by private for-profit companies and packaged as if it were beneficial to most people.
Yes, that’s exactly right. And there’s very little downside (at least so far) to hyping these products. Last December when Google unveiled its new Gemini model, the company had to admit almost immediately that their demo had been heavily edited.
The Super Bowl ad that stuck out for me was for Microsoft’s Copilot (the rebranded name for what had been the Bing search engine combined with a version of ChatGPT). I’d call this a clear case of what Lauren Berlant called “cruel optimism.” The commercial depicts a diverse group of mostly young people who appear demoralized and even angry. They’re venting against some anonymous “they” that has been trying to con them into believing they are powerless. But now Microsoft Copilot unlocks the key to their aspirations and empowers them in a flash.
There are two issues here: the cruel optimism comes in the form of a techno-utopian Silicon Valley libertarianism that is by now at least 30 years old and has coincided with massive inequality as well as the steady “enshittification” of the internet.
But what’s even more insidious is how Microsoft’s product helps these disaffected people to show up the anonymous “they” that has been duping them. Their message to these unnamed enemies is “just watch me” while this magical technology writes code for me, storyboards my movie, or helps me through school. Never mind that in the real world using Copilot for your projects expands the intensive surveillance and data theft that made generative AI training sets possible in the first place. And never mind that the use cases showcased in the commercial are misleading about what the technology can actually do while saying nothing at all about harms and social implications.
Recently Critical AI’s social media account posted a series of questions in response to OpenAI’s release of a demo of their new text-to-video application. The model looks to be impressive and may possibly be as impressive as it looks: but who is it actually going to empower?
Certainly not the performers, photographers, and producers who may lose work as some clients decide to make do with synthetic content. Definitely, not people whose actual creative labor was scraped without consent and in potential violation of copyright. Or the human crowdworkers who annotate these datasets under exploitative conditions. Or the under-represented groups and cultures that generative systems regularly stereotype and distort. And certainly not the planet which has to bear the added burdens that this computation-intensive technology requires in terms of the energy, water, and extraction of materials necessary for chip-making, training, and running models. This is a topic that ecocritic Mél Hogan writes about beautifully in the next issue of Critical AI.
What makes Critical AI different from other academic journals?
I think a lot of journals talk about interdisciplinarity but that in practice it’s a hard row to hoe.
Our hope is that somewhat like ecocriticism, critical AI studies—which includes developing and diffusing the critical AI literacies necessary for educating students and the public at large—will cross beyond a wide range of humanities disciplines, important though those are. We hope the journal and the field will also cross that especially challenging division between researchers who are principally involved in designing, engineering, and implementing AI-adjacent technologies, and those who have the training necessary to gauge its social, cultural, and environmental impacts.
Katrina Sluis and Nicolas Malevé’s essay on the machine vision pipeline is one of several in the current issue in which a co-author team integrates in-depth theoretical, historical, and technological knowledge. We also love the interview with Sasha Costanza-Chock, whose work on design justice principles has been a major inspiration for us. The interview included questions from scholars of policy, computer science, and engineering. And we’re thrilled to conclude the issue with a manifesto from Brooklyn artist Sam Lavigne. I should add that I learned a tremendous amount from working with Kath Bode on the introduction: even though we can both be characterized as “humanists” in some sense, her research more directly engages computational data practices and her theoretical influences differ from mine—but in productive ways.
I’m excited that the next issue features an even wider range of contributors on the topic of large language models, generative AI, and the rise of chatbots. The issue opens with a conversation that took place between novelist Ted Chiang and computational linguist Emily M. Bender and includes an array of thinkpieces and full-length essays from fields including data science, law, digital humanities, translation studies, and sociolinguistics. I co-authored the introduction with two computer scientists who specialize in Natural Language Processing. One of those co-authors, editorial collective member Matthew Stone is also my colleague at Rutgers and we discovered–literally in the act of writing the introduction–that his years of experience in the field pointed toward a modern history of chatbots that had not yet been told and perhaps would not have been told for some time had not a computer scientist sat down to write something with a cultural historian and critical theorist.
Read Critical AI online at Duke University Press. Subscribe: $30 individuals | $20 students (two issues annually) Sign up for issue alerts Follow on social media @CriticalAI Visit the editor’s website: criticalai.org
We’re thrilled to announce that the premiere issue of Critical AI, a special double issue titled Data Worlds, is now available!
By focusing on structures of power, social relations, and discourses that have consolidated around data-driven machine learning technologies (AI), contributors to this inaugural issue, co-edited by Katherine Bode and Lauren M. E. Goodlad, seek to theorize, historicize, and open pathways for rethinking data worlds and the communities of practice that study and develop them. In this way the authors set the stage for interdisciplinary and critical AI studies, broadly conceived, at a time when data is the substrate and condition of machine learning’s predictive patterns and yet is seldom featured in public-facing discourse on “artificial intelligence.”
Data Worldsis available, paywall-free, for a limited time!
“The shared aspiration behind Critical AI is to shape and activate conversations—in academia, industry, policymaking, media, and the public at large—at a time when the rapid commercialization and deployment of “AI” products coincide with, and sometimes abet, environmental crisis, economic precarity, political authoritarianism, intensifying harms, and an already disconcerting concentration of wealth and power.”
Lauren M. E. Goodlad, editor
Critical AI is an interdisciplinary journal based at Rutgers University’s Center for Cultural Analysis and is affiliated with the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science. Though rooted in critical methods from the humanities, social sciences, and arts, Critical AI works with technologists, scientists, economists, policy makers, health professionals, teachers, community organizers, legislators, lawyers, and entrepreneurs who share the understanding of interdisciplinary research as a powerful tool for building and implementing accountable technology in the public interest. Open to ideas born of new interdisciplinary alliances; design justice principles; antiracist, decolonial, and democratic political practices; community-centered collaborations; experimental pedagogies; and public outreach, Critical AI functions as a space for the production of knowledge, research endeavors, teaching ideas, and public humanities that bears on the ongoing history of machine technologies and their place in the world. Critical AI is legible to scholars across disciplines as well as to interested readers outside the academy. At the broadest level, its mission is to widen circles of scholarship across disciplines and national borders, encourage informed citizens, and activate a democratic culture through which the research, implementation, and evaluation of digital technologies is undertaken in dialogue with scholars, students, citizens, communities, policy makers, and the public at large.
Critical AI is an online-only journal, edited and co-founded by Lauren M. E. Goodlad at Rutgers University, and published twice annually by Duke University Press.
Read online at Duke University Press. Subscribe: $30 individuals | $20 students Sign up for issue alerts. Follow on social media @CriticalAI Visit the editor’s website: criticalai.org.
We’re thrilled to announce that the premiere issue of Monsoon: Journal of the Indian Ocean Rim is now available digitally and in print. The new interdisciplinary journal publishes original and innovative research that analyzes the cultural, historical, and political circumstances that have shaped—and currently affect—the coastal societies of the Indian Ocean.
All articles from Volume 1, Number 1, are freely available through September 30, 2023!
Monsoon, published in collaboration with The Africa Institute, is co-edited by Jeremy Prestholdt, Professor of History, University of California, San Diego; and Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf, Professor of Anthropology, Georgetown University of Qatar. The interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed, biannual journal aims to raise the profile of IO studies, bringing research on the societies, arts, and cultures of the basin to a wide audience. It also fills a glaring gap in the extant literature on the IO region, which has sidelined African and Gulf societies. With an eye cast toward expanding knowledge on the connections forged across diverse environments and cultures, the journal is a critical resource among, and in conversation with, other journals on oceanic and global studies.
Since its founding in 1941, the Journal of Asian Studies has been recognized as the most authoritative and prestigious publication in the field of Asian studies. The journal publishes the very best empirical and multidisciplinary work on Asia, spanning the arts, history, literature, the social sciences, and cultural studies. Experts around the world turn to the journal for the latest in-depth scholarship on Asia’s past and present, for its extensive book reviews, and for its state-of-the-field essays on established and emerging topics. With coverage reaching from South and Southeast Asia to China, Inner Asia, and Northeast Asia, the Journal of Asian Studies welcomes broad comparative and transnational studies as well as essays emanating from fine-grained historical, cultural, political, or literary research and interpretation.
The journal is edited by Joseph Alter (University of Pittsburgh, USA), who shares in the issue’s Editorial Foreword, “Changing publishers is an opportunity to reflect on the past, take critical stock of the present, and anticipate future directions in the field. I look forward to the many ways in which this new partnership will allow the journal to build creatively and imaginatively on the foundation of academic excellence established over the preceding seventy years by a community of scholars dedicated to the mission of the Association for Asian Studies.”
A New Look
“To commemorate the journal’s transition to DUP, I worked closely with the editorial office to create a new cover that would convey that this is a journal anchored in a tradition of scholarship but also oriented toward the future,” said Heather Hensley, Duke University Press Journals Designer. “The newly designed Journal of Asian Studies cover incorporates bold typography and colors supported by four rotating background textures. These textures each represent the four area groupings of the book reviews: China and Inner Asia, Northeast Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia.”
“We are excited to collaborate with the Association for Asian Studies to publish the Journal of Asian Studies, which is an excellent addition to our strong list of books and journals in Asian studies. The Press will provide strong publishing services, partnership management, and a history of growing and sustaining journals. Our partnership with AAS will benefit both the Association and the Press—two mission-driven organizations,” said Rob Dilworth, Duke University Press Journals Director.
Sign up for issue alerts and have the latest content from the Journal of Asian Studies sent directly to your inbox!
The Association for Asian Studies (AAS) offers membership to individuals (students, professors, independent scholars, and anyone interested in the study of Asia). Memberships are managed by the AAS and include subscriptions to the Journal of Asian Studies. Join or renew at www.asianstudies.org.
About
The Association for Asian Studies(AAS) is a scholarly, nonpolitical, nonprofit professional association open to anyone interested in Asia and the study of Asia. With approximately 5,500 members worldwide, representing all the regions and countries of Asia and all academic disciplines, the AAS is the largest organization of its kind.
Duke University Press is a nonprofit scholarly publisher with a focus on the humanities, the social sciences, and mathematics. The Press publishes approximately 140 books annually and around 60 journals, as well as offering several electronic collections and open-access publishing initiatives.
The Journal of Asian Studies (JAS), the flagship journal of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS), will join the Duke University Press journals program in 2023.
“There are many reasons we have decided to partner with Duke, but one of the most important is Duke’s prioritizing of the academic contributions of its journals. Duke’s academic credentials are stellar, with a global reputation for publishing top scholarly work in the arts, sciences, and humanities. Duke’s prioritizing of the academic market and readership melds with the association’s and journal’s mission of service to the field,” said Hilary Finchum-Sung, Executive Director of the AAS.
Since its founding in 1941, the Journal of Asian Studies has been recognized as the most authoritative and prestigious publication in the field of Asian studies. The journal publishes the very best empirical and multidisciplinary work on Asia, spanning the arts, history, literature, the social sciences, and cultural studies. Experts around the world turn to the journal for the latest in-depth scholarship on Asia’s past and present, for its extensive book reviews, and for its state-of-the-field essays on established and emerging topics. With coverage reaching from South and Southeast Asia to China, Inner Asia, and Northeast Asia, the Journal of Asian Studies welcomes broad comparative and transnational studies as well as essays emanating from fine-grained historical, cultural, political, or literary research and interpretation.
The journal is edited by Joseph Alter (University of Pittsburgh, USA), who said, “Asia’s ever increasing economic and political significance in the twenty-first century highlights the growing importance of Asian studies as a field of critical research. Globalization and rapid change, involving new cultural formations and the creative interconnectedness of people, places, and things, continues to stimulate incredibly innovative scholarship. I look forward to building on a legacy of excellence combined with Duke’s outstanding reputation to position the Journal of Asian Studies on the cutting edge of research that will redefine how we understand Asia’s past, present and future.”
“The Journal of Asian Studies has long been a critically important resource for those working in the field of Asian studies and is an exciting addition to our journals program. We are pleased to partner with the AAS to advance the journal’s mission and bring its scholarship to readers around the globe,” said Dean Smith, Director of Duke University Press.
The Association for Asian Studies(AAS) is a scholarly, nonpolitical, nonprofit professional association open to anyone interested in Asia and the study of Asia. With approximately 5,500 members worldwide, representing all the regions and countries of Asia and all academic disciplines, the AAS is the largest organization of its kind.
Duke University Press is a nonprofit scholarly publisher with a focus on the humanities, the social sciences, and mathematics. The Press publishes approximately 140 books annually and around 60 journals, as well as offering several electronic collections and open-access publishing initiatives.
We wish we could be meeting authors and readers at the MLA 2021 Annual Convention.We know that many of you look forward to stocking up on new titles at special discounts at our conferences, so we are pleased to offer a 30% discount on all in-stock books and journal issues with coupon code MLA21 until February 15, 2021. View our Literature and Literary Studies catalog below for a complete list of all our newest titles in the field and across disciplines. You can also explore all of our books and journals in literature and literary studies on dukeupress.edu.
Executive Editor Courtney Berger
Executive Editor Courtney Berger and Senior Executive Editor Ken Wissoker each have a welcome message for fellow MLA attendees, and their recommendations for the latest titles.
Most Januarys I end up with a new piece of winter weather gear—lined boots, a long down coat, thicker socks–prompted by the almost inevitable polar vortex or winter storm that accompanies the MLA conference. This year, I won’t be acquiring any new gear (except for maybe some new headphones). Instead, like many of you, I’ll be attending MLA from the warmth of my home in my reliable work-from-home uniform of sweatpants and cardigan. It has been a year since I’ve traveled to an academic conference, and I miss it. I miss meeting you all in person and getting updates on your writing and on your lives. I miss hearing about exciting new projects. And I especially miss showing off our new books and talking with folks in the book exhibit.
Nonetheless, I am excited for this year’s MLA program, which is truly stellar, and for all of the new books that we will be bringing to you in our virtual exhibit, also stellar. You will be seeing me at a lot of panels (a luxury that I’m not usually afforded during in-person conferences). Some of the ones on my list include: Black Feminist Poethics; Dissident Black Feminisms, Black Feminist Dissidence; Editing and Inclusivity; Quare Souths; and Scaling Trans Studies. (My Friday schedule is booked from morning ‘til night. How about yours?)
And now for some of my top picks from this year’s new books:
Riché Richardson’s Emancipation’s Daughters
Riché Richardson’s Emancipation’s Daughters: Reimagining Black Femininity and the National Body is a book for our moment. Richardson focuses on the ways that black women leaders in the U.S.—including Rosa Parks, Mary McLeod Bethune, Condoleezza Rice, and Michelle Obama–have expanded and challenged exclusionary and white-centered notions of the “national body” and political subjectivity. The book also features some of Richardson’s own quilts created as homage to the Black women leaders she discusses in the book.
In Infamous Bodies: Early Black Women’s Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights, Samantha Pinto also focuses on iconic Black women, in this case women from the 18th and 19th centuries, such as Sally Hemings, Sarah Baartman, and Sarah Forbes Bonetta. Through her provocative and engaging reading of these women’s lives and continued legacies, Pinto reveals how the forms of pleasure, risk, violence, desire, and ambition that these women experienced can offer powerful models of political embodiment and vulnerability that remain relevant today.
Race and Performance After Repetition by Soyica Diggs Colbert, Douglas A. Jones, and Shane Vogel
In Counterlife: Slavery after Resistance and Social Death Christopher Freeburg asks: how can we think about the lives and artwork created by and about slaves outside of a framework of resistance and freedom? Taking up a diverse set of texts—from Black spirituals to “The Boondocks”—Counterlife is a rich and provocative book that shows how enslaved Africans created meaning through artistic creativity, religious practice, and historical awareness both separate from and alongside concerns about freedom.
Race and Performance After Repetition, edited by Soyica Diggs Colbert, Douglas A. Jones, and Shane Vogel, brings together an impressive set of contributors to focus on the relationship between race and temporality in performance, pushing past the trope of “repetition” to consider pauses, rests, gaps, afterlives, and other forms of temporal interruption. There will also be a panel featuring some of the contributors on Sunday morning.
Christopher Chitty’s Sexual Hegemony
Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the Rise of the World System is Christopher Chitty’s posthumous first book, and it’s an incredibly expansive project, taking on 500 years of the history of capitalism and male-male sexual relations in Europe and the U.S. Revising Foucault’s account of the production of modern sexuality, Chitty offers a Marxist history of male homosexuality, focusing on the policing of male-male sexual relations as integral to the consolidation of capital and private property under the bourgeoisie. A must read for folks working in queer studies.
Influx & Efflux: Writing Up with Walt Whitman–Jane Bennett’s long-awaited follow up to Vibrant Matter–will be of special interest to folks in literary studies. Bennett turns to Whitman to help answer the question: What kind of “I” inhabits a world of vibrant matter? In Whitman she finds a model for what she calls a “processual self” – a self constantly in formation, susceptible to influence but also exerting an influence of its own. Bennett’s thinking is expansive and generous; it’s a pleasure to read this book.
Ken Quashie’s Black Aliveness, Or a Poetics of Being
Finally, even though it’s not out yet, I can’t resist pointing you towards Kevin Quashie’s Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being, the latest installment in the Black Outdoors series edited by Sarah Cervenak and J. Kameron Carter. Quashie builds his book on a seemingly simple prompt: “Imagine a black world.” Not a world where the racial logics of antiblackness are inverted, but rather a world where blackness is totality, where black being and the rightness of black being is assumed rather than justified. It’s a beautiful book that draws upon a wealth of Black feminist writing and poetry, from Audre Lorde to Nicky Finney. Quashie’s writing is magnetic. This one makes my must-read list for 2021.
There are plenty more books for you to browse at our virtual exhibit and on our website. Make sure to use the code MLA21 to receive a 30% discount (through March 31st).
If you would like to contact me about a project, you can send me an email, or you can submit your proposal through our online portal. I look forward to seeing folks in person next January (and perhaps sporting a new bit of winter weather gear as well).
Senior Executive Editor Ken Wissoker
I share with Courtney the sense of loss of our meeting in person. I’ve been attending MLA every year for many years, back to the last millennium. I was the rare person attached to the old conference schedule, when it met between Christmas and New Year’s. I loved arriving in a city in that liminal time, seeing chosen family, and finding a moment for a little sale shopping, a restaurant I had only read about. But even after the meeting moved to the start of January, I still love it. The chance to see so many people in such a short time. Panels that even now can crystalize a political or theoretical moment. I can remember lots of less-than-great things too – the hidden book display in Boston a mile away from everything – but overall, I’m missing all of you and the event.
So here we are with MLA, the play-at-home game. A consolation prize. Are we consoled? This is my fourth or fifth online conference and I’m here to say it’s not the same. Entering a room for a panel and finding a friend and joining them beats seeing a person on the same Zoom session every time. Still, we can sit where we want and get coffee without waiting in a twenty-minute line. We can actually see the speaker up close. Hang on to their words — or slip out to another session without being too conspicuous.
Like seeing people in person, seeing books in person is hard to replace. I’m in this business, so generally arrive at MLA thinking I’m up on things, but when I go around the book exhibit, there are always great books I hadn’t heard about. I love being in the booth and showing people the new titles – my old bookseller self — that will interest them. So here are a few exciting recommendations from our list. There are many – that’s why we have two booths – but here are some highlights!
Sara Ahmed’s next book Complaint! will be out in the fall, but if you haven’t read its companion, What’s the Use? it is a must. Like all of Sara’s book’s it is filled with perfectly described scenes and with clarifying sentences one recalls over and over again in meetings and in everyday life.
Speaking of meetings, Katina Rogers’ Putting the Humanities to Work asks what we need to do to rethink the literature PhD process from curriculum to department websites to hiring, that would make a program work better for all involved. Matt Brim’s Poor Queer Studies talks about the difference in teaching and theorizing in rich institutions and poor ones and asks how queer theory would have been different if it had developed in and for poorer students and communities of color.
Two books that would be headliners on any list came out this past fall. Jack Halberstam’s Wild Things and José Estaban Munoz’s long-awaited final book, The Sense of Brown. Both books are events. Halberstam is thinking through more wild and open relations to nature and sexuality. The book takes up more literature than his recent books, so will be especially good to think with for readers at MLA. José Munoz’s book has been in process for two decades. The thinking and writing runs parallel to Cruising Utopia and the book contains his important work on Brown feeling and the sense of Brown, Latinx performance, and much more.
It’s a particularly strong season for Latinx and Americas work in general. I’m very excited about former MLA President Diana Taylor’s ¡Presente! bringing her thinking about performance and politics together in some sparkling new ways. Also Arlene Dávila’s Latinx Art which made several end-of-year best lists, Ren Ellis Neyra, The Cry of the Senses, – just out – and the fabulous Keith Haring’s Line by Ricardo Montez. Finally, don’t miss Jillian Hernandez’s Aesthetics of Excess.
Equally important have been a series of books in Black Studies. R.A. Judy’s long-awaited Sentient Flesh, Ashon Crawley’s moving and beautiful The Lonely Letters, Shana Redmond’s capacious and necessary Everything Man, each brilliant thinking and creative critical writing. Don’t neglect Brigitte Fielder’s acclaimed Relative Races. And just out, Anthony Reed’s beautiful Soundworks on the interplay of Black poetry and experimental musics.
This is the moment for combining writing which takes chance with thinking that also moves in new directions. We have started a whole series Writing Matters! edited by Lauren Berlant, Saidiya Hartman, Erica Rand, and Katie Stewart, to give such books a home. The first, Diary of a Detour by Lesley Stern, came out earlier in the fall, and we have just published Erica Rand’s new The Small Book of Hip Checks: On Queer Gender, Race, and Writing.
Amitava Kumar’s challenge to academic writers, Every Day I Write the Book, is perfect for thinking about opening up one’s own writing. And if one wanted an example of someone who did this with wonderful skill and ease, read Emily Lordi’s transformative, The Meaning of Soul – both a fabulous book on soul music and an exemplary book of prose style.
One thing I love about our list and this moment – perhaps similar to the combination of theory and writing — is when thinkers take two conversations and think them together. Erin Mannings’s For a Pragmatics of the Useless, thinks Black theory in relation to neurodiversity, while Ian Baucom’s History 4° Celsius puts the history of the Black Atlantic with the Anthropocene.
We’ve just released Kaiama Glover’s fantastic A Regarded Self, her reading of unruly and uncontainable Caribbean women figures. Glover also translated Françoise Vergès, The Wombs of Women, which we published in the spring. Laura Kang’s Traffic in Asian Women takes these colonial, imperial, and feminist concerns to the Pacific mapping their complexities in a crucial way. Laura Doyle’s Inter-imperiality: Vying Empires, Gendered Labor, and the Literary Arts of Alliance is also just out, with its own longue durée account of empire and literature. Finally – in a true last but not least –if you don’t have Achille Mbembe’s crucial and all-too-timely, Necropolitics, it is the book needed now, for all the good and bad reasons.
There are lots more I could mention, but I hope you get a chance to virtually look around, and that we can wave across some Zoom room.
You can hear about DUP books or join DUP authors in panelsonline through the MLA conference portal, including:
And flip to page 29 of our literature & literary studies catalog to peruse exciting new issues from journals such as Comparative Literature, English Language Notes, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Modern Language Quarterly, Transgender Studies Quarterly, and many more. Don’t forget that journal issues are eligible for the 30% conference discount with code MLA21!
If you were hoping to connect with Courtney Berger, Ken Wissoker, or another of our editors about your book project at MLA, please reach out to them by email. See our editors’ specialties and contact information here and our online submissions guidelines here.
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