Publications
Now showing items 1-100 of 274
Affective Justice
(2019)
Since its inception in 2001, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has been met with resistance by various African states and their leaders, who see the court as a new iteration of colonial violence and control. In Affective ...
The Licit Life of Capitalism
(2019)
The Licit Life of Capitalism is both an account of a specific capitalist project—U.S. oil companies working off the shores of Equatorial Guinea—and a sweeping theorization of more general forms and processes that facilitate ...
Latter-day Screens
(2019)
From Sister Wives and Big Love to The Book of Mormon on Broadway, Mormons and Mormonism are pervasive throughout American popular media. In Latter-day Screens, Brenda R. Weber argues that mediated Mormonism contests and ...
Theft Is Property!
(2020)
Drawing on Indigenous peoples' struggles against settler colonialism, Theft Is Property! reconstructs the concept of dispossession as a means of explaining how shifting configurations of law, property, race, and rights ...
Paris in the Dark
(2020)
In Paris in the Dark Eric Smoodin takes readers on a journey through the streets, cinemas, and theaters of Paris to sketch a comprehensive picture of French film culture during the 1930s and 1940s. Drawing on a wealth of ...
Everything Man
(2019)
From his cavernous voice and unparalleled artistry to his fearless struggle for human rights, Paul Robeson was one of the twentieth century's greatest icons and polymaths. In Everything Man Shana L. Redmond traces Robeson's ...
Ethnography #9
(2019)
As Alan Klima writes in Ethnography #9, “there are other possible starting places than the earnest realism of anthropological discourse as a method of critical thought.” In this experimental ethnography of capitalism, ...
Respawn
(2018)
In Respawn Colin Milburn examines the connections between video games, hacking, and science fiction that galvanize technological activism and technological communities. Discussing a wide range of games, from Portal and ...
Sacred Men
(2019)
Between 1944 and 1949 the United States Navy held a war crimes tribunal that tried Japanese nationals and members of Guam's indigenous Chamorro population who had worked for Japan's military government. In Sacred Men Keith ...
The Race of Sound
(2019)
In The Race of Sound Nina Sun Eidsheim traces the ways in which sonic attributes that might seem natural, such as the voice and its qualities, are socially produced. Eidsheim illustrates how listeners measure race through ...
A Fragile Inheritance
(2019)
In A Fragile Inheritance Saloni Mathur investigates the work of two seminal figures from the global South: the New Delhi-based critic and curator Geeta Kapur and contemporary multimedia artist Vivan Sundaram. Examining ...
Revolution and Disenchantment
(2020)
The Arab Revolutions that began in 2011 reignited interest in the question of theory and practice, imbuing it with a burning political urgency. In Revolution and Disenchantment Fadi A. Bardawil redescribes for our present ...
Land of Necessity
(2009)
Published in cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University.
In Land of Necessity, historians and anthropologists unravel the interplay of the national and transnational ...
Thinking like a Climate
(2020)
In Thinking Like a Climate Hannah Knox confronts the challenges that climate change poses to knowledge production and modern politics. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among policy makers, politicians, activists, scholars, ...
A Language of Song
(2009)
In A Language of Song, Samuel Charters—one of the pioneering collectors of African American music—writes of a trip to West Africa where he found “a gathering of cultures and a continuing history that lay behind the flood ...
Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture
(2010)
In the late nineteenth century, if ethnologists in the United States recognized African American culture, they often perceived it as something to be overcome and left behind. At the same time, they were committed to salvaging ...
The CIA in Ecuador
(2021)
In The CIA in Ecuador, Marc Becker draws on recently released US government surveillance documents on the Ecuadorian left to chart social movement organizing efforts during the 1950s. Emphasizing the competing roles of the ...
Real Folks
(2011)
During the Great Depression, people from across the political spectrum sought to ground American identity in the rural know-how of “the folk.” At the same time, certain writers, filmmakers, and intellectuals combined ...
Virulent Zones
(2020)
Scientists have identified southern China as a likely epicenter for viral pandemics, a place where new viruses emerge out of intensively farmed landscapes and human--animal interactions. In Virulent Zones, Lyle Fearnley ...
A Century of Violence in a Red City
(2016)
In A Century of Violence in a Red City Lesley Gill provides insights into broad trends of global capitalist development, class disenfranchisement and dispossession, and the decline of progressive politics. Gill traces the ...
The Indian Craze
(2009)
In the early twentieth century, Native American baskets, blankets, and bowls could be purchased from department stores, “Indian stores,” dealers, and the U.S. government’s Indian schools. Men and women across the United ...
The Dictator's Seduction
(2009)
The dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, who ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961, was one of the longest and bloodiest in Latin American history. The Dictator’s Seduction is a cultural history ...
The Culture of Japanese Fascism
(2009)
This bold collection of essays demonstrates the necessity of understanding fascism in cultural terms rather than only or even primarily in terms of political structures and events. Contributors from history, literature, ...
Uneven Encounters
(2009)
In Uneven Encounters, Micol Seigel chronicles the exchange of popular culture between Brazil and the United States in the years between the World Wars, and demonstrates how that exchange affected ideas of race and nation ...
The Play in the System
(2020)
What does artistic resistance look like in the twenty-first century, when disruption and dissent have been co-opted and commodified in ways that reinforce dominant systems? In The Play in the System Anna Watkins Fisher ...
Cold War Anthropology
(2016)
In a wide-ranging and in-depth study of the recent history of anthropology, David Price offers a provocative account of the ways anthropology has been influenced by U.S. imperial projects around the world, and by CIA funding ...
Metroimperial Intimacies
(2016)
In Metroimperial Intimacies Victor Román Mendoza combines historical, literary, and archival analysis with queer-of-color critique to show how U.S. imperial incursions into the Philippines enabled the growth of unprecedented ...
Negro Soy Yo
(2016)
In Negro Soy Yo Marc D. Perry explores Cuba’s hip hop movement as a window into the racial complexities of the island’s ongoing transition from revolutionary socialism toward free-market capitalism. Centering on the music ...
Making Refuge
(2016)
How do people whose entire way of life has been destroyed and who witnessed horrible abuses against loved ones construct a new future? How do people who have survived the ravages of war and displacement rebuild their lives ...
Moral Economies of Corruption
(2016)
Nigeria is famous for "419" emails asking recipients for bank account information and for scandals involving the disappearance of billions of dollars from government coffers. Corruption permeates even minor official ...
Diaspora and Trust
(2016)
Diaspora and Trust charts changing Sino-Latin relations at the outset of the 21st century. Combining political-economic analysis with ethnography, the book examines the responses of Cuba and Mexico to China’s growing global ...
Biological Relatives
(2013)
Thirty-five years after its initial success as a form of technologically assisted human reproduction, and five million miracle babies later, in vitro fertilization (IVF) has become a routine procedure worldwide. In Biological ...
Disordering the Establishment
(2020)
In the decades following World War II, France experienced both a period of affluence and a wave of political, artistic, and philosophical discontent that culminated in the countrywide protests of 1968. In Disordering the ...
Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film
(2019)
Although overlooked by most narratives of American cinema history, films made for purposes outside of theatrical entertainment dominated twentieth-century motion picture production. This volume adds to the growing study ...
Technocrats of the Imagination
(2020)
Technocrats of the Imagination traces the rise of collaborative art and technology labs in the U.S. from WWII to the present. Ryan Bishop and John Beck reveal the intertwined histories of the avant-garde art movement and ...
The Sopranos
(2009)
“In its original run on HBO, The Sopranos mattered, and it matters still,” Dana Polan asserts early in this analysis of the hit show, in which he sets out to clarify the impact and importance of the series in both its ...
Native Americans and the Christian Right
(2008)
In Native Americans and the Christian Right, Andrea Smith advances social movement theory beyond simplistic understandings of social-justice activism as either right-wing or left-wing and urges a more open-minded approach ...
The Un-Americans
(2009)
In a bold rethinking of the Hollywood blacklist and McCarthyite America, Joseph Litvak reveals a political regime that did not end with the 1950s or even with the Cold War: a regime of compulsory sycophancy, in which the ...
The Apartment Plot
(2010)
Rethinking the significance of films including Pillow Talk, Rear Window, and The Seven Year Itch, Pamela Robertson Wojcik examines the popularity of the “apartment plot,” her term for stories in which the apartment functions ...
Affective Trajectories
(2020)
Affective Trajectories explores affective and emotional experiences as manifestations of religion in the rapidly shifting conditions of postcolonial African urban spaces and the diaspora. The editors define the term ...
Skin for Skin
(2014)
Since the 1960s, the Native peoples of northeastern Canada, both Inuit and Innu, have experienced epidemics of substance abuse, domestic violence, and youth suicide. Seeking to understand these transformations in the ...
Crash
(2010)
Artists, writers, and filmmakers from Andy Warhol and J. G. Ballard to Alejandro González Iñárritu and Ousmane Sembène have repeatedly used representations of immobilized and crashed cars to wrestle with the conundrums of ...
Ethnopornography
(2020)
Ethnopornography collects essays that both develop and critique the concept that gives the book its name. Ethnopornography, a term first coined by British anthropologist Walter Roth in the late nineteenth century, refers ...
Visualizing Fascism
(2020)
Visualizing Fascism explores various ways of tracing, displaying, viewing, and interacting with fascism, examining fascism as both a global and aesthetic phenomenon during the twentieth century. It emphasizes transnational ...
The Provocative Joan Robinson
(2009)
One of the most original and prolific economists of the twentieth century, Joan Robinson (1903–83) is widely regarded as the most important woman in the history of economic thought. Robinson studied economics at Cambridge ...
The Deliverance of Others
(2008)
The Deliverance of Others is a compelling reappraisal of the idea that narrative literature can expand readers' empathy. What happens if, amid the voluminous influx of otherness facilitated by globalization, we continue ...
Ethnography as Commentary
(2008)
The Internet allows ethnographers to deposit the textual materials on which they base their writing in virtual archives. Electronically archived fieldwork documents can be accessed at any time by the writer, his or her ...
Climate Lyricism
(2021)
Min Hyoung Song articulates a climate change-centered reading practice that foregrounds how literature, poetry, and essays help us to better grapple with our everyday encounters with climate change.
Bodyminds Reimagined
(2018)
Bridging black feminist theory with disability studies, Sami Schalk traces how black women's speculative fiction complicates the understanding of bodyminds in the context of race, gender, and (dis)ability, showing how the ...
Crip Genealogies
(2023)
The contributors to Crip Genealogies reorient the field of disability studies by centering the work of transnational feminism, queer of color critique, and trans scholarship and activism, showing how a white and Western-centric ...
Invited to Witness
(2022)
Jennifer Lynn Kelly explores the significance of contemporary solidarity tourism in Palestine/Israel, showing how such tourism functions both as political strategy and emergent industry.
Probing Arts and Emergent Forms of Life
(2023)
Examining the work of key Southeast and East Asian artists, Michael M. J. Fischer calls for a new anthropology of the arts that attends to the materialities and technologies of the world as it exists today.
Hailing the State
(2023)
Lisa Mitchell explores the historical and contemporary methods of collective assembly that people in India use to hold elected officials and government administrators accountable.
See It Feelingly
(2018)
Ralph James Savarese showcases the voices of autistic readers by sharing their unique insights into literature and their sensory experiences of the world, thereby challenging common claims that people with autism have a ...
Gaza on Screen
(2023)
Contributors to Gaza on Screen, including scholars and Gazan filmmakers, explore the practice, production, and impact of film and videos from and about the Gaza Strip.
Enduring Cancer
(2020)
Dwaipayan Banerjee explores the efforts of Delhi's urban poor to create a livable life with cancer as they negotiate an over-extended health system unequipped to respond to the disease.
Scales of Resistance
(2023)
Maylei Blackwell tells the story of how Indigenous women’s activism in Mexico and California moves in and between local, national, continental, and transborder scales.
Don't Look Away
(2023)
Brianne Cohen considers the role of contemporary art in developing a public commitment to ending structural violence in Europe.
The Surrendered
(2021)
The Surrendered is Peruvian public intellectual José Carlos Agüero's reflections on his parents—who were executed by the state for being Shining Path militants—as well as the legacies of the Peruvian internal armed conflict ...
Elementary Aspects of the Political
(2021)
Prathama Banerjee moves beyond postcolonial and decolonial critiques of European political philosophy to rethink modern conceptions of "the political" from the perspective of Indian and Bengali practices and philosophies ...
Since Time Immemorial
(2023)
Yanna Yannakakis traces the creation of Indigenous custom as a legal category and its deployment as a strategy of resistance to empire in colonial Mexico.
Sex Scene
(2014)
Sex Scene suggests that what we have come to understand as the sexual revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s was actually a media revolution. In lively essays, the contributors examine a range of mass media—film and ...
The Pandemic Divide
(2022)
As COVID-19 made inroads in the United States in spring 2020, a common refrain rose above the din: “We’re all in this together.” However, the full picture was far more complicated—and far less equitable. Black and Latinx ...
History from the Bottom Up & The Inside Out
(2017)
History from the Bottom Up and the Inside Out James R. Barrett rethinks the boundaries of American social and labor history by investigating the ways in which working-class, radical, and immigrant people's personal lives ...
Life Interrupted
(2014)
Life Interrupted introduces us to survivors of human trafficking who are struggling to get by and make homes for themselves in the United States. Having spent nearly a decade following the lives of formerly trafficked men ...
From Russia with Code
(2019)
While Russian computer scientists are notorious for their interference in the 2016 US presidential election, they are ubiquitous on Wall Street and coveted by international IT firms and often perceive themselves as the ...
Indigenous Textual Cultures
(2020)
As modern European empires expanded, written language was critical to articulations of imperial authority and justifications of conquest. For imperial administrators and thinkers, the non-literacy of “native” societies ...
Buy It Now
(2012)
Buy It Now, Michele White examines eBay and its emphasis on community and social norms, revealing the cultural assumptions about gender, race, and sexuality that are reinforced throughout the site. She shows how instructional ...
Futureproof
(2020)
Security is a defining characteristic of our age and the driving force behind the management of collective political, economic, and social life. Directed at safeguarding society against future peril, security is often ...
Work Requirements
(2022)
Throughout the history of the United States, work-based social welfare practices have served to affirm the moral value of work. In the late nineteenth century this representational project came to be mediated by the printed ...
Ten Books that Shaped the British Empire
(2014)
Combining insights from imperial studies and transnational book history, this provocative collection opens new vistas on both fields through ten accessible essays, each devoted to a single book. Contributors revisit ...
Paradoxes of Nostalgia
(2022)
Penny M. Von Eschen offers a sweeping examination of the afterlife of the cold war and its lingering shadows, showing how a nostalgia and longing for stability fuels US-led militarism and the rise of xenophobic right-wing ...
A Vital Frontier
(2023)
Andrea Muehlebach follows activists across Europe as they struggle to preserve water as a commons and public good in the face of privatization.
Obeah, Orisa, and Religious Identity in Trinidad, Volume I, Obeah
(2022)
Tracey E. Hucks traces the history of the repression of Obeah practitioners in colonial Trinidad.
Envisioning African Intersex
(2023)
Amanda Lock Swarr debunks the centuries old claim “hermaphroditism” and intersex are disproportionately common among black South Africans by interrogating how contemporary intersex medicine its indivisibility from colonial ...
Grammars of the Urban Ground
(2022)
The contributors to Grammars of the Urban Ground develop a new conceptual framework and vocabulary for capturing the complex, ever-shifting, and interactive processes that shape contemporary cities.
Eating beside Ourselves
(2023)
The contributors to Eating beside Ourselves examine eating as a site of transfer and transformation that create thresholds for human and nonhuman relations.
Black Disability Politics
(2022)
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.
Disappearing Rooms
(2023)
Michelle Castañeda lays bare the criminalization of race enacted every day in U.S. immigration courts and detention centers in order to reimagine alternatives to the deportation regimes.
Mendings
(2023)
Megan Sweeney tells an intimate story about family, selfhood, and love and loss, showing how her lifetime practice of sewing and mending clothes becomes a way of living.
China in the World
(2022)
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 ...
Living and Dying in São Paulo
(2025)
Jeffrey Lesser focuses on São Paulo’s Bom Retiro neighborhood to examine the competing visions of wellbeing in Brazil among racialized immigrants and policymakers and health officials.
The Fine Art of Persuasion
(2025)
Gennifer Weisenfeld examines the evolution of Japanese advertising graphic design from the early 1900s through the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, a pivotal design event that rebranded Japan on the world stage.
Artery
(2025)
Austin Zeiderman unearths how the fraught past and future of Colombia’s Magdalena River articulate the mirrored hierarchies of race and environment to explore global entanglements of race, nature, and capital.
The Inner Life of Race
(2024)
In The Inner Life of Race, Leerom Medovoi turns away from conventional views of race as a politics of the phenotypical body to theorize race instead as a politics of populational threat. Racism’s genealogy, argues Medovoi, ...
Migrants and Migration in Modern North America
(2011-09-15)
Presenting an unprecedented, integrated view of migration in North America, this interdisciplinary collection of essays illuminates the movements of people within and between Canada, the Caribbean, Mexico, and the United ...
An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti
(2013-01-04)
As the first complete narrative in English of the Haitian Revolution, Marcus Rainsford's An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti was highly influential in establishing nineteenth-century world opinion of this ...
Empire's Garden
(2011-07-13)
In the mid-nineteenth century the British created a landscape of tea plantations in the northeastern Indian region of Assam. The tea industry filled imperial coffers and gave the colonial state a chance to transform a ...
Culture of Class
(2012-04-26)
In an innovative cultural history of Argentine movies and radio in the decades before Peronism, Matthew B. Karush demonstrates that competition with jazz and Hollywood cinema shaped Argentina's domestic cultural production ...
All in the Family
(2012-06-04)
Western political philosophers since Plato have used the family as a model for harmonious political and social relations. Yet, far from being an uncontentious domain for shared interests and common values, the family is ...
Cooking Data
(2018-03-30)
COOKING DATA is an ethnographic study of how demographic data is collected, handled, processed, and manipulated by fieldworkers, researchers, policymakers, and NGOs in Malawi and internationally. Crystal Biruk’s fieldwork ...
Chinese Surplus
(2018-01-05)
In CHINESE SURPLUS Ari Heinrich dissects the figure of the medically or artistically commodified body in Chinese culture and popular science. Providing a history of how bodies have been thought and seen to mirror the nation, ...
Unthinking Mastery
(2017-12-22)
In UNTHINKING MASTERY Julietta Singh demonstrates how pervasive the concept of mastery has been to modern politics, even to anti-colonial thought, which rejects forms of political domination and subjection. Anti-colonial ...
Tango Lessons
(2014-01-21)
From its earliest manifestations on the street corners of nineteenth-century Buenos Aires to its ascendancy as a global cultural form, tango has continually exceeded the confines of the dance floor or the music hall. In ...
Soldiers' Stories
(2011-07-21)
From Skirts Ahoy! to M*A*S*H, Private Benjamin, G.I. Jane, and JAG, films and television shows have grappled with the notion that military women are contradictory figures, unable to be both effective soldiers and appropriately ...
A Nation on the Line
(2018-03-23)
A NATION ON THE LINE is an ethnographic study of the call center industry in the Philippines and of its workforce composed of young, largely college-educated Filipinos. Padios merges several lines of inquiry about Pacific ...
Return
(2013-09-13)
Since the late 1990s, Asian nations have increasingly encouraged, facilitated, or demanded the return of emigrants. In this interdisciplinary collection, distinguished scholars from countries around the world explore the ...
Making the Most of Mess
(2013-03-07)
In Making the Most of Mess, Emery Roe emphasizes that policy messes cannot be avoided or cleaned up; they need to be managed. He shows how policymakers and other professionals can learn these necessary skills from control ...
Monumental Matters
(2011-09-07)
Built in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, India’s Mughal monuments—including majestic forts, mosques, palaces, and tombs, such as the Taj Mahal—are world renowned for their grandeur and association with the Mughals, ...
Odd Couples
(2012-04-11)
Odd Couples examines friendships between gay men and straight women, and also between lesbians and straight men, and shows how these "intersectional" friendships serve as a barometer for shifting social norms, particularly ...