Publications
Now showing items 161-225 of 225
Don't Look Away
(2023)
Brianne Cohen considers the role of contemporary art in developing a public commitment to ending structural violence in Europe.
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 ...
Media, Erotics, and Transnational Asia
(2012-10-01)
Drawing on methods and approaches from anthropology, media studies, film theory, and cultural studies, the contributors to Media, Erotics, and Transnational Asia examine how mediated eroticism and sexuality circulating ...
New Countries
(2016-12-09)
Between 1750 and 1870 the world faced transformations marked by the rise of industrial capitalism, the fall of European empires in the Americas, and the rise of nations there. 'New Countries' explores how these events ...
Hydraulic City
(2017-03-10)
In Hydraulic City Nikhil Anand explores the politics of Mumbai's water infrastructure to demonstrate how citizenship emerges through the continuous efforts to control, maintain, and manage the city's water. Through extensive ...
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.
At the Pivot of East and West
(2023)
Michael M. J. Fischer examines documentary filmmaking, literature, and innovative dance from Southeast Asia and Singapore for their para-ethnographic insights into politics, culture, and aesthetics.
Para-States and Medical Science: Making African Global Health
(2015)
In Para-States and Medical Science, P. Wenzel Geissler and the contributors examine how medicine and public health in Africa have been transformed as a result of economic and political liberalization and globalization, ...
Beside You in Time
(2019)
In Beside You in Time Elizabeth Freeman expands biopolitical and queer theory by outlining a temporal view of the long nineteenth century. Drawing on Foucauldian notions of discipline as a regime that yoked the human body ...
The News at the Ends of the Earth
(2019)
From Sir John Franklin's doomed 1845 search for the Northwest Passage to early twentieth-century sprints to the South Pole, polar expeditions produced an extravagant archive of documents that are as varied as they are ...
Energopolitics
(2019)
Between 2009 and 2013 Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer conducted fieldwork in Mexico's Isthmus of Tehuantepec to examine the political, social, and ecological dimensions of moving from fossil fuels to wind power. Their work ...
Worlds Apart
(2011)
Worlds Apart tells of a well-meaning foreign policy establishment often deaf to the voices of everyday people. Its focus is the Bosnian War, but its implications extend to any situation that prompts the consideration of ...
This Was Not Our War
(2004)
"Replacing tyranny with justice, healing deep scars, exchanging hatred for hope . . . the women in This Was Not Our War teach us how."—William Jefferson Clinton This Was Not Our War shares amazing first-person accounts of ...
Rancière's Sentiments
(2018)
In Rancière’s Sentiments Davide Panagia explores Jacques Rancière’s aesthetics of politics as it informs his radical democratic theory of participation. Attending to diverse practices of everyday living and doing—of form, ...
Making Light
(2018)
In Making Light Raymond Knapp traces the musical legacy of German Idealism as it led to the declining prestige of composers such as Haydn while influencing the development of American popular music in the nineteenth century. ...
Get Shown the Light
(2023)
Michael Kaler demonstrates that the Grateful Dead developed a radical new way of playing rock music as a means to unleashing the spiritual and transformative potential of their music.
Political Landscapes
(2015)
In this environmental history of twentieth-century Mexico, Christopher R. Boyer conceptualizes the forests of Chihuahua and Michoacán as political landscapes. Conflicts among local landowners, the federal government and ...
Architecture of Migration
(2024)
Focusing on the Dadaab refugee camps established in 1991 on the Kenya-Somalia border, Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi shows how a refugee camp’s aesthetic and material landscapes—even if born out of emergency—reveal histories, ...
Deathlife
(2024)
Anthony Pinn examines how hip hop artists challenge white supremacist definitions of Blackness by challenging white distinctions between life and death.
Residual Governance
(2023)
Diving in to the history of South African gold and uranium mining, Gabrielle Hecht shows how forms of state governance and the fight for infrastructural and environmental justice tell a global story of racial capitalism ...
Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics Artists Reimagine the Arctic and Antarctic
(2022)
In Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics, Lisa E. Bloom considers the ways artists, filmmakers, and activists engaged with the Arctic and Antarctic to represent our current environmental crises and reconstruct public ...
An Intimate Rebuke
(2018-11-01)
Throughout West African societies, at times of social crises, postmenopausal women — the Mothers — make a ritual appeal to their innate moral authority. The seat of this power is the female genitalia. Wielding branches or ...
Europe (in theory)
(2007-01-01)
Europe (in Theory) is an innovative analysis of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ideas about Europe that continue to inform thinking about culture, politics, and identity today. Drawing on insights from subaltern and ...
Migrants and City-Making
(2018-10-01)
In Migrants and City-Making Ayşe Çağlar and Nina Glick Schiller trace the participation of migrants in the unequal networks of power that connect their lives to regional, national, and global institutions. Grounding their ...
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 ...
Soldier's Paradise
(2024)
Samuel Fury Childs Daly tell the history of how Africa’s postcolonial military regimes tried and ultimately failed to transform their societies into martial utopias.
Judicial Territory
(2024)
Shaina Potts traces how the post-World War II expansion of United States judicial authority in the economies of foreign governments promotes the interests of the American empire abroad.
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, ...
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 ...
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 ...
The Rule of Dons
(2024)
Rivke Jaffe explains how despite Jamaica’s “dons” are associated with crime and violence, they have become figures of political authority and seen as legitimate leaders.
Anthropology, Film Industries, Modularity
(2021)
From Bangladesh and Hong Kong to Iran and South Africa, film industries around the world are rapidly growing at a time when new digital technologies are fundamentally changing how films are made and viewed. Larger film ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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, ...
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 ...
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 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 ...
The Vanguard of the Atlantic World
(2014)
In the nineteenth century, Latin America was home to the majority of the world's democratic republics. Many historians have dismissed these political experiments as corrupt pantomimes of governments of Western Europe and ...
Bring on the Books for Everybody
(2010)
Bring on the Books for Everybody is an engaging assessment of the robust popular literary culture that has developed in the United States during the past two decades. Jim Collins describes how a once solitary and print-based ...
Animating Film Theory
(2014)
Animating Film Theory provides an enriched understanding of the relationship between two of the most unwieldy and unstable organizing concepts in cinema and media studies: animation and film theory. For the most part, ...
Cocaine
(2021)
The contributors to Cocaine analyze the contemporary production, transit, and consumption of cocaine throughout the Americas and the illicit economy's entanglement with local communities. Based on in-depth interviews and ...
Food, Farms & Solidarity
(2013)
The Confédération Paysanne, one of France's largest farmers' unions, has successfully fought against genetically modified organisms (GMOs), but unlike other allied movements, theirs has been led by producers rather than ...
Embodying Black Religions in Africa and Its Diasporas
(2021)
The contributors to Embodying Black Religions in Africa and Its Diasporas investigate the complex intersections between the body, religious expression, and the construction and transformation of social relationships and ...
The Creative Underclass
(2018)
As an undergraduate at Brown University, Tyler Denmead founded New Urban Arts, a nationally recognized arts and humanities program primarily for young people of color in Providence, Rhode Island. Along with its positive ...
Mad Men, Mad World
(2013)
Since the show's debut in 2007, Mad Men has invited viewers to immerse themselves in the lush period settings, ruthless Madison Avenue advertising culture, and arresting characters at the center of its 1960s fictional ...
How Climate Change Comes to Matter
(2014)
During the past decade, skepticism about climate change has frustrated those seeking to engage broad publics and motivate them to take action on the issue. In this innovative ethnography, Candis Callison examines the ...
Decolonizing Native Histories
(2011)
Decolonizing Native Histories is an interdisciplinary collection that grapples with the racial and ethnic politics of knowledge production and indigenous activism in the Americas. It analyzes the relationship of language ...
Queer Korea
(2020)
Since the end of the nineteenth century, the Korean people have faced successive waves of foreign domination, authoritarian regimes, forced dispersal, and divided development. Throughout these turbulent times, “queer” ...
Contemporary African Screen Worlds
(2025)
Contemporary African Screen Worlds brings together a new generation of African screen media scholars who explore and theorize the dynamic, interactive screen worlds that have arisen in contemporary Africa due to dramatic ...
Japonisme and the Birth of Cinema
(2020)
Daisuke Miyao reveals the undetected influence that Japanese art and aesthetics had on early cinema and the pioneering films of the Lumiére brothers.
The Long War on Drugs
(2023)
Since the early twentieth century, the United States has led a global prohibition effort against certain drugs in which production restriction and criminalization are emphasized over prevention and treatment as means to ...
Forest Lost
(2024)
Forest Lostis an ethnography of forest carbon offsets and the wider effort to make the living rainforest valuable in the Brazilian Amazon. Unlike other forest commodities, forest carbon offsets do not involve resource ...
The Prestes Column
(2024)
Jacob Blanc offers a new interpretation of the legendary Prestes Column rebellion, in which a band of rebel officers and soldiers marched 15,000 miles through the vast interior regions of Brazil between 1924 and 1927.