Books in the A John Hope Franklin Center Book series

An exploration of the visual meaning of the color line and racial politics through the analysis of archival photographs collected by W.E.B. Du Bois and exhibited at the Paris Exposition of 1900

The award-winning anthropologist Sherry B. Ortner draws on her longstanding interest in theories of cultural practice to rethink key concepts of culture, agency, and subjectivity.

In Duress Ann Laura Stoler traces how imperial formations and colonialism's presence shape current inequities around the globe by examining Israel's colonial practices, the United State's imperial practices, the recent rise of the French right wing, and affect's importance to governance.

In Can Politics Be Thought?-published in French in 1985 and appearing here in English for the first time-Alain Badiou offers his most forceful and systematic analysis of the crisis of Marxism in which he argues for the continuation of Marxist politics.

The preeminent political theorist Etienne Balibar examines what he calls "equaliberty," the fundamental tension in modern democracies between equality and liberty, humanity and citizenship.

Theorizes the political agency of things and natural phenomena-such as trash, food, weather, and electricity-to examine how non-human elements exert force on human politics and social relations.

Gayle Rubin laid the foundation for queer theory as a graduate student at Michigan in the early 70s with the essay The Traffic in Women, which was followed a decade later by an equally influential essay, Thinking Sex. This volume collects her essays covering topics ranging from BDSM to feminist debates on pornography and sex to lesbian and gay history.

The Problem with Work develops a Marxist feminist critique of the structures and ethics of work, as well as a perspective for imagining a life no longer subordinated to them.

Offers a historical guide through the metamorphoses and tumultuous debates that have defined literary study in recent decades, as viewed by one of critical theory's most astute thinkers.

Proposes "low theory" as a means of recovering ways of being and forms of knowledge not legitimized by existing systems and institutions

Eminent critic Achille Mbembe reevaluates history and racism, offering a capacious genealogy of the category of Blackness-from the Atlantic slave trade to the present-to show how the conjoining of the biological fiction of race with definitions of Blackness have been and continue to be used to uphold oppression.