Books in the A John Hope Franklin Center Book series

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.

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.

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

An ethnography of Wall Street, investment bankers and the cultural logics of finance.

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.

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.

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.

Examining the chronic, widespread poverty in India, the world's fourth largest economy, Akhil Gupta theorizes the relation between the state in India and the poor as one of structural violence.

This follow-up volume to our book The Age of the World Target collects interconnected entangled essays of literary and cultural theorist Rey Chow. The essays take up ideas of violence, capture, identification, temporality, sacrifice, and victimhood, engaging with theorists from Derrida and Deleuze to Agamben and Ranciere.

This book examines the career of Tiger Woods, from child star to global sports celebrity. Starn shows that while the scandal following the revelation of Tiger's infidelities was like many similar media-generated scandals of recent years, by examining the way Woods was seen afterwards, we can learn a lot about race and sex in contemporary America.

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.

The prominent political theorist William E. Connolly outlines a political philosophy for the contemporary world: a world whose powers of creative evolution include and exceed the human estate.

Provides an understanding of the vital role of performance in the Americas. This title shows how the repertoire of embodied memory - conveyed in gestures, the spoken word, movement, dance, song, and other performances - offers alternative perspectives to a reconsideration of historical processes of transnational contact.

Looks at the role of photography in the Brazilian and Mexican avant-garde movements of the 1920s and 1930s. This illustrated study introduces the concept of a modernist 'ethos' to illuminate the intertwining of aesthetic innovation and ethical concerns in the work of leading Brazilian and Mexican literary figures.

Argues that we need to understand the appeal and persistence of the outbreak narrative because the stories we tell about disease emergence have consequences. This title presents cautionary tale about how the stories we tell circumscribe our thinking about global health and human interactions as the world imagines the next Great Plague.

Mainstream media and film theory are based on the ways that media technologies operate in Europe and the United States. This work provides a history and ethnography of media in Nigeria, asking what media theory looks like when Nigeria rather than a European nation or the United States is taken as the starting point.

Critical biography of Sessue Hayakawa, a Japanese actor who became a popular silent film star in the U.S., that looks at how Hollywood treated issues of race and nationality in the early twentieth century.

A cultural analysis of Dolly, the cloned sheep.

This visual and textual study of lynchings that took place in California between 1850 and 1935 shows that race-based lynching in the United States reached far beyond the South.

Examines the use of Africa as a figure in the Harlem Renaissance and looks at the place of that movement within a wider Black modernism

A study of the Ellis Island museum, its gift shop, and the Statue of Liberty form the basis of reflections on sex, nation, and immigration

Analyzes cultural adaptation among aboriginal people in the Pacific Northwest, tracing the colonial origins and political implications of ideas about native "authenticity."

Explores the founding discourses of race, hybridity, savagery, and degenercy in the seventeenth and eighteenth century French Caribbean, in particular the way many of these discourses were used to describe French settlers.

A personal and historical account of the particular place of death and funerals in African American life.

Provides an examination of the production, consumption, and circulation of tea. This book reveals how the female tea-pluckers seen in advertisements came to symbolise the heart of colonialism in India. It exposes how this image has distracted from working conditions, low wages, and coercive labour practices enforced by the patronage system.

An unconventional, evocative work of history and a series of moving reflections on memory, modernity, space, and time, all based on the authors interviews with elderly Indonesian intellectuals.

Features a series of conversations about the past, present, and future of anthropological knowledge and practice. This book focuses on how anthropology understands its subject and how ethnographic research projects are designed and carried out.

For many years, kisses were the only sexual acts to be seen in mainstream American movies. This title investigates how sex acts have been represented on screen for more than a century and, just as important, how we have watched and experienced those representations.