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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

A lively, engaging ethnography that demonstrates how a volatile politics of race, class, and nation animates the infamously violent struggles over forests in the U.S. Southwest.

A social history of the earthquake-tsunami that struck Lima in October 1746, looking at how people in and beyond Lima understood and reacted to the natural disaster.