Books in the Theory in Forms series

Achille Mbembe theorizes the genealogy of the contemporary world-one plagued by inequality, militarization, enmity, and a resurgence of racist, fascist, and nationalist forces-and calls for a radical revision of humanism a the means to create a more just society.

Guillaume Lachenal tells the extraordinary story of Dr. Jean Joseph David-a French colonial army doctor who governed an entire region of French Cameroon during World War II-whose failed attempt to create a medical utopia continues to be felt in Cameroon.

Hagar Kotef explores the cultural, political, spatial, and theoretical mechanisms that enable people and nations to settle on the ruins of other people's homes, showing how settler-colonial violence becomes inseparable from one's sense of self.

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 from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Noah Tamarkin illustrates how Lemba people in South Africa give their own meanings to the results of DNA tests that substantiated their ancestral connections to Jews and employ them to manage competing claims of Jewish ethnic and religious identity, African indigeneity, and South African citizenship.

Monica Popescu traces the development of African literature during the second half of the twentieth century, showing how the United States and the Soviet Union's efforts to further their geopolitical and ideological goals influenced literary practices and knowledge production on the African continent.

Ian Baucom puts black studies into conversation with climate change, outlining how the ongoing concerns of critical race, diaspora, and postcolonial studies are crucial to understanding the Anthropocene and vice versa.

Justin Izzo examines how twentieth-century writers, artists, and anthropologists from France, West Africa, and the Caribbean experimented with ethnography and fiction in order to explore new ways of making sense of the complicated legacy of imperialism and to imagine new democratic futures.

Florence Bernault retells the colonial and postcolonial history of present-day Gabon from the late nineteenth century to the present, showing how colonialism shaped French and Gabonese obsessions about fetish, witchcraft, and organ trafficking for ritual murders.

Fadi A. Bardawil explores the hopes for and disenchantments with Marxism-Leninism in the writings and actions of revolutionary intellectuals within the 1960s Arab New Left.

Francoise Verges examines the scandal of white doctors forcefully terminating the pregnancies of thousands of poor women of color on the French island of Reunion during the 1960s, showing how they resulted from the legacies of the racialized violence of slavery and colonialism.

Naminata Diabate explores how the deployment of defiant nakedness by mature women in Africa challenges longstanding assumptions about women's political agency.

Lynn M. Thomas constructs a transnational history of skin lighteners in South Africa and beyond, theorizing skin and skin color as a site for antiracist struggle and lighteners as a technology of visibility that both challenges and entrenches racial and gender hierarchies.

Charles Piot follows a visa broker-known as a "fixer"-in the West African nation of Togo as he helps his clients apply for the U.S. Diversity Visa Lottery program.