Books published by Duke University Press

A theoretical physicist and feminist theorist, Karen Barad elaborates her theory of agential realism, a schema that is at once a new epistemology, ontology, and ethics.

Showing how feminist theory is generated from everyday life and the ordinary experiences of being a feminist, Sara Ahmed highlights the ties between feminist theory and living a life that sustains it by building on legacies of feminist of color scholarship and discussing the figure of the feminist killjoy.

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.

This provocative cultural critique of the imperative to be happy draws on the work of feminist, black, and queer critics showing how happiness is used to justify social oppression.

Cultural theorist Sara Ahmed demonstrates how queer studies can put phenomenology to productive use by analyzing what it means for bodies to be "oriented" in space and time.

Ties together political economy and affect in a time of decreased expectations.

Exploring the question of human agency amidst a world teeming with powerful nonhuman influences, Jane Bennett draws upon Whitman, Thoreau, Caillois, Whitehead, and other poetic writers to link a non-anthropocentric model of self to a democratic pluralism and a syntax and style of writing appropriate to the entangled world in which we live.

In this twentieth anniversary edition of Female Masculinity-which features a new preface by the author-Jack Halberstam uncovers a hidden history of female masculinities, cataloging the diversity of gender expressions among masculine women from nineteenth-century pre-lesbian practices to contemporary drag king performances.

Appearing here in English for the first time, Michel Chion's Sound addresses the philosophical questions that inform our encounters with sound, stimulating our thinking about being open to new sounds and to explore the links between language, technology, culture, and hearing.

A literary critical and historical chronicle of womens culture in the United States from 1830 to the present, by a leading Americanist.

Arlene Davila draws on numerous interviews with artists, dealers, and curators to explore how and why the contemporary international art market continues to overlook, devalue, and marginalize Latinx art and artists.

Arturo Escobar presents a new vision of design theory by arguing for the creation of what he calls "autonomous design"-a design practice aimed at channeling design's world-making capacity toward ways of being and doing that are deeply attuned to justice and the Earth.

Don Kulick and Jens Rydstroem argue that for people with disabilities, being able to explore their sexuality is an issue of fundamental social justice. The authors analyze how Sweden and Denmark engage with the sexuality of people with disabilities; whereas Sweden hinders sexuality, Denmark supports it through the work of third-party sexual helpers.

Bringing together classic and writings of the trailblazing feminist theorist Chandra Talpade Mohanty, this title addresses some of the pressing and complex issues facing contemporary feminism. It offers a sustained critique of globalization and urges a reorientation of transnational feminist practice toward anti-capitalist struggles.

Sara R. Farris examines the calls for gender equality from an unlikely collection of European right-wing nationalist political parties, neoliberals, and some feminist theorists and policymakers, showing how their exploitation of feminist ideals justifies anti-Islam and anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies.

Using the multiple meanings of "wake" to illustrate the ways Black lives are determined by slavery's afterlives, Christina Sharpe weaves personal experiences with readings of literary and artistic representations of Black life and death to examine what survives in the face of insistent violence and the possibilities for resistance.

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

Presents an argument for attention to various dimensions of everyday life and the potential that animates the ordinary. This book shows how ordinary impacts create the subject as a capacity to affect and be affected. It relates the intensities and banalities of common experiences and encounters, and the lingering resonance of passing events.

An introduction to the history, culture, and politics of the worlds largest country, from the earliest written accounts of the Russian people to today.

An interdisciplinary anthology that includes many primary materials never before published in English.

Walter D. Mignolo provides a sweeping examination of how colonialty has operated around the world in its myriad forms between the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries while calling for a decolonial politics that would delink from all forms of Western knowledge.

In Amkoullel, the Fula Boy, Malian writer Amadou Hampate Ba-one of the towering figures in the literature of twentieth-century Francophone Africa-tells in striking detail the story of his youth, which was set against inter-ethnic conflict and the arrival and installation of French colonialism.

Drawing on oral and written testimonies from academics and students who have made complaints about harassment, bullying, and unequal working conditions at universities, Sara Ahmed examines what we can learn about power from those who complain about abuses of power.

Sarah Jane Cervenak traces how Black artists and writers who create alternative spaces for Black people to gather free from those Enlightenment philosophies that presume Black people and land as given to enclosure and ownership.

Annmarie Mol reassess notions of human being and becoming by thinking through the activity of eating, showing how eating is a lively practice bound up with our identities, actions, politics, and senses of belonging in the world.