Books published by Duke University Press

La Marr Jurelle Bruce ponders the presence of "madness" in black literature, music, and performance since the early twentieth century, showing how artist ranging from Kendrick Lamar and Lauryn Hill to Nina Simone and Dave Chappelle activate madness as content, form, aesthetic, strategy, philosophy, and energy in an enduring black radical tradition.

Thea Riofrancos explores the politics of extraction, energy, and infrastructure in contemporary Ecuador in order to understand how resource dependency becomes a dilemma for leftist governments and movements alike.

Mack Hagood outlines how noise-cancelling headphones, tinnitus maskers, white noise machines, nature-sound mobile apps, and other forms of media give users the ability to create sonic safe spaces for themselves, showing how the desire to block certain sounds are informed by ideologies of race, gender, and class.

Exploring a wide range of sonic practices, from birdsong in the Marshall Islands to Zulu ululation, the contributors reorient the field of sound studies toward the global South in order to rethink and decolonize modes of understanding and listening to sound.

Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas traces how parenting practices among urban elites in Brazil and Puerto Rico preserve and reproduce white privilege and economic inequality.

Reflecting on the experience, philosophy, and practice of Latin American indigenous and Afro-descendant activist-intellectuals who mobilize to defend their territories from large-scale extraction, Arturo Escobar shows how the key to addressing planetary crises is the creation of the pluriverse-a world of many epistemological and ontological worlds.

Bonnie Ruberg presents twenty interviews with twenty-two queer video developers whose radical, experimental, vibrant, and deeply queer work is driving a momentous shift in the medium of video games.

Patricia Hill Collins offers a set of analytical tools for those wishing to develop intersectionality's capability to theorize social inequality in ways that would facilitate social change.

Benjamin Piekut tells the story of the English experimental rock band Henry Cow and how it linked its improvisational musical aesthetic with a collectivist, progressive politics.

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.

In Mafalda: A Social and Political History of Latin America's Global Comic Isabella Cosse examines the history, political commentary, and influence of the world-famous comic character Mafalda from her Argentine origins in 1964 to her global reach in the 1990s.

Cara New Daggett traces the genealogy of the idea of energy from the Industrial Revolution to the present, showing how it has informed fossil fuel imperialism, the governance of work, and our relationship to the Earth.

The Hundreds-composed of pieces one hundred or multiples of one hundred words long-is Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart's collaborative experimental writing project in which they strive toward sensing and capturing the resonances that operate at the ordinary level of everyday experience.

Drawing on numerous examples from popular culture, Sarah Banet-Weiser examines the relationship between popular feminism and popular misogyny as it plays out in advertising, online and multi-media platforms, and nonprofit and commercial campaigns, showing how feminism is often met with a backlash of harassment, assault, and institutional neglect.

Jennifer C. Nash reframes black feminism's engagement with intersectionality, contending that black feminists should let go of their possession and policing of the concept in order to better unleash black feminist theory's visionary and world-making possibilities.

In this ethnography Liisa H. Malkki reverses the study of humanitarian aid, focusing on aid workers rather than aid's recipients. She shows how aid serves the needs of its recipients and providers.

Brenna Bhandar examines how the emergence of modern property law contributed to the formation of racial subjects in settler colonies, showing how the colonial appropriation of indigenous lands depends upon ideologies of European racial superiority as well as legal narratives that equated civilized life with English concepts of property.

Over the course of several personal essays, genderqueer activist/writer Eli Clare weaves together memoir, history, and political thinking to explore meanings and experiences of home, all the while providing an intersectional framework for understanding how we actually experience the daily hydraulics of oppression, power, and resistance.

Sharon R. Kaufman examines the quandary of patients, families and doctors not knowing the point where enough medical treatment becomes too much treatment. A hidden chain of drivers among science, industry, new technology, and insurance spur this quandary, serving to obscure the ability to identify the difference between extraordinary and ordinary medicine.

Ochoa Gautier's groundbreaking book draws primarily from nineteenth-century Colombian sources to explore how listening has been central to the production of notions of language, music, voice, and sound.

Joseph Dumit argues that underlying Americans' burgeoning consumption of prescription drugs and the skyrocketing cost of healthcare is a relatively new perception of ourselves as inherently ill and in need of chronic treatment.

Jasbir K. Puar continues her pathbreaking work on the liberal state, sexuality, and biopolitics to theorize the production of disability, using Israel's occupation of Palestine as an example of how settler colonial states rely on liberal frameworks of disability to maintain control of bodies and populations.

Kristen Hogan traces the feminist bookstore movement's rise and fall, showing how the women at the heart of the movement developed theories and practices of lesbian antiracism and feminist accountability that continue to resonate today.

Through an analysis of four contemporary operas, Nina Sun Eidsheim offers a vibrational theory of music that radically re-envisions of how we think about sound, music, and listening by challenging common assumptions about sound, freeing it from a constraining set of fixed concepts and meanings.

In Emergent Ecologies Eben Kirksey insists that we should turn our attention toward small-scale ecologies and search for hope in the efforts of individuals who are building new ecologies, and in the plants, animals, and fungi that are flourishing in unexpected places.

In Alchemy in the Rain Forest Jerry K. Jacka explores how the indigenous population of Papua New Guinea's Porgeran highlands struggle to create meaningful lives in the midst of the extreme social conflict and environmental degradation brought on by commercial gold mining.

Light in the Dark is the culmination of Gloria E. Anzaldua's mature thought and the most comprehensive presentation of her philosophy. Focusing on aesthetics, ontology, epistemology, and ethics, it contains several developments in her many important theoretical contributions.

William E. Connolly expands his influential work on democratic pluralism to confront the perils of climate change by calling on us to deepen our attachment to the planet and to create a worldwide coalition of people from all demographics to contest the forces that prevent us from addressing climate change.

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.

Leviathans at the Gold Mine is an ethnography about the Ipili, an indigenous group in Papua New Guinea; an enormous gold mine operated by an international conglomerate on Ipili land; and the process through which "the Ipili" and "the mine" brought each other into being as entities.