Books published by Duke University Press

Andil Gosine revises understandings of queer desire in the Caribbean, showing how the very concept of homosexuality in the Caribbean (and in the Americas more broadly) has been overdetermined by a colonially-influenced human/animal divide.

The relationship between history and psychoanalysis has long been contentious, starting with Freud's ambivalence toward history, with some declaring the two fields to be largely incommensurable. The contributors to this special issue rethink this complicated dynamic, demonstrating both the uses of psychoanalysis for interrogating historical narratives and the importance of history for psychoanalytic analysis. Essays address how psychoanalysis reframes the ways historians have represented the Holocaust and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, investigate neoliberal group psychology by studying the emergence of QAnon, trace the political trajectories of psychoanalysis in the mid-twentieth century, and find previously unexplored links between Freud and the US plantation economy. Together, the essays testify to the importance of considering the unconscious dimensions of thought when attempting to understand the workings of politics and representations of the past. Contributors. Max Cavitch, Zahid R. Chaudhary, Alex Colston, Brian Connolly, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, David L. Eng, Joan Wallach Scott, Carolyn Shapiro, Michelle Stephens

This special issue brings together scholars, artists, and activists working at the intersections of queer theory, critical race studies, and radical movements to consider prison abolition as a project of queer liberation and queer liberation as an abolitionist project. Pushing beyond observations that prisons disproportionately harm queer people, the contributors demonstrate that gender itself is a carceral system and demand that gender and sexuality, too, be subject to abolition. The contributors offer fresh analytical lenses, personal reflections, and unequivocal calls to action to the ongoing work of constructing liberatory futures without prisons, police, or the tyranny of colonial gender systems. In the essays collected here, they explore trans identity and community across prison walls, consider how gentrification functions as a carceral mechanism, meditate on the importance and ethics of queer art, and argue for the necessity of anticarceral queer politics that do not look to punishment for justice. Contributors. Marquis Bey, Caia Maria Coelho, Stephen Dillon, Nadja Eisenberg-Guyot, Jesse A. Goldberg, Jaden Janak, Alexandre Martins, Alison Rose Reed, S. M. Rodriguez, Kitty Rotolo, Lorenzo Triburgo, Sarah Van Dyck

Bringing together media studies and environmental humanities, the contributors to Saturation develop saturation as a heuristic to analyze phenomena in which the elements involved are difficult or impossible to separate as a way of exploring the relationship between media, the environment, technology, capital, and the legacies of colonialism.

The contributors to Reactiving Elements explore how studying elements-as the foundations of the physical and social world-provide a way to imagine alternatives to worldwide environmental destruction.

The contributors to Reactiving Elements explore how studying elements-as the foundations of the physical and social world-provide a way to imagine alternatives to worldwide environmental destruction.

With historically underrepresented communities experiencing higher rates of COVID-19 infection and mortality, the pandemic has thrown into stark relief the severe inequities in US health care. In this special issue, a multidisciplinary group of contributors presents empirical evidence for how the pandemic has had a disproportionately negative impact on people of color, incarcerated people, and people with disabilities. These articles show how the pandemic response has been both wholly inadequate for the magnitude of the problem and, in certain policy arenas, has exacerbated existing inequities. Topics include changes in the treatment of disabilities under crisis standards of care, systemic racism in the federal pandemic health care response, and compounded racialized vulnerability within incarceration facilities. The contributors offer a dynamic and accessible analysis of the impacts of and public attitudes about the varieties of inequity in the COVID-19 pandemic. Contributors. Zackary Berger, Andrea Louise Campbell, Katharine Carman, Maria Casoni, Anita Chandra, Matthew Denney, Doron Dorfman, Ramon Garibaldo Valdez, Sarah E. Gollust, Colleen Grogan, Michael Gusmano, Morgan Handley, Yu-An Lin, Julia Lynch, Carolyn Miller, Rebecca Morris, Ari Ne’eman, Christopher Nelson, Sara Rosenbaum, Michael Sances, Michael Stein, Jhacova Williams

Rana M. Jaleel links international law's redefinition of mass rape as a crime against humanity to the expansion of US imperialism and its effacement of racialized violence and dispossession.

Nitasha Tamar Sharma maps the context and contours of Black life in Hawai'i, showing how despite the presence of anti-Black racism, the state's Black residents consider it to be their haven from racism.

Vicente L. Rafael provides a complex account of how Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte uses humor, fear, misogyny, and violence to weaponize death as a means to control life.

Marquis Bey offers a meditation on blackness and gender nonnormativity in ways that recalibrate traditional understandings of each, conceiving of black trans feminism as a politics grounded in fugitivity and the subversion of power.

Elisabeth R. Anker reckons with the complex legacy of freedom offered by liberal American democracy, identifying modes of "ugly freedom" that can lead to domination or provide a source of emancipatory potential.

Isabel Hofmeyr traces the relationship between print culture, colonialism, and the ocean through the institution of the late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British colonial custom houses, which acted as censors and pronounced on copyright and checked imported printed matter for piracy, sedition, or obscenity.

Min Hyoung Song articulates a climate change-centered reading practice that foregrounds how literature, poetry, and essays help us to better grapple with our everyday encounters with climate change.

Jafari S. Allen offers a sweeping and lively ethnographic and intellectual history of Black queer politics, culture, and history in the 1980s as they emerged out of radical Black lesbian activism and writing.

Artist and theorist micha cardenas considers contemporary digital media, artwork, and poetry in order to articulate trans of color strategies of safety and survival.

This collection of twenty-four essential essays written by Brian Massumi over the past thirty years is both a primer for those new to his work and a supplemental resource for those already engaged with his thought.

The contributors to Nervous Systems reassess contemporary artists' and critics' engagement with social, political, biological, and other systems as a set of complex and relational parts: an approach commonly known as systems thinking.

McKenzie Wark combines an autobiographical account of her relationship with Kathy Acker with her transgender reading of Acker's writing to outline Acker's philosophy of embodiment and its importance for theorizing the trans experience.

Mark Rifkin examines nineteenth-century Native writings by William Apess, Elias Boudinot, Sarah Winnemucca, and Zitkala-Sa to rethink and reframe contemporary debates around recognition, refusal, and resurgence for Indigenous peoples.

Elizabeth A. Povinelli theorizes how the legacies of colonial violence and the ways the dispossession and extraction that destroyed Indigenous and colonized peoples' lives now poses an existential threat to the West.

Patricia Stuelke traces the hidden history of the reparative turn, showing how it emerged out of the failed struggle against US empire and neoliberal capitalism in the 1970s and 1980s and unintentionally supported new forms of neoliberal and imperial governance.

The contributors to Embodying Black Religions in Africa and Its Diasporas investigate the complex intersections between the body, religious expression, and the construction and negotiation of social relationships and collective identities throughout the Black diaspora.

The contributors to Assembly Codes document how media and logistics-the techniques of organizing and coordinating the movement of materials, bodies, and information-are co-constitutive and key to the circulation of information and culture.

Abigail H. Neely explores social medicine's possibilities and limitations at one of its most important origin sites: the Pholela Community Health Centre (PCHC) in South Africa.

Elizabeth McHenry locates a hidden chapter in the history of Black literature at the turn of the twentieth century, revising concepts of Black authorship and offering a fresh account of the development of "Negro literature" focused on the never published, the barely read, and the unconventional.

Jennifer C. Nash examines how the figure of the "Black mother" has become a powerful political category synonymous with crisis, showing how they are often rendered into one-dimensional symbols of tragic heroism and the ground zero of Black life.

Priya Kandaswamy brings together two crucial moments in welfare history-the advent of the Freedmen's Bureau during Reconstruction and the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996-to show how they each targeted Black women through negative stereotyping and normative assumptions about gender, race, and citizenship.

Transnational Feminist Itineraries demonstrates the key contributions of transnational feminist theory and practice to analyzing and contesting authoritarian nationalism and the extension of global corporate power.

The contributors to Long Term use the tension between the popular embrace and legalization of same-sex marriage and the queer critique of homonormativity as an opportunity to examine the myriad forms of queer commitments and their durational aspect.