Books published by Duke University Press

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.

In Sex, or the Unbearable two of our leading theorists of sexuality, politics, and culture engage in intense and animated dialogue about living with-and imagining alternatives to-what's overwhelming in sex, friendship, social inequality, and one's relation to oneself.

B. Ruby Rich has been involved with queer filmmaking-as a critic, film-festival curator, publicist, scholar, and champion-since it emerged in the 1980s. This volume collects the best of her writing on New Queer Cinema from its beginning to the present.

Drawing on more than a decade of research in Japan and the United States, David Novak traces the "cultural feedback" that generates and sustains Noise, an underground music genre combining distortion and electronic effects.

Argues that a commitment to diversity is frequently substituted for a commitment to actual change. This title traces the work that diversity does, examining how the term is used and the way it serves to make questions about racism seem impertinent.

This volume explores how contemporary governments, particularly in settler nations such as Australia and the United States, deflect social responsibility for the crushing harms experienced by communities living at the margins.

A powerful critique of the stories that feminists tell about the past four decades of Western feminist theory.

A work on the history of black dandyism. It examines the pivotal role that style has played in the politics and aesthetics of African diasporic identity formation.

Drawing on fieldwork in a Dutch university hospital, this title looks at the day-to-day diagnosis and treatment of atherosclerosis. It focuses on medical anthropology, sociology, feminist theory, philosophy, and science and technology studies to reframe such issues as the disease-illness distinction, subject-object relations, and boundaries.

Explores how particular sexual practices and identifications were normalized while others were outlawed in medieval England. This work demonstrates how intellectual inquiry into pre-modern societies can contribute invaluably to contemporary issues in cultural studies. It also attempts to make connections between past and present cultures.

Opening with David Mancuso's seminal "Love Saves the Day" Valentine's party in February 1970, this title tells the definitive story of disco - from its murky subterranean roots in NoHo and Hell's Kitchen to its gaudy blossoming in midtown Manhattan to the out-of-town networks that emerged in the suburbs and alternative urban hotspots.

Drawing on indigenous social movements and politics, this volume's contributors question Western epistemologies, theorize new forms of knowledge production, and critique the presumed divide between nature and culture-all in service of creating a pluriverse: a cosmos composed of many worlds partially connected through divergent political practices.

Cultural theorist Sara Ahmed explores how willfulness is often a charge made by some against others. By following the figure of the willful subject, who wills wrongly or wills too much, Ahmed suggests that willfulness might be required to recover from attempts at its elimination.

Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh introduce the concept of decoloniality by providing a theoretical overview and discussing concrete examples of decolonial projects in action.

Katherine Verdery analyzes the 2,781 page surveillance file the Romanian secret police compiled on her during her research trips to Transylvania in the 1970s and 1980s. Reading it led her to question her identity and also revealed how deeply the secret police was embedded in everyday life.

This ethnography shows how the struggle to practice clinical medicine in a resource-strapped public hospital in Papua New Guinea is complicated by the attempts of doctors, nurses, and patients to make themselves visible to others-kin, clinical experts, global scientists, politicians, and international development workers-as socially recognizable and valuable persons.

The contributors to Unfinished explore the ethnographic essay's expressive potentials by pursuing an anthropology of becoming, which attends to the contingency of lived experience and provides new means to represent what life means and how it can be represented.

Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork and postcolonial theory, Sarah A. Radcliffe centers the experiences of rural indigenous women in Ecuador to show how the efforts of development agencies to reduce social and economic equality fail because they do not reckon with the legacies of colonialism.

Covering 500 years of Ghana's history, The Ghana Reader provides a multitude of historical, political, and cultural perspectives on this important West African nation, emphasizing Ghana's enormous symbolic and pragmatic value to global relations and its ethnic and cultural diversity.

Offers an account of development in action. Focusing on experts' attempts to improve landscapes and livelihoods in Indonesia, this title exposes the practices that enable experts to diagnose problems and devise interventions, and the agency of people whose conduct is targeted for reform.

A groundbreaking collection of sixteen essays that examines the productive intersection of the fields of black and queer studies

Author reconstructs the unwritten, taboo history of the Guatemalan civil war, focusing on the peasants who picked coffee, supported guerrilla movements of the 1970s and 1980s, and suffered the most when the military government retaliated with violence.

Carl Schmitt ranks among the original and controversial political thinkers of the twentieth century. This book contains translations of Schmitt's 1958 commentary on the work, explanatory notes, and an appendix including articles of the Weimar constitution.