Books published by Duke University Press

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.

In What Is a World? Pheng Cheah draws on accounts of the world as a temporal process from Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Arendt, and Derrida, and analyzes several postcolonial novels to articulate a normative theory of world literature's capacity to open up new possibilities for remaking the world.

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.

Mayra Rivera outlines the relationship between the ways ancient Christian thinkers and Western philosophers conceive of the "body" and "flesh." Rivera's analysis furthers developments in new materialism and helps us to better understand the influence of Christian texts on contemporary theorizations of social structure, gender, race, and faith.

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.

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

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.

The life story of the outstanding jazz vocalist Sathima Bea Benjamin sheds light on South African jazz history, women in jazz, and American music as a transnational art form.

Based on a return to the village in Sierra Leone where he did his first ethnographic fieldwork in 1969-70, an anthropologist reflects on the universality of human discontent.

An ethnography exploring the encounter between modernizing visions of development, the place-based life projects of the Yshiro indigenous people of the Paraguayan Chaco, and the agendas of scholars and activists.

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.

Prior to its destruction in 1918, the Austro-Hungarian Empire had ruled over a vast array of nationalities and, in the course of its demise as well as after, Austria was beset by nationalism, racism, and other forms of identity politics that ultimately led to the triumph of Nazism. This title presents the study of the works of Robert Musil.

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.

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.

In Metabolic Living Harris Solomon studies obesity and diabetes in Mumbai, India, presenting a new narrative of metabolic illness in which it is less about the overconsumption of food than it is about the body's relationship to its environment and the substances it absorbs.

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.