Books published by Duke University Press

Speculative Light brings together scholars, critics, and artists who analyze the stylistic and historical import of James Baldwin’s and Beauford Delaney’s works, showing how their lifelong friendship fundamentally shaped their ideas about art and life.

Speculative Light brings together scholars, critics, and artists who analyze the stylistic and historical import of James Baldwin’s and Beauford Delaney’s works, showing how their lifelong friendship fundamentally shaped their ideas about art and life.

Throughout the French empire, from the Atlantic and the Caribbean to West and North Africa, men, women, and children responded to enslavement, colonization, and oppression through acts of suicide. In The Suicide Archive, Doyle D. Calhoun charts a long history of suicidal resistance to French colonialism and neocolonialism, from the time of slavery to the Algerian War for Independence to the "Arab Spring." Noting that suicide was either obscured in or occluded from French colonial archives, Calhoun turns to literature and film to show how aesthetic forms and narrative accounts can keep alive the silenced histories of suicide as a political language. Drawing on scientific texts, police files, and legal proceedings alongside contemporary African and Afro-Caribbean novels, film, and Senegalese oral history, Calhoun outlines how such aesthetic works rewrite histories of resistance and loss. Consequently, Calhoun offers a new way of writing about suicide, slavery, and coloniality in relation to literary history.

Topics covered include queering the domestic by examining the diverse functionings of “home” for past and present LGBTQ+ and other marginalized groups; housing precarity and homelessness; LGBTQ+ social movements; kinship and caretaking; LGBTQ+ representation in literature and film; and ethnographies of everyday life. Contributors: Rasel Ahmed, Miguel Avalos, Darius Bost, Zhen Cheng, Ariel Dela Cruz, René Esparza, Jules Gill-Peterson, Gayatri Gopinath, Lauren Jae Gutterman, Joseph Henry, Efadul Huq, Holly Jackson, Jina B. Kim, Martin F. Manalansan IV, Sara Matthiesen, Nivati Misra-Shenoy, Richard Mora, Shoniqua Roach, Cody St. Clair, Maggie Schreiner, Gee Imaan Semmalar, Virginia Thomas, Stephen Vider, Hentyle Yapp

Topics covered include periodicals and other print ephemera—newspapers, literary journals, magazines, pamphlets, and handbills—as crucial sites of leftist, anti-imperial, and anti-colonial critical production; counter-political ideas and counter-cultural practices aiming to end empire and colonial rule or challenge authoritarian states and majorities; and oppositional networks, critical concepts, and alternative artistic practices that link local concerns to global revolutionary praxis. Contributors: Javaria Ahmad, Areej Akhtar, Amsale Alemu, Pablo Alvarez, Koni Benson, Drew Kahü¿ina Broderick, Asher Gamedze, Thayer Hastings, Aaron Katzeman, Sara Kazmi, Sana Farrukh Khan, Promise Li, Sara Marzagora, Mae A. Miller-Likhethe, Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja, Noor Nieftagodien, Francisco Rodriguez, Marral Shamshiri-Fard, Njoki Wamai, Kimani Waweru, Tony Wood, Rafeef Ziadeh

Topics covered include feminist perspectives about the realities of grappling with colonial legacies within global south communities in North America, Asia, and Africa; the impacts of colonial logic in shaping community identity and boundaries; complex entanglements with neo-colonialism while striving for decolonial praxis; and memory and trauma within communities disrupted by U.S. colonial interests.  Contributors: Maryam Ala Amjadi, La Vaughn Belle, Umayyah Cable, Ginetta E. B. Candelario, Debjani Chakravarty, Chia-Hsu Jessica Chang, Sutapa Chattopadhyay, Henrikke Sæthre Ellingsen, Guadalupe Escobar, Levi Gahman, Caroline M. Mar, Nasha Mohamed, Chamara Moore, Aurora Santiago Ortiz, Shreya Parikh, Christine Standish, Aisha A. Upton, Lisa Wright, Ming Li Wu