Books published by Duke University Press

Performer, activist, and writer Jill Johnston was a major queer presence in the history of dance and 1970s feminism. She was the first critic to identify postmodernism's arrival in American dance and was a fierce advocate for the importance of lesbians within feminism. In Jill Johnston in Motion, Clare Croft tracks Johnston's entwined innovations and contributions to dance and art criticism and activism. She examines Johnston's journalism and criticism--in particular her Village Voice columns published between 1960 and 1980--and her books of memoir and biography. At the same time, Croft attends to Johnston's appearances as both dancer and audience member and her physical and often spectacular appearances at feminist protests. By bringing together Johnston's criticism and activism, her writing and her physicality, Croft emphasizes the effect that the arts, particularly dance, had on Johnston's feminist thinking in the 1970s and traces lesbian feminism's roots in avant garde art practice.

Topics covered include New Citizenship Studies, an emergent methodology for reading the role of literature in the cultural making and unmaking of citizenship; the violent histories and imaginative possibilities of citizenship; theories of citizenship from the perspectives of groups who cannot presume the state’s protections; citizenship at the intersection of Indigenous Studies, Black Studies, and multiethnic U.S. literatures; and the forms of worldmaking and community that writers build as practitioners of political poiesis.   Contributors: Ajay Batra, Eve Eure, Carrie Hyde, Stephen Knadler, Florencia Lauria, Rodrigo Lazo, Joseph Miranda, Xiomara Santamarina, Sidonia Serafini, Derrick R. Spires, Erin Suzuki, Kathryn Walkiewicz, Edlie Wong, Sunny Xiang

Topics covered include the impacts of China’s economic and geopolitical global rise on cross-border media, financial, and human flows; everyday experiences of cultural globalization by ordinary Chinese people; and the ways in which transnationalization transforms representations, understandings, and practices of class, gender, race, nationality, and ethnicity in China. Contributors: Fanni Beck, Haijing Dai, Qian Gong, Christina Ho, Shuheng Jin, Anita Koo, Shih-Diing Liu, Fran Martin, Jacqueline Nelson, Pál Nyíri, Ngai Pun, Dallas Rogers, Lin Song, Huan Wu, Ting-Fai Yu

Drawing on cultural policy, queer and feminist theory, materialist media studies, and postcolonial historiography, Bliss Cua Lim analyzes the crisis-ridden history of Philippine film archiving—a history of lost films, limited access, and collapsed archives.

Paper Knowledge is a remarkable book about the mundane: the library card, the promissory note, the movie ticket, the PDF (Portable Document Format). It is a media history of the document.