A John Hope Franklin Center Book

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.

This Reader collects in a single volume some of the most influential essays written by Barbara Johnson over the course of her thirty-year career as a pioneering literary theorist and cultural critic. Johnson achieved renown early in her career, both as a brilliant student of the Yale School of literary criticism and as the translator of Jacques Derrida's Dissemination. She went on to lead the way in extending the insights of structuralism and poststructuralism into newly emerging fields now central to literary studies, fields such as gender studies, African American studies, queer theory, and law and literature. Stunning models of critical reading and writing, her essays cultivate rigorous questioning of universalizing assumptions, respect for otherness and difference, and an appreciation of ambiguity.

Along with the classic essays that established her place in literary scholarship, this Reader makes available a selection of Johnson's later essays, brilliantly lucid and politically trenchant works exploring multilingualism and translation, materiality, ethics, subjectivity, and sexuality. The Barbara Johnson Reader offers a historical guide through the metamorphoses and tumultuous debates that have defined literary study in recent decades, as viewed by one of critical theory's most astute thinkers.

The preeminent political theorist Étienne Balibar examines what he calls "equaliberty," the fundamental tension in modern democracies between equality and liberty, humanity and citizenship.

An ethnography examining how indigenous residents of crime-ridden, marginalized neighborhoods in Cochabamba, Bolivia, struggle to balance human rights with their need for safety and security.

Examining the chronic, widespread poverty in India, the world's fourth largest economy, Akhil Gupta theorizes the relation between the state in India and the poor as one of structural violence.

This follow-up volume to our book The Age of the World Target collects interconnected entangled essays of literary and cultural theorist Rey Chow. The essays take up ideas of violence, capture, identification, temporality, sacrifice, and victimhood, engaging with theorists from Derrida and Deleuze to Agamben and Rancière.

This book examines the career of Tiger Woods, from child star to global sports celebrity. Starn shows that while the scandal following the revelation of Tiger's infidelities was like many similar media-generated scandals of recent years, by examining the way Woods was seen afterwards, we can learn a lot about race and sex in contemporary America.

Gayle Rubin laid the foundation for queer theory as a graduate student at Michigan in the early 70s with the essay The Traffic in Women, which was followed a decade later by an equally influential essay, Thinking Sex. This volume collects her essays covering topics ranging from BDSM to feminist debates on pornography and sex to lesbian and gay history.

Prominent queer theorist offers a "low theory" of culture knowledge drawn from popular texts and films.

The Problem with Work develops a Marxist feminist critique of the structures and ethics of work, as well as a perspective for imagining a life no longer subordinated to them.

A kaleidoscopic view of Black Latin@s in the United States, addressing history, music, gender, class, and media representations in more than sixty selections, including essays, memoirs, journalism, poetry, and interviews.

An unconventional, evocative work of history and a series of moving reflections on memory, modernity, space, and time, all based on the authors interviews with elderly Indonesian intellectuals.

Theorizes the political agency of things and natural phenomena—such as trash, food, weather, and electricity—to examine how non-human elements exert force on human politics and social relations.

The prominent political theorist William E. Connolly outlines a political philosophy for the contemporary world: a world whose powers of creative evolution include and exceed the human estate.

A revised version of S. Ann Dunham's anthropology dissertation that examines the economic importance of the blacksmithing trade in the rural Javanese village of Kajar.

Uses a postcolonial critique of the universality of historical time to propose a new way of considering the fantastic in cinema, a prevalent trope in much Asian and Southeast Asian film.

An ethnography of Wall Street, investment bankers and the cultural logics of finance.

An interdisciplinary argument that the concept of cultural creolization must be expanded to encompass cultural productions by vulnerable populations living in situations of modern power inequalities anywhere in the world.

A sociologist explains how over the past two decades neoliberal societies have sought to control the poor through a combination of penal sanction and welfare supervision.

An argument that subaltern experiences that are devalued and overlooked in progressive late-twentieth-century Philippine literature have been essential to the social and economic changes wrought by globalization.

Examines photographs, mixed media essays, and experimental literature from two of the most influential modernist avant-garde movements in Latin America, proposing a theory of modernism that addresses the intersection of ethics and aesthetics.

Through analysis of the Colombian Pacific's geography, peoples, and environment, Escobar questions the place assigned to epistemology, politics and the economy in modernity, arguing that hierarchical privilege can be subverted via activists' entanglement

Conversations between two top anthropologists about the intellectual trends in contemporary anthropology and about the discipline's future as it continues to intersect with fields such as science studies.

Looks at the cinematic conventions for portraying sex acts from early representations of the kiss to more explicit depictions of sex in contemporary art films.

A social history of the earthquake-tsunami that struck Lima in October 1746, looking at how people in and beyond Lima understood and reacted to the natural disaster.

Examines the role of media technologies in shaping urban Africa through an ethnographic study of popular culture in northern Nigeria.

Focuses on perpetrators of human rights crimes, investigating confessions by human rights violators in contexts of transitional justice in South America and South Africa.

Shows how narratives of contagion structure communities of belonging and how the lessons of these narratives are incorporated into sociological theories of cultural transmission and community formation.

A cultural analysis of Dolly, the cloned sheep.

Critical biography of Sessue Hayakawa, a Japanese actor who became a popular silent film star in the U.S., that looks at how Hollywood treated issues of race and nationality in the early twentieth century.

A lively, engaging ethnography that demonstrates how a volatile politics of race, class, and nation animates the infamously violent struggles over forests in the U.S. Southwest.

The award-winning anthropologist Sherry B. Ortner draws on her longstanding interest in theories of cultural practice to rethink key concepts of culture, agency, and subjectivity.

This visual and textual study of lynchings that took place in California between 1850 and 1935 shows that race-based lynching in the United States reached far beyond the South.

This study of black women criminals suggests that we might understand more clearly the constructions of virtue, deviance, race, and gender by reading the crimes of women in the context of their lives and their historical moment.

Argues that the many forms of ethnic violence around the world, both internal and transnational, need to be seen in the context of globalization.

Examines the use of Africa as a figure in the Harlem Renaissance and looks at the place of that movement within a wider Black modernism.

A study of the Ellis Island museum, its gift shop, and the Statue of Liberty form the basis of reflections on sex, nation, and immigration.

Analyzes cultural adaptation among aboriginal people in the Pacific Northwest, tracing the colonial origins and political implications of ideas about native "authenticity."

Explores the founding discourses of race, hybridity, savagery, and degenercy in the seventeenth and eighteenth century French Caribbean, in particular the way many of these discourses were used to describe French settlers.

Explores the profound cultural transformations triggered by Spain's efforts to colonize the Andean region, and demonstrates the continuing influence of the Inquisition to the present day.

An historical account of native Hawaiian encounters with and resistance to American colonialism, based on little-read Hawaiian-language sources.

In World-Systems Analysis, Immanuel Wallerstein provides a concise and accessible introduction to the comprehensive approach that he pioneered thirty years ago to understanding the history and development of the modern world. Since Wallerstein first developed world-systems analysis, it has become a widely utilized methodology within the historical social sciences and a common point of reference in discussions of globalization. Now, for the first time in one volume, Wallerstein offers a succinct summary of world-systems analysis and a clear outline of the modern world-system, describing the structures of knowledge upon which it is based, its mechanisms, and its future.

Wallerstein explains the defining characteristics of world-systems analysis: its emphasis on world-systems rather than nation-states, on the need to consider historical processes as they unfold over long periods of time, and on combining within a single analytical framework bodies of knowledge usually viewed as distinct from one another—such as history, political science, economics, and sociology. He describes the world-system as a social reality comprised of interconnected nations, firms, households, classes, and identity groups of all kinds. He identifies and highlights the significance of the key moments in the evolution of the modern world-system: the development of a capitalist world-economy in the sixteenth-century, the beginning of two centuries of liberal centrism in the French Revolution of 1789, and the undermining of that centrism in the global revolts of 1968. Intended for general readers, students, and experienced practitioners alike, this book presents a complete overview of world-systems analysis by its original architect.

An exploration of the visual meaning of the color line and racial politics through the analysis of archival photographs collected by W.E.B. Du Bois and exhibited at the Paris Exposition of 1900.

An ethnography of Filipino gay men in New York that explores their sexual and national identities.

An interdisciplinary study about the centrality of performance in Latin American culture and politics.

A major postcolonial feminist theorist explores the gendered nature of citizenship and the state.

Explores the relation between the precolonial and colonial past to the postcolonial present in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.

Recovers the history of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century African American reading societies.

A major rethinking of the issues around African American masculinity, tracing its relation to images of construction, and applying ideas from Eve Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet.

A personal and historical account of the particular place of death and funerals in African American life.

An innovative ethnography of the production, circulation, and consumption of tea, centered on the lives of the mostly women workers who produce it.

The first analysis of a new phenomenon in Brazil, wherein a growing number of mestizos are asserting Indian identities, and racial politics and understandings of race formation have radically shifted.

Scholarly edition of a slave narrative that tells of life as an "apprentice" under the British gradual emancipation plan.