international rightsguide SPRING2026
Duke University Press
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Duke University Press
About Duke University Press
Duke University Press books have long been known for advancing innovative new scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. In our books, our authors have defined new fields (sound studies, transgender studies, etc.), redefined existing fields (anthropology, cultural studies, Latin American studies, African American and African studies, art history, etc.), and explored the rich spaces between fields to reshape the way we think about the world and our connections to it. We take pride in publishing traditionally underrepresented voices in terms of both authors and areas of study, viewpoints that are critical to understanding the diverse, interconnected societies in which we live. Duke books continue to be an essential part of any humanities and social sciences program.
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Notes from the Sex Worker Left Lumpen Theory
HEATHER BERG
In dressing rooms and shared cab rides home, mutual aid collectives and reading groups, sex workers are experimenting with how to live otherwise. Notes from the Sex Worker Left highlights unruly thinkers at the cutting-edge of radical political theory. Drawing on interviews with sex workers as well as their political and creative writings, Heather Berg curates an archive of radical thought on the trappings of respectability, the failures of work, and the role of everyday resistance in collective, militant struggle. Berg grounds her analysis in the perspective of the lumpenproletariat—the mutinous, precarious, and often criminalized counterpart to the respectable working class. Lumpen theorists use their position on the margins to imagine futures that welcome everyone for whom the usual solutions are not nearly enough. The nuclear family, the wage relation, the gendered racial capitalist state: all must go. Notes from the Sex Worker Left offers tools to dismantle them.
Heather Berg is Associate Professor of Labor Studies and Gender Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles and is the author of Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism
October 2026
216 pages
Sociology/Gender studies
Rights: World
Good Vibes Only
Phenomenology and the Biopolitics of Algorithmic Legitimation
ROBIN JAMES
Robin James is an independent scholar and author of several books, including The Sonic Episteme: Acoustic Resonance, Neoliberalism, Biopolitics, published by Duke University Press, as well as The Future of Rock and Roll: 97X WOXY and the Fight for True Independence November
October 2026
200 pages
Literary studies/Feminist studies
Rights: World
In Good Vibes Only, Robin James argues that the forms of governance performed by the algorithms fueling AI, recommender systems, facial recognition, and other contemporary technologies constitute a new biopolitical regime in which discourses of legitimacy function in place of norms to draw patriarchal racial capitalist lines around personhood. James innovatively combines continental philosophy, popular music studies, and media studies to show how the math driving modern technologies translates into both political forms of governance and colloquial cultural practices ranging from social media posts to playlist categories on music streaming services to hip hop aesthetics. These mathematical vectors have been vernacularized as “vibes”, categories that both users and platforms utilize to define the quantitative orientations lying beneath the qualitative abstractions. Good Vibes Only breaks down the phenomenology of how these algorithmic “vibes” have led to a shift in the way biopower governs: not with disciplinary or regulatory norms, but with orientations or lineages that it assesses for their capacity to carry patriarchal, racial, capitalist property relations into speculative realities.
Content Machines
Reading and Writing in the Platform Era
SARAH BROUILLETTE
While much has been said about the democratizing of publishing through the rise of platforms like Wattpad, TikTok, and Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, little attention has been paid to the broader effect these technologies have had on creatives and their industries. In Content Machines, Sarah Brouillette considers how short-form, platform-based, and social media writing has reshaped modern publishing, reading, and writing. Brouillette identifies three mutually reinforcing processes that platform capitalism was entangled in the publishing industry: the marked feminization of book work; the rise of a bibliotherapeutic vocabulary that grounds reading and writing in self-care work; and the growth of platform-based processes that at once cheapen content and intensify the pressure to engage in self-promotion and entrepreneurial strategizing. She breaks down the business models that have been key to this transformation and traces the social conditions that make online self-published fiction, especially romance, queer, and fantasy, into spaces for community and self-care while, conversely, signaling how these publishing practices depend upon undervalued and feminized labor from marginalized groups. Content Machines is a much-needed survey of the contours of the modern reading and writing landscape.
Sarah Brouillette is Professor of English at Carleton University and author of Underdevelopment and African Literature: Emerging Forms of Reading, among other works.
Cisgender
Disorienting a Category PERRY ZURN
In Cisgender, Perry Zurn turns an incisive yet playful eye toward the “norm” against which transgender gets defined. A cisgender person is informally understood as someone who doctors called male or female at birth, became a boy or girl, and finally lived as a man or woman—without fuss. It’s this “without fuss” that anchors the cis/trans binary as it has come to be understood and belies the complex relationship all people have with gender. How did this category arise? And what else might it do? Cisgender is the first book to trace the story of how cis entered contemporary gender lexicons. Utilizing unplumbed archives and fresh interviews, Zurn offers a critical history of the term from the 1990s to the present, deftly defamiliarizing and reimagining cis at the same time. This unique examination of cisgender is a must-read for all readers invested in trans life and the futures of gender.
Perry Zurn is Provost Associate Professor of Philosophy at American University. He is the author of How We Make Each Other: Trans Life at the Edge of the University, published by Duke University Press, as well as Curiosity and Power: The Politics of Inquiry and the co-author of Curious Minds: The Power of Connection July 2026
288 pages
Gender studies/Queer theory
Rights: World
Sex Isn't Real
The Invention of an Incoherent Binary BEANS VELOCCI
In Sex Isn’t Real, Beans Velocci traces the history of current high stakes attempts to define sex and to create a world devoid of trans life. Drawing on lab notes, family genealogies, medical case studies, and more, Velocci follows scientists and clinicians from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century and across five disciplines—zoology, eugenics, gynecology, statistical sexology, and transsexual medicine—as their ideas and practices created a definitional tangle. They demonstrate how the sorting of bodies into male and female persists not despite but because of sex’s incoherence: the defining features of these categories shift to contain various understandings of anatomy and physiology, theories of race, developments in research and medical methodologies, and bodies that cannot be accounted for in a binary framework. Exposing the endless work required to produce a world in which most people have a binary gender identity that neatly fits their binarily sexed body, Velocci demonstrates that it is not cis people who fit the categories; it’s the categories that flex to make them fit.
Beans Velocci is Assistant Professor of History and Sociology of Science and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
February 2026
326 pages
Trans studies/History of science
Rights: World
December 2026
288 pages
Middle East studies/Indigenous and Native studies
Rights: World
February 2025
248 pages
Middle East studies/Settler colonial studies/ Political geography
Rights: World
The Indigenous Anti-Colonial
A Palestinian Resistance Tradition That Does Not Yield to Settler Colonialism
LINDA TABAR
In The Indigenous Anti-Colonial, Linda Tabar explores the radical tradition in which defiant and undeterred Palestinians fight back against settler colonialism. Tracing this tradition through oral histories, Tabar outlines how Palestinians preserve and transmit a living archive of knowledge and memory that refuses and supplants Zionists efforts to erase Palestinian presence and history from the land. Tabar outlines the ways in which Palestinian resistance is distinctly Indigenous, as it is tied to the land and the world that Palestinians built with it. This Indigenous anticolonial radical tradition produces its own imaginaries of liberation that seek a world beyond settler colonialism, white supremacy, capitalism, and constructs alternative conditions for freedom. As Israeli settler colonialism accelerates its attempts to eradicate the Palestinian people and the horrors of its genocide in Gaza are broadcast to the world, Tabar puts Palestinian conceptions of liberation at the center of conversations around settler colonialism.
Linda Tabar is Associate Professor in the Department of International Relations and the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex.
The Time beneath the Concrete Palestine between Camp and Colony
NASSER ABOURAHME
In The Time beneath the Concrete, Nasser Abourahme argues that settler colonialism is always as much an attempt to conquer time as it is to conquer land. Taking as his primary object Palestinian refugee camps, created in the fallout of the eliminatory violence of Israel’s founding, Abourahme shows how these camps become the primary place where settler colonial attempts to dominate space and time encounter Indigenous refusal. Seen from the camps, Israel becomes a settler colonial project defined by its inability to move past the past—a project stuck at its foundational moment of conquest. At the same time, the Palestinian insistence on return is a refusal to abide by the closure of the past into settler futurity. Palestinian struggle does not just happen in the open time of dispossession; it happens over this time. That struggle, Abourahme demonstrates, is a form of anticolonial refusal that draws its power not from any decisive finality, but precisely from irresolution and keeping time open.
Nasser Abourahme is Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at Bowdoin College.
The High Priestess
Learning from Somatic Practice
ANN CVETKOVICH
In The High Priestess, Ann Cvetkovich draws from theory, conceptual analysis, and somatic practice to assemble a survival guide for artists, academics, and activists facing the crises of the current world. Through conversation with a wide range of thinkers, particularly Black, Indigenous, and other racialized feminist thinkers, Cvetkovich explores a wide range of resources for understanding, practicing, and developing methods of self care that are in balance with collective political efforts and that pursue the decolonization of the body and mind. She uses four key themes—care, disability and madness, trauma and somatics, and breath—as launch points to understand how to cope with and counter the many forms of pain. By so doing, Cvetkovich outlines a set of discourses and practices for academic, activist, and artistic work that center a well-being that includes body, mind, and all their entanglements.
Ann Cvetkovich is Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Depression: A Public Feeling and An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures, both published by Duke University Press.
Personal Demons
Possession Narratives of Late Liberalism GRACE LAVERY
Personal Demons offers a new theory of the relation between sex, desire, and personhood, asking what we should make of the many contemporary instances when bodies seem to want different things from the consciousnesses within them. Grace Lavery maps the negative energies—demonic, incoherent, resistant—through which liberalism produces and disciplines its scapegoats. Through an examination of modern possession narratives, from racialized spectacles of bodily transformation and disguise to the liturgy of the Church of Scientology, Lavery unspools the knot of body, affect, and representation at the end of liberalism. In the face of the uneasy bargains queer and trans liberal organizations made with the phobic state, Personal Demons elaborates a vision of queer collective living that does not assume a shared concept of interiority, taking the incompatibility of such concepts as the founding axiom for a coalition against the ideological regulation of bodies and minds.
Grace Lavery is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. She has authored multiple books, including Closures: Heterosexuality and the American Sitcom, published by Duke University Press, and Pleasure and Efficacy: Of Pen Names, Cover Versions, and Other Trans Techniques
November 2026
160 pages
Cultural studies/Gender studies
Rights: World
October 2026
264 pages
Critical theory/Gender studies
Rights: World
August 2026
336 pages
Art/Queer theory
Rights: World
Reparative Craft
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as a Textile Artist
JASON EDWARDS
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is primarily known for her foundational work in queer and affect theory, but her artistic work with textiles remains largely unexplored. In Reparative Craft, Jason Edwards examines a range of her textile art from a ten-year period in which she was also writing Touching Feeling. Employing the reparative approach that Sedgwick pioneered and analyzing her works from a series of four exhibitions, Reparative Craft demonstrates the necessity of connecting Sedgwick’s fiber art practice to her work as a theorist. Richly illustrated and presented in full color, this volume invites readers to connect Sedgwick’s art with her theory, presenting a new model of reparative reading that exemplifies ideas of queer and trans craft so vital to Sedgwick’s body of work.
July 2026
370 pages
Cultural studies/Literary Theory
Rights: World
The Future of Totality
Fredric Jameson and the Prospects of Critical Theory
NICHOLAS BROWN, MARIA ELISA CEVASCO, FABIO DURÃO, AND ROBERT T. TALLY, JR., EDITORS
The Future of Totality, edited by Nicholas Brown, Maria Elisa Cevasco, Fabio Akcelrud Durão, and Robert T. Tally, Jr., brings together a selection of Jameson's former students and other prominent scholars thinking from Jameson, rather than writing on him. Emerging from a symposium on Jameson’s work that asked what is to be done in response to our current moment, this book seeks to represent future directions of Jamesonian thought in the tradition of dialectical criticism and cultural study. Through four sections reflecting and building on Jameson’s legacy, focusing on theory, critical reading of new forms, the reshaping of contemporary problematics, and new dimensions inspired by Jameson, this volume makes its own intervention about the continuity and innovation of Jameson’s contributions. Serving as both a tribute to the scholar and a space for thinking about the future of his work, the essays in this volume seek to interpret the world in order to change it.
Nicholas Brown is Professor of English and Black Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Maria Elisa Cevasco is Professor of English and Cultural Studies at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. Fabio Durão is Professor of Literary Theory at the State University of Campinas. Robert T. Tally, Jr. is Professor of English at Texas State University.
Jason Edwards is Professor of Art History at the University of York. He is the author of Queer and Bookish:
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as Book Artist
Still Dangerous!
The Harmony Hammond Reader
HARMONY HAMMOND
EDITED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY TIRZA TRUE
LATIMER
FOREWORD BY
JULIA BRYAN-WILSON
Harmony Hammond, a leading figure in New York’s feminist and lesbian art movements, is primarily known for her abstract painting and sculpture. As a co-founder of A.I.R., the first major women’s cooperative art gallery, and Heresies, a groundbreaking feminist journal, Hammond played a critical role in the emergence of lesbian and feminist art through her curation and writing. Still Dangerous!, with an introduction by the volume editor Tirza True Latimer and a foreword by Julia Bryan-Wilson, brings together five decades of Hammond’s writings addressing the historical invisibility of women and lesbian artists, the politics of gender and sexuality in contemporary creative practice, materiality, feminism’s expanding purview, resisting censorship, and strategies of feminist and queer abstraction. Compiling essays, reviews, artist’s statements, presentations, letters, and interviews, Still Dangerous! fleshes out Hammond’s career while providing a valuable resource for scholars and students of contemporary culture.
Harmony Hammond, Professor Emerita of Art at the University of Arizona, is a visual artist, writer, educator, activist, and independent curator. Tirza True Latimer is Professor Emerita of History of Art and Visual Culture at the California College of the Arts. Julia Bryan-Wilson is Professor of Contemporary Art and LGBTQ+ Studies at Columbia University.
Faculties
A Dialogue on Inciting Constructive Change in Destructive Times
CATHY N. DAVIDSON AND JODY GREENE
Faculties is a call to action, a sourcebook, and a “how to” guide for academic colleagues who want to contribute to the administrative and educational decisions being made about the future of our institutions. There is no going back to the version of US higher education that existed twenty, ten, or even one year ago. Cathy N. Davidson and Jody Greene encourage faculty and allies to incite and participate in change by offering ideas and models of successful, constructive collaboration at a destructive and demoralizing time for higher education. Faculties focuses on the urgency of coalition-building, offering data and analyses of the structural, financial, ideological, and organizational circumstances that can support or inhibit productive change in higher education. Begun as weekly, pragmatic Zoom conversations between Davidson and Greene, two of higher education’s most innovative leaders, Faculties retains the dialogue form and a welcoming, conversational tone while incorporating extensive references and citations and addressing the drastic changes to higher education since January 2025. Faculties offers the evidence and inspiration needed to enact institutional transformation now.
Cathy N. Davidson is Distinguished Professor Emerita at the Graduate Center CUNY and Duke University. Jody Greene is Professor Emerit at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
March 2026
216 pages
Art/Feminism
Rights: World
November 2026
248 pages
Higher Education Rights: World
October 2026
216 pages
Art/Latinx studies
Rights: World
Visualizing Latinx
Creative Practices in Fashion, Film, and Beyond ARLENE DÁVILA
Visualizing Latinx elevates the stories of contemporary Latinx creators working in fashion, independent filmmaking, and public art who confront the longstanding issue of Latinx invisibility. Arlene Dávila documents how these creatives strive to visualize their communities as a means of transforming society and asserting inclusion on their own terms. She highlights how these artists approach their work with purpose, intention, style, and ingenuity to showcase the value, joy, and complexity of Latinx identities. Looking to the academic sector as a sanctioning and uplifting force, Dávila also explores academia’s role in making Latinx histories and creative communities visible. By focusing on the inventive, transformative, and decolonial practices of Latinx artists and creatives, she argues that seeing and appreciating Latinx culture through visual media can be revolutionary in creating a more equitable and vibrant society for all.
Arlene Dávila is Professor of Anthropology and American Studies at New York University and Founding Director of The Latinx Project. She is the author of Latinx Art: Artists, Markets, and Politics and the coeditor of Nuyorican and Diasporican Visual Art: A Critical Anthology, both published by Duke University Press.
January 2026
320 pages
Music/Latinx studies
Rights: World, excluding Spanish
P FKN R
How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance VANESSA
DÍAZ AND PETRA R. RIVERA-RIDEAU
“Aquí mataron gente por sacar la bandera / Por eso es que ahora yo la llevo donde quiera." (Here they killed people for taking out the flag / that’s why I bring it anywhere I want now.)—LA MuDANZA
Global superstar Bad Bunny, born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, like many other Puerto Ricans, has lived a life marked by public crises—blackouts, hurricanes, political corruption and oppression, among others—that have exposed the ongoing impacts of colonialism in Puerto Rico. Offering a portrait of the past and future of Puerto Rican resistance through one of its loudest and proudest voices, P FKN R draws on interviews with musicians, politicians, and journalists as well as ethnographic research to set Bad Bunny and Puerto Rican resistance in a historical, political, and cultural context. Authors Vanessa Díaz and Petra Rivera-Rideau—creators of the “Bad Bunny Syllabus”—demonstrate Bad Bunny’s place in a long tradition of infusing both joy and protest into music and honor the many evolving forms of daily resistance to oppression and colonialism that are part of Puerto Rican life.
Vanessa Díaz is Associate Professor of Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies at Loyola Marymount University and the author of Manufacturing Celebrity: Latino Paparazzi and Women Reporters in Hollywood. Petra R. Rivera-Rideau is Associate Professor of American Studies at Wellesley College and the author of Remixing Reggaetón: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico and Fitness Fiesta! Selling Latinx Culture Through Zumba, both also published by Duke University Press
Blackstar
Rising and the Purple Reign
The Sonic Afterlives of David Bowie and Prince
DAPHNE A. BROOKS, EDITOR
Blackstar Rising and the Purple Reign is the first critical anthology dedicated to exploring the legacies of the pop music icons David Bowie and Prince. Daphne A. Brooks brings together an extraordinary array of writers, artists, and scholars, including Greg Tate, Jack Halberstam, Kara Keeling, Eric Lott, and Ann Powers, to offer fresh insight into how Bowie and Prince each fundamentally changed pop culture as musicians who emerged at the intersections of modern movements surrounding race, gender, sexuality, and art. Featured alongside these pieces are interviews with trusted collaborators of Bowie and Prince such as D. A. Pennebaker, Sheila E., and Marie France, giving vital insider context to the impact both artists had on pop culture and the complexities of their repertoires, politics, and private lives. This work is essential reading for any fan of two of the most formidable and eminent figures in pop culture history.
Daphne A. Brooks is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Black Studies, American Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Music at Yale University. She is the author of Liner Notes for the Revolution and Jeff Buckley’s Grace, as well as Bodies in Dissent, published by Duke University Press.
Touch of Grey, or How the Grateful Dead Became Pop Stars
JOHN BRACKETT
Touch of Grey, or How the Grateful Dead Became Pop Stars tells the story of how one song transformed the popular legacy of one of rock’s most iconic musical groups. John Brackett traces the history of the song “Touch of Grey,” beginning with songwriter Robert Hunter’s lyrical sketches and the Grateful Dead’s earliest live arrangements, culminating in the group’s popular renaissance following the release of “Touch of Grey” and the album In the Dark in the summer of 1987. Brackett details how particular recording technologies, notable musical characteristics, modes of attending and listening, and the mechanics of the contemporary music industry shaped this defining moment in the group’s career. Drawing on extensive archival research, Touch of Grey examines how the band and their label worked to produce a hit record, a dynamic music video, and an effective promotional campaign that would propel the Grateful Dead from a group with a devoted cult following to become a pop culture phenomenon.
John Brackett is a writer and historian. His previous books include Live Dead: The Grateful Dead, Live Recordings, and the Ideology of Liveness, published by Duke University Press, and John Zorn: Tradition and Transgression
April 2026
520 pages Music Rights: World
March 2026
216 pages
Science studies/ Nutrition Rights: World
March 2026
288 pages
Feminist Theory/Marxism Rights: World, excluding Turkish
Protein
The Making of a Nutritional Superstar SAMANTHA KING AND GAVIN WEEDON
Protein is everywhere—praised as a muscle builder, a weight-loss miracle, an anti-aging elixir, and the catch-all solution for everything from exercise recovery to global malnutrition. In Protein, Samantha King and Gavin Weedon argue that protein’s rise to nutritional superstardom has less to do with human dietary needs and more to do with how its indeterminate, adhesive qualities are marshalled towards commerce, scientific, and social imperatives. Tracing its path from nineteenth-century biochemistry to the status it enjoys today, they expose how protein has been marketed as a cure for global hunger, repackaged as an eco-friendly meat alternative, and wielded as a symbol of masculinity in the fitness industry. From whey waste in industrial farming to longevity drugs for aging bodies, Protein unpacks the myths behind the macronutrient and challenges what we think we know about food, health, and the forces that shape our diets.
Samantha King is Professor in the School of Kinesiology & Health Studies at Queen’s University and the author of Messy Eating and Pink Ribbons, Inc. Gavin Weedon is Associate Professor of Sociology of Sport, Health and the Body at Nottingham Trent University.
Abolition Archives, Feminist Futures
KATHI WEEKS
Abolitionist Archives, Feminist Futures takes up the work of three iconic feminist thinkers— Angela Davis, Shulamith Firestone, and Donna Haraway—to ask how each author’s vision of work, the family, and the carceral state can expand contemporary feminism’s ability to structurally analyze social problems. Kathi Weeks examines the archive of this unexpected collection of Marxist feminists whose works are united by their abolitionist approaches, arguing that feminism can gain a broader constituency by taking up anti-capitalist critique and praxis. Across the book’s chapters, Weeks recontextualizes well-known feminist texts in a new and original light, bringing their insight from the past into the present and future of abolitionist politics.
Kathi Weeks is Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University and the author of The Problem with Work, published by Duke University Press, and Constituting Feminist Subjects
Insufferable Tools
Feminism Against Big Tech
SARAH SHARMA
In a world seemingly run by the whims and power plays of Musks and Zucks, Insufferable Tools cuts to the core of modern technology’s gendered politics. Sarah Sharma challenges the idea that the Big Tech broligarchs are neutral utilitarians who view technology as mere tools. She shows instead how these tech giants have turned the internet, and, increasingly, “real life” into a set of environments which they cultivate and manipulate to wield the real tools: us, the users. Sharma offers a system of inclusion she calls “Big Tech Feminism” that incorporates those who refuse to be used: people of color, queer people, and others who are seen as broken machines in the current gendered power structures. Deconstructing Big Tech’s patriarchal deployment of media theory to gain and maintain power, Sharma proposes a feminist techno-politics that can forge new futures free from the grip of the truly insufferable tools.
Sarah Sharma is Professor of Media Theory and Director of the Institute for Communication, Culture, Information and Technology at the University of Toronto. She is author of In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics and coeditor of Re-Understanding Media: Feminist Extensions of Marshall McLuhan, both published by Duke University Press.
The New Politics of Online Feminism
AKANE KANAI
In The New Politics of Online Feminism, Akane Kanai argues that for young feminists online culture often poses more dilemmas than it solves. Moving beyond a narrow characterization of online feminism as a site of activism and resistance, Kanai attends to the feminist quandaries of being politically conscientious as life online becomes inseparable from the offline world. Kanai suggests that for online feminists, avoiding complicity with patriarchy, racism, and other oppressions has never been more important, yet the self has remained the central site of agency and transformation—casting politics in terms of individual scrupulousness, diligence, and improvement. Under these circumstances, a feminist lens becomes about benchmarking, comparing, and anxiously avoiding the public mistakes that others make in online life. Kanai foregrounds the importance of moving beyond the polarities of correct and incorrect feeling to enable the everyday practices of listening to and learning about experience and difference.
Akane Kanai is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick and author of Gender and Relatability in Digital Culture: Managing Affect, Intimacy and Value
April 2026
222 pages
Technology/Feminism
Rights: World
February 2026
208 pages
Gender studies
Rights: World
Climbing
HIL MALATINO
Written by longtime climber Hil Malatino, Climbing explores the why of the sport, asking what pushes him and so many others to drag themselves to the gym and the crag time and again; to restructure their intimate lives around the pursuit of a new goal; and to devote thousands of hours forging their nerves to perform physical and mental feats while dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of feet off the ground. In chapters that explore gender, class, and sizeism in climbing culture, as well as grief, addiction, queer and trans-worldmaking, and the tensions between conservation and recreation, Climbing teases out how the art of navigating across rock can help us learn how to revel in being weird, vulnerable, and radically interdependent animals temporarily gifted the complicated tragicomedy of a body. It is a story of collective obsession and transformation that tracks how holding yourself on the wall helps you learn how to hold onto the ambiguities of life on earth.
Hil Malatino is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. He is also the author of Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad and Trans Care
Winnowing
SUZANNE MATSON
November 2026
128 pages
Essays
Rights: World
In Winnowing, Suzanne Matson examines our personal, cultural, and environmental relationship with material objects. Matson alternates between reflective essays on the nature of ownership and her own “Winnowing Log,” a day-by-day account of her attempts to reduce the items in her home. Sorting through the emotional value of mementos, the gendered dimensions of housekeeping, and the environmental cost of both mass production and disposal, she physically, mentally, and spiritually lightens her life while reflecting on the tethers that make winnowing so hard. She compares ideas of material impermanence in Stoicism, Buddhism, and Christianity, acknowledging that total renunciation of things is beyond most people’s goals or abilities, but also that reducing what we own, carry, and tend can clear space for spiritual lightness, aesthetic pleasure, and freedom. Rather than a celebration or condemnation of material goods, Winnowing is a meditation on the personal and universal struggles and rewards of separating the chaff from the grain.
Suzanne Matson is Professor of English at Boston College and the author of several novels and books of poetry, including Ultraviolet, The Tree-Sitter, and A Trick of Nature
Star Charting
BESS MATASSA
Astrology is the language in which all of existence speaks, says astrologer and tarotist Bess Matassa. In Star Charting, she leads readers on a vivid journey through the twelve signs of the zodiac as a poetic practice and transformative framework for befriending both the familiar and the strange. Matassa blends personal narrative, sensory immersion, inquiry exercises, and communal calls to action to reframe this ancient art as a modern manifesto for healing division by exalting the astounding complexity within this wild world. In contrast to more technical manuals on birth chart interpretation, this is magic-making as an exploratory treasure hunt, forging radical pathways to personal and collective evolution. Twelve modes of bearing witness to life and moving with its currents. Twelve styles of championing creative change. And twelve ways of never, ever losing heart.
Bess Matassa, PhD, is a New York-based astrologer and tarot reader who has authored books and decks that include The Tarot Almanac and NYC Tarot
Kicking
JULES BOYKOFF
As a poet, public-facing scholar of sports politics, and former professional soccer player, having represented the United States on the men’s U23 national soccer team, Jules Boykoff draws on his lifetime of athletic experience to reflect on the practice of kicking. With short vignettes blending the personal, the reflective, the historical, and the analytical, Kicking is uniquely positioned to reflect on the most popular sport in the world. From the act of kicking a soccer ball, Boykoff looks outward to his own family history, including his mother’s struggle with polio, which fed her insistence on his athleticism; to broader trends like greenwashing and sportwashing; and to reflections on sport’s toxic masculinity, the poetics of on-field revenge, and the power-politics of both the men’s and women’s World Cups. Kicking is a must-read for all those who love the beautiful game.
Jules Boykoff is the author of What Are the Olympics For?, The 1936 Berlin Olympics, and NOlympians
Doing Nothing
JAMES CURRIE
Doing Nothing is a book about doing nothing in a system where there is always something pressing that ought to be done. Not the productive unstructured time of self-help books, but the aimless and ineffective doing nothing of procrastination, resignation, and melancholia. James Currie pursues these themes across a wide terrain of experiences, materials, and examples from the personal, local, and anecdotal, through to the existential, cosmological, and apocalyptic—reflecting, among other things, on the COVID pandemic, the lives of teenagers, Lars Van Trier’s 2011 film Melancholia, work, play, and politics. Doing Nothing offers a lived-in embrace of queer states of being that stand against liveliness and the mournful feelings of entrapment and shame that exist alongside the unexpected opportunities such situations afford.
James Currie is a multi-arts practitioner and Associate Professor in the Department of Music at the University at Buffalo. He is the author of Music and the Politics of Negation
February 2026
160 pages
Astrology/Memoir Rights: World
May 2026
176 pages
Sports Rights: World
February 2026
104 pages
Memoir Rights: World
July 2026
272 pages
Environmental studies/Anthropology Rights: World
How to Control Fire on Burning Continent
TIMOTHY NEALE
Each year, Australia faces increasingly unprecedented wildfires, marked both by their scale and intense disagreements within public discourse about the political, cultural, and ecological causes of the fires. How to Control Fire on a Burning Continent is a critical and ethnographic exploration of wildfire management in Australia and the technoscientific systems of control that shape its current and future possibilities. Timothy Neale observes how two seemingly opposing forces, an entrenched sense of nested crises and widespread normalization, combine to form an apparatus of institutional fire management that increasingly centers governance and militarization. While sympathetic to the double-binds many fire management professionals find themselves in, Neale ties contemporary wildfire problems to ongoing colonization and Indigenous dispossession, exploring Indigenous-led land management and cultural burning as a practical assertion of sovereignty. Through ethnographic work with professional fire managers and Indigenous environmental stewards, Neale calls for a collective movement beyond control thinking by fostering new alliances and modes of coping with, rather than commanding, our flammable world.
Timothy Neale is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Deakin University and author of Wild Articulations: Environmentalism and Indigeneity in Northern Australia
We Live with the Sea
Ecologizing Safety in Post-Tsunami Japan
July 2026
260 pages
Anthropology/Asian Studies Rights: World
ANDREW LITTLEJOHN
In We Live with the Sea, Andrew Littlejohn addresses the implementation and controversy surrounding safety infrastructures following the March 2011 tsunami in northeastern Japan. While the Japanese government proposed and enforced infrastructural transformations in the wake of the tsunami, these changes did not consider the impact on residents who built their communities and livelihoods around the coast. Focusing on the tsunami survivors who resisted government plans for increased coastal defenses, Littlejohn highlights alternative proposals offered by the local residents as well as the environmental, ecological, and morethan-human dependencies and imbrications those proposals reveal. In doing so, he argues that imposed modernist safety structures undermine the very things they claim to protect, showing how attempts to “ecologize” safety may offer more sustainable ways of thinking about security, preservation, and infrastructure.
Andrew Littlejohn is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University.
Archives of the Anthropocene
Visual Grammars of Deep Time
YURIKO FURUHATA
Yuriko Furuhata’s Archives of the Anthropocene examines how visual inscriptions—from geological maps to photographs and films of snow, ice, and coral reefs—assisted the construction and codification of vertical and extractive modes of seeing Earth’s subterranean depths and aerial heights. Focusing specifically on the shifting boundaries and territorial ambitions of archipelagic empires of Japan and the United States in the twentieth century, Furuhata explores the overlapping moments between the geoscientific history of studying Earth’s deep time and the geopolitical history of settler colonization, territorialization, militarization, and extraction in the Pacific and the polar regions. By engaging with contemporary critiques of settler colonialism, liberal humanism, human exceptionalism, and nonhuman labor, the book gestures beyond the species-centered narrative of the Anthropocene, calling to imagine the anti-colonial and anti-imperial future of the planet.
Yuriko Furuhata is Professor in the Department of East Asian Studies at McGill University. She is alto the author of Climatic Media: Transpacific Experiments in Atmospheric Control and Cinema of Actuality: Japanese Avant-Garde Filmmaking in the Season of Image Politics, both from Duke University Press.
The Sound of Feathers
Attentive Living in a World Beyond Ourselves
KATHRYN GILLESPIE
From the rustle of a crow’s wings to the cool touch of moss on a stone wall, to the quiet determination of a worm crossing a sidewalk, The Sound of Feathers invites readers to notice the small wonders of life all around them. These fleeting details hold surprising truths about humanity’s connection to nature, the complex relationships of care and harm in which we are entangled, our responsibilities to other species, and what it means to be fully present in the world. Through vivid storytelling and deeply personal reflections, Kathryn Gillespie invites us to slow down, pay attention, and think differently about our everyday lives so that we might imagine shared futures of flourishing. She urges us to confront the forces that separate us from the natural world and find more compassionate ways of living in harmony with it. Gillespie reminds us that the quiet, often overlooked moments in life are where the most profound insights and connections begin.
Kathryn Gillespie is Associate Director of the Center for Food Systems Transformation at the University of San Diego and author of The Cow with Ear Tag #1389
September 2026
336 pages
Media Studies/Environmental studies
Rights: World
February 2026
224 pages
Nature
Rights: World
November 2026
240 pages
Anthropology/Public health Rights: World
Mosquito Work
Vectors of Global Health
ANN H. KELLY AND JAVIER LEZAUN
In Mosquito Work, Ann H. Kelly and Javier Lezaun reimagine global health by returning to its most persistent problem: the mosquito. Drawing on nearly two decades of ethnographic and historical research across Africa, Latin America, Europe, and the former Soviet Union, the authors follow entomologists, technicians, community volunteers, and the mosquitoes themselves to illuminate the collaborations, experimental improvisations, and political entanglements that shape contemporary disease control. In each setting, Kelly and Lezaun explore how expertise is crafted, how interventions take shape, and how scientific attention to mosquito life becomes a vehicle for imagining different futures of global health. Showing how the hard-won efforts to come to grips with the dynamic behaviors, elusive ecology, and irrepressible recalcitrance of mosquitoes offers crucial insight into what global health can know and do, Mosquito Work reveals a world where intervention depends less on silver bullets than on forms of care, persistence, and collaboration that unfold close to the problem at hand.
Love in a Time of Zika
Environmental Crisis and the Future of Reproduction
June 2026
202 pages
Geography/Science studies
Rights: World
PAIGE MARIE PATCHIN
Love in the Time of Zika examines the transformation of reproductive politics spurred by the Zika public health emergency in 2016. The Zika virus, a mosquito-borne disease with a direct link to fetal and children’s disabilities, provoked the surveillance of and intervention into women’s and girls’ bodies and lives. Paige Marie Patchin tracks this period of intense reproductive experimentation, from fast contraceptive implant insertion drives in Puerto Rico to the genetic modification of mosquitoes in Brazil, to explore the future of reproduction as environmental crises mount, public infrastructures wilt, and walls rise. Patchin questions what kind of a world we are building if the response to dangerous, global environmental problems like Zika is to pit fetuses against one another in a future of limited resources. Set between the twin specters of eugenics and fascism, Love in the Time of Zika argues for the relevance of reproduction to wider questions about what it means to be people living amongst other people, and people living amongst other beings.
Paige Marie Patchin is Lecturer in Race, Ethnicity and Postcolonial Studies at the Sarah Parker Remond Centre at the University College London.
Ann H. Kelly is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oxford. Javier Lezaun is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oxford.
Sick Work
Exhaustion, Labor, and Invisible Illness
EMILY LIM ROGERS
In Sick Work, Emily Lim Rogers argues that being sick is not work’s opposite, but rather, that sickness takes work. Through a historical and ethnographic account of myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS)—a disease defined by disproportionate exhaustion after any form of exertion, with no cures or treatments—she reveals that changing formations of labor decide what counts as disability and what does not. The frequent dismissal of their disease leaves people with ME/CFS to do their own labor of disease advocacy, or “sick work,” ironically because most cannot work paid jobs. Lim presents a history of the discursive construction of chronic fatigue and demonstrates its imbrications with capitalism since the dawn of industrial management science in the late nineteenth century. Examining the everyday lives of people with ME/CFS and their activist movements, Sick Work describes how they swim upstream against strong tides of disbelief and demands for a radical transformation of how work is defined and valued.
Emily Lim Rogers is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University.
Surviving the State
Land and Democracy in Myanmar
HILARY OLIVIA FAXON
In Myanmar's Kalay Valley, a rice-growing region near the Indian border, farmers have been subject to land grabs and displacement so that profitable palm oil plantations could be built on what was once subsistence agricultural land. Surviving the State considers the everyday, land-based practices of these farmers, many of whom are women, as they endure the violence and neglect of the authoritarian state. Through robust ethnography, Hilary Faxon describes how Myanmar smallholders treat land not only as a source of food, a place of kinship, and a source of identity, but also as a living thing entwined with the families it supports. She considers the centrality of land politics, both to the state's efforts to control the area and to the Burmese inhabitants’ efforts to survive and support their families, looking at how locals evade and obfuscate legal boundaries to hold onto their land in the face of seizures and redistribution. Providing a feminist ethnographic survey of post-coup Myanmar, Surviving the State is a testament to the daily work of survival in the face of political violence.
Hilary Olivia Faxon is Assistant Professor of Environmental Social Science at the University of Montana.
September 2026
240 pages
Disability studies/Medical anthropology
Rights: World
July 2026
246 pages
Geography/Asian studies
Rights: World
October 2026 224 pages
December 2026
240 pages
Literary studies/Philosophy Rights: World
Ninety-Nine
A Kaleidoscopic Portrait of Allah
AMIRA MITTERMAIER
According to Islamic tradition, God has at least ninety-nine names by which he is called and known by his creation. In Ninety-Nine, Amira Mittermaier presents ninety-nine short chapters based on her interviews and fieldwork with over one hundred Egyptians about who God is to them. In Egypt’s turbulent twenty-first century—the Egyptian uprising, a military coup, a pandemic, a climate crisis—God is talked about endlessly but remains elusive. Ninety-Nine follows Allah into different spaces and conversations without ever claiming to get the full picture. We meet a Cairo beggar, an enigmatic dervish, a queer agnostic, and a Salafi housewife. In yoga classes, overprized coffeeshops, and therapy sessions, we meet a depressed God, a cute God, a God who has stopped caring, a loving God, and a God who is a bully. An intimate, kaleidoscopic portrait of Allah, Ninety-Nine offers insight into how modern Muslims grapple with big theological questions and celebrates the many answers they have about the unknowable God entangled in their lives.
Amira Mittermaier is Professor of Religion and Anthropology and Director of the Institute of Islamic Studies at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Giving to God: Islamic Charity in Revolutionary Times and Dreams that Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination
Asylum
The Concept and the Practice
RANJANA KHANNA
In Asylum, Ranjana Khanna examines how sanctuaries, refugee camps, mental asylums, holding facilities for asylum seekers, and state boundaries are all understood through the term “asylum.” Engaging with Continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, literary theory, postcolonial studies, and Marxist critique, Khanna considers the multiple and entangled senses of asylum in the histories of mental health, incarceration, and human rights. She shows that a diversity of forms of migration are assessed in the terms of a new set of moral criteria concerning the right to political asylum. Simultaneously signifying safety and incarceration, Khanna shows how postcolonial asylum constructs spaces of hospitality and hostility that render divisions between the human and nonhuman, dignity and shame, value and disposability. Khanna demonstrates that the notion of asylum reveals the importance of sovereignty as understood through the formulation and imposition of the concepts of the human and of the valuable.
Ranjana Khanna is Director of the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute and Professor of English, Literature, and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. She is the author of Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism, also published by Duke University Press, and Algeria Cuts: Women and Representation, 1830 to the Present
Conceptual Activism
Reorganizing Meaning in the Struggle for Gender's Future
DAVINA COOPER
In Conceptual Activism, Davina Cooper examines how activists redefine huge, seemingly intractable concepts through law and politics. Cooper examines sex- and gender-based emancipatory projects in Britain that are waged through policy, focusing on how these projects transform social life and bring new social meanings and identities to life through what she calls “conceptual activism.” Cooper explores the conceptual activism of public bodies ranging from trade unions and community organizations to local government and regulatory agencies in the conflict over sex and gender, particularly in the context of the debates between trans feminists and so-called “gender critical” feminists. Cooper shows how conceptual activisms over sex and gender have come to bear on the domains of property, economy, and sports. More broadly, Cooper uses the framework of conceptual activism to understand how concepts advance social politics and change and emphasizes that concepts are not just abstract ideas; they have material force in daily life.
Davina Cooper is Research Professor in Law and Political Theory at King’s College London and author of Feeling Like a State: Desire, Denial, and the Recasting of Authority, also published by Duke University Press.
Ozu and the Ethics of Indeterminacy
DAISUKE MIYAO
Ozu and the Ethics of Indeterminacy re-examines cinema studies through the work of Japanese filmmaker Yasujirō Ozu, repositioning Ozu within contemporary discussions to explore cinema’s relationship to the world and the formation of film studies as a discipline. Centering a small selection of Ozu films in each chapter, Daisuke Miyao highlights how the director’s unique filmmaking methodologies make him a site of negotiation between the fields of cinema studies and ethics. Analyzing Ozu’s use of cinematography, narrative, and color, Miyao theorizes the indeterminate in film—the seen and unseen, human and nonhuman, domestic and international—to initiate a multi-directional dialogue on the study of cinema that reaches beyond auteurism and culturalism to establish a new basis for disciplinary conversations.
Daisuke Miyao is Professor and Hajime Mori Chair in Japanese Language and Literature at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author and editor of several books, including Japonisme and the Birth of Cinema, The Aesthetics of Shadow: Lighting and Japanese Cinema, and Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom, published by Duke University Press.
November 2026
272 pages
Gender studies/Law Rights: World
March 2026
290 pages
Film studies
Rights: World, excluding Arabic
February 2026
302 pages
Film/Queer theory
Rights: World
April 2026
342 pages
Film studies/ Cultural studies
Rights: World
Curating Deviance
Programming the Queer Film Canon
MARC FRANCIS
In Curating Deviance, Marc Francis scavenges film history for signs of vibrant, wayward life in the film programming of US art house and repertory cinemas between 1968 and 1989. Francis examines how creative and savvy programmers screened films by the likes of John Waters, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Russ Meyer, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and a bevy of others in major cities across the United States, forming intertextual constellations in their repertory calendars. These programs allied a dizzying range of sexual and gendered outlaws, including stigmatized practices often overlooked by LGBT-focused queer theory. Curating Deviance reveals how repertory and art cinemas built a coalition of outcasts stigmatized for their taboo desires or identities, rekindling queer utopian imaginaries.
Marc Francis is Manager of Film Programming in Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Yale University and has worked at HBO, Warner Bros, and Paramount.
Melodrama as Provocateur
LINDA WILLIAMS
EDITED BY CHRISTINE GLEDHILL, LAURA HORAK, AND ELISABETH R. ANKER
As one of the most influential contemporary film scholars, Linda Williams brought her critical feminist lens to some of society’s most maligned and underappreciated film genres. Melodrama as Provocateur showcases what was to be Williams’s last project in which, insisting on melodrama as a cross-generic, cross-media mode, she investigates the divergence between French and American attitudes to film melodrama. A diverse group of scholars respond to her provocations, rethinking melodrama’s transnational, transmedia histories and potential futures. Their contributions examine how melodrama became, as Williams argues, the default mode of contemporary media, and demonstrate how it plays an increasingly powerful role in public discourse and political rhetoric today.
Linda Williams (1946–2025) was Professor of Film Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. She authored and edited several books, including Screening Sex and Playing the Race Card. She received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies. Christine Gledhill is Visiting Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Leeds. Laura Horak is Professor of Film Studies at Carleton University. Elisabeth R. Anker is Professor of American Studies and Political Science and Director of Film Studies at The George Washington University.
Close Writing
Kathy Acker, Cookie Mueller, and Love-in-Pieces
ALICE BUTLER
In Close Writing, Alice Butler reflects on the diaries, letters, publications, performances, lives, and afterlives of her most beloved queer feminist writers: Kathy Acker and Cookie Mueller. While the transgressive avant-garde writer Kathy Acker has developed a cult following in the decades since her death in the late-90s, the actress and writer Cookie Mueller has remained relatively obscure. In this creative-critical study, Butler participates and responds to the lives and writings of her shared “beloved," reimagining the scene of the archive as a scene of triangulated and bittersweet love that traverses the boundaries of life and death. She draws on the autofictional strategies that Acker and Mueller pioneered in their own experimental writings and performances, encountering the women in intimate theoretical spaces of sensuality, sexuality, and sickness that slip between life and text. By encountering Acker and Mueller as transgressors and innovators, but also as beloved figures in her writing life whom she addresses in love letters, Butler brings readers to new, reparative textures of understanding, embodiment, and affection through close writing.
Alice Butler is Tutor (Research) in the School of Arts and Humanities at the Royal College of Art and coeditor of Gestures: A body of work
How Dungeons and Dragons Changed the Way We Play
AARON TRAMMELL
First released in 1974, Dungeons & Dragons revolutionized game design and speculative media by guiding role-players through hyper-detailed fantasy worlds as characters of their own design. In How Dungeons & Dragons Changed the Way We Play, Aaron Trammell excavates the game as an artifact of a dying counterculture with a burgeoning neoliberal ethos obsessed with quantification. Mapping the world onto a grid, building characters whose every trait is assigned a point value, and advancing the game’s narrative through dice throws—countless core mechanics are tied to numbers. Putting the game design of D&D into dialogue with the social and political tensions of the 1970s and 80s, Trammell illuminates how the integrated quantification in the game design led to reductionism, reinforced gender and oppressive racial norms, and accustomed generations of players to the bigoted, xenophobic mores of the Cold War era. He delivers a history of both how games can shape players and how players, united by their own shared values, can shape games in turn.
Aaron Trammell is Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, author of The Privilege of Play and Repairing Play, and senior editor of Analog Game Studies
April 2026
304 pages
Literature/Feminist studies
Rights: World
September 2026
176 pages
Media studies/Cultural studies
Rights: World
October 2026
232 pages
Cultural studies
Rights: World
Out of Sync
Ventriloquism in Popular Media from Vinyl to TikTok
SARAH REBECCA KESSLER
Ventriloquism, or the art of “throwing the voice,” has outdated or even unsettling connotations to many, associated with vaudeville and the nefarious talking dolls of so many horror movies. Yet ventriloquism remains a popular performance art, filling theaters and concert venues with audiences eager to hear puppets voice what humans—in an increasingly polarized present—want to say but feel they can’t. In Out of Sync, Sarah Rebecca Kessler explores ventriloquism’s persistence within, and relevance to, the contemporary moment, examining performances by recent and current practitioners such as Richard Sandfield, Nina Conti, Jeff Dunham, and Terry Fator, while also tracing ventriloquism’s travels across media including vinyl records, documentary films, music videos, and social media platforms such as TikTok. Kessler argues that ventriloquism and its many remediations thus amplify a cultural politics of synchronization that positions not just sounds and images, but voices and bodies, as more and less out of sync along the lines of race, gender, and sexuality. Looking closely at the art and its outgrowths, Out of Sync gives insight into the operations of race, gender, and sexuality as distinctly audiovisual processes.
Sarah Rebecca Kessler is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Southern California.
Hidden Empire of Finance
How Wall Street Profits from Our Cities and Fuels Global Inequality
MICHAEL GOLDMAN
Hidden Empire of Finance follows the rise of new global cities, tracing their roots back to the 1970s proliferation of neoliberalism and following their fate in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse. As India, China, and other nations sought to develop urban infrastructures that could compete with western hubs like New York, Paris, and London, large-scale flows of capital intruded into national economies as speculative investment in the growing real estate market. A web of opaque financial products, such as collateralized debt and real estate investment trusts, became alternative vehicles for these investments, resulting in vast networks of public goods and services that are now owned and controlled by major financial firms located oceans away. Michael Goldman shows that speculative urbanism relies on dispossession and the racialization of institutional practices to fuel finance's insatiable appetite for capital, determining the ways cities across the global South and North are governed.
Michael Goldman is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute for Global Studies at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. He is the author of Imperial Nature and the coeditor of The Social Lives of Land and Chronicles of a Global City, among others. February
Precarious Accumulation
Fast Fashion Bosses in Transnational Guangzhou
NELLIE CHU
In Precarious Accumulation, Nellie Chu tells the story of the migrant entrepreneurs at the heart of Guangzhou’s fast fashion industry—one of the world’s most dynamic hubs of transnational commodity production. Chu shows how rural Chinese migrants, West African traders, and South Korean jobbers navigate the high-speed, low-margin world of just-intime garment production that fuels the constant accumulation of wealth via global supply chains. Drawing on fieldwork in Guangzhou’s urban villages and household workshops, Chu outlines how these entrepreneurs’ dreams of economic freedom clash with the reality of precarity and the exclusions of emigre status. Migrant bosses operate within a highly competitive, informal economy where they are both agents and target of exploitation, as they must evade rent collectors, endure racialized policing, and mitigate extortion from security officers and competitors. Chu crucially demonstrates how their efforts generate novel forms of migratory labor, commodity production, and cross-cultural exchange in postsocialist China.
Nellie Chu is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke Kunshan University.
Enter the Lion
The 1966 State Visit of Emperor Haile Selassie I to the Caribbean
JOHN P. HOMIAK, GIULIA BONACCI, AND JAHLANI A. NIAAH
On April 21, 1966, tens of thousands of Jamaicans exuberantly greeted Ethiopia’s Emperor Haile Selassie I in Kingston, Jamaica. The emperor came to express gratitude for the peoples’ support during the Italo-Ethiopian War and bolster the ongoing struggle for liberation in Rhodesia. This state visit repositioned Rastafari in Jamaican society and ignited widespread cultural, social, and political transformations across the Caribbean. Enter the Lion assembles a vital archive of this landmark event, gathering British colonial records, newspaper reportage from the Caribbean and Ethiopia, the official records of the Ethiopian Ministry of Information, and oral history. The authors paint an illuminating picture of the diverse political interests at play, exploring how the visit reshaped the Rastafari movement, Jamaican society, the wider Caribbean, and their Pan-African connections.
John P. Homiak is Research Associate of Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. Giulia Bonacci is a historian and researcher at the Institute of Research for Sustainable Development. Jahlani A. Niaah is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the Institute of Caribbean Studies in the University of the West Indies.
February 2026
280 pages
Anthropology/Asian studies/Labor Rights: World
September 2026
352 pages
History/Caribbean studies
Rights: World
December 2026
344 pages
African studies/Literary studies
Rights: World
November 2026
264 pages
Photography/African studies
Rights: World
Materializing Imaginaries in Senegal
Modern African Literature and Global 1968
FATOUMATA SECK
In Materializing Imaginaries in Senegal, Fatoumata Seck shows how cultural revolutionary projects in Senegal and beyond in the 1960s shaped African literature, cinema, and intellectual thought in the latter half of the twentieth century. She charts an intellectual and literary history that positions Global 1968 as a defining moment in modern African literature. Seck analyzes African literature of this period through the prism of creative dissidence, revolutionary fervor, and cultural experimentation. Seck examines the role of African students and intellectuals in forging decolonizing aesthetics underpinned by pan-African, and internationalist solidarities of the 1960s. She also follows the enduring traces of these revolutionary projects in African letters, reframing the emergence and reception of works by figures such as Léopold Sédar Senghor, Cheikh Anta Diop, Aminata Sow Fall, Ousmane Sembène, Awa Thiam, Djibril Diop Mambéty, Ken Bugul, Boubacar Boris Diop, and others. In so doing, Seck demonstrates that unfulfilled revolutions do not prevent the materialization of revolutionary imaginaries.
Fatoumata Seck is Assistant Professor of French at Stanford University.
Private Subjects
Family Photography in South Africa and the Right to Opacity
JOHN PEFFER
In Private Subjects, John Peffer presents perspectives about everyday uses of photography in predominantly Black communities during apartheid in South Africa to give insight into how these images are seen through the eyes of those who own them today. In South Africa, portrait photography was used to create positive self-images during times of hardship and subjection. Peffer shows how owners limiting the distribution of their photographs to close networks of family and friends was a means to establish control over their own image. He develops a method for writing about vernacular photographic experience that keeps the subjects that appear in those photographs at the center of the story, creating a space to converse about race and history in their own ways rather than be explained about from outside the frame. At the same time, he develops an ethics for looking at others’ private family photographs and argues for a model of writing and scholarship that protects people’s desires for opacity.
John Peffer is Professor of Art History at Ramapo College of New Jersey and author of Art and the End of Apartheid
Black Undertow
HUGO KA CANHAM
In Black Undertow, Hugo ka Canham thinks through the intersections of queerness and black coastal life. Shifting the focus of theorizations of blackness away from West Africa and the Atlantic, Canham unmasks the violence of the Indian Ocean and South African shoreline. In this theoretical and meditative work, Canham listens to and for traces of African ancestors who linger in the water, the sand, coastal forts, corals, ritual practices, and unruly imaginations. In tracking these elusive figures, he develops an approach that honors a queer right to opacity. Canham reconstitutes the siloed disciplinarity that imagines African studies, Black studies, Queer African studies, and Queer studies as necessarily different. He shows that these areas are always already African, black, and queer. When read as coconstitutive, Canham demonstrates that they better allow for explicating local life, history, poetics, and theory. In so doing, he forges methods of studying black life that think beyond the limits of traditional, textual archives.
Hugo ka Canham is Professor in the Centre for Black Planetary Studies, Institute for Social and Health Sciences, at the University of South Africa. He is the author of Riotous Deathscapes, also published by Duke University Press.
Forms of Blackness
Race and Visibility in the French-Speaking World CÉCILE BISHOP
Considering race as form across literature, theory, painting, and photography, Cécile Bishop’s Forms of Blackness explores the formal devices that make Blackness both visible and recognizable. In keeping with Black Francophone theorists like Glissant and Fanon, Bishop uses the ambiguities these aesthetic forms carry to explore a range of identity concepts like opacity, formlessness, and doubleness. Bishop puts Blackness-as-race and blackness-as-form in dialogue, showing how race disrupts the concept of artistic autonomy and how the aesthetic challenges race as a self-evident visual phenomenon. Thought together, form does not isolate blackness from race but rather calls attention to the material substrate that turns race into a phenomenon that can be experienced through sense perception. Moving between careful analysis and experimental modes of critique, Forms of Blackness offers a new way of thinking about the politics of visibility and offers a pressing invitation to question the ways we interpret what we see.
Cécile Bishop is Associate Professor of Francophone Post-Colonial Literatures and Cultures at University of Oxford and Kelleher Fellow in French at Oriel College. She is the author of Postcolonial Criticism and Representations of African Dictatorship: The Aesthetics of Tyranny
December 2026
216 pages
African Diaspora Studies/Environmental Humanities
Rights: World
June 2026
272 pages
Art/Black studies
Rights: World
December 2026
280 pages
Current events/Gender and Sexuality Rights: World
Radicalizing Men
Fascist Desires, Great Replacement Propaganda, and Political Violence
JESSICA JOHNSON
In Radicalizing Men, Jessica Johnson examines the connection between white masculinity, participation in mainstream and alternative social media, and acts of political violence against perceived threats to understand and combat the far-right radicalization of men. Johnson tracks the networking of fascist desires through what she calls “great replacement” propaganda presented in sermons, during school board meetings, on digital platforms, in a campus quad, and conveyed through algorithms, rhetoric, and memes. She then interrogates how these medias, technologies, laws, and infrastructures move men to political violence. Rather than the result of impressionable individuals being manipulated by political rhetoric, Johnson frames political violence as replicable, social acts which take on lives of their own within a dynamic, emotional, and sensory body of fascist imagination. Radicalizing Men digs at the roots of the far-right movement, exploring the socioeconomic, infrastructural, and affective connections between neoliberal capitalism and militarized nationalism which have formed a transnational breeding ground for political violence.
Jessica Johnson is an independent scholar and the author of Biblical Porn: Affect, Labor, and Pastor Mark Driscoll's Evangelical Empire, published by Duke University Press.
Without Masters
Autogestión, Anarchist Ethics, and Mexico City Punk
October 2026
248 pages
Anthropology/Latin American studies Rights: World
LIVIA
K. STONE
Without Masters is an anthropological history of the radical ethical and political principle of autogestión as it traveled around the world in the twentieth century and came to be popularized in Mexico City in the early 2000s. The term first arose in 1962 Algeria, but as it traveled across continents, the concept took on new meanings and connotations until it landed in Mexico City’s anarcho-punk scene in the 1980s. As Livia K. Stone shows, though, that was far from the end of autogestión’s evolution. By the first decades of the twenty-first century, autogestión was associated more closely with the independent cultural production of zines, music, art, and Zapatismo than with its origins in anarchism or syndicalism. Without Masters brings the true history of autogestión and the quiet radicalism of Mexico City’s autogestive collectives to an English-speaking audience for the first time. Along the way, Stone brings together eclectic and diverse materials, from punk zines and political fliers, to Beat novels and Zapatista parables, that tell an alternate history of radical politics throughout the world in the second half of the twentieth century that serves as a reminder of Mexico’s formative role in the creation of social theory in the social sciences.
Livia K. Stone is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Illinois State University and author of Atenco Lives!: Filmmaking and Popular Struggle in Mexico
The Invention of Order
On the Coloniality of Space
DON THOMAS DEERE
In The Invention of Order, Don Thomas Deere retraces the colonial origins of spatial organization in the Americas and the Caribbean and its lasting impact on modern structures of knowledge, power, race, gender as well as understandings of global modernity. The coloniality of space dispossessed Indigenous, African, and mixed populations as it constructed new systems of control and movement. Deere demonstrates how these developments manifested, among other forms, in urban grid patterns imposed during the development of Spanish colonial cities as well as totalizing trade routes crisscrossing the Atlantic. Drawing on a range of thinkers including Enrique Dussel, Édouard Glissant, and Sylvia Wynter, Deere reveals how movement—who travels, who settles, and who is excluded—becomes an essential component of control under colonial rule. Against the violence of spatial reordering, Deere outlines how novel forms of resistance and insurgency geographies still take hold, particularly in the Caribbean, where landscapes remain excessive, eruptive, and uncaptured by the order of modernity.
Don Thomas Deere is Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at Texas A&M University.
January 2026
160 pages
Philosophy Rights: World
Viscous Performances
The Persistence of Creative Resistances in Neoliberal Chile
MARÍA JOSÉ CONTRERAS LORENZINI
Viscous Performances examines the endurance of creative protest performances in Chile from the 2011 student mobilizations to the aftermath of the 2019 social revolt. Drawing from performance theory, feminist new materialisms, affect studies, and decolonial perspectives, María José Contreras Lorenzini situates Chilean practices of resistance within a global conversation about the politics of performance, while attending closely to the historical and material specificities of the Chilean context. Case studies include student interventions, feminist mobilizations, and commemorative actions that unfolded along a two-kilometer stretch of Santiago’s main avenue, La Alameda. Contreras Lorenzini argues that repeated creative resistances that insistently occupied this same urban corridor generated a sticky, persistent, and affectively charged antidote to neoliberalism’s slow violence. These temporally dispersed acts territorialized the urban space as a site of resistance, where echoes and reverberations of repertoires accumulated, thickened, and remained available for re-enactment. By theorizing resistance as viscous rather than fleeting, Viscous Performances challenges neoliberal framings of dissent that privilege visibility and spectacle and highlights the quieter, less visible practices of care, collaboration, and imagination through which communities sustain longterm struggles.
María José Contreras Lorenzini is Associate Professor of Theatre at Columbia University and coeditor of Women Mobilizing Memory
November 2026
240 pages
Performance studies/Latin American studies
Rights: World, excluding Spanish
May 2026
344 pages
Feminist studies/Philosophy/Latin American & Latinx Studies
Rights: World
Strange Tastes
Aesthetics and the Public in Latin American and Latinx Feminisms
MONIQUE ROELOFS
Strange Tastes is a philosophical excursion into aesthetic experience and the public through the works of contemporary Latin American and Latinx women writers and artists. In a careful study of this revelatory archive, Monique Roelofs shows how life lived aesthetically can embrace public space instead of surrendering it to the constrictive forces of gendering and racial capital. Joining notions of sensibility grounded in Enlightenment aesthetics with the creative capabilities of a decolonial aesthetics, Roelofs looks to practices that animate the public through intimate, social, and political registers, particularly by engaging the historical and critical potentialities of disinterested play and what she calls “strange tastes,” or the unusual, uncanny, and nonnormative desires and sensations of marginalized individuals. Through sustained attention to materiality and lived experience, Roelofs offers a feminist philosophy of aesthetics that takes seriously the role of the public, where strange tastes turn aesthetic imaginaries into powerful possibilities to remake self, city, nation, and world.
Monique Roelofs is Professor and Chair of Philosophy of Art & Culture and Head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. She is the author of Arts of Address and The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic and coeditor of Black Art and Aesthetics
Backlist Highlights
Meeting the Universe Halfway
Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning
KAREN BARAD
Theoretical physicist and feminist theorist Karen Barad provides an account of the world as a whole rather than something composed of separate natural and social realms. Barad combines physics, critical social theory, and feminism to rework understandings of space, time, matter, and objectivity.
July 2007
Science and Technology Studies/Feminist Theory and Philosophy
28,000 lifetime paperback sales
Licensed in French (2025), Italian (2025), Korean (renewed 2024), Japanese, and Russian
Pollution Is Colonialism
MAX LIBOIRON
Pollution is Colonialism models an anticolonial scientific practice aligned with Indigenous concepts of land, ethics, and relations to outline the entanglements of capitalism, colonialism, and environmental science.
May 2021
Native and Indigenous Studies/Science and Technology Studies/Environmental Studies
13,200 lifetime paperback sales
Licensed in French
Marx for Cats
A Radical Bestiary
LEIGH CLAIRE LA BERGE
Marx for Cats revises the medieval form of the bestiary to meet Marxist critique to show how cats have been central to the consolidation of capitalism and inspirations for some of its fiercest critics.
November 2023
Marxism/Social Theory
7,000 lifetime paperback sales
Licensed in Spanish, Thai, Portuguese (Brazil), Chinese (s), Korean, Turkish
Raving
MCKENZIE WARK
Raving takes readers into the undisclosed locations of New York’s thriving queer rave scene, showing how raving to techno is an art and technique at which queer and trans bodies might be particularly adept, but which is for anyone who lets the beat seduce them.
March 2023
Trans Studies/Music
13,300 lifetime paperback sales
Licensed in Italian, Ukrainian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Czech, Danish, Korean
