front cover of The Pacific Northwest Coast
The Pacific Northwest Coast
Living with the Shores of Oregon and Washington
Paul D. Komar
Duke University Press, 1998
While the coast of the Pacific Northwest becomes populated with houses, condominiums, motels, and restaurants, its beaches and cliffs continue to be altered by ocean currents and winter storms. A companion volume to Living with the Shore of Puget Sound and the Georgia Strait, The Pacific Northwest Coast serves as a source of information about the coast of the Pacific Northwest, its geological setting, the natural responses of beaches and cliffs to ocean processes, and the ever-present problem of erosion.
In this guide, Paul D. Komar, one of the nation’s leading coastal oceanographers, examines the lessons taught by ages of geological and cultural history. With explanations of the area’s geological evolution, including natural shoreline erosion and sea-cliff landsliding, Komar details human interaction with the coast: erosion caused by early settlers, the development and destruction of Bayocean Spit, the disastrous effects caused by the 1982–1983 El Niño, and the notorious failure of a construction project on the picturesqueæbut unstableæbluffs at Jump-Off Joe. Emphasizing the actual and potential harm to human projects and to the natural heritage of the coast, Komar provides the knowledge necessary for finding a safe home near the shore while preserving the beauty that draws us to it.
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Painting Culture
The Making of an Aboriginal High Art
Fred R. Myers
Duke University Press, 2002
Painting Culture tells the complex story of how, over the past three decades, the acrylic "dot" paintings of central Australia were transformed into objects of international high art, eagerly sought by upscale galleries and collectors. Since the early 1970s, Fred R. Myers has studied—often as a participant-observer—the Pintupi, one of several Aboriginal groups who paint the famous acrylic works. Describing their paintings and the complicated cultural issues they raise, Myers looks at how the paintings represent Aboriginal people and their culture and how their heritage is translated into exchangeable values. He tracks the way these paintings become high art as they move outward from indigenous communities through and among other social institutions—the world of dealers, museums, and critics. At the same time, he shows how this change in the status of the acrylic paintings is directly related to the initiative of the painters themselves and their hopes for greater levels of recognition.

Painting Culture describes in detail the actual practice of painting, insisting that such a focus is necessary to engage directly with the role of the art in the lives of contemporary Aboriginals. The book includes a unique local art history, a study of the complete corpus of two painters over a two-year period. It also explores the awkward local issues around the valuation and sale of the acrylic paintings, traces the shifting approaches of the Australian government and key organizations such as the Aboriginal Arts Board to the promotion of the work, and describes the early and subsequent phases of the works’ inclusion in major Australian and international exhibitions. Myers provides an account of some of the events related to these exhibits, most notably the Asia Society’s 1988 "Dreamings" show in New York, which was so pivotal in bringing the work to North American notice. He also traces the approaches and concerns of dealers, ranging from semi-tourist outlets in Alice Springs to more prestigious venues in Sydney and Melbourne.

With its innovative approach to the transnational circulation of culture, this book will appeal to art historians, as well as those in cultural anthropology, cultural studies, museum studies, and performance studies.

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Painting the City Red
Chinese Cinema and the Urban Contract
Yomi Braester
Duke University Press, 2010
Painting the City Red illuminates the dynamic relationship between the visual media, particularly film and theater, and the planning and development of cities in China and Taiwan, from the emergence of the People’s Republic in 1949 to the staging of the Beijing Olympics in 2008. Yomi Braester argues that the transformation of Chinese cities in recent decades is a result not only of China’s abandonment of Maoist economic planning in favor of capitalist globalization but also of a shift in visual practices. Rather than simply reflect urban culture, movies and stage dramas have facilitated the development of new perceptions of space and time, representing the future city variously as an ideal socialist city, a metropolis integrated into the global economy, and a site for preserving cultural heritage.

Drawing on extensive archival research, interviews with leading filmmakers and urban planners, and close readings of scripts and images, Braester describes how films and stage plays have promoted and opposed official urban plans and policies as they have addressed issues such as demolition-and-relocation plans, the preservation of vernacular architecture, and the global real estate market. He shows how the cinematic rewriting of historical narratives has accompanied the spatial reorganization of specific urban sites, including Nanjing Road in Shanghai; veterans’ villages in Taipei; and Tiananmen Square, centuries-old courtyards, and postmodern architectural landmarks in Beijing. In Painting the City Red, Braester reveals the role that film and theater have played in mediating state power, cultural norms, and the struggle for civil society in Chinese cities.

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Painting the Maya Universe
Royal Ceramics of the Classic Period
Dorie Reents-Budet
Duke University Press, 1994
Lavishly illustrated with nearly 400 color images, Painting the Maya Universe is the most thorough study and brilliant display of Classic Maya ceramic painting yet published. Building on twenty years of research and debate, Dorie Reents-Budet and her collaborators Joseph W. Ball, Ronald L. Bishop, Virginia M. Fields, and Barbara MacLeod bring together many perspectives, including the art historical, archaeological, epigraphical, and ethnohistorical, to examine one of the world’s great but overlooked painting traditions. With an emphasis on sixth- to eighth-century pottery featuring both pictorial and hieroglyphic imagery, Painting the Maya Universe presents an extraordinary exploration of the cultural roles and meanings of these Guatemalan, Belizean, and Mexican elite painted ceramics. Maya pottery is discussed both in aesthetic terms and for the important information it reveals about Maya society, artistry, politics, history, religion, and ritual. The range of ceramic painting styles developed during this period is also presented and defined in detail.
Painting the Maya Universe is the first publication to present a definitive translation of the hieroglyphic texts painted on these objects. With many glyphs deciphered here for the first time, this analysis reveals much about how these vessels were perceived and used by the Maya, their owners’ names, and, in several cases, the names of the artists who created them. This information is combined with archaeological and other data, including nuclear chemical analyses, to correlate painting styles with specific Maya sites.
Published in conjunction with Duke University Museum of Art and an exhibition touring the United States, Painting the Maya Universe presents an astonishing visual record as well as a monumental scholarly achievement. With photographs by Justin Kerr, the foremost photographer of pre-Columbian art, it includes over 90 unique full-color rollout photographs, each showing the entire surface of an object in a single frame. The book also addresses the questions and controversy regarding the loss of information that occurs when objects are removed from their archaeological context to become part of public and private collections.
Painting the Maya Universe will energize discussion of Maya pottery, hieroglyphic texts, and iconography. Its photographs, a lasting resource on this great painting tradition, will stimulate and delight the eye. It is a breakthrough in art history and Latin American scholarship that will enrich general readers and scholars alike.
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Pakistan Desires
Queer Futures Elsewhere
Omar Kasmani, editor
Duke University Press, 2023
Drawing on history, anthropology, literature, law, art, film, and performance studies, the contributors to Pakistan Desires invite reflection on what meanings adhere to queerness in Pakistan. They illustrate how amid conditions of straightness, desire can serve as a mode of queer future-making. Among other topics, the contributors analyze gender transgressive performances in Pakistani film, piety in the transgender rights movement, the use of Grindr among men, the exploration of homoerotic subject matter in contemporary Pakistani artist Anwar Saeed's work, and the story of a sixteenth-century Sufi saint who fell in love with a Brahmin boy. From Kashmir to the 1947 Partition to the resonances of South Asian gay subjectivity in the diaspora, the contributors attend to narrative and epistemological possibilities for queer lives and loves. By embracing forms of desire elsewhere, ones that cannot correlate to or often fall outside dominant Western theorizations of queerness, this volume gathers other ways of being queer in the world.

Contributors. Ahmed Afzal, Asad Alvi, Anjali Arondekar, Vanja Hamzić, Omar Kasmani, Pasha M. Khan, Gwendolyn S. Kirk, Syeda Momina Masood, Nida Mehboob, Claire Pamment, Geeta Patel, Nael Quraishi, Abdullah Qureshi, Shayan Rajani, Jeffrey A. Redding, Gayatri Reddy, Syma Tariq
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Palestine America, Volume 102
Mohammed Bamyeh, ed.
Duke University Press
In the many decades of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the full complexity of that strife has seldom been heard. This special issue of SAQ seeks to intervene by offering a critique of the Palestinian experience. Mapping the complicated relationship among Palestine, the United States, and Israel, this issue includes critical essays on the politics, culture, literature, and history of the Palestinian people.

Bringing together a diverse group of contributors ranging from Roane Carey of the Nation to scholars in Arab, Jewish, and comparative literary studies, this special issue considers Palestinian gender and identity and their relationship to the conflict with Israel as represented in film, literature, and photography. Essays explore the failed peace process, misrepresentations of the Oslo meetings, the devastating effect of continued Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, and the growing controversy over the call for U.S. military divestment from Israel.

Contributors. Ammiel Alcalay, Amal Amireh, Mohammed Bamyeh, Roane Carey, Thomas W. Lockwood, Lisa Suhair Majaj, Saree Makdisi, Melani McAlister, Brinda J. Mehta, John Michael, Andrew N. Rubin, Kenneth Surin

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Palestine and Israel
A Challenge to Justice
John Quigley
Duke University Press, 1990
The dispute over Palestine between the Palestinian Arabs and the Israelis is one of the most volatile and intractable conflicts in the world today. Palestine and Israel examines the history of this battle from the perspective of international law, and it argues that a long-term solution to the conflict must protect legitimate interests to remain viable—an element the author believes has so far been seriously neglected. This extensively documented work details the complex politics and agonizing struggles that have characterized the clash between Jews and Arabs, examining in depth the competing claims to Palestine and the extent to which legitimate interests remain to be fulfilled.
Beginning with the early Zionist settlement in Palestine that rose from the effort by Jews to escape long-standing discrimination in Europe, Qigley investigates the origins of the dispute, including the British occupation of Palestine, the British Mandate, and the involvement of the United Nations. He examines the 1948 War, the establishment of Israel, and explores the legal and political status of Jews there. After a detailed analysis of the 1967 War and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, he concludes with recommendations for resolving the conflict, including discussions of the responsibility of other states for the persisting injustice, the role of other states in settling the dispute, and steps to a possible solution.
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Palestine in a Transnational Context, Volume 21
Timothy Mitchell , Gyan Prakash and Ella Shohat, eds.
Duke University Press
In the three years since the outbreak of the second Intifada in October 2000, the policy-making of the U.S. government has been haunted by the question of Palestine. While the United States has always been allied to and supportive of Israel, since September 11, 2001, its policy has shifted even closer to the Israeli regional agenda.

This special issue places the Palestine question in a transnational and comparative frame that strives to better depict its historical complexity. The issue also gives special consideration to the different modes of Palestinian resistance both within and outside the state of Israel and the occupied territories.

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Palestine Is Throwing a Party and the Whole World Is Invited
Capital and State Building in the West Bank
Kareem Rabie
Duke University Press, 2021
In 2008, Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad invited international investors to the first-ever Palestine Investment Conference, which was designed to jump-start the process of integrating Palestine into the global economy. As Fayyad described the conference, Palestine is “throwing a party, and the whole world is invited.” In this book Kareem Rabie examines how the conference and Fayyad's rhetoric represented a wider shift in economic and political practice in ways that oriented state-scale Palestinian politics toward neoliberal globalization rather than a diplomatic two-state solution. Rabie demonstrates that private firms, international aid organizations, and the Palestinian government in the West Bank focused on large-scale private housing development in an effort toward state-scale economic stability and market building. This approach reflected the belief that a thriving private economy would lead to a free and functioning Palestinian state. Yet, as Rabie contends, these investment-based policies have maintained the status quo of occupation and Palestine's subordinate and suspended political and economic relationship with Israel.
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Palestine, Israel, and the Politics of Popular Culture
Rebecca L. Stein and Ted Swedenburg, eds.
Duke University Press, 2005
This important volume rethinks the conventional parameters of Middle East studies through attention to popular cultural forms, producers, and communities of consumers. The volume has a broad historical scope, ranging from the late Ottoman period to the second Palestinian uprising, with a focus on cultural forms and processes in Israel, Palestine, and the refugee camps of the Arab Middle East. The contributors consider how Palestinian and Israeli popular culture influences and is influenced by political, economic, social, and historical processes in the region. At the same time, they follow the circulation of Palestinian and Israeli cultural commodities and imaginations across borders and checkpoints and within the global marketplace.

The volume is interdisciplinary, including the work of anthropologists, historians, sociologists, political scientists, ethnomusicologists, and Americanist and literary studies scholars. Contributors examine popular music of the Palestinian resistance, ethno-racial “passing” in Israeli cinema, Arab-Jewish rock, Euro-Israeli tourism to the Arab Middle East, Internet communities in the Palestinian diaspora, café culture in early-twentieth-century Jerusalem, and more. Together, they suggest new ways of conceptualizing Palestinian and Israeli political culture.

Contributors. Livia Alexander, Carol Bardenstein, Elliott Colla, Amy Horowitz, Laleh Khalili, Mary Layoun, Mark LeVine, Joseph Massad, Melani McAlister, Ilan Pappé, Rebecca L. Stein, Ted Swedenburg, Salim Tamari

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The Palm at the End of the Mind
Relatedness, Religiosity, and the Real
Michael Jackson
Duke University Press, 2009
In many societies and for many people, religiosity is only incidentally connected with texts or theologies, church or mosque, temple or monastery. Drawing on a lifetime of ethnographic work among people for whom religion is not principally a matter of faith, doctrine, or definition, Michael Jackson turns his attention to those situations in life where we come up against the limits of language, our strength, and our knowledge, yet are sometimes thrown open to new ways of understanding our being-in-the-world, to new ways of connecting with others.

Through sixty-one beautifully crafted essays based on sojourns in Europe, West Africa, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, and taking his cue from Wallace Stevens’s late poem, “Of Mere Being,” Jackson explores a range of experiences where “the palm at the end of the mind” stands “beyond thought,” on “the edge of space,” “a foreign song.” Moments of crisis as well as everyday experiences in cafés, airports, and offices disclose the subtle ways in which a single life shades into others, the boundaries between cultures become blurred, fate unfolds through genealogical time, elective affinities make their appearance, and different values contend.

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Panama in Black
Afro-Caribbean World Making in the Twentieth Century
Kaysha Corinealdi
Duke University Press, 2022
In Panama in Black, Kaysha Corinealdi traces the multigenerational activism of Afro-Caribbean Panamanians as they forged diasporic communities in Panama and the United States throughout the twentieth century. Drawing on a rich array of sources including speeches, yearbooks, photographs, government reports, radio broadcasts, newspaper editorials, and oral histories, Corinealdi presents the Panamanian isthmus as a crucial site in the making of an Afro-diasporic world that linked cities and towns like Colón, Kingston, Panamá City, Brooklyn, Bridgetown, and La Boca. In Panama, Afro-Caribbean Panamanians created a diasporic worldview of the Caribbean that privileged the potential of Black innovation. Corinealdi maps this innovation by examining the longest-running Black newspaper in Central America, the rise of civic associations created to counter policies that stripped Afro-Caribbean Panamanians of citizenship, the creation of scholarship-granting organizations that supported the education of Black students, and the emergence of national conferences and organizations that linked anti-imperialism and Black liberation. By showing how Afro-Caribbean Panamanians used these methods to navigate anti-Blackness, xenophobia, and white supremacy, Corinealdi offers a new mode of understanding activism, community, and diaspora formation.
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The Pandemic Divide
How COVID Increased Inequality in America
Gwendolyn L. Wright, Lucas Hubbard, and William A. Darrity, editors
Duke University Press, 2022
As COVID-19 made inroads in the United States in spring 2020, a common refrain rose above the din: “We’re all in this together.” However, the full picture was far more complicated—and far less equitable. Black and Latinx populations suffered illnesses, outbreaks, and deaths at much higher rates than the general populace. Those working in low-paid jobs and those living in confined housing or communities already disproportionately beset by health problems were particularly vulnerable. The contributors to The Pandemic Divide explain how these and other racial disparities came to the forefront in 2020. They explore COVID-19’s impact on multiple arenas of daily life—including wealth, health, housing, employment, and education—while highlighting what steps could have been taken to mitigate the full force of the pandemic. Most crucially, the contributors offer concrete public policy solutions that would allow the nation to respond effectively to future crises and improve the long-term well-being of all Americans.

Contributors. Fenaba Addo, Steve Amendum, Leslie Babinski, Sandra Barnes, Mary T. Bassett, Keisha Bentley-Edwards, Kisha Daniels, William A. Darity Jr., Melania DiPietro, Jane Dokko, Fiona Greig, Adam Hollowell, Lucas Hubbard, Damon Jones, Steve Knotek, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Henry Clay McKoy Jr., N. Joyce Payne, Erica Phillips, Eugene Richardson, Paul Robbins, Jung Sakong, Marta Sánchez, Melissa Scott, Kristen Stephens, Joe Trotter, Chris Wheat, Gwendolyn L. Wright
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Panic Diaries
A Genealogy of Panic Disorder
Jackie Orr
Duke University Press, 2006
Part cultural history, part sociological critique, and part literary performance, Panic Diaries explores the technological and social construction of individual and collective panic. Jackie Orr looks at instances of panic and its “cures” in the twentieth-century United States: from the mass hysteria following the 1938 radio broadcast of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds to an individual woman swallowing a pill to control the “panic disorder” officially recognized by the American Psychiatric Association in 1980. Against a backdrop of Cold War anxieties over atomic attack, Orr highlights the entanglements of knowledge and power in efforts to reconceive panic and its prevention as problems in communication and information feedback. Throughout, she reveals the shifting techniques of power and social engineering underlying the ways that scientific and social scientific discourses—including crowd psychology, Cold War cybernetics, and contemporary psychiatry—have rendered panic an object of technoscientific management.

Orr, who has experienced panic attacks herself, kept a diary of her participation as a research subject in clinical trials for the Upjohn Company’s anti-anxiety drug Xanax. This “panic diary” grounds her study and suggests the complexity of her desire to track the diffusion and regulation of panic in U.S. society. Orr’s historical research, theoretical reflections, and biographical narrative combine in this remarkable and compelling genealogy, which documents the manipulation of panic by the media, the social sciences and psychiatry, the U.S. military and government, and transnational drug companies.

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Paper Cadavers
The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala
Kirsten Weld
Duke University Press, 2014
In Paper Cadavers, an inside account of the astonishing discovery and rescue of Guatemala's secret police archives, Kirsten Weld probes the politics of memory, the wages of the Cold War, and the stakes of historical knowledge production. After Guatemala's bloody thirty-six years of civil war (1960–1996), silence and impunity reigned. That is, until 2005, when human rights investigators stumbled on the archives of the country's National Police, which, at 75 million pages, proved to be the largest trove of secret state records ever found in Latin America.

The unearthing of the archives renewed fierce debates about history, memory, and justice. In Paper Cadavers, Weld explores Guatemala's struggles to manage this avalanche of evidence of past war crimes, providing a firsthand look at how postwar justice activists worked to reconfigure terror archives into implements of social change. Tracing the history of the police files as they were transformed from weapons of counterinsurgency into tools for post-conflict reckoning, Weld sheds light on the country's fraught transition from war to an uneasy peace, reflecting on how societies forget and remember political violence.

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Paper Families
Identity, Immigration Administration, and Chinese Exclusion
Estelle T. Lau
Duke University Press, 2006
The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 made the Chinese the first immigrant group officially excluded from the United States. In Paper Families, Estelle T. Lau demonstrates how exclusion affected Chinese American communities and initiated the development of restrictive U.S. immigration policies and practices. Through the enforcement of the Exclusion Act and subsequent legislation, the U.S. immigration service developed new forms of record keeping and identification practices. Meanwhile, Chinese Americans took advantage of the system’s loophole: children of U.S. citizens were granted automatic eligibility for immigration. The result was an elaborate system of “paper families,” in which U.S. citizens of Chinese descent claimed fictive, or “paper,” children who could then use their kinship status as a basis for entry into the United States. This subterfuge necessitated the creation of “crib sheets” outlining genealogies and providing village maps and other information that could be used during immigration processing.

Drawing on these documents as well as immigration case files, legislative materials, and transcripts of interviews and court proceedings, Lau reveals immigration as an interactive process. Chinese immigrants and their U.S. families were subject to regulation and surveillance, but they also manipulated and thwarted those regulations, forcing the U.S. government to adapt its practices and policies. Lau points out that the Exclusion Acts and the pseudo-familial structures that emerged in response have had lasting effects on Chinese American identity. She concludes with a look at exclusion’s legacy, including the Confession Program of the 1960s that coerced people into divulging the names of paper family members and efforts made by Chinese American communities to recover their lost family histories.

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Paper Knowledge
Toward a Media History of Documents
Lisa Gitelman
Duke University Press, 2014
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. Drawing examples from the 1870s, the 1930s, the 1960s, and today, Lisa Gitelman thinks across the media that the document form has come to inhabit over the last 150 years, including letterpress printing, typing and carbon paper, mimeograph, microfilm, offset printing, photocopying, and scanning. Whether examining late nineteenth century commercial, or "job" printing, or the Xerox machine and the role of reproduction in our understanding of the document, Gitelman reveals a keen eye for vernacular uses of technology. She tells nuanced, anecdote-filled stories of the waning of old technologies and the emergence of new. Along the way, she discusses documentary matters such as the relation between twentieth-century technological innovation and the management of paper, and the interdependence of computer programming and documentation. Paper Knowledge is destined to set a new agenda for media studies.
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Paper Tangos
Julie Taylor
Duke University Press, 1998
Tango. A multidimensional expression of Argentine identity, one that speaks to that nation’s sense of disorientation, loss, and terror. Yet the tango mesmerizes dancers and audiences alike throughout the world. In Paper Tangos, Julie Taylor—a classically trained dancer and anthropologist—examines the poetics of the tango while describing her own quest to dance this most dramatic of paired dances.
Taylor, born in the United States, has lived much of her adult life in Latin America. She has spent years studying the tango in Buenos Aires, dancing during and after the terror of military dictatorships. This book is at once an account of a life lived crossing the borders of two distinct and complex cultures and an exploration of the conflicting meanings of tango for women who love the poetry of its movement yet feel uneasy with the roles it bestows on the male and female dancers. Drawing parallels among the violences of the Argentine Junta, the play with power inherent in tango dancing, and her own experiences with violence both inside and outside the intriguing tango culture, Taylor weaves the line between engaging memoir and insightful cultural critique. Within the contexts of tango’s creative birth and contemporary presentations, this book welcomes us directly into the tango subculture and reveals the ways that personal, political, and historical violence operate in our lives.
The book’s experimental design includes photographs on every page, which form a flip-book sequence of a tango. Not simply a book for tango dancers and fans, Paper Tangos will reward students of Latin American studies, cultural studies, anthropology, feminist studies, dance studies, and the art of critical memoir.


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Paper Trails
Migrants, Documents, and Legal Insecurity
Sarah B. Horton and Josiah Heyman, editors
Duke University Press, 2020
Across the globe, states have long aimed to control the movement of people, identify their citizens, and restrict noncitizens' rights through official identification documents. Although states are now less likely to grant permanent legal status, they are increasingly issuing new temporary and provisional legal statuses to migrants. Meanwhile, the need for migrants to apply for frequent renewals subjects them to more intensive state surveillance. The contributors to Paper Trails examine how these new developments change migrants' relationship to state, local, and foreign bureaucracies. The contributors analyze, among other toics, immigration policies in the United Kingdom, the issuing of driver's licenses in Arizona and New Mexico, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, and community know-your-rights campaigns. By demonstrating how migrants are inscribed into official bureaucratic systems through the issuance of identification documents, the contributors open up new ways to understand how states exert their power and how migrants must navigate new systems of governance.

Contributors. Bridget Anderson, Deborah A. Boehm, Susan Bibler Coutin, Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz, Sarah B. Horton, Josiah Heyman, Cecilia Menjívar, Juan Thomas Ordóñez, Doris Marie Provine, Nandita Sharma, Monica Varsanyi
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Parables for the Virtual
Movement, Affect, Sensation
Brian Massumi
Duke University Press, 2021
Since its publication twenty years ago, Brian Massumi's pioneering Parables for the Virtual has become an essential text for interdisciplinary scholars across the humanities. Massumi views the body and media such as television, film, and the internet as cultural formations that operate on multiple registers of sensation. Renewing and assessing William James's radical empiricism and Henri Bergson's philosophy of perception through the filter of the postwar French philosophy of Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault, Massumi links a cultural logic of variation to questions of movement, affect, and sensation. Replacing the traditional opposition of literal and figural with distinctions between stasis and motion and between actual and virtual, Massumi tackles related theoretical issues by applying them to cultural mediums as diverse as architecture, body art, the digital art of Stelarc, and Ronald Reagan's acting career. The result is an intriguing combination of cultural theory, science, and philosophy that asserts itself in a crystalline and multifaceted argument.

This twentieth anniversary edition includes a new preface in which Massumi situates the book in relation to developments since its publication and outlines the evolution of its main concepts. It also includes two short texts, “Keywords for Affect” and “Missed Conceptions about Affect,” in which Massumi explicates his approach to affect in ways that emphasize the book's political and philosophical stakes.
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Parables for the Virtual
Movement, Affect, Sensation
Brian Massumi
Duke University Press, 2002
Although the body has been the focus of much contemporary cultural theory, the models that are typically applied neglect the most salient characteristics of embodied existence—movement, affect, and sensation—in favor of concepts derived from linguistic theory. In Parables for the Virtual Brian Massumi views the body and media such as television, film, and the Internet, as cultural formations that operate on multiple registers of sensation beyond the reach of the reading techniques founded on the standard rhetorical and semiotic models.

Renewing and assessing William James's radical empiricism and Henri Bergson's philosophy of perception through the filter of the post-war French philosophy of Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault, Massumi links a cultural logic of variation to questions of movement, affect, and sensation. If such concepts are as fundamental as signs and significations, he argues, then a new set of theoretical issues appear, and with them potential new paths for the wedding of scientific and cultural theory. Replacing the traditional opposition of literal and figural with new distinctions between stasis and motion and between actual and virtual, Parables for the Virtual tackles related theoretical issues by applying them to cultural mediums as diverse as architecture, body art, the digital art of Stelarc, and Ronald Reagan's acting career. The result is an intriguing combination of cultural theory, science, and philosophy that asserts itself in a crystalline and multi-faceted argument.
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Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty
Land, Sex, and the Colonial Politics of State Nationalism
J. Kehaulani Kauanui
Duke University Press, 2018
In Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty J. Kēhaulani Kauanui examines contradictions of indigeneity and self-determination in U.S. domestic policy and international law. She theorizes paradoxes in the laws themselves and in nationalist assertions of Hawaiian Kingdom restoration and demands for U.S. deoccupation, which echo colonialist models of governance. Kauanui argues that Hawaiian elites' approaches to reforming and regulating land, gender, and sexuality in the early nineteenth century that paved the way for sovereign recognition of the kingdom complicate contemporary nationalist activism today, which too often includes disavowing the indigeneity of the Kanaka Maoli (Indigenous Hawaiian) people. Problematizing the ways the positing of the Hawaiian Kingdom's continued existence has been accompanied by a denial of U.S. settler colonialism, Kauanui considers possibilities for a decolonial approach to Hawaiian sovereignty that would address the privatization and capitalist development of land and the ongoing legacy of the imposition of heteropatriarchal modes of social relations.
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Paradoxes of Nostalgia
Cold War Triumphalism and Global Disorder since 1989
Penny M. Von Eschen
Duke University Press, 2022
In Paradoxes of Nostalgia Penny M. Von Eschen offers a sweeping examination of the cold war’s afterlife and the lingering shadows it casts over geopolitics, journalism, and popular culture. She shows how myriad forms of nostalgia across the globe—from those that posit a mythic national past to those critical of neoliberalism that remember a time when people believed in the possibility of a collective good—indelibly shape the post-cold war era. When Western triumphalism moved into the global South and former Eastern bloc spaces, many articulated a powerful sense of loss and a longing for stability. Innovatively bringing together diplomatic archives, museums, films, and video games, Von Eschen shows that as the United States continuously sought new enemies for its unipolar world, cold war triumphalism fueled the ascendancy of xenophobic right-wing nationalism and the embrace of authoritarian sensibilities in the United States and beyond. Ultimately, she demonstrates that triumphalist claims that capitalism and military might won the cold war distort the past and disfigure the present, undermining democratic values and institutions.
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The Paraguay Reader
History, Culture, Politics
Peter Lambert and Andrew Nickson, eds.
Duke University Press, 2013
Hemmed in by the vast, arid Chaco to the west and, for most of its history, impenetrable jungles to the east, Paraguay has been defined largely by its isolation. Partly as a result, there has been a dearth of serious scholarship or journalism about the country. Going a long way toward redressing this lack of information and analysis, The Paraguay Reader is a lively compilation of testimonies, journalism, scholarship, political tracts, literature, and illustrations, including maps, photographs, paintings, drawings, and advertisements. Taken together, the anthology's many selections convey the country's extraordinarily rich history and cultural heritage, as well as the realities of its struggles against underdevelopment, foreign intervention, poverty, inequality, and authoritarianism.

Most of the Reader is arranged chronologically. Weighted toward the twentieth century and early twenty-first, it nevertheless gives due attention to major events in Paraguay's history, such as the Triple Alliance War (1864–70) and the Chaco War (1932–35). The Reader's final section, focused on national identity and culture, addresses matters including ethnicity, language, and gender. Most of the selections are by Paraguayans, and many of the pieces appear in English for the first time. Helpful introductions by the editors precede each of the book's sections and all of the selected texts.

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Parallax Visions
Cumings
Duke University Press

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Parallax Visions
Making Sense of American-East Asian Relations at the End of the Century
Bruce Cumings
Duke University Press, 1999
In a work that synthesizes crucial developments in international relations at the close of the twentieth century, Bruce Cumings—a leading historian of contemporary East Asia—provides a nuanced understanding of how the United States has loomed over the modern history and culture of East Asia. By offering correctives to widely held yet largely inaccurate assessments of the affairs of this region, Parallax Visions shows how relations between the United States, Japan, Vietnam, North and South Korea, China, and Taiwan have been structured by their perceptions and misperceptions of each other.

Using information based on thirty years of research, Cumings offers a new perspective on a wide range of issues that originated with the cold war—with particular focus on the possibly inappropriate collaboration between universities, foundations, and intelligence agencies. Seeking to explode the presuppositions that Americans usually bring to the understanding of our relations with East Asia, the study ranges over much of the history of the twentieth century in East Asian–American relations—Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Korean War, and more recent difficulties in U.S. relations with China and Japan. Cumings also rebuts U.S. media coverage of North Korea’s nuclear diplomacy in the 1990s and examines how experiences of colonialism and postcolonialism have had varying effects on economic development in each of these countries. Positing that the central defining experience of twentieth-century East Asia has been its entanglement first with British and Japanese imperialism, and then with the United States, Cumings ends with a discussion of how the situation could change over the next century as the economic and political global clout of the United States declines.

Illuminating the sometimes self-deluded ideology of cold war America, Parallax Visions will engage historians, political scientists, and students and scholars of comparative politics and social theory, as well as readers interested in questions of modernity and the role of the United States in shaping the destinies of modernizing societies in Asia.

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Parallel Tracks
The Railroad and Silent Cinema
Lynne Kirby
Duke University Press, 1997
From its earliest days, the cinema has enjoyed a special kinship with the railroad, a mutual attraction based on similar ways of handling speed, visual perception, and the promise of a journey. Parallel Tracks is the first book to explore and explain this relationship in both historical and theoretical terms, blending film scholarship with railroad history. Describing the train as a mechanical double for the cinema, Lynne Kirby gives her romantic topic a compelling twist. She views the railroad/cinema romance in light of the technological and cultural instability underlying modernity and presents the railroad and cinema as complementary experiences that shaped the modern world and its subjects—the passengers and spectators who traveled through that world.
In wide-ranging and provocative analyses of dozens of silent films—icons of film history like The General and The Great Train Robbery as well as many that are rarely discussed—Kirby examines how trains and rail travel embodied concepts of spectatorship and mobility grounded in imperialism and the social, sexual, and racial divisions of modern Western culture. This analysis at the same time provides a detailed and largely unexamined history of the railroad in silent filmmaking. Kirby also devotes special attention to the similar ways in which the railroad and cinema structured the roles of men and women. As she demonstrates, these representations have had profound implications for the articulation of gender in our culture, a culture in some sense based on the machine as embodied by the train and the camera/projector.
Ultimately, this book reveals the profound and parallel impact that the railroad and the cinema have had on Western society and modern urban industrial culture. Parallel Tracks will be eagerly awaited by those involved in cinema studies, American studies, feminist theory, and the cultural study of modernity.
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Para-States and Medical Science
Making African Global Health
P. Wenzel Geissler, editor
Duke University Press, 2015
In Para-States and Medical Science, P. Wenzel Geissler and the contributors examine how medicine and public health in Africa have been transformed as a result of economic and political liberalization and globalization, intertwined with epidemiological and technological changes. The resulting fragmented medical science landscape is shaped and sustained by transnational flows of expertise and resources. NGOs, universities, pharmaceutical companies and other nonstate actors now play a significant role in medical research and treatment. But as the contributors to this volume argue, these groups have not supplanted the primacy of the nation-state in Africa. Although not necessarily stable or responsive, national governments remain crucial in medical care, both as employers of health care professionals and as sources of regulation, access, and – albeit sometimes counterintuitively - trust for their people. “The state” has morphed into the “para-state” — not a monolithic and predictable source of sovereignty and governance, but a shifting, and at times ephemeral, figure.  Tracing the emergence of the “global health” paradigm in Africa in the treatment of HIV, malaria, and leprosy, this book challenges familiar notions of African statehood as weak or illegitimate by elaborating complex new frameworks of governmentality that can be simultaneously functioning and dysfunctional.

Contributors. Uli Beisel, Didier Fassin, P. Wenzel Geissler, Rene Gerrets, Ann Kelly, Guillaume Lachenal, John Manton, Lotte Meinert, Vinh-Kim Nguyen, Branwyn Poleykett, Susan Reynolds Whyte
 
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Parenting Empires
Class, Whiteness, and the Moral Economy of Privilege in Latin America
Ana Yolanda Ramos-Zayas
Duke University Press, 2020
In Parenting Empires, Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas focuses on the parenting practices of Latin American urban elites to analyze how everyday experiences of whiteness, privilege, and inequality reinforce national and hemispheric idioms of anti-corruption and austerity. Ramos-Zayas shows that for upper-class residents in the affluent neighborhoods of Ipanema (Rio de Janeiro) and El Condado (San Juan), parenting is particularly effective in providing moral grounding for neoliberal projects that disadvantage the overwhelmingly poor and racialized people who care for and teach their children. Wealthy parents in Ipanema and El Condado cultivate a liberal cosmopolitanism by living in multicultural city neighborhoods rather than gated suburban communities. Yet as Ramos-Zayas reveals, their parenting strategies, which stress spirituality, empathy, and equality, allow them to preserve and reproduce their white privilege. Defining this moral economy as “parenting empires,” she sheds light on how child-rearing practices permit urban elites in the Global South to sustain and profit from entrenched social and racial hierarchies.
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The Pariahs of Yesterday
Breton Migrants in Paris
Leslie Page Moch
Duke University Press, 2012
Beginning in the 1870s, a great many Bretons—men and women from Brittany, a region in western France—began arriving in Paris. Every age has its pariahs, and in 1900, the “pariahs of Paris” were the Bretons, the last distinct group of provincials to come en masse to the capital city. The pariah designation took hold in Paris, in Brittany, and among historians. Yet the derision of recent migrants can be temporary. Tracing the changing status of Bretons in Paris since 1870, Leslie Page Moch demonstrates that state policy, economic trends, and the attitudes of established Parisians and Breton newcomers evolved as the fortunes of Bretons in the capital improved. The pariah stereotype became outdated. Drawing on demographic records and the writings of physicians, journalists, novelists, lawyers, and social scientists, Moch connects internal migration with national integration. She interprets marriage records, official reports on employment, legal and medical theses, memoirs, and writings from secular and religious organizations in the Breton community. As the pariahs of yesterday, Bretons are an example of successful integration into Parisian life. At the same time, their experiences show integration to be a complicated and lengthy process.
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Paris in the Dark
Going to the Movies in the City of Light, 1930–1950
Eric Smoodin
Duke University Press, 2020
In Paris in the Dark Eric Smoodin takes readers on a journey through the streets, cinemas, and theaters of Paris to sketch a comprehensive picture of French film culture during the 1930s and 1940s. Drawing on a wealth of journalistic sources, Smoodin recounts the ways films moved through the city, the favored stars, and what it was like to go to the movies in a city with hundreds of cinemas. In a single week in the early 1930s, moviegoers might see Hollywood features like King Kong and Frankenstein, the new Marlene Dietrich and Maurice Chevalier movies, and any number of films from Italy, Germany, and Russia. Or they could frequent the city's ciné-clubs, which were hosts to the cinéphile subcultures of Paris. At other times, a night at the movies might result in an evening of fascist violence, even before the German Occupation of Paris, while after the war the city's cinemas formed the space for reconsolidating French film culture. In mapping the cinematic geography of Paris, Smoodin expands understandings of local film exhibition and the relationships of movies to urban space.
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A Part of the Heart Can't Be Eaten
A Memoir
Tristan Taormino
Duke University Press, 2023
In A Part of the Heart Can’t Be Eaten, award-winning author, sex educator, filmmaker, and podcast host Tristan Taormino shares her coming-of-age story, revealing how her radical sexuality and unconventional career grew out of an extraordinary queer father-daughter relationship. Raised by a hard-working single mother on Long Island, Tristan got her sex ed from the 1980s TV show Solid Gold and The Joy of Sex. She spent summers at drag shows in Provincetown with her father, Bill, who had come out as gay in the mid-1970s. Her sexual identity bloomed during her college years at Wesleyan University, where she discovered her desire for butches and kinky sex.

Tristan’s world began to fall apart when her dad was diagnosed with AIDS. After a series of devastating events, she moved to the messy, glorious world of 1990s New York City. In the midst of grief and depression, she helped change queer sexual subculture with her zine Pucker Up, her infamous The Village Voice column, and her editorship of legendary lesbian porn magazine On Our Backs. After the publication of her first book, The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women, Tristan followed her own path that marked the beginning of her work as a trailblazing feminist pornographer.

After a lifetime of outrageous adventures, Tristan reflects on the bonds, loss, and mental-health struggles that shaped her. She weaves together history from her father’s unpublished memoir, exploring the surprising ways their personal patterns converge and diverge. Bracingly emotional and erotically charged, A Part of the Heart Can’t Be Eaten reveals the transformative power of queer pleasure and defiance.
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Parties and Elections in Greece
The Search for Legitimacy
Richard Clogg
Duke University Press, 1987
Although Greece acquired the formal institutions of liberal constitutional democracy early in her independent history, her politics have been characterized by clientelism, instability and frequent military intervention. The most blatant instance of 'praetorianism' was the military dictatorship of 1967-74. Yet in the years since the Colonels' downfall, the political system appears to have acquired a new legitimacy. Although many features of the 'old' politics remain, recent years have seen the collapse of the traditional centre and the emergence of new political formations, reflecting the rapid pace of post-war socio-economic change. And 1981 saw the election by a convincing majority of a socialist government, the first ever in Greece, committed to radical domestic transformation and to a major reorientation of external relations.
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Partisan Canons
Anna Brzyski, ed.
Duke University Press, 2007
Whether it is being studied or critiqued, the art canon is usually understood as an authoritative list of important works and artists. This collection breaks with the idea of a singular, transcendent canon. Through provocative case studies, it demonstrates that the content of any canon is both historically and culturally specific and dependent on who is responsible for the canon’s production and maintenance. The contributors explore how, where, why, and by whom canons are formed; how they function under particular circumstances; how they are maintained; and why they may undergo change.

Focusing on various moments from the seventeenth century to the present, the contributors cover a broad geographic terrain, encompassing the United States, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Taiwan, and South Africa. Among the essays are examinations of the working and reworking of a canon by an influential nineteenth-century French critic, the limitations placed on what was acceptable as canonical in American textbooks produced during the Cold War, the failed attempt to define a canon of Rembrandt’s works, and the difficulties of constructing an artistic canon in parts of the globe marked by colonialism and the imposition of Eurocentric ideas of artistic value. The essays highlight the diverse factors that affect the production of art canons: market forces, aesthetic and political positions, nationalism and ingrained ideas concerning the cultural superiority of particular groups, perceptions of gender and race, artists’ efforts to negotiate their status within particular professional environments, and the dynamics of art history as an academic discipline and discourse. This volume is a call to historicize canons, acknowledging both their partisanship and its implications for the writing of art history.

Contributors. Jenny Anger, Marcia Brennan, Anna Brzyski, James Cutting, Paul Duro, James Elkins, Barbara Jaffee, Robert Jensen, Jane C. Ju, Monica Kjellman-Chapin, Julie L. McGee, Terry Smith, Linda Stone-Ferrier, Despina Stratigakos

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Partners in Conflict
The Politics of Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in the Chilean Agrarian Reform, 1950–1973
Heidi Tinsman
Duke University Press, 2002
Partners in Conflict examines the importance of sexuality and gender to rural labor and agrarian politics during the last days of Chile’s latifundia system of traditional landed estates and throughout the governments of Eduardo Frei and Salvador Allende. Heidi Tinsman analyzes differences between men’s and women’s participation in Chile’s Agrarian Reform movement and considers how conflicts over gender and sexuality shape the contours of working-class struggles and national politics.
Tinsman restores women to a scholarly narrative that has been almost exclusively about men, recounting the centrality of women’s labor to the pre-Agrarian Reform world of the hacienda during the 1950s and recovering women’s critical roles in union struggles and land occupations during the Agrarian Reform itself. Providing a theoretical framework for understanding why the Agrarian Reform ultimately empowered men more than women, Tinsman argues that women were marginalized not because the Agrarian Reform ignored women but because, under both the Frei and Allende governments, it promoted the male-headed household as the cornerstone of a new society. Although this emphasis on gender cooperation stressed that men should have more respect for their wives and funneled unprecedented amounts of resources into women’s hands, the reform defined men as its protagonists and affirmed their authority over women.
This is the first monographic social history of Chile’s Agrarian Reform in either English or Spanish, and the first historical work to make sexuality and gender central to the analysis of the reforms.
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Passages and Afterworlds
Anthropological Perspectives on Death in the Caribbean
Maarit Forde and Yanique Hume, editors
Duke University Press, 2018
The contributors to Passages and Afterworlds explore death and its rituals across the Caribbean, drawing on ethnographic theories shaped by a deep understanding of the region's long history of violent encounters, exploitation, and cultural diversity. Examining the relationship between living bodies and the spirits of the dead, the contributors investigate the changes in cosmologies and rituals in the cultural sphere of death in relation to political developments, state violence, legislation, policing, and identity politics. Contributors address topics that range from the ever-evolving role of divinized spirits in Haiti and the contemporary mortuary practice of Indo-Trinidadians to funerary ceremonies in rural Jamaica and ancestor cults in Maroon culture in Suriname. Questions of alterity, difference, and hierarchy underlie these discussions of how racial, cultural, and class differences have been deployed in ritual practice and how such rituals have been governed in the colonial and postcolonial Caribbean.

Contributors. Donald Cosentino, Maarit Forde, Yanique Hume, Paul Christopher Johnson, Aisha Khan, Keith E. McNeal, George Mentore, Richard Price, Karen Richman, Ineke (Wilhelmina) van Wetering, Bonno (H.U.E.) Thoden van Velzen
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Passed On
African American Mourning Stories, A Memorial
Karla FC Holloway
Duke University Press, 2002
Passed On is a portrait of death and dying in twentieth-century African America. Through poignant reflection and thorough investigation of the myths, rituals, economics, and politics of African American mourning and burial practices, Karla FC Holloway finds that ways of dying are just as much a part of black identity as ways of living. Gracefully interweaving interviews, archival research, and analyses of literature, film, and music, Holloway shows how the vulnerability of African Americans to untimely death is inextricably linked to how black culture represents itself and is represented.
With a focus on the “death-care” industry—black funeral homes and morticians, the history of the profession and its practices—Holloway examines all facets of the burial business, from physicians, hospital chaplains, and hospice administrators, to embalming- chemical salesmen, casket makers, and funeral directors, to grieving relatives. She uses narrative, photographs, and images to summon a painful history of lynchings, white rage and riot, medical malpractice and neglect, executions, and neighborhood violence. Specialized caskets sold to African Americans, formal burial photos of infants, and deathbed stories, unveil a glimpse of the graveyards and burial sites of African America, along with burial rituals and funeral ceremonies.
Revealing both unexpected humor and anticipated tragedy, Holloway tells a story of the experiences of black folk in the funeral profession and its clientele. She also reluctantly shares the story of her son and the way his death moved her research from page to person.
In the conclusion, which follows a sermon delivered by Maurice O. Wallace at the funeral for the author’s son, Bem, Holloway strives to commemorate—through observation, ceremony, and the calling of others to remembrance and celebration.
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Passing and the Fictions of Identity
Elaine K. Ginsberg
Duke University Press, 1996
Passing refers to the process whereby a person of one race, gender, nationality, or sexual orientation adopts the guise of another. Historically, this has often involved black slaves passing as white in order to gain their freedom. More generally, it has served as a way for women and people of color to access male or white privilege. In their examination of this practice of crossing boundaries, the contributors to this volume offer a unique perspective for studying the construction and meaning of personal and cultural identities.
These essays consider a wide range of texts and moments from colonial times to the present that raise significant questions about the political motivations inherent in the origins and maintenance of identity categories and boundaries. Through discussions of such literary works as Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, The Autobiography of an Ex–Coloured Man, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Hidden Hand, Black Like Me, and Giovanni’s Room, the authors examine issues of power and privilege and ways in which passing might challenge the often rigid structures of identity politics. Their interrogation of the semiotics of behavior, dress, language, and the body itself contributes significantly to an understanding of national, racial, gender, and sexual identity in American literature and culture.
Contextualizing and building on the theoretical work of such scholars as Judith Butler, Diana Fuss, Marjorie Garber, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., Passing and the Fictions of Identity will be of value to students and scholars working in the areas of race, gender, and identity theory, as well as U.S. history and literature.

Contributors. Martha Cutter, Katharine Nicholson Ings, Samira Kawash, Adrian Piper, Valerie Rohy, Marion Rust, Julia Stern, Gayle Wald, Ellen M. Weinauer, Elizabeth Young

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The Passion of Ingmar Bergman
Frank Gado
Duke University Press, 1986
Acknowledged as one of the greatest filmmakers of this or any other time, Bergman has with few exceptions written his own screenplays—an uncommon practice in the film industry—and for this practice critics refer to him as a "literary" filmmaker: In this work, Gado examines virtually the entire range of Bergman's literary output. While treating the matter of the visual presentation of Bergman's films, Gado concentrates on story and narrative and their relationship to Bergman's personal history.

Gado concludes that whatever the outward appearance of Bergman's works, they contain an elementary psychic fantasy that links them all, revealing an artist who hoped to be a dramatist, "the new Strindberg," and who saw the camera as an extension of his pen.

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The Passion of Tiger Woods
An Anthropologist Reports on Golf, Race, and Celebrity Scandal
Orin Starn
Duke University Press, 2012
Perhaps the best golfer ever, Tiger Woods rocketed to the top of a once whites-only sport. Endorsements made him a global brand and the world’s richest athlete. The child of a multiracial marriage, Woods and his blond, blue-eyed wife, Elin Nordegren, seemed to represent a new postracial America. Then, in late 2009, Woods became embroiled in a sex scandal that made headlines worldwide. In this concise yet far-reaching analysis, Orin Starn brings an anthropologist’s perspective to bear on Tigergate. He explores our modern media obsession with celebrity scandals and their tawdry ritualized drama, yet he offers much more than the usual banal moralizing about the rich and famous. Starn explains how Tiger’s travails and the culture of golf reflect broader American anxieties—about race and sex, scapegoating and betrayal, and the role of the sports hero. The Passion of Tiger Woods is required reading for all those interested in the high-stakes world of professional golf, the politics of sports and celebrity, and the myths and realities surrounding the flawed yet riveting figure who remains among the most famous athletes of our time.
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Passionate and Pious
Religious Media and Black Women's Sexuality
Monique Moultrie
Duke University Press, 2018
In Passionate and Pious Monique Moultrie explores the impact of faith-based sexual ministries on black women's sexual agency to trace how these women navigate sexuality, religious authority, and their spiritual walk with God. Providing churchwomen a space to candidly discuss these issues, these popular ministries exist largely beyond the traditional church, with dialogues about sex taking place in chat rooms and through text messages, social media, email, and other media. Moultrie foregrounds televangelist Juanita Bynum's construction of the black Christian sexual identity these ministries promote while emphasizing how churchwomen reconcile these prescriptive identities with their individual experiences. What does it mean for senior women to exercise sexual agency when their church standing could be questioned? What does celibacy mean for women who experience same-sex desire while believing that such desire goes against God's will? Advancing a womanist sexual ethics, Moultrie reframes biblical interpretations and conceptions of what constitutes a healthy relationship to provide a basis for sexual decision making that does not privilege monogamy or deny female pleasure, thereby calling on black churchwomen to experience responsible and life-enhancing sex.
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Passionate Work
Endurance after the Good Life
Renyi Hong
Duke University Press, 2022
In Passionate Work, Renyi Hong theorizes the notion of being “passionate about your work” as an affective project that encourages people to endure economically trying situations like unemployment, job change, repetitive and menial labor, and freelancing. Not simply a subject of aspiration, passion has been deployed as a means to build resilience and mend disappointments with our experiences of work. Tracking the rise of passion in nineteenth-century management to trends like gamification, coworking, and unemployment insurance, Hong demonstrates how passion can emerge in instances that would not typically be understood as passionate. Gamification numbs crippling boredom by keeping call center workers in an unthinking, suspensive state, pursuing even the most banal tasks in hope of career advancement. Coworking spaces marketed toward freelancers combat loneliness and disconnection at the precise moment when middle-class sureties are profoundly threatened. Ultimately, Hong argues, the ideal of passionate work sustains a condition of cruel optimism in which passion is offered as the solution for the injustices of contemporary capitalism.
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Pathways to Prohibition
Radicals, Moderates, and Social Movement Outcomes
Ann-Marie E. Szymanski
Duke University Press, 2003
Strategies for gradually effecting social change are often dismissed as too accommodating of the status quo. Ann-Marie E. Szymanski challenges this assumption, arguing that moderation is sometimes the most effective way to achieve change. Pathways to Prohibition examines the strategic choices of social movements by focusing on the fates of two temperance campaigns. The prohibitionists of the 1880s gained limited success, while their Progressive Era counterparts achieved a remarkable—albeit temporary—accomplishment in American politics: amending the United States Constitution. Szymanski accounts for these divergent outcomes by asserting that choice of strategy (how a social movement defines and pursues its goals) is a significant element in the success or failure of social movements, underappreciated until now. Her emphasis on strategy represents a sharp departure from approaches that prioritize political opportunity as the most consequential factor in campaigns for social change.

Combining historical research with the insights of social movement theory, Pathways to Prohibition shows how a locally based, moderate strategy allowed the early-twentieth-century prohibition crusade both to develop a potent grassroots component and to transcend the limited scope of local politics. Szymanski describes how the prohibition movement’s strategic shift toward moderate goals after 1900 reflected the devolution of state legislatures’ liquor licensing power to localities, the judiciary’s growing acceptance of these local licensing regimes, and a collective belief that local electorates, rather than state legislatures, were best situated to resolve controversial issues like the liquor question. "Local gradualism" is well suited to the porous, federal structure of the American state, Szymanski contends, and it has been effectively used by a number of social movements, including the civil rights movement and the Christian right.

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Patients of the State
The Politics of Waiting in Argentina
Javier Auyero
Duke University Press, 2012
Patients of the State is a sociological account of the extended waiting that poor people seeking state social and administrative services must endure. It is based on ethnographic research in the waiting area of the main welfare office in Buenos Aires, in the line leading into the Argentine registration office where legal aliens apply for identification cards, and among people who live in a polluted shantytown on the capital’s outskirts, while waiting to be allocated better housing. Scrutinizing the mundane interactions between the poor and the state, as well as underprivileged people’s confusion and uncertainty about the administrative processes that affect them, Javier Auyero argues that while waiting, the poor learn the opposite of citizenship. They learn to be patients of the state. They absorb the message that they should be patient and keep waiting, because there is nothing else that they can do. Drawing attention to a significant everyday dynamic that has received little scholarly attention until now, Auyero considers not only how the poor experience these lengthy waits but also how making poor people wait works as a strategy of state control.
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Peace and Mind
Part 3: Seriatim Symposium on Dispute, Conflict, and Enmity, Volume 8
Jeffrey M. Perl, ed.
Duke University Press
Scholars must make their names, assert themselves, take credit for their original work, and stake claims to their positions to achieve credibility in their disciplines. Common Knowledge is dedicated to a mission that is often at odds with this academic protocol. The journal aims to break down boundaries between disciplines, find compromise and common ground, and move beyond dispute. Toward this end, it is publishing an ongoing symposium on dispute, conflict, and enmity titled "Peace and Mind." This third installment of the symposium focuses on a virtue rarely associated with academia: humility. By considering the idea of humility in intellectual work from a variety of perspectives—philosophical, historical, literary, moral, and political—this issue promises to add a surprising new voice to the dialogue on conflict resolution.
One contributor, a longtime president of the American Council of Learned Societies, calls for "intellectual philanthropy" and suggests that academics should transcend their ideological differences and form cooperative partnerships in the public service. A pair of essays, by key figures of the 1989 Velvet Revolution in Eastern Europe, analyze the ways that self-confidence and self-regard undercut efforts toward the resolution of complex social problems. The qualities of ideological self-subversion and even weakness, Common Knowledge maintains, are essential if the intellectual community is to become an agent for peace in a time of war.

Contributors. Wayne Andersen, Sissela Bok, Yves Bonnefoy, Caroline Walker Bynum, Clare Cavanagh, Charles-Albert Cingria, Caryl Emerson, Clifford Geertz, Stanley N. Katz, Aileen Kelly, Adam Michnik, Péter Nádas, Eugene Ostashevsky, Jeffrey M. Perl, Marjorie Perloff, Nina Pelikan Straus, Rei Terada, Gianni Vattimo, William Vesterman, Aleksandr Vvedensky, Adam Zagajewski.

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Peasants on Plantations
Subaltern Strategies of Labor and Resistance in the Pisco Valley, Peru
Vincent Peloso
Duke University Press, 1999
After the 1854 abolition of slavery in Peru, a new generation of plantation owners turned to a system of peasant tenantry to maintain cotton production through the use of cheap labor. In Peasants on Plantations Vincent C. Peloso analyzes the changing social and economic relationships governing the production of cotton in the Pisco Valley, a little-studied area of Peru’s south coast. Challenging widely held assumptions about the system of relations that tied peasants to the land, Peloso’s work examines the interdependence of the planters, managers, and peasants—and the various strategies used by peasants in their struggle to resist control by the owners.

Grounded in the theoretical perspectives of subaltern studies and drawing on an extremely complete archive of landed estates that includes detailed regular reports by plantation managers on all aspects of farming life, Peasants on Plantations reveals the intricate ways peasants, managers, and owners manipulated each other to benefit their own interests. As Peloso demonstrates, rather than a simple case of domination of the peasants by the owners, both parties realized that negotiation was the key to successful growth, often with the result that peasants cooperated with plantation growth strategies in order to participate in a market economy. Long-term contracts gave tenants and sharecroppers many opportunities to make farming choices, to assert claims on the land, compete among themselves, and participate in plantation expansion. At the same time, owners strove to keep the peasants in debt and well aware of who maintained ultimate control.

Peasants on Plantations offers a largely untold view of the monumental struggle between planters and peasants that was fundamental in shaping the agrarian history of Peru. It will interest those engaged in Latin American studies, anthropology, and peasant and agrarian studies.

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Pedagogies of Crossing
Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred
M. Jacqui Alexander
Duke University Press, 2005
M. Jacqui Alexander is one of the most important theorists of transnational feminism working today. Pedagogies of Crossing brings together essays she has written over the past decade, uniting her incisive critiques, which have had such a profound impact on feminist, queer, and critical race theories, with some of her more recent work. In this landmark interdisciplinary volume, Alexander points to a number of critical imperatives made all the more urgent by contemporary manifestations of neoimperialism and neocolonialism. Among these are the need for North American feminism and queer studies to take up transnational frameworks that foreground questions of colonialism, political economy, and racial formation; for a thorough re-conceptualization of modernity to account for the heteronormative regulatory practices of modern state formations; and for feminists to wrestle with the spiritual dimensions of experience and the meaning of sacred subjectivity.

In these meditations, Alexander deftly unites large, often contradictory, historical processes across time and space. She focuses on the criminalization of queer communities in both the United States and the Caribbean in ways that prompt us to rethink how modernity invents its own traditions; she juxtaposes the political organizing and consciousness of women workers in global factories in Mexico, the Caribbean, and Canada with the pressing need for those in the academic factory to teach for social justice; she reflects on the limits and failures of liberal pluralism; and she presents original and compelling arguments that show how and why transgenerational memory is an indispensable spiritual practice within differently constituted women-of-color communities as it operates as a powerful antidote to oppression. In this multifaceted, visionary book, Alexander maps the terrain of alternative histories and offers new forms of knowledge with which to mold alternative futures.

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People Get Ready
The Future of Jazz Is Now!
Ajay Heble and Rob Wallace, eds.
Duke University Press, 2013
In People Get Ready, musicians, scholars, and journalists write about jazz since 1965, the year that Curtis Mayfield composed the famous civil rights anthem that gives this collection its title. The contributors emphasize how the political consciousness that infused jazz in the 1960s and early 1970s has informed jazz in the years since then. They bring nuance to historical accounts of the avant-garde, the New Thing, Free Jazz, "non-idiomatic" improvisation, fusion, and other forms of jazz that have flourished since the 1960s, and they reveal the contemporary relevance of those musical practices. Many of the participants in the jazz scenes discussed are still active performers. A photographic essay captures some of them in candid moments before performances. Other pieces revise standard accounts of well-known jazz figures, such as Duke Ellington, and lesser-known musicians, including Jeanne Lee; delve into how money, class, space, and economics affect the performance of experimental music; and take up the question of how digital technology influences improvisation. People Get Ready offers a vision for the future of jazz based on an appreciation of the complexity of its past and the abundance of innovation in the present.

Contributors
. Tamar Barzel, John Brackett, Douglas Ewart, Ajay Heble, Vijay Iyer, Thomas King, Tracy McMullen, Paul D. Miller/DJ Spooky, Nicole Mitchell, Roscoe Mitchell, Famoudou Don Moye, Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Eric Porter, Marc Ribot, Matana Roberts, Jaribu Shahid, Julie Dawn Smith, Wadada Leo Smith, Alan Stanbridge, John Szwed, Greg Tate, Scott Thomson, Rob Wallace, Ellen Waterman, Corey Wilkes
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People of Faith
Slavery and African Catholics in Eighteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro
Mariza de Carvalho Soares
Duke University Press, 2011
In People of Faith, Mariza de Carvalho Soares reconstructs the everyday lives of Mina slaves transported in the eighteenth century to Rio de Janeiro from the western coast of Africa, particularly from modern-day Benin. She describes a Catholic lay brotherhood formed by the enslaved Mina congregants of a Rio church, and she situates the brotherhood in a panoramic setting encompassing the historical development of the Atlantic slave trade in West Africa and the ethnic composition of Mina slaves in eighteenth-century Rio. Although Africans from the Mina Coast constituted no more than ten percent of the slave population of Rio, they were a strong presence in urban life at the time. Soares analyzes the role that Catholicism, and particularly lay brotherhoods, played in Africans’ construction of identities under slavery in colonial Brazil. As in the rest of the Portuguese empire, black lay brotherhoods in Rio engaged in expressions of imperial pomp through elaborate festivals, processions, and funerals; the election of kings and queens; and the organization of royal courts. Drawing mainly on ecclesiastical documents, Soares reveals the value of church records for historical research.
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People of the Volcano
Andean Counterpoint in the Colca Valley of Peru
Noble David Cook, with Alexandra Parma Cook
Duke University Press, 2007
While it now attracts many tourists, the Colca Valley of Peru’s southern Andes was largely isolated from the outside world until the 1970s, when a passable road was built linking the valley—and its colonial churches, terraced hillsides, and deep canyon—to the city of Arequipa and its airport, eight hours away. Noble David Cook and his co-researcher Alexandra Parma Cook have been studying the Colca Valley since 1974, and this detailed ethnohistory reflects their decades-long engagement with the valley, its history, and its people. Drawing on unusually rich surviving documentary evidence, they explore the cultural transformations experienced by the first three generations of Indians and Europeans in the region following the Spanish conquest of the Incas.

Social structures, the domestic export and economies, and spiritual spheres within native Andean communities are key elements of analysis. Also highlighted is the persistence of duality in the Andean world: perceived dichotomies such as those between the coast and the highlands, Europeans and Indo-Peruvians. Even before the conquest, the Cabana and Collagua communities sharing the Colca Valley were divided according to kinship and location. The Incas, and then the Spanish, capitalized on these divisions, incorporating them into their state structure in order to administer the area more effectively, but Colca Valley peoples resisted total assimilation into either. Colca Valley communities have shown a remarkable tenacity in retaining their social, economic, and cultural practices while accommodating various assimilationist efforts over the centuries. Today’s population maintains similarities with their ancestors of more than five hundred years ago—in language, agricultural practices, daily rituals, familial relationships, and practices of reciprocity. They also retain links to ecological phenomena, including the volcanoes from which they believe they emerged and continue to venerate.

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People on the Move
The Security, Social, and Economic Implications of Mass Migration, Volume 15
Nikolas A. Stavrou, ed.
Duke University Press
On an annual basis, approximately 100 million people either attempt to or actually do leave their place of birth, often not knowing their final destination. The flow of immigrants who arrive in neighboring countries in search of refuge and work raises social, political, and security concerns. This special issue of Mediterranean Quarterly takes a closer look at a pattern of history that is at the core of current global instability—the mass migration of peoples.

This collection gathers a unique group of contributors, including representatives from Congress, the United Nations, and Israel’s Ministry of Justice, as well as senior diplomats from Canada, Bulgaria, Portugal, Spain, and Turkey. Presenting their diverse perspectives, the contributors address regional and policy issues related to the mass migration of people, as well as questions concerning citizenship and national security, human trafficking in the form of prostitution, and cultural discrimination. The result is a multifaceted exploration of issues underlying many of the world’s economic, security, and social challenges. Other topics include the impact of state failure on migration, immigration in California, security measures and “preferred” immigrants in Canada after September 11, 2001, and Albanian migration into Greece.

Contributors. Alexandre Afonso, David Binder, Andrew C. Danopoulos, Constantine P. Danopoulos, Francis M. Deng, Mohamed A. El-Khawas, Omar G. Encarnación, Rochelle Gershuni, Larry L. Gerston, Ahmet Içduygu, Benjamin Kline, Bojan Korenic, Erin Kruger, Robert S. Leiken, Marlene Mulder, Elena Poptodorova, Tom Tancredo

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A People's History of Detroit
Mark Jay and Philip Conklin
Duke University Press, 2020
Recent bouts of gentrification and investment in Detroit have led some to call it the greatest turnaround story in American history. Meanwhile, activists point to the city's cuts to public services, water shutoffs, mass foreclosures, and violent police raids. In A People's History of Detroit, Mark Jay and Philip Conklin use a class framework to tell a sweeping story of Detroit from 1913 to the present, embedding Motown's history in a global economic context. Attending to the struggle between corporate elites and radical working-class organizations, Jay and Conklin outline the complex sociopolitical dynamics underlying major events in Detroit's past, from the rise of Fordism and the formation of labor unions, to deindustrialization and the city's recent bankruptcy. They demonstrate that Detroit's history is not a tale of two cities—one of wealth and development and another racked by poverty and racial violence; rather it is the story of a single Detroit that operates according to capitalism's mandates.
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The People's Hotel
Working for Justice in Argentina
Katherine Sobering
Duke University Press, 2022
In 2001 Argentina experienced a massive economic crisis: businesses went bankrupt, unemployment spiked, and nearly half the population fell below the poverty line. In the midst of the crisis, Buenos Aires’s iconic twenty-story Hotel Bauen quietly closed its doors, forcing longtime hospitality workers out of their jobs. Rather than leaving the luxury hotel vacant, a group of former employees occupied the property and kept it open. In The People’s Hotel, Katherine Sobering recounts the history of the Hotel Bauen, detailing its transformation from a privately owned business into a worker cooperative—one where decisions were made democratically, jobs were rotated, and all members were paid equally. Combining ethnographic and archival research with her own experiences as a volunteer worker at the hotel, Sobering examines how the Bauen Cooperative grew and, against all odds, successfully kept the hotel open for nearly two decades. Highlighting successes and innovations alongside the many challenges that these workers faced, Sobering presents a vivid portrait of efforts to address inequality and reorganize work in a capitalist economy.
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Percussion
Drumming, Beating, Striking
John Mowitt
Duke University Press, 2002
Percussion is an attempt—in the author’s words—to make sense of "senseless beating," to grasp how rhythm makes sense in music and society. Both a scholar and a former professional drummer, John Mowitt forges a striking encounter between cultural studies and new musicology that seeks to lay out the "percussive field" through which beating—specifically the backbeat that defines early rock-and-roll—comes to matter for raced, urban subjects.
For Mowitt, percussion is both an experience of embodiment—making contact in and on the skin—and a provocation for critical theory itself. In delimiting the percussive field, he plays drumming off against the musicological account of the beat, the sociological account of shock and the psychoanalytical account of fantasy. In the process he touches on such topics as the separation of slaves and drums in the era of the slave trade, the migration of rural blacks to urban centers of the North, the practice and politics of "rough music," the links between interpellation and possession, the general strike, beating fantasies, and the concept of the "skin ego."
Percussion makes a fresh and provocative contribution to cultural studies, new musicology, the history of the body and critical race theory. It will be of interest to students of cultural studies and critical theory as well as readers with a serious interest in the history of music, rock-and-roll and drumming.
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Perfect Wives, Other Women
Adultery and Inquisition in Early Modern Spain
Georgina Dopico Black
Duke University Press, 2001
In Perfect Wives, Other Women Georgina Dopico Black examines the role played by women’s bodies—specifically the bodies of wives—in Spain and Spanish America during the Inquisition. In her quest to show how both the body and soul of the married woman became the site of anxious inquiry, Dopico Black mines a variety of Golden Age texts for instances in which the era’s persistent preoccupation with racial, religious, and cultural otherness was reflected in the depiction of women.
Subject to the scrutiny of a remarkable array of gazes—inquisitors, theologians, religious reformers, confessors, poets, playwrights, and, not least among them, husbands—the bodies of perfect and imperfect wives elicited diverse readings. Dopico Black reveals how imperialism, the Inquisition, inflation, and economic decline each contributed to a correspondence between the meanings of these human bodies and “other” bodies, such as those of the Jew, the Moor, the Lutheran, the degenerate, and whoever else departed from a recognized norm. The body of the wife, in other words, became associated with categories separate from anatomy, reflecting the particular hermeneutics employed during the Inquisition regarding the surveillance of otherness.
Dopico Black’s compelling argument will engage students of Spanish and Spanish American history and literature, gender studies, women’s studies, social psychology and cultural studies.
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Performance
Diana Taylor
Duke University Press, 2016
"Performance" has multiple and often overlapping meanings that signify a wide variety of social behaviors. In this invitation to reflect on the power of performance, Diana Taylor explores many of its uses and iterations: artistic, economic, sexual, political, and technological performance; the performance of everyday life; and the gendered, sexed, and racialized performance of bodies. This book performs its argument. Images and texts interact to show how performance is at once a creative act, a means to comprehend power, a method of transmitting memory and identity, and a way of understanding the world.
 
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Performance in America
Contemporary U.S. Culture and the Performing Arts
David Román
Duke University Press, 2005
Performance in America demonstrates the vital importance of the performing arts to contemporary U.S. culture. Looking at a series of specific performances mounted between 1994 and 2004, well-known performance studies scholar David Román challenges the belief that theatre, dance, and live music are marginal art forms in the United States. He describes the crucial role that the performing arts play in local, regional, and national communities, emphasizing the power of live performance, particularly its immediacy and capacity to create a dialogue between artists and audiences. Román draws attention to the ways that the performing arts provide unique perspectives on many of the most pressing concerns within American studies: questions about history and politics, citizenship and society, and culture and nation.

The performances that Román analyzes range from localized community-based arts events to full-scale Broadway productions and from the controversial works of established artists such as Tony Kushner to those of emerging artists. Román considers dances produced by the choreographers Bill T. Jones and Neil Greenberg in the mid-1990s as new aids treatments became available and the aids crisis was reconfigured; a production of the Asian American playwright Chay Yew’s A Beautiful Country in a high-school auditorium in Los Angeles’s Chinatown; and Latino performer John Leguizamo’s one-man Broadway show Freak. He examines the revival of theatrical legacies by female impersonators and the resurgence of cabaret in New York City. Román also looks at how the performing arts have responded to 9/11, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, and the second war in Iraq. Including more than eighty illustrations, Performance in America highlights the dynamic relationships among performance, history, and contemporary culture through which the past is revisited and the future reimagined.

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Perilous Memories
The Asia-Pacific War(s)
T. Fujitani, Geoffrey M. White, Lisa Yoneyama, eds.
Duke University Press, 2001
Perilous Memories makes a groundbreaking and critical intervention into debates about war memory in the Asia-Pacific region. Arguing that much is lost or erased when the Asia-Pacific War(s) are reduced to the 1941–1945 war between Japan and the United States, this collection challenges mainstream memories of the Second World War in favor of what were actually multiple, widespread conflicts. The contributors recuperate marginalized or silenced memories of wars throughout the region—not only in Japan and the United States but also in China, Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands, Okinawa, Taiwan, and Korea.
Firmly based on the insight that memory is always mediated and that the past is not a stable object, the volume demonstrates that we can intervene positively yet critically in the recovery and reinterpretation of events and experiences that have been pushed to the peripheries of the past. The contributors—an international list of anthropologists, cultural critics, historians, literary scholars, and activists—show how both dominant and subjugated memories have emerged out of entanglements with such forces as nationalism, imperialism, colonialism, racism, and sexism. They consider both how the past is remembered and also what the consequences may be of privileging one set of memories over others. Specific objects of study range from photographs, animation, songs, and films to military occupations and attacks, minorities in wartime, “comfort women,” commemorative events, and postwar activism in pursuing redress and reparations.
Perilous Memories is a model for war memory intervention and will be of interest to historians and other scholars and activists engaged with collective memory, colonial studies, U.S. and Asian history, and cultural studies.

Contributors. Chen Yingzhen, Chungmoo Choi, Vicente M. Diaz, Arif Dirlik, T. Fujitani, Ishihara Masaie, Lamont Lindstrom, George Lipsitz, Marita Sturken, Toyonaga Keisaburo, Utsumi Aiko, Morio Watanabe, Geoffrey M. White, Diana Wong, Daqing Yang, Lisa Yoneyama

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The Perils and Prospects of Southern Black Leadership
Gordon Blaine Hancock, 1884–1970
Raymond Gavins
Duke University Press, 1993
The Perils and Prospects of Southern Black Leadership fills an important gap in uncovering the history of southern black leaders between the death of Booker T. Washington and the rise of Martin Luther King, Jr. Originally published to critical acclaim in 1977 (Duke University Press), and now available in paperback with a new preface by the author, this book provides an intellectual biography of Gordon Blaine Hancock, a Virginia educator, journalist, and minister whose writings and speeches on race relations were widely influential in the South in the thirty years prior to the Brown decision of 1954. In showing how Hancock faced his generation's main dilemma—how to end Jim Crow and ensure integration without abandoning ideals of black identity, independence, and solidarity—Raymond Gavins's biography illuminates the history of African Americans and race relations in America.
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Periodization
Cutting Up the Past, Volume 62
Marshall Brown, ed.
Duke University Press
Why do we need to divide time into periods, and how do these divisions of time contribute to or impede our understanding? Unlike other studies of periodization that limit discussions to whether particular period definitions are true and accurate, Periodization delves into our wariness of such categorizing and the impulse to categorize historical time in the first place.

This special issue of MLQ covers examples of periodization from the early modern to the present, including a range from the individual year to the longue durée and incorporates a variety of methods from close empirical study to global concern. In the lead essay, Russell A. Berman argues that periodization saves us from the dangers of both anachronism and presentism. Srinivas Aravamudan, updating Vico, reminds usthat we lose the past if we simply leave it unexamined. In “Perioddity” Timothy J. Reiss reflects on the crossings of chronology with geology in long-range and global perspectives.

This collection strives to turn discomfort with periodization into a constructive discourse.

Contributors. Srinivas Aravamudan, Russell Berman, Marshall Brown, Margreta de Grazia, Robert J. Griffin, Anne K. Mellor, Michael North, Timothy J. Reiss

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Peripheral Nerve
Health and Medicine in Cold War Latin America
Anne-Emanuelle Birn and Raúl Necochea López
Duke University Press, 2020
Buenos Aires psychoanalysts resisting imperialism. Brazilian parasitologists embracing communism as an antidote to rural misery. Nicaraguan revolutionaries welcoming Cuban health cooperation. Chilean public health reformers gauging domestic approaches against their Soviet and Western counterparts. As explored in Peripheral Nerve, these and accompanying accounts problematize existing understandings of how the Cold War unfolded in Latin America generally and in the health and medical realms more specifically. Bringing together scholars from across the Americas, this volume chronicles the experiences of Latin American physicians, nurses, medical scientists, and reformers who interacted with dominant U.S. and European players and sought alternative channels of health and medical solidarity with the Soviet Union and via South-South cooperation. Throughout, Peripheral Nerve highlights how Latin American health professionals accepted, rejected, and adapted foreign involvement; manipulated the rivalry between the United States and the USSR; and forged local variants that they projected internationally. In so doing, this collection reveals the multivalent nature of Latin American health politics, offering a significant contribution to Cold War history.

Contributors. Cheasty Anderson, Anne-Emanuelle Birn, Katherine E. Bliss, Gilberto Hochman, Jennifer L. Lambe, Nicole Pacino, Carlos Henrique Assunção Paiva, Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney, Raúl Necochea López, Marco A. Ramos, Gabriela Soto Laveaga
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Perpetual War
Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence
Bruce Robbins
Duke University Press, 2012
For two decades Bruce Robbins has been a theorist of and participant in the movement for a "new cosmopolitanism," an appreciation of the varieties of multiple belonging that emerge as peoples and cultures interact. In Perpetual War he takes stock of this movement, rethinking his own commitment and reflecting on the responsibilities of American intellectuals today. In this era of seemingly endless U.S. warfare, Robbins contends that the declining economic and political hegemony of the United States will tempt it into blaming other nations for its problems and lashing out against them.

Under these conditions, cosmopolitanism in the traditional sense—primary loyalty to the good of humanity as a whole, even if it conflicts with loyalty to the interests of one's own nation—becomes a necessary resource in the struggle against military aggression. To what extent does the "new" cosmopolitanism also include or support this "old" cosmopolitanism? In an attempt to answer this question, Robbins engages with such thinkers as Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Anthony Appiah, Immanuel Wallerstein, Louis Menand, W. G. Sebald, and Slavoj Zizek. The paradoxes of detachment and belonging they embody, he argues, can help define the tasks of American intellectuals in an era when the first duty of the cosmopolitan is to resist the military aggression perpetrated by his or her own country.

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Persistent Oligarchs
Elites and Politics in Chihuahua, Mexico 1910–1940
Mark Wasserman
Duke University Press, 1993
Did the Mexican Revolution do away with the ruling class of the old regime? Did a new ruling class rise to take the old one's place—and if so, what differences resulted? In this compelling study, the first of its kind, Mark Wasserman pursues these questions through an analysis of the history and politics of the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua from 1910 to 1940.
Chihuahua boasted one of the strongest pre-revolutionary elite networks, the Terrazas-Creel family. Wasserman describes this group's efforts to maintain its power after the Revolution, including its use of economic resources and intermarriage to forge partnerships with the new, revolutionary elite. Together, the old and new elites confronted a national government that sought to reestablish centralized control over the states and the masses. Wasserman shows how the revolutionary government and the popular classes, joined in opposition to the challenge of the elites, finally formalized into a national political party during the 1930s.
Persistent Oligarchs concludes with an account of the Revolution's ultimate outcome, largely accomplished by 1940: the national government gaining central control over politics, the popular classes obtaining land redistribution and higher wages, and regional elites, old and new, availing themselves of the great opportunities presented by economic development. A complex analysis of revolution as a vehicle for both continuity and change, this work is essential to an understanding of Mexico and Latin America, as well as revolutionary politics and history.
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Person and Myth
Maurice Leenhardt in the Melanesian World
James Clifford
Duke University Press, 1992
Originally published in 1982, James Clifford's analytical biography of Maurice Leenhardt (1878–1954)—missionary, anthropologist, founder of French Oceanic studies, historian of religion, and colonial reformer—received wide critical acclaim for its insight into the colonial history of anthropology. Drawing extensively on unpublished letters and journals, Clifford traces Leenhardt's life from his work as a missionary on the island of New Caledonia (1902–1926) to his subsequent return to Paris where he became an academic anthropologist at the École Practique des Hautes Études, where he followed Marcel Mauss and was succeeded in 1951 by Claude Lévi-Strauss. Clifford sees in Leenhardt's career a foreshadowing of contemporary anthropological concerns with reflexivity, cultural hybridity, and colonial and post-colonial entanglements.
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Personology
Method and Content in Personality Assessment and Psychobiography
Irving E. Alexander
Duke University Press, 1990
How can we know what another human being is like in some meaningful, dynamic way? Can we distill the signature-like features of an individual personality? What is the relationship between personal experience and our attempts to describe the person who has that experience?
This work by a highly respected senior psychologist is an effort to answer these questions. Irving E. Alexander presents a case for considering the personal narrative of a human life as the most compelling aspect of that life to be decoded and understood. In part a critique of an exclusive reliance on general theories about the development of personality and ways of knowing based primarily on comparison with others, Personology is illustrated with material drawn from the lives, personal writings, and theories of Freud, Jung, and Sullivan. Alexander develops new insights into the lives of these men and offers methods and guidelines for investigating and teaching personology and psychobiography.
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The Peru Reader
History, Culture, Politics
Orin Starn, Carlos Iván Degregori and Robin Kirk, editors
Duke University Press, 2005
Sixteenth-century Spanish soldiers described Peru as a land filled with gold and silver, a place of untold wealth. Nineteenth-century travelers wrote of soaring Andean peaks plunging into luxuriant Amazonian canyons of orchids, pythons, and jaguars. The early-twentieth-century American adventurer Hiram Bingham told of the raging rivers and the wild jungles he traversed on his way to rediscovering the “Lost City of the Incas,” Machu Picchu. Seventy years later, news crews from ABC and CBS traveled to Peru to report on merciless terrorists, starving peasants, and Colombian drug runners in the “white gold” rush of the coca trade. As often as not, Peru has been portrayed in broad extremes: as the land of the richest treasures, the bloodiest conquest, the most poignant ballads, and the most violent revolutionaries. This revised and updated second edition of the bestselling Peru Reader offers a deeper understanding of the complex country that lies behind these claims.

Unparalleled in scope, the volume covers Peru’s history from its extraordinary pre-Columbian civilizations to its citizens’ twenty-first-century struggles to achieve dignity and justice in a multicultural nation where Andean, African, Amazonian, Asian, and European traditions meet. The collection presents a vast array of essays, folklore, historical documents, poetry, songs, short stories, autobiographical accounts, and photographs. Works by contemporary Peruvian intellectuals and politicians appear alongside accounts of those whose voices are less often heard—peasants, street vendors, maids, Amazonian Indians, and African-Peruvians. Including some of the most insightful pieces of Western journalism and scholarship about Peru, the selections provide the traveler and specialist alike with a thorough introduction to the country’s astonishing past and challenging present.

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Perversion and the Social Relation
sic IV
Molly Anne Rothenberg, Dennis A. Foster and Slavoj Zizek, eds.
Duke University Press, 2003
The masochist, the voyeur, the sadist, the sodomite, the fetishist, the pedophile, and the necrophiliac all expose hidden but essential elements of the social relation. Arguing that the concept of perversion, usually stigmatized, ought rather to be understood as a necessary stage in the development of all non-psychotic subjects, the essays in Perversion and the Social Relation consider the usefulness of the category of the perverse for exploring how social relations are formed, maintained, and transformed.

By focusing on perversion as a psychic structure rather than as aberrant behavior, the contributors provide an alternative to models of social interpretation based on classical Oedipal models of maturation and desire. At the same time, they critique claims that the perverse is necessarily subversive or liberating. In their lucid introduction, the editors explain that while fixation at the stage of the perverse can result in considerable suffering for the individual and others, perversion motivates social relations by providing pleasure and fulfilling the psychological need to put something in the place of the Father. The contributors draw on a variety of psychoanalytic perspectives—Freudian and Lacanian—as well as anthropology, history, literature, and film. From Slavoj Žižek's meditation on “the politics of masochism” in David Fincher's movie Fight Club through readings of works including William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner, Don DeLillo’s White Noise, and William Burroughs's Cities of the Red Night, the essays collected here illuminate perversion's necessary role in social relations.

Contributors. Michael P. Bibler, Dennis A. Foster, Bruce Fink, Octave Mannoni, E. L. McCallum, James Penney, Molly Anne Rothenberg, Nina Schwartz, Slavoj Žižek

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Petrochemical Planet
Multiscalar Battles of Industrial Transformation
Alice Mah
Duke University Press, 2023
In Petrochemical Planet Alice Mah examines the changing nature of the petrochemical industry as it faces the existential threats of climate change and environmental activism. Drawing on research from high-level industry meetings, petrochemical plant tours, and polluted communities, Mah juxtaposes the petrochemical industry’s destructive corporate worldviews with environmental justice struggles in the United States, China, and Europe. She argues that amid intensifying public pressures, a profound planetary industrial transformation is underway that is challenging the reigning age of plastics and fossil fuels. This challenge comes from what Mah calls multiscalar activism—a form of collective resistance that spans local, regional, national, and planetary sites and scales and addresses the interconnected issues of environmental justice, climate, pollution, health, extraction, land rights, workers’ rights, systemic racism, and toxic colonialism. Reflecting on the obstacles and openings for critical interventions in the petrochemical industry, Mah offers important insights into the possibilities for resistance and for developing alternatives to the reliance on fossil fuels.
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Phantasmatic Indochina
French Colonial Ideology in Architecture, Film, and Literature
Panivong Norindr
Duke University Press, 1996
This reflection on colonial culture argues for an examination of “Indochina” as a fictive and mythic construct, a phantasmatic legacy of French colonialism in Southeast Asia. Panivong Norindr uses postcolonial theory to demonstrate how French imperialism manifests itself not only through physical domination of geographic entities, but also through the colonization of the imaginary. In this careful reading of architecture, film, and literature, Norindr lays bare the processes of fantasy, desire, and nostalgia constituent of French territorial aggression against Indochina.
Analyzing the first Exposition Coloniale Internationale, held in Paris in 1931, Norindr shows how the exhibition’s display of architecture gave a vision to the colonies that justified France’s cultural prejudices, while stimulating the desire for further expansionism. He critiques the Surrealist counter-exposition mounted to oppose the imperialist aims of the Exposition Coloniale, and the Surrealist incorporation and appropriation of native artifacts in avant-garde works. According to Norindr, all serious attempts at interrogating French colonial involvement in Southeast Asia are threatened by discourse, images, representations, and myths that perpetuate the luminous aura of Indochina as a place of erotic fantasies and exotic adventures. Exploring the resilience of French nostalgia for Indochina in books and movies, the author examines work by Malraux, Duras, and Claudel, and the films Indochine, The Lover, and Dien Bien Phu.
Certain to impact across a range of disciplines, Phantasmatic Indochina will be of interest to those engaged in the study of the culture and history of Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and Laos, as well as specialists in the fields of French modernism, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and comparative literature.
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Phantasmic Radio
Allen S. Weiss
Duke University Press, 1995
The alienation of the self, the annihilation of the body, the fracturing, dispersal, and reconstruction of the disembodied voice: the themes of modernism, even of modern consciousness, occur as a matter of course in the phantasmic realm of radio. In this original work of cultural criticism, Allen S. Weiss explores the meaning of radio to the modern imagination. Weaving together cultural and technological history, aesthetic analysis, and epistemological reflection, his investigation reveals how radiophony transforms expression and, in doing so, calls into question assumptions about language and being, body and voice.
Phantasmic Radio presents a new perspective on the avant-garde radio experiments of Antonin Artaud and John Cage, and brings to light fascinating, lesser-known work by, among others, Valère Novarina, Gregory Whitehead, and Christof Migone. Weiss shows how Artaud’s "body without organs" establishes the closure of the flesh after the death of God; how Cage’s "imaginary landscapes" proffer the indissociability of techne and psyche; how Novarina reinvents the body through the word in his "theater of the ears." Going beyond the art historical context of these experiments, Weiss describes how, with their emphasis on montage and networks of transmission, they marked out the coordinates of modernism and prefigured what we now recognize as the postmodern.
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Pharmocracy
Value, Politics, and Knowledge in Global Biomedicine
Kaushik Sunder Rajan
Duke University Press, 2017
Continuing his pioneering theoretical explorations into the relationships among biosciences, the market, and political economy, Kaushik Sunder Rajan introduces the concept of pharmocracy to explain the structure and operation of the global hegemony of the multinational pharmaceutical industry. He reveals pharmocracy's logic in two case studies from contemporary India: the controversial introduction of an HPV vaccine in 2010, and the Indian Patent Office's denial of a patent for an anticancer drug in 2006 and ensuing legal battles. In each instance health was appropriated by capital and transformed from an embodied state of well-being into an abstract category made subject to capital's interests. These cases demonstrate the precarious situation in which pharmocracy places democracy, as India's accommodation of global pharmaceutical regulatory frameworks pits the interests of its citizens against those of international capital. Sunder Rajan's insights into this dynamic make clear the high stakes of pharmocracy's intersection with health, politics, and democracy.
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The Philosopher and His Poor
Jacques Rancière
Duke University Press, 2004
What has philosophy to do with the poor? If, as has often been supposed, the poor have no time for philosophy, then why have philosophers always made time for them? Why is the history of philosophy—from Plato to Karl Marx to Jean-Paul Sartre to Pierre Bourdieu—the history of so many figures of the poor: plebes, men of iron, the demos, artisans, common people, proletarians, the masses? Why have philosophers made the shoemaker, in particular, a remarkably ubiquitous presence in this history? Does philosophy itself depend on this thinking about the poor? If so, can it ever refrain from thinking for them?

Jacques Rancière’s The Philosopher and His Poor meditates on these questions in close readings of major texts of Western thought in which the poor have played a leading role—sometimes as the objects of philosophical analysis, sometimes as illustrations of philosophical argument. Published in France in 1983 and made available here for the first time in English, this consummate study assesses the consequences for Marx, Sartre, and Bourdieu of Plato’s admonition that workers should do “nothing else” than their own work. It offers innovative readings of these thinkers’ struggles to elaborate a philosophy of the poor. Presenting a left critique of Bourdieu, the terms of which are largely unknown to an English-language readership, The Philosopher and His Poor remains remarkably timely twenty years after its initial publication.

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Philosophical Imagination and Cultural Memory
Appropriating Historical Traditions
Patricia Cook, ed.
Duke University Press, 1993
Does philosophy have a future? Postmodern thought, with its rejection of claims to absolute truth or moral objectivity, would seem to put the philosophical enterprise in jeopardy. In this volume some of today's most influential thinkers face the question of philosophy's future and find an answer in its past. Their efforts show how historical traditions are currently being appropriated by philosophy, how some of the most provocative questions confronted by philosophers are given their impetus and direction by cultural memory.
Unlike analytic philosophy, a discipline supposedly liberated from any manifestation of cultural memory, the movement represented by these essays demonstrates how the inquiries, narratives, traditions, and events of our cultural past can mediate some of the most interesting exercises of the present-day philosophical imagination. Attesting to the power of historical tradition to enhance and redirect the prospects of philosophy these essays exemplify a new mode of doing philosophy.
The product of a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute in 1990, it is the task of this book to show that history can be reclaimed by philosophy and resurrected in postmodernity.

Contributors. George Allan, Eva T. H. Brann, Arthur C. Danto, Lynn S. Joy, George L. Kline, George R. Lucas, Jr., Alasdair MacIntyre, Robert C. Neville, John Rickard, Stanley Rosen, J. B. Scheenwind, Donald Phillip Verene

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Philosophy for Spiders
On the Low Theory of Kathy Acker
McKenzie Wark
Duke University Press, 2021
It's time to recognize Kathy Acker as one of the great postwar American writers. Over the decades readers have found a punk Acker, a feminist Acker, a queer Acker, a kink Acker, and an avant-garde Acker. In Philosophy for Spiders, McKenzie Wark adds a trans Acker. Wark recounts her memories of Acker (with whom she had a passionate affair) and gives a comprehensive reading of her published and archived works. Wark finds not just an inventive writer of fiction who pressed against the boundaries of gender but a theorist whose comprehensive philosophy of life brings a conceptual intelligence to the everyday life of those usually excluded from philosophy's purview. As Wark shows, Acker's engagement with topics such as masturbation, sadism, body-building, and penetrative sex are central to her distinct phenomenology of the body that theorizes the body's relation to others, the city, and technology.
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Phonographies
Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity
Alexander G. Weheliye
Duke University Press, 2005
Phonographies explores the numerous links and relays between twentieth-century black cultural production and sound technologies from the phonograph to the Walkman. Highlighting how black authors, filmmakers, and musicians have actively engaged with recorded sound in their work, Alexander G. Weheliye contends that the interplay between sound technologies and black music and speech enabled the emergence of modern black culture, of what he terms “sonic Afro-modernity.” He shows that by separating music and speech from their human sources, sound-recording technologies beginning with the phonograph generated new modes of thinking, being, and becoming. Black artists used these new possibilities to revamp key notions of modernity—among these, ideas of subjectivity, temporality, and community. Phonographies is a powerful argument that sound technologies are integral to black culture, which is, in turn, fundamental to Western modernity.

Weheliye surveys literature, film, and music to focus on engagements with recorded sound. He offers substantial new readings of canonical texts by W. E. B. Du Bois and Ralph Ellison, establishing dialogues between these writers and popular music and film ranging from Louis Armstrong’s voice to DJ mixing techniques to Darnell Martin’s 1994 movie I Like It Like That. Looking at how questions of diasporic belonging are articulated in contemporary black musical practices, Weheliye analyzes three contemporary Afro-diasporic musical acts: the Haitian and African American rap group the Fugees, the Afro- and Italian-German rap collective Advanced Chemistry, and black British artist Tricky and his partner Martina. Phonographies imagines the African diaspora as a virtual sounding space, one that is marked, in the twentieth century and twenty-first, by the circulation of culture via technological reproductions—records and tapes, dubbing and mixing, and more.

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Phonological Variation and Change in the Dialect of Charleston, South Carolina, Volume 82
Maciej Baranowski
Duke University Press

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Phonology as Human Behavior
Theoretical Implications and Clinical Applications
Yishai Tobin
Duke University Press, 1997
Phonology as Human Behavior brings work in human cognition, behavior, and communication to bear on the study of phonology—the theory of sound systems in language. Yishai Tobin extends the ideas of William Diver—an influential linguist whose investigations into phonology reflect the principle that language represents a constant search for maximum communication with minimal effort—as a part of a new theory of phonology as human behavior. Showing the far-reaching psycho- and sociolinguistic utility of this theory, Tobin demonstrates its applicability to the teaching of phonetics, text analysis, and the theory of language acquisition.
Tobin describes the methodological connection between phonological theory and phonetics by way of a comprehensive and insightful survey of phonology’s controversial role in twentieth-century linguistics. He reviews the work of Saussure, Jakobson, Troubetzkoy, Martinet, Zipf, and Diver, among others, and discusses issues in distributional phonology through analyses of English, Italian, Latin, Hebrew, and Yiddish. Using his theory to explain various functional and pathological speech disorders, Tobin examines a wide range of deviant speech processes in aphasia, the speech of the hearing-impaired, and other syndromes of organic origin. Phonology as Human Behavior provides a unique set of principles connecting the phylogeny, ontogeny, and pathology of sound systems in human language.
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Photographic Returns
Racial Justice and the Time of Photography
Shawn Michelle Smith
Duke University Press, 2020
In Photographic Returns Shawn Michelle Smith traces how historical moments of racial crisis come to be known photographically and how the past continues to inhabit, punctuate, and transform the present through the photographic medium in contemporary art. Smith engages photographs by Rashid Johnson, Sally Mann, Deborah Luster, Lorna Simpson, Jason Lazarus, Carrie Mae Weems, Taryn Simon, and Dawoud Bey, among others. Each of these artists turns to the past—whether by using nineteenth-century techniques to produce images or by re-creating iconic historic photographs—as a way to use history to negotiate the present and to call attention to the unfinished political project of racial justice in the United States. By interrogating their use of photography to recall, revise, and amplify the relationship between racial politics of the past and present, Smith locates a temporal recursivity that is intrinsic to photography, in which images return to haunt the viewer and prompt reflection on the present and an imagination of a more just future.
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Photographies East
The Camera and Its Histories in East and Southeast Asia
Rosalind C. Morris, ed.
Duke University Press, 2009
Introducing Photographies East, Rosalind C. Morris notes that although the camera is now a taken-for-granted element of everyday life in most parts of the world, it is difficult to appreciate “the shock and sense of utter improbability that accompanied the new technology” as it was introduced in Asia (and elsewhere). In this collection, scholars of Asia, most of whom are anthropologists, describe frequent attribution of spectral powers to the camera, first brought to Asia by colonialists, as they examine the transformations precipitated or accelerated by the spread of photography across East and Southeast Asia. In essays resonating across theoretical, historical, and geopolitical lines, they engage with photography in China, Japan, Taiwan, and Thailand, and on the islands of Aru, Aceh, and Java in what is now Indonesia.

The contributors analyze how in specific cultural and historical contexts, the camera has affected experiences of time and subjectivity, practices of ritual and tradition, and understandings of death. They highlight the links between photography and power, looking at how the camera has figured in the operations of colonialism, the development of nationalism, the transformation of monarchy, and the militarization of violence. Moving beyond a consideration of historical function or effect, the contributors also explore the forms of illumination and revelation for which the camera has offered itself as instrument and symbol. And they trace the emergent forms of alienation and spectralization, as well as the new kinds of fetishism, that photography has brought in its wake. Taken together, the essays chart a bravely interdisciplinary path to visual studies, one that places the particular knowledge of a historicized anthropology in a comparative frame and in conversation with aesthetics and art history.

Contributors. James L. Hevia, Marilyn Ivy, Thomas LaMarre, Rosalind C. Morris, Nickola Pazderic, John Pemberton, Carlos Rojas, James T. Siegel, Patricia Spyer

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Photography after Photography
Gender, Genre, History
Abigail Solomon-Godeau
Duke University Press, 2017
Presenting two decades of work by Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Photography after Photography is an inquiry into the circuits of power that shape photographic practice, criticism, and historiography. As the boundaries that separate photography from other forms of artistic production are increasingly fluid, Solomon-Godeau, a pioneering feminist and politically engaged critic, argues that the relationships between photography, culture, gender, and power demand renewed attention. In her analyses of the photographic production of Cindy Sherman, Robert Mapplethorpe, Susan Meiselas, Francesca Woodman, and others, Solomon-Godeau refigures the disciplinary object of photography by considering these practices through an examination of the determinations of genre and gender as these shape the relations between photographers, their images, and their viewers. Among her subjects are the 2006 Abu Ghraib prison photographs and the Cold War-era exhibition The Family of Man, insofar as these illustrate photography's embeddedness in social relations, viewing relations, and ideological formations.
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Photography and the Optical Unconscious
Shawn Michelle Smith and Sharon Sliwinski, editors
Duke University Press, 2017
Photography is one of the principal filters through which we engage the world. The contributors to this volume focus on Walter Benjamin's concept of the optical unconscious to investigate how photography has shaped history, modernity, perception, lived experience, politics, race, and human agency. In essays that range from examinations of Benjamin's and Sigmund Freud's writings to the work of Kara Walker and Roland Barthes's famous Winter Garden photograph, the contributors explore what photography can teach us about the nature of the unconscious. They attend to side perceptions, develop latent images, discover things hidden in plain sight, focus on the disavowed, and perceive the slow. Of particular note are the ways race and colonialism have informed photography from its beginning. The volume also contains photographic portfolios by Zoe Leonard, Kelly Wood, and Kristan Horton, whose work speaks to the optical unconscious while demonstrating how photographs communicate on their own terms. The essays and portfolios in Photography and the Optical Unconscious create a collective and sustained assessment of Benjamin's influential concept, opening up new avenues for thinking about photography and the human psyche.

Contributors. Mary Bergstein, Jonathan Fardy, Kristan Horton, Terri Kapsalis, Sarah Kofman, Elisabeth Lebovici, Zoe Leonard, Gabrielle Moser, Mignon Nixon, Thy Phu, Mark Reinhardt, Shawn Michelle Smith, Sharon Sliwinski, Laura Wexler, Kelly Wood, Andrés Mario Zervigón
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Photography and Work
Kevin Coleman, Daniel James, and Jayeeta Sharma, special issue editors
Duke University Press, 2018
What makes photographs different from other kinds of documents that historians use to explain what happened in the past? What can photographic images do that other documents cannot? Can photography accurately depict labor? Contributors to this issue examine these questions with both fine art photography and visual archives of many kinds: state, corporate, family, trade union, ethnographic, photojournalistic, and environmental. They investigate the ways that photography has been central to both the expropriation and exploitation of labor and the potential of photography to enable new and radical approaches to historicizing the study of working peoples and labor. Articles showcase methodologically generative research that builds upon the recent boom in theoretical work in the fields of visual cultural studies and photography to reinvigorate historical studies of work. 

Contributors: Siobhan Angus, Ian Bourland, Oliver Coates, Kevin Coleman, Clare Corbould, Adrian De Leon, Rick Halpern, Daniel James, Tong Lam, Walter Benn Michaels, Jessica Stites Mor, Carol Quirke, Jayeeta Sharma, Erica Toffoli, Daniel Zamora
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Photography on the Color Line
W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture
Shawn Michelle Smith
Duke University Press, 2004
Through a rich interpretation of the remarkable photographs W. E. B. Du Bois compiled for the American Negro Exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition, Shawn Michelle Smith reveals the visual dimension of the color line that Du Bois famously called “the problem of the twentieth century.” Du Bois’s prize-winning exhibit consisted of three albums together containing 363 black-and-white photographs, mostly of middle-class African Americans from Atlanta and other parts of Georgia. Smith provides an extensive analysis of the images, the antiracist message Du Bois conveyed by collecting and displaying them, and their connection to his critical thought. She contends that Du Bois was an early visual theorist of race and racism and demonstrates how such an understanding makes the important concepts he developed—including double consciousness, the color line, the Veil, and second sight—available to visual culture and African American studies scholars in powerful new ways.

Smith reads Du Bois’s photographs in relation to other turn-of-the-century images such as scientific typologies, criminal mugshots, racist caricatures, and lynching photographs. By juxtaposing these images with reproductions from Du Bois’s exhibition archive, Smith shows how Du Bois deliberately challenged racist representations of African Americans. Emphasizing the importance of comparing multiple visual archives, Photography on the Color Line reinvigorates understandings of the stakes of representation and the fundamental connections between race and visual culture in the United States.

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Photography's Other Histories
Christopher Pinney and Nicolas Peterson, eds.
Duke University Press, 2003
Moving the critical debate about photography away from its current Euro-American center of gravity, Photography’s Other Histories breaks with the notion that photographic history is best seen as the explosion of a Western technology advanced by the work of singular individuals. This collection presents a radically different account, describing photography as a globally disseminated and locally appropriated medium. Essays firmly grounded in photographic practice—in the actual making of pictures—suggest the extraordinary diversity of nonwestern photography.

Richly illustrated with over 100 images, Photography’s Other Histories explores from a variety of regional, cultural, and historical perspectives the role of photography in raising historical consciousness. It includes two first-person pieces by indigenous Australians and one by a Seminole/Muskogee/Dine' artist. Some of the essays analyze representations of colonial subjects—from the limited ways Westerners have depicted Navajos to Japanese photos recording the occupation of Manchuria to the changing "contract" between Aboriginal subjects and photographers. Other essays highlight the visionary quality of much popular photography. Case studies centered in early-twentieth-century Peru and contemporary India, Kenya, and Nigeria chronicle the diverse practices that have flourished in postcolonial societies. Photography’s Other Histories recasts popular photography around the world, as not simply reproducing culture but creating it.

Contributors.
Michael Aird, Heike Behrend, Jo-Anne Driessens, James Faris, Morris Low, Nicolas Peterson, Christopher Pinney, Roslyn Poignant, Deborah Poole, Stephen Sprague, Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie, Christopher Wright

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Physicians and Hospitals
The Great Partnership at the Crossroads
Duncan Yaggy and Patricia Hodgson, eds.
Duke University Press, 1985
Physicians and Hospitals addresses an issue of concern and one of fundamental importance to the American health care system. While the ranks of physicians continue to swell and hospitals continue to expand their facilities, federal, state, and local governments remain determined to control health care expenditures. As a result, checks on the supply of services and facilities have been implemented that strain the physician-hospital relationship, often placing physicians and hospital administrations in conflict. The implications for American health care are the subject of disagreement and vigorous debate.
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Picasso's Demoiselles
The Untold Origins of a Modern Masterpiece
Suzanne Preston Blier
Duke University Press, 2019
In Picasso's Demoiselles, eminent art historian Suzanne Preston Blier uncovers the previously unknown history of Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, one of the twentieth century's most important, celebrated, and studied paintings. Drawing on her expertise in African art and newly discovered sources, Blier reads the painting not as a simple bordello scene but as Picasso's interpretation of the diversity of representations of women from around the world that he encountered in photographs and sculptures. These representations are central to understanding the painting's creation and help identify the demoiselles as global figures, mothers, grandmothers, lovers, and sisters, as well as part of the colonial world Picasso inhabited. Simply put, Blier fundamentally transforms what we know about this revolutionary and iconic work.
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Pictures and Progress
Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity
Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith, eds.
Duke University Press, 2012
Pictures and Progress explores how, during the nineteenth century and the early twentieth, prominent African American intellectuals and activists understood photography's power to shape perceptions about race and employed the new medium in their quest for social and political justice. They sought both to counter widely circulating racist imagery and to use self-representation as a means of empowerment. In this collection of essays, scholars from various disciplines consider figures including Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and W. E. B. Du Bois as important and innovative theorists and practitioners of photography. In addition, brief interpretive essays, or "snapshots," highlight and analyze the work of four early African American photographers. Featuring more than seventy images, Pictures and Progress brings to light the wide-ranging practices of early African American photography, as well as the effects of photography on racialized thinking.

Contributors. Michael A. Chaney, Cheryl Finley, P. Gabrielle Foreman, Ginger Hill, Leigh Raiford, Augusta Rohrbach, Ray Sapirstein, Suzanne N. Schneider, Shawn Michelle Smith, Laura Wexler, Maurice O. Wallace

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Picturing American Modernity
Traffic, Technology, and the Silent Cinema
Kristen Whissel
Duke University Press, 2008
In Picturing American Modernity, Kristen Whissel investigates the relationship between early American cinema and the experience of technological modernity. She demonstrates how between the late 1890s and the eve of the First World War moving pictures helped the U.S. public understand the possibilities and perils of new forms of “traffic” produced by industrialization and urbanization. As more efficient ways to move people, goods, and information transformed work and leisure at home and contributed to the expansion of the U.S. empire abroad, silent films presented compelling visual representations of the spaces, bodies, machines, and forms of mobility that increasingly defined modern life in the United States and its new territories.

Whissel shows that by portraying key events, achievements, and anxieties, the cinema invited American audiences to participate in the rapidly changing world around them. Moving pictures provided astonishing visual dispatches from military camps prior to the outbreak of fighting in the Spanish-American War. They allowed audiences to delight in images of the Pan-American Exposition, and also to mourn the assassination of President McKinley there. One early film genre, the reenactment, presented spectators with renditions of bloody battles fought overseas during the Philippine-American War. Early features offered sensational dramatizations of the scandalous “white slave trade,” which was often linked to immigration and new forms of urban work and leisure. By bringing these frequently distant events and anxieties “near” to audiences in cities and towns across the country, the cinema helped construct an American national identity for the machine age.

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Picturing Imperial Power
Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth-Century British Painting
Beth Fowkes Tobin
Duke University Press, 1999
This study of colonialism and art examines the intersection of visual culture and political power in late-eighteenth-century British painting. Focusing on paintings from British America, the West Indies, and India, Beth Fowkes Tobin investigates the role of art in creating and maintaining imperial ideologies and practices—as well as in resisting and complicating them.
Informed by the varied perspectives of postcolonial theory, Tobin explores through close readings of colonial artwork the dynamic middle ground in which cultures meet. Linking specific colonial sites with larger patterns of imperial practice and policy, she examines paintings by William Hogarth, Benjamin West, Gilbert Stuart, Arthur William Devis, and Agostino Brunias, among others. These works include portraits of colonial officials, conversation pieces of British families and their servants, portraits of Native Americans and Anglo-Indians, and botanical illustrations produced by Calcutta artists for officials of the British Botanic Gardens. In addition to examining the strategies that colonizers employed to dominate and define their subjects, Tobin uncovers the tactics of negotiation, accommodation, and resistance that make up the colonized’s response to imperial authority. By focusing on the paintings’ cultural and political engagement with imperialism, she accounts for their ideological power and visual effect while arguing for their significance as agents in the colonial project.
Pointing to the complexity, variety, and contradiction within colonial art, Picturing Imperial Power contributes to an understanding of colonialism as a collection of social, economic, political, and epistemological practices that were not monolithic and inevitable, but contradictory and contingent on various historical forces. It will interest students and scholars of colonialism, imperial history, postcolonial history, art history and theory, and cultural studies.
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Pierre Bourdieu and Literary History, Volume 58
Marshall Brown
Duke University Press
The recent publication in English of The Rules of Art has consolidated the work of the great French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu on literary history. In this special issue MLQ explores the development of Bourdieu’s thought, its philosophical and institutional implications, and a range of applications to the history of English literature.

Essays included in this collection discuss the hesitant response of the American academy to Bourdieu; Bourdieu on Derrida on Kant; “pure poetry,” cultural capital, and the rejection of classicism; and the insight Bourdieu’s work lends to our understanding of the position of eighteenth-century women writers.

Contributors. Marilyn Butler, John Guillory, Elizabeth W. Harries, Jonathan Joesberg, Toril Moi, William Paulson, Trevor Ross

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Pikachu's Global Adventure
The Rise and Fall of Pokemon
Joseph Tobin, ed.
Duke University Press, 2004
Initially developed in Japan by Nintendo as a computer game, Pokémon swept the globe in the late 1990s. Based on a narrative in which a group of children capture, train, and do battle with over a hundred imaginary creatures, Pokémon quickly diversified into an array of popular products including comic books, a TV show, movies, trading cards, stickers, toys, and clothing. Pokémon eventually became the top grossing children's product of all time. Yet the phenomenon fizzled as quickly as it had ignited. By 2002, the Pokémon craze was mostly over. Pikachu’s Global Adventure describes the spectacular, complex, and unpredictable rise and fall of Pokémon in countries around the world.

In analyzing the popularity of Pokémon, this innovative volume addresses core debates about the globalization of popular culture and about children’s consumption of mass-produced culture. Topics explored include the origins of Pokémon in Japan’s valorization of cuteness and traditions of insect collecting and anime; the efforts of Japanese producers and American marketers to localize it for foreign markets by muting its sex, violence, moral ambiguity, and general feeling of Japaneseness; debates about children’s vulnerability versus agency as consumers; and the contentious question of Pokémon’s educational value and place in school. The contributors include teachers as well as scholars from the fields of anthropology, media studies, sociology, and education. Tracking the reception of Pokémon in Japan, the United States, Great Britain, France, and Israel, they emphasize its significance as the first Japanese cultural product to enjoy substantial worldwide success and challenge western dominance in the global production and circulation of cultural goods.

Contributors. Anne Allison, Linda-Renée Bloch, Helen Bromley, Gilles Brougere, David Buckingham, Koichi Iwabuchi, Hirofumi Katsuno, Dafna Lemish, Jeffrey Maret, Julian Sefton-Green, Joseph Tobin, Samuel Tobin, Rebekah Willet, Christine Yano

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Pilgram Marpeck
His Life and Social Theology
Stephen B. Boyd
Duke University Press, 1992
This intellectual and social history is the first comprehensive biography of Pilgram Marpeck (c. 1495–1556), a radical reformer and lay leader of Anabaptist groups in Switzerland, Austria, and South Germany. Marpeck’s influential life and work provide a glimpse of the theologies and practices of the Roman Church and of various reform movements in sixteenth-century Europe.
Drawing on extensive archival data documenting Marpeck’s professional life, as well as on his numerous published and unpublished writings on theology and religious reform, Stephen B. Boyd traces Marpeck’s unconventional transition from mining magistrate to Anabaptist leader, establishes his connections with various radical social and religious groups, and articulates aspects of his social theology. Marpeck’s distinctive and eclectic theology, Boyd demonstrates, focused on the need for personal, uncoerced conversion, rejected state interference in the affairs of the church, denied the need for a monastic withdrawal from the secular world, and called for the Christian’s active pursuit of justice before God and among human beings.
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Pink Globalization
Hello Kitty's Trek across the Pacific
Christine R. Yano
Duke University Press, 2013
In Pink Globalization, Christine R. Yano examines the creation and rise of Hello Kitty as a part of Japanese Cute-Cool culture. Yano argues that the international popularity of Hello Kitty is one aspect of what she calls pink globalization—the spread of goods and images labeled cute (kawaii) from Japan to other parts of the industrial world. The concept of pink globalization connects the expansion of Japanese companies to overseas markets, the enhanced distribution of Japanese products, and the rise of Japan's national cool as suggested by the spread of manga and anime. Yano analyzes the changing complex of relations and identities surrounding the global reach of Hello Kitty's cute culture, discussing the responses of both ardent fans and virulent detractors. Through interviews, Yano shows how consumers use this iconic cat to negotiate gender, nostalgia, and national identity. She demonstrates that pink globalization allows the foreign to become familiar as it brings together the intimacy of cute and the distance of cool. Hello Kitty and her entourage of marketers and consumers wink, giddily suggesting innocence, sexuality, irony, sophistication, and even sheer happiness. Yano reveals the edgy power in this wink and the ways it can overturn, or at least challenge, power structures.
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Pink Noises
Women on Electronic Music and Sound
Tara Rodgers
Duke University Press, 2010
Pink Noises brings together twenty-four interviews with women in electronic music and sound cultures, including club and radio DJs, remixers, composers, improvisers, instrument builders, and installation and performance artists. The collection is an extension of Pinknoises.com, the critically-acclaimed website founded by musician and scholar Tara Rodgers in 2000 to promote women in electronic music and make information about music production more accessible to women and girls. That site featured interviews that Rodgers conducted with women artists, exploring their personal histories, their creative methods, and the roles of gender in their work. This book offers new and lengthier interviews, a critical introduction, and resources for further research and technological engagement.

Contemporary electronic music practices are illuminated through the stories of women artists of different generations and cultural backgrounds. They include the creators of ambient soundscapes, “performance novels,” sound sculptures, and custom software, as well as the developer of the Deep Listening philosophy and the founders of the Liquid Sound Lounge radio show and the monthly Basement Bhangra parties in New York. These and many other artists open up about topics such as their conflicted relationships to formal music training and mainstream media representations of women in electronic music. They discuss using sound to work creatively with structures of time and space, and voice and language; challenge distinctions of nature and culture; question norms of technological practice; and balance their needs for productive solitude with collaboration and community. Whether designing and building modular synthesizers with analog circuits or performing with a wearable apparatus that translates muscle movements into electronic sound, these artists expand notions of who and what counts in matters of invention, production, and noisemaking. Pink Noises is a powerful testimony to the presence and vitality of women in electronic music cultures, and to the relevance of sound to feminist concerns.

Interviewees: Maria Chavez, Beth Coleman (M. Singe), Antye Greie (AGF), Jeannie Hopper, Bevin Kelley (Blevin Blectum), Christina Kubisch, Le Tigre, Annea Lockwood, Giulia Loli (DJ Mutamassik), Rekha Malhotra (DJ Rekha), Riz Maslen (Neotropic), Kaffe Matthews, Susan Morabito, Ikue Mori, Pauline Oliveros, Pamela Z, Chantal Passamonte (Mira Calix), Maggi Payne, Eliane Radigue, Jessica Rylan, Carla Scaletti, Laetitia Sonami, Bev Stanton (Arthur Loves Plastic), Keiko Uenishi (o.blaat)

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Pinter In Play
Critical Strategies and the Plays of Harold Pinter
Susan Hollis Merritt
Duke University Press, 1990
Pinter in Play provides a survey of diverse readings of the Harold Pinter canon organized around and presented in terms of the major critical schools of the past twenty-five years, from New Criticism to deconstruction to poststructuralism. Reflecting on the cultural, personal, sociological, and philosophical contexts of these diverse critical perspectives and the critics who express them, this book is equally about the act or the art of literary criticism and itself an important work of literary criticism. Drawing on interviews with Pinter scholars, Susan Hollis Merritt shows how critics "play" with Pinter and thereby seriously enforce personal, professional, and political affiliations. Cutting across traditional academic and nonacademic boundaries, Merritt argues that greater cooperation and collaboration among critics can resolve conflicts, promote greater social equity, and foster ameliorative critical and cultural change.
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Pin-Up Grrrls
Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture
Maria Elena Buszek
Duke University Press, 2006
Subverting stereotypical images of women, a new generation of feminist artists is remaking the pin-up, much as Annie Sprinkle, Cindy Sherman, and others did in the 1970s and 1980s. As shocking as contemporary feminist pin-ups are intended to be, perhaps more surprising is that the pin-up has been appropriated by women for their own empowerment since its inception more than a century ago. Pin-Up Grrrls tells the history of the pin-up from its birth, revealing how its development is intimately connected to the history of feminism. Maria Elena Buszek documents the genre’s 150-year history with more than 100 illustrations, many never before published.

Beginning with the pin-up’s origins in mid-nineteenth-century carte-de-visite photographs of burlesque performers, Buszek explores how female sex symbols, including Adah Isaacs Menken and Lydia Thompson, fought to exert control over their own images. Buszek analyzes the evolution of the pin-up through the advent of the New Woman, the suffrage movement, fanzine photographs of early film stars, the Varga Girl illustrations that appeared in Esquire during World War II, the early years of Playboy magazine, and the recent revival of the genre in appropriations by third-wave feminist artists. A fascinating combination of art history and cultural history, Pin-Up Grrrls is the story of how women have publicly defined and represented their sexuality since the 1860s.

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Pipe Politics, Contested Waters
Embedded Infrastructures of Millennial Mumbai
Lisa Bjorkman
Duke University Press, 2015
Winner, 2014 Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences

Despite Mumbai's position as India's financial, economic, and cultural capital, water is chronically unavailable for rich and poor alike. Mumbai's dry taps are puzzling, given that the city does not lack for either water or financial resources. In Pipe Politics, Contested Waters, Lisa Björkman shows how an elite dream to transform Mumbai into a "world class" business center has wreaked havoc on the city’s water pipes. In rich ethnographic detail, Pipe Politics explores how the everyday work of getting water animates and inhabits a penumbra of infrastructural activity—of business, brokerage, secondary markets, and sociopolitical networks—whose workings are reconfiguring and rescaling political authority in the city. Mumbai’s increasingly illegible and volatile hydrologies, Björkman argues, are lending infrastructures increasing political salience just as actual control over pipes and flows becomes contingent on dispersed and intimate assemblages of knowledge, power, and material authority. These new arenas of contestation reveal the illusory and precarious nature of the project to remake Mumbai in the image of Shanghai or Singapore and gesture instead toward the highly contested futures and democratic possibilities of the actually existing city.
 

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Pirate Novels
Fictions of Nation Building in Spanish America
Nina Gerassi-Navarro
Duke University Press, 1999
In Pirate Novels Nina Gerassi-Navarro examines an overlooked genre to reveal how history and fiction blend to address important isuses of nation building in nineteenth-century Spanish America. In the figure of the pirate, bold and heroic to some, cruel and criminal to others, she reveals an almost ideal character that came to embody the spirit of emerging nationhood and the violence associated with the struggle to attain it.
Beginning with an overview of the history of piracy, Gerassi-Navarro traces the historical icon of the pirate through colonial-era chronicles before exploring a group of nineteenth-century Mexican, Colombian, and Argentine novels. She argues that the authors of these novels, in their reconstructions of the past, were less interested in accurate representations than in using their narratives to discuss the future of their own countries. In reading these pirate narratives as metaphors for the process of nation building in Spanish America, Gerassi-Navarro exposes the conflicting strains of a complex culture attempting to shape that future. She shows how these pirate stories reflect the on-going debates that marked the consolidation of nationhood, as well as the extent to which the narratives of national identity in Spanish America are structured in relation to European cultures, and the ways in which questions of race and gender were addressed.
Providing new readings of the cultural and political paradigms that marked the literary production of nineteenth-century Spanish America, Pirate Novels uniquely expands the range of texts usually examined in the study of nation-building. It will interest literary scholars generally as well as those engaged in Latin American, colonial, and postcolonial studies.
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front cover of The Pivot
The Pivot
One Pandemic, One University
Robert J. Bliwise
Duke University Press, 2022
The COVID-19 pandemic presented higher education with an unprecedented challenge: How could institutions continue the basic work of teaching and research while maintaining safe environments for their faculty, staff, and students? In The Pivot, Robert J. Bliwise traces Duke University’s response to the pandemic to show how higher education broadly met that challenge head-on. Bliwise interviews people across the campus: from bus drivers and vaccine researchers to student activists, dining hall managers, and professors in areas from English to ecology. He explores the shift to teaching online and the reshaping of research programs; how surveillance testing and reconfiguring residence halls and dining sites helped limit the virus spread on campus; the efforts to promote student well-being and to sustain extracurricular programs; and what the surge in COVID-19 cases meant for the university health system. Bliwise also shows how broad cultural conversations surrounding the 2020 presidential election, climate change, free speech on campus, and systemic racism unfolded in this changed campus environment. Although the pandemic put remarkable pressures on the campus community, Bliwise demonstrates that it ultimately reaffirmed the importance of the campus experience in all its richness and complexity.
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front cover of A Place in Politics
A Place in Politics
São Paulo, Brazil, from Seigneurial Republicanism to Regionalist Revolt
James P. Woodard
Duke University Press, 2009
A Place in Politics is a thorough reinterpretation of the politics and political culture of the Brazilian state of São Paulo between the 1890s and the 1930s. The world’s foremost coffee-producing region from the outset of this period and home to more than six million people by 1930, São Paulo was an economic and demographic giant. In an era marked by political conflict and dramatic social and cultural change in Brazil, nowhere were the conflicts as intense or changes more dramatic than in São Paulo. The southeastern state was the site of the country’s most important political developments, from the contested presidential campaign of 1909–10 to the massive military revolt of 1924. Drawing on a wide array of source materials, James P. Woodard analyzes these events and the republican political culture that informed them.

Woodard’s fine-grained political history proceeds chronologically from the final years of the nineteenth century, when São Paulo’s leaders enjoyed political preeminence within the federal system codified by the Constitution of 1891, through the mass mobilization of 1931–32, in which São Paulo’s people marched, rioted, and eventually took up arms against the national government in what was to be Brazil’s last great regionalist revolt. In taking to the streets in the name of their state, constitutionalism, and the “civilization” that they identified with both, the people of São Paulo were at once expressing their allegiance to elements of a regionally distinct political culture and converging on a broader, more participatory public sphere that had arisen amid the political conflicts of the preceding decades.

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