Books Books Press imprint: 2592 books
Where the River Ends
Contested Indigeneity in the Mexican Colorado Delta
Language: English
Release Date: May 23, 2013
Living in the northwest of Mexico, the Cucapá people have relied on fishing as a means of subsistence for generations, but in the last several decades, that practice has been curtailed by water scarcity and government restrictions. The Colorado River once met the Gulf of California near the village...
Dark Shamans
Kanaimà and the Poetics of Violent Death
Language: English
Release Date: October 7, 2002
On the little-known and darker side of shamanism there exists an ancient form of sorcery called kanaim**à, a practice still observed among the Amerindians of the highlands of Guyana, Venezuela, and Brazil that involves the ritual stalking, mutilation, lingering death, and consumption of human victims....
by Arturo Escobar, Dianne Rocheleau, Michael R. Dove
Language: English
Release Date: November 22, 2006
Language: English
Release Date: November 22, 2006
Reimagining Political Ecology is a state-of-the-art collection of ethnographies grounded in political ecology. When political ecology first emerged as a distinct field in the early 1970s, it was rooted in the neo-Marxism of world system theory. This collection showcases second-generation political...
Imperial Debris
On Ruins and Ruination
Language: English
Release Date: May 10, 2013
Imperial Debris redirects critical focus from ruins as evidence of the past to "ruination" as the processes through which imperial power occupies the present. Ann Laura Stoler's introduction is a manifesto, a compelling call for postcolonial studies to expand its analytical scope to address...
Understories
The Political Life of Forests in Northern New Mexico
Language: English
Release Date: December 8, 2006
Through lively, engaging narrative, Understories demonstrates how volatile politics of race, class, and nation animate the notoriously violent struggles over forests in the southwestern United States. Rather than reproduce traditional understandings of nature and environment, Jake Kosek shifts the...
Bioinsecurities
Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species
Language: English
Release Date: March 31, 2016
In Bioinsecurities Neel Ahuja argues that U.S. imperial expansion has been shaped by the attempts of health and military officials to control the interactions of humans, animals, viruses, and bacteria at the borders of U.S. influence, a phenomenon called the government of species. The book explores...
Conquest
Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide
Language: English
Release Date: September 17, 2015
In this revolutionary text, prominent Native American studies scholar and activist Andrea Smith reveals the connections between different forms of violence—perpetrated by the state and by society at large—and documents their impact on Native women. Beginning with the impact of the abuses inflicted...
An Aqueous Territory
Sailor Geographies and New Granada's Transimperial Greater Caribbean World
Language: English
Release Date: November 17, 2016
In An Aqueous Territory Ernesto Bassi traces the configuration of a geographic space he calls the transimperial Greater Caribbean between 1760 and 1860. Focusing on the Caribbean coast of New Granada (present-day Colombia), Bassi shows that the region's residents did not live their lives bounded by...
Empire of Care
Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History
Language: English
Release Date: January 31, 2003
In western countries, including the United States, foreign-trained nurses constitute a crucial labor supply. Far and away the largest number of these nurses come from the Philippines. Why is it that a developing nation with a comparatively greater need for trained medical professionals sends so many...
The One and the Many
Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context
Language: English
Release Date: September 12, 2011
Collaborative and collective art practices have proliferated around the world over the past fifteen years. In The One and the Many, Grant H. Kester provides an overview of the broader continuum of collaborative art, ranging from the work of artists and groups widely celebrated in the mainstream art...
The Day of Shelly's Death
The Poetry and Ethnography of Grief
Language: English
Release Date: November 27, 2013
This deeply moving collection of poetry by Renato Rosaldo focuses on the shock of his wife Michelle (Shelly) Rosaldo's sudden death on October 11, 1981. Just the day before, Shelly and her family had arrived in the northern Philippine village of Mungayang, where she and her husband Renato, both accomplished...
Working Fictions
A Genealogy of the Victorian Novel
Language: English
Release Date: January 18, 2007
Working Fictions takes as its point of departure the common and painful truth that the vast majority of human beings toil for a wage and rarely for their own enjoyment or satisfaction. In this striking reconceptualization of Victorian literary history, Carolyn Lesjak interrogates the relationship...
An Epistemology of the Concrete
Twentieth-Century Histories of Life
Language: English
Release Date: September 6, 2010
An Epistemology of the Concrete brings together case studies and theoretical reflections on the history and epistemology of the life sciences by Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, one of the world’s foremost philosophers of science. In these essays, he examines the history of experiments, concepts, model organisms,...
Gods of the Blood
The Pagan Revival and White Separatism
Language: English
Release Date: June 27, 2003
Racist paganism is a thriving but understudied element of the American religious and cultural landscape. Gods of the Blood is the first in-depth survey of the people, ideologies, and practices that make up this fragmented yet increasingly radical and militant milieu. Over a five-year period during...