Duke University Press Books imprint: 2462 books
The Difference Aesthetics Makes
On the Humanities “After Man”
Language: English
Release Date: March 28, 2019
In The Difference Aesthetics Makes cultural critic Kandice Chuh asks what the humanities might be and do if organized around what she calls “illiberal humanism” instead of around the Western European tradition of liberal humanism that undergirds the humanities in their received form. Recognizing...
Vampire Nation
Violence as Cultural Imaginary
Language: English
Release Date: August 12, 2011
Vampire Nation is a nuanced analysis of the cultural and political rhetoric framing ‘the serbs’ as metaphorical vampires in the last decades of the twentieth century, as well as the cultural imaginaries and rhetorical mechanisms that inform nationalist discourses more broadly. Tomislav Z. Longinović...
by Lisa Lowe
Language: English
Release Date: June 27, 2015
Language: English
Release Date: June 27, 2015
In this uniquely interdisciplinary work, Lisa Lowe examines the relationships between Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- centuries, exploring the links between colonialism, slavery, imperial trades and Western liberalism. Reading across archives, canons,...
Territories of the Soul
Queered Belonging in the Black Diaspora
Language: English
Release Date: August 27, 2015
Nadia Ellis attends to African diasporic belonging as it comes into being through black expressive culture. Living in the diaspora, Ellis asserts, means existing between claims to land and imaginative flights unmoored from the earth—that is, to live within the territories of the soul. Drawing on...
Spill
Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity
Language: English
Release Date: September 22, 2016
In Spill, self-described queer Black troublemaker and Black feminist love evangelist Alexis Pauline Gumbs presents a commanding collection of scenes depicting fugitive Black women and girls seeking freedom from gendered violence and racism. In this poetic work inspired by Hortense Spillers, Gumbs...
The Right to Look
A Counterhistory of Visuality
Language: English
Release Date: November 18, 2011
In The Right to Look, Nicholas Mirzoeff develops a comparative decolonial framework for visual culture studies, the field that he helped to create and shape. Casting modernity as an ongoing contest between visuality and countervisuality, or “the right to look,” he explains how visuality sutures...
Records Ruin the Landscape
John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording
Language: English
Release Date: March 3, 2014
John Cage's disdain for records was legendary. He repeatedly spoke of the ways in which recorded music was antithetical to his work. In Records Ruin the Landscape, David Grubbs argues that, following Cage, new genres in experimental and avant-garde music in the 1960s were particularly ill suited to...
Art beyond Itself
Anthropology for a Society without a Story Line
Language: English
Release Date: June 17, 2014
First published in Spanish in 2010, Art beyond Itself is Néstor García Canclini's deft assessment of contemporary art. The renowned cultural critic suggests that, ideally, art is the place of imminence, the place where we glimpse something just about to happen. Yet, as he demonstrates, defining...
Shine
The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice
Language: English
Release Date: May 9, 2015
In Jamaican dancehalls competition for the video camera's light is stiff, so much so that dancers sometimes bleach their skin to enhance their visibility. In the Bahamas, tuxedoed students roll into prom in tricked-out sedans, staging grand red-carpet entrances that are designed to ensure they are...
by Diana Taylor
Language: English
Release Date: December 30, 2015
Language: English
Release Date: December 30, 2015
"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;...
Where Is Ana Mendieta?
Identity, Performativity, and Exile
Language: English
Release Date: February 24, 1999
Ana Mendieta, a Cuban-born artist who lived in exile in the United States, was one of the most provocative and complex personalities of the 1970s’ artworld. In Where Is Ana Mendieta? art historian Jane Blocker provides an in-depth critical analysis of Mendieta’s diverse body of work. Although...
Monrovia Modern
Urban Form and Political Imagination in Liberia
Language: English
Release Date: August 17, 2017
In Monrovia Modern Danny Hoffman uses the ruins of four iconic modernist buildings in Monrovia, Liberia, as a way to explore the relationship between the built environment and political imagination. Hoffman shows how the E. J. Roye tower and the Hotel Africa luxury resort, as well as the unfinished...
Deep River
Music and Memory in Harlem Renaissance Thought
Language: English
Release Date: July 19, 2001
“The American Negro,” Arthur Schomburg wrote in 1925, “must remake his past in order to make his future.” Many Harlem Renaissance figures agreed that reframing the black folk inheritance could play a major role in imagining a new future of racial equality and artistic freedom. In Deep River...
Blue Nippon
Authenticating Jazz in Japan
Language: English
Release Date: September 6, 2001
Japan’s jazz community—both musicians and audience—has been begrudgingly recognized in the United States for its talent, knowledge, and level of appreciation. Underpinning this tentative admiration, however, has been a tacit agreement that, for cultural reasons, Japanese jazz “can’t swing.”...