Duke University Press Books imprint: 2462 books
Sovereignty in Ruins
A Politics of Crisis
Language: English
Release Date: March 18, 2017
Featuring essays by some of the most prominent names in contemporary political and cultural theory, Sovereignty in Ruins presents a form of critique grounded in the conviction that political thought is itself an agent of crisis. Aiming to develop a political vocabulary capable of critiquing and transforming...
Dissident Syria
Making Oppositional Arts Official
Language: English
Release Date: August 14, 2007
From 1970 until his death in 2000, Hafiz Asad ruled Syria with an iron fist. His regime controlled every aspect of daily life. Seeking to preempt popular unrest, Asad sometimes facilitated the expression of anti-government sentiment by appropriating the work of artists and writers, turning works of...
Freedom's Empire
Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640-1940
Language: English
Release Date: January 11, 2008
In this pathbreaking work of scholarship, Laura Doyle reveals the central, formative role of race in the development of a transnational, English-language literature over three centuries. Identifying a recurring freedom plot organized around an Atlantic Ocean crossing, Doyle shows how this plot structures...
Archives of Labor
Working-Class Women and Literary Culture in the Antebellum United States
Language: English
Release Date: May 4, 2017
In Archives of Labor Lori Merish establishes working-class women as significant actors within literary culture, dramatically redrawing the map of nineteenth-century US literary and cultural history. Delving into previously unexplored archives of working-class women's literature—from autobiographies,...
Animals and Women
Feminist Theoretical Explorations
Language: English
Release Date: November 14, 1995
Animals and Women is a collection of pioneering essays that explores the theoretical connections between feminism and animal defense. Offering a feminist perspective on the status of animals, this unique volume argues persuasively that both the social construction and oppressions of women are inextricably...
Culture and the Question of Rights
Forests, Coasts, and Seas in Southeast Asia
Language: English
Release Date: April 16, 2003
This collection of ethnographic and interpretive essays fundamentally alters the debate over indigenous land claims in Southeast Asia and beyond. Based on fieldwork conducted in Malaysia and Indonesia during the 1980s and 1990s, these studies explore new terrain at the intersection of environmental...
by Annamarie Jagose
Language: English
Release Date: December 24, 2012
Language: English
Release Date: December 24, 2012
For all its vaunted attention to sexuality, queer theory has had relatively little to say about sex, the material and psychic practices through which erotic gratification is sought. In Orgasmology, Annamarie Jagose takes orgasm as her queer scholarly object. From simultaneous to fake orgasms, from...
Close Reading
The Reader
Language: English
Release Date: December 23, 2002
An anthology of exemplary readings by some of the twentieth century’s foremost literary critics, Close Reading presents a wide range of responses to the question at the heart of literary criticism: how best to read a text to understand its meaning. The lively introduction and the selected essays...
The Revival of Pragmatism
New Essays on Social Thought, Law, and Culture
Language: English
Release Date: November 23, 1998
Although long considered the most distinctive American contribution to philosophy, pragmatism—with its problem-solving emphasis and its contingent view of truth—lost popularity in mid-century after the advent of World War II, the horror of the Holocaust, and the dawning of the Cold War. Since...
From a Nation Torn
Decolonizing Art and Representation in France, 1945-1962
Language: English
Release Date: February 3, 2014
From a Nation Torn provides a powerful critique of art history's understanding of French modernism and the historical circumstances that shaped its production and reception. Within art history, the aesthetic practices and theories that emerged in France from the late 1940s into the 1960s are demarcated...
Theodor W. Adorno
An Introduction
Language: English
Release Date: April 6, 2009
Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) was one of the twentieth century’s most important thinkers. In light of two pivotal developments—the rise of fascism, which culminated in the Holocaust, and the standardization of popular culture as a commodity indispensable to contemporary capitalism—Adorno sought...
Necro Citizenship
Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States
Language: English
Release Date: September 27, 2001
In Necro Citizenship Russ Castronovo argues that the meaning of citizenship in the United States during the nineteenth century was bound to—and even dependent on—death. Deploying an impressive range of literary and cultural texts, Castronovo interrogates an American public sphere that fetishized...
by Donald E. Pease
Language: English
Release Date: April 29, 1996
Language: English
Release Date: April 29, 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...
by Michael Warner, John McWilliams, Wai Chee Dimock
Language: English
Release Date: June 17, 1994
Language: English
Release Date: June 17, 1994
Throughout the era of the Cold War a consensus reigned as to what constituted the great works of American literature. Yet as scholars have increasingly shown, and as this volume unmistakably demonstrates, that consensus was built upon the repression of the voices and historical contexts of subordinated...