Fordham University Press

What does it mean to lead a moral life?

In their first extended study of moral philosophy, Judith Butler offers a provocative outline for a new ethical practice—one responsive to the need for critical autonomy yet grounded in the opacity of the human subject.

Butler takes as their starting point one’s ability to answer the questions “What have I done?” and “What ought I to do?” They show that these questions can be answered only by asking a prior question, “Who is this ‘I’ who is under an obligation to give an account of itself and to act in certain ways?” Because I find that I cannot give an account of myself without accounting for the social conditions under which I emerge, ethical reflection requires a turn to social theory.

In three powerfully crafted and lucidly written chapters, Butler demonstrates how difficult it is to give an account of oneself, and how this lack of self-transparency and narratibility is crucial to an ethical understanding of the human. In dialogue with Adorno, Levinas, Foucault, and other thinkers, they eloquently argue the limits, possibilities, and dangers of contemporary ethical thought.

Butler offers a critique of the moral self, arguing that the transparent, rational, and continuous ethical subject is an impossible construct that seeks to deny the specificity of what it is to be human. We can know ourselves only incompletely, and only in relation to a broader social world that has always preceded us and already shaped us in ways we cannot grasp. If inevitably we are partially opaque to ourselves, how can giving an account of ourselves define the ethical act? And doesn’t an ethical system that holds us impossibly accountable for full self-knowledge and self-consistency inflict a kind of psychic violence, leading to a culture of self-beratement and cruelty? How does the turn to social theory offer us a chance to understand the specifically social character of our own unknowingness about ourselves?

By recasting ethics as a project in which being ethical means becoming critical of norms under which we are asked to act, but which we can never fully choose, Butler illuminates what it means for us as “fallible creatures” to create and share an ethics of vulnerability, humility, and ethical responsiveness.

An incendiary literary work more relevant now than ever.

“if anger were an ax/it would split me open/and if this is a sermon/let it be my granddaddy’s sermon/my grandmother’s foottapping/steady rocking/choir singing” —from "It Is Not a New Age"

First published in 1998, Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom than Slavery is the debut collection by acclaimed poet and performer Pamela Sneed. Provocative and potent, it tackles the political and personal issues of enslavement, sexuality, emotional trauma, and abuse. These poems chart the journey of an artist trying to escape cycles of dependency and reclaim lost self and identity. Drawing parallels to Harriet Tubman’s journey on the Underground Railroad, Sneed’s explora­tions of the woods are a metaphor and emotional path one must explore to attain self-ownership. Sneed’s poems are bound by the search for love, freedom, and justice—from images of lesbian love to Emmet Till’s bloated body, they offer a raging cry and a roadmap for those interested in transforming the personal into social justice and abolitionist practices.

Manhattan is the tale of a young French scholar who travels to the United States in 1965 on a Fulbright Fellowship to consult the manuscripts of beloved authors. In Yale University’s Beinecke Library, tantalized by the conversational and epistolary brilliance of a fellow researcher, she is lured into a picaresque and tragic adventure. Meanwhile, back in France, her children and no-nonsense mother await her return.

A young European intellectual’s first contact with America and the city of New York are the background of this story. The experience of Manhattan haunts this labyrinth of a book as, over a period of thirty-five years, its narrator visits and revisits Central Park and a half-buried squirrel, the Statue of Liberty and a never again to be found hotel in the vicinity of Morningside Heights: a journey into memory in which everything is never the same.

Traveling from library to library, France to the United States, Shakespeare to Kafka to Joyce, Manhattan deploys with gusto all the techniques for which Cixous’s fiction and essays are known: rapid juxtapositions of time and place, narrative and description, analysis and philosophical reflection. It investigates subjects Cixous has spent her life probing: reading, writing, and the “omnipotence-other” seductions of literature; a family’s flight from Nazi Germany and postcolonial Algeria; childhood, motherhood, and, not least, the strange experience of falling in love with a counterfeit genius.

A provocative, highly accessible journey to the heart of Sophocles’ Antigone elucidating why it keeps resurfacing as a central text of Western thought and Western culture.

There is probably no classical text that has inspired more interpretation, critical attention, and creative response than Sophocles’ Antigone. The general perspective from which the book is written could be summarized with this simple question: What is it about the figure of Antigone that keeps haunting us? Why do all these readings and rewritings keep emerging? To what kind of always contemporary contradiction does the need, the urge to reread and reimagine Antigone—in all kinds of contexts and languages—correspond?

As key anchor points of this general interrogation, three particular “obsessions” have driven the author’s thinking and writing about Antigone. First is the issue of violence. The violence in Antigone is the opposite of “graphic” as we have come to know it in movies and in the media; rather, it is sharp and piercing, it goes straight to the bone. It is the violence of language, the violence of principles, the violence of desire, the violence of subjectivity. Then there is the issue of funerary rites and their role in appeasing the specific “undeadness” that seems to be the other side of human life, its irreducible undercurrent that death alone cannot end and put to rest. This issue prompted the author to look at the relationship between language, sexuality, death, and “second death.” The third issue, which constitutes the focal point of the book, is Antigone’s statement that if it were her children or husband lying unburied out there, she would let them rot and not take it upon herself to defy the decree of the state. The author asks, how does this exclusivist, singularizing claim (she would do it only for Polyneices), which she uses to describe the “unwritten law” she follows, tally with Antigone’s universal appeal and compelling power? Attempting to answer this leads to the question of what this particular (Oedipal) family’s misfortune, of which Antigone chooses to be the guardian, shares with the general condition of humanity. Which in turn forces us to confront the seemingly self-evident question: “What is incest?”

Let Them Rot is Alenka Zupančič’s absorbing and succinct guided tour of the philosophical and psychoanalytic issues arising from the Theban trilogy. Her original and surprising intervention into the broad and prominent field of study related to Sophocles’ Antigone illuminates the classical text’s ongoing relevance and invites a wide readership to become captivated by its themes.

Pushing the boundaries of Latinx literature and what constitutes a borderlands poetics.

Throughout Roberto Tejada’s body of work, the renowned poet and celebrated critic has explored themes of Latinx culture, politics, history, language, and ecologies. In his latest collection, Why the Assembly Disbanded, he presents a unique contribution to Latinx letters that reflects on the relations between the United States and Latin America, especially their real and symbolic borderlands.

Immersive, postmodern, and philosophical, Why the Assembly Disbanded provides an associative, critical Latinx aesthetic connecting the Mexico–United States borderlands to Latin America’s neo-baroque heritage. Migrants, settlers, tourists, and exiles moving across various hemispheric landscapes are featured in these exuberant, capacious, and self-reflexive poems. Tejada relates the ravages of white supremacy in our culture that, together with immigrant precarity, turn home into a place of foreboding and impending eviction, even as a dream-weather makes room at last for scenes of possibility and attainment in the account of human history.

The sweeping futuristic vistas open on to narratives of colonial extraction, human displacement, abuses of capitalism, mass media spectacle, the antagonism of language and technical images in the sensorium of urban and digital life-worlds, and the relations of desire encouraged by pictures and words in the economy of attention. Los Angeles and Mexico City figure prominently in poems committed to voicing modes of formation and community in an intersectional reckoning of personhoods prompted in work by artists Betye Saar, Amiri Baraka, Connie Samaras, and Rubén Ortiz Torres.

With language given to pageantry, tonal precision, and a hopeful lyric radiance that can accommodate ecstasy and justice, Roberto Tejada’s carnivalesque, borderland imagery pushes the boundaries of Latinx literature. World-building by way of reverie, speculation, and retro-futurist tableaux, and with vivid, sometimes violent particularity, his poems enact hallucinatory realities of the hemisphere: an imagination that triangulates history, lyricism, and art as social practice.

Is freedom our most essential belonging, the intimate source of self-mastery, an inalienable right? Or is it something foreign, an other that constitutes subjectivity, a challenge to our notion of autonomy? To Basterra, the subjectivity we call free embodies a relationship with an irreducible otherness that at once exceeds it and animates its core.

Tracing Kant’s concept of freedom from the Critique of Pure Reason to his practical works, Basterra elaborates his most revolutionary insights by setting them in dialogue with Levinas’s Otherwise than Being. Levinas’s text, she argues, offers a deep critique of Kant that follows the impulse of his thinking to its most promising consequences. The complex concepts of freedom, autonomy, and subjectivity that emerge from this dialogue have the potential to energize today’s ethical and political thinking.

Circuitous Journeys: Modern Spiritual Autobiography provides a close reading and analysis of ten major life stories by twentieth-century leaders and thinkers from a variety of religious and cultural traditions: Mohandas Gandhi, Black Elk, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, C. S. Lewis, Malcolm X, Paul Cowan, Rigoberta Menchu, Dan Wakefield, and Nelson Mandela.

The book uses approaches from literary criticism, developmental psychology (influenced by Erik Erikson, James Fowler, and Carol Gilligan), and spirituality (influenced by John S. Donne, Emile Griffin, Walter Conn, and Bernard Lonergan).

Each text is read in the light of the autobiographical tradition begun by St. Augustine’s Confessions, but with a focus on distinctively modern and post-modern transformations of the self-writing genre. The twentieth-century context of religious alienation, social autonomy, identity crises and politics, and the search for social justice is examined in each text.

William Seraile uncovers the history of the colored orphan asylum, founded in New York City in 1836 as the nation’s first orphanage for African American children. It is a remarkable institution that is still in the forefront aiding children. Although no longer an orphanage, in its current incarnation as Harlem-Dowling West Side Center for Children and Family Services it maintains the principles of the women who organized it nearly 200 years ago.

The agency weathered three wars, two major financial panics, a devastating fire during the 1863 Draft Riots, several epidemics, waves of racial prejudice, and severe financial difficulties to care for orphaned, neglected, and delinquent children. Eventually financial support would come from some of New York’s finest families, including the Jays, Murrays, Roosevelts, Macys, and Astors.

While the white female managers and their male advisers were dedicated to uplifting these black children, the evangelical, mainly Quaker founding managers also exhibited the extreme paternalistic views endemic at the time, accepting the advice or support of the African American community only grudgingly. It was frank criticism in 1913 from W. E. B. Du Bois that highlighted the conflict between the orphanage and the community it served, and it wasn’t until 1939 that it hired the first black trustee.

More than 15,000 children were raised in the orphanage, and throughout its history letters and visits have revealed that hundreds if not thousands of “old boys and girls” looked back with admiration and respect at the home that nurtured them throughout their formative years.

Weaving together African American history with a unique history of New York City, this is not only a painstaking study of a previously unsung institution of black history but a unique window onto complex racial dynamics during a period when many failed to recognize equality among all citizens as a worthy purpose.

For Strasbourg consists of a series of essays and interviews about the city of Strasbourg and the philosophical friendships Jacques Derrida developed there over a period of some forty years.

Written just months before his death, the opening essay, “The Place Name(s): Strasbourg,” recounts in detail, and in very moving terms, Derrida’s deep attachment to this French city on the border between France and Germany. More than just a personal narrative, however, the essay is a profound interrogation of the relationship between philosophy and place, philosophy and language, and philosophy and friendship. As such, it raises a series of philosophical, political, and ethical questions that might all be placed under the aegis of what Derrida once called “philosophical nationalities and nationalism.”

The other three texts included in the book are long interviews/conversations between Derrida and his two principal interlocutors in Strasbourg, Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. These interviews are significant both for the themes they focus on (language, politics, friendship, death, life after death, and so on) and for what they reveal about Derrida’s relationships to Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe. Filled with sharp insights into one anothers’ work and peppered with personal anecdotes and humor, the interviews bear witness to the decades-long intellectual friendships of these three important contemporary thinkers.

This collection thus stands as a reminder of and testimony to Derrida’s unique relationship to Strasbourg and to the two thinkers most closely associated with that city.

Named 'Top 6' South Asia studies publications of 2016 by the British Association for South Asian Studies

The Alchemy of Empire unravels the non-European origins of Enlightenment science. Focusing on the abject materials of empire-building, this study traces the genealogies of substances like mud, mortar, ice, and paper, as well as forms of knowledge like inoculation. Showing how East India Company employees deployed the paradigm of alchemy in order to make sense of the new worlds they confronted, Rajani Sudan argues that the Enlightenment was born largely out of Europe’s (and Britain’s) sense of insecurity and inferiority in the early modern world. Plumbing the depths of the imperial archive, Sudan uncovers the history of the British Enlightenment in the literary artifacts of the long eighteenth century, from the correspondence of the East India Company and the papers of the Royal Society to the poetry of Alexander Pope and the novels of Jane Austen.

A groundbreaking volume that represents the first examination of cultural production amongst Italian prisoners of war.

Captivity and Creativity explores the artistic and material production by Italian prisoners of war (POWs) and some civilian internees who were captured by the Western Allies in 1940-43 and detained in prison camps scattered across Africa, Australia, India, the United Kingdom, and the United States during World War II. Twelve chapters discuss from different theoretical and historical angles the various artistic activities (e.g., theatre, music, visual arts, architecture, chapels, and material objects), technical contributions (e.g., maps, photography, radio), writings (e.g., memoirs, diaries, letters, and fiction), as well as the documentary evidence that resulted from the diverse experiences and transnational exchanges between the prisoners and their captors as military personnel and local civilian populations in different parts of the globe between 1940 and 1947.

The book describes the prisoners’ economic importance for the Western Allied powers in their war effort to fight Nazi-Fascism, and the enforced diaspora through which POWs were moved across different allied countries. It analyzes the prisoners’ daily camp life, work, and treatment before and after the 1943 Armistice, when POWs were asked to sign an agreement to renounce Fascism and become cooperators of war, underlining the different treatment reserved for cooperators of war and noncooperators of war. The book also investigates the legacy of the prisoners’ artistic and material production, the cultural heritage, and the practices of memorialization (e.g., photography, monuments, museums, anniversary celebrations, exhibits) that have derived from the Italian presence in camps in different countries up to this date, through reference to groups and communities that preserve that heritage.

A groundbreaking volume that represents the first examination of cultural production amongst Italian prisoners of war.

Captivity and Creativity explores the artistic and material production by Italian prisoners of war (POWs) and some civilian internees who were captured by the Western Allies in 1940-43 and detained in prison camps scattered across Africa, Australia, India, the United Kingdom, and the United States during World War II. Twelve chapters discuss from different theoretical and historical angles the various artistic activities (e.g., theatre, music, visual arts, architecture, chapels, and material objects), technical contributions (e.g., maps, photography, radio), writings (e.g., memoirs, diaries, letters, and fiction), as well as the documentary evidence that resulted from the diverse experiences and transnational exchanges between the prisoners and their captors as military personnel and local civilian populations in different parts of the globe between 1940 and 1947.

The book describes the prisoners’ economic importance for the Western Allied powers in their war effort to fight Nazi-Fascism, and the enforced diaspora through which POWs were moved across different allied countries. It analyzes the prisoners’ daily camp life, work, and treatment before and after the 1943 Armistice, when POWs were asked to sign an agreement to renounce Fascism and become cooperators of war, underlining the different treatment reserved for cooperators of war and noncooperators of war. The book also investigates the legacy of the prisoners’ artistic and material production, the cultural heritage, and the practices of memorialization (e.g., photography, monuments, museums, anniversary celebrations, exhibits) that have derived from the Italian presence in camps in different countries up to this date, through reference to groups and communities that preserve that heritage.

Baudelaire’s fame and notoriety have been established through the representation of his complex work through reductive profiles: the poet of the modern city, of erotic obsession, of Satanic revolt, of colonial fantasies, of mystical correspondences, of corporeal decay . . . But what is it that holds these facets of the work together? Is there a logic underpinning the proliferation of themes, styles, and personae in The Flowers of Evil, while suturing content and form?

Baudelaire’s Shadow argues that what is most fundamentally at stake across the manifold layers of Baudelaire’s poetic project is the problem of determination: a contradiction between determining and being determined, a dialectic of agency bound up with its negation. This approach enables a new understanding of conceptual, formal, and figural cruxes traversing The Flowers of Evil, including the relationship between writing and reading, the anticipation of death, the negativity of the void, the representation of race, the poetics of ekphrasis, the singularity of the aesthetic, the actuality of the social, the indeterminacy of sense, and the materiality of the signifier.

With philosophical precision and poetic élan, one of Baudelaire’s finest translators reconstructs what we thought we knew about The Flowers of Evil from the ground up, revealing the dialectical logic at the heart of this major work of modern literature.

Grief is non-linear and destabilizing. It can unravel our sense of time and relation to the world. Poetic Grief follows these effects across poems written in the wake of National Socialism. Moving beyond established paradigms of trauma and representation, the book offers a formally grounded and affect-oriented approach to post-Holocaust poetry that develops a new framework for understanding the relationship between reading poetry and the experience of grief.

Bringing together phenomenologically informed close readings and historical-political analysis, Poetic Grief considers how poetry can affect embodied experiences through rhythm and breath, how its complex semantic patterns can collapse epistemic certainty and upend the flow of time—like grief does. New readings of poets familiar to the context of Holocaust remembrance such as Paul Celan, Dan Pagis, Charlotte Delbo, and Irena Klepfisz appear alongside analyses of poets remembering National Socialism at different historical moments, including May Ayim, Audre Lorde, Ghayath Almadhoun, and Max Czollek. In their poetry, reading becomes an act of participating in relations that the book’s respective chapters describe as “withness,” “ongoingness,” and “solidarities of grief”—modes of answering to and being with loss.

In a world shaped both by decolonization and the aftermath of the Shoah, Poetic Grief offers a new vocabulary for poetic remembrance alongside reflections about the role of grief in cultures of memory: To confront the force of grief in poetry is to rethink its place in cultures of remembrance, to see where it has been repressed and instrumentalized, and to create openings that respond to what cannot be contained and conceptualized about loss.

This book is a recipient of the Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award, administered by the Association for Jewish Studies.

Baudelaire’s fame and notoriety have been established through the representation of his complex work through reductive profiles: the poet of the modern city, of erotic obsession, of Satanic revolt, of colonial fantasies, of mystical correspondences, of corporeal decay . . . But what is it that holds these facets of the work together? Is there a logic underpinning the proliferation of themes, styles, and personae in The Flowers of Evil, while suturing content and form?

Baudelaire’s Shadow argues that what is most fundamentally at stake across the manifold layers of Baudelaire’s poetic project is the problem of determination: a contradiction between determining and being determined, a dialectic of agency bound up with its negation. This approach enables a new understanding of conceptual, formal, and figural cruxes traversing The Flowers of Evil, including the relationship between writing and reading, the anticipation of death, the negativity of the void, the representation of race, the poetics of ekphrasis, the singularity of the aesthetic, the actuality of the social, the indeterminacy of sense, and the materiality of the signifier.

With philosophical precision and poetic élan, one of Baudelaire’s finest translators reconstructs what we thought we knew about The Flowers of Evil from the ground up, revealing the dialectical logic at the heart of this major work of modern literature.

Cinema before the World investigates the transnational origins of filmmaking by focusing on a case study in world cinema—the 1896-1897 voyage of one of the Lumière Brothers camera operators, Alexandre Promio, across North Africa and the Middle East. The book shows how the sites in these early films are not simply backdrops, but integral to film form and its global history.

Connecting a series of filmic principles (framing, tracking shots, close-ups) to the sites where they are made visible (a rooftop in Algiers, a train station and the Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem), Allan unsettles a familiar narrative of imperial vision. In the interplay of local history and global media, he highlights tensions between ethnography, observation, and visual capture, revealing how the Lumière Brothers films persist as living archives.

The book evokes a formative moment when cinema stood before the world—both as a technological marvel and as a medium that shaped how space and time were perceived. Tracing a journey from Algeria to Egypt and Palestine, and moving across media from lithography to photography and panoramas, Allan shows how in the hands of later filmmakers, such as Egyptian director Youssef Chahine and the Syrian collective Abounaddara, the Lumière films continue to enrich and inform visions of what cinema—and the world—can be.

Cinema before the World offers a critical historical intervention in the global story of the cinematograph and a visionary method for film scholarship grounded in transnational analysis across languages, regions, and media.

The Antic Root explores the relations among art, sense-experience, and the conception of the world in the early modern era. Against vitalist and posthumanist accounts that presume to grasp the world beyond its interpretive framing, Pye argues that any possibility of conceiving a world beyond us depends on acknowledging the fact of its mediated condition, a condition Shakespeare explored with particular acuity.

Rather than either a subjective or objective phenomenon, Pye shows how the world should be understood as an autopoietic one, that is, as a function of the process through which the very distinction between self and environment is constituted, a formative mechanism extending from the creation of the world as a phenomenal domain to the most intimate dimensions of affective life.

Coinciding with the separation of spheres during the era, autopoiesis lies at the heart of Shakespeare’s reflexive art, revealing the grounds of the works’ generic distinctions. Engaging plays from Twelfth Night to King Lear to the late romances, and concluding with an in-depth consideration of the painter Diego Velázquez, The Antic Root enlists autopoiesis to rethink the boundaries of the human in relation to affect, disability, animality, environment, and law.

Ultimately, autopoietics lets us imagine community, human and otherwise, beyond economic notions of equivalency, and justice beyond the assignation of guilt and innocence, as a condition of indebtedness that amounts to the origin of being as such.

The Noigandres group was one of the key movements in Brazilian modernism. Bessa’s account works through the specific poetic innovations that are the hallmark of the concrete poetics the group developed. These include their unprecedented reevaluation of Brazilian literary history, their distinctive exploration of graphic space inspired by emerging studies on cybernetics, and their embrace of a range of Modernist traditions, from Mallarmé’s vision of poetry as a constellation of words, to Joyce’s concept of the “verbivocovisual,” to Pound’s writings about the Chinese ideogram.

Bessa’s account begins with the core traits of concrete poetry developed by the Noigandres poets throughout the 1950s (the so-called “heroic phase” of concretism) and continues to the poetic experiments the group undertook after the military coup of 1964 in Brazil. The book concludes with translations of key primary texts: essays by the poets Augusto de Campos, Décio Pignatari and Haroldo de Campos and correspondence between the three poets and Ezra Pound.

Cinema before the World investigates the transnational origins of filmmaking by focusing on a case study in world cinema—the 1896-1897 voyage of one of the Lumière Brothers camera operators, Alexandre Promio, across North Africa and the Middle East. The book shows how the sites in these early films are not simply backdrops, but integral to film form and its global history.

Connecting a series of filmic principles (framing, tracking shots, close-ups) to the sites where they are made visible (a rooftop in Algiers, a train station and the Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem), Allan unsettles a familiar narrative of imperial vision. In the interplay of local history and global media, he highlights tensions between ethnography, observation, and visual capture, revealing how the Lumière Brothers films persist as living archives.

The book evokes a formative moment when cinema stood before the world—both as a technological marvel and as a medium that shaped how space and time were perceived. Tracing a journey from Algeria to Egypt and Palestine, and moving across media from lithography to photography and panoramas, Allan shows how in the hands of later filmmakers, such as Egyptian director Youssef Chahine and the Syrian collective Abounaddara, the Lumière films continue to enrich and inform visions of what cinema—and the world—can be.

Cinema before the World offers a critical historical intervention in the global story of the cinematograph and a visionary method for film scholarship grounded in transnational analysis across languages, regions, and media.

Grief is non-linear and destabilizing. It can unravel our sense of time and relation to the world. Poetic Grief follows these effects across poems written in the wake of National Socialism. Moving beyond established paradigms of trauma and representation, the book offers a formally grounded and affect-oriented approach to post-Holocaust poetry that develops a new framework for understanding the relationship between reading poetry and the experience of grief.

Bringing together phenomenologically informed close readings and historical-political analysis, Poetic Grief considers how poetry can affect embodied experiences through rhythm and breath, how its complex semantic patterns can collapse epistemic certainty and upend the flow of time—like grief does. New readings of poets familiar to the context of Holocaust remembrance such as Paul Celan, Dan Pagis, Charlotte Delbo, and Irena Klepfisz appear alongside analyses of poets remembering National Socialism at different historical moments, including May Ayim, Audre Lorde, Ghayath Almadhoun, and Max Czollek. In their poetry, reading becomes an act of participating in relations that the book’s respective chapters describe as “withness,” “ongoingness,” and “solidarities of grief”—modes of answering to and being with loss.

In a world shaped both by decolonization and the aftermath of the Shoah, Poetic Grief offers a new vocabulary for poetic remembrance alongside reflections about the role of grief in cultures of memory: To confront the force of grief in poetry is to rethink its place in cultures of remembrance, to see where it has been repressed and instrumentalized, and to create openings that respond to what cannot be contained and conceptualized about loss.

This book is a recipient of the Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award, administered by the Association for Jewish Studies.

The Antic Root explores the relations among art, sense-experience, and the conception of the world in the early modern era. Against vitalist and posthumanist accounts that presume to grasp the world beyond its interpretive framing, Pye argues that any possibility of conceiving a world beyond us depends on acknowledging the fact of its mediated condition, a condition Shakespeare explored with particular acuity.

Rather than either a subjective or objective phenomenon, Pye shows how the world should be understood as an autopoietic one, that is, as a function of the process through which the very distinction between self and environment is constituted, a formative mechanism extending from the creation of the world as a phenomenal domain to the most intimate dimensions of affective life.

Coinciding with the separation of spheres during the era, autopoiesis lies at the heart of Shakespeare’s reflexive art, revealing the grounds of the works’ generic distinctions. Engaging plays from Twelfth Night to King Lear to the late romances, and concluding with an in-depth consideration of the painter Diego Velázquez, The Antic Root enlists autopoiesis to rethink the boundaries of the human in relation to affect, disability, animality, environment, and law.

Ultimately, autopoietics lets us imagine community, human and otherwise, beyond economic notions of equivalency, and justice beyond the assignation of guilt and innocence, as a condition of indebtedness that amounts to the origin of being as such.

Mere Materialism challenges us to recognize a neglected, transhistorical aesthetics of loss. Against the affirmative materialisms prevalent in cultural criticism today, mere materialism in art and literature documents the slow, ordinary violence of routine physical deterioration, including art’s own. It inhabits a space where loss can remain nothing but loss, without having to serve any productive or redemptive purpose.

Attending to material surfaces and the processes of attrition Goldsmith examines works from Rembrandt to the present that that stand in counterpoint to the typical materialist emphasis on dynamic, generative possibility. These works turn aside from such future horizons to pose a central question: Amid the urgent purposes we ask art to serve, and amid the many values we invest in the concept of materialism, is it possible for art to occupy the everyday damage of erosion and, on occasion, simply let loss be?

Wide-ranging in philosophical reference and in discussions of specific materials, conservation theory, and reception histories, the book draws out the phenomenon of mere materialism through a series of extended case studies: a Rembrandt portrait of Saint Bartholomew; Melville’s slave-revolt novella Benito Cereno; a Dada collage by Kurt Schwitters; and recent “gray” writings by Karl Ove Knausgaard and C. S. Giscombe. Together, these works index an aesthetics of fragility and decay, without presupposing that material vulnerability is in a dialectical relationship with deeper meaning, and without assuming that an encounter with it has a redeeming cognitive, affective, political or social function.

The Noigandres group was one of the key movements in Brazilian modernism. Bessa’s account works through the specific poetic innovations that are the hallmark of the concrete poetics the group developed. These include their unprecedented reevaluation of Brazilian literary history, their distinctive exploration of graphic space inspired by emerging studies on cybernetics, and their embrace of a range of Modernist traditions, from Mallarmé’s vision of poetry as a constellation of words, to Joyce’s concept of the “verbivocovisual,” to Pound’s writings about the Chinese ideogram.

Bessa’s account begins with the core traits of concrete poetry developed by the Noigandres poets throughout the 1950s (the so-called “heroic phase” of concretism) and continues to the poetic experiments the group undertook after the military coup of 1964 in Brazil. The book concludes with translations of key primary texts: essays by the poets Augusto de Campos, Décio Pignatari and Haroldo de Campos and correspondence between the three poets and Ezra Pound.

Mere Materialism challenges us to recognize a neglected, transhistorical aesthetics of loss. Against the affirmative materialisms prevalent in cultural criticism today, mere materialism in art and literature documents the slow, ordinary violence of routine physical deterioration, including art’s own. It inhabits a space where loss can remain nothing but loss, without having to serve any productive or redemptive purpose.

Attending to material surfaces and the processes of attrition Goldsmith examines works from Rembrandt to the present that that stand in counterpoint to the typical materialist emphasis on dynamic, generative possibility. These works turn aside from such future horizons to pose a central question: Amid the urgent purposes we ask art to serve, and amid the many values we invest in the concept of materialism, is it possible for art to occupy the everyday damage of erosion and, on occasion, simply let loss be?

Wide-ranging in philosophical reference and in discussions of specific materials, conservation theory, and reception histories, the book draws out the phenomenon of mere materialism through a series of extended case studies: a Rembrandt portrait of Saint Bartholomew; Melville’s slave-revolt novella Benito Cereno; a Dada collage by Kurt Schwitters; and recent “gray” writings by Karl Ove Knausgaard and C. S. Giscombe. Together, these works index an aesthetics of fragility and decay, without presupposing that material vulnerability is in a dialectical relationship with deeper meaning, and without assuming that an encounter with it has a redeeming cognitive, affective, political or social function.

In the aftermath of the global mass protests of the 2010s, democratic theorists have shown renewed interest in conceptualizing popular mobilization and “the people.” A series of provocative works have theorized assembled crowds in the streets as sources of democratic authority, legitimacy, and sovereignty. These insightful accounts nevertheless often remain detached from the full range of the situated experiences of protesters.

Inappropriable Force brings the concrete, on-the-ground practices of Turkey’s 2013 Gezi Uprising into the foreground of theoretical reflection,asking what people gathered in the streets shared, desired, or refused, and what their public experimentations with politics, language, and aesthetics made possible. Working from the empirical particularities of Gezi to political theory, the book theorizes protest as a political meaning-making enterprise that reconfigures everyday regimes of sense, speech, and engagement.

Drawing on Gezi’s archives and engaging democratic and critical theorists such as Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Rancière, Joan Copjec, and René Girard, the book identifies a surplus in protest irreducible to the categories of popular sovereignty, authorization, or legitimation. This surplus—an inappropriable force—can only be experienced in practice, through collective action. Not predicated on unified will or hegemonic claims to peoplehood, it unfolds in plural modes of thinking, sociality, affect, creativity, and imagination that emerge when people assemble out of doors.

Adopting a practice-oriented and deparochializing approach, Inappropriable Force treats the political activities and cultural artifacts of the Gezi protests as texts of political theory in their own right. In doing so, it conceptualizes popular protest as a generative reservoir of political meaning and critical insight.

Why does injustice often deepen during moments of rapid urban growth? And what does the pursuit of more just urban futures looks like when the realization of alternatives seems impossible?

African cities have boomed over the last two decades. Large-scale infrastructure projects, high-rises, and real estate ventures have transformed urban landscapes. While urban poverty levels have declined, rising housing costs, stagnant wages, and forced evictions—twinned with political authoritarianism—have intensified precarity and injustice.

Drawing on more than a decade of ethnographic research in construction sites, design offices, and new developments, anthropologist Marco Di Nunzio narrates the tensions animating the urban transformation that has reshaped Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, beyond recognition.

Unjust Developments reminds us that city building in Addis Ababa, as elsewhere, is not only about economic accumulation. It is a moral project, rooted in the belief that modern infrastructure will generate opportunity and uplift the poor. These promises have often failed the poor. Commitments to infrastructure have given political leaders, investors, planners, developers and architects the leverage to prioritize their own visions of development and dismiss demands for better wages and affordable housing as politically irrelevant or economically unviable. Government and corporate investments in the built environment have helped entrench unequal hierarchies of entitlement and rights.

Yet city building remains a fragile achievement. It is marked by struggles not only between developers and displaced communities, or companies and workers, but also among the city builders themselves. Demands for a more just city and frictions within the building industry open space for rearticulating what counts as political necessity, moral action, expertise, and the future of development.

In conversation with critical urbanism, anthropology, and moral philosophy, Unjust Developments offers a powerful account of city building as both a site of injustice and a terrain of struggle—where justice is not guaranteed, but persistently demanded.

Why does injustice often deepen during moments of rapid urban growth? And what does the pursuit of more just urban futures looks like when the realization of alternatives seems impossible?

African cities have boomed over the last two decades. Large-scale infrastructure projects, high-rises, and real estate ventures have transformed urban landscapes. While urban poverty levels have declined, rising housing costs, stagnant wages, and forced evictions—twinned with political authoritarianism—have intensified precarity and injustice.

Drawing on more than a decade of ethnographic research in construction sites, design offices, and new developments, anthropologist Marco Di Nunzio narrates the tensions animating the urban transformation that has reshaped Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, beyond recognition.

Unjust Developments reminds us that city building in Addis Ababa, as elsewhere, is not only about economic accumulation. It is a moral project, rooted in the belief that modern infrastructure will generate opportunity and uplift the poor. These promises have often failed the poor. Commitments to infrastructure have given political leaders, investors, planners, developers and architects the leverage to prioritize their own visions of development and dismiss demands for better wages and affordable housing as politically irrelevant or economically unviable. Government and corporate investments in the built environment have helped entrench unequal hierarchies of entitlement and rights.

Yet city building remains a fragile achievement. It is marked by struggles not only between developers and displaced communities, or companies and workers, but also among the city builders themselves. Demands for a more just city and frictions within the building industry open space for rearticulating what counts as political necessity, moral action, expertise, and the future of development.

In conversation with critical urbanism, anthropology, and moral philosophy, Unjust Developments offers a powerful account of city building as both a site of injustice and a terrain of struggle—where justice is not guaranteed, but persistently demanded.

In the aftermath of the global mass protests of the 2010s, democratic theorists have shown renewed interest in conceptualizing popular mobilization and “the people.” A series of provocative works have theorized assembled crowds in the streets as sources of democratic authority, legitimacy, and sovereignty. These insightful accounts nevertheless often remain detached from the full range of the situated experiences of protesters.

Inappropriable Force brings the concrete, on-the-ground practices of Turkey’s 2013 Gezi Uprising into the foreground of theoretical reflection,asking what people gathered in the streets shared, desired, or refused, and what their public experimentations with politics, language, and aesthetics made possible. Working from the empirical particularities of Gezi to political theory, the book theorizes protest as a political meaning-making enterprise that reconfigures everyday regimes of sense, speech, and engagement.

Drawing on Gezi’s archives and engaging democratic and critical theorists such as Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Rancière, Joan Copjec, and René Girard, the book identifies a surplus in protest irreducible to the categories of popular sovereignty, authorization, or legitimation. This surplus—an inappropriable force—can only be experienced in practice, through collective action. Not predicated on unified will or hegemonic claims to peoplehood, it unfolds in plural modes of thinking, sociality, affect, creativity, and imagination that emerge when people assemble out of doors.

Adopting a practice-oriented and deparochializing approach, Inappropriable Force treats the political activities and cultural artifacts of the Gezi protests as texts of political theory in their own right. In doing so, it conceptualizes popular protest as a generative reservoir of political meaning and critical insight.

Hexameral Poetics tells the story of a forgotten genre: poetry about the creation of the world. The hexameral poems, as they are known, expand at length on the six days of Creation described in the first chapter of the Bible. Yet where we might expect such works to be conservative in nature, defending a traditional cosmos and ceding creative power to God, Pertile argues that they undertake an unprecedented investigation into the nature of our relationship to the universe. Foregrounding their own creative processes, they seek at the same time to reconcile their inescapable artifice with the world as already created. What follows from this attempt is a new model of creativity itself, incompatible with the traditional idea of creation ex nihilo.

Rather than emphasizing their absolute sovereignty, poets from Du Bartas to Milton thus seek out a poetics that would bridge the difference between human and divine creators without simply collapsing one into the other—a poetics free of domination and in alignment rather than in contest with the generative powers of the cosmos. In so doing they are not merely powerfully modern but may also lead us to revise our notions of modernity itself. Drawing on French, Italian, Spanish, and English poetry, Hexameral Poetics brings a transnational approach to urgent questions concerning the intersection of poetry, religion, and human impact on the planet at the origins of modernity.

Engages with the prehistory and contemporary afterlives of Laudato Si’ through critical and constructive engagement with the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences using an intersectional, anti-colonial feminist methodology.

Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home, Pope Francis’s encyclical on ecology, was addressed to “every person living on the planet” and released in the of summer 2015 to critical skepticism and enthusiastic acclaim. From the professoriate to political pundits, from the apathetic to the atheistic, from Harvard economists to secular Jewish feminist thought leaders, Laudato Si’ (LS) got people’s attention. It remains the most important legacy of Pope Francis and stands as a historical referent of global moral clarity in a period of ecological degradations, racial capitalism, and widespread social suffering.

Beyond Laudato Si’ advances an intersectional feminist, anti-colonial method to explore the LS’s prehistory, its claims, its impact, its key contributions, and its recursively freighted concepts. With chapters that chart the trajectory of theology and science in the Catholic Church, the allure of integral ecology, the dangers of gendered theological abuse, and the turn to Indigenous values, Beyond Laudato Si’ elegantly charts the intellectual and ethical patterns that emerge and resurface in various theoretical and practical contexts of papal ecotheology. These topics, while not often considered together, reflect larger theological histories and collective behaviors and must be oriented toward integrity in theological reasoning and pursuit of equitable social formations in the present and future.

Characterized by rigorous interdisciplinarity (among the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences) and grounded in an intersectional, anti-colonial feminist viewpoint, Beyond Laudato Si’ amplifies and engages key concepts from LS and its afterlives, while also elucidating persistent themes, troubles, and methods in Catholic ecotheology and ethics.

A Critical Engagement with and Interrogation of the Dominant Tropes of Racial Violence

This volume brings together a diverse cohort of contributors working to trace the genealogies, geographies and the entanglements of anti-Asian violence. Representing a range of critical perspectives, these essays—a collection of works by scholars, students, and community organizers—open up lines of inquiry that unsettle the taken-for-granted framings of anti-Asian violence as simply a matter of “hate.”

Intimacies of Anti-Asian Violence makes crucial connections enabled by transnational, intersectional, comparative, and critical lenses, collectively interrogating the complex linkages between imperialist and settler colonial histories, modalities of violence, and the geopolitical formation of Asia and Asianness.

Working through and between a range of critical frameworks, including but not limited to the Black radical tradition, feminist and queer critiques, Indigenous and decolonial perspectives, critical pedagogies, and the anti-caste movement, this volume provides an original and layered intervention that strives to complicate the discourse of anti-Asian violence and attends to the multiple and different ways Asia and its diasporas can be located in relation to varied permutations of violence.
Importantly and powerfully, the insights offered in Intimacies of Anti-Asian Violence point toward the possibilities for solidarities and movement-building across racial, ethnic, class and gendered lines in the contemporary moment.

Engages with the prehistory and contemporary afterlives of Laudato Si’ through critical and constructive engagement with the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences using an intersectional, anti-colonial feminist methodology.

Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home, Pope Francis’s encyclical on ecology, was addressed to “every person living on the planet” and released in the of summer 2015 to critical skepticism and enthusiastic acclaim. From the professoriate to political pundits, from the apathetic to the atheistic, from Harvard economists to secular Jewish feminist thought leaders, Laudato Si’ (LS) got people’s attention. It remains the most important legacy of Pope Francis and stands as a historical referent of global moral clarity in a period of ecological degradations, racial capitalism, and widespread social suffering.

Beyond Laudato Si’ advances an intersectional feminist, anti-colonial method to explore the LS’s prehistory, its claims, its impact, its key contributions, and its recursively freighted concepts. With chapters that chart the trajectory of theology and science in the Catholic Church, the allure of integral ecology, the dangers of gendered theological abuse, and the turn to Indigenous values, Beyond Laudato Si’ elegantly charts the intellectual and ethical patterns that emerge and resurface in various theoretical and practical contexts of papal ecotheology. These topics, while not often considered together, reflect larger theological histories and collective behaviors and must be oriented toward integrity in theological reasoning and pursuit of equitable social formations in the present and future.

Characterized by rigorous interdisciplinarity (among the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences) and grounded in an intersectional, anti-colonial feminist viewpoint, Beyond Laudato Si’ amplifies and engages key concepts from LS and its afterlives, while also elucidating persistent themes, troubles, and methods in Catholic ecotheology and ethics.

A Critical Engagement with and Interrogation of the Dominant Tropes of Racial Violence

This volume brings together a diverse cohort of contributors working to trace the genealogies, geographies and the entanglements of anti-Asian violence. Representing a range of critical perspectives, these essays—a collection of works by scholars, students, and community organizers—open up lines of inquiry that unsettle the taken-for-granted framings of anti-Asian violence as simply a matter of “hate.”

Intimacies of Anti-Asian Violence makes crucial connections enabled by transnational, intersectional, comparative, and critical lenses, collectively interrogating the complex linkages between imperialist and settler colonial histories, modalities of violence, and the geopolitical formation of Asia and Asianness.

Working through and between a range of critical frameworks, including but not limited to the Black radical tradition, feminist and queer critiques, Indigenous and decolonial perspectives, critical pedagogies, and the anti-caste movement, this volume provides an original and layered intervention that strives to complicate the discourse of anti-Asian violence and attends to the multiple and different ways Asia and its diasporas can be located in relation to varied permutations of violence.
Importantly and powerfully, the insights offered in Intimacies of Anti-Asian Violence point toward the possibilities for solidarities and movement-building across racial, ethnic, class and gendered lines in the contemporary moment.

Catherine Malabou’s elaboration of the concept of plasticity has made her one of the most innovative philosophers working today. Formations collects eighteen of Malabou’s early writings, spanning 1986 to 2003, within which her initial articulations of plasticity take shape.

Though Malabou might be most famous for bringing neurobiological discourse into conversation with continental philosophy, she has always maintained, as the essays in Formation make clear, that “plasticity” circulates dynamically within the history of philosophy. Across readings of Hegel, Marx, Derrida, Rousseau, Heidegger, Ricoeur, Plato, Aristotle, and many others, these essays highlight the deep entrenchment of plasticity within the history of philosophy.

Formations puts on full display Malabou’s associations with deconstruction, her negotiations with structuralism, her interdisciplinary investments in philosophical calibrations of literature, and the unique form of dialectics that will shape her later thought. A critical introduction by Adrian Johnston situates these essays within the contexts of French Hegelianism and Marxism, showing both the continuity of these early essays with Malabou’s later work as well as their singular contributions to the development of these still-relevant critical fields. An afterword by Malabou herself offers a biographical and bibliographic retrospective to these essays.

Never just an archive of precursory traces of a later project, Formations exhibits the plastic metamorphosis of Malabou’s own thought by revealing any oeuvre, including any translation or editorial arrangement of that oeuvre, to be a product constituted by its ongoing formations. In this sense, the title reflects one of the most enduring features of Malabou’s thought: “formation” stands doubly for the rigidity of an identity and the processes by which that identity changes and takes shape.

Catherine Malabou’s elaboration of the concept of plasticity has made her one of the most innovative philosophers working today. Formations collects eighteen of Malabou’s early writings, spanning 1986 to 2003, within which her initial articulations of plasticity take shape.

Though Malabou might be most famous for bringing neurobiological discourse into conversation with continental philosophy, she has always maintained, as the essays in Formation make clear, that “plasticity” circulates dynamically within the history of philosophy. Across readings of Hegel, Marx, Derrida, Rousseau, Heidegger, Ricoeur, Plato, Aristotle, and many others, these essays highlight the deep entrenchment of plasticity within the history of philosophy.

Formations puts on full display Malabou’s associations with deconstruction, her negotiations with structuralism, her interdisciplinary investments in philosophical calibrations of literature, and the unique form of dialectics that will shape her later thought. A critical introduction by Adrian Johnston situates these essays within the contexts of French Hegelianism and Marxism, showing both the continuity of these early essays with Malabou’s later work as well as their singular contributions to the development of these still-relevant critical fields. An afterword by Malabou herself offers a biographical and bibliographic retrospective to these essays.

Never just an archive of precursory traces of a later project, Formations exhibits the plastic metamorphosis of Malabou’s own thought by revealing any oeuvre, including any translation or editorial arrangement of that oeuvre, to be a product constituted by its ongoing formations. In this sense, the title reflects one of the most enduring features of Malabou’s thought: “formation” stands doubly for the rigidity of an identity and the processes by which that identity changes and takes shape.

Hexameral Poetics tells the story of a forgotten genre: poetry about the creation of the world. The hexameral poems, as they are known, expand at length on the six days of Creation described in the first chapter of the Bible. Yet where we might expect such works to be conservative in nature, defending a traditional cosmos and ceding creative power to God, Pertile argues that they undertake an unprecedented investigation into the nature of our relationship to the universe. Foregrounding their own creative processes, they seek at the same time to reconcile their inescapable artifice with the world as already created. What follows from this attempt is a new model of creativity itself, incompatible with the traditional idea of creation ex nihilo.

Rather than emphasizing their absolute sovereignty, poets from Du Bartas to Milton thus seek out a poetics that would bridge the difference between human and divine creators without simply collapsing one into the other—a poetics free of domination and in alignment rather than in contest with the generative powers of the cosmos. In so doing they are not merely powerfully modern but may also lead us to revise our notions of modernity itself. Drawing on French, Italian, Spanish, and English poetry, Hexameral Poetics brings a transnational approach to urgent questions concerning the intersection of poetry, religion, and human impact on the planet at the origins of modernity.

The untold history of a pioneering Black design company in Bed-Stuy whose creativity garnered national attention in the 1970s

In Stories in Fabric: The Design Works of Bedford Stuyvesant, design historian Phyllis Ross uncovers the rise of a groundbreaking African American textile studio founded in Brooklyn in 1969. The Design Works of Bedford Stuyvesant began as a collaboration between Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and textile designer Leslie Tillett. Through Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s urban renewal vision, they grew it into a nationally recognized brand that celebrated African sources and Black pride, bringing national attention to neighborhood ambition.

Ross follows Design Works from hand-printed textiles to a broader licensing and printing operation that put African-inspired patterns into homes across the country. The company’s visibility soared through high-profile showcases and museum partnerships, including a spectacular Metropolitan Museum event and later exhibitions that showed how its patterns connected to African art, flora, and fauna. These collaborations helped shift perceptions of Bed-Stuy from crisis to creativity and possibility.

At the heart of the story are the people who made the designs and made the business work, including post-war textile designers D.D. Tillett and Leslie Tillett. Early artistic direction came from designers such as Callie Simpson Thomas, followed by head designer Sherl Nero, whose talent and market instincts shaped the brand’s evolution. Under president Mark Bethel, the pivot to licensing carried Design Works into the national marketplace, even as the company continued to navigate tensions among social mission, profitability, and cultural representation.

Drawing on deep archival research and interviews, Ross traces Design Works’ evolution against the backdrop of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, and the practical realities of community development and corporate partnerships. The result is a vivid portrait of collaboration across communities and institutions, and a reclamation of a significant episode in twentieth-century design and African American urban history.

In the late 1920s and 30s, the international chess scene was rocked by the success of Sultan Khan, a self-taught prodigy from colonial Punjab. In a brief international career, Khan stunned the chess elite by repeatedly defeating the world’s best players and winning the British Chess Championship three times. Despite his dazzling creativity and peerless endgame technique, Khan’s legacy has long been marginalized or inaccurately portrayed. Written by Khan’s son and granddaughter, Endgame of Empire offers a comprehensive biography of this trailblazing genius who became the first Asian and first person of color to rise to the top of international chess.

From its origins in South Asia, chess had developed into an emblem of European culture. With Khan’s arrival to reclaim the game, it became a catalyst for the many ways in which individuals, ideologies, and empires clashed in the interwar period. Endgame of Empire offers a vivid portrait of Khan as he navigated challenges on and off the chessboard. His rise was meteoric, but also fraught with prejudice and ultimately cut short by the political realities of his time. Set in the broader context of race, empire, and decolonization, the book celebrates Khan’s genius as a strategist while also uncovering the difficult circumstances under which he conquered international chess. It also provides the first extended accounts of Khan’s life in colonial India before his chess career and his life after professional chess in the Pakistan whose arrival he had long desired.

In an appendix, former U.S. Chess Champion Sam Shankland walks the reader through six of Khan’s finest victories. This instructive commentary provides both an account of Khan’s style and a lesson for beginning and experienced chess players alike in the strategic ideas at which Khan was ahead of his time.

At a moment of emergent nationalism in South Asia, Khan’s unassuming brilliance on the chessboard came to represent something greater: a graceful assertion of equality and a prelude to independence. Blending intimate family recollections, archival discoveries, and sharp historical analysis, Endgame of Empire reclaims a legacy long overshadowed by race, empire, and myth and offers a playbook in holding one’s own through adversity.

Confronting racism, sexism, and clericalism in Catholic life and inviting real conversion and justice.

In The Wounded Church, theologian Annie Selak argues that the Catholic Church must confront its own injuries in order to credibly be Church. Using a feminist framework, she develops a new ecclesiology around three wounds, racism, sexism, and clericalism, that actively harm the Body of Christ and distort its witness.

Attentive to history, pastoral practice, and lived experience, Selak shows how each wound is both inflicted by the Church and borne within the Church. She offers the resurrected body of Jesus, scarred yet no longer bleeding, as a guiding metaphor for ecclesial renewal, a body that does not deny its wounds but is transformed through them. Drawing on Karl Rahner, she grounds hope in the reign of God while insisting on concrete institutional and spiritual conversion.

Written for students and scholars, ministers and lay leaders, The Wounded Church uncovers overlooked histories tied to racism, sexism, and the clergy sexual abuse crisis, and proposes clear theological principles for reform. The result is a constructive, pastorally engaged vision that tells the truth about harm and imagines credible paths toward change, accountability, and justice.

Confronting racism, sexism, and clericalism in Catholic life and inviting real conversion and justice.

In The Wounded Church, theologian Annie Selak argues that the Catholic Church must confront its own injuries in order to credibly be Church. Using a feminist framework, she develops a new ecclesiology around three wounds, racism, sexism, and clericalism, that actively harm the Body of Christ and distort its witness.

Attentive to history, pastoral practice, and lived experience, Selak shows how each wound is both inflicted by the Church and borne within the Church. She offers the resurrected body of Jesus, scarred yet no longer bleeding, as a guiding metaphor for ecclesial renewal, a body that does not deny its wounds but is transformed through them. Drawing on Karl Rahner, she grounds hope in the reign of God while insisting on concrete institutional and spiritual conversion.

Written for students and scholars, ministers and lay leaders, The Wounded Church uncovers overlooked histories tied to racism, sexism, and the clergy sexual abuse crisis, and proposes clear theological principles for reform. The result is a constructive, pastorally engaged vision that tells the truth about harm and imagines credible paths toward change, accountability, and justice.

A photographic time capsule of a pre-gentrified South Brooklyn Memorial Day parade, 80 photographs that preserve a neighborhood and a moment now largely vanished

On Memorial Day 1976, weeks before the nation marked its 200th birthday, South Brooklyn filled with flags, brass bands, scout troops, and families along Fifth Avenue. A vivid portrait of South Brooklyn in 1976, patriotic, diverse, and on the cusp of change, this book gathers more than fifty photographs by lifelong New Yorker Larry Racioppo, who left his nearby apartment that morning to record the pageantry of “America’s Birthday.” What he captured is a timeless record of Brooklyn’s people and pride during the Bicentennial year, now published as the United States marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 2026.

Italian-, Puerto Rican-, Irish-, and Polish-American neighbors appear as marchers and as spectators on stoops, at bar windows, inside ethnic clubhouses, and in second-story windows. The pictures register storefronts and fraternal halls, homemade floats and uniforms, and the easy mingling of ritual and everyday life that defined the blocks then. Seen together, they preserve a local parade and the social world around it, including mom-and-pop businesses, clubs, and gathering places, at a moment when the city and neighborhood were about to change.

A foreword by novelist and historian Kevin Baker situates the work within the civic culture of 1970s New York. Racioppo’s Afterward traces the 1976 route from Green-Wood Cemetery to the Old Stone House Park and reflects on five decades of photographing Memorial Day parades, from South Brooklyn to Rockaway, as generations of veterans and families pass the tradition along.

Part civic history and part street-level portrait, Memorial ’76 expands Racioppo’s acclaimed chronicle of New York’s neighborhoods, standing alongside Brooklyn Before and Here Down on Dark Earth, and offers scholars and general readers an essential visual archive of working-class pride, urban ritual, and the everyday textures of a Brooklyn that has largely disappeared.

The first book to offer an expansive view of both major figures and emerging voices in Latin American and U.S. Latinx art

With a poet’s eye and a critic’s insight, Guggenheim Fellow and celebrated scholar Roberto Tejada brings together a dynamic collection drawn from decades of lectures, articles, cultural criticism, and catalog essays that reframe our understanding of Latin American and U.S. Latinx art throughout the diaspora.

A landmark work from one of today’s most vital minds in art criticism and cultural thought, Along the Diagonal moves fluidly between close readings of memoir, visual analysis, and political history to offer an expansive and deeply personal journey. Rather than defining Latinx or Latin American art as fixed categories, Tejada explores them as overlapping and diverging trajectories shaped by migration, colonization, media culture, and institutional visibility. He pushes against narrow conceptions of Latinx identity as well as isolated histories of Civil Rights movements to situate artists, works of art, and images in sociopolitical contexts and within a web of identity, memory, and often-contested meanings.

Opening with Celia Álvarez Muñoz’s participatory installation, A Brand New Ball Game, Tejada sets the tone for his diagonal approach: one that favors slantwise perception, speculative connection, and aesthetic risk. From there, the book spans the street-level murals of Chicano Los Angeles, the photobooks of contemporary Brazil, and the multimedia installations of Puerto Rican duo Allora & Calzadilla. Tejada draws on his personal experiences in Mexico City in the 1990s, the theory of Roger Caillois and Vilém Flusser, and the activism of queer and Latinx artists to stage a rich and restless conversation about art as both a record and agent of historical change. Tejada offers sharp insights into the work of influential precursors such as Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco, and contemporary artists Miguel Angel Ríos, Francis Alÿs, and Allora & Calzadilla, while also amplifying emerging and lesser-known voices, including Jenni(f)fer Tamayo and Jesús Macarena-Ávila.

A vital contribution to the evolving conversation about Latinx and Latin American art, Along the Diagonal opens new paths for thinking about how art lives in, and helps shape, the social and political worlds we inhabit.

The first and only book devoted to the landscape Frederic Church designed at Olana – what he considered his greatest work of art – timed to coincide with the bicentennial of his birth

Modelled on her acclaimed On the High Line (now in its third edition from Fordham University Press), Composing Olana unfolds as a series of walks along the seven carriage roads Frederic Edwin Church built here in 1860s-1880s. Along the way, LaFarge unpacks the history of everything we see, and much that we don’t, in the greater landscape, from the Ice Age geology that created it to the artists and conservationists who preserved it. We learn about lesser-known women painters of the Hudson River School; the Native Peoples who lived here before the Europeans arrived; and the mentorship of Church’s only teacher, Thomas Cole.

Archival letters, diaries, and historic accounts reveal Church’s vital role in preserving Niagara Falls; his contributions to Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and his engagement with music, photography, and global exploration throughout the second half of the 19th century.

Published to coincide with the 200th anniversary of his birth, Composing Olana enables readers to finally comprehend Church’s vital, and still not properly recognized, place in the American story. Illustrated with dozens of historic and contemporary photographs, it is both a guidebook and a meditation on American art, landscape, and preservation.

An innovative companion website, OlanaBook.com, provides hundreds of photos, audio clips from the soundscape, and an interactive version of the specially created “Rambler’s Map.” Designed as an accessible and lively companion for armchair readers and park visitors, Composing Olana shows why this landscape, still intact today, matters so profoundly in the history of American art and public parks.

An on-the-ground study of how faith communities create belonging and build bridges across one of the most diverse urban landscapes in the world

Micro-City follows congregations, clergy, and everyday New Yorkers across twelve Queens neighborhoods to show how religious life both shelters difference and connects it in public. Blending theories from urban sociology and the sociology of religion with fieldwork, Richard Cimino and Hans Tokke map a borough where no single group is the majority and where people cluster into micro-communities that feel like home, yet still meet, trade, vote, and celebrate across lines of ethnicity, language, and creed.

For readers interested in neighborhoods, culture, and faith, it offers a street-level tour of festivals, storefront churches, temples, parades, and parks. For scholars, students, and practitioners in urban studies, sociology of religion, and American studies, it sets out a usable framework for superdiversity grounded in interaction rituals and congregational niches, showing how bonding and bridging social capital take shape. Clergy, community organizers, and planners will find practical insights into how congregations act as specialist and generalist hubs, shaping neighborhood belonging, civic life, and cross-group cooperation.

Readers encounter Little Guyana’s Liberty Avenue, Greek Astoria, Pan-Asian Bayside, Holy Hip-Hop in Hollis, Jain, Buddhist, and Hindu temples, and hipster Hunters Point. Along the way the authors introduce archetypes such as pastor- and pundit-preneurs, civic Catholicism and charismatics, Black-clergy groups, and show how religious culture influences neighborhood politics and everyday coexistence. The result is a field guide to how plural cities work, and how they can work better.

From pushcart to pantry staple in the city that never sleeps

New York’s Family Grocer tells how a neighborhood name became part of the city’s daily rhythm. Patsy and Nicholas D’Agostino arrived from Italy, learned their trade on crowded sidewalks, and opened a small shop in 1932. The idea was simple. Treat people well. Keep the shelves full. Make everyday shopping feel easy by offering meat, produce, and dairy in one location. That approach turned one store into a local favorite and, in time, a chain that stretched across Manhattan.

The book brings back moments shoppers remember, including the jingle “Mr. D’Agostino move closer to me”. The move from street stands, pushcarts, and market stalls to bright aisles. Fresh produce piled high. A butcher who knew your order. A name on the corner that signaled quality on the walk home from the subway. Ads and window displays gave the stores a friendly voice, and family ownership carried that spirit for three generations.

Archival photos, ads, clippings, and interviews show how immigrant networks raised capital, how storefronts doubled as social spaces, and how a surname became a trusted brand. Readers watch the shift from street markets to self-service, then into an era of gourmet counters, convenience, and delivery. Labor, supply, and competition tested the company, and the city kept changing around it.

Led by the D’Agostino family, the company tried new ideas and kept what worked for shoppers. The results include wins, losses and chapters that feel unmistakably New York. At its heart, this book is about work and pride and the promise that a small business can grow without losing its touch. It shows how food shopping shapes daily life and how a family brand becomes part of the map of a city.

The first book to offer an expansive view of both major figures and emerging voices in Latin American and U.S. Latinx art

With a poet’s eye and a critic’s insight, Guggenheim Fellow and celebrated scholar Roberto Tejada brings together a dynamic collection drawn from decades of lectures, articles, cultural criticism, and catalog essays that reframe our understanding of Latin American and U.S. Latinx art throughout the diaspora.

A landmark work from one of today’s most vital minds in art criticism and cultural thought, Along the Diagonal moves fluidly between close readings of memoir, visual analysis, and political history to offer an expansive and deeply personal journey. Rather than defining Latinx or Latin American art as fixed categories, Tejada explores them as overlapping and diverging trajectories shaped by migration, colonization, media culture, and institutional visibility. He pushes against narrow conceptions of Latinx identity as well as isolated histories of Civil Rights movements to situate artists, works of art, and images in sociopolitical contexts and within a web of identity, memory, and often-contested meanings.

Opening with Celia Álvarez Muñoz’s participatory installation, A Brand New Ball Game, Tejada sets the tone for his diagonal approach: one that favors slantwise perception, speculative connection, and aesthetic risk. From there, the book spans the street-level murals of Chicano Los Angeles, the photobooks of contemporary Brazil, and the multimedia installations of Puerto Rican duo Allora & Calzadilla. Tejada draws on his personal experiences in Mexico City in the 1990s, the theory of Roger Caillois and Vilém Flusser, and the activism of queer and Latinx artists to stage a rich and restless conversation about art as both a record and agent of historical change. Tejada offers sharp insights into the work of influential precursors such as Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco, and contemporary artists Miguel Angel Ríos, Francis Alÿs, and Allora & Calzadilla, while also amplifying emerging and lesser-known voices, including Jenni(f)fer Tamayo and Jesús Macarena-Ávila.

A vital contribution to the evolving conversation about Latinx and Latin American art, Along the Diagonal opens new paths for thinking about how art lives in, and helps shape, the social and political worlds we inhabit.

An on-the-ground study of how faith communities create belonging and build bridges across one of the most diverse urban landscapes in the world

Micro-City follows congregations, clergy, and everyday New Yorkers across twelve Queens neighborhoods to show how religious life both shelters difference and connects it in public. Blending theories from urban sociology and the sociology of religion with fieldwork, Richard Cimino and Hans Tokke map a borough where no single group is the majority and where people cluster into micro-communities that feel like home, yet still meet, trade, vote, and celebrate across lines of ethnicity, language, and creed.

For readers interested in neighborhoods, culture, and faith, it offers a street-level tour of festivals, storefront churches, temples, parades, and parks. For scholars, students, and practitioners in urban studies, sociology of religion, and American studies, it sets out a usable framework for superdiversity grounded in interaction rituals and congregational niches, showing how bonding and bridging social capital take shape. Clergy, community organizers, and planners will find practical insights into how congregations act as specialist and generalist hubs, shaping neighborhood belonging, civic life, and cross-group cooperation.

Readers encounter Little Guyana’s Liberty Avenue, Greek Astoria, Pan-Asian Bayside, Holy Hip-Hop in Hollis, Jain, Buddhist, and Hindu temples, and hipster Hunters Point. Along the way the authors introduce archetypes such as pastor- and pundit-preneurs, civic Catholicism and charismatics, Black-clergy groups, and show how religious culture influences neighborhood politics and everyday coexistence. The result is a field guide to how plural cities work, and how they can work better.

Dive into the electrifying tale of a Brooklyn-born patriot turned radical activist, in an era when America was torn by its ideological extremes

In the shadow of recent turmoil, Join the Conspiracy transports readers to a pivotal moment of division and dissent in American history: the late 1960s. Against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and a nation grappling with internal conflict, this compelling narrative follows the life of George Demmerle, a factory worker whose political odyssey encapsulates the era’s tumultuous spirit. From his roots as a concerned citizen wary of his country’s leftward tilt, Demmerle’s journey takes a dramatic turn as he delves into the heart of radical activism.

Participating in iconic protests from the March on Washington to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Demmerle’s story is a whirlwind of political fervor, embodying the struggle against what was perceived as imperialist war and racial injustice. His transformation is marked by alliances with key figures of the time, including Abbie Hoffman, and an eventual leadership role within an East Coast Black Panther affiliate. Yet, beneath his radical veneer lies a secret: Demmerle is an FBI informant.

Join the Conspiracy reveals Demmerle’s complex role in a society at war with itself, where his deepening involvement with the radical left and a bombing collective forces him to confront his loyalties. The narrative, enriched by a rare trove of period documents, candid photos taken from inside the radical movement, and underground art—more than a hundred of which are included in the book—not only charts Demmerle’s saga but also reflects the broader story of a nation struggling to find its moral compass amidst chaos.

As Demmerle navigates the dangerous waters of political extremism, readers are invited to ponder the price of ideology, the nature of loyalty, and the fine line between activism and betrayal. This book is not just a recounting of historical events but a vibrant portrait of a man and a move­ment that sought to reshape America.

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The neglected histories of 19th-century NYC’s maligned working-class fortune tellers and the man who set out to discredit them

Under the pseudonym Q. K. Philander Doesticks, P. B., humor writer Mortimer Thomson went undercover to investigate and report on the fortune tellers of New York City’s tenements and slums. When his articles were published in book form in 1858, they catalyzed a series of arrests that both scandalized and delighted the public. But Mortimer was guarding some secrets of his own, and in many ways, his own life paralleled the lives of the women he both visited and vilified. In Mortimer and the Witches, author Marie Carter examines the lives of these marginalized fortune tellers while also detailing Mortimer Thomson’s peculiar and complicated biography.

Living primarily in the poor section of the Lower East Side, nineteenth-century fortune tellers offered their clients answers to all questions in astrology, love, and law matters. They promised to cure ailments. They spoke of loved ones from beyond the grave. Yet Doesticks saw them as the worst of the worst evil-doers. His investigative reporting aimed to stop unsuspecting young women from seeking the corrupt soothsaying advice of these so-called clairvoyants and to expose the absurd and woefully inaccurate predictions of these “witches.”

Marie Carter views these stories of working-class, immigrant women with more depth than Doesticks’s mocking articles would allow. In her analysis and discussion, she presents them as three-dimensional figures rather than the caricatures Doesticks made them out to be. What other professions at that time allowed women the kind of autonomy afforded by fortune-telling? Their eager customers, many of whom were newly arrived immigrants trying to navigate life in a new country, weren’t as naive and gullible as Doesticks made them out to be. They were often in need of guidance, seeking out the advice of someone who had life experience to offer or simply enjoying the entertainment and attention.

Mortimer and the Witches offers new insight into the neglected histories of working-class fortune tellers and the creative ways that they tried to make a living when options were limited for them.

WINNER, 2025 NATIONAL INDIE EXCELLENCE AWARD, MULTICULTURAL NON-FICTION
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A NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY & FOREWORD REVIEWS BOOK OF THE DAY • NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2023 BY ZED BOOK CLUB & INDIA CURRENTS • LA WEEKLY BOOK PICK • RECOMMENDED BY BOOK RIOT & ELECTRIC LITERATURE

A timely self-examination of the “mixed” American experience featuring exclusive recipes and photographs from the author’s multicultural family.

As citizens continue to evolve and diversify within the United States, the ingredients that make up each flavorful household are waiting to be discovered and devoured. In Colorful Palate, author Raj Tawney shares his coming-of-age memoir as a young man born into an Indian, Puerto Rican, and Italian-American family, his struggles with understanding his own identity, and the mouthwatering flavors of the melting pot from within his own childhood kitchen.

While the world outside can be cruel and unforgiving, it’s even more complicated for a mixed-race kid, unsure of his place in the world. Turning to his mother and grandmother for guidance, Tawney assists in the kitchen, providing intimate moments and candor as he listened to the tales behind each culinary delicacy and the women who perfected it. Each lovingly prepared meal offered another opportunity to learn more about his extraordinary heritage. The ability to create delicious fare with his family wasn’t just a duty for the grand ladies who raised him; it was a survival tactic for navigating new and unknown cultures, not always willing to accept them at first or even a hundredth glance. As Tawney examines both himself and his loved ones through the formative stages of his life, from boyhood through adulthood, he begins to realize, through all of the chaos and confusion, just how “American” he actually was.

In this contemporary coming-of-age tale, Tawney tackles personal hot-button issues about race and identity through poignant, heartfelt moments centered on delicious meals. From succulent tandoori chicken to delectable arroz con habichuelas to scrumptious spaghetti and meatballs, Tawney shares his family recipes along with the intimate stories he overheard in the kitchen as he played sous chef to hundreds of recipes that not only span continents but also come with their own personal histories attached. Colorful Palate is a tale of the mixed experience, one of the millions that rarely get told, undefined by a single group or birthright and unapologetic about its lack of classification.

WINNER, 2025 ASSOCIATION OF UNIVERSITY PRESSES BOOK, JACKET, AND JOURNAL SHOW IN THE JACKETS & COVERS CATEGORY

A captivating memoir of New York’s Historic Upper West Side at a time when community and unity defined the neighborhood

Step into the world of Just City and embark on a poignant journey to a time when ideals were woven into the very fabric of a neighborhood. Jennifer Baum’s evocative storytelling brings to life an era in New York City’s history where affordable housing wasn’t just a concept, but a reality that defined the essence of community.

Within the pages of this captivating memoir, you’ll find yourself transported to the historic Upper West Side—a place where diversity flourished and a shared belief in the importance of a home for all bound the residents together. Through personal anecdotes and heartfelt accounts, Baum illuminates her own upbringing alongside the stories of those who shared her neighbor­hood. She describes how as an adult, she came to appreciate that being raised in an integrated collective was a unique and exceptional experience. As she moves around the world for school, a husband, and work, she tells the story of her search for a home that would embody the values and community she grew up with.

Just City goes beyond the physicality of housing; it unveils the emotional tapestry of housing for an entire generation. As you immerse yourself in the stories of rallies, grassroots efforts, and the sense of kinship that defined this era, you’ll witness a generation that stood united for justice and fairness. The book captures not just moments, but the ethos of a time when the city was a testament to the power of community.

Celebrate the legacy of an era when a city was truly a home, when principles of social respon­sibility thrived. Just City isn’t just a memoir—it’s an invitation to revive the spirit of unity and create a city where everyone belongs. So open its pages and let its words rekindle the flame of a just and inclusive city once more.

At a time when terms like restoration, religion, authority, obligations, and natural law—once the rallying cries of the most emancipatory movements—are increasingly coopted by conservative forces, Revolution and Restoration offers a thought-provoking account of how “outdated” concepts can ignite radical energy and collective action. Through both historical and contemporary examples, the book elaborates the concrete possibilities for reimagining politics and society that emerge out of the clash between incompatible legal and economic structures.

At its core, Tomba’s book confronts the very foundations of the modern state and its three pillars: property, democracy, and citizenship. These pillars, long celebrated in the Western canon, are nevertheless mechanisms of exclusion: property is the denial of communal access, representative democracy the marginalization of the demos from decision-making, and citizenship the exclusion of the foreigner. Revolution and Restoration critiques these pillars to show how new concepts and political possibilities that emerge from political and social conflicts hold the potential to transcend and remake democracies in crisis.

Revolution and Restoration: The Politics of Anachronism is available from the Knowledge Unlatched on an open-access basis.

At a time when terms like restoration, religion, authority, obligations, and natural law—once the rallying cries of the most emancipatory movements—are increasingly coopted by conservative forces, Revolution and Restoration offers a thought-provoking account of how “outdated” concepts can ignite radical energy and collective action. Through both historical and contemporary examples, the book elaborates the concrete possibilities for reimagining politics and society that emerge out of the clash between incompatible legal and economic structures.

At its core, Tomba’s book confronts the very foundations of the modern state and its three pillars: property, democracy, and citizenship. These pillars, long celebrated in the Western canon, are nevertheless mechanisms of exclusion: property is the denial of communal access, representative democracy the marginalization of the demos from decision-making, and citizenship the exclusion of the foreigner. Revolution and Restoration critiques these pillars to show how new concepts and political possibilities that emerge from political and social conflicts hold the potential to transcend and remake democracies in crisis.

Revolution and Restoration: The Politics of Anachronism is available from the Knowledge Unlatched on an open-access basis.

Once dismissed as “tragedy,” the commons have been making a comeback. Amid intensifying social and environmental injustices in neoliberal regimes, scholars and activists have turned to the commons—historically, the shared ownership of land—as a way to express more just ways of living within and against the grasp of capitalism. Resurgent Commons reframes the commons by foregrounding relations of care and socio-ecological reproduction, while questioning anthropocentric formulations that would render the commons a set of available resources and the product of human cooperation. Interdisciplinary in nature, Tola’s book troubles universalist accounts of the commons by unearthing its ambivalent role in European colonial histories marked by racial and sexual violence and environmental destruction.

As central case studies, the book considers contemporary political projects that enact feminist, anti-racist and more-than-human practices of urban commoning in Rome, a sprawling built environment in the European South that is also a city of ruins. From transfeminist commons to struggles for repairing areas where industrial ruins and recalcitrant natures coexist, to encounters with indigenous perspectives from the Americas, resurgent commons enact forms of life that are at odds with dominant regimes of property and governance. The book shows how a reconsideration of a supposedly obsolete mode of shared ownership can enable new modes of inhabiting the earth.

Reading Better States traces the persistence of desires for the postcolonial state in an era of environmental harms and climate catastrophe. As pollution, toxicity, drought, and flood increasingly threaten peoples and environments across the global South, postcolonial writers and ordinary citizens alike have not ceded their futures to the damaged presents they inhabit. Rather, Reading Better States shows how they turn to the state as a resource, imagining postcolonial states as powerful actors and calling upon them to intervene in processes like global capitalism and environmental racism, or to provide environmental protections and basic material necessities. These utopic possibilities are concrete rather than grand, limited and situated rather than totalizing. But they are no less utopic for being quotidian.

Reading Better States challenges the anti-statism prevalent in postcolonial studies and the environmental humanities, where states are predominantly defined through violence. Seeing postcolonial states beyond their bad surfaces requires a utopian method of reading, a way of seeing the state that reads its negativity against the grain for alternative possibilities. In Reading Better States the state is Janus-faced. It is a bad actor, but it is also a site of collective hopes and concrete utopian visions. Using a wide-ranging archive of novels, films, court decisions, legislation, poetry, and testimony, Reading Better States reveals the importance of environmental concrete utopias in the present and reconsiders the postcolonial state for its interventionist possibilities as well as its violence. It does this through a utopian method that, like concrete utopias themselves, attends to negativity while stretching beyond it, seeking out visions of surplus which exceed, even if they cannot escape, the damage and disappointment of the present earth.

Reading Better States traces the persistence of desires for the postcolonial state in an era of environmental harms and climate catastrophe. As pollution, toxicity, drought, and flood increasingly threaten peoples and environments across the global South, postcolonial writers and ordinary citizens alike have not ceded their futures to the damaged presents they inhabit. Rather, Reading Better States shows how they turn to the state as a resource, imagining postcolonial states as powerful actors and calling upon them to intervene in processes like global capitalism and environmental racism, or to provide environmental protections and basic material necessities. These utopic possibilities are concrete rather than grand, limited and situated rather than totalizing. But they are no less utopic for being quotidian.

Reading Better States challenges the anti-statism prevalent in postcolonial studies and the environmental humanities, where states are predominantly defined through violence. Seeing postcolonial states beyond their bad surfaces requires a utopian method of reading, a way of seeing the state that reads its negativity against the grain for alternative possibilities. In Reading Better States the state is Janus-faced. It is a bad actor, but it is also a site of collective hopes and concrete utopian visions. Using a wide-ranging archive of novels, films, court decisions, legislation, poetry, and testimony, Reading Better States reveals the importance of environmental concrete utopias in the present and reconsiders the postcolonial state for its interventionist possibilities as well as its violence. It does this through a utopian method that, like concrete utopias themselves, attends to negativity while stretching beyond it, seeking out visions of surplus which exceed, even if they cannot escape, the damage and disappointment of the present earth.

Once dismissed as “tragedy,” the commons have been making a comeback. Amid intensifying social and environmental injustices in neoliberal regimes, scholars and activists have turned to the commons—historically, the shared ownership of land—as a way to express more just ways of living within and against the grasp of capitalism. Resurgent Commons reframes the commons by foregrounding relations of care and socio-ecological reproduction, while questioning anthropocentric formulations that would render the commons a set of available resources and the product of human cooperation. Interdisciplinary in nature, Tola’s book troubles universalist accounts of the commons by unearthing its ambivalent role in European colonial histories marked by racial and sexual violence and environmental destruction.

As central case studies, the book considers contemporary political projects that enact feminist, anti-racist and more-than-human practices of urban commoning in Rome, a sprawling built environment in the European South that is also a city of ruins. From transfeminist commons to struggles for repairing areas where industrial ruins and recalcitrant natures coexist, to encounters with indigenous perspectives from the Americas, resurgent commons enact forms of life that are at odds with dominant regimes of property and governance. The book shows how a reconsideration of a supposedly obsolete mode of shared ownership can enable new modes of inhabiting the earth.

Designs a novel analytical framework to approach transcultural food mobilities, a culinary phenomenon that has been with us for decades as a result of colonialism and globalization

Why is it surprising for some of us to read the pairing of “Chinese” with “pizzas” and “Italian” with “dumplings,” such as proposed in the book’s title? After all, in some regions of the two countries, Italians eat frequently dumplings, and Chinese frequently make baked, steamed, or fried flatbread with toppings or fillings. Furthermore, when dumplings are made in Italy by Chinese migrants or Chinese Italians, or when pizzas are made in China by Italian migrants, Chinese Italians, or Chinese without apparent ties with Italy, are these culinary products Chinese, Italian, Chinese-Italian, or something else? Why do we need to care for such labeling dilemmas?

This book shows how China-Italy food mobilities relayed in popular culture helped forge Chi­nese and Italians’ socioeconomic identities in recent decades by fundamentally shaping contempo­rary Chinese and Italian consumer cultures. This book addresses China-Italy food cultures against the backdrops of two epoch-making socioeconomic processes. During the 1980s, Chinese cuisine became the first non-European food widely available in Italy, thanks to the widespread presence of Chinese eateries. Only American fast food, which established itself in Italy around the same time, enjoyed comparable popularity as a destination for Italian culinary tourism. Meanwhile, in the early 1990s, together with American hamburgers and fried chicken, the American food chain Pizza Hut’s pizzas and spaghetti were the first non-Asian foods that post-Mao Chinese customers recognized as “Western.” The book proposes a critical framework that analyzes transcultural food mobilities by seriously assessing the confluence of diverse mobilities and their impact on food cultures. Ulti­mately, the study shows that a sophisticated interpretation of transcultural food mobilities can help address alterity and build understanding in a world of increasing political and cultural polarization.

A bold and rigorous reexamination of transcendence—uniting religion, theology, philosophy, and science—while bridging Confucian and Christian thought to explore the origins of the world and human destiny

Debating Transcendence is a groundbreaking contribution to the ongoing dialogue between Confu­cian and Christian thought by addressing the transcendence debate—a key controversy that has shaped centuries of cross-cultural intellectual exchange. Song examines whether the Confucian concept of Tian (Heaven) or Taiji (Ultimate Limit) possesses a transcendent dimension comparable to Christian understandings of the Creator God. This study revisits the historical and philosophi­cal roots of the debate, tracing its evolution from early interactions between Confucianism and Christianity during the sixteenth century to present-day discussions.

At the heart of this book is Song’s aim to construct a Confucian definition of theology and a Confucian approach to comparative theology. Grounded in a scientifically rigorous methodology that transcends the conceptual boundaries of philosophy, religion, and theology, this new approach balances rootedness and impartiality, minimizing biases and revealing shared ground. Covering essential thinkers from the West and the East—such as Plato, Augustine, Descartes, and Paul Tillich alongside Confucius, Laozi, Wang Bi, and Zhu Xi—Song explores the historical development of key concepts such as creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothing) and sheng sheng (birth birth), challenging misconceptions and highlighting underexplored commonalities and differences. Drawing from his diverse scholarly background and extensive engagement with both traditions, Song distinguishes Confucian from Daoist metaphysics and demonstrates that Confucian metaphysics, centered around the concept of generatio ex nihilo, offers a compelling framework for understanding transcendence that not only resembles but, in certain aspects, surpasses major streams of its Christian counterpart.

Readers seeking to understand the profound spiritual foundations underpinning interactions between China and the West will find Song’s work essential. Combining rigor, scope, and depth, Debating Transcendence paves the way for refreshed interactions between Confucian and Christian thought, offering insights vital to contemporary scholarship and interreligious exchange.

Introduces a new way of understanding influence, reception, and adaptation via the work of Italy’s most famous modern writer

In Transmedial Resonance, Robert A. Rushing addresses the remarkable and ongoing responses to the imagination of Italo Calvino, Italy’s most important modern writer. Since his death in 1985, Calvino’s writing has served as a constant figure of inspiration for other artists, and tellingly, that inspiration has been “more outside than inside.” Although Calvino’s reputation as a writer is immense, his influence has in fact been vastly larger outside of literature, including in architecture, city plan­ning, community organizing, design, visual arts, video games, the performing arts, and much more. That influence is not only transmedial. It has also been “more outside than inside” across national boundaries, particularly in the English-speaking world.

Rushing thinks about Calvino’s influence through the metaphor of resonance. When something resonates, he argues, it may be “inspired” to do so, but it does so in its own voice, singing its own song. In fact, resonance offers an entirely different way of thinking about influence and artistic reception, stressing the energy of the inspiration rather than fidelity to the original. In keeping with that underlying sonic metaphor, Rushing looks at specifically acoustic responses to Calvino. They include Chris Cerrone’s Pulitzer-nominated “opera in headphones” based on Invisible Cities, Lisa Mezzacappa’s Cosmicomics jazz suite, and Ashwini Ramaswamy’s multimedia dance performance of Invisible Cities, which combines traditional South Indian Bharatanatyam, urban breaking, and African American modern dance. These works, Rushing shows, tell the story of a very different Calvino, one who is (in Mezzacappa’s words) “nerdy and neurotic,” playfully perverse, and profoundly political.

Bringing together sound studies with literary studies and cultural reception, Transmedial Reso­nance argues for a radical re-imagination of how we think about artistic and cultural influence, calling for a completely new understanding of this major figure of modern Italian and world literature.

An engaging and thought-provoking translation of Paul Ricoeur’s earliest work that is essential for understanding his philosophical development

The Reflexive Method Applied to the Problem of God in Lachelier and Lagneau, now held in the Ricoeur Archive in Paris, was a qualifying thesis Ricoeur wrote at the age of twenty-one when he was just beginning his advanced university studies. In it he examines the use of the reflexive method by two important French philosophers from the nineteenth century, Jules Lachelier and Jules Lagneau. They both sought to develop an “integral metaphysics” that recognizes God as the principle underlying pure, impersonal thought and practical reason, and that requires a kind of philosophical faith. In his conclusion, Ricoeur criticizes their doctrine of God and philosophy of immanence for not being able to deal with the question of transcendence and for its failure to address concrete human existence, yet he concedes that it may be seen as a first truce in “the internecine war” between faith and reason.

Despite this criticism, Ricoeur later maintained that his own philosophy does stand “in the line of a reflexive philosophy” while remaining “within the sphere of Husserlian phenomenology” and striving to be “a hermeneutical variation of this phenomenology.” He also continued to address the question of faith and reason in works like Figuring the Sacred and (with André LaCocque) Thinking Biblically, as well as in many other essays.

The Reflexive Method Applied to the Problem of God in Lachelier and Lagneau is necessary reading for anyone doing serious work on and with Ricoeur’s philosophy.

Arts of the Border investigates the consequences of unfolding catastrophes across the world and the displacement they continue to produce. Through recent narratives and media representations of the refugee “crisis” at Europe’s edges, it tells a new story about those on the move, the technologies unleashed on them at borders, the racialized and colonial histories that inform these technologies, and the artistry with which migrants and allies bear witness to displacement. The book reorients us toward the creativity and movement of migrants themselves– their “arts of the border”—as well as toward the political force of the arts that represent them, whether in literature, documentary film, or art installations.

Sanyal proposes kino-aesthetics as a framework for capture and fugitivity at borders. From kino—to set in motion—and aesthetics— relating to sensory perception—kino-aesthetics conveys the force of bodies in motion and the image in its circulation. The book examines the simultaneity of capture and escape at thresholds of illegalization, from airport detention zones to Calais’s “jungle” and the Euro-African border at Ceuta and Melilla. What emerges throughout these case studies is a portrayal of border violence in its racial and colonial forms as well as an archive of refusal, fugitivity, and un-bordered imagining.

Challenges the assumptions made over the medieval/modern divide by examining the medieval roots of modern racism

Humanists have long insisted on a chasm separating modernity and the Middle Ages. In Bad Medi­evalism and the Modernity Problem, Kathy Lavezzo demonstrates how the temporal divide scholars typically accept is a fiction that has shaped racial discourse over a longue durée. The hard line drawn between “then” and “now” is of a piece with the line separating whiteness from humans deemed irrevocably other. Thus, Lavezzo advocates a “bad”—that is, depressing and disturbing, even nau­seating—historicism attuned to the interpenetration of race, whiteness, and periodicity in the “west.”

Teasing out the dialectical invocation of both periods by figures as diverse as W. E. B. Du Bois, Carolyn Bynum, Stuart Hall, Johan Huizinga, Paule Marshall, Karl Marx, Gloria Naylor, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Sylvia Wynter, Lavezzo demonstrates how the tension between and across categories of the “medieval” and the “modern” has mobilized intense emotional and political responses.

Inspired by Lavezzo’s discovery that Hall, the beloved founder of cultural studies, planned as a student at Oxford to become a medievalist but was dissuaded from that path by his teacher Tolkien, Bad Medievalism and the Modernity Problem unpacks the implications of that charged encounter. Central chapters contrast Tolkien’s white heritage medievalism with a speculative inquiry into the Piers Plowman dissertation that Hall never wrote.

Other chapters assess the white “feel” of periodization by scholars, including Jacob Burckhardt, Huizinga, Fredric Jameson, and Bynum, and draw on theorists, including Du Bois and Wynter, to chart the medieval roots of a racialized discourse of progress and primitivism. Bad Medievalism and the Modernity Problem culminates in new readings of Gloria Naylor’s Bailey’s Cafe and Paule Marshall’s The Fisher King, demonstrating their importance as productively pessimistic engagements with the racial legacies of both the medieval and the modern.

Illusive Materialisms brings a close attention to gender to bear on the philosophical and political argument that sensual pleasure, framed as a mode of feminine responsiveness, is the primary business of enlightenment. Ultimately, the book argues on behalf of a history of feminine speculation that resonates with contemporary feminist and queer efforts to recenter pleasure and its generative illusions in the necessary work of critique. Through its analysis of a materialism that is often hiding in plain sight, Illusive Materialisms explores different ways to cultivate delight in a world in ruin.

While most studies of materialism during the French Enlightenment focus on works by men, Illusive Materialisms foregrounds responses by women to the materialist currents that cut across the eighteenth-century canon and that aim to recast femininity as the privileged condition of the modern, enlightened subject. For the women writers examined here, femininity is both a form that is embodied and an art that is practiced, often with transformative effects.

Illusive Materialisms illuminates the crucial role played by femininity in a long history of materialist philosophy. At the same time, it uncovers a specifically feminine engagement with the materialist thought and practice of eighteenth-century France. The book shows how three women authors (Madeleine de Puisieux, Émilie Du Châtelet, and Françoise de Graffigny) rework, revise, and reuse materialist texts and ideas in order to craft an ethic of pleasure whose effects traverse their writing and their life. At the same time, it demonstrates that feminine forms, images, and persons lie at the heart of a tradition of materialist thought stretching from antiquity into the present day.

Brings together geographies and methodologies often kept apart by the difficulties of researching such a broad-ranging topic as the war

Shots in the Dark offers cutting-edge scholarship across different subfields in World War II history, revealing new insights into how this crucial conflict was planned, experienced, and fought. Twelve chapters demonstrate the broad scope of wartime innovation and how the war functioned as a global turning point, driving change at all levels of human society, from government institutions to individual identities.

Contributors collaborated in a vibrant workshops series sponsored by the North American branch of the Second World War Research Group (SWWRGNA), an organization that emerged to nurture scholarship on the global war and unite scholars fragmented in narrower regional and methodological “stovepipes” to consider the war as a whole. The SWWRGNA and this volume showcase the work of diverse historians across subfields—operational, cultural, gender, social, intelligence, and diplomatic history. This approach exposes the Second World War as a catalyst for overlapping global changes that revolutionized the world after 1945. These scholars reveal continuities and parallels in wartime experiences that would remain invisible in narrowly focused projects.

The volume establishes three frameworks for understanding and interpreting changes the war provoked: 1) institutional adaptation, 2) “totalization,” or the militarization of civilians, and 3) cultural transformation. Each of the three frameworks is explored from four vantage points. Geographies are deliberately contrasted within each framework to examine the broad scope of that level of war-driven change.

Anthropologically explores the entanglement of theology and politics among contemporary Orthodox Christians

Much of the anthropological literature on Christianity tends to concentrate on Protestants and Catholics in the Global South. The contemporary scholarly interest in such communities descends from histories of missionization and colonization of these regions, as well as a sense of their theologi­cal kinship with the secularized visions of Western political and social life. Orthodox Christianity, however, has largely been rendered marginal in mainstream anthropological engagement because of its theological and social alterity from such Western anthropological traditions of knowledge production. Because of this, Orthodox Christian lifeworlds in and beyond the academy are cre­ated, contested, and transformed in relation to various “others,” whether they be religious, political, secular, or historical, with an eye toward a discursive opposition between modernity and Orthodoxy.

Each of the essays in Anthropologies of Orthodox Christianity texture a new trajectory in the study of this religious tradition that take seriously the theopolitical aspects of Orthodox life through anthropological inquiry. The volume engages and moves beyond the tension between populist and institutional framings of religion and critically addresses the ontological gap in both anthropology and theology as social, cultural, and geopolitical interest in Orthodox Christianity continues to expand and grow.

Life in the Cracks is a rich ethnographic portrait of law, violence, and resistance in Haiti. In a contemporary context marked by international interference, global capitalism, and state collapse, Haitians face complex challenges that are largely ignored and misunderstood. By examining the most unexpected inflections of ordinary life, Life in the Cracks offers a well-grounded account of people’s experience of law in their lives. The book describes what it means to endure violence partly engendered by the law, and thus to live up to one’s disappointment with the law itself.

By not taking for granted the places where the law appears, Life in the Cracks asks legal anthropology to confront questions beyond law-making and law-application, dispute resolution, and social order. In everyday life’s textures of messy subtleties and contradictory movements that are never reconciled, Life in the Cracks reconsiders the place of law in human affairs. Motta reimagines how people cope with their disillusionments by reinventing relationships with each other. What had appeared questions of law and justice turn out to be questions of life and death. As life resists annihilation, Motta shows, many Haitians have found ways to breathe new life into the present and make the future worth fighting for.

Life in the Cracks: Law, Violence, and Resistance in Haiti is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.

Spiro Jabbour’s enigmatic exploration of the resonances between the Eastern Christian science of the soul and psychoanalysis, now in annotated English translation

Confession and Psychoanalysis, written by Spiro Jabbour—the prolific Syrian monastic, scholar, and translator—offers a speculative formulation of mystical ethics in the aftermath of the postcolonial loss of tradition. Jabbour reads Freud’s theories of the drive, transference, and the unconscious through Orthodox Christian writings on the purification of the heart and transfiguration the soul in the works of, among others, John Climacus, Maximos the Confessor, and Gregory Palamas.

Composed in 1983 in Homs, Confession and Psychoanalysis is the written account of the spiritual guidance Jabbour offered to a seeker who queried him concerning the practice of confession. Taking the question of spiritual interlocution and the encounter between Freudian psychoanalysis and Orthodox asceticism as its launching point, Jabbour’s text moves across a staggering breadth of topics—Islamic Sufism, psychotherapy and psycho-somatic medicine, Arabic poetics and linguistics, hesychasm, counterfeit cultural life in the aftermath of war and dispossession, and the destructive ambivalence of civilization. As such, Confession and Psychoanalysis is a window into a dynamic Middle Eastern Christian tradition that speaks with and beyond a devastated present.

The multi-century event of enslavement and colonialism changed the cultural and political imagination of the Atlantic world. We still live and work in the horizon of that event. It was an event that placed a violent Manichean structure of antiblackness at the foundation of our shared world. What kinds of life are possible in nihilistic, antiblack worlds of social death? Is it possible to imagine life outside the reach of those worlds? What decolonial methods help us understand that form of life in relation to expressive cultures of resistance and refusal?

At the Margins of Nihilism develops a theoretical frame through a comparative reading of Jacques Derrida and Orlando Patterson. Reading between deconstruction and social death, Drabinski describes a notion of life as interstitial, situated outside the play of life and death in systems of antiblackness. This notion of life has broad epistemological, existential, and ontological implications.

Drawing from a diverse set of sources including Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Gloria Anzaldúa, and others, At the Margins of Nihilism shows how the nihilisms of Richard Wright, Frantz Fanon, James Baldwin, and contemporary afropessimism operate as a closed system. Each system is opened by vernacular forms of life and practices of refusal. Those forms and practices speak to the power and significance of life that persists across centuries of antiblack culture, social life, and political hegemony.

An innovative historical analysis that draws upon performance and theatre studies to stage the ruination and demise of the eighteenth-century Mexican Jesuits

Inventories of Ruin dramatizes the ruination of the Mexican Province of the Society of Jesus as their power and influence waned over a period of approximately fifty years in the eighteenth-century Spanish Atlantic world. To tell the story of the arrest, migration, and ultimate dissolution of this powerful organization of missionary men, three sets of “inventories” are juxtaposed. The first is composed by notaries, who record the objects left behind by the Jesuits at a college in Puebla de Los Angeles when they were arrested on June 25, 1767. The second is an “inventory of the self,” a conversion narrative composed by a Swedish convert who encounters the Jesuit refugees while shipboard on the Mediterranean Sea. The last is an inventory of the dead written by an exiled ex-Jesuit in Bologna, Italy, whose necrology memorializes the life and death of his brethren from the now defunct Mexican province.

Inventories of Ruin is about the ruination and disappearance of Jesuit ways of being that counters Jesuit historiography’s framing of this period as a moment of “suppression.” At the same time, Inventories of Ruin is about how this story of ruination appears in the archives. The book studies the epistemological drama of inventorying, as writers labor to uproot religious power, to locate and secure a religious self, and to capture religious histories. What weighs upon these texts is a sense of anxiety because the question of what will be found animates authors whose literary exertions appear as historiographical struggles to have a say over what appears and what vanishes before leaving the stage, or before pushing others toward the exit.

A crucial intervention at the intersection of ecotheology and trauma theology

We are in the midst of a global ecological crisis. At times, the scale of the suffering involved can be hard to fully comprehend. The whole planetary ecosystem feels out of kilter. Meanwhile, trauma theorists, and society at large, have become increasingly aware of the incidence of trauma in a growing variety of contexts. In Witnessing a Wounded World, Timothy Middleton asks what might be gained by viewing ecological suffering through the lens of trauma.

By bringing concepts and methodologies from trauma theology to bear on questions that arise within ecotheology, Middleton engages a series of pressing questions. What kind of traumas are being precipitated by anthropogenic climate change and accelerating biodiversity loss? What would it mean to envisage the Earth itself as traumatized? And how might a Christian theologian respond?

From large-scale deforestation and opencast mining to rampaging wildfires and fracturing ice sheets, the Earth itself is subject to intense devastation. Witnessing a Wounded World analyzes such phenomena in terms of three traumatic ruptures—to communication, to flesh, and to time. Drawing on practices of witnessing and the insights of deep incarnation Christologies, Middleton proceeds to offer a theological account of this ecological trauma. For Christians, a model of Christic witnessing can bring the Earth’s suffering to light.

As the first sustained treatment of ecological trauma to address the trauma of the Earth itself, Witnessing a Wounded World makes a profound contribution to discussions of suffering, faith, and the present ecological emergency.

Witnessing a Wounded World is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.

“Will you not memorize a little poetry to halt the slaughter?” the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote. Darwish’s poetic statement points to world-evacuating and genocidal violences—in a triangulation of Palestine, Iraq, and the American settler state—as his language recalls us to a sonority in utterance and acts of refusal in collective form. Through readings of Arabic and Arab poetry, art, translation, and philosophy, Jeffrey Sacks illumines an indetermined, non-accumulative, non-propertied manner of lingual doing—across post-Ottoman topographies and states, and in excess of any single language—where language is a practice in sociality, the social is indistinct from the ontological, and being is a poetic mode—what this book calls “poeticality.”

Poeticality studies the Lebanese-American poet and painter Etel Adnan, the Iraqi poet and translator Khālid al-Maʿālī, philosophers in the Arabic peripatetic tradition, and writings of Karl Marx, Paul Celan, Walter Benjamin, and others, to demonstrate a sense of form wholly other than what is advanced in self-determined social existence, linguistic self-understanding, and philosophical self-representation—a manner of address and a social pose, which Sacks summarizes under the heading “settler life.”

Settler life—a form of life, a practice of reading, and an asymmetric distribution of social destruction—asserts itself as a generalized and regulating attack upon Black and Indigenous life, and upon all forms of nonwhite, non-Christian, non-heteronormative existence. “Everything is in the language we use,” the Oglala Lakota poet Layli Long Soldier has written. This book—learning from Long Soldier’s observation and with Darwish’s sense of the poetic—affirms the demand for Indigenous sovereignty, in Palestine, in Turtle Island, and elsewhere, a demand which, through the collective acts occasioned in it, decomposes and deposes all sovereign forms and all stately legalities, in refusal of settler life.

Holocaust and Hope shows one of our preeminent critics grappling with a subject to which he had returned for decades: literary, cultural, political, and historiographical implications of the Holocaust and its aftermath in Europe and America. In his last planned book, Geoffrey Hartman confronts contradictions that pose a challenge for our present and future. The passing of Holocaust survivors and their immediate families makes continued acts of witnessing more necessary even as distance in time makes the identities and acts of future witnessing more complicated. In addition, the particular kinds of amplification that we may be accustomed to or expect from our contemporary media environment can call forth not an intensity of response but rather an inertia, an “unreality effect,” that can come unexpectedly from the heightening of the real, or the hyperreality of too much, too fast, too strong.

Holocaust and Hope takes seriously the difference between our coming after Auschwitz and our being past it. With characteristic intensity and humanity, Hartman’s essays explore the full complexity of how to transmit knowledge of the Holocaust to the future in ways that avoid simplification, the illusion of synthesis, or the aspiration to final closure, on the one hand, or compulsive repetition on the other. A significant part of the answer, for Hartman, requires special attention to the role of literary and audiovisual forms in promoting an active witnessing to extreme suffering that is relevant both for our time and the encroaching future.

WINNER, 2024 ALDO AND JEANNE SCAGLIONE PUBLICATION AWARD FOR A MANUSCRIPT IN ITALIAN LITERARY STUDIES, MODERN LANGUAGES ASSOCIATION

Introduces a way to study migration that privileges literary analysis over and against sociological data and insists on the importance of culture in the production of political identities

This book argues that Italians first became racialized as white in São Paulo, Brazil, at the turn of the twentieth century. Whereas Italians in the United States struggled with xenophobia and were often not fully acknowledged as white, in São Paulo, due to a series of social, economic, and cultural fac­tors, Italians became closely associated with ideas of whiteness, modernization, and civilization. This book brings to light how the overlooked experiences of Italians in Brazil complicate conventional narratives about the racial ambiguity and oppression of Italians in the Americas, on the one hand, and the conflation of Italians with cultural and economic backwardness in Europe, on the other.

In the book, close readings of a wide array of texts—the travel writings of Gina Lombroso Ferrero, the short stories of Antônio de Alcântara Machado, the columns of José Correia Leite, the political essays of Miguel Reale, and the memoirs of Zélia Gattai—trace a “New World Italian discourse,” or the overlapping narratives about Italian racial, economic, and cultural superiority that constructed and maintained Italians’ status as a model minority in São Paulo. These discursive practices represent essential antecedents to the racial nationalism that reared its ugly head in Italy throughout the twentieth century and remain central to contemporary debates about national identity in the Italian public sphere.

The Italian Colony of São Paulo: Race, Class, and Cultural Capital in Brazil is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.

WINNER, 2024 ALDO AND JEANNE SCAGLIONE PUBLICATION AWARD FOR A MANUSCRIPT IN ITALIAN LITERARY STUDIES, MODERN LANGUAGES ASSOCIATION

Introduces a way to study migration that privileges literary analysis over and against sociological data and insists on the importance of culture in the production of political identities

This book argues that Italians first became racialized as white in São Paulo, Brazil, at the turn of the twentieth century. Whereas Italians in the United States struggled with xenophobia and were often not fully acknowledged as white, in São Paulo, due to a series of social, economic, and cultural fac­tors, Italians became closely associated with ideas of whiteness, modernization, and civilization. This book brings to light how the overlooked experiences of Italians in Brazil complicate conventional narratives about the racial ambiguity and oppression of Italians in the Americas, on the one hand, and the conflation of Italians with cultural and economic backwardness in Europe, on the other.

In the book, close readings of a wide array of texts—the travel writings of Gina Lombroso Ferrero, the short stories of Antônio de Alcântara Machado, the columns of José Correia Leite, the political essays of Miguel Reale, and the memoirs of Zélia Gattai—trace a “New World Italian discourse,” or the overlapping narratives about Italian racial, economic, and cultural superiority that constructed and maintained Italians’ status as a model minority in São Paulo. These discursive practices represent essential antecedents to the racial nationalism that reared its ugly head in Italy throughout the twentieth century and remain central to contemporary debates about national identity in the Italian public sphere.

The Italian Colony of São Paulo: Race, Class, and Cultural Capital in Brazil is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.

Anthropologically explores the entanglement of theology and politics among contemporary Orthodox Christians

Much of the anthropological literature on Christianity tends to concentrate on Protestants and Catholics in the Global South. The contemporary scholarly interest in such communities descends from histories of missionization and colonization of these regions, as well as a sense of their theologi­cal kinship with the secularized visions of Western political and social life. Orthodox Christianity, however, has largely been rendered marginal in mainstream anthropological engagement because of its theological and social alterity from such Western anthropological traditions of knowledge production. Because of this, Orthodox Christian lifeworlds in and beyond the academy are cre­ated, contested, and transformed in relation to various “others,” whether they be religious, political, secular, or historical, with an eye toward a discursive opposition between modernity and Orthodoxy.

Each of the essays in Anthropologies of Orthodox Christianity texture a new trajectory in the study of this religious tradition that take seriously the theopolitical aspects of Orthodox life through anthropological inquiry. The volume engages and moves beyond the tension between populist and institutional framings of religion and critically addresses the ontological gap in both anthropology and theology as social, cultural, and geopolitical interest in Orthodox Christianity continues to expand and grow.

Challenges the assumptions made over the medieval/modern divide by examining the medieval roots of modern racism

Humanists have long insisted on a chasm separating modernity and the Middle Ages. In Bad Medi­evalism and the Modernity Problem, Kathy Lavezzo demonstrates how the temporal divide scholars typically accept is a fiction that has shaped racial discourse over a longue durée. The hard line drawn between “then” and “now” is of a piece with the line separating whiteness from humans deemed irrevocably other. Thus, Lavezzo advocates a “bad”—that is, depressing and disturbing, even nau­seating—historicism attuned to the interpenetration of race, whiteness, and periodicity in the “west.”

Teasing out the dialectical invocation of both periods by figures as diverse as W. E. B. Du Bois, Carolyn Bynum, Stuart Hall, Johan Huizinga, Paule Marshall, Karl Marx, Gloria Naylor, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Sylvia Wynter, Lavezzo demonstrates how the tension between and across categories of the “medieval” and the “modern” has mobilized intense emotional and political responses.

Inspired by Lavezzo’s discovery that Hall, the beloved founder of cultural studies, planned as a student at Oxford to become a medievalist but was dissuaded from that path by his teacher Tolkien, Bad Medievalism and the Modernity Problem unpacks the implications of that charged encounter. Central chapters contrast Tolkien’s white heritage medievalism with a speculative inquiry into the Piers Plowman dissertation that Hall never wrote.

Other chapters assess the white “feel” of periodization by scholars, including Jacob Burckhardt, Huizinga, Fredric Jameson, and Bynum, and draw on theorists, including Du Bois and Wynter, to chart the medieval roots of a racialized discourse of progress and primitivism. Bad Medievalism and the Modernity Problem culminates in new readings of Gloria Naylor’s Bailey’s Cafe and Paule Marshall’s The Fisher King, demonstrating their importance as productively pessimistic engagements with the racial legacies of both the medieval and the modern.

A crucial intervention at the intersection of ecotheology and trauma theology

We are in the midst of a global ecological crisis. At times, the scale of the suffering involved can be hard to fully comprehend. The whole planetary ecosystem feels out of kilter. Meanwhile, trauma theorists, and society at large, have become increasingly aware of the incidence of trauma in a growing variety of contexts. In Witnessing a Wounded World, Timothy Middleton asks what might be gained by viewing ecological suffering through the lens of trauma.

By bringing concepts and methodologies from trauma theology to bear on questions that arise within ecotheology, Middleton engages a series of pressing questions. What kind of traumas are being precipitated by anthropogenic climate change and accelerating biodiversity loss? What would it mean to envisage the Earth itself as traumatized? And how might a Christian theologian respond?

From large-scale deforestation and opencast mining to rampaging wildfires and fracturing ice sheets, the Earth itself is subject to intense devastation. Witnessing a Wounded World analyzes such phenomena in terms of three traumatic ruptures—to communication, to flesh, and to time. Drawing on practices of witnessing and the insights of deep incarnation Christologies, Middleton proceeds to offer a theological account of this ecological trauma. For Christians, a model of Christic witnessing can bring the Earth’s suffering to light.

As the first sustained treatment of ecological trauma to address the trauma of the Earth itself, Witnessing a Wounded World makes a profound contribution to discussions of suffering, faith, and the present ecological emergency.

Witnessing a Wounded World is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.

Designs a novel analytical framework to approach transcultural food mobilities, a culinary phenomenon that has been with us for decades as a result of colonialism and globalization

Why is it surprising for some of us to read the pairing of “Chinese” with “pizzas” and “Italian” with “dumplings,” such as proposed in the book’s title? After all, in some regions of the two countries, Italians eat frequently dumplings, and Chinese frequently make baked, steamed, or fried flatbread with toppings or fillings. Furthermore, when dumplings are made in Italy by Chinese migrants or Chinese Italians, or when pizzas are made in China by Italian migrants, Chinese Italians, or Chinese without apparent ties with Italy, are these culinary products Chinese, Italian, Chinese-Italian, or something else? Why do we need to care for such labeling dilemmas?

This book shows how China-Italy food mobilities relayed in popular culture helped forge Chi­nese and Italians’ socioeconomic identities in recent decades by fundamentally shaping contempo­rary Chinese and Italian consumer cultures. This book addresses China-Italy food cultures against the backdrops of two epoch-making socioeconomic processes. During the 1980s, Chinese cuisine became the first non-European food widely available in Italy, thanks to the widespread presence of Chinese eateries. Only American fast food, which established itself in Italy around the same time, enjoyed comparable popularity as a destination for Italian culinary tourism. Meanwhile, in the early 1990s, together with American hamburgers and fried chicken, the American food chain Pizza Hut’s pizzas and spaghetti were the first non-Asian foods that post-Mao Chinese customers recognized as “Western.” The book proposes a critical framework that analyzes transcultural food mobilities by seriously assessing the confluence of diverse mobilities and their impact on food cultures. Ulti­mately, the study shows that a sophisticated interpretation of transcultural food mobilities can help address alterity and build understanding in a world of increasing political and cultural polarization.

A groundbreaking investigation of how representations of Orthodox Christian saints serve as means of resistance amid cultural and political domination

On the eastern Mediterranean island of Cyprus, repeatedly conquered and colonized, Orthodox Christians have long struggled for political self-determination, agricultural sustainability, and spiri­tual wholeness. Saint George Liberator illuminates the intimate interplay of Christian theology and Mediterranean politics through the lens of St. George: the martyred soldier of pre-Constantinian Christianity, the liberator of captives and protector of the downtrodden, the dragonslayer of medieval legend. A saint beloved by Christians and Muslims alike, St. George’s representations across many different media are upheld as means of resistance and hope in contexts of domina­tion and suffering. The book offers a profound and original reading of Orthodox hagiography, demonstrating how hagiography is not only an art form of historical significance but also a vibrant, living theology of liberation amid struggles to be whole and free.

Saint George Liberator is interdisciplinary in its methodology and scope, deepening its vivid ethnographic narration through conversation with sociological theory and the historical theology that has shaped Orthodox Christian society and consciousness over the course of centuries. Enmeshed in the multicultural complexity of the Ottoman and British Empires, modern Cyprus offers a case study of how colonized and colonizing populations may turn to the same religious repertoires for understanding themselves and one another, telling opposing stories with shared symbols and claiming the means of interpretation as a path of cultural resistance. As a case study in interreligious imagination and the political power of vernacular theology, the book speaks of psychosocial dynamics that far exceed their enactment in Cyprus. It shows that Christian saints, mediated diversely in material and intellectual culture, may not only propose magnetic alternatives to the world as it is but also directly aid in forming Christian publics for liberative politics in the present.

Brings together geographies and methodologies often kept apart by the difficulties of researching such a broad-ranging topic as the war

Shots in the Dark offers cutting-edge scholarship across different subfields in World War II history, revealing new insights into how this crucial conflict was planned, experienced, and fought. Twelve chapters demonstrate the broad scope of wartime innovation and how the war functioned as a global turning point, driving change at all levels of human society, from government institutions to individual identities.

Contributors collaborated in a vibrant workshops series sponsored by the North American branch of the Second World War Research Group (SWWRGNA), an organization that emerged to nurture scholarship on the global war and unite scholars fragmented in narrower regional and methodological “stovepipes” to consider the war as a whole. The SWWRGNA and this volume showcase the work of diverse historians across subfields—operational, cultural, gender, social, intelligence, and diplomatic history. This approach exposes the Second World War as a catalyst for overlapping global changes that revolutionized the world after 1945. These scholars reveal continuities and parallels in wartime experiences that would remain invisible in narrowly focused projects.

The volume establishes three frameworks for understanding and interpreting changes the war provoked: 1) institutional adaptation, 2) “totalization,” or the militarization of civilians, and 3) cultural transformation. Each of the three frameworks is explored from four vantage points. Geographies are deliberately contrasted within each framework to examine the broad scope of that level of war-driven change.

Illusive Materialisms brings a close attention to gender to bear on the philosophical and political argument that sensual pleasure, framed as a mode of feminine responsiveness, is the primary business of enlightenment. Ultimately, the book argues on behalf of a history of feminine speculation that resonates with contemporary feminist and queer efforts to recenter pleasure and its generative illusions in the necessary work of critique. Through its analysis of a materialism that is often hiding in plain sight, Illusive Materialisms explores different ways to cultivate delight in a world in ruin.

While most studies of materialism during the French Enlightenment focus on works by men, Illusive Materialisms foregrounds responses by women to the materialist currents that cut across the eighteenth-century canon and that aim to recast femininity as the privileged condition of the modern, enlightened subject. For the women writers examined here, femininity is both a form that is embodied and an art that is practiced, often with transformative effects.

Illusive Materialisms illuminates the crucial role played by femininity in a long history of materialist philosophy. At the same time, it uncovers a specifically feminine engagement with the materialist thought and practice of eighteenth-century France. The book shows how three women authors (Madeleine de Puisieux, Émilie Du Châtelet, and Françoise de Graffigny) rework, revise, and reuse materialist texts and ideas in order to craft an ethic of pleasure whose effects traverse their writing and their life. At the same time, it demonstrates that feminine forms, images, and persons lie at the heart of a tradition of materialist thought stretching from antiquity into the present day.

An engaging and thought-provoking translation of Paul Ricoeur’s earliest work that is essential for understanding his philosophical development

The Reflexive Method Applied to the Problem of God in Lachelier and Lagneau, now held in the Ricoeur Archive in Paris, was a qualifying thesis Ricoeur wrote at the age of twenty-one when he was just beginning his advanced university studies. In it he examines the use of the reflexive method by two important French philosophers from the nineteenth century, Jules Lachelier and Jules Lagneau. They both sought to develop an “integral metaphysics” that recognizes God as the principle underlying pure, impersonal thought and practical reason, and that requires a kind of philosophical faith. In his conclusion, Ricoeur criticizes their doctrine of God and philosophy of immanence for not being able to deal with the question of transcendence and for its failure to address concrete human existence, yet he concedes that it may be seen as a first truce in “the internecine war” between faith and reason.

Despite this criticism, Ricoeur later maintained that his own philosophy does stand “in the line of a reflexive philosophy” while remaining “within the sphere of Husserlian phenomenology” and striving to be “a hermeneutical variation of this phenomenology.” He also continued to address the question of faith and reason in works like Figuring the Sacred and (with André LaCocque) Thinking Biblically, as well as in many other essays.

The Reflexive Method Applied to the Problem of God in Lachelier and Lagneau is necessary reading for anyone doing serious work on and with Ricoeur’s philosophy.

A bold and rigorous reexamination of transcendence—uniting religion, theology, philosophy, and science—while bridging Confucian and Christian thought to explore the origins of the world and human destiny

Debating Transcendence is a groundbreaking contribution to the ongoing dialogue between Confu­cian and Christian thought by addressing the transcendence debate—a key controversy that has shaped centuries of cross-cultural intellectual exchange. Song examines whether the Confucian concept of Tian (Heaven) or Taiji (Ultimate Limit) possesses a transcendent dimension comparable to Christian understandings of the Creator God. This study revisits the historical and philosophi­cal roots of the debate, tracing its evolution from early interactions between Confucianism and Christianity during the sixteenth century to present-day discussions.

At the heart of this book is Song’s aim to construct a Confucian definition of theology and a Confucian approach to comparative theology. Grounded in a scientifically rigorous methodology that transcends the conceptual boundaries of philosophy, religion, and theology, this new approach balances rootedness and impartiality, minimizing biases and revealing shared ground. Covering essential thinkers from the West and the East—such as Plato, Augustine, Descartes, and Paul Tillich alongside Confucius, Laozi, Wang Bi, and Zhu Xi—Song explores the historical development of key concepts such as creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothing) and sheng sheng (birth birth), challenging misconceptions and highlighting underexplored commonalities and differences. Drawing from his diverse scholarly background and extensive engagement with both traditions, Song distinguishes Confucian from Daoist metaphysics and demonstrates that Confucian metaphysics, centered around the concept of generatio ex nihilo, offers a compelling framework for understanding transcendence that not only resembles but, in certain aspects, surpasses major streams of its Christian counterpart.

Readers seeking to understand the profound spiritual foundations underpinning interactions between China and the West will find Song’s work essential. Combining rigor, scope, and depth, Debating Transcendence paves the way for refreshed interactions between Confucian and Christian thought, offering insights vital to contemporary scholarship and interreligious exchange.

“Will you not memorize a little poetry to halt the slaughter?” the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote. Darwish’s poetic statement points to world-evacuating and genocidal violences—in a triangulation of Palestine, Iraq, and the American settler state—as his language recalls us to a sonority in utterance and acts of refusal in collective form. Through readings of Arabic and Arab poetry, art, translation, and philosophy, Jeffrey Sacks illumines an indetermined, non-accumulative, non-propertied manner of lingual doing—across post-Ottoman topographies and states, and in excess of any single language—where language is a practice in sociality, the social is indistinct from the ontological, and being is a poetic mode—what this book calls “poeticality.”

Poeticality studies the Lebanese-American poet and painter Etel Adnan, the Iraqi poet and translator Khālid al-Maʿālī, philosophers in the Arabic peripatetic tradition, and writings of Karl Marx, Paul Celan, Walter Benjamin, and others, to demonstrate a sense of form wholly other than what is advanced in self-determined social existence, linguistic self-understanding, and philosophical self-representation—a manner of address and a social pose, which Sacks summarizes under the heading “settler life.”

Settler life—a form of life, a practice of reading, and an asymmetric distribution of social destruction—asserts itself as a generalized and regulating attack upon Black and Indigenous life, and upon all forms of nonwhite, non-Christian, non-heteronormative existence. “Everything is in the language we use,” the Oglala Lakota poet Layli Long Soldier has written. This book—learning from Long Soldier’s observation and with Darwish’s sense of the poetic—affirms the demand for Indigenous sovereignty, in Palestine, in Turtle Island, and elsewhere, a demand which, through the collective acts occasioned in it, decomposes and deposes all sovereign forms and all stately legalities, in refusal of settler life.

Life in the Cracks is a rich ethnographic portrait of law, violence, and resistance in Haiti. In a contemporary context marked by international interference, global capitalism, and state collapse, Haitians face complex challenges that are largely ignored and misunderstood. By examining the most unexpected inflections of ordinary life, Life in the Cracks offers a well-grounded account of people’s experience of law in their lives. The book describes what it means to endure violence partly engendered by the law, and thus to live up to one’s disappointment with the law itself.

By not taking for granted the places where the law appears, Life in the Cracks asks legal anthropology to confront questions beyond law-making and law-application, dispute resolution, and social order. In everyday life’s textures of messy subtleties and contradictory movements that are never reconciled, Life in the Cracks reconsiders the place of law in human affairs. Motta reimagines how people cope with their disillusionments by reinventing relationships with each other. What had appeared questions of law and justice turn out to be questions of life and death. As life resists annihilation, Motta shows, many Haitians have found ways to breathe new life into the present and make the future worth fighting for.

Life in the Cracks: Law, Violence, and Resistance in Haiti is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.

Spiro Jabbour’s enigmatic exploration of the resonances between the Eastern Christian science of the soul and psychoanalysis, now in annotated English translation

Confession and Psychoanalysis, written by Spiro Jabbour—the prolific Syrian monastic, scholar, and translator—offers a speculative formulation of mystical ethics in the aftermath of the postcolonial loss of tradition. Jabbour reads Freud’s theories of the drive, transference, and the unconscious through Orthodox Christian writings on the purification of the heart and transfiguration the soul in the works of, among others, John Climacus, Maximos the Confessor, and Gregory Palamas.

Composed in 1983 in Homs, Confession and Psychoanalysis is the written account of the spiritual guidance Jabbour offered to a seeker who queried him concerning the practice of confession. Taking the question of spiritual interlocution and the encounter between Freudian psychoanalysis and Orthodox asceticism as its launching point, Jabbour’s text moves across a staggering breadth of topics—Islamic Sufism, psychotherapy and psycho-somatic medicine, Arabic poetics and linguistics, hesychasm, counterfeit cultural life in the aftermath of war and dispossession, and the destructive ambivalence of civilization. As such, Confession and Psychoanalysis is a window into a dynamic Middle Eastern Christian tradition that speaks with and beyond a devastated present.

Arts of the Border investigates the consequences of unfolding catastrophes across the world and the displacement they continue to produce. Through recent narratives and media representations of the refugee “crisis” at Europe’s edges, it tells a new story about those on the move, the technologies unleashed on them at borders, the racialized and colonial histories that inform these technologies, and the artistry with which migrants and allies bear witness to displacement. The book reorients us toward the creativity and movement of migrants themselves– their “arts of the border”—as well as toward the political force of the arts that represent them, whether in literature, documentary film, or art installations.

Sanyal proposes kino-aesthetics as a framework for capture and fugitivity at borders. From kino—to set in motion—and aesthetics— relating to sensory perception—kino-aesthetics conveys the force of bodies in motion and the image in its circulation. The book examines the simultaneity of capture and escape at thresholds of illegalization, from airport detention zones to Calais’s “jungle” and the Euro-African border at Ceuta and Melilla. What emerges throughout these case studies is a portrayal of border violence in its racial and colonial forms as well as an archive of refusal, fugitivity, and un-bordered imagining.

An innovative historical analysis that draws upon performance and theatre studies to stage the ruination and demise of the eighteenth-century Mexican Jesuits

Inventories of Ruin dramatizes the ruination of the Mexican Province of the Society of Jesus as their power and influence waned over a period of approximately fifty years in the eighteenth-century Spanish Atlantic world. To tell the story of the arrest, migration, and ultimate dissolution of this powerful organization of missionary men, three sets of “inventories” are juxtaposed. The first is composed by notaries, who record the objects left behind by the Jesuits at a college in Puebla de Los Angeles when they were arrested on June 25, 1767. The second is an “inventory of the self,” a conversion narrative composed by a Swedish convert who encounters the Jesuit refugees while shipboard on the Mediterranean Sea. The last is an inventory of the dead written by an exiled ex-Jesuit in Bologna, Italy, whose necrology memorializes the life and death of his brethren from the now defunct Mexican province.

Inventories of Ruin is about the ruination and disappearance of Jesuit ways of being that counters Jesuit historiography’s framing of this period as a moment of “suppression.” At the same time, Inventories of Ruin is about how this story of ruination appears in the archives. The book studies the epistemological drama of inventorying, as writers labor to uproot religious power, to locate and secure a religious self, and to capture religious histories. What weighs upon these texts is a sense of anxiety because the question of what will be found animates authors whose literary exertions appear as historiographical struggles to have a say over what appears and what vanishes before leaving the stage, or before pushing others toward the exit.

Introduces a new way of understanding influence, reception, and adaptation via the work of Italy’s most famous modern writer

In Transmedial Resonance, Robert A. Rushing addresses the remarkable and ongoing responses to the imagination of Italo Calvino, Italy’s most important modern writer. Since his death in 1985, Calvino’s writing has served as a constant figure of inspiration for other artists, and tellingly, that inspiration has been “more outside than inside.” Although Calvino’s reputation as a writer is immense, his influence has in fact been vastly larger outside of literature, including in architecture, city plan­ning, community organizing, design, visual arts, video games, the performing arts, and much more. That influence is not only transmedial. It has also been “more outside than inside” across national boundaries, particularly in the English-speaking world.

Rushing thinks about Calvino’s influence through the metaphor of resonance. When something resonates, he argues, it may be “inspired” to do so, but it does so in its own voice, singing its own song. In fact, resonance offers an entirely different way of thinking about influence and artistic reception, stressing the energy of the inspiration rather than fidelity to the original. In keeping with that underlying sonic metaphor, Rushing looks at specifically acoustic responses to Calvino. They include Chris Cerrone’s Pulitzer-nominated “opera in headphones” based on Invisible Cities, Lisa Mezzacappa’s Cosmicomics jazz suite, and Ashwini Ramaswamy’s multimedia dance performance of Invisible Cities, which combines traditional South Indian Bharatanatyam, urban breaking, and African American modern dance. These works, Rushing shows, tell the story of a very different Calvino, one who is (in Mezzacappa’s words) “nerdy and neurotic,” playfully perverse, and profoundly political.

Bringing together sound studies with literary studies and cultural reception, Transmedial Reso­nance argues for a radical re-imagination of how we think about artistic and cultural influence, calling for a completely new understanding of this major figure of modern Italian and world literature.

The multi-century event of enslavement and colonialism changed the cultural and political imagination of the Atlantic world. We still live and work in the horizon of that event. It was an event that placed a violent Manichean structure of antiblackness at the foundation of our shared world. What kinds of life are possible in nihilistic, antiblack worlds of social death? Is it possible to imagine life outside the reach of those worlds? What decolonial methods help us understand that form of life in relation to expressive cultures of resistance and refusal?

At the Margins of Nihilism develops a theoretical frame through a comparative reading of Jacques Derrida and Orlando Patterson. Reading between deconstruction and social death, Drabinski describes a notion of life as interstitial, situated outside the play of life and death in systems of antiblackness. This notion of life has broad epistemological, existential, and ontological implications.

Drawing from a diverse set of sources including Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Gloria Anzaldúa, and others, At the Margins of Nihilism shows how the nihilisms of Richard Wright, Frantz Fanon, James Baldwin, and contemporary afropessimism operate as a closed system. Each system is opened by vernacular forms of life and practices of refusal. Those forms and practices speak to the power and significance of life that persists across centuries of antiblack culture, social life, and political hegemony.

Holocaust and Hope shows one of our preeminent critics grappling with a subject to which he had returned for decades: literary, cultural, political, and historiographical implications of the Holocaust and its aftermath in Europe and America. In his last planned book, Geoffrey Hartman confronts contradictions that pose a challenge for our present and future. The passing of Holocaust survivors and their immediate families makes continued acts of witnessing more necessary even as distance in time makes the identities and acts of future witnessing more complicated. In addition, the particular kinds of amplification that we may be accustomed to or expect from our contemporary media environment can call forth not an intensity of response but rather an inertia, an “unreality effect,” that can come unexpectedly from the heightening of the real, or the hyperreality of too much, too fast, too strong.

Holocaust and Hope takes seriously the difference between our coming after Auschwitz and our being past it. With characteristic intensity and humanity, Hartman’s essays explore the full complexity of how to transmit knowledge of the Holocaust to the future in ways that avoid simplification, the illusion of synthesis, or the aspiration to final closure, on the one hand, or compulsive repetition on the other. A significant part of the answer, for Hartman, requires special attention to the role of literary and audiovisual forms in promoting an active witnessing to extreme suffering that is relevant both for our time and the encroaching future.