Fordham University Press

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A deeply moving memoir of love, resilience, and identity, chronicling one family’s journey through adoption, caregiving, and the profound connections that define us

Twice Blessed is a beautifully written memoir that explores the depths of love, resilience, and the true meaning of family. Stefanie Mercado Altman, Claire Altman, and Stan Altman share an inti­mate and inspiring story about the bonds that define us, from adoption to caregiving and beyond. When Stefanie was adopted by Claire and Stan, their family was built on love and trust rather than biology. As they navigated the joys and struggles of parenting, they faced challenges that tested their resilience, including Stefanie’s search for identity and connection with her birth mother, Rosa, a gifted artist whose struggles with AIDS cast a long shadow.

From the highs of new beginnings to the heartbreak of loss, Twice Blessed captures the com­plexities of relationships and the sacrifices made in the name of love. The story unfolds with warmth, humor, and honesty, offering a powerful perspective on what it means to belong. Through Stefanie’s journey of self-discovery and the family’s steadfast devotion, the book paints a vivid portrait of compassion and perseverance.

Engaging and deeply moving, Twice Blessed speaks to anyone who has ever questioned their place in the world or searched for a deeper understanding of family. This book will resonate with fans of personal memoirs, adoption narratives, and heartfelt stories about love that transcends boundaries.

A trailblazing journalist who took on New York’s Gilded-Age injustices

Zoe Anderson Norris was a woman ahead of her time. A Kentucky-born belle turned fearless Manhattan journalist, she used her pen as a weapon in the fight for justice. From exposing slumlords and corrupt politicians to advocating for impoverished immigrants, she captured the injustices of her era with a wit and tenacity that still resonate today. In this first biography of Norris, independent scholar Eve Kahn restores her legacy, illuminating her work as a novelist, magazine publisher, and social reformer who challenged the powerful and gave voice to the oppressed.

A prolific writer and editor, Norris chronicled the struggles of Lower East Side immigrants in her self-published periodical, The East Side, often going undercover to report on the harsh realities of tenement life. She documented tragedies such as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, publicly denounced predatory men, and advised women on seizing control of their destinies. With her bohemian spirit, she led the Ragged Edge Klub, a gathering of artists, writers, and social critics who rejected the status quo.

But Norris’s courage came at a personal cost. Her life was marked by tumultuous relationships, family estrangement, and battles against the very injustices she exposed. She endured financial struggles, unfaithful or deadbeat husbands, and social ostracization for her refusal to remain silent. In her final issue of The East Side, she eerily predicted her own death, an uncanny premonition that made national headlines before she faded into obscurity.

With meticulous research and captivating storytelling, Kahn brings Norris’s extraordinary life back into the spotlight. Drawing on newly uncovered archival materials, including Norris’s own writings, letters, and investigative reports, Queen of Bohemia Predicts Own Death sheds light on a fearless journalist whose influence on investigative reporting and social justice continues to be felt today. This biography is a compelling testament to the power of the written word in the fight for truth and equity.

A stunning exploration of New York’s most enchanting fountains

New York City’s fountains are more than just decorative features—they are historical landmarks, cultural icons, and dynamic works of art that shape the city’s landscape. In Fabulous Fountains of New York, award-winning author and native New Yorker Stephanie Azzarone takes readers on a captivating journey through the artistry, history, and hidden stories behind these remarkable waterworks.

From the grandeur of Central Park’s Bethesda Fountain to the sleek modern cascades of the Unisphere in Queens, this beautifully illustrated book showcases more than fifty fountains across all five boroughs. Alongside these celebrated landmarks, Azzarone uncovers lesser-known gems, such as Triumph of the Human Spirit and the long-forgotten temperance fountains, revealing how they reflect the city’s evolving cultural and political landscape.

With vivid storytelling, she traces the work of the architects and artists who shaped these fountains, exploring the historical events they commemorate and the scandals, controversies, and tragedies that surround them. Whether serving as refreshing retreats on hot summer days, symbols of civic pride, or gathering places for contemplation and protest, New York’s fountains have played a vital role in the city’s life.

Accompanied by breathtaking photography by Robert F. Rodriguez, Fabulous Fountains of New York captures the beauty and movement of these dynamic waterworks—from classical bronze and stone sculptures to contemporary interactive installations. Perfect for history buffs, architecture enthusiasts, and urban explorers, this book invites readers to rediscover New York through its most mesmerizing fountains.

A visionary look at Central Park’s creation as an urban success story inspiring bold climate action

Climate change is the existential crisis of our time. With extreme heatwaves, wildfires, hurricanes, and floods displacing millions, many wonder: What can I do? Ten Thousand Central Parks challenges the despair of inaction, using the history of Central Park as an unlikely yet urgent environmental parable.

Created in the years immediately before, during, and after the Civil War, Central Park is a radical experiment in urban renewal, transforming a chaotic and polluted terrain into an 843-acre refuge. More than a scenic landmark, it was a visionary public project that provided jobs, green space, and a lasting environmental legacy. Designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, the park was America’s first large-scale public works project, undertaken at a time of national crisis and built almost entirely by immigrants. Its creation offers a powerful lesson: Even in turbulent times, cities can be reimagined, and large-scale ecological transformations are possible.

With over half of the world’s population living in cities today, predicted soon to reach nearly 70%, urban green spaces are more crucial than ever. Morris argues that Central Park is not just an artifact of the past but a model for the future. Its 18,000 trees sequester nearly a million pounds of carbon dioxide annually, proving that ambitious, nature-based solutions can improve the quality of life while addressing environmental challenges.

Written with urgency and optimism, Ten Thousand Central Parks offers a fresh perspective on the climate crisis, rejecting doom in favor of possibility. We need projects on the scale of Central Park— thousands of them—to meet today’s environmental challenges. This book—a boundary-crossing work of narrative nonfiction—is an invitation to think big, act boldly, and embrace radical hope.

A captivating portrait of Westbeth, the legendary artists’ residence that shaped contemporary art, activism, and New York’s cultural landscape for over fifty years

In 1970, the former Bell Telephone Laboratories in Manhattan was transformed into Westbeth, an ambitious experiment in urban renewal that became the world’s largest and longest-running art­ists’ residence. Home to generations of visual artists, musicians, writers, dancers, and performers, Westbeth has fostered creativity, community, and activism for over fifty years.

From legendary photographer Diane Arbus and conceptual artist Hans Haacke to avant-garde theater pioneers like Joe Chaikin and Gloria Miguel, Westbeth has nurtured some of the most influential voices in contemporary art. Beyond its creative legacy, the residence has been a hub for social change. Its artists played leading roles in the anti-Vietnam protests, LGBTQ+ rights movements, feminist art collectives, and urban preservation efforts.

In Creative Ozone, Miriam Chaiken offers a rare insider’s look at this extraordinary community. Drawing on intimate interviews with multiple generations of Westbeth residents, including those who grew up in the building as “feral children” immersed in art from birth, Chaiken captures the spirit of a place where creativity and activism are inseparable. She explores how Westbeth artists have weathered gentrification, economic upheavals, and major historical events, from 9/11 and Hurricane Sandy to the ongoing pandemic, revealing the resilience of this one-square-block artistic village. Blending vivid storytelling with cultural history, Creative Ozone is a tribute to the artists who shaped, and were shaped by, New York City.

Rich with character-driven narratives, this book will captivate art lovers, history buffs, and anyone fascinated by the creative life. Whether you’re drawn to the bohemian legends of Greenwich Vil­lage, the evolution of urban spaces, or the intersection of art and activism, Creative Ozone offers an unforgettable portrait of a community like no other.

Facts and established truths are regularly denied in contemporary life. This situation has brought paranoid politics into the mainstream, from conspiracy theories like QAnon, to sex panics and assaults on public health measures, to election denialism and the rise of vigilante militias. Paranoid Publics analyzes these phenomena as psychosocial realities enmeshed with emerging ways of determining truth.

Today’s paranoia cannot simply be blamed on the rise of social media or the recent surge of populist anger. Rather, as Chaudhary shows, both are fueled by preexisting psychosocial processes. Applying psychodynamics to analyze truth and politics, Paranoid Publics foregrounds unconscious demands, wishes, and compulsions. Against the hope that progressive economic policies might dispel widespread disorientation and disillusionment, Chaudhary reveals how psychic realities mark politics as deeply as do self-interest and class dynamics.

Chaudhary takes up and reinvents psychoanalytic concepts to analyze how, for example, the personal liberty exercised through vaccine exemptions is paradoxically grounded in submission to the authority of the family and the state. Such politically consequential attitudes concerning truth emerge from a social order that they proceed to challenge. Making a case for psychosocial understandings of our current historical juncture, Paranoid Publics radically expands our notion of the political.

In cinema, blurriness is usually intended to go unnoticed. When it appears it is either considered an error — a mistake of focus or a technological failure — or a background effect of shallow focus intended to offset a defined image. As Martine Beugnet argues, however, blur is an essential feature of the cinema, possessing its own properties and affordances, and capable of powerful effects.

Examining an array of notable examples of blurriness from horror to art cinema and experimental film, and including the works of the Lumière brothers, Josef von Sternberg, Agnès Varda and many others, she develops a taxonomy of blurs, from speed and motion blur to the hand-held, “shaky camera” blur common in contemporary digital cinema. These wide-ranging instances all return the viewer to the sensorial and material qualities of the moving image.

In the face of technological developments that valorize sharpness as an indicator of progress, blur stands as a provocative reminder of the value of uncertainty—a sign of the irreducible mystery at the heart of the filmic image.

How Thomas Jefferson’s vision for knowledge shapes what we know and how we access it—and why that matters more than ever

As the United States approaches the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Peculiar Satisfaction examines how the ideals and contradictions of the nation’s founding live on in libraries, archives, and museums. Thomas Jefferson championed an informed citizenry as essential to democracy, yet the systems he built to organize knowledge reinforced racial and ideological hierarchies that persist today.

Melissa Adler explores Jefferson’s lasting influence on public institutions, from his personal library, which became the foundation of the Library of Congress, to his archival practices in gov­ernment record-keeping and his museum at Monticello as a site of colonial knowledge production. Through an interdisciplinary lens, she reveals how his methods of classification and preservation shaped national memory and democratic participation.

Drawing from archival research and critical theory, Peculiar Satisfaction exposes the paradoxes of access, exclusion, and control embedded in information systems. As censorship and disinformation threaten democracy, Adler argues that understanding these foundational structures is essential to defending the role of knowledge in public life.

Offering a fresh perspective on the ways information, power, and race have shaped American institutions, this book will engage scholars and general readers interested in how libraries, archives, and museums influence history, democracy, and collective memory and argues for a nuanced understanding of these institutions at a critical moment where disinformation and authoritarian rule threaten to undo them.

A bold, trailblazing investigation into soteriology, approached by way of Girardian mimetic theory and Eastern Orthodox theological reflection

Redemption: A Mimetic Soteriology brings French literary critic René Girard’s mimetic theory of human behavior together with a breadth of Christian approaches to redemption through the Cross. Girard’s mimetic understanding of sacrifice is drawn upon to illuminate biblical narratives about redemption as well as the theologies of Anselm of Canterbury, Peter Abelard, and Gregory of Nyssa. Nicholas Roumas shows by these readings that redemption can be understood as a reconfigura­tion of symbolic values with profound consequences for human relations and social organization. Redemption thus serves theologians as a basis for a new practical dogmatics.

This exploration is a breath of fresh air in Orthodox theology, utilizing patristic and scriptural sources outside the framework of the predominant “neo-Patristic synthesis” and introducing an entirely new modern paradigm onto the Orthodox scene. For theologians of other traditions, Redemption contributes to the library of Girardian theologies its first Eastern Orthodox install­ment. For Girardians, it provides critique and refinement of many of Girard’s most nuanced views and gives due attention to overlooked and controversial aspects of his thought. For the lay reader, the book provides an accessible entry into the spirituality of the Cross through a lens that is both modern and traditional.

Redemption provides a revitalizing infusion into contemporary Orthodox theological discourse. Its ideas will impact theology in the Orthodox Church and beyond for decades to come and are the basis for a paradigm shift in our understanding of redemption and its practical consequences. The lay reader and professional theologian alike will find novelty and utility in its ideas.

This coursebook is the first full-length study of cinematic “legal medievalism,” or the modern interpretation of medieval law in film and popular culture

For more than a century, filmmakers have used the “Middle Ages” to produce popular entertainment and comment on contemporary issues. Each of the twenty chapters in Law, Justice, and Society in the Medieval World represents an original contribution to our understanding of how medieval regulations, laws, and customs have been depicted in film. It offers a window into the “rules” of medieval society through the lens of popular culture.

This book includes analyses of recent and older films, avant-garde as well as popular cinema. Films discussed in this book include Braveheart (1995), Kingdom of Heaven (2005), The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), The Last Duel (2021), The Green Knight (2021), The Little Hours (2017), and The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), among others.

Each chapter explores the contemporary context of the film in question, the medieval literary or historical milieu the film references, and the lessons the film can teach us about the medieval world. Attached to each chapter is an appendix of medieval documentary sources and reading questions to prompt critical reflection.

Opens the field of Dante Studies to further transnational studies of the Divine Comedy’s circulation, translation, and global influence

This fascinating book examines how Dante was repurposed by Argentine politicians and authors who were concerned with the construction of Argentine national identity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sottong’s work is informed by the theories of Eric Hobsbawm, Benedict Anderson, and Nicolas Shumway, who coined the concepts of “invented traditions,” “imagined communities,” and “guiding fictions,” respectively. Sottong has applied these notions to the case of Argentina, which, after the War of Independence from Spain (1810–1818), had to develop its own national cultural identity.

In this volume, she investigates Dante’s transnational influence in Argentina: Why did Argentine authors consistently call upon Dante in their attempts to develop Argentine literature? What are the textual and thematic characteristics of Dante’s Divine Comedy that make it an ideal vehicle for literary appropriation? What are the historical and cultural factors that account for Dante’s enduring popularity in Italy and beyond? How did the strong presence of Italians in Argentina influence cultural production in the developing nation? And how are the re-writings of Dante in the Argentine canon in dialogue with one another?

What Sottong found, remarkably, was that rewriting Dante was a way for Argentine authors to voice their views on the direction that should be taken to develop Argentine letters; Dante became something of a literary guide as Argentine intellectuals navigated the complex labyrinth of their national identity. The consistent rewriting of the Divine Comedy in the Argentine context testifies to the fact that great works of literature can be revived during different periods and even reappropriated by various peoples to foster mythologies of inclusion or exclusion related to national identity.

Offers new perspectives on freedom of conscience and religious liberty by tracing their origins to the Middle Ages, thereby challenging the common assumption that these core tenets of modernity were products of the Enlightenment

Deeply committed to the formation of a just and sacred society, medieval theologians and canon­ists developed sophisticated arguments in defense of religious liberty and freedom of conscience. They did so based upon the conviction that each human person possesses an inalienable right to pursue his or her spiritual vocation and to inquire into the truth, provided that such pursuits were not deemed injurious to the commonweal. For this was an age in which all power, whether secular or sacred, was held to be exercised legitimately only insofar as it served the common good. Within these basic parameters there existed a domain of personal freedom guaranteed by natural and divine law that could not be infringed by either secular or ecclesiastical authority. Theologians and canonists did not countenance blind obedience to reigning powers nor did they permit Christians to stand idle in the face of manifest transgressions of sacred tradition, constitutional order, and fundamental human rights.

Such foundational principles as the sacred domain of conscience, freedom of intellectual inquiry, dissent from unjust authority, and inalienable personal rights had been carefully developed throughout the later Middle Ages, hence from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries. Contrary to the popular conception, therefore, the West did not need to wait for the Protestant Reforma­tion, or the Enlightenment, for these values to take hold. In fact, the modern West may owe its greatest debt to the Middle Ages. With a Pure Conscience sheds further light on these matters in a variety of contexts, within and without the medieval university walls, and often amid momentous controversies. This was a robust intellectual culture that revered careful analysis and vigorous disputation in its relentless quest to understand and defend the truth as it could be ascertained through both reason and revelation.

The Small Worlds of Childhood argues that prose representations of bourgeois childhood contain surprising opportunities to reflect on the temporality of experience. In their narratives of children at home in their everyday worlds, Adalbert Stifter, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Walter Benjamin are not only able to shed a unique light on key issues in the history of philosophy. They also offer a queer critique of the normative expectation that the literature of childhood is oriented toward the future.

Stone shows that when writers engage in philosophical storytelling, showing children tarrying in quotidian experience, they dislodge childhood from its nostalgic value to grown-ups and the heteronormative demand to grow up. Such stories of children as philosophical subjects thus take on their own lingering, backwards, or all together strange sense of time. Stone demonstrates the necessity of recognizing how texts on childhood—before and beyond Freud—engage literary language in the service of a variety of philosophical attitudes, reminding us how poetic techniques can tell us something extraordinary about moments of ordinary experience and the manner with which humans, and especially children, cognize the world.

By bringing canonical German-language literary and philosophical traditions into conversation with current English-language queer approaches, Stone opens a queer counter-history of German and Austrian realist and modernist literature.

This title is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.

What is the relationship between a writer’s life, milieu, and thought? In this daring and intellectually expansive text, part memoir and part political philosophy, the anthropologist Rafael Sánchez explores the forces and events that shaped him and the nations through which he moved.

Reconocimientos is a book of both personal and political reckoning, from the thrillingly emancipatory possibilities of Venezuela’s plazas to the political promise and disappointments of revolution. Written in the final year of his life, Reconocimientos moves from scenes of Sánchez’s youth in Cuba to fieldwork on the cult of Maria Lionza in Venezuela to confront the terrifying and alluring forces of patriarchal privilege at the base of monumentalist authoritarianism.

Sánchez’s intimate prose speaks with the urgency both of his own mortality and of the political crises of our moment. Amid the resurgence of patriarchy, hierarchy, and the valorization of inequality that have become pillars of populist movements in Latin America and beyond, Sánchez finds a residual radical possibility in ‘horizontal’ spaces, where the forces of mimesis permit manifold transformations.

Commemorating the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, this volume offers an original examination of the enduring impact of the single most famous gathering of Christians since the apostolic age

Despite the longstanding historical and theological study of the Council of Nicaea, several central questions remain. Was Nicaea a theological event or a political one? What does it mean if it was both? Was Constantine’s intervention without precedent, or was he simply continuing a long-standing role of a Roman emperor who was responsible for leading a religious cult (albeit now for a different faith tradition)? And what about the actual theological debates of Nicaea and our ability to understand them? Scholars might never exhaust this avenue of inquiry, despite the numerous studies in recent decades.

For many scholars and Christian activists today, the significance of Nicaea centers around the idea of conciliarity and what this has meant, both historically and theologically, for the Christian community. Why and how did Nicaea become foundational for thinking that the church operates in a conciliar manner? How did that work historically in different parts of the Christian world? And how should it work today?

Nicaea and the Future of Christianity offers a fresh, globally-diverse, ecumenically-minded approach to these questions with an impressive collection of both senior and junior scholars, reflecting a diversity of views within the Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant traditions. The great benefit of this wide-ranging approach lies precisely in its ability to see the many ways in which Nicaea continues to speak to the future of Christianity.

A deeply researched and clearly argued account of the mutual growth of the federal government and the modern tobacco

Nearly everything about the United States tobacco economy changed in the generation following the American Civil War. From labor to consumption, manufacturing to regulation, tobacco was utterly reconstructed, “comparatively a new industry,” as one contemporary wrote.

The Political Reconstruction of American Tobacco, 1862–1933 exposes the causes of these changes, and in the process, it reconsiders cornerstones of the American national narrative. Through a detailed rendering of tobacco’s late-nineteenth-century political economy, this book argues that the federal state’s and American capitalism’s development were mutually constitutive—and fundamentally political—processes. From the Civil War to the Progressive Era, diverse political movements across tobacco’s commodity chain drove state and market development, creating the immense power and stifling poverty that defined tobacco’s reconstruction. The Political Reconstruc­tion of American Tobacco, 1862–1933 emphasizes the significance of the thousands of manufactur­ers whose interest groups shaped federal tax policy and, in turn, forged a powerful and effective internal revenue system; the increasingly influential fertilizer producers and warehouse operators who determined tobacco’s value; and the crop scientists who sought to promote and rationalize US tobacco production. As these actors reshaped tobacco’s commodity chain, they missed, and even dismissed, the interests of tobacco growers, especially newly emancipated African Americans and smallholding whites throughout the South.

The ruling logic of tobacco’s reconstructed political economy rationalized agrarian indebtedness, justified low prices, and intensified labor discipline on thousands of small farms. In emphasizing these exclusions, The Political Reconstruction of American Tobacco, 1862–1933 reveals how nineteenth-century state and economic development coincided with and even created rural poverty.

Muslim charities and community organizations have assumed a significant role in refugee support since the Syrian catastrophe: in Jordan and Canada, as elsewhere, they deliver food aid, house orphans, and organize remedial education. But Islam is more than just a resource for humanitarian projects. The Dread Heights details how the Islamic tradition guides refugees, relief workers, and religious scholars in a world of brutal sieges and mass displacement.

Through an ethnography of religious imagination and theological argumentation, Iqbal demonstrates what is at stake beyond secular frames for migration and relief. Even as refugees become objects of humanitarian concern suspended between national orders, The Dread Heights brings another suspension into view: a form of life whose gestures are illuminated by the Quranic figure of the Heights. Iqbal’s ethnography pursues an unsentimental lucidity across the search for refuge, the trials of creational existence, and the ultimately enigmatic divine decree. In the shadow of war, beyond humanitarian order, Islam offers an orientation to the devastation of the present.

The first sustained treatment of religion and religions in the scholarship of a prominent Caribbean thinker

Sylvia Wynter is a profoundly transdisciplinary scholar whose works span an impressive array of theory, literature, science, anthropology, philosophy, and religious studies as well as different forms, including essays, plays, a novel, and a 935-page unpublished manuscript entitled “Black Metamor­phosis: New Natives in a New World.” Whatever the medium, Wynter frequently engages religion as a relevant category of analysis, from reflections on Christianity, Islam, and Rastafarianism to the category and role of religion as a universal aspect of human social production.

Wynter’s writings have received enthusiastic attention by scholars in Black studies, Caribbean theory, critical race theory, literature, and philosophy. But until recently little scholarly writing exists that directly engages the topic of religion in her corpus. Words Made Flesh seeks to fill this gap by focusing exclusively on religion, religions, and religiosity in her work.

Bringing together scholars that provide a wide variety of theoretical perspectives on religion, political theology, social theory, and science studies, this book offers an in-depth engagement with one of the most innovative and important thinkers of the last forty years and illustrates how Wynter’s writing has significant implications for the study of religion and religion’s relationship to colonialism, race, humanism, science, and political theology.

The first comparative treatment of the topic of līlā in Hindu and Christian traditions, this volume explores what it means to consider divine and human action under the categories of play, wit, drama, grace, and compassion

God at Play presents a theological exploration of the multifaceted motif of līlā across diverse Hindu and Christian landscapes and its wide-ranging connections to divine and human creativity. Given its ubiquity in Hindu theologies and life-forms, līlā offers a rich comparative framework for exploring certain ways of understanding divine and human action as expressed in Hindu and Christian sacred texts, philosophical theology, and ritual practices.

Though līlā is often interpreted simply as “play,” the essays in this volume reflect a far richer semantic and conceptual field, ranging from spontaneity and gratuitousness, through joy and humor, to mercy and compassion. By focusing on the different contexts in which līlā is found in Hindu traditions and resisting any uniform translation of the term, the contributors to this volume avoid the risk of using predominantly western or Christian categories to understand the Hindu other. The volume thus explores how līlā functions in a variety of distinctive philosophical, theological, and devotional ways across Hindu traditions, and listens for echoes in Christian understandings of the gratuitousness of the created order in relation to God.

God at Play is a genuine experiment in deep learning across traditions. Each chapter reflects on what is learned by taking līlā as the category of comparison and invites the reader to think about what these conversations add, confirm, or change in relation to earlier twentieth-century scholarship on play—not least, in terms of what difference it might make to understand human life as an imitation and a participation in the divine life of a playful deity.

Across Africa, Asia, and the Americas, colonial Britain’s property laws are in the process of being transformed. Aesthetic Impropriety analyzes vanguard legal actions and literary innovations to reveal contemporary reforms to property law that are undoing law’s colonial legacies. Casey traces precise legal histories across distinct jurisdictions throughout the anglophone world, revealing the connection between land law and petroleum extraction in the Niger Delta, inheritance and divorce laws and gender inequality in India, intellectual property law and Indigenous dispossession in South Africa, and admiralty law and racialized non-personhood in the English Atlantic. In response to these manifold forms of dispossession, significant reforms are underway, including through common law suits, statutory reform, and proposed changes to legal doctrine.

Casey develops the concept of aesthetic impropriety to identify shared structures of thought across legal and literary venues. She shows that writers of poetry and prose are also transforming harmful property laws: in Nigeria, Ben Okri and Chigozie Obioma have articulated symbiotic ecological relationships that are also evidenced in recent actions against petroleum companies; in India, Arundhati Roy’s challenge to divorce laws has preempted similar attempts at reform in Parliament; in South Africa, Zoë Wicomb theorized protections for Indigenous modes of creative production nineteen years before they were signed into law; and in the Americas, M. NourbeSe Philip has proposed a novel method of achieving justice for the one hundred fifty enslaved people who were killed in the 1781 Zong massacre.

Aesthetic Impropriety makes a convincing case for literature’s generative capacities and registers the enduring significance of the postcolonial as a necessary framework for understanding globalized inequality in the twenty-first century. By analyzing shared legal and aesthetic transformations, Aesthetic Impropriety argues that law and literature play vital roles in creating anticolonial world orders.

Contemporary debate on cosmopolitanism routinely refers to Immanuel Kant as its intellectual origin. A group of Chinese and German-speaking thinkers in the early twentieth century, however, used classical Chinese philosophy as an alternative intellectual genealogy to reimagine ethics, politics, society, and modernity for the entire world. Their engagement with Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism broadens the scope of global intellectual history to include a non-European origin of concepts and ideas.

Due to the differences in their local crises, the Chinese and the European stories are often narrated in separate national and cultural contexts. Bridging the critical divide between China and the West, The Quest for Liberation examines the thinkers’ shared interest in Chinese philosophy and their common effort to envision a world culture other than Western modernity.

Breaking with the common logic of either studying the reception and adaptation of Western ideas in the East or critiquing the misrepresentation of the East in the West, Zhang’s book emphasizes entanglements between Chinese and European thinkers and highlights their quest for liberation in a globalizing world. Their visions of an ontological commons for everyone help us imagine a better world community in our time of global crises, beyond the clash of civilizations.

This book is available from the publisher on an open access basis.

Culture is inextricable from politics. This includes the politics of who we are, as teachers, intellectuals, writers, cultural workers, and students, and what we want to bring to and take from the site of instruction. It also includes the politics of who we want to be, as citizens, professionals, and active contributors to our communities and to the world in general, and what we can be, realistically, in the particular contexts in which we live.

Teaching Politically addresses some of the political constraints that shape our pedagogical spaces, especially in the teaching of literature. The book brings together a global group of academics, activists, public intellectuals, poets, and novelists to examine the way politics manifest pedagogically, and how a commitment to educating manifests politically, in and beyond the classroom. At the heart of the discussion is how political and professional paradigms chafe against, intersect with, or otherwise become inseparable from each other in any vocation that attempts to educate: from writing, journalism, and public speaking to art, activism, and medicine.

Contributors: Dimitris Christopoulos, Dimitri Dimoulis, Khaled Fahmy, Rishi Goyal, May Hawas, Bonnie Honig, Mona Kareem, Benjamin Mangrum, Nora Parr, Bruce Robbins, Ahdaf Soueif, Omid Tofighian, Elahe Zivardar

Reveals how Mayan and Palestinian narratives connect through shared Indigenous struggles, proposing ‘affinity’ as a framework for global solidarity

Inspired by and committed to global Indigenous solidarity and South-South encounters, Indigenous Affinities examines the multifaceted connection between Chiapas and Palestine. In tracing unseen threads that connect parallel geographies of struggle found in contemporary Mayan and Palestinian narratives, Indigenous Affinities proposes affinity as a new conceptual framework. Eqeiq shows how—despite emerging from distinct historical processes of minoritization, subalternization, and racialization—Mayan and Palestinian written, visual, and performance texts articulate a common configuration of Indigeneity. These seemingly unrelated connections, Eqeiq contends, can be read through shared histories of land struggle, practices of autonomy, quests for liberation, and collective resistance to racial capitalism, military oppression, and colonial violence.

Eqeiq examines murals that offer a visual testimony to common struggles and transnational connection, explores fragmented bilingualisms that have propelled language revival and revitalization, highlights a shared concern with borders, and documents the performative commemorations of massacres. Reading such sites together in the complexities and specificities of disparate contexts, Indigenous Affinities illuminates how the lens of affinity can elucidate solidarity and resistance within the Global South.

“Fighter-Writer” reports from major battles in the Pacific highlight what America’s Marines endured in World War II

Douglass K. Daniel presents a fascinating trove of previously classified material withheld from the public because of government and public relations concerns at the time, including tactical details that could inadvertently aid the enemy, battlefield gore that could disturb readers, and the gamut of issues of taste. Navy censors in the field and editors at Marine Corps headquarters in Washington were also on alert for any material that could negatively affect the Corps itself or the overall war effort. Soul-searching stories that questioned the nature of war were rejected lest they sow doubt stateside about the cause for which so many lives were being lost.

Behind the bylines was a new breed of storytellers. Considered “fighter-writers,” Marine combat correspondents, or CCs, carried typewriters as well as weapons. The Marine Corps Division of Public Relations recruited them from America’s newsrooms to join the fight that stretched from Guadalcanal and the bloody assault on Tarawa to the black sands of Iwo Jima and the dense jungles of Okinawa. Their approved work appeared in civilian newspapers, magazines, and other national and local media.

This collection also highlights the unique efforts of the CCs and the public relations officers who commanded them. While they were assigned to report and write, they were Marines first. They eagerly put aside their notebooks to take up arms against the enemy as needed. Many were wounded in battle, and more than a dozen were killed, giving their lives to get the story behind the most significant conflict in human history.

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.

What are film props? What do they do? This book answers these questions by a close attention to those material objects that are used to construct cinematic worlds.

The term “prop” is short for property. This truncated term’s etymology belies the expansiveness of the concept and indicates the micro and macro scales at which the prop operates. Props are the material—often literal—furniture of cinema’s diegetic reality. Props are also narrative agents: think of the animacy of objects in Jean Epstein’s account of photogénie, the crystal egg in Risky Business, or the domestic bric-à-brac of Sirk’s melodramas. The prop is central to production design and the construction of mise-en-scène. And yet, the prop has rarely—almost never—been taken as an object of analysis and theorization in its own right.

This book begins by tracing the prop’s curious but unacknowledged role in film theory, before proceeding to a series of theoretical speculations and close readings that bring the prop into focus. Analyses of scenes of “prop mastery” demonstrate the labor that props perform and enable, as well as the interpretive work they make possible. Across a variety of genres, modes, and historical contexts—studio filmmaking, art cinema, adult and avant-garde films—The Prop introduces readers to the notion of “prop value,” a quality that puts the prop in proximity to the capitalist commodity, but also provides an ironic distance from the commodity’s subjection to exchange value. Gorfinkel and Rhodes argue that the prop is nothing less than a condensation of how labor, subjection, value, and instrumentality underwrite the very conditions of cinema.

Discover New York’s poignant memorials through powerful photographs capturing everything from fleeting tributes to enduring monuments

The photographs in Here Down on Dark Earth document the many ways New Yorkers express their intertwined feelings of loss and remembrance. The famous and the unknown, the rich and the poor, meet the same fate, but how they are mourned and remembered varies greatly. New York City’s monuments and memorials are large and small, civic and personal, traditional and vernacular, planned and spontaneous. Some commemorate a significant event such as the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, others the death of a single child hit by a stray bullet. A memorial of stone and steel dedicated to deceased WWII veterans from a church parish may outlast a painted Rest-In-Peace (RIP) memorial wall for a slain teenager. Still, both grow out of the feeling of loss and a desire to preserve the memory of departed loved ones.

As Racioppo traveled throughout New York City, he became increasingly aware of the impermanence of these memorials. The paint eventually peels, and the image gradually disappears. Sanitation workers remove the rotted toys and flowers. Small and personal, or large and communal, created by professionals or amateurs, the memorials in Here Down on Dark Earth express a powerful sense of loss and connection. Throughout the book, the author’s contextual notes accompany the poignant photographs depicting these expressions of remembrance.

A prize-winning historian details his intellectual and political evolution

Written by the author of the landmark book The Wages of Whiteness and one of the key figures in the critical study of race and racism in America, An Ordinary White is the life story of the historian and radical American writer, David Roediger.

With wry wit and keen observation, Roediger chronicles his intellectual and political evolution from growing up in his southern Midwest sundown town to becoming a leading figure in working-class his­tory and Whiteness studies. A latecomer to the New Left, a longtime figure in the Chicago Surrealist Group, and part of the collective reviving of the Charles Kerr Company—the world’s oldest socialist publisher—Roediger captures events and characters absent from standard histories of the left as well as such icons of resistance as Studs Terkel, Noel Ignatiev, Angela Davis, Toni Morrison, and C. L. R. James.

A direct response to the venom, effectiveness, and durability of white nationalist attacks on Critical Race Theory, this memoir describes Roediger’s youth as “ordinary,” both in its unfolding in a lower-middle-class family of southern Illinois workers and in the depth of white racism he was taught. He considers himself “saved” by social movements of his time, including those of labor, against empire, and, above all, the Black Freedom struggle. Public education, dissenting currents in Catholicism, knowledge of the importance of good union jobs, and generative impulses in sports and music helped make his salvation stick.

Roediger’s knowledge of white advantage came from his personal everyday experiences, but among people ordinary enough to guard against the mistaken notion that poor and working-class whites are uniquely the culprits of white nationalism. Importantly he argues against the character­ization of them as intractably racist or incapable of understanding the advantages of whiteness. A teacher in state universities for forty years, Roediger has tirelessly fought against their being hollowed out by corporate values and austerity. In An Ordinary White, he writes movingly of these experiences and what we have lost in our institutions whose soaring rhetoric outstrips any ability to defend education or racial justice.

Explore Gilded Age New York through the lens of Alice Austen, who captured the social rituals of New York’s leisured class and the bustling streets of the modern city. Celebrated as a queer artist, she was this and much more

Alice Austen (1866–1952) lived at Clear Comfort, her grandparent’s Victorian cottage on Staten Island, which is now a National Historic Landmark. As a teenager, she devoted herself to photography, recording what she called “the larky life” of tennis matches, yacht races, and lavish parties.

When she was 25 and expected to marry, Austen used her camera to satirize gender norms by posing with her friends in their undergarments and in men’s clothes, “smoking” cigarettes, and feigning drunkenness. As she later remarked, she was “too good to get married.” Austen embraced the rebellious spirit of the “New Woman,” a moniker given to those who defied expectations by pursuing athletics, higher education, or careers. She had romantic affairs with women, and at 31, she met Gertrude Tate, who became her life partner. Briefly, Austen considered becoming a professional photographer. She illustrated Bicycling for Ladies, a guide written by her friend Violet Ward, and she explored the working-class neighborhoods of Manhattan to produce a portfolio, “Street Types of New York.” Rejecting the taint of commerce, however, she remained within the confines of elite society with Tate by her side.

Although interest in Austen has accelerated since 2017, when the Alice Austen House was designated a national site of LGBTQ history, the only prior book on Austen was published in 1976. Copiously illustrated, Too Good to Get Married fills the need for a fresh and deeply researched look at this skillful and witty photographer. Through analysis of Austen’s photographs, Yochelson illuminates the history of American photography and the history of sexuality.

A profound new volume that reckons with the history of an American Catholic Church embedded in and drawing benefits from White supremacy

For the Church to become a truly anti-racist institution, we must first understand how today’s racial challenges are embedded in the theo-logic of American Christianity and the cultural production of our Christian educational institutions. As colleges and universities reckon with their involvement in slavery, Grace of the Ghosts asks Christian-affiliated institutions (of congregation, school, and media) to expand this reckoning with attention to the many ways they have been embedded in and drew benefits from American systems of White supremacy.

Too often, White Christian histories render White Christians as the “good guys” in order to make a brutal history plausible and thus erase countless injustices committed against Indigenous, Black, Latinx, and Asian peoples. Author Jeannine Hill Fletcher writes instead a US Catholic history that sheds light on the crimes committed against these ancestors by members of their own faith community. Grace of the Ghosts focuses on specific case studies of Catholic educational and ecclesial institutions, journeying through numerous microhistories to provide an accessible program to work toward the flourishing of a multiracial and multicultural Church. Hill Fletcher digs deeply into the details of Jesuit slaveholding at Georgetown, the expansion of Church networks on the frontiers to the West and South and emer­gent cities to the North, and the extension of the work of religious women from the East Coast to the Midwest. The volume considers the implications of Catholic involvement in Indian Boarding Schools and envisions alternative possibilities in the Catholic activism of the United Farmworkers. Each micro­history elevates the theological insights that emerge from those who withstood the assaults of White Christian supremacy. Hill Fletcher then orients the reader forward by envisioning possibilities of repair. Recognizing that this will require extensive and ongoing work, the book closes with the consideration of spiritual capital (including a reclamation of Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises) that might sustain us as we write the next chapter in the nation’s long struggle against White supremacy.

Much work must be done for reparation, reconciliation, and repair to unfold fully. Grace of the Ghosts provides a bridge to institutional accountability for past failings and a path toward becoming transformative institutions for the future.

How Mayor Ray Flynn’s leadership and a coalition of activists transformed Boston, challenging established powers and setting new precedents for urban governance

The Battle for Boston captures the remarkable era under Mayor Ray Flynn, whose election in 1983 marked the beginning of a profound shift in the city’s political and social landscape. Don Gillis, a Flynn senior advisor, chronicles the inspiring journey of a city that dared to challenge the entrenched power brokers—including developers, landlords, and banking industry leaders—through powerful grassroots campaigns.

Gillis provides a vivid portrayal of the political dynamics and the coalition of community organiz­ers, neighborhood leaders, and residents that played a pivotal role in rejecting the business-backed growth machine and the city’s historically divisive racial politics. This book charts the strategic battles fought within the corridors of power and on the streets and highlights the substantial impact these movements had on the city’s governance and power dynamics.

In a historic turn, in 2021, Michelle Wu became the first woman, person of color, and Asian- American elected Mayor of Boston. Wu’s victory on a similarly progressive platform as Flynn underscores the enduring relevance of his legacy, signaling a hopeful future for more inclusive and effectively governed cities.

The Battle for Boston poses a critical inquiry: Can cities truly embrace progressivism and gov­ern effectively in the twenty-first century? This qualitative narrative study is a testament to the possibility of such governance, driven by the indomitable spirit of those who strive for a fair and equitable society.

From Marienbad to the Bates Motel, cinematic hotels are more than a mere backdrop to a film’s action. They actively scaffold the formal, aesthetic, and narrative possibilities of cinema. This book takes a journey through spaces of temporary dwelling—hotels, inns, and motels—to delve into the dynamics and contradictions that structure modern life.

Along the way, O’Dwyer considers questions of plot and eroticism, labor and globalization, and the ethics and economics of hospitality. Drawing on a broad array of films from European art cinema to experimental adult media, and placing cinema into dialogue with film theory and media history, Hotels explores both how and why the hotel has such a strong purchase on the cinematic imaginary.

Discover the chilling untold story of sexual forced labor in Nazi concentration camps

In his seminal work, The Concentration Camp Brothel, Robert Sommer reveals the hidden hor­rors of sexual forced labor within the SS camp system, a subject long overshadowed and seldom acknowledged in the discourse on the Holocaust.

Through his rigorous examination of over seventy archives and poignant interviews with more than thirty survivors, including former visitors of camp brothels, Sommer paints a vivid and harrow­ing picture of the atrocities committed. This book is the first to offer a comprehensive exploration of the establishment, operation, and profound impact of brothels in Nazi concentration camps.

Sommer’s research meticulously details the brothels’ integration into the concentration camp system, their role in the Nazi exploitation of bodies for control and profit, and the complex reac­tions of the prisoner society to these establishments. He explores the desperate survival strategies employed by the women forced into sexual labor and the chilling motivations of their exploiters.

The book also places the tragedy of camp brothels in the broader context of sexual violence under Nazi rule, making a critical connection between these acts of exploitation and the overall history of the Holocaust. This updated English edition incorporates new findings and perspectives since the original German publication in 2009, providing a more comprehensive understanding of the subject. The foreword by Annette F. Timm adds further context and contemporary analysis, enhancing the book’s relevance and depth.

An exploration of the mythical Mary Glass—her art, her life, and her times

Mary Glass (1946–2021) was an innovative modern dancer and choreographer, quietly instrumental to the San Francisco Bay Area art scene of the 1960s and ’70s—barely known today—admired for her experimental movements based on sounds and images of the Pacific.

As a child, Mary Glass took her first dance class with Anna Halprin on her famed redwood dance deck in Marin County’s Kent Woodlands. Dancing with the blue sky as her ceiling—surrounded by magical madrones and redwoods—the effect on Mary Glass was seismic. Fittingly, Halprin called her classes “dance experiences.”
Mary Glass’s lifestyle, her anxieties, and her dance reflect the human geography of Northern California: Happenings, Zero Population Growth (ZPG), feminism, same-sex love, civil rights, Vietnam, environmentalism. Cascading in the waves of the politics of the time was Mary Glass’s anorexia, an unexpected pregnancy, and her life-long love affair with the Black painter Eliza Vesper.

Today Mary Glass is remembered by an increasingly diminishing handful of devotees. Author Carol Mavor is one of them.

In this daring work of fictocriticism, where “feelings are facts,” Like the Sea asks its readers—just as Anna Halprin asked of each of her young students as they were leaving class—“What are you taking with you from the natural world?”

Halprin’s words will resonate in Mary’s mind her entire lifetime and beyond.

In the after-time of the prescient Mary Glass—with its decline of sea kelp and warm Decembers— Mavor herself considers the Anthropocene, tasting extinction as if swallowing the long-gone abalone mollusks of her own Bay-Area childhood: salty, like the sea, but strangely sweet. And from it, Mavor delivers the reader to the far-away country of the not-so-distant past to help envision a future.

There are no photographs or films of Mary Glass dancing. The life of Mary Glass is nearly forgotten, her memory on the edge of extinction. In meditative, dazzling and lyrical prose, Like the Sea tells us—like the ocean’s music in our ear—we need to remember extinction to imagine our way out of it.

Discover the vibrant journey of music from New York’s melting pot to the mystical shores of the Bosphorus

From the Bronx to the Bosphorus explores the vibrant, yet largely concealed, musical culture of New York, tracing its origins to a period when the city served as a crucible for immigrants and their diverse musical expressions. Walter Zev Feldman chronicles his journey through the musical landscapes of post–WWII New York—from the declining world of East European immigrant klezmorim to the dynamic environments of Greek, Armenian, and Caucasian musicians.

These experiences culminate in the klezmer revitalization movement of the late 1970s. Feldman, whose father emigrated from Bessarabia—a region known for its rich interactions among Jewish, Roma, and Greek musicians—connects various musical worlds. From the local Turkish Sephardi synagogue and the Greek Orthodox cathedral in Washington Heights to the lively Armenian and Greek nightclubs of Manhattan, his interactions with a diverse group of musicians, including an Armenian virtuoso who once performed for Stalin and the Shah of Iran, enhance his understanding and appreciation of these interconnected cultures.

Finally, at age twenty-five, in a sense he returned to his father’s shtetl and studied with Dave Tarras, the greatest living klezmer in America, who had learned his key musical lessons in that very same Bessarabian town following World War I. From the Bronx to the Bosphorus is not just a chronicle of music but a poignant examination of the power of music to connect cultures, transcend borders, and preserve the echoes of a nearly vanished world.

On the urgent need to promote critical reading skills amidst rising authoritarianism

Children’s author Philip Pullman famously said that “There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children’s book.” While the recent rise of fascist ideology in the United States might seem a subject too large and adult to be dealt with in literature for children or teens, Annette Wannamaker proposes in How to Read Like an Anti-Fascist that there are books aimed at future generations which critique and counter fascist propaganda and mythmaking.

Works of literature can reflect fascist ideology and promote it as well, but Wannamaker proposes that some books also offer tools for understanding it. Books written for beginners can introduce readers to complex concepts, break big ideas into manageable parts, and teach readers how to read the world outside of the book. Antifascist books are ones that analyze fascistic rhetoric and storytelling, educate about America’s long history of authoritarianism, and highlight various facets of fascism such as scapegoating others and reasserting patriarchal power.

From “The Emperor’s New Clothes” and the tales of Superman to Mildred Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, the 1619 Project and contemporary works such as All Boys Aren’t Blue and Donald Builds the Wall, Wannamaker shows how the ethos of authoritarianism is characterized by a strict hierarchy that places children at its very bottom. In doing so, she argues convincingly that books written for young people can provide a particular view from the bottom, a perspective well-suited to interrogating systems of power.

Reimagining our cities for a sustainable and human-centric future

In her groundbreaking book Wonder City, Lynn Ellsworth delves deep into the heart of modern urban life, casting a critical eye on the transformative changes sweeping through cities like New York. This compelling journey into the world of urban development goes beyond the usual narra­tive, serving as a passionate call to action that encourages readers to actively participate in shaping the future of their cities.

Ellsworth expertly navigates through complex themes such as affordable housing, urban plan­ning, historic preservation, and architecture. With a focus on major cities undergoing significant transformations, Wonder City offers an insightful examination of the challenges and opportunities that define contemporary urban life.

At the core of this engaging narrative is a striking critique of the real estate industry’s influence over urban landscapes. Ellsworth reveals how historic and culturally rich urban settings are increas­ingly being overshadowed by the rise of impersonal glass towers, a trend she argues is driven by the industry’s grip on politicians and technocrats. This analysis is both eye-opening and unsettling, shedding light on the forces reshaping our urban environments.

Wonder City is more than a critique, however. Ellsworth provides a pragmatic blueprint for revitalizing urban spaces. She champions the need for affordable housing, sustainable urban plan­ning, and architecture that respects and enhances the human experience. Her arguments challenge the prevailing economic theories behind housing supply and question the architectural ideologies that often justify the demolition of historic urban assets.

This book is an essential read for urban planners, policymakers, and anyone interested in the future of urban living. Ellsworth’s clear, accessible insights into complex issues make Wonder City a vital contribution to the discourse on urban development, appealing to a broad audience that cares about the dynamics and future of city life.

WINNER, 2025 GOTHAM BOOK PRIZE

InsideHook: The 10 Books You Should Be Reading This November

A gripping account of how the automobile has failed NYC and how mass transit and a revitalized streetscape are vital to its post-pandemic recovery

In 1969, as all students of New York City history think they have learned, master builder Robert Moses lost his long battle to urbanist Jane Jacobs over his planned Lower Manhattan Expressway. The ten-lane elevated expressway would have sliced across SoHo and Little Italy, demolishing historic build­ings, and displacing thousands of families and businesses. Jacobs and her neighbors defeated Moses, and as a result, New York became the only major American city with no interstate highway running through its core. Like many global cities, though, New York had spent fifty years during the first half of the twentieth century trying and failing to tame its heavily populated landscape to fit the private automobile. New York has now spent more than fifty years trying to undo those mistakes, wresting back city space for people, not cars.

Movement: New York’s Long War to Take Back Its Streets from the Car chronicles the earlier, less-known battles that preceded the cancellation of the Lower Manhattan Expressway: Jacobs became an example for generations of urban planners, but whose example did Jacobs emulate in an earlier victory that saved Washington Square Park? Moses may serve handily as New York’s uber-villain now, but who, before him, was responsible for destroying a critical part of New York’s transit system?

A well respected urban writer who has focused on New York’s transportation system for more than a decade, author Nicole Gelinas resumes the story where Robert Caro’s landmark The Power Broker ended. Movement explores how, in the half-century leading up to the COVID- 19 pandemic, New York’s re-embracement of its mass-transit system and a livable streetscape helped save the city. Gelinas tackles the 1970s environmental movement, the 1980s rebuilding of the subways, and more contemporary battles, from Mayor Bloomberg's push for more pedestrian plazas and bike lanes in the early 2000s, to transportation advocates' protests to prevent traffic deaths in the Mayor de Blasio era of the 2010s, to how New York’s stewardship of its streets and subways have played a critical role during the 2020 pandemic and subsequent recovery.

Introducing a cast of transportation heroes to rival Jane Jacobs (Shirley Hayes, Hazel Henderson, Richard Ravitch, Nilka Martell) and puncturing the myth of Moses as New York’s anti-hero, Movement explores how New York City has helped redefine what it means to be a global city: not a place that is easy to drive through, but a place where people can take transit, walk, and bike to work, to school, or just for fun.

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.

The tale of New York’s Young Reds—a riveting journey through the YPA’s rise and influence

Young Reds in the Big Apple: The New York YPA, 1923–1934 by Jack Hodgson is a compelling historical account that delves into the heart of American communism through the lens of New York City’s Young Pioneers of America (YPA). This meticulously researched book sheds light on a neglected aspect of American history, revealing the intricate details of the YPA’s formation, ideologies, and activities from 1923 to 1934.

Hodgson illustrates the YPA’s journey, from its early days as a branch of the Communist Party USA, intended for youth aged 8–16, to its eventual disbandment. The book explores the organization’s unique structure, ethos, and activities, showcasing how it became a formidable force in New York’s political landscape. He vividly portrays the YPA members’ involvement in public protests, education reform, and their bold stance against prevailing social norms, including racial and gender issues.

The narrative goes beyond mere historical recounting, offering deep insights into the internal dynamics of the YPA, its relationship with the adult Communist Party, and its interactions with other political entities. Hodgson’s analysis of the YPA’s impact on its young members and the broader community is both insightful and thought-provoking.

Young Reds in the Big Apple stands out for its rigorous approach to a controversial subject, avoiding partisanship to provide a balanced view of the YPA’s legacy. This book is not just a histori­cal account; it’s an exploration of youthful activism, political movements, and the complexities of American communism during a pivotal era.

Explores how heritage discourses and local publics interact at Catholic mission sites in the southwestern United States, northern Mexico, and the Southern Cone

Interdisciplinary in scope and classed under the name “critical heritage studies,” Heritage and Its Missions makes extensive use of ethnographic perspectives to examine heritage not as a collection of inert things upon which a general historical interest is centered, but as a series of active meanings that have consequences in the social, political, and economic arenas. This approach considers the places of interaction between heritage discourses and local publics as constructed spaces where the very materiality of the social and the political unfolds.

Heritage and Its Missions brings together researchers from several countries interested in the pre-republican Catholic missions in the Americas as heritage. Each essay discusses the past and current heritage meanings applied to a specific mission by national and multicultural states, local Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities, international heritage institutions, and scholars. They then address how heritage actors produce knowledge from their positioned perspectives; how dif­ferent actors, collectives, communities, and publics relate to them; how heritage representations are deployed and contested as social facts; and how different conceptions of “heritage” collide, collaborate, and intersperse to produce the meanings around which heritage struggles unfold.

A testament to the resilience and determination of Black North Carolinians to achieve educational equality

This book examines the educational experiences of Black North Carolinians during the American Civil War and Reconstruction period, 1861–1877. By highlighting the collaborative efforts that led to the growing network of schools for the formerly enslaved people, it argues that schooling the Freedpeople was a contested terrain, fraught with conflicting visions of Black freedom and the role education should play. Although Black men and women emerged as the driving force behind the educational endeavors of this period, their work was facilitated by Northern aid and mission­ary societies, the federally-mandated Freedmen’s Bureau, and over 1,400 teachers from various regional and racial backgrounds. Yet the educational landscape was far from uniform, and the individuals and organizations involved had their distinct visions regarding the nature and purpose of Freedpeople’s education.

Through the use of qualitative and quantitative research methods, this book offers new insights into the reasons why Black and white Northerners and Southerners elected to become teachers. By examining their diverse motivations and experiences, it argues that attitudes toward Freedpeople’s education were complex and fluid, defying neat characterization.

Despite mounting obstacles and opposition to their work, Black North Carolinians’ unrelenting quest for education ultimately gave rise to free public schooling for both races, the professionaliza­tion of Black teachers, and an extensive network of Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

A primer for those with no previous knowledge of Chinese, this book introduces readers to the fundamentals of classical Chinese poetry through twenty-nine ways of understanding a single poem. “Seeing Off a Friend,” by the great Tang poet Li Bai (701–762) has long been praised for its vividness, subtlety, and poignancy. Anthologizing twenty-nine translations of the poem, Timothy Billings not only introduces the poem’s richness and depth but also the nuanced art of translating Chinese poetry into European languages.

A famous exemplar of “seeing off poetry,” which was common in an empire whose literati were continually on the move, Li’s poem has continued to fascinate readers far removed from its moment of composition, from the Victorians, to Ezra Pound, to contemporary translators from around the world. In talking us through these linguistic crossings, Billings unpacks the intricacies of the lüshi or "regulated verse poem," a form as pivotal to Chinese literature as the sonnet is to European tradition.

This book promises to transform its readers, step-by-step, into adept interpreters of one of the most significant verse forms in Chinese literary history. Billings’s engaging teaching style, backed by a lightly worn but deep scholarly engagement with Chinese poetry, makes this work an indispensable guide for anyone interested in poetry, translation, or the cultural heritage of China.

We tend to feel that works of fiction give us special access to lived experience. But how do novels cultivate that feeling? Where exactly does experience reside?

The Location of Experience argues that, paradoxically, novels create experience for us not by bringing reality up close, but by engineering environments in which we feel constrained from acting. By excavating the history of the rise of experience as an important category of Victorian intellectual life, this book reveals how experience was surprisingly tied to emotions of remorse and regret for some of the era’s great women novelists: the Brontës, George Eliot, Margaret Oliphant, and Elizabeth Gaskell. It shows how these writers passed ideas about experience—and experiences themselves—among each other.

Drawing on intellectual history, psychology, and moral philosophy, The Location of Experience shows that, through manipulating the psychological dimensions of fiction’s formal features, Victorian women novelists produced a philosophical account of experience that rivaled and complemented that of the male philosophers of the period.

The Location of Experience: Victorian Women Writers, the Novel, and the Feeling of Living is available from the Knowledge Unlatched on an open-access basis.

Composed as a counter-history of western philosophical and political thought, Stormy Weather explores the role western cosmologies have played in the conquests of paganism in Europe and the Americas, the production of climate wreckage, and the concealment of that wreckage from western humanists and earth scientists until late in the day. A lived cosmology, Connolly says, contains embedded understandings about the beginnings of the earth and the way time unfolds. The text engages the major western cosmologies of Augustine, Descartes, Kant, Tocqueville, together with pagan and minor western orientations that posed challenges to them or could have. Hesiod, Ovid, William Apess, Amazonian and Aztec cosmologies, Catherine Keller’s minor Christianity, James Baldwin, and Michel Serres instigate key responses, often challenging binary logics and the subject/object dichotomy with a world of multiple human and nonhuman subjectivities.

Connolly pursues a conception of time as a multiplicity of intersecting temporalities to come to terms with the vicissitudes of climate destruction and the grandeur of an earth neither highly susceptible to mastery nor designed to harmonize smoothly with humans. The book revisits the “improbable necessity” of a politics of swarming to respond to the ongoing wreckage and potential fascist responses to vast infusions of climate refugees from the south into temperate-zone capitalist states.

Stormy Weather draws on the work of earth scientists, indigenous thinkers, naturalists, humanists, and students of nonwestern cosmologies. Ultimately, Connolly contends that critical intellectuals today must not remain enclosed in disciplinary silos, or even in “the humanities” as currently defined, to do justice to our moment of climate wreckage.

A revealing exploration of domestic fascism in the United States from the 1930s to the January 6th insurrection in Washington, D.C.

In 1951, the Civil Rights Congress presented to the United Nations We Charge Genocide, a more than two-hundred-page petition that held the United States accountable for genocide against African Americans. This landmark text represented the dawn of Black Lives Matter and is as relevant today as it was then, as evidenced by the rise of white supremacist groups across the nation and the January 6th Capitol riot which disclosed the specter of a fascist revival in the US Tracing this specter to its roots, We Charge Genocide! provides an original interpretation of American fascism as a permanent and longstanding current in US politics dating to the origins of US settler-colonialism.

Picking up where Angela Davis’s 1971 essay, “Political Prisoners, Prisons, and Black Liberation,” left off, We Charge Genocide! reveals how the United States legal system has contributed to the growth of fascist states and fascist movements domestically and internationally. American Studies scholar Bill V. Mullen contends that the preservation of a white supremacist world order—and the prevention of revolutionary threats to that order—structure the discourse and practice of US fascism. He names this fascist modality the “counterrevolution of law” in tribute to the radicals on the American Left, such as George Jackson, Angela Davis, Herbert Marcuse, and the Black Panther Party, who perceived the American state’s destruction of revolutionary groups and ideas as a distinctive form of American fascism. Mullen argues that US law, particularly US “race law,” has been an enabling mechanism for modalities of fascist rule that have locked historic blocs of non-white populations into an iron cage of legal and extralegal violence.

To this end We Charge Genocide! offers a legal historiography of US fascism rooted in law’s capacity to legitimate and sustain racial domination. By recovering the legacy of important orga­nizations, such as the Civil Rights Congress and Black Panther Party, which have both theorized and resisted American legal fascism, Mullen demonstrates how their work and critical theorists like Davis, Marcuse, Jackson, Walter Benjamin, and Ernst Fraenkel illuminate the threat of American legal fascism to its most vulnerable racialized victims of state violence in our time, including gender and transgender violence.

FINALIST, 38th ANNUAL FRENCH-AMERICAN FOUNDATION TRANSLATION PRIZE

Exploring the ever-changing philosophy of city life with Jean-Luc Nancy

In The City in the Distance, Jean-Luc Nancy embarks on nothing less than a philosophy of the city. Drawing on his widely discussed accounts of sense and of the fraught question of community, Nancy views the city as the site of a disposition that is constantly undergoing metamorphoses.

Far from an abstract account, Nancy attends in the most concrete way possible to the workings of a city not typically taken as paradigmatic, Los Angeles. As Jean-Christophe Bailly suggests in his foreword, Nancy joins Walter Benjamin in thinking the city not from an external vantage point, but on its own terms.

FINALIST, ASSOCIATION FOR THEATRE IN HIGHER EDUCATION (ATHE) OUTSTANDING BOOK AWARD

A moving journey through the shadows of queer suicide and a tribute to lives marked by struggle and beauty

The Lamentations explores the struggles and resilience within the queer community, offering a unique blend of historical analysis and emotional tribute to those affected. Author Patrick Ander­son examines the phenomenon of queer suicide across various art forms such as film, theatre, and literature, tracing its evolution from the twentieth century to today.

Anderson brings to light the personal stories of individuals in the queer community who have ended their lives, compiling narratives from sources like newspaper articles, obituaries, and case studies. The book confronts the harsh realities of loneliness, shame, and oppression faced by many LGBTQ+ individuals, providing a poignant reflection on the societal challenges they face.

The Lamentations is more than a meditation on death; it’s a narrative of survival, mourning, and healing. Sharing personal accounts, including the losses of loved ones and friends, Anderson highlights the importance of memory and storytelling in celebrating the vibrancy of queer life amidst the sorrow of loss.

Accessible to a broad readership, the book transcends academic boundaries to address themes of love, loss, and the human spirit. It’s a compelling read for anyone interested in queer studies or anyone seeking to understand human experience through the lens of loss and legacy.

A profound exploration into the spiritual beliefs and practices of Seattle’s unhoused youth

Soul Woundedness is an intimate, piercing book about everyday life for young adults living on the streets of Seattle. Based on over five years of research and as a participant-observer, Paul Houston Blankenship-Lai presents the personal experiences of “street kids,” highlighting how their spiritual beliefs and practices offer them comfort, a sense of community, and a feeling of belonging amidst their struggles. They also demonstrate how spirituality on the streets can alienate people from themselves and the world.

The stories Blankenship-Lai tells here are about how social wounds go soul deep, and how seemingly antireligious spiritual practices, fashioned in an almost unlivable local world, help people create a life still worth living. By paying deep, sustained attention to what spirituality is like on the streets and what difference it makes, Blankenship-Lai uncovers an important, overlooked dimension in the experience and study of homelessness. They invite us to enter these stories and to question how our own spiritual and otherwise practices can help create “a more loving love.”

Aimed at a diverse audience, Soul Woundedness is a book not merely to educate but to transform. It is particularly relevant for those interested in spirituality’s role in addressing social inequities and underscores the importance of spiritual practices in overcoming adversity and promoting social change, making a compelling case for a world where everyone has a place to call home.

A vivid, artfully crafted, and deeply hopeful account of one community’s struggle to rediscover and reinvent itself after a century of genocidal loss, dispossession, and displacement

To the extent that Middle Eastern Christians register in Euro-American political imaginaries, they are usually invoked to justify Western military intervention into countries like Iraq or Syria, or as an exemption to anti-Islamic immigration policies because of an assumption that their Christianity makes them easily assimilable in the so-called “Judeo-Christian” West.

Using the tools of multisensory ethnography, Sonic Icons uncovers how these views work against the very communities they are meant to benefit. Through long term fieldwork in the Netherlands among Syriac Orthodox Christians—also known as Assyrians, Aramaeans, and Syriacs—Bakker Kel­logg reveals how they intertwine religious practice with political activism to save Syriac Christianity from the twin threats of political violence in the Middle East and cultural assimilation in Europe.

In a historical moment when much of their tradition has been forgotten or destroyed, their story of self-discovery is one of survival and reinvention. By reviving the late antique Syriac litur­gical tradition known as the Daughters and Sons of the Covenant, they seek a complex form of recognition for what they understand to be the ethical core of Christian kinship in an ethnic as well as in a religious sense, despite living in societies that do not recognize this unhyphenated form of ethnoreligiosity as a politically legitimate mode of public identity.

Drawing on both theological and linguistic understandings of the icon, Sonic Icons rethinks foundational theoretical accounts of ethnicization, racialization, and secularization by examining how kinship gets made, claimed, and named in the global politics of minority recognition. The icon, as a site of communicative and reproductive power, illuminates how these processes are shaped by religious histories of struggle for sovereignty over the reproductive future.

A Taytsh Manifesto calls for a translational paradigm for Yiddish studies and for the study of modern Jewish culture. Saul Noam Zaritt calls for a shift in vocabulary, from Yiddish to taytsh, in order to promote reading strategies that account for the ways texts named as Jewish move between languages and cultures.

Yiddish, a moniker that became dominant only in the early twentieth century, means “Jewish” and thus marks the language with a single identity: of and for a Jewish collective. In contrast, this book calls attention to an earlier and, at one time, more common name for the language: taytsh, which initially means “German.” By using the term taytsh, speakers indicated that they were indeed speaking a Germanic language, a language that was not entirely their own. In time, when the word shifted to a verb, taytshn, it came to mean the act of translation. To write or speak in Yiddish is thus to render into taytsh and inhabit the gap between languages.

A Taytsh Manifesto highlights the cultural porousness that inheres in taytsh and deploys the term as a paradigm that can be applied to a host of modern Jewish cultural formations. The book reads three corpora in modern Yiddish culture through the lens of translation: Yiddish pulp fiction, also known as shund (trash); the genre of the Yiddish monologue as authored by Sholem Aleichem and other prominent Yiddish writers; and the persistence of Yiddish as a language of vulgarity in contemporary U.S. culture. Together these examples help revise current histories of Yiddish while demonstrating the need for new vocabularies to account for the multidirectionality of Jewish culture. A Taytsh Manifesto develops a model for identifying, in Yiddish and beyond, how cultures intertwine, how they become implicated in world systems and empire, and how they might escape such limiting and oppressive structures.

One of the enduring claims in the Christian tradition is that creation is good. Given the diversity of experience and the abundance of suffering in the world, however, such an affirmation is not always straightforward. The Play of Goodness provides a phenomenology of creation’s goodness that clarifies the ongoing relevance of the doctrine today. It argues that what is “good” about creation is not synonymous with a confession of faith and does not require an overly optimistic disposition, but instead appears within diverse and often surprising circumstances.

Alongside original contributions to French phenomenology and creation theology, The Play of Goodness counterbalances a tendency in continental philosophy to focus on negative phenomena. By developing the philosophical concept of a prelinguistic experience of goodness, the book identifies a quality of goodness that is integral to the place in which we find ourselves. It also articulates shared points of contact among people in an increasingly polarized world, while demonstrating that distinctly theological concepts do not need to be presented in opposition to secular, agnostic, or atheist perspectives in order to be relevant.

Benjamins develops an account of creation’s goodness that has the potential to animate an abiding affection for one’s place, accentuate our reasons to care for it, and confirm that what happens in our lives is of genuine significance.

In a bid to wean himself off Facebook and Twitter, media scholar and cultural theorist Dominic Pettman decided to revive an ancient custom. He decided to tell the local bees of his thoughts, theories, musings, and meditations. The result was an apian journal that parses the daily news and the routines of modern life in a more sustained and reflective way than the Pavlovian posts to which we are so addicted.

The account that emerges from Pettman’s regular discussion with the bees forms a compelling portrait of the tumultuous period running from the Fall of 2019 to New Year’s Eve, 2022. What began as a reflection on the traumatic effects of an “unprecedented” presidency soon evolved into a real-time response to the equally extraordinary events of the pandemic and its aftermath.

One key concern that emerges from Pettman’s ongoing discussion with the bees is the extent to which, thanks to the alienating effects of neoliberalism, we were already engaged in an advanced form of social distancing long before anyone had heard of COVID. Other key themes include education, human-animal relations, climate change, mediated intimacy, attention ecologies, collective memory, slow violence, the self-fulfilling prophecy that is New York City, the never-ending end of history, and the mundane strategies we share in a bid to forge on, despite the accumulating challenges of the twenty-first century.

Telling the Bees is an invitation to rediscover the art of reflection and a profound meditation on human connection, alienation, and our collective yearning for intimacy in an age of distance. Through what Pettman describes as an "interspecies monologue," readers are treated to a unique perspective on navigating the complexities of the twenty-first century, inspired by the ingenuity and resilience of our natural cohabitants.

A collection of essays that outline the recent work on ecology, political theology, religion, and philosophy by one of the leading theologians of our age

As we face relentless ecological destruction spiraling around a planet of unconstrained capitalism and democratic failure, what matters most? How do we get our bearings and direct our priorities in such a terrestrial scenario? Species, race, sex, politics, and economics will increasingly come tangled in the catastrophic trajectory of climate change. With a sense of urgency and of possibility, Catherine Keller’s No Matter What reflects multiple trajectories of planetary crisis. They converge from a point of view formed of the political ecologies of a transdisciplinary theological pluralism. In its work an ancient symbolism of apocalypse deconstructs end-of-the-world narratives, Christian and secular, even as any notion of an all-controlling and good God collapses under the force of internal contradiction. In the place of a once-for-all incarnation, the materiality of unbounded intercarnation, of fragile yet animating relations of mattering earth-bodies, comes into focus.

The essays of No Matter What share the preoccupation with matter characteristic of the so-called new materialism. They also root in an older ecotheological tradition, one that has long struggled against the undead legacy of an earth-betraying theology that, with the aid of its white Christian right wing, invests the denigration of matter, its spirit of “no matter,” in limitless commodi­fication. The fragile alternative Keller outlines here embraces—no matter what—the mattering of the life of the Earth and of all its spirited bodies. These essays, struggling against Christian and secular betrayals of the spirited matter of Earth, work to materialize the still possible planetary healing.

In 2009, the body of a former president of the Republic of Cyprus, Tassos Papadopoulos, was stolen from his grave. The Time of the Cannibals reconsiders this history and the public discourse on it to reconsider how we think about conspiracy theory, and specifically, what it means to understand conspiracy theories “in context.”

The months after Papadopoulos’s body was stolen saw intense public speculation in Cyprus, including widespread expressions of sacrilege, along with many false accusations against Cypriots and foreigners positioned as his political antagonists. Davis delves into the public discourse on conspiracy theory in Cyprus that flourished in the aftermath, tracing theories about the grave robbery to theories about the division of Cyprus some thirty-five years earlier, and both to longer histories of imperial and colonial violence.

Along the way, Davis explores cross-contextual connections among Cyprus and other locales, in the form of conspiracy theories as well as political theologies regarding the dead bodies of political leaders. Through critical close readings of academic and journalistic approaches to conspiracy theory, Davis shows that conspiracy theory as an analytic object fails to sustain comparative analysis, and defies any general theory of conspiracy theory. What these approaches accomplish instead, she argues, is the perpetuation of ethnocentrism in the guise of contextualization.

The Time of the Cannibals asks what better kind of contextualization this and any “case” call for, and proposes the concept of conspiracy attunement: a means of grasping the dialogic contexts in which conspiracy theories work recursively as matters of political and cultural significance in the long durée.

Examines the need to recenter the category of sex–theorizing sex itself as nonbinary–in contemporary studies of gender and sexuality

Gender has largely replaced sex as a category in critical theory, in progressive cultural circles, and in everyday bureaucratic language. Much of this development has been salutary. Gender has become a crucial site for theorizing trans identifications and embodiments. Yet, without a concomi­tant theory of sex, gender’s contemporary uses also intersect with late neoliberalism’s emphasis on micro-identities, flexibility, avatar culture, and human capital. Contemporary culture has also grown more ambivalent about sexual desire and its expression. Sex is seen as both ubiquitous and ubiquitously a problem.

In Defense of Sex theorizes sex as both a nonbinary form of embodiment (one that can comple­ment recent trans conceptions of gender as multiple and nonbinary) and a crucial form of social desire. Drawing on intersex and trans theory as well as Marxist theory, feminist new materialism, psychoanalysis, and accounts of the flesh in Black studies, author Christopher Breu argues for a materialist understanding of embodiment and the workings of desire as they structure contemporary culture. Moving from critique to theorizing embodiment, desire, and forms of bioaccumulation, In Defense of Sex concludes by proposing the unabashedly utopian project of building a sexual and embodied commons.

In Defense of Sex: Nonbinary Embodiment and Desire is available from Knowledge Unlatched on an open-access basis.

A new perspective on spirituality and social change as seen through the work of six visionary thinkers

In Liberating Spiritualities, Christopher D. Tirres offers an in-depth exploration of spirituality as a catalyst for social transformation, showcasing the profound insights of six distinguished twentieth-century liberation thinkers from across the Américas. This thought-provoking work examines the contributions of Marxist philosopher José Carlos Mariátegui, renowned educator and philosopher Paulo Freire, innovative constructive theologian Virgilio Elizondo, influential cultural and feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa, activist mujerista theologian and social ethicist Ada María Isasi-Díaz, and groundbreaking ecofeminist theologian Ivone Gebara.

Tirres examines the distinct yet interconnected philosophies of these figures, showcasing their unified critique of colonial Christendom and their deep commitment to the marginalized. He adeptly articulates how their diverse religious and philosophical backgrounds come together in a shared vision of spirituality as a fundamental aspect of human life and intelligence. He further illuminates how these thinkers advocate for spirituality as a non-reductive, life-affirming practice, transcending traditional boundaries and offering an integrated approach to faith, culture, and social justice. Their collective insights form a persuasive case for re-envisioning spirituality as a crucial element in the quest for a more just and compassionate world.

Liberating Spiritualities is not only a tribute to these six influential figures but also a critical reflection on the relevance of their ideas in today’s global context. Tirres’s transdisciplinary study bridges liberationist and pragmatic insights, offering readers a fresh, highly original interpretation of socially engaged spirituality, making this book an essential resource for those seeking to understand the transformative power of spirituality in the pursuit of social justice and human dignity.