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Winner, 2023 Bernard S. Cohn Prize, Association for Asian Studies
Winner, 2021 Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences
Winner, 2021 Ruth Benedict Prize, Association for Queer Anthropology
Honorable Mention, 2023 Anne Bolin & Gil Herdt Book Prize, Human Sexuality & Anthropology Interest Group

Hijras, one of India’s third gendered or trans populations, have been an enduring presence in the South Asian imagination—in myth, in ritual, and in everyday life, often associated in stigmatized forms with begging and sex work. In more recent years hijras have seen a degree of political emergence as a moral presence in Indian electoral politics, and with heightened vulnerability within global health terms as a high-risk population caught within the AIDS epidemic.

Hijras, Lovers, Brothers recounts two years living with a group of hijras in rural India. In this riveting ethnography, Vaibhav Saria reveals not just a group of stigmatized or marginalized others but a way of life composed of laughter, struggles, and desires that trouble how we read queerness, kinship, and the psyche.

Against easy framings of hijras that render them marginalized, Saria shows how hijras makes the normative Indian family possible. The book also shows that particular practices of hijras, such as refusing to use condoms or comply with retroviral regimes, reflect not ignorance, irresponsibility, or illiteracy but rather a specific idiom of erotic asceticism arising in both Hindu and Islamic traditions. This idiom suffuses the densely intertwined registers of erotics, economics, and kinship that inform the everyday lives of hijras and offer a repertoire of self-fashioning beyond the secular horizons of public health or queer theory.

Engrossingly written and full of keen insights, the book moves from the small pleasures of the everyday—laughter, flirting, teasing—to impossible longings, kinship, and economies of property and substance in order to give a fuller account of trans lives and of Indian society today.

Perfect for gift giving, the complete three-volume boxed set of In Your Eyes I See My Words gives readers an extraordinary opportunity to understand the vision of Pope Francis

Volume 1 (1999–2004)
Pope Francis is a first in many ways: the first pope from the Americas, the first Jesuit, the first Francis, the first child of immigrants from the Old World, nurtured and transformed by the New World and returned to lead the whole world. His eloquent homilies and speeches have inspired the faithful of Argentina for decades, largely through his gift of oratory, tracing back to his time as a bishop, archbishop, and cardinal in his home country. Published in English for the first time in their entirety and with contextual annotations, In Your Eyes I See My Words, Volume 1 collects his homilies and speeches from 1999 to 2004.

This illuminating collection presents an extraordinary opportunity to understand the vision of a great pastor. His words bear witness to the deep experience of faith among God’s people while also showcasing his own extraordinary ability to connect with communities of faith. Through these homilies and speeches, Pope Francis humbly displays his abilities as a wordsmith, a patient and attentive teacher, an inspired and faithful theologian, and a sensitive pastor uniquely attuned to his people, offering ready guidance for their journeys but also journeying with them.

The first of a three-volume translation of Pope Francis’s theological, pastoral, anthropological, and educational thought provides rich insights into the mind and theological unfolding of a spiritual leader who has become beloved across the globe. Within it we see Archbishop Jorge Mario Bergoglio—later Pope Francis—ministering to the needs of the people while also engaging with the political, technological, and societal forces affecting their daily lives. Here is an ecclesial voice not afraid to challenge the politicians, the culture-makers, and media moguls—even his own ordained and lay church ministers—to live a life of faithfulness marked by justice, equality, and concern for the needs of everyone, urging all to rely on the “vitality of memory” and the “recovery of hope.” In Your Eyes I See My Words also provides a glimpse into the political, social, and religious environment of Argentina and Latin America, providing a unique perspective on the issues confronting the faithful and how those issues motivated and nurtured Pope Francis’s understanding of the Church’s mission to all segments of society—particularly to those underrepresented and on the margins of history.

Volume 2 (2005–2008)
In Your Eyes I See My Words, Volume 2 contains Pope Francis’s homilies and speeches from 2005 to 2008. Continuing what began in the first volume of this three-volume publication, Volume 2 shows Archbishop Bergoglio’s growth as a pastor and a theologian/scholar in the midst of his people. At the same time, it shows him emerging as an international voice calling for changes in the way the Church carries out its ministry and its educational task on behalf of children, youth, adults, and Church ministers. In his homilies from Christmas, Easter, and especially in his response to the tragic fire and deaths of 194 people at the nightclub Republica Cromañon, we see Bergoglio speak passionately to his parishioners, challenging them with equal portions of tenderness and righteous anger. Perhaps uniquely, we also watch as his audiences, prominence, and influence grow globally, foreshadowing who he will become in 2013 when he is elected Pope.

On the larger national and international scale, Bergoglio addresses various conferences, such as the Argentina Press Association and the Episcopal Conference of Argentina of which he was elected President in 2005 and served the maximum possible term of six years. We see and read as his work takes him outside his country to Rome (2007) at the Pontifical Commission for Latin America; to Brazil (2007), where his presentation on the Crisis of Civilization and Culture at the Fifth CELAM Conference ends up shaping much of the Aparecida Conclusions; and, finally, to Quebec (2008) as he speaks at the FortyNinth International Eucharistic Congress. All told, In Your Eyes I See My Words, Volume 2 is a glimpse into a period of time in which Archbishop Bergoglio grows immensely in thought, reflection, and action, laying the groundwork for the mature, thoughtful, and beloved Pope Francis he has come to be known as around the world.

Volume 3 (2009–2013)
In Your Eyes I See My Words, Volume 3 brings together the homilies and speeches of Archbishop Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio from 2009 through his election as Pope Francis on March 13, 2013. Taken together, all three volumes present with remarkable clarity his theological, educational, and pastoral vision for the Church that was shaped far from Europe and North America and in the tumultuous years of Argentina’s political and economic struggles. These writings provide an intimate glimpse into the theological, philosophical, scientific, and cultural-educational currents that forged the steady, loving, and nurturing hands with which Bergoglio guided the Church in Buenos Aires. Those very same hands have now done the same for the Church from Rome, a Church rocked by financial and moral scandals, and a world shaken by the first global pandemic in a century.

No Pope in modern times has compiled such a rich variety of writings in as many fields as Bergoglio has done for us in the years prior to his election to the papacy, especially during his time as Archbishop/Cardinal of Buenos Aires. These writings were kneaded—a word he uses when talking about the work of molding the souls and character of youth and seminarians—in the relationships he formed in his bus rides to work and in his intense contact with all segments of the population. Because of that careful and prayerful process of kneading, they have found their full development in Bergoglio’s writing as Pope Francis, especially in Evangelii gaudium (November 2013); Gaudete et exsultate, On the call to sanctity (March 2018); and his encyclical Laudato si’ (May 2015). In this final volume of Bergoglio’s homilies and papers we meet European theologians and thinkers such as Hans Urs von Balthasar, Henri de Lubac, and Bergoglio’s Uruguayan philosopher and friend Methol Ferré, the literary figure Miguel Ángel Asturias, and Enrique Santos Discépolo, a singer and composer of tangos that decry corruption.

In Your Eyes I See My Words, Volume 3 concludes with a homily Bergoglio prepared before leaving for Rome to attend the conclave that elected him to the papacy. It was for the Chrism Mass on Holy Thursday, to be delivered to his priests in Buenos Aires. Instead, it was his homily from Rome to the priests of the world, reminding them, “The precious oil that anoints Aaron’s beard not only perfumes his person but spreads and reaches the margins. The Lord will say it clearly: his anointing is for the poor, the prisoners, the sick, those who are sad and alone.” Here, as Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio became Pope Francis, he spoke words of deep tenderness, reminding all of us that the Lord’s anointing is meant precisely for those who are floundering—those who are sick, who are sad or alone, who are in need of care. In short, the Lord’s anointing is meant for the world we live in today, at this exact moment of crisis. In a prophetic conclusion, the last homily of this volume is an outline of the road map Pope Francis has followed throughout his papacy: one defined by ongoing love and care for God’s people and that seeks to spread God’s anointing to those living on the margins of life.

More than a purely philosophical problem, straddling the ambivalent terrain between necessity and impossibility, contingency has become the very horizon of everyday life. Often used as a synonym for the precariousness of working conditions under neoliberalism, for the unknown threats posed by terrorism, or for the uncertain future of the planet itself, contingency needs to be calculated and controlled in the name of the protection of life.

The overcoming of contingency is not only called upon to justify questionable mechanisms of political control; it serves as a central legitimating factor for Enlightenment itself. In this volume, nine major philosophers and theorists address a range of questions around contingency and moral philosophy. How can we rethink contingency in its creative aspects, outside the dominant rhetoric of risk and dangerous exposure? What is the status of contingency—as the unnecessary and law-defying—in or for ethics? What would an alternative “ethics of contingency”—one that does not simply attempt to sublate it out of existence—look like?

The volume tackles the problem contingency has always posed to both ethical theory and dialectics: that of difference itself, in the difficult mediation between the particular and the universal, same and other, the contingent singularity of the event and the necessary generality of the norms and laws.

From deconstruction to feminism to ecological thought, some of today’s most influential thinkers reshape many of the most debated concepts in moral philosophy: difference, agency, community, and life itself.

Contributors: Étienne Balibar, Rosi Braidotti, Thomas Claviez, Drucilla Cornell, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Viola Marchi, Michael Naas, Cary Wolfe, Slavoj Žižek

In 1631, Marie Guyart stepped over the threshold of the Ursuline convent in Tours, leaving behind her eleven-year-old son, Claude, against the wishes of her family and her own misgivings. Marie concluded, “God was dearer to me than all that. Leaving him therefore in His hands, I bid adieu to him joyfully.” Claude organized a band of schoolboys to storm the convent, begging for his mother’s return. Eight years later, Marie made her way to Quebec, where over the course of the next thirty-three years she opened the first school for Native American girls, translated catechisms into indigenous languages, and served some eighteen years as superior of the first Ursuline convent in the New World. She would also maintain, over this same period, an extensive and intimate correspondence with the son she had abandoned to serve God.

The Cruelest of All Mothers is, fundamentally, an explanation of Marie de l’Incarnation’s decision to abandon Claude for religious life. Complicating Marie’s own explication of the abandonment as a sacrifice carried out in imitation of Christ and in submission to God’s will, the book situates the event against the background of early modern French family life, the marginalization of motherhood in the Christian tradition, and seventeenth-century French Catholic spirituality. Deeply grounded in a set of rich primary sources, The Cruelest of All Mothers offers a rich and complex analysis of the abandonment.

Working from the Bible to contemporary art, Shibboleth surveys the linguistic performances behind the politics of border crossings and the policing of identities.

In the Book of Judges, the Gileadites use the word shibboleth to target and kill members of a closely related tribe, the Ephraimites, who cannot pronounce the initial shin phoneme. In modern European languages, shibboleth has come to mean a hard-to-falsify sign that winnows identities and establishes and confirms borders. It has also acquired the ancillary meanings of slogan or cliché. The semantic field of shibboleth thus seems keyed to the waning of the logos in an era of technical reproducibility—to the proliferation of technologies and practices of encryption, decryption, exclusion and inclusion that saturate modern life. The various phenomena we sum up as neoliberalism and globalization are unimaginable in the absence of shibboleth-technologies.

In the context of an unending refugee crisis and a general displacement, monitoring and quarantining of populations within a global regime of technics, Paul Celan’s subtle yet fierce reorientation of shibboleth merits scrupulous reading. This book interprets the episode in Judges together with Celan’s poems and Jacques Derrida’s reading of them, as well as passages from William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Doris Salcedo’s 2007 installation Shibboleth at the Tate Modern. Redfield pursues the track of shibboleth: a word to which no language can properly lay claim—a word that is both less and more than a word, that signifies both the epitome and the ruin of border control technology, and that thus, despite its violent role in the Biblical story, offers a locus of poetico-political affirmation.

Infectious Liberty traces the origins of our contemporary concerns about public health, world population, climate change, global trade, and government regulation to a series of Romantic-era debates and their literary consequences. Through a series of careful readings, Robert Mitchell shows how a range of elements of modern literature, from character-systems to free indirect discourse, are closely intertwined with Romantic-era liberalism and biopolitics.

Eighteenth- and early-nineteenth century theorists of liberalism such as Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus drew upon the new sciences of population to develop a liberal biopolitics that aimed to coordinate differences among individuals by means of the culling powers of the market. Infectious Liberty focuses on such authors as Mary Shelley and William Wordsworth, who drew upon the sciences of population to develop a biopolitics beyond liberalism. These authors attempted what Roberto Esposito describes as an “affirmative” biopolitics, which rejects the principle of establishing security by distinguishing between valued and unvalued lives, seeks to support even the most abject members of a population, and proposes new ways of living in common.

Infectious Liberty expands our understandings of liberalism and biopolitics—and the relationship between them—while also helping us to understand better the ways creative literature facilitates the project of reimagining what the politics of life might consist of.


Infectious Liberty is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.

The question of life, Michael Naas argues, though rarely foregrounded by Plato, runs through and structures his thought. By characterizing being in terms of life, Plato in many of his later dialogues, including the Statesman, begins to discover—or, better, to invent—a notion of true or real life that would be opposed to all merely biological or animal life, a form of life that would be more valuable than everything we call life and every life that can actually be lived.

This emphasis on life in the Platonic dialogues illuminates the structural relationship between many of Plato’s most time-honored distinctions, such as being and becoming, soul and body. At the same time, it helps to explain the enormous power and authority that Plato’s thought has exercised, for good or ill, over our entire philosophical and religious tradition.

Lucid yet sophisticated, Naas’s account offers a fundamental rereading of what the concept of life entails, one that inflects a range of contemporary conversations, from biopolitics, to the new materialisms, to the place of the human within the living world.

Remembering Wolsey seeks to contribute to our understanding of historical memory and memorialization by examining in detail the commemoration and representation of the life of Thomas Wolsey, the sixteenth-century cardinal, papal legate, and lord chancellor of England. Hornbeck surveys a wide range of representations of Cardinal Wolsey, from those contemporary with his death to recent mass-market appearances on television and historical fiction, to go beyond previous scholarship that has examined Wolsey only in an early modern context.

Remembering Wolsey contributes significantly to the ongoing reimagining of English church history in the years prior to the Reformation. Surveying chronicle accounts, pamphlets, plays, poems, historical fictions, works of historical scholarship, civic pageants and monuments, films, and television programs, the book shows how an extended sequence of authors have told widely varying stories about Wolsey’s life, often through the lens of their own religious and ideological commitments and/or in response to the pressing concerns of their times.

Featuring scholars at the forefront of contemporary political theology and the study of German Idealism, Nothing Absolute explores the intersection of these two flourishing fields. Against traditional approaches that view German Idealism as a secularizing movement, this volume revisits it as the first fundamentally philosophical articulation of the political-theological problematic in the aftermath of the Enlightenment and the advent of secularity.

Nothing Absolute reclaims German Idealism as a political-theological trajectory. Across the volume’s contributions, German thought from Kant to Marx emerges as crucial for the genealogy of political theology and for the ongoing reassessment of modernity and the secular. By investigating anew such concepts as immanence, utopia, sovereignty, theodicy, the Earth, and the world, as well as the concept of political theology itself, this volume not only rethinks German Idealism and its aftermath from a political-theological perspective but also demonstrates what can be done with (or against) German Idealism using the conceptual resources of political theology today.

Contributors: Joseph Albernaz, Daniel Colucciello Barber, Agata Bielik-Robson, Kirill Chepurin, S. D. Chrostowska, Saitya Brata Das, Alex Dubilet, Vincent Lloyd, Thomas Lynch, James Martel, Steven Shakespeare, Oxana Timofeeva, Daniel Whistler

Saint Marks invokes and pluralizes the figure of Mark in order to explore relations between painting and writing. Emphasizing that the saint is not a singular biographical individual in the various biblical and hagiographic texts that involve someone so named, the book takes as its ultimate concern the kinds of material life that outlive the human subject.

From the incommensurate, anachronic instances in which Saint Mark can be located—among them, as Evangelist or as patron saint of Venice—the book traces Mark’s afterlives within art, sacred texts, and literature in conversation with such art historians and philosophers as Aby Warburg, Giorgio Agamben, Georges Didi-Huberman, T. J. Clark, Adrian Stokes, and Jean-Luc Nancy. Goldberg begins in sixteenth-century Venice, with a series of paintings by Gentile and Giovanni Bellini, Tintoretto, and others, that have virtually nothing to do with biblical texts. He turns then to the legacy of John Ruskin’s Stones of Venice and through it to questions about what painting does as painting. A final chapter turns to ancient texts, considering the Gospel of St. Mark together with its double, the so-called Secret Gospel that has occasioned controversy for its homoerotic implications.

The posthumous persistence of a life is what the gospel named Mark calls the Kingdom of God. Saints have posthumous lives; but so too do paintings and texts. This major interdisciplinary study by one of our most astute cultural critics extends what might have been a purely theological subject to embrace questions central to cultural practice from the ancient world to the present.

In Theosemiotic, Michael Raposa uses Charles Peirce’s semiotic theory to rethink certain issues in contemporary philosophical theology and the philosophy of religion. He first sketches a history that links Peirce’s thought to that of earlier figures (both within the tradition of American religious thought and beyond), as well as to other classical pragmatists and to later thinkers and developments. Drawing on Peirce’s ideas, Raposa develops a semiotic conception of persons/selves emphasizing the role that acts of attention play in shaping human inferences and perception. His central Peircean presuppositions are that all human experience takes the form of semiosis and that the universe is “perfused” with signs. Religious meaning emerges out of a process of continually reading and re-reading certain signs.

Theology is explored here in its manifestations as inquiry, therapy, and praxis. By drawing on both Peirce’s logic of vagueness and his logic of relations, Raposa makes sense out of how we talk about God as personal, and also how we understand the character of genuine communities. An investigation of what Peirce meant by “musement” illuminates the nature and purpose of prayer. Theosemiotic is portrayed as a form of religious naturalism, broadly conceived. At the same time, the potential links between any philosophical theology conceived as theosemiotic and liberation theology are exposed.

Bringing together theologies of liberation and decolonial thought, Decolonial Love interrogates colonial frameworks that shape Christian thought and legitimize structures of oppression and violence within Western modernity. In response to the historical situation of colonial modernity, the book offers a decolonial mode of theological reflection and names a historical instance of salvation that stands in conflict with Western modernity. Seeking a new starting point for theological reflection and praxis, Joseph Drexler-Dreis turns to the work of Frantz Fanon and James Baldwin. Rejecting a politics of inclusion into the modern world-system, Fanon and Baldwin engage reality from commitments that Drexler-Dreis describes as orientations of decolonial love. These orientations expose the idolatry of Western modernity, situate the human person in relation to a reality that exceeds modern/colonial significations, and catalyze and authenticate historical movement in conflict with the modern world-system. The orientations of decolonial love in the work of Fanon and Baldwin—whose work is often perceived as violent from the perspective of Western modernity—inform theological commitments and reflection, and particularly the theological image of salvation.

Decolonial Love offers to theologians a foothold within the modern/colonial context from which to commit to the sacred and, from a historical encounter with the divine mystery, face up to and take responsibility for the legacies of colonial domination and violence within a struggle to transform reality.

In Political Theology on Edge, the discourse of political theology is seen as situated on an edge—that is, on the edge of a world that is grappling with global warming, a brutal form of neoliberal capitalism, protests against racism and police brutality, and the COVID-19 pandemic. This edge is also a form of eschatology that forces us to imagine new ways of being religious and political in our cohabitation of a fragile and shared planet. Each of the essays in this volume attends to how climate change and our ecological crises intersect and interact with more traditional themes of political theology.

While the tradition of political theology is often associated with philosophical responses to the work of Carl Schmitt—and the critical attempts to disengage religion from his rightwing politics—the contributors to this volume are informed by Schmitt but not limited to his perspectives. They engage and transform political theology from the standpoint of climate change, the politics of race, and non-Christian political theologies including Islam and Sikhism. Important themes include the Anthropocene, ecology, capitalism, sovereignty, Black Lives Matter, affect theory, continental philosophy, destruction, and suicide. This book features world renowned scholars and emerging voices that together open up the tradition of political theology to new ideas and new ways of thinking.

Contributors: Gil Anidjar, Balbinder Singh Bhogal, J. Kameron Carter, William E. Connolly, Kelly Brown Douglas, Seth Gaiters, Lisa Gasson-Gardner, Winfred Goodwin, Lawrence Hillis, Mehmet Karabela, Michael Northcott, Austin Roberts, Noëlle Vahanian, Larry L. Welborn

Theory, as it’s happened across the humanities, has often been coded as “Jewish.” This collection of essays seeks to move past explanations for this understanding that rely on the self-evident (the historical centrality of Jews to the rise of Critical Theory with the Frankfurt School) or stereotypical (psychoanalysis as the “Jewish Science”) in order to show how certain problematics of modern Jewishness enrich theory.

In the range of violence and agency that attend the appellation “Jew,” depending on how, where, and by whom it’s uttered, we can see that Jewishness is a rhetorical as much as a sociological fact, and that its rhetorical and sociological aspects, while linked, are not identical. Attention to this disjuncture helps to elucidate the questions of power, subjectivity, identity, figuration, language, and relation that modern theory has grappled with. These questions in turn implicate geopolitical issues such as the relation of a people to a state and the violence done in the name of simplistic identitarian ideologies.

Clarifying a situation where “the Jew” is not readily or unproblematically legible, the editors propose what they call “spectral reading,” a way to understand Jewishness as a fluid and rhetorical presence. While not divorced from sociological facts, this spectral reading works in concert with contemporary theory to mediate pessimistic and utopian impulses, experiences, and realities.

Contributors: Svetlana Boym, Andrew Bush, Sergey Dolgopolski, Jay Geller, Sarah Hammerschlag, Hannan Hever, Martin Land, Martin Jay, James I. Porter, Yehouda Shenhav, Elliot R. Wolfson

Philosophers have long and skeptically viewed religion as a source of overeasy answers, with a singular, totalizing “God” and the comfort of an immortal soul being the greatest among them. But religious thought has always been more interesting—indeed, a rich source of endlessly unfolding questions.

With questions from the 1885 Baltimore Catechism of the Catholic Church as the starting point for each chapter, Karmen MacKendrick offers postmodern reflections on many of the central doctrines of the Church: the oneness of God, original sin, forgiveness, love and its connection to mortality, reverence for the relics of saints, and the doctrine of bodily resurrection. She maintains that we begin and end in questions and not in answers, in fragments and not in totalities—more precisely, in a fragmentation paradoxically integral to wholeness.

Taking seriously Augustine’s idea that we find the divine in memory, MacKendrick argues that memory does not lead us back in time to a tidy answer but opens onto a complicated and fragmented time in which we find that the one and the many, before and after and now, even sacred and profane are complexly entangled. Time becomes something lived, corporeal, and sacred, with fragments of eternity interspersed among the stretches of its duration. Our sense of ourselves is correspondingly complex, because theological considerations lead us not to the security of an everlasting, indivisible soul dwelling comfortably in the presence of a paternal deity but to a more complicated, perpetually peculiar, and paradoxical life in the flesh.

Written out of MacKendrick’s extensive background in both recent and late-ancient philosophy, this moving and poetic book can also be an inspiration to anyone, scholar or lay reader, seeking to find contemporary significance in these ancient theological doctrines.

Honorable Mention, James Russell Lowell Prize, Modern Language Association
Honorable Mention, René Wellek Prize, American Comparative Literature Association

How did the Cold War shape culture and political power in decolonizing countries and give rise to authoritarian regimes in the so-called free world? Cold War Reckonings tells a new story about the Cold War and the global shift from colonialism to independent nation-states. Assembling a body of transpacific cultural works that speak to this historical conjuncture, Jini Kim Watson reveals autocracy to be not a deficient form of liberal democracy, but rather the result of Cold War entanglements with decolonization.

Focusing on East and Southeast Asia, the book scrutinizes cultural texts ranging from dissident poetry, fiction, and writers’ conference proceedings of the Cold War period, to more recent literature, graphic novels, and films that retrospectively look back to these decades with a critical eye. Paying particular attention to anti-communist repression and state infrastructures of violence, the book provides a richaccount of several U.S.–allied Cold War regimes in the Asia Pacific, including the South Korean military dictatorship, Marcos’ rule in the Philippines, illiberal Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew, and Suharto’s Indonesia.

Watson’s book argues that the cultural forms and narrative techniques that emerged from the Cold War-decolonizing matrix offer new ways of comprehending these histories and connecting them to our present. The book advances our understanding of the global reverberations of the Cold War and its enduring influence on cultural and political formations in the Asia Pacific.


Cold War Reckonings is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.

The Blind Man: A Phantasmography examines the complicated forces of perception, imagination, and phantasms of encounter in the contemporary world. In considering photographs he took while he was traveling in France, anthropologist and writer Robert Desjarlais reflects on a few pictures that show the features of a man, apparently blind, who begs for money at a religious site in Paris, frequented by tourists. In perceiving this stranger and the images his appearance projects, he begins to imagine what this man’s life is like and how he perceives the world around him.

Written in journal form, the book narrates Desjarlais’s pursuit of the man portrayed in the photographs. He travels to Paris and tries to meet with him. Eventually, Desjarlais becomes unsure as to what he sees, hears, or remembers. Through these interpretive dilemmas he senses the complexities of perception, where all is multiple, shifting, spectral, a surge of phantasms in which the actual and the imagined are endlessly blurred and intertwined. His mind shifts from thinking about photographs and images to being fixed on the visceral force of apparitions. His own vision is affected in a troubling way.

Composed of an intricate weave of text and image, The Blind Man attends to pressing issues in contemporary life: the fraught dimensions of photographic capture; encounters with others and alterity; the politics of looking; media images of violence and abjection; and the nature of fantasy and imaginative construal. Through a wide-ranging inquiry into histories of imagination, Desjarlais inscribes the need for a “phantasmography”—a writing of phantasms, a graphic inscription of the flows and currents of fantasy and fabulation.

The untold story of African-born migrants and their vibrant African influence in Harlem.

From the 1920s to the early 1960s, Harlem was the intellectual and cultural center of the Black world. The Harlem Renaissance movement brought together Black writers, artists, and musicians from different backgrounds who helped rethink the place of Black people in American society at a time of segregation and lack of recognition of their civil rights. But where is the story of African immigrants in Harlem’s most recent renaissance? Africans in Harlem examines the intellectual, artistic, and creative exchanges between Africa and New York dating back to the 1910s, a story that has not been fully told until now.

From Little Senegal, along 116th Street between Lenox Avenue and Frederick Douglass Boulevard, to the African street vendors on 125th Street, to African stores, restaurants, and businesses throughout the neighborhood, the African presence in Harlem has never been more active and visible than it is today. In Africans in Harlem, author, scholar, writer, and filmmaker Boukary Sawadogo explores Harlem’s African presence and influence from his own perspective as an African-born immigrant. Sawadogo captures the experiences, challenges, and problems African émigrés have faced in Harlem since the 1980s, notably work, interaction, diversity, identity, religion, and education. With a keen focus on the history of Africans through the lens of media, theater, the arts, and politics, this historical overview features compelling character-driven narratives and interviews of longtime residents as well as community and religious leaders.

A blend of self-examination as an immigrant member in Harlem and research on diasporic community building in New York City, Africans in Harlem reveals how African immigrants have transformed Harlem economically and culturally as they too have been transformed. It is also a story about New York City and its self-renewal by the contributions of new human capital, creative energies, dreams nurtured and fulfilled, and good neighbors by drawing parallels between the history of the African presence in Harlem with those of other ethnic immigrants in the most storied neighborhood in America.

Throughout the 1950s, a coalition of developers, politicians, and planners bulldozed vast areas of land deemed “slums” or “blighted” to make way for freeways, public and private housing projects, cultural centers, and skyscrapers. While the program was national, New York was ground zero, and the demolition and monumental reconstruction of the city created a distinctive urban sensorium, rooted in the new segregated landscapes of prosperous white private space and poor black public space.

Novel Shocks situates these landscapes at the center of the midcentury novel, arguing that James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Patricia Highsmith, Ayn Rand, William Burroughs, Sylvia Plath, and Warren Miller all registered these new urban spaces as traumatic “shocks” that required new aesthetic forms. Rejecting older shock-based modernisms, these novelists forged a new modernism, which reimagined shock as a therapeutic force that would create a more flexible, self-reliant, and resilient subject that would nourish neoliberalism’s roots. In offering a cultural prehistory of neoliberalism, Novel Shocks resituates the Cold War novel as a key archive for understanding neoliberalism’s emergence and offers a more materialist and historically grounded account of neoliberalism’s subjective, affective, and ideological structures.

NAMED THE BEST POETRY OF 2020 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES

My Daily Actions, or The Meteorites is the result of a daily investigative writing practice, in which I was worried that a poem invested in the particulars of my life would be uninteresting—that the "ordinary" would be mundane. Instead memory, dreams, and the associative power of the imagination filled each moment with meaning, each tv show I watched or friend I spoke with, each outfit I wore or nail polish color I chose. In these poems, a combination of dread (for something approaching) and anxiety (for what might be approaching but isn't yet known) undid a sense of the present separate from climate change, global racial capitalism, whiteness, and gender-based violence, especially as I wrote as I tried to find out how my own gender fit into the world. The prose poem is the vehicle by which a recording practice ("journaling") meets the associative power of the poem.

Before the onset of his irreversible decline, Eddie Socket always suspected he was on the verge of something. Now that “something” has arrived in the form of Merrit Mather, an attractive older gentleman of impeccable taste in everything from sweaters to his numerous sexual conquests. That Merrit happens to be the lover of Eddie’s agitated boss, Saul, hardly fazes the smitten Eddie; that the elusive Merrit loses interest in Eddie with dizzying speed hardly dims his ardor. While Eddie continues his futile chase, he finds solace in his roommate, Polly, involved in her own implausible affair with a self-involved banker. Both Eddie and Polly eventually conclude that solitude is their best option. But even that is not possible as Eddie finds his life taking an unexpected turn—a turn that that serves as the catalyst for Eddie, love-ravaged Polly, and the indomitable Saul to reclaim their lives.

First published in 1989 and winner of the 1990 Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Debut Novel, The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket is one of the first novels to respond to the global AIDS crisis. A comedy of absurdist horror, it weaponizes the comic as a way of intensifying the tragic aspects of AIDS, which were especially acute in the early 1980s, and the scars of which are still visible today.

Anxiety, suffering and death are not simply the “ills” of our society, nor are they uniquely the product of a sick and sinful humanity. We must all some day confront them, and we continually face their implications long before we do. In that sense, the Garden of Gethsemane is not merely a garden “outside the walls” of Jerusalem but also the essential horizon for all of us, whether we are believers or not.

Emmanuel Falque explores, with no small measure of doubt, Heidegger’s famous statement that by virtue of Christianity’s claims of salvation and the afterlife, its believers cannot authentically experience anxiety in the face of death. In this theological development of the Passion, already widely debated upon its publication in French, Falque places a radical emphasis on the physicality and corporeality of Christ’s suffering and death, marking the continuities between Christ’s Passion and our own orientation to the mortality of our bodies. Beginning with an elaborate reading of the divine and human bodies whose suffering is masterfully depicted in the Isenheim Altarpiece, and written in the wake of the death of a close friend, Falques’s study is both theologically rigorous and marked by deeply human concerns.

Falque is at unusual pains to elaborate the question of death in terms not merely of faith, but of a “credible Christianity” that remains meaningful to non-Christians, holding, with Maurice Blondel, that “the important thing is not to address believers but to say something which counts in the eyes of unbelievers.” His account is therefore as much a work of philosophy as of theology—and of philosophy explicated not through abstractions but through familiar and ordinary experience. Theology’s task, for Falque, is to understand that human problems of the meaning of existence apply even to Christ, at least insofar as he lives in and shares our finitude. In Falque’s remarkable account, Christ takes upon himself the burden of suffering finitude, so that he can undertake a passage through it, or a transformation of it.

This book, a key text from one the most remarkable of a younger generation of philosophers and theologians, will be widely read and debated by all who hold that theology and philosophy has the most to offer when it eschews easy answers and takes seriously our most anguishing human experiences.

Winner, Prix Littéraire Paris-Liège 2021
Winner, French Voices Award for Excellence in Publication and Translation

When we speak of mass killers, we may speak of radicalized ideologues, mediocrities who only obey orders, or bloodthirsty monsters. Who are these men who kill on a mass scale? What is their consciousness? Do they not feel horror or compassion?

Richard Rechtman’s Living in Death offers new answers to a question that has haunted us at least since the Holocaust. For Rechtman, it is not ideologies that kill, but people. This book descends into the ordinary life of people who execute hundreds every day, the same way others go to the office. Bringing philosophical sophistication to the ordinary, the book constitutes an anthropology of mass killers.

Turning away from existing psychological and philosophical accounts of genocide’s perpetrators, Rechtman instead explores the conditions under which administering death becomes a job like any other. Considering Cambodia, Rwanda, and other mass killings, Living in Death draws on a vast array of archival research, psychological theory, and anecdotes from the author’s clinical work with refugees and former participants in genocide. Rechtman mounts a compelling case for reframing and refocusing our attempts to explain—and preempt—acts of mass torture, rape, killing, and extermination.

What we must see, Rechtman argues, is that for genocidaires (those who carry out acts that are or approach genocide), there is nothing extraordinary, unusual, or world-historical about their actions. On the contrary, they are preoccupied with the same mundane things that characterize any other job: interactions with colleagues, living conditions, a drink and a laugh at the end of the day. To understand this is to understand how things came to be the way they are—and how they might be different.

2022 PROSE Awards Category Winner - Biography & Autobiography
Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards - 2021 BRONZE Winner for Biography

The fascinating biography of Eunice Hunton Carter, a social justice and civil rights trailblazer and the only woman prosecutor on the Luciano trial

Eunice Hunton Carter rose to public prominence in 1936 as both the only woman and the only person of color on Thomas Dewey’s famous gangbuster team that prosecuted mobster Lucky Luciano. But her life before and after the trial remains relatively unknown. In this definitive biography on this trailblazing social justice activist, authors Marilyn S. Greenwald and Yun Li tell the story of this unknown but critical pioneer in the struggle for racial and gender equality in the twentieth century.

Carter worked harder than most men because of her race and gender, and Greenwald and Li reflect on her lifelong commitment to her adopted home of Harlem, where she was viewed as a role model, arts patron, community organizer, and, later, as a legal advisor to the United Nations, the National Council of Negro Women, and several other national and global organizations.

Carter was both a witness to and a participant in many pivotal events of the early and mid– twentieth century, including the Harlem riot of 1935 and the social scene during the Harlem Renaissance.

Using transcripts, letters, and other primary and secondary sources from several archives in the United States and Canada, the authors paint a colorful portrait of how Eunice continued the legacy of the Carter family, which valued education, perseverance, and hard work: a grandfather who was a slave who bought his freedom and became a successful businessman in a small colony of former slaves in Ontario, Canada; a father who nearly single-handedly integrated the nation’s YMCAs in the Jim Crow South; and a mother who provided aid to Black soldiers in France during World War I and who became a leader in several global and domestic racial equality causes.

Carter’s inspirational multi-decade career working in an environment of bias, segregation, and patriarchy in Depression-era America helped pave the way for those who came after her.

The Body of the Cross is a study of holy victims in Western Christian history and how the uses of their bodies in Christian thought led to the idea of the cross as a substitutionary sacrifice. Since its first centuries, Christianity has traded on the suffering of victims—martyrs, mystics, and heretics—as substitutes for the Christian social body. These victims secured holiness, either by their own sacred power or by their reprobation and rejection. Just as their bodies were mediated in eucharistic, social, and Christological ways, so too did the flesh of Jesus Christ become one of those holy substitutes. But it was only late in Western history that he took on the function of the exemplary victim.

In tracing the story of this embodied development, The Body of the Cross gives special attention to popular spirituality, religious dissent, and the writing of women throughout Christian history. It examines the symbol of the cross as it functions in key moments throughout this history, including the parting of the ways of Judaism and Christianity, the gnostic debates, martyr traditions, and medieval affective devotion and heresy. Finally, in a Reformation era haunted by divine wrath, these themes concentrated in the unique concept that Jesus Christ died on the cross to absorb divine punishment for sin: a holy body and a rejected body in one.

Portraits, this book suggests, unlock the paradoxes of subjectivity. Nancy shows how the portrait, far from conveying a sitter’s self-sameness, is suspended between proximity and distance, likeness and strangeness, representation and presentation, the faithful and the forceful. A portrait can identify an individual, but it can also express a more complex double movement of approach and withdrawal.

Portrait comprises two extended essays in close conversation, written a decade apart, in which Nancy considers the range of aspirations articulated by the portrait. Accompanied by three dozen illustrations, it also includes a new preface written for the English-language edition and a substantial introduction by Jeffrey Librett, which situates the work within a range religious, aesthetic, and psychoanalytic accounts of the subject.

Portrait is grounded in a bold and searching engagement with the traditions out of which our thinking about the subject has emerged. It is also a playful series of readings that draws on a wide range of portraits: from carvings on ancient drinking vessels to recent experimental or parodic pieces in which sitters are rendered in the ‘media’ of their own blood, germ culture, or DNA.

Photos are ubiquitous today, but Nancy argues that this in no way makes thinking about the portrait an idle pursuit. On the contrary, the forms of appearing (and disappearing) that mark portraits—old and new—can serve to renew our exploration of the human figure today. At stake is what Nancy calls “the very possibility of our being present.”

This work received the French Voices Award for excellence in publication and translation. French Voices is a program created and funded by the French Embassy in the United States and FACE (French American Cultural Exchange).

The book offers both literary journalism from one of the twentieth century’s major writers, as well as a snapshot of the complex, conflicting currents of literary and intellectual activity during the last months of German occupation and Vichy government in France.

By 1944, the days of Germany’s domination of Europe are numbered, and defeat seems no more than a matter of time. In occupied France, there is renewed activity on the political and the cultural fronts, in anticipation of the liberation that now appears inevitable. Already the author of two novels and a volume of criticism, Maurice Blanchot is henceforth fully established as a major figure in what will soon be post-war France.

Blanchot’s position in this new order is problematical, however. Despite having discreetly supported the Resistance, he makes clear that his only true allegiance is to literature. Against the tide of his own emerging reputation, he is increasingly drawn to silence as the only valid response to what the world has become. For him, ruin cannot be reconstructed with the aid of literature, because ruin is the mode in which literature most authentically exists. Disaster has long been the writer’s lot, with which the world has only now caught up. Politics and literature coexist in what he will call the “abyss of the present,” and neither offers any prospect for the future.

This grim and potentially nihilistic message seems to make Blanchot into little more than an anachronism in the emerging post-war world. Yet his attitude is the very opposite of aloofness. Silence becomes for him an intense search for a language commensurate with “circumstances that literature can still neither express directly nor distort”. Beyond this volume, which completes the English publication of his wartime literary journalism, his writing over the next fifty years will patiently establish a margin in which new forms thought will offer themselves to a new age.

This sparkling collection of essays invites readers to join a seasoned scholar on his journey to catch “radical theology” in action, both in the Church and our culture at large.

Capturing a career’s worth of thought and erudition, this rich volume treats readers to creative thought, careful argumentation, and sophisticated analysis transmitted through the lucid, accessible prose that has earned the author a wide readership of academics and non-academics alike. In tackling “radical theology,” John D. Caputo has in mind the deeper stream that courses its way through various historical and confessional theologies, upon which these theologies draw even while it disturbs them from within. They are well served by this disturbance because it keeps them on their toes. When we read about professional theologians’ losing their jobs in confessional institutions, the chances are that, by earnestly digging into what is going on in their tradition, they have hit upon radical theological rock.

Unlike modernist dismissals of religion, radical theology does not debunk but re-invents the theological tradition. Radical theology, Caputo says, is a double deconstruction—of supernatural theology on the one hand and of transcendental reason on the other, and therefore of the settled distinctions between the religious and the secular. Caputo also addresses the challenge for radical theology to earn a spot in the curriculum, given that the “radical” makes it suspect among the confessional seminaries while the “theology” renders it suspect among university seminars. Journeying from the academy to contemporary American culture, In Search of Radical Theology includes a captivating presentation of radical political theology for the time of Trump. This utterly unique volume not only brings readers on an enlightening tour of Caputo’s thought but also invites us to accompany the author as he travels into intriguing new territories.

From the award-winning author of Crossing Ocean Parkway, a personal memoir about adjusting to loss through books, meditation, and the process of memory itself

Marianna De Marco Torgovnick experienced the rupture of two of her life’s most intimate relations when her mother and brother died in close proximity. Mourning rocked her life, but it also led to the solace and insight offered by classic books and the practice of meditation. Her resulting journey into the past imagines a viable future and raises questions acute for Italian Americans but pertinent to everyone, about the nature of memory and the meanings of home at a time, like ours, marked by cultural disruption and wartime. Crossing Back: Books, Family, and Memory without Pain presents a personal perspective on death, mourning, loss, and renewal.

A sequel to her award-winning and much-anthologized Crossing Ocean Parkway, Crossing Back is about close familial ties and personal loss, written after the death of her remaining birth family, who had always been there, and now were not. After their loss, she entered a spiritual and psychological state of “transcendental homelessness”: the feeling of being truly at home nowhere, of being spiritually adrift. In a grand act of symbolic reenactment, she found herself moving apartments repeatedly, not realizing she did so subconsciously to keep busy, to stave off grief. By reading and studying great books, she opened up to mourning, a process she constitutionally resisted as somehow shameful. Over time, she discovered that a third death colored and prolonged her feelings of grief: her first child’s death in infancy, which, in the course of a happier lifetime, had never been adequately acknowledged. Her new losses led her finally to take stock of her son’s death too. Reading and meditating, followed by writing, became daily her healing rituals.

A warm and intimate user’s guide to books, family, and memory in the mourning process, the end-point being memory without pain, Crossing Back is a wide-ranging memoir about growing older and learning to ride the waves of change. Lively and conversational, Torgovnick is masterful at tracking the moment-to moment, day-to-day challenges of sudden or protracted grief and the ways in which the mind and the body seem to search for—and sometimes find—solutions.

The first book devoted to this landmark of architecture, urban planning, and social engineering

Situated in the borough of Queens, New York, Sunnyside Gardens has been an icon of urbanism and planning since its inception in the 1920s. Not the most beautifully planned community, nor the most elegant, and certainly not the most perfectly preserved, Sunnyside Gardens nevertheless endures as significant both in terms of the planning principles that inspired its creators and in its subsequent history. Why this garden suburb was built and how it has fared over its first century is at the heart of Sunnyside Gardens.

Reform-minded architects and planners in England and the United States knew too well the social and environmental ills of the cities around them at the turn of the twentieth century. Garden cities gained traction across the Atlantic before the Great War, and its principles were modified by American pragmatism to fit societal conditions and applied almost as a matter of faith by urban planners for much of the twentieth century. The designers of Sunnyside— Clarence Stein, Henry Wright, Frederick Ackerman, and landscape architect Marjorie Cautley—crafted a residential community intended to foster a sense of community among residents.

Richly illustrated throughout with historic and contemporary photographs as well as architectural plans of the houses, blocks, and courts, Sunnyside Gardens first explores the planning of Sunnyside, beginning with the English garden-city movement and its earliest incarnations built around London. Chapters cover the planning and building of Sunnyside and its construction by the City Housing Corporation, the design of the homes and gardens, and the tragedy of the Great Depression, when hundreds of families lost their homes. The second section examine how the garden suburbs outside London have been preserved and how aesthetic regulation is enforced in New York. The history of the preservation of Sunnyside Gardens is discussed in depth, as is the controversial proposal to place the Aluminaire House, an innovative housing prototype from the 1930s, on the only vacant site in the historic district.

Sunnyside Gardens pays homage to a time when far-sighted and socially conscious architects and planners sought to build communities, not merely buildings, a spirit that has faded to near-invisibility

A collection of poems that contemplate the bureaucracy of the mind through interior political cabinets

Taking its name from the banal, purgatorial space outside (but inside) a doctor’s office, Well Waiting Room imagines the conversations we have with ourselves at this liminal site as an exchange between interior bureaucrats, each of whom governs a particular aspect of the psyche. The poems explore the dynamics of this political ministry, which includes the Cabinets of Desire, Indulgences, Self-Preservation, Ordinary Affairs, Ambivalence, Confrontations, and many others—there’s even a press secretary, a curator, and a general counsel. Like a cabinet of curiosity wrapped in red tape, the poems examine the compartmentalization of the mind and the confounding news of the day.

Formally, the poems range from dramatic monologues to combative sonnets, quippy memos to voice-y prose blocks, incantatory interludes to dreamlike visual landscapes. Sometimes, the poems address a purely internal conflict: Why do we lie to ourselves, indulge in schadenfreude, repeat the same mistakes? Other times, the poetic lens points outward like a spear, confronting the external universe: social injustice, polar ice melt, the Trump administration, and other man-made disasters. But in both universes, the poems find joy: the first observation of gravitational waves, the otherworldly beauty of rare marine species, the discovery that you are your own best way out.

For Schlaifer, the underlying question is an epistemological one, an ontological one, a theological one. Why are we here, how do we know things, and why does God—so often—seem to be working against us? In Schlaifer’s bureaucratic vision of the mind, readers will see their own internal voices affectingly (and often humorously) reflected. The book traverses unknowable terrain in sturdy boots. It unearths not answers but better questions for our time.

A clear and concise A-to-Z of keywords that echo our current human rights crisis

As millions are forced to leave their nations of origin as a result of political, economic, and environmental peril, rising racism and xenophobia have led to increasingly harsh policies. A mass-mediated political circus obscures both histories of migration and longstanding definitions of words for people on the move, fomenting widespread linguistic confusion. Under this circus tent, there is no regard for history, legal advocacy, or jurisprudence. Yet in a world where the differences between “undocumented migrant” and “asylum seeker” can mean life or death, words have weighty consequences.

A timely antidote to this circus, A is for Asylum Seeker reframes key words that describe people on the move. Written to correct the de-meaning of terms by rhetoric and policies based on dehumanization and profitable incarceration, this glossary provides an intersectional and historically grounded consideration of the words deployed in enflamed debate. Skipping some letters of the alphabet while repeating others, thirty terms cover everything from Asylum-seeker to Zero Tolerance Policy. Each entry begins with a contemporary or historical story for illustration and then proceeds to discuss the language politics of the word. The book balances terms affected by current political debates—such as “migrant,” “refugee,” and “illegal alien”—and terms that offer historical context to these controversies, such as “fugitive,” “unhoused,” and “vagrant.”

Rendered in both English and Spanish, this book offers a unique perspective on the journeys, histories, challenges, and aspirations of people on the move. Enhancing the book’s utility as an educational and organizing resource, the author provides a list of works for further reading as well as a directory of immigration-advocacy organizations throughout the United States.

*****
Un claro y breve abecedario de palabras clave que hacen eco en nuestra crisis humanitaria presente.

Mientras millones son forzados de huir de sus naciones de origen debido a peligro político, económico, y ecológico, racismo y xenofobia han llevado a políticas más y más severas. Un circo político en los medios oculta a ambas las historias de inmigración y las definiciones antiguas de palabras para personas en movimiento, creando confusión lingüística amplia. Bajo esta carpa de circo, no hay consideración para historia, defensa legal, o jurisprudencia. Pero en un mundo donde las diferencias entre “migrante indocumentade” y “solicitante de asilo” pueden ser la diferencia entre vida y muerte, palabras tienen consecuencias graves.

Un antídoto oportuno a este circo, A de Asilo re-enmarca palabras claves que describen a personas en movimiento. Escrito para corregir la de-significación de términos por retórica y políticas basadas en deshumanización y encarcelación lucrosa, este glosario provee una consideración interseccional e histórica de las palabras usadas en debate inflamado. Brincando a unas letras del alfabeto mientras repite a otras, treinta términos cubren todo desde Asilo a Tolerancia Cero. Cada artículo empieza con una historia contemporánea u histórica para ilustrar, y después discute la política alrededor de la palabra. El libro balancea términos impactados por debates políticos contemporáneos—como “migrante,” “refugiado” y “extranjero ilegal”—y términos que ofrecen contexto histórico a estas controversias, como “fugitivo” “sin casa” y “vagante.”

Escrito en inglés y español, este libro ofrece una perspectiva única en las jornadas, historias, retos, y aspiraciones de personas en movimiento. Aumentando la utilidad del libro como un recurso educacional y organizacional, la autora provee una lista de obras para más lectura, igual que un directorio de organizaciones de defensa de inmigrantes a través de los Estados Unidos.

Over the last few decades, vibrant debates regarding post-secularism have found inspiration and provocation in the works of Sigmund Freud. A new interest in psychoanalysis's relation to society has emerged, allowing Freud’s account of the interdependence of religion, ethics, and violence to gain currency in recent debates on modernity. In that context, the pivotal role of Freud’s masterpiece, Moses and Monotheism, is widely recognized.

Freud and Monotheism critically examines a range of discourses surrounding Freud and Moses, taking as its entry point Freud’s relations to Judaism, his conception of tradition and history, his theory of the mind, and his model of transgenerational inheritance. Highlighting the broad impact of Moses and Monotheism across the humanities, contributors from philosophy, comparative literature, cultural studies, Jewish studies, psychoanalysis, and Egyptology come together to illuminate Freud’s book and the modern world with which it grapples.

WINNER, SOCIETY FOR MILITARY HISTORY DISTINGUISHED BOOK AWARDS - FIRST BOOK

This book informs the public for the first time about the impact of American psychiatry on soldiers during World War II.

Breaking Point is the first in-depth history of American psychiatry in World War II. Drawn from unpublished primary documents, oral histories, and the author’s personal interviews and correspondence over years with key psychiatric and military policymakers, it begins with Franklin Roosevelt’s endorsement of a universal Selective Service psychiatric examination followed by Army and Navy pre- and post-induction examinations. Ultimately, 2.5 million men and women were rejected or discharged from military service on neuropsychiatric grounds. Never before or since has the United States engaged in such a program.

In designing Selective Service Medical Circular No. 1, psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan assumed psychiatrists could predict who might break down or falter in military service or even in civilian life thereafter. While many American and European psychiatrists questioned this belief, and huge numbers of American psychiatric casualties soon raised questions about screening’s validity, psychiatric and military leaders persisted in 1942 and 1943 in endorsing ever tougher screening and little else. Soon, families complained of fathers and teens being drafted instead of being identified as psychiatric 4Fs, and Blacks and Native Americans, among others, complained of bias. A frustrated General George S. Patton famously slapped two “malingering” neuropsychiatric patients in Sicily (a sentiment shared by Marshall and Eisenhower, though they favored a tamer style). Yet psychiatric rejections, evacuations, and discharges mounted.

While psychiatrist Roy Grinker and a few others treated soldiers close to the front in Tunisia in early 1943, this was the exception. But as demand for manpower soared and psychiatrists finally went to the field and saw that combat itself, not “predisposition,” precipitated breakdown, leading military psychiatrists switched their emphasis from screening to prevention and treatment. But this switch was too little too late and slowed by a year-long series of Inspector General investigations even while numbers of psychiatric casualties soared.

Ironically, despite and even partly because of psychiatrists’ wartime performance, plus the emotional toll of war, postwar America soon witnessed a dramatic growth in numbers, popularity, and influence of the profession, culminating in the National Mental Health Act (1946). But veterans with “PTSD,” not recognized until 1980, were largely neglected.

Most theology proceeds under the assumption that divine grace works on human beings at the points of our supposed uniqueness among earth’s creatures—our freedom, our self-awareness, our language, or our rationality. Inner Animalities turns this assumption on its head. Arguing that much theological anthropology contains a deeply anti-ecological impulse, the book draws creatively on historical and scriptural texts to imagine an account of human life centered in our creaturely commonality.

The tendency to deny our own human animality leaves our self-understanding riven with contradictions, disavowals, and repressions. How are human relationships transformed when God draws us into communion through our instincts, our desires, and our bodily needs? Meyer argues that humanity’s exceptional status is not the result of divine endorsement, but a delusion of human sin. Where the work of God knits human beings back into creaturely connections, ecological degradation is no longer just a matter of bodily life and death, but a matter of ultimate significance.

Bringing a theological perspective to the growing field of Critical Animal Studies, Inner Animalities puts Gregory of Nyssa and Karl Rahner in conversation with Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Kelly Oliver, and Cary Wolfe. What results is not only a counterintuitive account of human life in relation with nonhuman neighbors, but also a new angle into ecological theology.

Foreword Book of the Year Award
Independent Publishers Award (IPPY)
Lambda Literary Award Finalist
Publishing Triangle Award Finalist
GAMMA Award, Best Feature from The Magazine Association of the Southwest for “Getting the News,” The Georgia Review, Summer 2009
Notable Essay of the Year Citation in Best American Essays 2010 for “Getting the News”
Named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Guerilla Girls On Tour and by WILLA: Women in Literary Arts and Letters

An extended meditation on the nature of love and the nature of time inside illness, Called Back is both a narrative and non-narrative experiment in prose. The book moves through the standard breast cancer treatment trajectory (diagnosis, surgery, chemotherapy, radiation), with the aim of discovering unexpected vectors of observation, meaning and desire inside each phase of the typically mandated four-part ritual. A lyrical feminist critique of living with cancer at the turn of the twenty-first century in the United States, the book looks through the lens of cancer to discover new truths about intimacy and essential solitude, eroticism, the fact of the body, and the impossibility of turning away. Offering original exegeses of the work of Marsden Hartley, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and Marcel Proust, Called Back relies on these artists’ queer aesthetics to tease the author back to life. What might a person tutored as a reader of signs “see” inside breast cancer’s paces, protocols, and regimes? What does the experience occlude, and what can we afford to liberate?

The first chapter paves the way for the book’s central emphases: a meditation on the nature of “news” and the new, on noticing, on messages—including those that the body itself relies upon in the assumption of disease—and the interpretive methods we bring to them in medical crisis. Language is paramount for how we understand and act on the disease, how we imagine it, how we experience it, and how we treat it, Cappello argues.

Working at the borders of memoir, literary nonfiction, and cultural analysis, Called Back aims to displace tonal and affective norms— infantilizing or moralizing, redemptive, sentimental or cute—with reverie, rage, passionate intensity, intelligence, and humor.

Represents some of the best, cutting-edge thinking available on multiple forms of social upheaval and related grassroots movements.

From the January 2017 Women’s March to the August 2017 events in Charlottesville and the 2020 protests for racial justice in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, social upheaval and protest have loomed large in the United States in recent years. The varied, sometimes conflicting role of religious believers, communities, and institutions in such events and movements calls for scholarly analysis. Arising from a conference held at the College of the Holy Cross in November 2017, Religion, Protest, and Social Upheaval gathers contributions from ten scholars in religious studies, theology and ethics, and gender studies—from seasoned experts to emerging voices—to illuminate this tumultuous era of history and the complex landscape of social action for economic, racial, political, and sexual and gender justice.

The contributors consider the history of resistance to racial capitalist imperialism from W. E. B. Du Bois to today; the theological genealogy of the capitalist economic order, and Catholic theology’s growing concern with climate change; affect theory and the rise of white nationalism, theological aesthetics, and solidarity with migrants; differing U.S. Christian churches’ responses to the “revolutionary aesthetics” of the Black Lives Matter movement; Muslim migration and the postsecular character of Muslim labor organizing in the United States; shifts in moral reasoning and religiosity among U.S. women’s movements from the 1960s to today; and the intersection of heresy discourse and struggles for LGBTQ+ equality among Korean and Korean-American Protestants. With this pluralistic approach, Religion, Protest, and Social Upheaval offers a snapshot of scholarly religious responses to the crises and promises of the late 2010s and early 2020s. Representing the diverse coalitions of the religious left, it provides groundbreaking analysis, charts trajectories for further study and action, and offers visions for a more hopeful future.

The question of how far Dewey’s thought is indebted to Hegel has long been a conundrum for philosophers. This book shows that, far from repudiating Hegel, Dewey’s entire pragmatic philosophy is premised on a “philosophy of spirit” inspired by Hegel’s project. Two essays by Shook and Good defending this radical viewpoint are joined by the definitive text of Dewey’s 1897 Lecture at the University of Chicago
on Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit. Previously cited by scholars only from the archival manuscript, this edited Lecture is now available to fully expose the basic concern shared by Hegel and Dewey for the full and free development of the individual in the social context. Dewey’s and Hegel’s philosophies are at the center of modern philosophy’s hopes for advancing human freedom.

A biting, funny, up-to-the-minute collection of essays by a major political thinker that gets to the heart of what feminist criticism can do in the face of everyday politics.

Stormy Daniels offered a #metoo moment, and Anderson Cooper missed it. Conservatives don’t believe that gender is fluid, except when they’re feminizing James Comey. “Gaslighting” is our word for male domination but a gaslight also lights the way for a woman’s survival.

Across two dozen trenchant, witty reflections, Bonnie Honig offers a biting feminist account of politics since Trump. In today’s shock politics, Honig traces the continuing work of patriarchy, as powerful, mediocre men gaslight their way across the landscape of democratic institutions.

But amid the plundering and patriarchy, feminist criticism finds ways to demand justice. Shell-Shocked shows how women have talked back, acted out, and built anew, exposing the practices and policies of feminization that have historically been aimed not just at women but also at racial and ethnic minorities. The task of feminist criticism—and this is what makes it particularly well-suited to this moment—is to respond to shock politics by resensitizing us to its injustices and honing the empathy needed for living with others in the world as equals.

Feminist criticism’s penchant for the particular and the idiosyncratic is part of its power. It is drawn to the loose threads of psychological and collective life, not to the well-worn fabrics with which communities and nations hide their shortcomings and deflect critical scrutiny of their injustices. Taking literary models such as Homer’s Penelope and Toni Morrison’s Cee, Honig draws out the loose threads from the fabric of shock politics’ domination and begins unraveling them.

Honig’s damning, funny, and razor sharp essays take on popular culture, national politics, and political theory alike as texts for resensitizing through a feminist lens. Here are insightful readings of film and television, from Gaslight to Bombshell, Unbelievable to Stranger Things, Rambo to the Kavanaugh hearings. In seeking out the details that might break the spell of shock, this groundbreaking book illustrates alternative ways of living and writing in a time of public violence, plunder, and—hopefully—democratic renewal.

“What one cannot compute, one must poetize.” So concludes this remarkable sequence of propositions on the centrality of poetry for what we call cognition. Developed through brief, lucid, and eloquent logical elaborations that are punctuated by incisive readings of a range of poems—Western and non-Western, low culture and high—Poetry and Mind offers to theorists and practitioners of literature, together with logicians and cognitive scientists, a more sophisticated account of the extraordinary regimes of human mental experience.

Poetry grants us the ability to move “beyond the limits of thought” and to explore the beyond of cognition. It teaches us to think differently. An elliptic response to Wittgenstein’s point of arrival in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, this book is first and foremost an interdisciplinary study of poetry, drawing on literary, philosophical, and scientific traditions. The work conducted on minds and brains over the last decades in psychology, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience cannot be ignored if, as humanists, we are interested in the way we think. Dubreuil thus calls for a constant dialogue with the positive examination of cognition to better situate the normal regimes of thought, as well as to underline the other mental possibilities that literature opens up.

Poetry and Mind shows that poetry—a widespread and perhaps universal phenomenon among humans—arises through syntactic structures, cognitive binding, and mental regulations, but that, in going through them, it also exceeds them. The best poems, then, are not only thought experiments but actual thinking experiments for the unthinkable. They expand the usual semantics of natural languages, and singularly deploy the rhetorical armature of speech. Made of iterations and linguistic reorganizations, they exceed their own algorithms and, often, they become reflexive, strange, and cognitively dissonant. They provide detachable, movable, and livable significations to our selves.

The literary scope of this book is more than “global”: it is uniquely broad and comparative, encompassing dozens of different traditions, oral or written, from all continents, from Ancient times to the contemporary era, with some thirty specific readings of texts, ranging from Sophocles to Gertrude Stein, from Wang Wei to Aimé Césaire, and from cuneiform tablet to rap music. Together, Dubreuil’s readings and elaborations offer a major reappraisal of the relations between creation, language and our embodied brains.

Italian adventurer and sea captain Celso Cesare Moreno traveled the world lying, scheming, and building an extensive patron/client network to establish his reputation as a middleman and person of significance. Through his machinations, Moreno became a critical player in the expansion of western trade and imperialism in Asia, the trafficking of migrant workers and children in the Atlantic, the conflicts of Americans and Native Hawaiians over the fate of Hawaii, and the imperial competitions of French, British, Italian, and American governments during a critically important era of imperial expansion during the nineteenth century. Oh Capitano! teases out Moreno’s enormous peculiarities and fascination as well as his significance.

Celso Cesare Moreno was simultaneously toxic, deceitful, and charming in equal measure. He wandered, adventured, cheated, exaggerated, promoted (mainly himself), and continuously created newly invented past lives. He repeatedly sought a role at the center of a globalizing world with gusto and had no qualms about lying or betraying others. He claimed at times to be the ruler of a Southeast Asian island that he then offered for sale to several western nations. He briefly became prime minister of Hawai’i. He testified before the U.S. Congress as an expert witness. He sought to promote a trans-Pacific cable project. He fought with the ministers and leaders of many countries (and with his fellow Italians and Catholic churchmen almost everywhere) but was more often ignored and rejected than feted. He was accused, probably with good cause, of abusing his obligations after claiming guardianship of the sons of King David Kalakaua of Hawaii. Dragged by his uncontrollable polemical passions, the old Captain died alone, unloved by anyone and with no significant relations to others.

With its focus on Moreno, Oh Capitano! illustrates some of the most puzzling cultural traits of emigrant Italian elites. Called a “carpetbagger,” “land pirate,” “extinct volcano,” among many other derogatory monikers, Celso emerges in this fascinating biography as a multifaceted, chameleon-like personality not reducible to a single epithet.

More than a purely philosophical problem, straddling the ambivalent terrain between necessity and impossibility, contingency has become the very horizon of everyday life. Often used as a synonym for the precariousness of working conditions under neoliberalism, for the unknown threats posed by terrorism, or for the uncertain future of the planet itself, contingency needs to be calculated and controlled in the name of the protection of life.

The overcoming of contingency is not only called upon to justify questionable mechanisms of political control; it serves as a central legitimating factor for Enlightenment itself. In this volume, nine major philosophers and theorists address a range of questions around contingency and moral philosophy. How can we rethink contingency in its creative aspects, outside the dominant rhetoric of risk and dangerous exposure? What is the status of contingency—as the unnecessary and law-defying—in or for ethics? What would an alternative “ethics of contingency”—one that does not simply attempt to sublate it out of existence—look like?

The volume tackles the problem contingency has always posed to both ethical theory and dialectics: that of difference itself, in the difficult mediation between the particular and the universal, same and other, the contingent singularity of the event and the necessary generality of the norms and laws.

From deconstruction to feminism to ecological thought, some of today’s most influential thinkers reshape many of the most debated concepts in moral philosophy: difference, agency, community, and life itself.

Contributors: Étienne Balibar, Rosi Braidotti, Thomas Claviez, Drucilla Cornell, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Viola Marchi, Michael Naas, Cary Wolfe, Slavoj Žižek

On April 4, 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered the anti-war speech, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” in New York City at the Riverside Church. At the time, the United States framed its intervention in Vietnam as a mechanism to protect democracy worldwide. While this supposed defense of democracy raged on thousands of miles away, social protests for racial equity, political representation, and an economic livelihood for its most disenfranchised communities spread across the United States. Highlighting this contradiction in his anti-war speech, King presented his doubts regarding the government’s ability to eliminate the materialism, militarism, and racism that built the nation, a plight that continues today. Written from the perspectives of education practitioners and scholars who have personal histories with global war via (settler) colonialism, immigration, and subsequent disenfranchisement in the United States, Education at War addresses the vestiges of war that shape the lives of youth of color.

This thought-provoking collection of essays reveals how the contemporary specter of war has become a central way that racism and materialism are manifested and practiced within education. Education at War asserts that the contemporary neoliberal characterization of education and school-based reform is situated within the global political economy that has facilitated growth in the prison and military industrial complex, and simultaneous divestment from education domestically. Essays examine anti-war projects across the K–20 education continuum with chapters from educators who are from and/or work directly with the communities often pathologized in “damage-centered” educational discourse. The authors do not just frame the conditions faced by our communities as state-mediated but also as collectively resisted.

They place war, surveillance, and carcerality at the center of critical race analysis in education. Each of the chapters include a pedagogical component, including lessons and comments for educators and youth workers. In cultivating this text, the editors have contributed to building a community of educators, activists, teachers, and scholars who collectively explore how resistance can produce the opportunity for rich, diverse, and transformative learning for marginalized students and communities.

Contributors: Suzie M. Abajian, Yousef K. Baker, Dolores Calderon, Edward R. Curammeng, Chandni Desai, Maryam S. Griffin, Heather L. Horsley, David Stovall, Clayton Pierce, Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales, Sepehr Vakil, Shirin Vossoughi,, Connie Wun, Miguel Zavala

However divergent their analyses may be in other ways, some prominent anti-capitalist critics have remained critical of contemporary debates over reparative justice for groups historically oppressed and marginalized on the basis of race, gender, sexual identity, sexual preference, and/or ability, arguing that the most these struggles can hope to produce is a more diversity-friendly capital. Meanwhile, scholars of gender and sexuality as well as race and ethnic studies maintain that, by elevating the socioeconomic above other logics of domination, anti-capitalist thought fails to acknowledge specific forms and experiences of subjugation.

The thinkers and activists who appear in Totality Inside Out reject this divisive logic altogether. Instead, they aim for a more expansive analysis of our contemporary moment to uncover connected sites of political struggle over racial and economic justice, materialist feminist and queer critique, climate change, and aesthetic value. The re-imagined account of capitalist totality that appears in this volume illuminates the material interlinkages between discrepant social phenomena, forms of oppression, and group histories, offering multiple entry points for readers who are interested in exploring how capitalism shapes integral relations within the social whole.

Contributors: Brent Ryan Bellamy, Sarah Brouillette, Sarika Chandra, Chris Chen,
Joshua Clover, Tim Kreiner, Arthur Scarritt, Zoe Sutherland, Marina Vishmidt

The arrival of the Anthropocene brings the suggestion that we are only now beginning to speculate on an inhuman world that is not for us, only now confronting fears and anxieties of ecological, political, social, and philosophical extinction. While pointing out that reflections on disaster were not foreign to what we historically call romanticism, Last Things pushes romantic thought toward an altogether new way of conceiving the “end of things,” one that treats lastness as neither privation nor conclusion. Through quieter, non-emphatic modes of thinking the end of human thought, Khalip explores lastness as what marks the limits of our life and world. Reading the fate of romanticism—and romantic studies—within the key of the last, Khalip refuses to elegize or celebrate our ends, instead positing romanticism as a negative force that exceeds theories, narratives, and figures of survival and sustainability.

Each chapter explores a range of romantic and contemporary materials: poetry by John Clare, Emily Dickinson, John Keats, Percy Shelley, and William Wordsworth; philosophical texts by William Godwin, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau; paintings by Hubert Robert, Caspar David Friedrich, and Paterson Ewen; installations by Tatsuo Miyajima and James Turrell; and photography by John Dugdale, Peter Hujar, and Joanna Kane. Shuttling between temporalities, Last Things undertakes an original reorganization of romantic thought for contemporary culture. It examines an archive on the side of disappearance, perishing, the inhuman, and lastness.

Traditional medicine enjoys widespread appeal in today’s Russia, an appeal that has often been framed either as a holdover from pre-Soviet times or as the symptom of capitalist growing pains and vanishing Soviet modes of life. Mixing Medicines seeks to reconsider these logics of emptiness and replenishment. Set in Buryatia, a semi-autonomous indigenous republic in Southeastern Siberia, the book offers an ethnography of the institutionalization of Tibetan medicine, a botanically-based therapeutic practice framed as at once foreign, international, and local to Russia’s Buddhist regions.

By highlighting the cosmopolitan nature of Tibetan medicine and the culturally specific origins of biomedicine, the book shows how people in Buryatia trouble entrenched center-periphery models, complicating narratives about isolation and political marginality. Chudakova argues that a therapeutic life mediated through the practices of traditional medicines is not a last-resort response to sociopolitical abandonment but depends on a densely collective mingling of human and non-human worlds that produces new senses of rootedness, while reshaping regional and national conversations about care, history, and belonging.

WINNER, ALDO AND JEANNE SCAGLIONE PRIZE FOR STUDIES IN GERMANIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES

Viking Mediologies is a study of pre-modern multimedia rooted in the embodied poetic practice of Viking Age skalds. Prior study of the skaldic tradition has focused on authorship—distinctions of poetic style, historical contexts, and attention to the oeuvres of the skalds whose names are preserved in the written tradition. Kate Heslop reconsiders these not as texts but as pieces in a pre-modern media landscape, focusing on poetry’s medial capacity to embody memory, visuality, and sound.

Mobile, hybrid, diasporic social formations—bands of raiders and traders, petty kingdoms, colonial expeditions—achieved new prominence in the Viking Age. Skalds offered the leaders of these groups something uniquely valuable. With their complicated poetry, they claimed to be able to capture shared contingent meanings and re-mediate them in named, memorable, reproducible works. The commemorative poetry in kviðuháttr remembers histories of ruin and loss. Skaldic ekphrasis discloses and reproduces the presence of the gods. Dróttkvætt encomium evokes for the leader’s retinue the soundscape of battle.

As writing arrived in Scandinavia in the wake of Christianization, the media landscape shifted. In the poetry of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, skalds adjusted to the demands of a literate audience, while the historical and poetological texts of the Icelandic High Middle Ages opened a dialogue between Latin Christian ideas of mediation and local traditions. In the Second Grammatical Treatise, for example, the literate technology of the grid is used to analyze the complex resonances of dróttkvætt as the output of a syllable-spewing hurdy-gurdy—a poetry machine.

Offering both new readings of both canonical works such as Ynglingatal, Ragnarsdrápa, and Háttatal, and examinations of lesser-known texts like Glymdrápa, Líknarbraut, and Sturla Þórðarson’s Hákonarkviða, Viking Mediologies explores the powers and limits of poetic mediation.

Less than a year after the end of authoritarian rule in 1998, huge images of Jesus Christ and other Christian scenes proliferated on walls and billboards around a provincial town in eastern Indonesia where conflict had arisen between Muslims and Christians. A manifestation of the extreme perception that emerged amid uncertainty and the challenge to seeing brought on by urban warfare, the street paintings erected by Protestant motorbike-taxi drivers signaled a radical departure from the aniconic tradition of the old colonial church, a desire to be seen and recognized by political authorities from Jakarta to the UN and European Union, an aim to reinstate the Christian look of a city in the face of the country’s widespread islamicization, and an opening to a more intimate relationship to the divine through the bringing-into-vision of the Christian god.

Stridently assertive, these affectively charged mediations of religion, masculinity, Christian privilege and subjectivity are among the myriad ephemera of war, from rumors, graffiti, incendiary pamphlets, and Video CDs, to Peace Provocateur text-messages and children’s reconciliation drawings. Orphaned Landscapes theorizes the production of monumental street art and other visual media as part of a wider work on appearance in which ordinary people, wittingly or unwittingly, refigure the aesthetic forms and sensory environment of their urban surroundings. The book offers a rich, nuanced account of a place in crisis, while also showing how the work on appearance, far from epiphenomenal, is inherent to sociopolitical change. Whether considering the emergence and disappearance of street art or the atmospherics and fog of war, Spyer demonstrates the importance of an attunement to elusive, ephemeral phenomena for their palpable and varying effects in the world.

Orphaned Landscapes: Violence, Visuality, and Appearance in Indonesia is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.

“The likeness of form between Chinese and English sentences,” writes the American Sinologist Ernest Fenollosa around 1906, “renders translation from one to the other exceptionally easy.” If Babel Had a Form asks not if his claim may be true, but what its phantasmic surprise may yet do. In twentieth-century intersections of China and Asia with the United States, translations did more than communicate meaning across politicized and racializing differences of language and nation. Transpacific translation breached the regulative protocols that created those very differences of human value and cultural meaning. The result, Tze-Yin Teo argues, saw translators cleaving to the sounds and shapes of poetry to imagine a translingual “likeness of form” but not of meaning or kind.

At stake in this form without meaning is a startling new task of equivalence. As a concept, equivalence has been rejected for its colonizing epistemology of value, naming a broken promise of translation and false premise of comparison. Yet the writers studied in this book veered from those ways of knowing to theorize a poetic equivalence: negating the colonial foundations of the concept, they ignited aporias of meaning into flashpoints for a radical literary translation. The book’s transpacific readings glean those forms of equivalence from the writing of Fenollosa, the vernacular experiments of Boxer Scholar Hu Shi, the trilingual musings of Shanghai-born Los Angeles novelist Eileen Chang, the minor work of the Bay Area Korean American transmedial artist Theresa Cha, and a post-Tiananmen elegy by the exiled dissident Yang Lian. The conclusion returns to the deconstructive genealogy of recent debates on translation and untranslatability, displacing the axiom of radical alterity for a no less radical equivalence that remains—pace Fenollosa—far from easy or exceptional.

Ultimately, If Babel Had a Form illuminates the demanding force of even the slightest sameness entangled in the translator’s work of remaking our differences.

This volume examines the historical connections between the United States’ Reconstruction and the country’s emergence as a geopolitical power a few decades later. It shows how the processes at work during the postbellum decade variously foreshadowed, inhibited, and conditioned the development of the United States as an overseas empire and regional hegemon. In doing so, it links the diverse topics of abolition, diplomacy, Jim Crow, humanitarianism, and imperialism.

In 1935, the great African American intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois argued in his Black Reconstruction in America that these two historical moments were intimately related. In particular, Du Bois averred that the nation’s betrayal of the South’s fledgling interracial democracy in the 1870s put reactionaries in charge of a country on the verge of global power, with world-historical implications. Working with the same chronological and geographical parameters, the contributors here take up targeted case studies, tracing the biographical, ideological, and thematic linkages that stretch across the postbellum and imperial moments. With an Introduction, eleven chapters, and an Afterword, this volume offers multiple perspectives based on original primary source research. The resulting composite picture points to a host of countervailing continuities and changes. The contributors examine topics as diverse as diplomatic relations with Spain, the changing views of radical abolitionists, African American missionaries in the Caribbean, and the ambiguities of turn-of-the century political cartoons.

Collectively, the volume unsettles familiar assumptions about how we should understand the late nineteenth-century United States, conventionally framed as the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. It also advances transnational approaches to understanding America’s Reconstruction and the search for the ideological currents shaping American power abroad.

This volume spotlights the unique suitability and situatedness of Filipinx American studies both as a site for reckoning with the work of historicizing U.S. empire in all of its entanglements, as well as a location for reclaiming and theorizing the interlocking histories and contemporary trajectories of global capitalism, racism, sexism, and heteronormativity. It encompasses an interrogation of the foundational status of empire in the interdiscipline; modes of labor analysis and other forms of knowledge production; meaning-making in relation to language, identities, time, and space; the critical contours of Filipinx American schooling and political activism; the indispensability of relational thinking in Filipinx American studies; and the disruptive possibilities of Filipinx American formations. A catalogue of key resources and a selected list of scholarship are also provided.

Filipinx American Studies constitutes a coming-to-terms with not only the potentials and possibilities but also the disavowals, silences, and omissions that mark Filipinx American studies. It provides a reflective and critical space for thinking through the ways Filipinx American studies is uniquely and especially suited to the interrogation of the ongoing legacies of U.S. imperialism and the urgencies of the current period.

Contributors: Karin Aguilar-San Juan, Angelica J. Allen, Gina Apostol, Nerissa S. Balce, Joi Barrios-Leblanc, Victor Bascara, Jody Blanco, Alana Bock, Sony Coráñez Bolton, Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns, Richard T. Chu, Gary A. Colemnar, Kim Compoc, Denise Cruz, Reuben B. Deleon, Josen Masangkay Diaz, Robert Diaz, Kale Bantigue Fajardo, Theodore S. Gonzalves, Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, Anna Romina Guevara, Allan Punzalan Isaac, Martin F. Manalansan IV, Dina C. Maramba, Cynthia Marasigan, Edward Nadurata, JoAnna Poblete, Anthony Bayani Rodriguez, Dylan Rodríguez, Evelyn Ibatan Rodriguez, Robyn Magalit Rodriguez, J. A. Ruanto-Ramirez, Jeffrey Santa Ana, Dean Itsuji Saranillio, Michael Schulze-Oechtering, Sarita Echavez See, Roy B. Taggueg Jr.

“Google is a champion of cultural democracy, but without culture and without democracy.” In this witty and polemical critique the philosopher Barbara Cassin takes aim at Google and our culture of big data. Enlisting her formidable knowledge of the rhetorical tradition, Cassin demolishes the Google myth of a “good” tech company and its “democracy of clicks,” laying bare the philosophical poverty and political naiveté that underwrites its founding slogans: “Organize the world’s information,” and “Don’t be evil.” For Cassin, this conjunction of globalizing knowledge and moral imperative is frighteningly similar to the way American demagogues justify their own universalizing mission before the world.

While sensitive to the possibilities of technology and to Google’s playful appeal, Cassin shows what is lost when a narrow worship of information becomes dogma, such that research comes to mean data mining and other languages become provincial “flavors” folded into an impoverished Globish, or global English.

Five hundred years before “Jabberwocky” and Tender Buttons, writers were already preoccupied with the question of nonsense. But even as the prevalence in medieval texts of gibberish, babble, birdsong, and allusions to bare voice has come into view in recent years, an impression persists that these phenomena are exceptions that prove the rule of the period’s theologically motivated commitment to the kernel of meaning over and against the shell of the mere letter.

This book shows that, to the contrary, the foundational object of study of medieval linguistic thought was vox non-significativa, the utterance insofar as it means nothing whatsoever, and that this fact was not lost on medieval writers of various kinds. In a series of close and unorthodox readings of works by Priscian, Boethius, Augustine, Walter Burley, Geoffrey Chaucer, and the anonymous authors of the Cloud of Unknowing and St. Erkenwald, it inquires into the way that a number of fourteenth-century writers recognized possibilities inherent in the accounts of language transmitted to them from antiquity and transformed those accounts into new ideas, forms, and practices of non-signification. Retrieving a premodern hermeneutics of obscurity in order to provide materials for an archeology of the category of the literary, Medieval Nonsense shows how these medieval linguistic textbooks, mystical treatises, and poems were engineered in such a way as to arrest the faculty of interpretation and force it to focus on the extinguishing of sense that occurs in the encounter with language itself.

Class Acts examines two often neglected aspects of Jacques Derrida’s work as a philosopher, his public presentations at lectures and conferences and his teaching, along with the question of the “speech act” that links them. What, Michael Naas asks, is one doing when one speaks in public in these ways?

The book follows Derrida’s itinerary with regard to speech act theory across three public lectures, from 1971 to 1997, all given, for reasons the book seeks to explain, in Montreal. In these lectures, Derrida elaborated his critique of J. L. Austin and his own subsequent redefinition of speech act theory. The book then gives an overview of Derrida’s teaching career and his famous “seminar” presentations, along with his own explicit reflections on pedagogy and educational institutions beginning in the mid-1970s. Naas then shows through a reading of three recently published seminars—on life death, theory and practice, and forgiveness—just how Derrida the teacher interrogated and deployed speech act theory in his seminars. Whether in a conference hall or a classroom, Naas demonstrates, Derrida was always interested in the way spoken or written words might do more than simply communicate some meaning or intent but might give rise to something like an event. Class Acts bears witness to the possibility of such events in Derrida’s work as a pedagogue and a public intellectual.

This highly accessible portrayal of a post-apartheid neighborhood in transition analyzes the relationship between identity, migration, and place.

Since it was founded in 1894, amidst Johannesburg’s transformation from a mining town into the largest city in southern Africa, Hillbrow has been a community of migrants. As the “city of gold” accumulated wealth on the backs of migrant laborers from southern Africa, Jewish Eastern Europeans who had fled pogroms joined other Europeans and white South Africans in this emerging suburb. After World War II, Hillbrow became a landscape of high-rises that lured western and southern Europeans seeking prosperity in South Africa’s booming economy. By the 1980s, Hillbrow housed some of the most vibrant and visible queer spaces on the continent while also attracting thousands of Indian and Black South Africans who defied apartheid laws to live near the city center. Filling the void for a book about migration within the Global South, The Roads to Hillbrow explores how one South African neighborhood transformed from a white suburb under apartheid into a “grey zone” during the 1970s and 1980s to become a “port of entry” for people from at least twenty-five African countries.

The Roads to Hillbrow explores the diverse experiences of domestic and transnational migrants who have made their way to this South African community following war, economic dislocation, and the social trauma of apartheid. Authors Ron Nerio and Jean Halley weave sociology, history, memoir, and queer studies with stories drawn from more than 100 interviews. Topics cover the search for employment, options for housing, support for unaccompanied minors, possibilities for queer expression, the creation of safe parks for children, and the challenges of living without documents. Current residents of Hillbrow also discuss how they cope with inequality, xenophobia, high levels of crime, and the harsh economic impacts of COVID-19.

Many of the book’s interviewees arrived in Hillbrow seeking not only to gain better futures for themselves but also to support family members in rural parts of South Africa or in their countries of origin. Some immerse themselves in justice work, while others develop LGBTQ+ support networks, join religious and community groups, or engage in artistic expression. By emphasizing the disparate voices of migrants and people who work with migrants, this book shows how the people of Hillbrow form connections and adapt to adversity.

Poetry is dead. Poetry is all around us. Both are trite truisms that this book exploits and challenges.

In his 1798 Advertisement to Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth anticipates that readers accustomed to the poetic norms of the day might not recognize his experiments as poems and might signal their awkward confusion upon opening the book by looking round for poetry, as if seeking it elsewhere. Look Round for Poetry transforms Wordsworth’s idiomatic expression into a methodological charge. By placing tropes and figures common to Romantic and Post-Romantic poems in conjunction with contemporary economic, technological, and political discourse, Look Round for Poetry identifies poetry’s untimely echoes in discourses not always read as poetry or not always read poetically.

Once one begins looking round for poetry, McGrath insists, one might discover it in some surprising contexts. In chapters that spring from poems by Wordsworth, Lucille Clifton, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, McGrath reads poetic examples of understatement alongside market demands for more; the downturned brow as a figure for economic catastrophe; Romantic cloud metaphors alongside the rhetoric of cloud computing; the election of the dead as a poetical, and not just a political, act; and poetic investigations into the power of prepositions as theories of political assembly.

For poetry to retain a vital power, McGrath argues, we need to become ignorant of what we think we mean by it. In the process we may discover critical vocabularies that engage the complexity of social life all around us.

On the Horizon of World Literature compares literary texts from asynchronous periods of incipient literary modernity in different parts of the world: Romantic England and Republican China. These moments were oriented alike by “world literature” as a discursive framework of classifications that connected and re-organized local articulations of literary histories and literary modernities. World literature thus provided—and continues to provide—a condition of possibility for conversation between cultures as well as for their mutual provincialization.

The book offers readings of a selection of literary forms that serve also as textual sites for the enactment of new socio-political forms of life. The literary manifesto, the tale collection, the familiar essay, and the domestic novel function as testing grounds for questions of both literary-aesthetic and socio-political importance: What does it mean to attain a voice? What is a common reader? How does one dwell in the ordinary? What is a woman? In different languages and activating heterogeneous literary and philosophical traditions, works by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lu Xun, Charles and Mary Lamb, Lin Shu, Zhou Zuoren, Jane Austen, and Eileen Chang explore the far-from-settled problem of what it means to be modern in different lifeworlds.

Sun’s book brings to light the disciplinary-historical impact world literature has had in shaping literary traditions and practices around the world. The book renews the practice of close reading by offering the model of a deprovincialized close reading loosened from confinement within monocultural hermeneutic circles. By means of its own focus on England and China, the book provides methods useful for comparatists working between other Western and non-Western languages. It establishes the critical significance of Romanticism for the discipline of literary studies and opens up new paths of research in global Romanticism and global nineteenth-century studies. And it offers a new approach to analyzing the cosmopolitan character of the literary and cultural transformations of early twentieth-century China.

Finance Fictions takes the measure of what it means to live in a world ruled by high finance by examining the tension between psychosis and realism that plays out in the contemporary finance novel. When the things traded at the center of the economy cease to be things at all, but highly abstracted speculations, how do we come to see the real? What sorts of narrative can accurately approach the actual workings of a neoliberal economy marked by accelerating cycles of market crashes, economic and political crisis, and austerity?

Revisiting such twentieth-century classics of the genre as Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, De Boever argues that the twenty-first century is witnessing the birth of a new kind of realistic novel that can make sense of complex financial instruments like collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, and digital algorithms operating at speeds faster than what human beings or computers can record. If in 1989 Wolfe could still urge novelists to work harder to “tame the billion-footed beast of reality,” today’s economic reality confronts us with a difference that is qualitative rather than quantitative: a new financial ontology requiring new modes of thinking and writing.

Mobilizing the philosophical thought of Quentin Meillassoux in the close reading of finance novels by Robert Harris, Michel Houellebecq, Ben Lerner and less well-known works of conceptual writing such as Mathew Timmons’ Credit, Finance Fictions argues that realism is in for a speculative update if it wants to take on the contemporary economy—an “if” whose implications turn out to be deeply political. Part literary study and part philosophical inquiry, Finance Fictions seeks to contribute to a new mindset for creative and critical work on finance in the twenty-first century.

The Two Cultures of English examines the academic discipline of English in the final decades of the twentieth century and the first years of the new millennium. During this period, longstanding organizational patterns within the discipline were disrupted. With the introduction of French theory into the American academy in the 1960s and 1970s, both literary studies and composition studies experienced a significant reorientation.

The introduction of theory into English studies not only intensified existing tensions between those in literature and those in composition but also produced commonalities among colleagues that had not previously existed. As a result, the various fields within English began to share an increasing number of investments at the same time that institutional conflicts between them became more intense than ever before.

Through careful reconsiderations of some of the key figures who shaped and were shaped by this new landscape—including Michel Foucault, Kenneth Burke, Paul de Man, Fredric Jameson, James Berlin, Susan Miller, John Guillory, and Bruno Latour—the book offers a more comprehensive map of the discipline than is usually understood from the perspective of either literature or composition alone.

Possessing a clear view of the entire discipline is essential today as the contemporary corporate university pushes English studies to abandon its liberal arts tradition and embrace a more vocational curriculum. This book provides important conceptual tools for responding to and resisting in this environment.

Winner, French Voices Award

This book, a crossover hit in France, offers a fresh genealogy of our neoliberal moment.

“We must adapt!” These words can be heard almost everywhere and in every aspect of our lives. Where does this widespread sense that we have fallen behind come from? How can we explain this progressive colonization of the economic, social, and political fields by this biological vocabulary of evolution? Offering a lucid account of sophisticated material, Barbara Stiegler uncovers the prehistories of today’s ubiquitous rhetoric in Darwinism and American liberalism, while, at the same time, recovering powerful resistances to the rhetoric of adaptation across the twentieth century.

Walter Lippmann, an American theorist of this new liberalism, believed democracy was not adapted to the needs of globalization. Only a government of experts could force society to evolve, he argued. Lippmann thus found himself confronted with John Dewey, the great figure of American Pragmatism. Both Lippmann and Dewey labored under the impression that the world had changed and society needed to adapt. However, Lippmann did not trust society to adapt on its own and insisted on the need for experts who would force the necessary adaptation. Dewey, by contrast, believed the necessary adaptation could only come "from below" and should proceed in a democratic fashion.

Focusing on readings of Michel Foucault, Walter Lippmann, and John Dewey, Adapt! paves the way for renewed insights into neoliberalism’s history, essence, characteristic forces, and impacts, as well as biopolitical theory. Stiegler presents an intriguing new genealogy for the development of neoliberalism, examining whether humans are by nature lagging and require biopolitical and disciplinary management to enforce adaptation. Stiegler also reorients Foucault’s genealogy of neoliberalism by emphasizing the Darwinian rhetoric of adaptation, as it arose in the Lippmann–Dewey Debate, and deftly handles the question of human nature in a way that re-enlivens this traditional concept.

As the industrialization of our ways of life never stops destroying the environment and the health of organisms (climate disruption, the destruction of biodiversity, the growth of chronic diseases, the return of large pandemics), how can we think of a democratic government of life and the living? This is the question that Stiegler’s work helps us to confront.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST SPIRITUAL BOOKS OF 2021 BY SPIRITUALITY & PRACTICE
Winner, 2023 AUPresses Book, Jacket, and Journal Show, Trade Typographic

Bearing witness to the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic

When New York City went into lockdown in March 2020, spiritual leader Micah Bucey found the world and himself in desperate need of prayer. While social distancing created disconnect, Bucey began a daily practice of writing a “Tiny Prayer” each morning and posting it on social media, each offering a reflection on what was going on in his own heart and in the wider world. Soon, a solitary practice became a communal one, with others engaging and sharing the prayers that touched them most, suggesting issues and topics for future prayers, and creating connection across a digital divide.

Over the course of a year filled with fear and faith, protest and possibility, Bucey composed prayers for frontline workers and activists, those lost to illness and wins for democracy, for civic leaders, celebrities, and everyday emotions. While overwhelm threatened to engulf us all, these short meditations invited a combination of attention and intention in bite-sized form that aided the reader in focusing on one issue at a time, from the rise of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths, to police violence, social justice uprisings, immigrant detentions, catastrophic climate events, mass shootings, and violent right-wing insurrections.

Now, all 366 “Tiny Prayers” are collected here, together forming a chronicle of a specific moment in time and modeling a form for everyone to compose their own tiny prayers to engage the everyday around them. The Book of Tiny Prayer recalls a very particular year, but its spirit is universal, inviting all to quiet themselves, name the pain and the joy around them, and recommit to the change required for collective liberation, during the worst times and far beyond.

Radical Hospitality addresses a timely and challenging subject for contemporary philosophy: the ethical responsibility of opening borders, psychic and physical, to the stranger.

Kearney and Fitzpatrick show how radical hospitality happens by opening oneself in narrative exchange to someone or something other than ourselves—by crossing borders, whether literal or figurative. Against the fears, dogmas, and demands for certainty and security that push us toward hostility, we also desire to wager with the unknown, leap into the unanticipated, and celebrate the new, a desire this book seeks to recognize and cultivate. The book contends that hospitality means chancing one’s hand, one’s arm, one’s very self, thereby opening a vital space for new voices to be heard, shedding old skins, and welcoming new understandings.

Radical Hospitality engages with urgent moral conversations concerning identity, nationality, immigration, commemoration, and justice, moving between theory and praxis and on to the formative life of the classroom. Building on key critical debates on the question of hospitality ranging from phenomenology, hermeneutics and deconstruction to neo-Kantian moral critique and Anglo-American virtue ethics, the book explores novel possibilities for an ethics of hospitality in our contemporary world of border anxiety, refugee crises, and ecological catastrophe.

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

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

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

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

The Mormon faith may seem so different from aspirations to transcend the human through technological means that it is hard to imagine how these two concerns could even exist alongside one another, let alone serve together as the joint impetus for a social movement. Machines for Making Gods investigates the tensions between science and religion through which an imaginative group of young Mormons and ex-Mormons have found new ways of understanding the world.

The Mormon Transhumanist Association (MTA) believes that God intended humanity to achieve Mormonism’s promise of theosis through imminent technological advances. Drawing on a nineteenth-century Mormon tradition of religious speculation to reimagine Mormon eschatological hopes as near-future technological possibilities, they envision such current and possible advances as cryonic preservation, computer simulation, and quantum archeology as paving the way for the resurrection of the dead, the creation of worlds without end, and promise of undergoing theosis—of becoming a god. Addressing the role of speculation in the anthropology of religion, Machines for Making Gods undoes debates about secular transhumanism’s relation to religion by highlighting the differences an explicitly religious transhumanism makes.

Charting the conflicts and resonances between secular transhumanism and Mormonism, Bialecki shows how religious speculation has opened up imaginative horizons to give birth to new forms of Mormonism, including a particular progressive branch of the faith and even such formations as queer polygamy. The book also reveals how the MTA’s speculative account of God and technology together has helped to forestall some of the social pressure that comes with apostasy in much of the Mormon Intermountain West.

A fascinating ethnography of a group with much to say about crucial junctures of modern culture, Machines for Making Gods illustrates how the scientific imagination can be better understood when viewed through anthropological accounts of myth.

Winner, 2022 Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Prize

While the idea that successful missions needed Indigenous revolts and missionary deaths seems counterintuitive, this book illustrates how it became a central logic of frontier colonization in Spanish North America. Missions Begin with Blood argues that martyrdom acted as a ceremony of possession that helped Jesuits understand violence, disease, and death as ways that God inevitably worked to advance Christendom. Whether petitioning superiors for support, preparing to extirpate Native “idolatries,” or protecting their conversions from critics, Jesuits found power in their persecution and victory in their victimization. This book correlates these tales of sacrifice to deep genealogies of redemptive death in Catholic discourse and explains how martyrological idioms worked to rationalize early modern colonialism. Specifically, missionaries invoked an agricultural metaphor that reconfigured suffering into seed that, when watered by sweat and blood, would one day bring a rich harvest of Indigenous Christianity.

A beautiful, profound series of reflections on the body by one of the most prominent and consequential philosophers of continental Europe

This landmark volume brings into English Jean-Luc Nancy’s last completed work and concludes his remarkable philosophical reflections on the body, a project he began almost thirty years ago. Taking the body as an intersection of pulsing life and destructive cruelty on a global scale, Nancy’s account becomes more vivid, more physical, than ever, even as it ventures into language that is as lyrical as it is profound. This vividness is manifest in blood: as it flows, in all its pulsing and forceful circulation, and as it spills, in the cruelty of existences confronted daily by countless destructions. This can be described as sanguis and cruor, the two Latin words for blood’s intermingled but distinct aspects. This distinction allows Nancy to highlight an almost mystical sense of the body (yet one that remains soberly on this side of its manifest insistence), alongside the cruelty that pervades our world—a world whose very existence is threatened by its reduction to mere objects.

The exceptional writings brought together in Corpus III comprise a masterful work of philosophy that marries rigorous erudition—on Freud, Nietzsche, and others—with rich poetic language and an actual poem. Nancy’s thought opens the body onto its own unaccountable origins, its plural singularities, its enmeshed instantiations, and its excessive irreducibles, which are also the elusive excesses of language. Whereas in earlier texts Nancy has referred to this excess as poetry, here he performs it in the form of a poem, in the extraordinary hymn entitled Stoma. While the publication of a poem by Nancy is a notable event, equally noteworthy is a remarkable essay entitled “Scandalous Death,” in which Nancy meditated on a subject that was to come to him too soon after. Above all, the book is crucial for bringing into English Cruor, the very last book Nancy completed before his death, an evocative meditation offered by a great thinker on the complex conditions of his own—and our—singular survival.

Rousseau’s opposition to the theater is well known: Far from purging the passions, it serves only to exacerbate them, and to render them hypocritical. But is it possible that Rousseau’s texts reveal a different conception of theatrical imitation, a more originary form of mimesis? Over and against Heidegger’s dismissal of Rousseau in the 1930s, and in the wake of classic readings by Jacques Derrida and Jean Starobinski, Lacoue-Labarthe asserts the deeply philosophical importance of Rousseau as a thinker who, without formalizing it as such, established a dialectical logic that would determine the future of philosophy: an originary theatricality arising from a dialectic between “nature” and its supplements.

Beginning with a reading of Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality, Lacoue-Labarthe brings out this dialectic in properly philosophical terms, revealing nothing less than a transcendental thinking of origins. For Rousseau, the origin has the form of a “scene”—that is, of theater. On this basis, Rousseau’s texts on the theater, especially the Letter to d’Alembert, emerge as an incisive interrogation of Aristotle’s Poetics. This can be read not in the false and conventional interpretation of this text that Rousseau had inherited, but rather in relation to its fundamental concepts, mimesis and katharsis, and in Rousseau’s interpretation of Greek theater itself. If for Rousseau mimesis is originary, a transcendental structure, katharsis is in turn the basis of a dialectical movement, an Aufhebung that will translate the word itself (for, as Lacoue-Labarthe reminds us, Aufheben translates katharein). By reversing the facilities of the Platonic critique, Rousseau inaugurates what we could call the philosophical theater of the future.

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

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

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

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

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

WINNER, SOCIETY FOR MILITARY HISTORY DISTINGUISHED BOOK AWARDS - FIRST BOOK

This book informs the public for the first time about the impact of American psychiatry on soldiers during World War II.

Breaking Point is the first in-depth history of American psychiatry in World War II. Drawn from unpublished primary documents, oral histories, and the author’s personal interviews and correspondence over years with key psychiatric and military policymakers, it begins with Franklin Roosevelt’s endorsement of a universal Selective Service psychiatric examination followed by Army and Navy pre- and post-induction examinations. Ultimately, 2.5 million men and women were rejected or discharged from military service on neuropsychiatric grounds. Never before or since has the United States engaged in such a program.

In designing Selective Service Medical Circular No. 1, psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan assumed psychiatrists could predict who might break down or falter in military service or even in civilian life thereafter. While many American and European psychiatrists questioned this belief, and huge numbers of American psychiatric casualties soon raised questions about screening’s validity, psychiatric and military leaders persisted in 1942 and 1943 in endorsing ever tougher screening and little else. Soon, families complained of fathers and teens being drafted instead of being identified as psychiatric 4Fs, and Blacks and Native Americans, among others, complained of bias. A frustrated General George S. Patton famously slapped two “malingering” neuropsychiatric patients in Sicily (a sentiment shared by Marshall and Eisenhower, though they favored a tamer style). Yet psychiatric rejections, evacuations, and discharges mounted.

While psychiatrist Roy Grinker and a few others treated soldiers close to the front in Tunisia in early 1943, this was the exception. But as demand for manpower soared and psychiatrists finally went to the field and saw that combat itself, not “predisposition,” precipitated breakdown, leading military psychiatrists switched their emphasis from screening to prevention and treatment. But this switch was too little too late and slowed by a year-long series of Inspector General investigations even while numbers of psychiatric casualties soared.

Ironically, despite and even partly because of psychiatrists’ wartime performance, plus the emotional toll of war, postwar America soon witnessed a dramatic growth in numbers, popularity, and influence of the profession, culminating in the National Mental Health Act (1946). But veterans with “PTSD,” not recognized until 1980, were largely neglected.

Following the discovery of an anonymous libretto, Abner Blossom comes out of retirement to write an opera based on the life of infamous novelist-turned-photographer Cyril Vane. But those who knew Vane and his Russian-born wife, the silent-screen star Madame Olga Petrovna, are prepared to go to any length to suppress the truth about them. Vane’s dark secret follows him to the grave. But his jealous and vengeful widow and her faded cronies employ all the means at their disposal to prevent the opening of Blossom’s opera. Out with the Stars is peopled by the Gothic characters readers of James Purdy have come to anticipate and relish, from Val Sturgis, Kentucky boy made good and now Blossom’s protégé to Francis X. Beauregard, aging star of the silver screen now living surrounded by streetwise hustlers in his Brooklyn mansion.

Back in print for the first time since 1993, Purdy’s flamboyant tale of New York City’s pre-Stonewall bohemia includes an incisive Foreword by Robert J. Corber, placing the work within its rich social and cultural context.

Napoli/New York/Hollywood is an absorbing investigation of the significant impact that Italian immigrant actors, musicians, and directors—and the southern Italian stage traditions they embodied—have had on the history of Hollywood cinema and American media, from 1895 to the present day. In a unique exploration of the transnational communication between American and Italian film industries, media or performing arts as practiced in Naples, New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, this groundbreaking book looks at the historical context and institutional film history from the illuminating perspective of the performers themselves—the workers who lend their bodies and their performance culture to screen representations. In doing so, the author brings to light the cultural work of families and generations of artists that have contributed not only to American film culture, but also to the cultural construction and evolution of “Italian-ness” over the past century.

Napoli/New York/Hollywood offers a major contribution to our understanding of the role of southern Italian culture in American cinema, from the silent era to contemporary film. Using a provocative interdisciplinary approach, the author associates southern Italian culture with modernity and the immigrants’ preservation of cultural traditions with innovations in the mode of production and in the use of media technologies (theatrical venues, music records, radio, ethnic films). Each chapter synthesizes a wealth of previously under-studied material and displays the author’s exceptional ability to cover transnational cinematic issues within an historical context. For example, her analysis of the period from the end of World War I until the beginning of sound in film production in the end of the 1920s, delivers a meaningful revision of the relationship between Fascism and American cinema, and Italian emigration.

Napoli/New York/Hollywood examines the careers of those Italian performers who were Italian not only because of their origins but because their theatrical culture was Italian, a culture that embraced high and low, tragedy and comedy, music, dance and even acrobatics, naturalism, and improvisation. Their previously unexplored story—that of the Italian diaspora’s influence on American cinema—is here meticulously reconstructed through rich primary sources, deep archival research, extensive film analysis, and an enlightening series of interviews with heirs to these traditions, including Francis Coppola and his sister Talia Shire, John Turturro, Nancy Savoca, James Gandolfini, David Chase, Joe Dante, and Annabella Sciorra.

Represents some of the best, cutting-edge thinking available on multiple forms of social upheaval and related grassroots movements.

From the January 2017 Women’s March to the August 2017 events in Charlottesville and the 2020 protests for racial justice in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, social upheaval and protest have loomed large in the United States in recent years. The varied, sometimes conflicting role of religious believers, communities, and institutions in such events and movements calls for scholarly analysis. Arising from a conference held at the College of the Holy Cross in November 2017, Religion, Protest, and Social Upheaval gathers contributions from ten scholars in religious studies, theology and ethics, and gender studies—from seasoned experts to emerging voices—to illuminate this tumultuous era of history and the complex landscape of social action for economic, racial, political, and sexual and gender justice.

The contributors consider the history of resistance to racial capitalist imperialism from W. E. B. Du Bois to today; the theological genealogy of the capitalist economic order, and Catholic theology’s growing concern with climate change; affect theory and the rise of white nationalism, theological aesthetics, and solidarity with migrants; differing U.S. Christian churches’ responses to the “revolutionary aesthetics” of the Black Lives Matter movement; Muslim migration and the postsecular character of Muslim labor organizing in the United States; shifts in moral reasoning and religiosity among U.S. women’s movements from the 1960s to today; and the intersection of heresy discourse and struggles for LGBTQ+ equality among Korean and Korean-American Protestants. With this pluralistic approach, Religion, Protest, and Social Upheaval offers a snapshot of scholarly religious responses to the crises and promises of the late 2010s and early 2020s. Representing the diverse coalitions of the religious left, it provides groundbreaking analysis, charts trajectories for further study and action, and offers visions for a more hopeful future.

2019 NAUTILUS GOLD WINNER

In a time of rapid climate change and species extinction, what role have the world’s religions played in ameliorating—or causing—the crisis we now face? Religion in general, and Christianity in particular, appears to bear a disproportionate burden for creating humankind’s exploitative attitudes toward nature through unearthly theologies that divorce human beings and their spiritual yearnings from their natural origins. In this regard, Christianity has become an otherworldly religion that views the natural world as “fallen,” as empty of signs of God’s presence.

And yet, buried deep within the Christian tradition are startling portrayals of God as the beaked and feathered Holy Spirit – the “animal God,” as it were, of historic Christian witness. Through biblical readings, historical theology, continental philosophy, and personal stories of sacred nature, this book recovers the model of God in Christianity as a creaturely, avian being who signals the presence of spirit in everything, human and more-than-human alike.

Mark Wallace’s recovery of the bird-God of the Bible signals a deep grounding of faith in the natural world. The moral implications of nature-based Christianity are profound. All life is deserving of humans’ care and protection insofar as the world is envisioned as alive with sacred animals, plants, and landscapes. From the perspective of Christian animism, the Earth is the holy place that God made and that humankind is enjoined to watch over and cherish in like manner. Saving the environment, then, is not a political issue on the left or the right of the ideological spectrum, but, rather, an innermost passion shared by all people of faith and good will in a world damaged by anthropogenic warming, massive species extinction, and the loss of arable land, potable water, and breathable air. To Wallace, this passion is inviolable and flows directly from the heart of Christian teaching that God is a carnal, fleshy reality who is promiscuously incarnated within all things, making the whole world a sacred embodiment of God’s presence, and worthy of our affectionate concern.

This beautifully and accessibly written book shows that “Christian animism” is not a strange oxymoron, but Christianity’s natural habitat. Challenging traditional Christianity’s self-definition as an other-worldly religion, Wallace paves the way for a new Earth-loving spirituality grounded in the ancient image of an animal God.

This book shows how rhythm constitutes an untapped resource for understanding poetry. Intervening in recent debates over formalism, historicism, and poetics, the authors show how rhythm is at once a defamiliarizing aesthetic force and an unstable concept. Distinct from the related terms to which it’s often assimilated—scansion, prosody, meter—rhythm makes legible a range of ways poetry affects us that cannot be parsed through the traditional resources of poetic theory.

Rhythm has rich but also problematic roots in still-lingering nineteenth-century notions of primitive, oral, communal, and sometimes racialized poetics. But there are reasons to understand and even embrace its seductions, including its resistance to lyrical voice and even identity. Through exploration of rhythm’s genealogies and present critical debates, the essays consistently warn against taking rhythm to be a given form offering ready-made resources for interpretation. Pressing beyond poetry handbooks’ isolated descriptions of technique or inductive declarations of what rhythm “is,” the essays ask what it means to think rhythm.

Rhythm, the contributors show, happens relative to the body, on the one hand, and to language, on the other—two categories that are distinct from the literary, the mode through which poetics has tended to be analyzed. Beyond articulating what rhythm does to poetry, the contributors undertake a genealogical and theoretical analysis of how rhythm as a human experience has come to be articulated through poetry and poetics. The resulting work helps us better understand poetry both on its own terms and in its continuities with other experiences and other arts.

Contributors: Derek Attridge, Tom Cable, Jonathan Culler, Natalie Gerber, Ben Glaser, Virginia Jackson, Simon Jarvis, Ewan Jones, Erin Kappeler, Meredith Martin, David Nowell Smith, Yopie Prins, Haun Saussy

This concluding volume of the Future of the Religious Past series approaches contemporary religion through the lens of practice: the rituals, performances, devotions, and everyday acts through which humans do religion. In spite of predictions about the inevitability of secularism, religion in the twenty-first century remains stubbornly resilient, and Gestures: The Study of Religion as Practice offers a new vantage point from which to see the religious as a category shaped and reshaped by modernity and to encounter religion not as something bounded by doctrines and sacred texts but as lived experience.

Twenty-four globally based scholars look to practice to examine such diverse phenomena as human rights, memory, martyrdom, dress and fashion, colonial legacies, blasphemy, mass political action, and the future of secularism.

What is it like to run away from bombing, lose your family, and work out how to take care of yourself in a foreign country when you are seven years old? What do you do when the woman who promised you a good job in Europe turns out to have sold you into prostitution? How do you escape from torture and detention in Libya? What is it like to almost drown in the Mediterranean and then be confined in a garbage and rat-filled settlement on a Greek island for years?

In this book, Lynne Jones answers these questions by combining direct testimony from children with a blazingly frank eyewitness account of providing mental health support on the front line of the migrant crisis across Europe and Central America in the past five years. Her diaries document how a compassionate welcome shifted to indifference and hostility toward those seeking refuge from war, disaster, and poverty in the richest countries in the world. They shine light on what it is like to be caught up on the front lines of the migrant crises in Europe and Central America, either as a person in flight or as a volunteer trying to help. They show how people who have fled war, poverty, and disaster—trapped in degrading, humiliating living conditions—have responded with resourcefulness and creativity. In the absence of most large professional humanitarian agencies, migrants and volunteers together have created a new form of humanitarianism that challenges old ways of working.

Today there are 79 million forcibly displaced people in the world today, 1 percent of the world’s population. Understanding the perspectives of people on the move has never been more important.

The Author's profits from this book will be donated to the charity: CHOOSE LOVE/HELP REFUGEES

WINNER, 25th ANNUAL SUSANNE M. GLASSCOCK BOOK PRIZE

Life on Earth is facing a mass extinction event of our own making. Human activity is changing the biology and the meaning of extinction. What Is Extinction? examines several key moments that have come to define the terms of extinction over the past two centuries, exploring instances of animal and human finitude and the cultural forms used to document and interpret these events.

Offering a critical theory for the critically endangered, Joshua Schuster proposes that different discourses of limits and lastness appear in specific extinction events over time as a response to changing attitudes toward species frailty. Understanding these extinction events also involves examining what happens when the conceptual and cultural forms used to account for species finitude are pressed to their limits as well. Schuster provides close readings of several case studies of extinction that bring together environmental humanities and multispecies methods with media-specific analyses at the terminus of life.

What Is Extinction? delves into the development of last animal photography, the anthropological and psychoanalytic fascination with human origins and ends, the invention of new literary genres of last fictions, the rise of new extreme biopolitics in the Third Reich that attempted to change the meaning of extinction, and the current pursuit of de-extinction technologies. Schuster offers timely interpretations of how definitions and visions of extinction have changed in the past and continue to change in the present.

How is religious conversion transforming American democracy? In one corner of Appalachia, a group of American citizens has embraced the Russian Orthodox Church and through it Putin’s New Russia. Historically a minority immigrant faith in the United States, Russian Orthodoxy is attracting Americans who look to Russian religion and politics for answers to Western secularism and the loss of traditional family values in the face of accelerating progressivism. This ethnography highlights an intentional community of converts who are exemplary of much broader networks of Russian Orthodox converts in the United States. These converts sought and found a conservatism more authentic than Christian American Republicanism and a nationalism unburdened by the broken promises of American exceptionalism. Ultimately, both converts and the Church that welcomes them deploy the subversive act of adopting the ideals and faith of a foreign power for larger, transnational political ends.

Offering insights into this rarely considered religious world, including its far-right political roots that nourish the embrace of Putin’s Russia, this ethnography shows how religious conversion is tied to larger issues of social politics, allegiance, (anti)democracy, and citizenship. These conversions offer us a window onto both global politics and foreign affairs, while also allowing us to see how particular U.S. communities are grappling with social transformations in the twenty-first century. With broad implications for our understanding of both conservative Christianity and right-wing politics, as well as contemporary Russian–American relations, this book provides insight in the growing constellations of far-right conservatism. While Russian Orthodox converts are more likely to form the moral minority rather than the moral majority, they are an important gauge for understanding the powerful philosophical shifts occurring in the current political climate in the United States and what they might mean for the future of American values, ideals, and democracy.

The Political Logic of Experience argues that experience and phenomenology are essentially political, with profound implications for our understanding of subjectivity, epistemology, experience, the phenomenological method, and politics.

Drawing on work from across the phenomenological tradition, it develops an account of expression as the internal relationship uniting knowing, being, and doing with both transcendental conditions and empirical phenomena. This expressive unification generates subjectivity as an expression of particular communities and subjects as an expression of subjectivity. Subjectivity and experience are therefore both revealed to be inherently political prior to their expression in particular subjects.

In clarifying the political nature of experience and the constitution of subjectivity, the book puts the work of critical phenomenology in dialogue with transcendental phenomenology to reveal the need for a phenomenological politics: a field tasked with explaining the expressive, co-constitutive, and necessarily political relationships between subjects and their communities. It is only through such a phenomenological politics that we can properly make sense of the epistemological, ontological, and practical significance of issues like racism and sexism, problems that concern our very experience of the world. The book reveals phenomenology to be both essentially political and politically essential, as it emerges within particular communities and shapes and transforms how individuals within those communities experience the world.

Touching on issues of transcendental phenomenology, political strategy, historical interpretation and inter-disciplinary phenomenological method, the book argues for foundational claims pertaining to phenomenology, politics, and social criticism that will be of interest to those working in philosophy, gender studies, race, queer theory, transcendental and applied phenomenology, and beyond.

Written by leading historians of the mid–nineteenth century United States, this book focuses on the continental dimensions of the U.S. Civil War. It joins a growing body of scholarship that seeks to understand the place of America’s mid-nineteenth-century crisis in the broader sweep of world history. However, unlike other studies that have pursued the Civil War’s connections with Europe and the Caribbean, this volume focuses on North America, particularly Mexico, British Canada, and sovereign indigenous states in the West.

As the United States went through its Civil War and Reconstruction, Mexico endured its own civil war and then waged a four-year campaign to expel a French-imposed monarch. Meanwhile, Britain’s North American colonies were in complex and contested negotiations that culminated in confederation in 1867. In the West, indigenous nations faced an onslaught of settlers and soldiers seeking to conquer their lands for the United States. Yet despite this synchronicity, mainstream histories of the Civil War mostly ignore its connections to the political upheaval occurring elsewhere in North America.

By reading North America into the history of the Civil War, this volume shows how battles over sovereignty in neighboring states became enmeshed with the fratricidal conflict in the United States. Its contributors explore these entangled histories in studies ranging from African Americans fleeing U.S. slavery by emigrating to Mexico to Confederate privateers finding allies in Halifax, Nova Scotia. This continental perspective highlights the uncertainty of the period when the fate of old nations and possibilities for new ones were truly up for grabs.

Winner of the Frederick Streng Book Award for Excellence in Buddhist-Christian Studies

This work provides the first systematic discussion of the Bodhisattva path and its importance for constructive Christian theology. Crucified Wisdom examines specific Buddhist traditions, texts, and practices not as phenomena whose existence requires an apologetic justification but as wells of tested wisdom that invite theological insight. With the increasing participation of Christians in Buddhist practice, many are seeking a deeper understanding of the way the teachings of the two traditions might interface. Christ and the Bodhisattva are often compared superficially in Buddhist–Christian discussion. This text combines a rich exposition of the Bodhisattva path, using Śāntideva’s classic work the Bodicaryāvatāra and subsequent Tibetan commentators, with detailed reflection on its implications for Christian faith and practice.

Author S. Mark Heim lays out root tensions constituted by basic Buddhist teachings on the one hand, and Christian teachings on the other, and the ways in which the Bodhisattva or Christ embody and resolve the resulting paradoxes in their respective traditions. An important contribution to the field of comparative theology in general and to the area of Buddhist–Christian studies in particular, Crucified Wisdom proposes that Christian theology can take direct instruction from Mahāyāna Buddhism in two respects: deepening its understanding of our creaturely nature through no-self insights, and revising its vision of divine immanence in dialogue with teachings of emptiness. Heim argues that Christians may affirm the importance of novelty in history, the enduring significance of human persons, and the Trinitarian reality of God, even as they learn to value less familiar, nondual dimensions of Christ’s incarnation, human redemption, and the divine life.

Crucified Wisdom focuses on questions of reconciliation and atonement in Christian theology and explores the varying interpretations of the crucifixion of Jesus in Buddhist–Christian discussion. The Bodhisattva path is central for major contemporary Buddhist voices such as the Dalai Lama and Thích Nhât Hanh, who figure prominently as conversation partners in the text. This work will be of particular value for those interested in “dual belonging” in connection to these traditions.

Imagistic Care explores ethnographically how images function in our concepts, our writing, our fieldwork, and our lives. With contributions from anthropologists, philosophers and an artist, the volume asks: How can imagistic inquiries help us understand the complex entanglements of self and other, dependence and independency, frailty and charisma, notions of good and bad aging, and norms and practices of care in old age? And how can imagistic inquiries offer grounds for critique?

Cutting between ethnography, phenomenology and art, this volume offers a powerful contribution to understandings of growing old. The images created in words and drawings are used to complicate rather than simplify the world. The contributors advance an understanding of care, and of aging itself, marked by alterity, spectral presences and uncertainty.

Contributors: Rasmus Dyring, Harmandeep Kaur Gill, Lone Grøn, Maria Louw, Cheryl Mattingly, Lotte Meinert, Maria Speyer, Helle S. Wentzer, Susan Reynolds Whyte

A provocative re-reading of Stanley Kubrick’s work and its focus on masculine desire

The work of Stanley Kubrick amounts to a sustained reflection on the male condition: past, present, and future. The persistent theme of his filmmaking is less violence or sex than it is the pressurized exertion of masculinity in unusual or extreme circumstances, where it may be taxed or exaggerated to various effects, tragic and comic—or metamorphosed, distorted, and even undone.

The stories that Kubrick’s movies tell range from global nuclear politics to the unpredictable sexual dynamics of a marriage; from a day in the life of a New York City prizefighter preparing for a nighttime bout to the evolution of humankind. These male melodramas center on sociality and asociality. They feature male doubles, pairs, and rivals. They explore the romance of men and their machines, and men as machines. They figure intensely conflicted forms of male sexual desire. And they are also very much about male manners, style, taste, and art.

Examining the formal, thematic, and theoretical affiliations between Kubrick’s three bodies of work—his photographs, his documentaries, and his feature films—Kubrick’s Men offers new vantages on to the question of gender and sexuality, including the first extended treatment of homosexuality in Kubrick’s male-oriented work.