“I don't really want to write about theory, but it just keeps coming up again and again. It's inescapable.”
Tag: Duke University Press
Queer Ever After?
If queer today often looks rather like heteronormativity’s “sick and boring life,” how can we cultivate queerer worlds, or other possibilities?
Ahmed’s Good Grief
Institutions separate complainers from one another and from their own support networks. But what if we complained as a collective?
Necessary Housework: Dismantling the Master’s House
White supremacy tells us we do not belong, but we do have a place in history.
Public Picks 2021
Each May we send our readers into summer with a curated list of the titles that dazzled, challenged, and inspired us most over the past year (or so).
Black Freedom Is the Seed for All Freedom
Even with colonialism and slavery ended, black life remains unfree. What will it take to go from emancipation to liberation?
Stories of Soil, Soy, and Life Otherwise
What happens when thinking of soil as a living being and force, with whom the human world needs to repair and rebuild ties?
Who’s Afraid of Antiracism?
By France’s twisted logic, acknowledging race equals attacking the Republic.
How to Step Out of Comfort Zones
Caribbean authors—and the “disorderly” women of whom they write—can reveal how important it is to seek out one’s true self.
Poor Queer Use: Repurposing the Ivory Tower
Outside elite institutions, queer studies has the potential to go hand in hand with broader struggles of racial and economic justice.
When Black Humanity Is Denied
Critiquing the Enlightenment is essential, because there the asylum, prison, and science itself unveil their violent foundations.
Think like a Virus
Rather than accepting that a virus will come, we can learn how viruses live and thrive—and work to suppress them before they take off.
Water as Right, Water as Future
Declaring water a human right is easy. But to actually secure that right, the best method—surprisingly—is bureaucratic sleights of hand.
Political Life in the Age of Catastrophe
Thanks to surveillance, political violence, and AI, we no longer have the luxury of humanist utopias to plan for the future.
Injustice in the Breeze
Energy companies promise to “go green.” Yet they use the same forms of extractive capitalism that have destroyed the planet’s climate.
Why Seek Impossible Foods?
The Impossible™ burger does pollute less. But does this matter, in the face of capitalism’s continued control of the global food system?
Listen to the Birds
Avian flu came from environmental devastation, an increasingly interconnected world, and a growing population—just like COVID-19.
Can Photography Be Decolonial?
Can the inherent contradictions of “whiteness” and the “decolonial” ever align with the reparative potential of photography?
Making Therapy Work for Asian Americans
How does one negotiate the truth within a network of Western racist stereotypes that pathologize the East, alongside equally Western ideas about “insanities”?
Lessons from Haiti on Living and Dying
If he had to write The Black Jacobins again, C. L. R. James “would only give Toussaint [Louverture] a walk-on part.”