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).
Tag: Duke University Press
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.”
In the Library of Lévi-Strauss
The walls were lined with books, as one might expect. Among them were a number of wooden masks, woven baskets, and a tapestry of a bodhisattva. The desk was ...
What Did We See in Color TV?
For those seeking to break up with their phones, or just decrease their screen time, tech ethicist Tristan Harris recommends starting with a quick technological fix ...
Getting to the Party in Time
The best parties, L. O. Aranye Fradenburg Joy claims in her epilogue to Jonathan Goldberg’s Sappho: ]fragments, are the after-parties: the parties that happen ...
Autism Aesthetics
About 10 years ago, I began to get impatient with disability studies. The field was still relatively young, but it seemed devoted almost entirely to analyzing how disability was represented—in art ...